You Can't Make Mistakes.

This is the first post that I am writing from my phone, a Nokia N900. Initially, when buying the phone, I had hoped to do more of this. The WordPress interface was akward to handle on this device, though, so I never did it. The interface has gotten better, so here we are.

I hope that this might encourage me to write a bit more, particularly while on the bus on the way to the university in the morning. This activity may also cause an early onset of arthritis of the thumbs or carpal tunnel syndrome, which will be horrible. You takes your chances, I guess.

I also hope to find a bit of spare time to build a new theme as well. This one has had a good run, but it’s time for something new. Maybe a cleaner theme, or a trash style. Lord knows that all I would need to do is look around me for inspiration for that. That’s not a bad idea actually. I’ll call it “Banks of the Nile.” It can have bits of garbage and Bebsi cans and sand and murky water. The possibilities are endless.

I should be moving the site to a new server at some point as well. This should be interesting and may fail terribly at first. Who can say? it will be better though: and I do like trying stuff that I have never done before. It is kind of my motto after all.

“A series of pipes.”

My dad has been hosting his origami site at Geocities for the past several years. I spoke to him yesterday about acquiring a domain name and self hosting the site as Geocities—presently owned and operated by Yahoo—will close its electronic doors very soon. He will move from there to a self-hosted site with its own independent address, which is inherently better because of greater control over the back-end of things. He rightly said that this was a good thing anyway, because this is how we keep these things—websites, the Internet—alive. This started me thinking about the Internet and how different a place it is from when I first started using it over a decade ago.

Thinking about Geocities in particular made me a bit reminiscent about all of the one-off, special interest sites that sprang up in the late 1990s. Usenet aside, you could find almost any information—be it quality or not—in single column pages with colored text and often over a bright—sometimes obnoxious—background. In those days, the big Internet companies had sites that were complex, multi-column affairs with boxes and ads, but the real Internet was the domain of the people writing whatever they wanted in center-aligned pages.

It was a great time to be a conspiracy theorist. Or really into Wicca.

Searching the Internet in the 90s was fantastic and weird. Democracy at its finest. All things change with time, some for worse some for better. There are reasonable arguments in either direction for the changes evident in the Internet over the last decade and a half. For some applications, the Internet has made life easier, obviously. Communication is fantastic. I live in Egypt and communicate with friends readily all over the world in an inexpensive and effective way. This is due to greater ubiquity of broadband Internet coverage in Egypt and elsewhere.

Websites have also become easier to create and maintain. I use WordPress to generate this site and have been for several years. The first version of the site, however, was written in PHP by yours truly. It was an exercise in basics which has made working with and customizing WordPress much easier for me in subsequent years. That said, it is really easy now to have a site that looks more or less professional, and everyone does. The downside is that now everything on the Internet seems to be a blog and sites grow stagnant as soon as the writer gets a book deal—which seems inevitable for many upstart bloggers these days.

The information which used to be so readily available on the Internet is now relegated to the All Thing¹ of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a great tool as a first-reference: it democratizes basic reference, particularly for those who already have experience with traditional encyclopedias. It also contains vastly more information on a much wider variety of topics than do traditional encyclopedias. That said, it is still only a first reference, and the “peer-review” to which the information is subjected to is conducted by experts and non-experts alike.

My brother and I grew up with a set—two actually—of encyclopedia in the house. It was a great first- or quick-reference for almost anything that we wondered about or were writing about for school. As I got older and learned more about doing research, the references and bibliography proved perfect guides to more and deeper information on a given topic. That was how it was done.

The Internet changed all that. I cannot count the times that I heard college professors tell students that they had to use books and journal articles rather than online references. I was always confused. Did college students really not know how to use a library? It turns out that, no, they did—and do—not. Library usage seems to be, more and more, a thing of the past. The library at my present University is not expanding its collection very rapidly because they are exploring electronic alternatives—none of which work very well.

We used to go to the library with my mom almost every weekend. We had library cards by the time we were six or seven years old. I was—and am still—an avid reader because of this level of access to books. I am like a ship without a rudder—or more aptly, a ship without water—when I have no access to a library. This is not to say that I do not now primarily access academic journals via the Internet while conducting research. I do. It is easier, and saves me the time of sifting through stacks of journals in the basement in order to photocopy endless pages from them. This is an improvement.

Additionally, Google Books and the Internet Archive are becoming ever more useful resources for finding out-of-print and public-domain works written before the current copyright cutoff. They do not, however, replace the public or research library. Instances of false information being reported elsewhere in the media based on a Wikipedia article as an authoritative source are a good argument for returning to more rigorous forms of research on the part of journalists and academics alike.

Also, the above-mentioned one-off specialist sites seem to be going by the wayside as the Internet evolves into an archive of photoshopped pictures of cats and funny/stupid things. It used to be the case that the top of the search engine output would be a number of websites with a vast amount of—potentially questionable—data on almost any topic.

Now, on the other hand, Wikipedia is at the top of the list for almost anything that you can search for. That is unless you are accustomed to advance searching and particularly adept at using keywords. Most of the students who I help at the reference desk are not. They typically begin their research by going to Google and typing their topic or a full sentence (e.g. – “Mongolia” or “why is there domestic violence in the middle east?.” These are two recent examples of searches which students were having trouble with). To get to much of the real information that is available on the Internet these days you have to sift through hundreds of entries in blogs or advertisements. Monetizing the Internet proves to be primarily a tool for obfuscating it rather than improving user-as-content-generator experience.

This is one of the primary reasons that I am an advocate of net-neutrality and online rights—including, but not limited to, file-sharing, digitized books, and un-filtered/un-traffic-shaped Internet service, not to mention open-source/open-licensing. The Internet has the potential to be a tool for posterity, and indeed it is already serving us in this manner to some degree. It has the potential to be so much more. The moment that corporate interests became more important than the needs of Internet users, the system broke. It will limp though, but it will not recover fully and become the repository of information that it should be until corporate money-making interests are set aside.

This will not happen anytime soon, and indeed, Yahoo’s decision to discontinue Geocities in order to promote their new web-hosting platform—which is pay to play—is a step in the wrong direction. The Internet is not about closing things down in order that they might not be in conflict with business interests: it is about information being freely and readily available the world over and even beyond. This used to be a purpose of libraries as well.

It seems, however, that we have lost sight of this, lulled into contented complacence by cute pictures of talking cats and repositories of awkward family photos. This does not bode well at all. It will eventually change, though. Economies and finance online are not, and never have been stable. The one thing that is stable at this stage is the ability of one computer to connect to another. As long as we have that, when the corporate hegemony Internet collapses, we will simply start over, one node at a time.

Until then, if anyone needs me I’ll be reading online comics and looking at pictures of sandwiches.

———
¹ A reference to the progeny of the blogosphere presented in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion and Endymion.

Break 2 in progress

I am currently taking coffee-break number two from writing and revising Chapter 2 of the Thesis. I’ve been working on this for about two weeks and will be glad to be done this weekend. Nothing really big left to be done. I have e-reams and reams of notes that I am consulting and compiling into what will be the finished project by the end of the summer.

This afternoon I need to look again at a couple of interviews with former heads of the order that I am studying and see if there is any more historical-background-type data that I can glean from them. I haven’t watched or listened to these particular interviews in a few months and I can’t remember right now which is which, but I know that there is something in there.

Anyway, as I was taking this break, which I think might morph into walk-around-the-block break in a minute, I was thinking about the snowballing effects which occur during procrastination. For instance: I decided to take a break 10 minutes ago and poured myself coffee. Then I sat back down in front of the computer, and decided that taking a break meant at least doing something other than what I was doing before. Then, being afraid to get out of the writing mood, I decided that I would write a blog entry. It should keep me in that mood while also getting another task done.

Now, I feel like I should really get up and walk around a bit because my ass hurts from sitting here all morning typing. This is very dangerous and could lead to vacuuming if I walk through the house, or watering the plants if I go into the garden, or almost any other thing. If I walked into the right environment, I might cure a disease.

What I am saying is that I think that procrastination periods can be very productive and helpful, but not necessarily for what you are intending to do. I am sure that the Segway was invented in a period of procrastination. Also: penicillin.

Regardless, I am going for a walk now. I cannot be held responsible for the creative brilliance which will occur in the next ten minutes.

What was your last creative procrastinating moment?

These are a few of my favorite things

This is my favorite new blog. I was not surprised to see that I do, as a white person, like many of the things listed: just on the first page!

Stuff White People Like

This will be a useful tool for anthropologists of the future to know what the cultural values of white people in the 21st century, as there is very little other cultural artifacts left by white people.

Brilliant.

30 percent more effective!

You, gentle readers, may have noticed a few changes round the joint of late. I have been using my time since acquiring an internet connection in my apartment to make some changes and upgrades to the blog that I have been salivating over for some time. Now they are almost done. My hope is that these features will make it easier for me to relate my experiences back to you in a more meaningful way.

First, I have added a glossary. Now, when I write words that I don’t think that are common, everyday words, I can define them. That definition shows up in a little box when you place your mouse over the word. So, if you see a word that you don’t know, like AUC or alhamdulillah, you will be able to just put your mouse over it and: Blammo! The word is defined for you, inshallah. You may also click on the “Glossary” button at the right for a full listing of all defined terms. If you click the words in the text, you will be taken to a definition page.

You just tried all those things, didn’t you? Helw, isn’t it?

I have also been making some changes to the general layout and look and feel of the blog. You probably won’t notice these things very much. They are little.

I have added a response function to the comments. I can now post response comments to your comments and they will be sent to you via e-mail. So, this means that you should all take this opportunity to leave me a comment. Mostly you should leave me comments because it feeds my sense of good-will knowing that there are so many people out there interested in the minutiae of my life.

I have added a cache function to the site so that now the pages will load more quickly. If you get an error message, simply refresh the page. It probably means that I am working on the site as you were trying to access it.

Podcast Pilot

Last, and absolutely in no way least, I have added support for audio and video in posts. This gives me the ability to create a podcast and have it syndicated through the blog. Keep your eyes open on iTunes for it. In the mean time, you can listen right here.

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My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-336efdbcf2a28a9a5ce8a251dd4d43fe}

The music at the beginning is a sample from Joe Sibol’s song “Dance with the Pharaoh.” You can listen to other of Joe’s work at PodSafe Audio.

The rest of the music in this podcast is from a concert by a Nubian folk band which I recorded in October 2007 while attending their concert in Alexandria.

Well, that is all for now. I hope that you all enjoy the new toys and stay tuned for more audio and video and other things as well.