The automobile was a giant leap forward in personal transportation. Not only did it run on an unlimited natural resource called oil instead of hay, but you could take up twice as much space on the road to that of a horse. As a bonus automobiles produced emission just like they were mini factories. Carbon emissions made your city look modern and productive. This was much preferred to that of biodegradable horse poo.

As the automobile became more reliable man could travel far distances. He no longer had to worry about the convenience of building little shops within walking distance of his home. Because he loved traveling in his automobile so much he built small roads that went to far away areas. These areas were designated for giant ugly retail establishments that he would not want near his house. Now entire cities could navigate their cars via these small roads called highways to the designated areas for shopping. Man was very cleaver in creation of these roadways. Because the roads can not handle the volume of entire cities trying to go shopping an new wondrous byproduct of the automobile was created. With the invention now known as traffic man had another excuse to spend even more waking hours of the day traveling inside his large motorized vehicle.

With the cheap production of automobiles public transportation and general human happiness has sored to new heights. We have also found that those carbon emissions help trap sunlight in our atmosphere creating an warmer more pleasant climate. This helps to melt those pesky ice caps at both the north and south pools thus creating more water for fish to swim in and more land for people to live on.

Indeed the automobile is such a perfect model of transportation the idea has not needed updating or innovation in over 100 years. Only time can tell what wonderful things this model of transportation has in store for us. Three cheers for the mechanical horse.

I have never really been a pro-materialist. I know my lifestyle seems to contradict that being filled with high tech gadgets and all sorts of expensive material possessions. In the end it’s all just stuff. We come into this world owning nothing and we leave this world if we are lucky owning nothing but a memory.

I would post a picture of my smashed in car but my Canon Powershot S60 was among the stolen items along with my 12″ Apple Powerbook G4. I guess the thieves were not interested in role playing because they left my D&D PHB and Monster Manual. Thankfully they were also not audiophiles leaving my Grado Labs SR 125’s well alone.

I’m kind of irritated that they stole my sweatshirt and an extra set of jeans I had in my car. I can’t help but think how much I hate going clothes shopping. I think at this point the idea of buying another set of pants is almost more painful then coming up with the money for a new laptop.

At this time of loss I keep going though ways that it could have been prevented. The truth is I live in my car and all my stuff is in my car. It was bound to happen someday it just so happened on a day I had more in my car then less. I also have this need to place blame on something. It’s really silly. Oddly enough the first thing I found that I wanted to blame was Christmas, followed by George Bush, and then Wal-Mart. I think I want to blame these things because I feel that they have some sort of personal vendetta against me or my character. The thieves just simply want money and this is the way society has trained them to get it, nothing personal about it.

So I survived the snow. It’s funny how everything comes to a halt when the temperature drops below freezing. It was nice though because I needed some days off. Of course missing two days of work means my work area looks like this.

In other news one should not use the -delete flag with the find command.

The people of planet Mack do celebrate new years. In fact it is a very big global celebration filled with all sorts of entertaining activities. Because they do not use timezones it is celebrated by everyone all at once.

Timezones were used on planet Mack for many years. However as the community became more global more and more time was wasted in the conversion of time itself. To solve this problem a global time standard much like UTC was established. Everyone uses the same 24 hour clock. Research is currently being done on metric time as an alternative to the current system but development has not yet been completed.

Because everyone uses the same time it is very simple to communicate when you want something to happen. For example if you want someone to call you at 00:21 then you simply tell them to call you at that time. It doesn’t matter where they live, the time that the call is to take place is understood. People all over the globe still do sleep at different times, but even in the real world sleep is still not guaranteed to be during daylight hours anyway. Systems are of course in place to let others know when you will be sleeping or awake before they decide to try and communicate with you in real time.

I personally living in the real world hate timezones. I think everyone should just stay on UTC, GMT, Zulu or whatever you want to call it. Think of how great new years would be if the world could celebrate one holiday together at the same time united by a sense of true global understanding.

Christmas would really have a hard time existing in the Windleverse. The people of planet Mack as I have mentioned before do not have a strong sense of ownership. As a citizen of planet Mack nothing belongs to you personally, but you may possess anything as long as possessing it does not hinder others who need access to the item. Family is also not a strongly understood concept. When two people decide that they wish to procreate they are given the blessing of the community. This is not difficult to obtain but necessary because the child will be not only the parents responsibility but the communities responsibility as a whole. The child’s first year of life is spent primarily with one motherly figure. As the child gets older it is rased and guilded by more and more members of the community. In a sense whenever you are spending time with anyone you are spending time with family. Organized religion does not exsist and there for does not play into any holidays in the Windleverse.

So in my search for a Windleverse holiday to compare to Christmas the other morning I remembered the special time of fsckmas. That is short for File System Check all Master Systems. This is a time when all the computer systems of planet Mack are allowed to be shut down for maintenance. Because planet Mack has such a global community and it’s culture is strongly driven by it’s global communications network this down time allows the people of Mack to focus on more local parts of their culture. Fsckmas is often celebrated with close friends spent playing games and having fun. It is also a reminder of how important the communications network is as a whole and where the people of Mack have evolved from.

If you are a Christian, Christmas is a celebration of the birth of your lord and savior Jesus Christ. Even though historians agree that Jesus was not born on December 25th, the 25th of December seems like as good of day as any to celibrate his birth. After all, the cool groovy pegans are celebrating winter solstice anyway. The Christians might as well get in on the festivities.

The craziness of Christmas does not end with religious celebration. If you are not a Christian you too can celebrate in the commercialized version of Christmas. To play the game all it takes is a small donation to your local retail stores, some wise gift choosing and you shall be well on your way with holiday joy and merriness. Make sure to push and shove your way to the front of the lines while you are there.

In the windleverse everything is decided by votes. Elected officials for decision making are uncommon. Every citizen that lives on Mack is assigned a special user key that is linked to them via biometrics. Needless to say it’s near impossible to tamper with the voting system. Even after a user has voted they can continue to monitor their vote or change it up until the poll closes. Vote tampering is a serious offense which includes loss of citizenship status. Anyone can propose a new law, initiative or any other idea. If something turns out to be rotten it can simply be overturned by a new vote the next day. Voting in the windleverse takes place anywhere you are via your personal computer device.

I don’t think the people of the real world are ready for such control and responsibility over their own governance. On the other hand the system we are currently using is a few centuries out of date and does not reflect the resources we have available to us. It’s as if the “founding fathers” of this country were democracy programmers and after they died off no one continued to maintain and update the democracy software. Thus we are stuck continuing to use this V0.5 beta release of democracy when we should have developed version 2 by now.

Things that do not grown and evolve with society will die by it.

In the windleverse we not only have a high speed global wireless network but a massive decentralized storage system. All content is stored in a lossless format which everyone can have access to. Some high resolution video is still streamed in a lossy format to conserve bandwidth but all audio and still picture formats are streamed in lossless. No digital media is ever archived in a lossy format.

The amount of lossy media that is consumed in the real world disturbs and worries me. We are slowly locking ourselfs into media formats that are quickly outdated even if people like to pretend they are not. The MP3 format is a perfect example of an outdated codec still in strong use today.

Lossless codecs are different in that nothing is thrown away. When a new lossless codec comes out you can always decompress and recompress with the new codec without any loss to your orginal file. Once compressed with a lossy codec you are forever doomed to that format.

So please stop using lossy formats for archiving and stop buying lossy media. You are only dooming yourselfs.

Anyway despite all the problems I had with blog themes I think I found one I can live with for awhile.

Welcome to The Windleverse.