I'm closing comments on the stevesgallery.com website, for various reasons - the main one being that every post is now reblogged on stevenmansour.com, and I don't see the need to manage two commenting instances for each post.

If you have a comment, please leave it there. Ideally, I'd recommend replacing the syndication feed for stevesgallery.com with the new one at stevenmansour.com.

See you there!

Ugh - that wasn't very good, now was it?

I was disappointed by what Sony's done to Bond. The action and stunt scenes in the movie were great, especially the chase scene through the African factory. But the writers did a horrible job of making Bond seem like the charismatic superspy he's supposed to be.

The plot was almost non-existent, and while the acting was alright, there were too many gaps in the story for it to remain interesting... not to mention lots of unnecessary, brutal senseless violence that a 'real' Bond would stay away from.

It's not Daniel Craig's fault either - he could definitely pull off the character, if he were given a character. But a real James Bond wouldn't just shrug off the fact that an innocent person was tortured and killed because of his ineptitude. Actually, that wouldn't even happen in a Bond movie.

technorati tags:movies, bond, sony

She got out of bed, her caramel skin glistening and her long, black hair still tied in a perfect ponytail. Without saying a word, I watched her naked body walk over to her suitcase, pick out some clothes, then head to the bathroom to take a shower - the second one she'd taken in as many hours.

She looked like Pocahontas oughta look like. Not the real Pocahontas, but Disney's Pocahontas. In my mind's eye, Disney's is more real anyway.

I stayed in bed and picked up the TV remote control, something that's very counterintuitive for me since I don't have a TV at home. But here, in this artificial mega-hotel built for pasty white gringos and their bank-teller wives and their three obese, lobsteresque children, I now had nothing else to do but lay in bed and watch mexican soap operas with english subtitles. In an ugly room of an ugly hotel in an ugly city, a stunning apparition of a woman is getting dressed to hit the local club scene with some girls she'd met here the night before - and without the man she just crawled out of bed from.

Her knees still wobbly, she quietly grabbed one of the two hotel keycards off the nightstand and walked out the door, never picking her eyes up off the floor. I had no desire or intention of going after her, arguing, or even so much as getting out of bed.

Twenty minutes later, I was sitting at a beachside bar along the strip, staring at something I loathe: the bottom of an empty glass. I was waiting on a 3rd round of 80-pesos-a-glass Jack Daniel's on the rocks. In the defense of "The Pirate's Loot Bar and Grill", the glasses were more akin to beer mugs and nearly filled to the rim. I wasn't sad or depressed, but I did know that I wanted to leave this place. Acapulco, like every other artificial cocoon built to attract tourist dollars, is sterile and hollow. And not "clean" sterile either, but the kind of sterile you can smell in the air of a mortician's office. Or a taxidermist's. Or a mortician-slash-taxidermist's.

Despite these hiccups, coming to Mexico definitely wasn't a mistake. I've had some of the best food I've ever tasted in my life here, in the little stands and markets that dot the otherwise uninviting cityscapes of Mexico City and Queretaro. And minus the crowds, buildings, cars, highways, pollution and garbage, it's definitely a beautiful place to explore. Mmmm... the food.

My mouth started to feel like I imagine the inside of a working microwave feels like as I started devouring my third taco. I must've been quite a sight to behold with little beads of sweat running down my forehead, my eyes sinking deep into their sockets, my hands trembling, and my normally inaudible breathing sounding closer to a fat Texan halfway through an all-you-can buffet. It was such delicious torture. There were maybe 8 or 9 clay pots sitting on the counter, each one filled with different erotic exotic meats, vegetables and combinations - each tastier (and spicier) than the last. I didn't even bother to check the price list as we sat down to eat. By the time we'd both had our of several helpings of soft tacos, quesadillas and sopes, and God knows how many refrescos to wash it all down, I paid the delightful, cheerful lady at the counter. I owed her 55 pesos, or about $5. For both of us. I've paid 20 times that in Paris for foie gras that didn't come close to being as satisfying as these little pieces of soft bread filled with love.

I can't say I've had any bad food here. Nearly every meal left me incredulous. But one night, late, we were both rather hungry and so she suggested that we go to the nearest family restaurant, one of these generic restaurant chains like "Scores" or "St-Hubert" in Canada, or, umm... well whatever you Americans pass off as a restaurant chain. The food was alright - nothing like the authentic home-made mexican food I'd been enjoying the the courtyards, plazas and markets since I'd gotten here, but it was serviceable and I couldn't complain. As I walked out, I began noticing something underneath all of the restaurants signs, advertisements and promotional material; a little white star with some writing underneath. A Wal-Mart logo.

As the days went on, I started seeing this logo more and more often. On other restaurants. Tourist shops. Convenience stores. Even seemingly innocuous cafes and ice cream shops.

“What Wal-Mart did in Mexico was very instructive. Mexico was a testing ground for the method of operation. They basically acquired existing stores. They moved into Mexico and that became the theme in other countries like the UK, Germany, and Japan. They would buy into an existing operation, rather then start from scratch.”

Wal-Mart, it turned out, owns a largish chunk of anything worth owning in Mexico. There are nearly 900 Wal-Mart units in Mexico, including 113 supercenters, throughout 130 cities. Wal-Mart de Mexico operates over 280 restaurants including VIPS (international cuisine), El Portón (Mexican), Ragazzi (Italian-style) and other specialized restaurants. In 2004, Wal-Mart de Mexico reported sales of $139.8 billion pesos (US $12.5 billion), a 15.8% increase over the previous year. Wal-Mart employs over 130,000 Mexicans as dronemonkeys "associates", making it Mexico's #1 employer. As in the U.S., the bottom line is king in Wal-Mart Mexico - that means no unions or other troublemakers are tolerated. These non-union Mexican Wal-Mart "associates" earn about 13 pesos an hour (about $1.20 USD) as compared to their non-union U.S. counterparts' $9.50.

"I really don't see what is to prevent us from owning all of Mexico and running it to suit ourselves."

- William Randolph Hearst

Despite the jobs created, Mexico is a country with a severe poverty problem. Social mobility is at an all-time low, while homelessness is skyrocketing. All the while, Mexicans are losing Mexico. Instead of being the owners of their own country and land, the economic fate of their country is decided in backroom deals across the border. Through trade annexation agreements such as NAFTA, outsourcing and consolidations, the powers-that-were slowly sold out their nation to the highest bidder.

And the highest bidder is always the United States.

Added to the penetration of Wal-Mart in Mexican life is the new Wal-Mart store that will appear less than one mile from the ancient pyramids of Teotihuacan. "What might this mean? Perhaps they can build a strip club at the Holy Sepulcher, a McDonald's at the ruins of Montealban, or a Hard Rock Cafe next to the Pyramids of Egypt," wrote columnist Javier Aranda, referring, respectively, to the site where Jesus was buried, another famous Mexican ruin and a man-made wonder of the world.

There is nothing "free" about free markets when they are connected via puppet strings to a stick in another country. And things aren't about to change. This year, Wal Mart will invest $750 million, more than all its competitors combined, opening 70 new stores, according to Walmex spokesman Raul Arguelles. "Expect many, many more square meters of Wal-Mart sales floor in Mexico in the future," he says.

Sincreticism unlocks the door to much of the Mexican mystery. When the Europeans came, they pulled down the Aztec temples--Teotihuacan is a fortuitous exception--and built their cathedrals from the rubble. The Teotihuacan Wal-Mart, albeit transiently imposed, sits atop land once occupied by an Aztec "tianguis" or bazaar. In Mexico, you always need to look underneath.

Mexico is a four millennium-old civilization with a culture as obdurate as granite and obsidian. In contrast, the United States is a make-believe country with a bubble-wrapped culture and a minimal national history. The smart money says that when all the Wal-Marts crumble into dust, the majestic Pyramids of Teotihuacan will still be standing.

BIG (67 MB) original file if you have a slow connection or don't care about video quality, get the smaller / dial-up version, or see it on YouTube (mediocre) or Blip.Tv (good).This is a small clip from the San Miguelada - the running of the bulls in Mexico. September 23rd, 2006. You can also look at the pics.

UPDATE: An eerie self-biography of Kimveer Gill, found in the Google Cache.

UPDATE #2: I've created a Podcast to accompany this post.

Today is September 14th, 2006.

Yesterday, a young man walked into Dawson college with a rifle and murdered one person, injuring many more, apparently without motive.

Today, taking the subway from my home to downtown Montreal, everyone was reading their "Metro" newspaperoid and sitting silently in the train car. People eyed each other suspiciously - more than usual - and it seemed that everyone was a little on edge. I'm naturally the kind of person who looks around alot, directly at people, constantly examining my surrounding environment. Whether it's natural curiosity or ADHD I don't really know, but today everyone I looked at seemed to avert their eyes quicker, as if they felt I was staring them down, accusing them.

Maybe I was.

What happened yesterday at Dawson - and what will continue to happen in the media until the next big story comes along - is, to me, a bleak reminder that the world is broken. Though I'd love to attribute why "this happened here" to our new conservative ungovernment, they haven't been in power long enough to take the blame, unfortunately. Well, at least they can take credit for the 30+ Canadians dead in Afghanistan so far, sent there with inadequate training and equipment to fight what is basically a ghost army. Only the US and the UK have lost more troops than us. By population, though, more Canadians have died.

In a few days, though, we'll all go back to fawning over the new iPods (from Steve Jobs, who hoards his riches like a next-generation Rockerfeller), buying our cigarettes and gas from industries that help keep the American military-industrial complex in power, and wait for the next episode of 24 from Fox [News], feeding imperialism's thirst for propaganda a little more every time we watch.

Kimveer Gill - the 25 year old who shot all those people yesterday - wasn't born any different than you or me. If you go back far enough, you'll see that the same blood that flows flowed through his veins also streams through ours. The world he was immersed in was no different than ours until he got lost in a gothic vampire fantasy-land. But what led to that transition? Why did he feel a need to be different?

This morning on the metro, I could've been in any big city with a subway system... but I didn't feel like I was in Montreal. I felt like I was on the tube in London, one of the cleanest, most sterile, and dreariest places I've ever been in my life. Everyone has their little headphones plugged into their ears, with their shit-on-a-page of the day in their hands, completely disconnected from the world around them. Their experience of "being on the subway" consisted of "being anywhere but" - I think that someone could dropped dead on that train without anyone noticing. Maybe that feeling was exarcebated by the fact that I had just returned from a two-month stint in Cuba - one of the last bastions of humanism I've found - but it made me want to just break down in the middle of the train and start yelling "What the hell is wrong with you people?!?"

Instead, I kept listening to my iPod and reading my morning paper.

Mr. Gill didn't always want to kill 'innocent' people, or be - ahem - a 'vampire'. He thought that he could find uniqueness within that subculture. So there he was, "Kimveer The Vampire" (ahem) driving to Dawson College in his black Pontiac Sunfire (ahem) with a rifle in his trunk. In a sea of billboards, magazines, television, 'fashion' and pseudo-culture, he somehow decided that his identity wasn't unique enough, that he wasn't "different" enough. Well, "being the same" is "the new different".

We are seeing an entire generation - mine, and the next - weaned on spoon-fed, carefully crafted messages and ideas created to shove us into this or that path. Everything we're feeling today, all of our emotions, our great ideas, and our fears have been thought, felt and experienced thousands of time of thousands of people before us. All those people in the subway this morning shared the same distress and anxiety together, which has been felt for eons. We're simultaneously allowing the powers that be cover up our true inherent individuality with media messages, fashion, capitalism and "culture" while we're cheating ourselves out of the unity and sharing that was supposed to be our nature. While they create a feudal hierarchy and give us false senses of identity through the things they make us think we want, we're losing the ability to think for ourselves, to discern what we need to do to build the world we wanted to when we were newborns and infants. It's a lose-lose situation.

We are not united, but we are not unique either. Artificially created ideas of how to live our lives has made good little servants of us.

It's perfectly normal and acceptable that some of us get lost along the wayside. What's most troublesome to me is when we take others along with us who weren't necessarily ready to go.

Cool song, cool unofficial music video:

To everyone who says that Castro was photoshopped... sigh...

Three-quarters of Americans can correctly identify two of Snow White's
seven dwarfs while only a quarter can name two Supreme Court justices,
according to a poll on pop culture.

The poll by Zogby International has been commissioned by the makers of a new game show on pop culture called Gold Rush.

It shows that 57 per cent of Americans can identify JK Rowling's
fictional boy wizard as Harry Potter, while only 50 per cent can name
the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

Just over 60 per cent of respondents are able to name Bart as Homer's son on the television show The Simpsons, while only 20.5 per cent were able to name one of the ancient Greek poet Homer's epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Asked what planet Superman was from, 60 per cent named the fictional
planet Krypton, while only 37 per cent knew that Mercury was the planet
closest to the sun.

Respondents are far more familiar with the Three Stooges - Larry, Curly
and Moe - than the three branches of the US Government - judicial,
executive and legislative.

Seventy-four per cent identified the former, while 42 per cent identified the latter.

Twice as many people (23 per cent) were able to identify the most recent winner of the television talent show American Idol, Taylor Hicks, as were able to name the Supreme Court Justice confirmed in January 2006, Samuel Alito (11 per cent).

The pollsters spoke to 1,213 people across the United States.

The results had a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.

Dwarfs better-known than US justices: poll. 15/08/2006. ABC News Online

This is the Democracy that Bush is selling to the Middle East and Latin America?

via imomus - read it and the comment thread.

Friday morning, I had to take my dad to the hospital to get a cortisone injection, because he has been developping acute shoulder bursistis and needed something for the pain.

A friend from Syria who was visiting us happened to know a doctor who worked at Centre Hospitalier Pierre Boucher, in Longueuil on the south shore of Montreal.

From the outside, it looks more like a library or the headquarters of some Web 2.0 (sorry...) company than a hospital, all glass and brushed aluminum.

I've never had such a positive experience in a hospital here in Canada before. Despite the renovations and construction work going on to expand the hospital's east wing, everything was clean and spotless. Any questions we had were answered with a courteous, friendly and professional attitude, and everyone was smiling. No one seemed like they didn't want to be there, which is more and more the case in the Canadian health care system.

First we had to have his hospital card made, which took all of 15 seconds to do at the reception. Then we went up, and the receptionist of the orthopedics department told us we needed to do xrays first. We walked for maybe 30 seconds across the hall to radiology, the xrays were done after maybe 4 minutes.

After that, we walked back to the doctor's office, and the xrays were literally waiting for him on the computer screen! This may not seem like a big deal, but I was amazed at how efficient they were here.

It turned out that it was just the beginning of a great, productive day - there's the 1$ sale at the supemarket (Maxi) going on right now, so I stocked up on weeks of groceries for like $100. Pack of 12 hot dogs, 12 buns, and bag of McCain fries - 3$. Enough food to feed 4 people. That's unheard of in my house, where I generally try to shop organic and local whenever I can, which ends up costing way way more.

I have no more faith in the Arab world.

I may be an ethnic Iraqi, but I am completely unable to associate myself with the Middle Eastern world - and this feeling is reinforced every day.

Growing up, I could never make friends with other Arab kids, because I didn't have the right culture or mindset. As a result, most of my friends were a melting pot of others like me, who never really quite "fit in" anywhere.

I'm glad I didn't.

I wrote this, this and this almost two years ago to explain (mostly to myself) how I was feeling, and these feelings have only become more and more crystallized and radical since.

Yes, a Hummer with Lebanese flags, protesting the Israeli action. The irony is blinding.

It isn't all bad of course - my lack of faith in the Arab identity pushed me to focus my work on Latin America, where people are much more interested in taking active control of their own lives and pushing for real change instead of remaining comfortably dependent on a system that lets them drive Hummers and drink Starbucks at the costs of the lives of their brothers and sisters.

What happened in Iraq, what happened in Palestine what's happening in Lebanon, and what will end up happening all over the Middle East is the bloody appropriation of the resources and land needed to control our own destinies not as "arabs", but as "human beings". We were once compassionate humans before being Iraqi, or Syrian, or Saudi, or Lebanese, or Palestinian, or Egyptian, or Emirati, or...

Our rallies and protests are all nice and dandy, but they ultimately lead nowhere. "Awww - how nice... we're organizing a rally!". They will not help us one bit until we acknowledge that we need to change our outlooks, our lifestyles and our actions.

Every drop of oil into your SUVs, every fast food meal you order, every TV sitcom you watch, and everytime you watch the bad news on Al-Jazeera, then turn it off and go back to reading "The Da Vinci Code"... means that you're directly responsible for the death of another Lebanese civilian that you pretend to support, another Palestinian town that is destroyed to make way for an Israeli settlement, and the genocide of countless Iraqis who are dying so that you can continue to live your cushy lives so dependent on Free Market capitalism and the American and European military industrial complex.

Yes, that's an Israeli flag with a swastiska painted on it. I have no more faith in the arab world.

The enemy isn't "America" or "Israel". No, to see the problem - to see why our brothers and sisters are dying in droves - all of us Middle Easterners need only look in the mirror at our guilty souls, or in the sink at our blood-drenched hands. The leaders we chose to guide our nations are morally and ethically corrupt, and what are they if not reflections of ourselves?

If this post makes you angry, fills you with rage, then good. Get mad. Get angry. Break something. Break everything. Go outside and tear it all down. Raze everything you see. Che Guevara famously hoped for the "new man to emerge from the ashes of the old world".

I'm starting to understand what he meant.

via Sabbah:

Dear Lebanese/Palestinian/Arab/Muslim/Christians Kids,

Die with love.

Yours,

Israeli Kids

I can't think of anything to say to this.

Go France!

... with his latest girlfriend.

One of the things I'd like to learn more about at the AMC is the reason behind Hip Hop's domination of musical genres in the world's poorer and more neglected neighborhoods.

• How come artists from rural Africa to inner-city Cleveland to Palestine to Habana Vieja choose Hip Hop as their weapon of choice to speak out?
• What is it about forms like Rap and Hip Hop that make them more attractive as an outlet for the disenchantment, frustration and rebellion that come with living under oppression and poverty, when most mainstream artists today sing about expensive cars and jewelry?
• How did this niche of inner-city African American and Latino youth in 1970s New York City create a movement that has spread to Barrios the world over?
• What makes Hip Hop more accessible to this audience than, say rock or emo (gasp! ) or alternative music?

Doing some spring cleaning, and came across a whole slew of computer stuff that I don't need anymore, but that might be useful to someone else out there. Unless stated otherwise, everything is in working condition, though of course sold "as is". You'll also have to come up to Laval to pick it up.

• HP DeskJet 810C Printer, $15

• Dell Trinitron 20.1 Inch monitor, stable up to 1280x1024, above that it becomes shaky and susceptible to interference from speakers, etc. Body is scratched and full of stickers, screen is pretty much flawless. $25

• Linksys 802.11B Wireless Ethernet Bridge, $10

• Lexmark z32 Printer (USB+Printer Port cable), needs ink, $10

• NEC Versa 2000D (color!) laptop... 486 SL, 16MB ram, Windows 95 running, bright screen nice targus carrying case, PCMCIA, $30

• Old 14" TTX monitor - I can only get it to work in 800x600 or 640x480 after leaving it on to warm up for about 30 mins. If you leave it on all the time should work fine. $5

• 7.5 DBi indoor "smoke detector" Hyperlink 802.11b antenna, n-female connector $15

• Various heavy coax antenna cabling, (LMR-200 I think, not sure) 5-ft - 50 ft, n-female or male connectors, a few adaptors, make an offer.

• 2-Piece YDI AMP 2440 2.4 Ghz amplifier for 802.11b - cannot seem to get it to work. Lights come on when plugged into AP and antenna. $35

• Full-tower PC case, on wheels, no powersupply, missing front covers. $10

• 14dBi Lucent / Bell Yagi directional Antenna, n-female, $25

• Thrustmaster Top Gun Fox 2 Pro USB Flight Stick (non force-feedback), near-mint: $12

... when flirting in Spanish.

"Neck" is "cuello", not "culo".

...

(vahe, friends, vahe.ca, video, funny, hurt)

My buddies have decidedly too much time on their hands, and I'm awfully grateful about that.

My dad and I were just hanging out the other day, and as always is the case with him, the conversation turned to food.

We cracked out a huge rack of baby back ribs from the freezer, and I swung by the little vietnamese grocery store by my house.

A few hours, later, we're sitting at the dinner table, staring at:

- Several pounds of BBQ'd baby back ribs marinated in Honey Garlic Diana sauce,
- Fried Spinach... I'm still awestruck at how so much spinach becomes so little in a frying pan,
- Grilled Portobello mushrooms,
- 3-layer guacamole with cheese and artichoke hearts, which we also ended up using in addition to sour cream on the baked potatoes,
- Baked potatoes,
- Basmati rice, cooked properly, ie, soaked and drained several times, then placed in a pot - not a rice-cooker,
- A couple Sleeman Clear beers.

In totally unrelated news, I didn't go to the gym today.

Along with poutine and pasta, ribs have become another food that I think twice about before ordering at a restaurant, since few places manage to live up to how good they come out at home.

Oficina de intereses USA

Billboard next to the US Special Interests building in Havana, Cuba. Shows a child held at gunpoint by a US soldier, saying "And for the new year, I wish that they stop bombing my house and torturing my father".

video: Dreamfall's take on "Esclavage..."
podcast: My very second podcast
blog: Cia Chief Resigns
link: Assholes are bullshit

"Oh no you di'n't!"

There, it's over..

To everyone who always gasped in disbelief upon finding out that I don't follow hockey, you can leave me alone now.

Everyone agrees that changing your URL, especially when you have a decent, steady stream of visitors reading your crap, is a bad idea. Any benefit that you would get from a shiny new poignant URL would be offset by the droves of people who don't want to be bothered to read you somewhere else (especially if - like me - you're not terribly well-written), or add Yet Another XML Feed (tm) to their aggregator.

I thought I was going to drop stevesgallery.com, but I'm not. If I'm a wacko for feeling nostalgic about something as ethereal as a domain name, so be it. stevesgallery.com will probably devolve into a sandbox to throw out thoughts and feelings at irregular intervals. I'll keep it closely tied to monolithic social hosting services like flickr, blip, youtube and del.icio.us, because I'm trying to accomplish the exact opposite of relying on that very infrastructure for my content. And we all know that you can't slay the beast unless you understand it.

What the hell am I talking about? Well, mainly about the centralization and ownership of data. My good friend Boris sparked up a great conversation about this a couple months ago. Namely, I question the reasons behind many of these services unwillingness to develop a standard import / export strategy for when users want to jump ship. I'm not paying Flickr to host my photos, I'm paying them to be part of their community. However, in order to get my images back under my control, I have to resort to a hack.

All things considered, I've been trying to create a system which lets me publish my content just as easily as I would with these hosted services, but allow me to nevertheless retain nearly-full control of my own information. Sure, it's still "hosted" somewhere else, but that "somewhere" isn't as bloated as some other entities that we rely on. A catch-22 I have in the work I do is trying to come to terms with the fact that some of the tools I rely on were built by runaway capitalism, which is also what I'm trying to subvert. It's hypocritical of me to keep doing what I'm doing while remaining subservient to Apple, Yahoo et al. It's also ridiculous for me (and for you...) to run around praising the merits of open-source technology while toting an Apple Powerbook or sitting at a Windows desktop.

With that in mind, I have set up a sort of hybrid CMS / Aggregator at my new URL, stevenmansour.com. I'm tweaking it piece by piece so that it's almost as easy to use as the sum of all the other services I've been using this far, with the big question mark being, "How can I encourage the same level of community interaction without being a part of the actual "community" on those big content sharing services"?

In short, this is all just a big fun science experiment: I'm going to continue to "allow" one part of my content, through stevesgallery.com, flickr, del.icio.us, youtube and blip.tv to float out there on their own, acting as a catalyst for these companies (basically "Yahoo!" ;) ) to continue to profit from them. On the other hand, stevenmansour.com will not rely on any of these services, instead allowing me complete freedom to access and manipulate my data however I wish - directly, without going through some convoluted API.

So, errr, run, don't walk! There are already some juicy video clips, a couple of blog posts, and my very first podcast! You can hop between content categories (video, pics, podcasts, blog entries, etc) and pick and choose the RSS / Atom feed you subscribe to based on what you want to see / which application you use to aggregate, or you can just subscribe to the site's global feed. Either way, it's all goodness!

Wow. I am sooooo sorry.

I just realized that comments weren't being approved automatically anymore because of a spam filter modification I made.

It won't happen again, I swear on my pet monkey Locutus' head. Please send me more of your awesome!

This is the first in a series of three related announcements I would like to put out there.

I'd never written a grant proposal in my life. So when the first response was a positive one, informally telling me that one of my main ICT projects would likely be accepted, I was quite pleased. Not surprised, however - this endeavour had lots of backing, and I had been very thorough in documenting all aspects of it, especially impact assessment - one very key point to funders.

Then, I went out on a limb and tried to secure funding on my own for a second, independent project. That one failed (narrowly, if I'm to believe the hype), but in the process of applying, I met a very cool person who referred me to a group doing something somewhat parallel to what I was planning on doing. Lo and behold, somehow they were already forwarded a copy of my proposal and knew a bit about me, mainly from my Cuba blog. As it turns out, they were looking for someone to carry out something very similar to what I wanted to do, but didn't know where to turn. About a week ago, I got an email telling me that the project was greenlighted and that it would be covered by a stipend from their current backer.

What I'm praying these two projects will afford me personally is freedom - freedom from having to do one-off web and IT jobs every month to make ends meet, freedom to work solely on sustainability and science projects, and freedom to finally move around and build bridges between all these incredible people and groups I know that really should be working together. Social mobility, global justice, the environment, anti-war, responsible science, sustainable development, anti-privatisation, feminism, open-source, liberation of intellectual property... these causes are really all one thing. I refuse to refer to them as "movements". Movements are fleeting, halting and occur in short bursts - my bowels have about one every day. There is nothing persistent about a movement - when it's finished, there is nothing left of it. I flush the toilet; all the protesters drop their banners and go home.

No, these efforts need to be persistent (across space and time), unified, and distributed. That's where the techno-activist scene comes in - we're the dwarves who can build these magnificent structures - "infra"-structures, I hear they're called - to coordinate and unify our blob-like mass into something more cohesive. "The tie that binds". If we do our job properly, then the true hero, wisdom - not "information" or "data" - flows freely to and from all of these nodes. Furthermore, as the value of this wisdom increases exponentially, so too the complexity - and thereby, cost - of the infrastructure decreases. Our jobs become easier, but no less important. We are marching towards a singular time when infrastructure - hardware, software and everything in between - will be so infinitely simple as to be almost nonexistent. Only then will it be truly efficient in doing its purposeful duty of being the unobstrusive medium.

All of this - wireless community networks, social networking websites, blogs, open-source software in general, wikis - are means to an end, not means in themselves. A city-wide wireless network is about as useful as a ton of bricks unless someone is using it for something. Throw a tool in there specifically to help, say, the local environmental group organize a rally about the wetlands nearby that are being replaced with industries, and suddenly the infrastructure stops being a cold hard network of Wires and Watchtowers, and springs to life as the humble servant that it should be.

Hey, no one ever said that this was going to be glamorous.

Anyhow, I titled this post "Funding Hat-Trick", and most hat-tricks usually have three of something. This last item will be left intentionally vague for now, until I get more details... but suffice it to say that I'm surprised to find myself returning to the world of immersive environments, virtual reality, and online gaming. This time, not as a gamer / "user", but as a writer. And, perhaps getting paid for it... ;)

Sustainable science research, Cuba, and next-gen gaming... what more could I possibly ask for?

This morning, I went for a walk on The Main.

I was walking behind a man in an expensive-looking business suit, toting a metal briefcase in one hand, and a sweet-smelling, perfectly-rolled joint in the other hand.

I was waiting for the light to turn green, and cross the street with all the other distracted twenty-somethings, when I heard a young voice talking to her friend: "...and so you see, the worst thing that would happen to us is dying. And dying's really not so bad, because...", her voice trailing off as I turned the corner. I looked back, and saw two tiny, waify schoolgirls, dressed in chirpy summer clothes, not looking a day older than 12.

I stop at a small mexican joint for some lunch, and am happily reading my friend's copy of "Oreilly's Mind Hacks", when this 5'5" blonde scandinavian-looking girl with the longest legs you've ever seen walks in and sits across from me, pulling her "Le Devoir" out of her purse. She's got these glassy blue eyes that make her look like she's about to cry, but she's not. With salsa and chicken bits running down my forearm, I do my best not to stare. Her baby blue cashmere sleeveless tee and skin-tight blue jeans stand out like a sore thumb among the old sepia photos of rural Mexico that adorn the walls. As I open the glass door to leave I turn ever so slightly in time to catch her wipe away a falling tear from her cheek.

I spend the rest of the day working, writing, emailing, and discussing. And occasionally, wondering what the blonde beauty was crying about, what the 12 year olds were talking about, and why the business man was smoking weed as he walked down the street.

... for ordering nothing but a café allongé at lunchtime. I don't hang out here for the food, the coffee or the nouveau-hipster clueless attitude that seems to have started permeating this space. No, I come here because being around certain people here reminds me why I do what I do, and just as often - and more importantly - why I don't do what I don't do.

So you can drop the sass, Ms. Sassy-Pants, because I don't want your $15 salad nor do I want to know what shit-in-a-bowl is your lunch special for today. It's not that I can't afford it, it's just that it doesn't really fit into my hopefully low-impact lifestyle to finance your new Golf by paying 900% markup on a plate of raw vegetables.

Remember that your coffee isn't even particularily good or even better that any place in a half-mile radius. Yes, the wifi here is fast, but I'll downgrade from 5mbps to 3 mbps happily - if it means that I don't have to put up with your dirty looks.