Open Life Challenge openlifechallenge@identi.ca

@Karl Fogel claims this statement of mine is deep, so I guess I should post it here:

Most monopolies are centered around the human fear of failure, after all.

Bix Beiderbecke

I had never heard of jazz coronet player Bix Beiderbecke until I bumped into a collection of his music on archive.org a few months ago. According to the wikipedia article on him at #^http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bix_Biederbecke he was one of the most influential jazz musicians in the late 20s until his death at 28 in 1931. I downloaded all the works by Beiderbecke I could find to the Bibliotecha and have had a good time listening to them.

These works are mostly jazz tunes with a heavy dose of ragtime thrown in for good measure. This music is a feast for the ears, especially when compared to the garbage that has been produced in the last forty years or so. It is light, lively, and just plain fun to listen to.

Here is a list of his music available on the Internet Archive: #^https://archive.org/search.php?query=Bix Beiderbecke

#publicdomain
#pdmusic

I wrote the following on Thursday 20 October 2011. I still like it...

Unfinished Thoughts
by Jim Morgan

#gadaffi #madeleine #foxholeradio #ows #selfreliance #deathrates

Some random thoughts for your Thursday:

1) Gadaffi is dead. The irony is that after nearly 30 years of living in tents and moving from place to place fearing that the United States would do him in, his own people offed him. Good riddance you bastard.

2) I wonder what the odds are that Libya will bring back their monarchy.

3) Libya CANNOT have Princess Madeleine of Sweden for their Queen. She will be America’s Queen. I am afraid that I must insist on this point.

4) I will write a wiki/blog article on how to build a foxhole radio, just as soon as I build one myself.

5) I think I may be turning into some sort of hippie.

6) My father is fond of saying “never take by direct assault what you can out maneuver.” This is my attitude towards all this Occupy nonsense. These protesters are asking the government and the corporations to do something that runs contrary to the way these entities functions. All that will happen is a minor calibration that will need recalibrating in about 40 years.

What needs to happen is that people need to realise that we don’t need to government and corporations. We need to become self-reliant and quit hanging on their teets. With Farmer’s Markets, urban/guerilla farmers and a little bit of luck we can feed ourselves. Developing alternative means of power generation is fairly easy to do and on a small scale can be fairly inexpensive. Low-tech or even no-tech solves most if not all of the first world “problems.’ For example one does not need to worry about Google or Facebook spying on them if they never get online. For that matter if we begin to think slower and smaller we may discover that we may not really “need” the world wide web and may be happier with a localised mesh network where the only people on the network are people within spitting distance of you. Osama bin Laden waged a war and managed his terrorism empire for ten years without a telephone, much less an internet connection.

7) Most of the people that I know are slaves to the tech they hold in their hands.

8) As a library the internet is a fine invention. I am not convince that the web is all that grand as a communications tool. It is too weak of a system with way too many points where the system can be breached and/or broken.

9) If you are stupid enough to assume that anything that you say or do online is in anyway secure then you deserve whatever happens to you.

10) I have to wonder sometimes if politics and religion are pointless diversions created by the powers that be to occupy people and keep them from learning about and living life.

11) From the CIA World Factbook: Top Ten Countries with the Highest Death Rates

Rank
country (deaths/1,000 population) Date of Information
1 Angola 23.40 July 2011 est.
2 Afghanistan 17.39 July 2011 est.
3 South Africa 17.09 July 2011 est.
4 Nigeria 16.06 July 2011 est.
5 Russia 16.04 July 2011 est.
6 Ukraine 15.74 July 2011 est.
7 Chad 15.47 July 2011 est.
8 Guinea-Bissau 15.27 July 2011 est.
9 Lesotho 15.19 July 2011 est.
10 Central African Republic 15.01 July 2011 est.

12) Seeing South Africa, Russia and the Ukraine on the top ten death rate list surprises me a little.

13) I know it is from the CIA and I know the CIA is the big boogie man but I am downloading the CIA World Factbook. It is current, it is in the public domain and it is the best almanac I’ve seen in a long time.

14) ¿Crees en el amor?

15) I have always believed that alternatives always exist. I also believe that the alternatives can coexist within the extant paradigm. We just need to learn how to think in a different way. Qui-gon Jin told Anakin Skywalker that his focus determined his reality. Where is your focus? Is it on the problem or the solution?

16) A fox was chasing some rabbits. After an hour of being chased the tired rabbits paused for a moment and thought. A wise young rabbit piped in and said “to hell with this running shit, let’s stop running, make a little love, and outnumber that damned fox!”

17) That is what I am talking about…thinking creatively about solutions. I’m sure the rabbits enjoyed the plan as well.

Quicksand

Quicksand- A decent into crime
by Jim Morgan

Last night my spleen ruptured appreciably as I watched the public domain film Quicksand which stars Mickey Rooney as a man who gets caught in a wild descent into crime after he steals $20 from the cash register at work.



This movie is generally believed to be one of Mickey Rooney’s best performances and is first film dark character after his good guy “Andy Hardy” movies.



This movie also stars Peter Lorre (who does a most adequate job of playing Peter Lorre), Jeanne Cagney and Barbara Bates.



I loved this movie. This was incredible. Within a few minutes I was totally wrapped up in the story and almost forgot that I was doing other things online while I was watching it. There was no cheesy dialogue or over the top scenes in it. I even liked Peter Lorre’s character, Nick, in this movie and I generally get annoyed by Lorre’s characters who are usually weasels.



Do yourself a favour and spend the hour and eighteen minutes to watch this public domain classic. It is well worth the time.



This movie can be watched or downloaded from archive.org

#toppdflix #PeterLorre #MickeyRooney

Barcelona Debian MiniDebConf just started! Join the live streaming! #debbcn #bcn2014minidebconf

Whether or not Dorian S. Nakamoto (64) is satoshi, inventor of bitcoin, I'm finding ageism in tech to be an interesting lens through which to look today.

The myths that have been circulating before: "satoshi" was some "shadowy pseudonymous cabal of libertarian cryptographers" (dTal); the bitcoin code was the product of genius. "My fifteen point list of obvious likely bugs was systematically destroyed by a codebase that quite frankly knew better" -- Kaminsky http://www.businessinsider.com/dan-kaminsky-highlights-flaws-bitcoin-2013-4

Compare with how I've seen the bitcoin code described today: "Satoshi's style of writing code was old-school. He used things like reverse Polish notation. [...] We have rewritten roughly 70 percent of the code since inception. It wasn't written with nice interfaces. It was like one big hairball." -- Gavin Andresen

Then there's the HN thread, which seems mostly concerned with protecting a kindly grandfather (who is into model trains no less) from the world, and various reddit threads in various stages of denial and confusion, which I stopped reading when I got to the predictable "(sounds a bit senile tbh)" http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zpuer/the_newsweek_article_is_probably_incorrect_look/

http://cercademi.net/pumpnodes/

happy bday, GNU

W00t -- participating in symposium on @BiellaColeman's excellent "Coding Freedom". #frdm http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2013/09/upcoming-online-symposium-on-professor-gabriella-...

I can't wait to order an unlocked $80 Firefox phone from eBay.

Unlocked.

Open Source.

Smartphone.

$80.

Is it going to be an awesome phone? Almost definitely not. It will almost surely be a little plasticky piece of shit.

But I'm willing to spend $80 to try out an OS for a month or two. I'm not willing to spend $1000 for it.

To be honest, the first thing I will probably do with the phone is flash it with software I download and build.

ZTE has been the subject of what seem to be now insanely hypocritical technology spyware hearings in Congress. But that doesn't mean they weren't somewhat valid.

If I were at Mozilla, I'd probably try to address that in the most diplomatic way possible.

What the hell happened to "graceful degradation"? Most websites are nearly unusable without #Javascript now. What gives?