Yesterday was the First Official Shopping Day of the Christmas Season. I had a cold, and spent the day on the couch, watching hours of MST3K on tape, and news coverage of the shopping ruckuses, broadcast live from various parts of the United States, commenting on the volume of stuff being bought and sold. I also napped, worked on a model of a Snowspeeder, and tinkered around on the internet.

But something struck me, making me say "well, s#1t!" out loud. ABC News (maybe it was NBC) said that the average Christmas shopper was going to spend over $800 on presents this year. $800!! That's over half of my GROSS paycheck, pre taxes, benefits, etc. They got that number from a survey of holiday shoppers. I think this goes back to the idea that the Media has a stranglehold on society's idea of what is real. All that their statistic tells me is that the people willing to spend the better part of a grand are the people out and about, bags and boxes stacked higher than they can carry, and are the people willing to stop and brag to a TV reporter about how much money they had to spend on presents. Continue reading…

Nov 14 1999 0 comments

11/14/1999 more identity ramblings

I dunno...I really like my original concepts for online identity, but I'm a bit unsure about real-world application. The most it accomplishes is to bring about individual awareness to the information harvesting going on, and the manipulation thereof, but you still only use one interface at a time. Humans aren't designed for more than that.

Lately I've been chatting on the disinformation site. Within my rules of online identity, when you connect, you create an aspect of yourself, designed specifically to interface with that specific "realm" of cyberspace. In this case, you pick a username, select an icon to represent you (amusingly, the chat applets calls this an "avatar"), and you're in. Interfacing is done with the keyboard for typing and the mouse for menu selection and some drawing capabilities.

That makes up for a pretty run-of-the-mill online experience. You create the identity, use the interface to manipulate that identity, and it's a 1-to-1 representation of yourself. Continue reading…

Nov 5 1999 0 comments

11/5/1999 why no entries in a while?

Well, here I am...I haven't put anything else here recently, mostly because I've had a busy life the past few days. Dinner with grandparents, meetings at work, shopping, etc., etc. Lots of crap to fill the already minimal time in my life.

You may ask, why hasn't Derek put anything in 11111001111 about himself? Well, chances are, if you've found this, and are interested in me, you'll track across to my personal page, but now that I think of it, there isn't a lot of "straight from the brain" things over there. I mean, you are interested enough in me, wetting your palate with these odd techo-rantings of some guy that you ran across parusing a web ring or something. Who is this Derek guy? Continue reading…