The peppermint propaganda you sit and read on your beach house porch on some lonely ocean moon watching the past drift in and out like the tide of your miserable lonely forgotten life. The sun reflecting off thousands of diamonds buried beneath the hot sand that rarely breathes moist air despite its taunting proximity to the ocean. Your mind wanders and you think of the battles you’ve won with ships, with words. As you contemplate the medals you’ve earned and the worlds you’ve burnt, I drift through space in this coffin on another irrelevant run to sell tobacco to a bunch of tall gray men, delivering leaves to these old unforgiving trees just to watch them burn up. I feel like a patriot walking sinners to the gallows back on earth. What, leaves, have you done to deserve such a harsh end to life? Did you always know this would be your fate? Did you live life with the knowledge of how it would end, not where, not when, but how? At least your ashes will be spread among the stars you reached for for so much of your life, reached for with the humility of a bow, reached for a possibility that was never really possible, without hope, but with peace.
Red Lights.
Red lights are never good.
I don’t understand what red did
To be branded bad, green good.
Stop blinking.
This contrast is too much, my eyes
can’t adjust to the in and out
over and over
The controls.
What’s wrong?
Who gave you that black
eye of broken glass
shards filling the cabin
like fairy dust helping me fly
towards you ever so slowly,
carefully. Another lost boy drifting
homeless if home is a location–
a destination.
That hiss.
Air must be leaking.
The slow sound of death
as life runs like rats
hopelessly jumping ship.
Hurry.
Hurry hurry hurry
hurry hurry hurry
the fingers disobey.
A rebellion of the body
as it awakens in time
to witness the end.
Birth and death hand in hand,
lovers sharing a final embrace.
Oh bright stars!
Oh guiding light!
Come close, comfort me.
Envelop me in your
warmth one last time.
The ship
is dissolving
into darkness
but you
haven’t
abandoned
me.
I’ve reached
and
finally
have
touched.
Automated Mental Impression (AMI) for unknown being recovered 5 Dec. 326 G.E.
This is a poem I wrote last year for a class I was taking. I think I’m going to start posting some random poetry on the blog for a while for lack of anything better to do. Most of it will probably be a little dated. In any case, feedback/questions welcome.
…
The thoughtfully placed street lamps
cast a warm, almost uniform glow
over the four still figures sitting
complacently next to each other
on two wooden benches,
wondering whether any of this
is real or the product of some
cruel hallucination meant to contrast
their reality with an ideal image
of harmony and bliss.
.
A solitary swing sways gently
as the fifth member of the party
begins to pick up speed, racing
higher and higher trying to escape the illusion
while wind and gravity together join
forces to brush back her hair into a waterfall of gold
and yet,
at the same time,
not wanting to ever leave
the thoughtful calm,
a sense of peace that permeates
this place so vividly:
the importance of which shoelace
receives the privilege of being on top
without bothering to recognize
that they are one in the same, or the
significance of insignificant conversation
gently flowing from one wondering
face to the next along a cloud of empty breath
that for a brief moment fills the cool autumn air
before disappearing despite it’s desperate attempt to
grasp on to something
permanent.
As a follow-up to my previous post about the privacy implications of a central identity provider (*coughfacebookcough*), in this installment of “Kevin rants about shit” I will attempt to lay out my vision for how I think our online identities should be maintained, respected, and managed. This post will be more technical than the last but hopefully the concepts will be somewhat accessible to more than just my computer science friends 
.
The Problem
Briefly, the problem as I described it in my previous post is that right now our online identities are at the mercy of the sites that create them. The most notable of these being, of course, Facebook. This is cause for concern because any information you enter about yourself can be taken and shared with the world without your permission, or maybe with your implicit permission through confusion. As I see it, there are two possible approaches to solving this problem: government intervention and a technological solution. If there is one entity I trust less than Facebook (or most corporations), it’s the government, so I will only be talking here about the second. In the following sections I will lay out a high level architecture for how what a technological solution to the problem might look like.
(Continue reading…)
This post has been a long time coming, and in light of recent events I feel the need now more than ever to write it. I don’t intend to be the most comprehensive or elegant critic to make the following points, but hopefully it will go a little ways towards raising awareness.
The Latest Tradeoff
Facebook recently announced a series of new initiatives, the largest of which they refer to as the Facebook Open Graph. In a nutshell what this means for users is websites are now able to provide specific information to Facebook about themselves (and about you). If you log into a site, such as Pandora, using your Facebook profile, it will start broadcasting your likes, dislikes, and listens back to Facebook. Facebook then has the ability to share this information with your friends, advertisers, or the general public. ReadWriteWeb has a more in depth explanation of the details of this announcement from the perspective of a user.
The implications of this announcement are tremendous. Previously Facebook sought to be the owner and manager of personal data that you entered into its system (and it has succeeded extremely well so far). With this new initiative, it seeks to track and own not just your personal information, but also your activity across the web.
(Continue reading…)
The other night I was speaking with Courtney outside of the 12th Street Pub in Lincoln and the subject of information filtering came up, specifically with regards to Twitter and Google Reader. Since “this is what Twitter should do” posts are all the rage right now, I figured I would share some thoughts on the topic.
Courtney brought up the insightful and for some reason not obvious (to me at least) point that all filtering in 1 to many services like this is done on the receiving end, the “pull” end of the process. We talked about why this is a problem and how it could be addressed.
Generally, in a world of “information overload” there needs to be a better way for producers to selectively target and filter the information they send out. Not all of this burden should lie on the information consumer. (Continue reading…)
This has been a long time coming, but I’ve finally gotten everything set up and transferred a good portion my internet presence to this new website. This is the home for now of any writing, etc I do. This means you can ignore the old, ugly blog from now on. If you subscribe to my posts through RSS, you will also need to update your feed.
The Name
I spent days of intense meditation looking for the perfect name for the new site. After three days of no sleep or food, an idea came to me: just give up and just pick something. So I settled on “Shuttlebum.” The name is sort of a reference to a term I picked up from one of my favorite Sci-fi books: Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany. Shuttle-bums are basically uneducated people who work on ships that fly around the galaxy. I feel like that’s a decent metaphor for my excursions here. (Continue reading…)
