Buffini's Blog

I think I love this man. If he’s not on TV then by Jeebus he should be.

BELIEVE IN THE LORD, B*TCH!!!

Its a terrible thing. Why can’t we get our mucus glands removed? I ask you… in this day and age should I really have to sit on my couch smoothering with a head cold, completely unable to breathe?

A load of pox is what its. Bah and most definitely Humbug.

It should be noted before I go off on my rant that I am a bit of a Superman fanatic – There is no other superhero that can ever come close to bettering him in my eyes. It always  surprises me a little though, the attitudes to the different heros and their various personas.

Take for example Batman – a hero certainly, but a dark and moody, broody type of a chap. Most people I know consider Batman to be cooler than Superman, and this tends to follow through for most of the mainline heros out there – The darker, cooler, crankier, etc… that they are, the more popular they tend to be. It seems to be a case of we want our heros, much like our celebrities and so on, to misbehave and be “bad boys” in order to be worthy of our adulation.

But why? What is it about the bad boy mystique that attracts us over the simple messages espoused by others like good old Clark? Its something thats fascinated me for a long time, and has (it seems to me anyway..) strong ties into people’s morbid fascination with fame and celebrity, the need to believe in the supernatural, and all of that other jazz.

A related topic is the way that Superman, being damn near omnipotent, omnisicient, and pretty much omnipresent, is frequently portrayed as a Messiah figure. Think about it – people worship him, pray to him for salvation, curse him when things go wrong; he is the effective manifest saviour of the world, and because of his nature he can never back down from that mile high pedestal which the masses have placed him on. This in itself is a massive research topic, and one deserving of a post all of it’s own. A nice little weekend project I feel

Oh the summer has landed. Oh joyous happy day! Poxy sunshine.

As you may have guessed i am not a fan of hot weather. This stems from the fact that i am perfectly suited to the climate that I grew up in – good old rainy Ireland. Not too hot, not too cold, not too wet, not too dry, etc etc… but for some strange and unholy reason the summer seems to have gotten lost en route to wherever the hell it normally goes at this time of year, and is instead paying us poor monekys a visit.

I don’t like I tells ye. Tain’t natural, and no good can ever come of it. So here is my cargo cult attempt to banish the evil sun back behind the clouds and bring on the winter (You may now picture me doing some form of weird “winter dance”, possibly in nothing more than a loin cloth. Hoh yes.)

Come on the winter…

I couldn’t help it. I cracked and had to have one, and am now sitting in a code review tool meeting enjoying the sweet caffeine coursing through my veins.

Wondering about other people’s jobs recently. I posted about this a while ago, about love of the job and all that. It ties in a little with some of the work going on in my Masters at the moment, particularly relating to workers needs, etc… And whenever I think about my job I feel very happy that I’m one of the lucky 3% that actually enjoy their work.

I think that my industry is unusual in this though. Most IT/Software people are geared towards their work and fall into it naturally. And luckily for us, most of the rest of the world is frightened by what we do, so we get a lot of latitude in what we can do, our working environment and so on. Its almost to the point where we have carte blanche to create our own working environment.

The rest of the workforce does not. People who are in jobs they don’t really enjoy or want will frequently find themselves caught in a vicious circle of work hatred – cant stand the work, the place, the hours are crap, my boss blows, etc… leading around and around in a massive cycle of misery that wont get broken until either retirement or the worker breaks and sets up their own business swearing blind to never go back.

So what I would like to see is some way to increase general workforce satisfaction, give the general populace the privileges we have enjoyed for so long, let them take charge of their own work happiness. It would take a lot to get that done, but would be very worth it.

Save your sanity – take control of your work life back.

Interesting reading:

• The case against worker satisfaction
• Scholarly articles a-la Google

And I am not exactly impressed with this. Let me explain.

The title of the competition kind of gives it away. “The All-Ireland Talent show”. Here we have a competition entirely based on the premise that the person or group or act or whatever with the most talent should win. Now I’m not saying that the act (3 young brothers from the Arran Islands) that won are not talented. Clearly they are. They are very good, particularly when you factor in their age, but the problem is that, and I don’t mean to be sour graping or disparaging towards the boys, but what they did wasn’t overly original or unique. None of the other acts were.

Young Daithí was the only performer that not only wrote his own music, but was developing his own style in which to write it. He displayed genuine musical talent, a love of his instrument and a musical style that most people would take a lifetime to develop. He was the only person in the competition who did have this. All of the others were very talented in their areas, but they didn’t have that special edge. And because of this disparity, he not only did not win, he in fact came last. First out.

This just reinforces my firm belief that these competitions are, sadly, entirely based on popularity and not on talent, musical skill, or even on the odd bits of musical genius that do occasionally shine through, like this performer. It was another sad day for Irish talent, but I still have faith that he will go on to better things. I think that his sheer talent will see him win through where so many others.

Anyway, whatever happens, I’ll be going to his concerts.

Image via WikipediaSo here we goes, a test to see how well the train of thought can handle a very large black coffee first thing in the morning with no effort at censoring the brain diarrhea. Mmmm lovely words.
This morning I’m attempting to build stuff, which can get on your nerves pretty quick when each build process takes about an hour, and its someone else’s code your building so you got no guarantee it’ll actually work, gah people, so sitting around waiting for stuff to finish gets real old real fast.
On my right I can see Zemanta is pulling all sorts of strange images and related monkey poo, its funny cos the stuff its coming up with is just as disjointed as the gibberish I’m writing. Read an interesting comic there yesterday, “Death – the time of your life” by Neil Gaiman, gives a quick insight into the life of a gay singer and her lover, and what happens to them and their friends when Death, portrayed in this case by a teenage girl (I think), or a gothette as described in the book. Pictures of Mr. Gaiman in various states of rough looking-ness have now appeared. I wish I could get away with writing stuff and looking like that all day. Sweeeeeeet….

Was also reading stuff on lucid dreaming, something I’ve long been interested in. Imagine being in a really cool dream and being able to take control of it, going on a wild rampage through the solar system, trying to make the sun go nova. Actually there’s an interesting thought, if you could take control of your dreams and do anything you wanted, in an environment where there can be no consequences, what would you do? Would you go on a murderous rampage, slaughtering millions for the hell of it? Imagine yourself to be a giant zeppelin, possibly made of lead, that farts its toxic wayt through the sky causing untold disasters? Or would the fantasies be…. naughtier? Untriguing….

Damn caffeine and its wearing off-ness.

So lets say the new iPhone launched on Tuesday, that being two days ago, by the way if I was an early adopter I would probably be WHOPPINGLY pissed at Apple right about now, and you’ve decided you can’t live without one, and like me are too cheap to sign up for a long and expensive contract to get one, just how long do you think it will take the new beasties to appear on eBay? A swim sounds good right about now actually.

Clever lad that I am I managed to bust my glasses last Friday, and (should’ve gone to SpecSavers) had no spare pair to tide me over. I’m quite lucky in that my prescription is pretty light, so I really only need them for computer work. On the downside I’m a Software Engineer so computer work accounts for approximately 9 hours of my day. Went to SpecSavers on Tuesday and got a new pair, two actually, substantially stronger and sturdier than the last ones, so hopefully the ear piece coming off in my hand wont be such a problem.

Something else I was about to write has just disappeared.

Came across “The Lives of Others” group blog there recently thanks to a friends page (Prototype of a Person) and its a really interesting blog, a fascinating project. Obviously one of the appeals of the web is anonymity and the ability to say what you normally couldn’t, but with this one there’s got to be an element of group think kicking in at some point? If people are posting regularly to this thing, is it possible that the tone and content of the posts will begin to influence each other so that the blogs will become more and more similar so that the many becomes the one? Will each poster be able to maintain their individuality or just become part of the gestalt?

I’d love a really good speech to text interpreter so I could spew this stuff out nice and fast and top of the head instead of having to slow down and do it all through the irritation of the keyboard. A neural interface would be good too.

Comics Rock. Redshirts are expendable. Buy low.

My brain hurts now.

Mixture between nanotech, architecture, and nature, with a little ethical focus on the side.

Recently talking to a friend of mine (architecture student, big into the archy scene) who mentioned a couple of projects he was working on, which I’m not going to give away here, but it got me thinking about the possible overlap between certain disciplines. That and the horrendous amount of sci-fi I’ve read.

Lets say that some time in the near future the problem of true Von Neumann systems are cracked, giving the human race the power to manufacture at a molecular level. This basically gives us a capability to build practically anything, producing numerous paradigm shifts in several fields, from the a shift to the rod logic style computing as envisaged in Neal Stephenson’s “Diamond Age”, to the biononics (nanodevices operating and interfacing at a deep biological level) shown in Peter F. Hamilton’s “The Dreaming Void”, to the more mundane efforts of reprogrammable clothing , and even way up to environmental scrubbers. There would also be major shifts in materials science, as materials which are now being manipulated at a molecular level now display a whole host of new physical properties, for example the surface tension of a water droplet all of a sudden becomes a major factor.

The question then arises – if we suddenly arrive at a point where we have the ability to do, almost literally, anything, what is to stop people from doing it?

Now this isn’t entirely a bad thing, as we would see an explosion in human creativity, vast new areas opening up for expansion, medicine advanced exponentially, and so on, as well the ability to create almost any structure and have it be smart, self-maintaining, and reconfigurable at the drop of a hat. But there is also the flip side of this – what if some despot gets his grubby hands on it and decides to key a nanobot keyed to mangle DNA with certain characteristics, say blue eyes…

While the ethical issue has always been a bit of a laugh to most people, it will become more and more relevant as time goes by. As a species, large scale ethics is not something we’re particularly good at, the analogy I generally prefer is that if the human race were a single person, it would be a teenager battling through the latter stages of adolescence.

Now to tie it all in: at the beginning I mentioned nanotech, architecture, nature and ethics. Lets say for example that someone was to design a house, a free standing configurable house, that incorporated both nature and nanotech in its design. Lets say it was a 2 storey edifice with living roots instead of foundations, which provided heat by geo-thermal tapping, water directly from the root system, oxygen from plan life living in and around it, a wildly variegated ecosystem of, say, savannah flora and (small obviously) in one area, heat gathering/shedding plants growing from the roof, a whole host of different ecologies co-existing symbiotically in building. Such a building could even incorporate food production into its design. The nanotech within the structure would be responsible for managing, monitoring and maintaining such a diverse ecology, as well as for providing all the elements a technological civilisation would come to expect, communications, computing power, entertainmet. It could even be intelligent, self-aware.

Such a house could be very well be viewed as “smart”, self repairing, eco friendly, etc… It could even be considered, in a very real sense, to be alive.

Yay the pundits cry!! Utopia has been discovered!! But what happens if this smart, self-renewing, self-maintaining, self-aware edifice decides that it doesn’t want anyone living in it? Do we declare this a travesty and force our view on it, or possibly worse, eradicate all traces of intelligence and self-awareness from it, thereby committing genocide? Numerous people, much cleverer than me, have debated the possibility of an AI conflict, and the various benign or apocalyptic outcomes thereof, so I’ll keep my nose out of it, thank you.

My question instead is at what point do we take stock, sit down and make a rational and mature decision as a society that this is what we want to do? When do we take responsibility for what we are trying to do, and lay ethical ground rules for the creation, development and treatment of these new entities?

The sooner the better I would think.