John: Who
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card
[ Interests
-- Net
| Computers
| Science
Fiction | Politics
| (non-?)
Conspiracy ]
Some links go to my old public bookmarks
(new 2d)
or to CreationMatters
Part of ourpla.net | Views of our planet
Random Items of the Moment (quite superceded by AbbeNormal)
That's my name. I'm old enough to be president, from Massachusetts but until recently lived in Berkeley, California (a mile from the San Francisco Bay), in the United States of America , which is part of the United Nations (when it feels like it), all of which are on planet Earth. At least that's the mostly RuleOfLaw way to see some entities I've been part of. Now i live in Sri Lanka, in the village my wife grew up in.
Mid-2000, i decided/realized that i'm no longer agnostic. I believe that there is not just pattern, but meaning and probably good intent (or at least humor) in the universe. Unsure whether i want a label, or if so which. Maybe i'm a credulist.
Jeyanthy made a home page. She's a mediator, artist -- runs the Bay Area South Asian Artist Resource -- writer, student, teacher and freethinker (not necessarily in that order), and she is originally from Sri Lanka, a beautiful island nation off the coast of India, tragically at war. Occasionally i take some time to learn more Tamil so that we can teach our (future) kids properly and so that I can communicate better with her and family.
I briefly hosted a radio show in 1997, What Goes On Among Us?
Photos of John doing different things.
Many still use text-only web browsers, because they happen to be sitting at a command line interface, or have visual disabilities, etc. I've created
one-page+ lynx help page
text-only Periodic Table of Elements (once the most popular page on the site)
Calendar and calendar builder for making text-only web calendars
The Jargon File (also published as an Actual Book: The New Hacker's Dictionary ) is a hyper-dictionary of hacker slang, culture, and linguistics. Mostly English. My favorite entry is for kluge, and of course one should look up hacker).
Yes, there really are vending machines, cameras, robots and other machines accessible on the Internet.
Don't look now, but you're soaking in it (the World Wide Web FAQ)!
Mac OS X is increasingly popular among computer geeks -- it's a Unix with good support of software drivers, and has a complete graphical interface. I still know Macs better than other hardware/OSs (though Be, Linux and DOS all ran at least once on my old Mac clone). Anyway, here's some useful information for Macintosh.
Of course what I really want is a free (and open source) next-generation interface operating system--one that adds as much usability as the graphical interface has to the command line interface. Apple's put Unix under Mac, and the Linux/GNUcommunity has put more than one real GUI (e.g. GNOME, Eazel's Nautilus, etc.) on top of Unix. Maybe as those tasks near completion someone will get really creative. I want something with all the powers of RealBasic, Perl, and Guile and more available to the end-user.
I want the Mac's Finder with Venn views; easy translation of information among systems, journalling and dynamically updated searches like BeOS; a content management/IDE/server/client tool like Frontier, and at least one language that is the easiest for non-programmers to learn yet, making it straightforward to most end users to build custom solutions that can be interacted with through better visualizations, voice, & other meaningful new interface technologies. We're getting close... See Wiki Weblog PIM.
A toolbox for users to manage their information and communication that doesn't suck.
HRSFA ran its it's second Vericon (science fiction convention)-- in January 2002; i only visited a little (including midnight Diplomacy!), and brought my brother for a brief visit to his first SF convention. Worldcon was in San Jose this year, good hanging out with you-know-who-you-are.
My friends at ![[Circlet logo]](Graphics/Circlet.gif)
Circlet Press
publish erotic science
fiction & fantasy.
In my wayward youth, i helped start the Harvard-Radcliffe
Science Fiction Association (
, pronounced "hearse-fah").
Our tenth reunion back at Hahvahd June '99 was great fun. The
rumor mill occasionally produces whispers of an alumni association.
Probably just the echoes of some confused Cthulhu cult.
There are better ways than jail or prison to deal with people caught doing something "wrong." One great alternative is Equity-Restorative Justice (an approach to victim-offender reconciliation programs).
Anarchists are not people who just want everything to fall apart. Check out Situationists International , and for the wacky artist side of anarchism, The Cacophony Society.
Ken Cheetham maintains an excellent San Francisco Bay Area Progressive Directory.
Did you know that jurors have the power to overturn the law in the case they're involved in? Check out the Fully Informed Jury Association.
USA weapons sales have gone waaay up since the breakup of the USSR. Now the weapons we make kill even more people all over the planet, including USA troops. Almost half of the major conventional weapons delivered (in cost) from 1994-1998 . To me this is a sign that there are still quite a few bugs in the system. [Other countries are apparently catching up percentage-wise. Not sure if we're selling less or they're selling more though...]
For
many years, this page has claimed Carnivore
(later renamed
Magic
Lantern) to be a Federal Bureau
of Investigation (USA) system for
spying on
its citizens' activities on the Internet. According
to some it was the FBI's
custom software that protected your privacy more than the off-the-shelf
snooping software otherwise available to them.
Intelligence agencies in some countries of a 5-pack (USA, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand) less recently admitted to their mass-spying system, some say there's been collective spying on each another's citizens to get around laws barring them from tracking their own citizens. The EU is upset at Great Britain over charges of using the system for commercial spying. It's called Echelon.
The School of the Americas is where the CIA taught terror techniques to many Latin Americans. Congress recently closed it, then re-opened it under a new name.
Remember all the brouhaha over black helicopters? There's evidence the USA military experimented in populated areas with these hard-to-hear & see choppers without notifying residents. Good thing there's no conspiracy here...hmmm...except by the military for practicing on its own citizens. It's kind of like the military exercise the Marines did in downtown Oakland where they admitted that one purpose was to train for the eventuality of citizens getting upset during a depression or other social disturbance.
On the east coast i worked at Technical
Education Research Centers (![[TERC logo]](Graphics/tercns.GIF){kind=small}
). They do research and develop
math & science curricula
and affordable equipment, working with real teachers, often in
real classrooms, to improve math and science education.
On the west coast i briefly volunteered & worked at the
Institute
for the Arts of Democracy, re-named the Center for Living Democracy.
The founder, Frances Moore Lappe, left the Institute
for Food and Development Policy
(which she'd also started)
because she came to see local democracy as more of a root issue
than food. The center learned and shared about people getting
involved in their communities to make things better, and started
the American News Service (distributed through Knight-Ridder)
to spread the news of such grassroots democracy. Now both organizations
are defunct (ironically in part due to a failure to sufficiently
apply the democratic arts internally -- this stuff is hard!),
but check out the archives
of livingdemocracy.org. Also, some of the folks who worked there
have started up Community
Innovation News).
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