November 2004

I am not happy. My Powerbook’s hard drive failed on Saturday. Competely. I’m writing this up on the PC, which is fine for the blogs and gmail. I can’t do anything else, but I remembered that I don’t really do anything else. The good news is that I backed up my drive a while ago. The bad news is that I backed it up quite a while ago. Several months ago in fact. So I’ve lost my email database (no one sends me email to my POP addresses anyway), my photos (annoying, but not life-threatening) and some movies (ditto).

Much more annoying is that there is a mouse, or mice, in my flat. This shortly after a friend of mine related his woes of mouse attack.

There are some things I could try, but all of them involve buying a new hard drive for my machine, a 60GB 2.5″ IDE - which at about £90 is beyond my means. I really should sell the car now.

Geoff told me that there are many stories of people freezing the offending drive in a ziploc back overnight, which upon re-insertion, miraculously gives them up to half an hour more life. I will try this once I get a spare drive. And of course, once I’ve found a way of opening my Mac, which appears to have the tiniest screws in the history of technology. Anyone know where I can get a nanodriver?

My output will be sporadic and somewhat limited until I get my Mac back on track. Any help or advice appreciated!

I’ve covered The Cure’s A Forest and adapted it for a ringtone. If your phone supports MIDI ringtones, then you can download it from the link above and squirt it onto your phone with bluetooth. Make sure you send it to the right directory if you’re browsing the phone device directly. If you click the link, it will probably play it on your computer and won’t sound wonderful. Right-click and save it if you’re on a PC, and if you’re on a Mac, like sensible people, control click and save it first.

Have you seen the lousy Kodak adverts? “We like digital, but we miss our pictures”

Fuck off you whiny shits. Prints would come back blurred or overexposed or bumraped by the chemist or something. Then the last exposure would be black, missing your most important shot. And you’d pay regardless. For every sodding print.

What’s worse is that if you bought duplicates on the pretext that you’d save money, every wasted print would incur double wastage. Arse.

So I won’t give money to Kodak now that they can’t hack selling traditional film thanks very much. I give money only for those prints that I definitely want in paper or whatever form I choose. And I choose to give my money to Photobox. My friend Dylan told me about them ages ago. Their service is first class, their prices, especially when you buy more than five of a print are reasonable.

And they do all sorts of cool printing, like a strip of 16 stickers of any picture you want at £1.50, poster sizes, calendars, mugs, cushions, make-up bags, cubes, keyrings, mouse-mats and of course, photo frames if you’re old fashioned. The web site is fairly easy to use and once your account is set up, it’s dangerously simple for simpletons to lose cash and gain prints in very short order. Mac or PC, doesn’t matter.

If you have a digital camera and you miss pictures, fuck Kodak, try Photobox.

My good friend Geoff has in the past warned me about the dangers of unprotected surfing. He has always been security conscious and indeed, was the man who introduced me to ZoneAlarm and the concept of software firewalls. He also gave me a program for the PC that removes scumware. I was shocked to find over 180 Software Rapist on my vulnerable machine.

The number 180 has other connotations.

I use a Mac. It’s a lot easier. Using a PC reminds me of one of the daftest weapons I’d ever heard of - an anti-anti-missile-missile. It’s a wonder XP runs at all. It’s not that the Mac isn’t vulnerable (though the operating system is more robust), it’s just that at present, it presents too small a target for the Software Rapists.

My prediction is that someone will some day write a fake iPod updater that is downloaded by a fake System Software Updater screen that sticks a virus on the iPod and slowly trashes your entire music collection.

You can get my entries through your RSS readers now as I have an XML feed of Suspect Paki through the really rather clever FeedBurner. This means you don’t have to keep checking back on my site for new posts. Comments also are covered with this system - what happens is that if one of my posts gets a new message, it will be re-published through the RSS feed and that’s why sometimes you’ll get the same message more than once, even though you might have already read it or its previous comments.

And check out the really rather funky animator below. I’m told I can use this as a signature on my outgoing emails, but I’d really rather not! I would soon have very few people replying to me once their spam filters had me sussed!

Modern science tells us what the major religions and some philosophers have been telling us for millenia: nothing is real. Come to think of it, John Lennon told us that in Strawberry Fields too.

Matter doesn’t matter. There is nothing “solid” as such. What stops you being able to walk through a wall is not “substance” - there is no such thing - it is the strong nuclear force. The empty space within each atom is vast. If you imagnie a football pitch and place a pea on the centre circle, that would represent the nucleus. Now imagine the electrons whizzing around the outside of the stadium at the edge of the pitch in their “orbit”. I’m ignoring all the wave/particle duality stuff for now and treating you as if you know less about sub-atomic physics than me - which would mean you know less than bugger all. Unless you’re David Eastman in which case you have a degree in all this anyway.

So the atom is mostly empty space. And get this. The stuff that atoms are made of, well, that’s just bundles of energy too in strange configurations. Everything that we sense, has the nature of energy. Just energy of different types, of different frequency and amplitude. You and I are made of this energy. Our brains are “made” of this energy.

Now, perception and consciousnes. That’s the interesting bit. Everything that comes into our brains from the “outside” world, is energy. Energy in the form of various frequencies of light (which is just a part of the spectrum that our eyes are set up to detect, nothing special about that) hits the lens in our eye, forming an image on our retinas, upside down as everyone knows. The retina has specialised cells (rods and cones and shit) that in specialised groups, convert the energy into electric impulses which are shot down the optic nerve to the place at the back of the brain where they are interpreted as images. Interpretation is the key word. We don’t know how the brain “sees” anything at all. We don’t really know how this stream of electrical impulses is “seen” and by what. The other senses work according to a similar principle. Energy is converted into electrical impulses which are then fed to the brain which interprets the input.

Our sense are very limited. Everything is a representation. As quantum physics has shown in the 20th century, there is no subject/object duality. The act of observation itself alters reality. We can never observe reality objectively. Everything we see is a representation - an apparition. My sense of the world is all in my mind. The part of me that appreciates the senses - the sound of Jimi Hendrix, Picasso’s Guernica, the chilli sauce from Efes, the piercing feeling of my injection needle penetrating my flesh, the smell aroma of a Cohiba Robusto - all of this is in my mind. None of it has an objective existence, but I appreciate it all.

Some might say “Let me strike you in the groin with a mallet, then you can tell me that this is all representation and that nothing is real, that matter isn’t solid”. I would say “Fair point, but pain too, is perception, and pain too, is in the mind, as a representation, that is picked up by the consciousness and “felt” by the “soul”.

Some materialists argue that the “I” that experiences this is a pehnomenon of aggregated neural acivity from which consciousness spontaneously springs once an arbitrary limit has been reached. Bollocks. Whilst not wishing to underplay the incredible sophistication of the most miraculous creation in the universe, the human brain, I don’t buy the idea that consciousness is a factor of intelligence. I know a lot of people - and so do you - who have consciousness, but probably very little neural activity. I know bacteria who’d interest me more than some of the people I know. I believe in a soul. I can’t prove it. But the evidence is mounting.

“I didn’t release a bogus story to help me bring in more repressive measures! Honest! Nudge, nudge! Wink, wink!”

I’ve found one teaching in all religions that holds the answer to most of the problems of the world, best captured by the teaching “Love thy neighbour as thyself”

This beautiful teaching isn’t so difficult to apply to loved ones. It’s not so easy to apply to the distracted woman in the dented Nissan Micra in front of you in the morning rush hour; who leaves a gap in front that a couple of nuclear trains could get into, so that she has sufficient reaction time to avoid a collision while she composes a text on the mobile phone in the passenger seat. I have tried to put myself in her shoes more often. And it seems to be working - the heels do my back in, the pointed end crushes my toes, but it will feel great when I take them off!

I tried to enter a side street today, but was blocked by a lady driver intent on occupying the middle ground (oh how I wish there were more people with that bent). She looked at me and started to become restless. She reversed a little, then moved forward a little. I did something unusual; I resisted the middle-finger-salute that is my standard message to drivers who offend my sensibilities - and instead - I smiled - broadly - mouthing “it’s ok, don’t worry”. I sat patiently and moved on without complaint or ill-will.

I must try it more often. It made me feel better about myself and I’m sure the lady was slightly relieved by my unexpected attitude too. Imagine the world where everyone did that, most of the time? Would we be lashing out as a society at those we don’t trust, in the grip of unreasonable media-fuelled fear and hysteria? I think not. Tolerance used to be a byword for this country, or at least I feel it was in some circles. Maybe my Starck specs have started to tint a lighter shade of rose.

2000 years on, we are murdering, pillaging and raping in the name of Christ in Iraq. I wouldn’t say that our current actions accurately reflect the philosophy of Jesus.

From the destruction of Red Indians to the humiliation of the Iraqis. From the enslavement of Africans to the obliteration of the Japanese. From the sponsoring of dictatorships all over the world to the attempted destruction of the voice of native people in the same places. From Israel to Vietnam.

I love the West. Sincerely. It is better than dictatorship. But it is the most hypocritical empire in the history of humanity. I love the West because many points of view can be expressed. But the views of many are controlled by the power of a very few. I love the West because it is as much in my blood as is Islam or Pakistan, if not more so. But the abuse of power in the West is greater than with any empire in history.

There is hope. I am allowed to express this shame. In a repressive, tyrannical (US-sponsored!) Arab regime like Saudi Arabia or Iraq (once allies of America) I wouldn’t be allowed this freedom. It’s the hypocrisy, the holier-than-thou attitude. It pisses me off that Bush gives lectures on the spreading of freedom and free elections while his puppets are re-instated in Iraq and a stooge is in place at Afghanistan.

Inequality is rife. Even without a job, I’m better off here than just about anywhere else in the world. I thank God that I live in my beloved London, which I have served and which has looked after me.

I hope that sanity will prevail. There is hope, hope for the West, but that is a luxury that many people under the cosh of brutal regimes established and sponsored by the West do not have. We really must stop calling people terrorists when we have taken the lives of their entire families and left them homeless, stateless and hopeless. When you are left with nothing to live for, it becomes very easy to die for what might be. Especially when your enemy is committing acts of terrorism on a daily basis and calling it a War on Terror. The appropriation of language is really the biggest crime we’ve committed. It has deprived us of the only tool we have to enable human progress. The Truth.