There is no greater challenge to my geek credentials, no more damning indictment of my weak kung fu, than the fact that I can't write a regular expression to save my life.
I know, I know. They're a command-line ninja's shuriken* of choice. If Linux is dough, they're the KitchenAid**. They're loyal and loving, and they'll jump up and do tricks for you if you only know how to ask them.
But I don't know how to ask them, because I only step into the land of regex once or twice a year. Every time the need comes up, I have to re-learn regular expressions more or less from zero. The last time it happened, I broke down and bought an O'Reilly book for my iPad. (This is my usual strategy, based partly on the hope that the knowledge will seep into my brain osmotically through my fingertips while I'm playing Cannibal Bunnies.)
I realized the other day, in the middle of a conversation with someone, that – for just a moment – I had stopped thinking of them as a human being, and started thinking of them as the thing that stood between me and some quality time with my iPad.
(If you were talking to me in the past few days, and wondering if you're the person in question, let me assure you that you weren't. It was someone else. Really.)
And, you know, that happens. At parties, some of us catch ourselves looking over the shoulder of the person we're talking to, in case there's someone we actually want to talk with nearby. A friend could be pouring their hearts out to us, and a stray anxiety could drift up from our subconscious long enough to distract us. Even when we give someone our full attention, we're rehearsing what to say next or wondering how they're reacting to what we just said.
Agree or disagree with the DDoS attacks attributed to activists affiliated with Anonymous, they've put the word "hacktivism" squarely on the radar of the chattering classes.
I'll cop to a kind of Pavlovian response to hearing "hacktivism", because Alex wrote her doctoral thesis on the subject and for several months it damn near displaced "What's Steve Jobs going to announce next?" as our primary topic of conversation. (Thank god for those iPad 2 rumours, or we'd be in danger of it happening all over again.)
As 2010 dies down, a lot of us are looking back over the past year. This cartoon was inspired - indirectly - by one of the year's less-reported stories: the collision between the informal, off-the-cuff culture of Twitter and the rigid world of law. That conflict runs the gamut from totalitarian regimes to liberal democracies:
This one came to me while I was watching an episode of Burn Notice (please hold your applause until the end of the post), where Michael, Fiona, Sam and Jesse have realized they have a piece of unspeakably important information in their hands. And maybe a decade ago, I would have found their dilemma compelling.
But today? In a few minutes, they could post it to Tumblr, Posterous, WordPress, 4chan and - just for the hell of it - Plenty of Fish, with plenty of time left over for Michael and Fiona to agonize over their relationship, for Sam and Fiona to explore their rivalry for Michael's attention (I suspect they each had emotionally distant parents), and for Michael and Jesse to finally acknowledge the sexual tension between them.
It's possible I'm overreaching. That may have to be a two-parter.
So now I know. And I have to live with the knowledge.
I'm married to someone who... (okay, deep breaths; bring down the pulse)... who keys in smileys... without a hyphen.
Ten years of marriage, and it's only yesterday that I discover Alex is perfectly willing to deprive her emoticon-people of a critical facial feature. "A smiley? Really? Exactly how freakin' happy are they going to be without a nose?!"
I can directly thank two people for today's cartoon. One is Deb Ng, who tweeted this a few days ago:
If I were to propose a day where no one tweeted links to their own stuff, would you laugh at me, or think "hmmm. That's a good idea?"
And the other is my wife and Social Signal partner, Alexandra Samuel, whose take on those tweets was:
I'm in an exotic location, contributing brilliant, world-changing insights to a conversation among important, influential people.
You may have noticed the home pages of your favourite torrent-tracking sites look a little different today: fewer search fields and options than you're used to, and maybe a few more U.S. Department of Homeland Security crests and seizure notices than before.
I for one had no idea that the same superagency charged with keeping American skies free from explosive devices was also responsible for keeping American hard drives free from bootleg copies of Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. (To the movie and recording industries, I'm sure that seems entirely appropriate - their only misgiving being that DMCA violations aren't punishable with extraordinary rendition.)
This week's cartoon is inspired by working at a lot of cafés this week – cafés with very... slow... Wi-Fi.
I'm finding that decent broadband is common enough these days to make slower connections feel extra frustrating. I'm used to being able to download hundred-megabyte software upgrades in the time it takes the barista to pull shots for my Americano. And I've grown accustomed to genuinely streaming video; I'll grind my molars to powder if that TED talk on the Western world's addiction to speed has to pause for a few seconds midway through to buffer.
