Alex Reid

I ordered a $10 shirt from Threadless last Tuesday and it just arrived today.

Very happy with my purchase.

Not only is it a great shirt for a great price, it’s a great quality shirt and they included some schwag. I was also pleasantly surprised they cut off the inner-collar tag and printed the artist’s name on the inner-collar. Good job guys!

This website has brilliantly put together a tag cloud representing the popularity and frequency in the usages of words of all speeches, official documents and declarations written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 – 2006 AD. The slider tool moves you from moment to moment in US presidential policy.

I hate Manitoba’s only telephony company

Today, I made a payment for $157.00 on my credit card. Woman puts me on hold … for 13 minutes. I hang up and call back, and I’m told by someone else that they charged my card for $296. Huh?

When I asked for the woman’s name, they couldn’t tell me. While I’m sure most the staff are good people, their procedures/policies and charge schedules are ridiculous. They are the worst company I’ve ever had to deal with.

When people ask what’s wrong with doing business in Manitoba, MTS is the first company I think of. I’m aware of VoIP and other forms of communication, but the PBX industry is just not that advanced.

“Little Brother” is the personification of self-surveillance.

This is, of course, the opposite of the “big brother” idea that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four warned us about; that everybody was under complete surveillance by the authorities via “telescreens”. Ironically, “little brother” also monitors people via telescreens, but they also distribute surveillance of you to others.

Last century, if you slipped and fell on a patch of ice, you might elicit some chuckles from your peers. Now that cameras are proliferating faster than nuclear weapons, chances are good that same fall might make you the next Internet hit. People are willing to record each other, in the name of entertainment. Reality TV producers and the makers of America’s Funniest Home Videos saw this trend a decade ago. Life is stranger than fiction.

Technology and consumerism have fueled this decentralized power of communication – a freedom that traditional media companies have reigned with for the past century. Now anyone can be their own broadcaster; buy a small video camera, a computer and use a low-cost (or free at the library) broadband Internet connection, all for less than $1000.

Everything is getting smaller, cheaper and faster – for everyday people; your little brothers.

This is both great for it increases communication and knowledge of real events. Little brother has broadcast events that the traditional media companies either wouldn’t be able to or wouldn’t want to, such as the tsunami tragedy two years ago, harassment/brutality by the police, a bicyclist courier being attacked, etc. These are just a few examples of everyday events that occur, but are left out of the space-constrained traditional mediums.

This trend will scare people, because life is stranger than fiction and there’s a lot going on out in the world that many of us have yet to understand. However, understanding is education.

But what should scare people is the privacy concerns that little brother brings. Some “primitive people”, feel that photography steals your soul. Right now, photo-journalists are directed to obtain permission prior to taking a photo. But is little brother?

While drafting this post (I’ve been on about this for much longer than this post date will suggest), I found this article that pretty much echoes how I feel, but put more eloquently with the ethical consideration that we should consider “the boundaries between transparency and privacy”. Read that article here.