Hacking the Good days…

Life without delicious is bad – on a given lazy sunday when you don’t want to go out nor do anything particularly meaningful, such as watching our wonderful BBCs. (having said that, I still k.o. 1.3 episodes of mighty boosh). I’ve done 4 things (that I remember) today… and probably worth sharing with you.

(1) Registered on Jooce

No, not the TV Joost – it’s the Parakey-like Jooce. I have been waiting for years (well, probably since 2006) for Blake Ross (the founder of Firefox) to launch his web-base desktop, Parakey. (you can sigh up for sneak peek from their website, though I did it months ago and have not heard back from them yet). While I was still in full anticipation mode, two guys from Paris seem to have crack the nut (or at least started sharing what they have) – and that’s Jooce.

Jooce aspires to be a mobile desktops for people who are on the go, see screen capture here:

I’m too old to get too into the site, especially the main cool function of the site is to have allowed a one-off sign-in for all of your chat clients – which again, probably matters lot more to those still in their teens and cared much less about their privacy. The overall feeling is that the designers/developers must be mac lovers – both the default screen paper and the dock remind me a bit too much of my good old mac – if I am to sign up and adopt something new, i’d rather be getting some fresh experience. Though it’s probably to easy to suggest the alternative without appreciate what a long way it is for them to come up with this!

(2) Kids, the Internet: the greatest generation gap since the rock and roll

Great full-length article from New York Magazine has easily won my applauds for articulating generation gaps accentuated from the internet, and why I was understood as the ‘geek’ girl at work, when I don’t even know too much about the net (as I aspire to be). (say – what exactly does Bill Gate do? lol – bad j/k – don’t get me into Zizek’s liberal communist argument… courtesy:Discourses)

My favourite quote from the article is this one from the adorable Clay Shirky:

Clay Shirky, a 42-year-old professor of new media at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, who has studied these phenomena since 1993, has a theory about that response. “Whenever young people are allowed to indulge in something old people are not allowed to, it makes us bitter. What did we have? The mall and the parking lot of the 7-Eleven? It sucked to grow up when we did! And we’re mad about it now.” People are always eager to believe that their behavior is a matter of morality, not chronology, Shirky argues. “You didn’t behave like that because nobody gave you the option.”

Referring to online exhibitionism, i.e. people share their personal information/photos/videos freely on the internet.

Another cool epiphany I had while reading this article is that – people do not log onto the web to ’social network’ – they log onto different sites for 3 mains reasons (1) to look information up; (2) to check out what’s going on – i.e. emails from your mom/live feeds from facebook, and (3) to check out who check you out. Com’on let’s admit it – we’re all social, if not narcissistic animals and being commented, rated, or even simply visited significantly reinforce our behaviors. Plus – it’s really fun to ‘gaze’ anyone, anything as long and as much as you love to, without other people watching over you on that. Say, if you think that she’s cute:

You can’t glare her as much as you love to if she’s in a cafe – but now that she’s on a Flickr ( by gowers ) – mmm, just remember to attribute her properly. ;) Welcome to the world of guilt-free gaze…

(3) Joined iCommons

‘Incubated by Creative Commons, iCommons is an organisation with a broad vision to develop a united global commons front by collaborating with open education, access to knowledge, free software, open access publishing and free culture communities around the world.’

I suspect it’s SJ who is running around the world talking about the One Laptop Per Child initiatives – as a core Wikipedian himself, I would not underestimate his involvement in this programme.

Guys – if you’re thinking about x’mas presents, still want to do some good and less waste for the environment, One Laptop Per Child is on the Give one, Get one offer. For every laptop you buy, you are also donating one to the developing countries.

Finally, (4) The machine is Us /ing Us

One of the best videos that gave me geek goose pumps since Epic2014. See it yourself – It’s probably going to save me loads of time what’s going on with the buzz word Web 2.0.

*yawning

I wish to consider today a product one.