...and a wakeup (more or less)!

The larder here at in my lair at the TownSuites is running light, which is good, as I prepare to leave tomorrow. Unfortunately, the only thing left is something called "boudin," which is a sausage that looks to be mostly rice with a few bits of meat. The packaging proudly pronounces the contents to be a "rice, pork, and pork liver product" (how positively appealing... yum!... kinda like describing aged ribeye as "partially putrefied striated bovine muscle tissue"), and in any event I've cut up and fried the remaining sausage together with the last two eggs, and slathered the lot in taco sauce, to be on the safe side.

Most of the food bought from the neighboring HEB market has been remarkably lacking in taste. The soft green interiors of the avocados I bought frankly tasted like sheet rock mud, the cherries only hinted at what a cherry might taste like, and when I ate the first boudin sausage the other day, I felt it definitely combined the best gastronomic features of pork liver and sawdust, but maybe that's the way it's supposed to taste, I don't know.

Apropos of food this trip, I'd give full marks to the Tokyo Bowl for their excellent sushi and especially the "cici" roll that I became acquainted with during this go-around. It's amazing how much business flows through that place, which has a dining area measuring about 20 feet on a side.

I went to sleep yesterday at a little after noon and slept fairly well until nearly 9 pm, which made for a yawn-free night and a so-far yawn-free morning. I shall probably go for a walk around the neighborhood to let the eggs-and-boudin settle and then probably go catch up with email, etc. before hitting the hay. Soon, it'll be time to (mentally) cue up a song that's been bouncing around in my mind ever since I heard Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald a little while ago, to wit, my 2002 takeoff on Lightfoot's Alberta Bound.

Cheers...

1984 delayed...

Several recent news items appear to point to a fairly bleak future for this medium we call the Internet.

I've mentioned the recent festivities in Tunis where most of the world's most repressive regimes tried unsuccessfully (this time) to wrest control of the Internet and turn it into a well-regulated kindergarten, free of any sites that may tend to displease The Powers That Be™. This issue is a lot like the "broadcast flag" that Big Media keeps trying to maneuver through Congress: every defeat results in merely another attempt to get the job done. No doubt, the same players will be chomping at the bit to put the genie back in the bottle the next time folks get together to discuss what's to happen with the Internet.

In other news, the European Union has adopted rules to force all information providers in that beleaguered continent to keep track of all electronic traffic information: phone call logs, fax logs, email logs, records of who connects to what sites and when, etc. Ostensibly, this is for the purpose of combatting terrorism, but there are already indications that industry would be willing to pay to mine that data for marketing purposes. In any event, even if such activity were to be categorically forbidden, there remains the troubling aspect of giving governments the ability to - by the way - keep track of other sources of heartache, such as organizers of political opposition movements and other similar rabble.

And finally, one item that really caught my attention concerned the deployment of a chip on future computers that would effectively eliminate the need for passwords and logins on the Internet, and - by the way - eliminate anonymity on the Internet as well.

The [Trusted Platform Module] chip assigns a unique and permanent identifier to every computer before it leaves the factory and that identifier can't subsequently be changed. It also checks the software running on the computer to make sure it hasn't been altered to act malevolently when it connects to other machines: that is can, in short be trusted.

Besides all of the benefits of the chip (e.g., worry-free banking), one must keep in mind that there's "malevolent" and there's "malevolent."

Music downloads could be set up to play only on one machine (and not on your iPod as well). Indeed, it is not too far-fetched to think that before you could play such a song, the machine would have to "call home" to let Sony or whomever know you were about to play it. Songs could be set up to play for only a certain number of times or - here's an idea - to deduct a micropayment from your bank account every time you listen to it.

Theoretically, you wouldn't need the chip to connect to sites that don't require TPM verification for interaction, but if such a requirement can't be made mandatory (i.e., all connections between any two machines on the 'net must be verified - for the purposes of combatting terrorism and child porn, naturally) then what's a government for?

Enjoy the Internet while you can, folks.

Cheers...