Without a Traceroute

I’m in Madrid right now. I’m surprised by how much I like the city. The weather is nice, and there’s a fantastic variety of outdoor cafes and bars. It’s also way less overrun by tourists than Barcelona. Yesterday, I met with some cool Spanish hackers at Hamlab.

Later, I’ll try to write more about that (and the dozen other things I haven’t really properly written up), but in the meantime, here’s a video the Hamlab guys put together of a protest they organized outside the ruling political party’s headquarters. Based on what they told me, it sounds like under current Spanish law, downloading copyrighted material is not actually illegal, only uploading. I believe Canada has a similar legal situation. Anyway, there’s a proposal to change that, and they showed up to protest against it. When the camera pans around, you can really see how large the crowd is. I was surprised how many people they got out for their protest.

Thanks/blame for the subtitles goes to the Hamlab guys, not me.
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So I’m here to shamelessly plug Monochrom’s USA tour. As previously discussed in this blog, Monochrom are awesome. Anyone in America these days should make an effort to see them. I sincerely doubt it will cost much, if anything, since Monochom’s relationship with capitalism could generously be described as ‘conflicted’.

I was also thinking it would be quite amusing if any of my American friends who attend would bring some sort of small, strange gift to give to Johannes Grenzfurthner. You’ll recognize him as the loud, singing one wearing all black.

Examples of the kinds of things he might appreciate are: Chick Tracts, Burger King body spray, historical memorabilia from the German American Bund, a Kinko’s-bound collection of applied office art works (a.k.a. bored doodles) stolen off the desks of your coworkers, or Sarah Palin campaign buttons. But use your imagination, many of you are more creative than I am. If anyone goes to see the show, be sure to come back here and comment about it.

Right Claw South – The March 2009 Monochrom Tour:

• March 7: San Francisco (8 PM @ Soviet Special, Chez Poulet, 3359 Cesar Chavez)
• March 11: San Jose (9:30 @ Etech/LateTech, Fairmont Hotel)
• March 14: Seattle (8 PM @ Theatre4, 305 Harrison, 4th Floor)
• March 18: Chicago (7:30 PM @ Mercury Cafe, 1505 W Chicago Ave)
• March 19: St. Louis (3 PM @ Webster University, Dept. of Arts)
• March 19: St. Louis (9 PM @ to be announced)
• March 21: Brooklyn/NY (8 PM @ NYCResistor, 397 Bridge Street, 5th Floor)
• March 24: Boston (8 PM @ to be announced)

I’ve been generally trying not to just comment on news stories like every other blogger on the planet. And by this point, I’m pretty much used to reading stupid, sensationalist stories about hacking/hackers in the mainstream media, so those barely even register. I should also be accustomed to the fact that Fox News is going to hate on everything Obama does for the next 4-8 years.

However, I was totally unprepared to encounter these two immutable principles of journalistic incompetence exemplified together in a single article, like some horrible Orthrus of fail.

Twice the facepalm for twice the fail.

I’ve been invited to be a guest blogger at hackerspaces.org. They’re a cool bunch of people, based out of Vienna, where I met some of them. The site is an attempt to maintain an up-to-date database of hackerspaces worldwide and provide resources for those running hackerspaces or interested in starting their own hackerspaces.

It’s a pretty cool opportunity, and I’m excited. The hackerspaces.org people’s interests dovetail very well with the focus of my project. If you’re interested, you can read my introductory post, although if you’ve been following this blog regularly, it will contain approximately zero new information for you.
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Today I felt healthy enough to where the prospect of eating food seemed appealing rather than off-putting for the first time in several days. Let’s hear it for antibiotics, easily humanity’s best totally accidental discovery since fire (I’m actually taking regular old penicillin).

I went grocery shopping and discovered that while you can get Campbell’s soup in Sweden, you can only get mushroom, tomato and asparagus; sadly, not chicken noodle. Also, the cans are weirdly small and metric. Every company in the world seems to round down to the nearest metric size.

I promise this story goes somewhere (not necessarily anywhere interesting).

What could this be?

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