Changes of Two Kinds: Domain and Logo

It's May and this blog is still pretty much desolated. I couldn't say that I put blogging on hold, it's the format that changed: I tweet pretty regularly. In fact, thinking about tweeting led me into believing that each tweet I make could easily be expanded into a blog post of its own, adding a cluster of content around a focal point.

That is even the purpose of some tweets - making short notes to further expand my thoughts on a specific subject later on, though turning 140 characters or less into 140 or 1400 words every time would not be the most wise idea.

Even though other issues I tweet about would certainly deserve more attention than the two I am about to mention here, I believe that they deserve mentioning simply because of their direct relation to this blog.


The first thing that I am extremely glad to announce is that I have finally taken hold of Z-lot.com domain and finally became its proud official owner!
It appears that the domain squatters who have been holding it suddenly lost interest in keeping it for another year. Perhaps the unfavorable economic climate caused them to somewhat tighten their belts. It was my fault to start with since I made a fatal mistake and created a second-level domain blog before attempting to register my own.

I still intend to keep the current Z-lot.net domain for various services, especially my mail address and services such as Calendar, Docs, Mail and Sites etc.


The second thing on this post's agenda is the redesign of my logo. The previous one was all about balance and stability in addition to reflecting the contrast of myself as a person. While all that still applies and the old logo continues to represent me in a nutshell, including the kinky endings of the Z, I have decided to design a logo from a different viewpoint.

This time the focus is not on an all-encompassing personal philosophy of life but what specific characteristics Z-lot actually binds together, attempting to offer a satisfying answer to the question "what does Z-lot actually mean and what does it represent"?

A simultaneous creative process of first thinking and then drawing led me to my new logo. A logo that is out of balance yet still retaining its posture, that annihilates symmetry but remains proportional, a logo that is sharp and decisive, strong and still kinky, puzzling the observant viewer's mind why one part of it is hidden from plain sight - is it hiding or is it meant to be unable to grasp as a whole?

One thing about giving impressions is clear, the (3D) perspective that the logo subtly implies to be observed from is meant as a look from the ground below onto the massive kinky shape, piercing the sky above somewhere in the distance.

The logo is no longer in a square shaped frame but rather in golden ratio proportions which can be either a blessing or a curse. For me it is certainly the former since the logo was envisioned as heavily dynamic, contrary to its predecessor. An additional key benefit is the ease of its manipulability: it can be stretched, skewed and deformed in any number of ways, objects of various shapes and sizes can be added to it and finally, the clean, minimalistic shapes make recoloring process a delight.

I've spent quite some time playing with all sorts of variables, especially adding convenient square shapes to bind the logo to them. My favorite one is the combination of a red square with a black Z logo. It's made of clean lines, simplistic shapes and a radiant,colorful element that attempts to counter-balance the kinky shape and ground its swirling black tentacle.

A more square friendly yet compromising variant is the logo with a colored strip on its side. These can come in handy when it's time to express a certain mood or state of being and don't offer an appealing substitute for a square logo - I'd much rather see it stretched, oversized and cropped to fit or moved to the left side as I did with the favicon of this blog.

Overall, the move to create a new, clean logo felt like the right thing to do and it still does, especially since I managed to put own reflecting thoughts and feelings into a coherent form, calling those same reflections into memory each time I look at the sharp yet massive outline.

 It is interesting to note a detail on creative process that led me to choosing such design. At first I was under the influence of old logo, constrained exclusively to straight symmetric lines. As I moved forward, nothing truly new happened until I turned the page, painted it black and made a simple white outline that completely defied the previous logo, putting it a vibrant green rectangular shape which immediately framed its perspective.

It's just the kind of feeling that I get when looking at my own logo, this time on an even more vocal level... mission successful.

MacBook Pro and the Winter Cold

Lately I've gotten used to the idea of taking my laptop outside, simply because of the ambient effect. It is far more enjoyable to sit outside in the sun with eyes resting on the green grass below, the surrounding vegetation or whatever scenery is offered in the sky above.

The feeling of being on the Internet while simultaneously rolling around in the grass brings along a somewhat perverse pleasure of comforting thought that for that one moment everything seems to be at hand's reach and yet still remaining completely relaxed.

The only obstacle is laptop's battery life... and in the winter - low temperatures. These make my usually sweaty Toppy dangerously cold and though it may seem that freezing air is beneficial for my silver companion, the truth is quite the opposite.

As I already wrote before about a faulty nVidia GPU when talking about my Toppy, the GPU temperature as seen on the picture seems much too high to be viewed as regular in these freezing conditions, especially when you compare it to the CPU temperature.

In addition, if it does actually have a faulty GPU, then exposing Toppy to extreme temperature shifts during its operation will significantly reduce its GPU's lifespan.

The same goes for its hard disk drive whose temperature of around 20ºC is almost pushing the limit of safe operating temperature. As Google's research on this subject has shown, lower temperatures in hard disks are associated with higher failure rates.

The reason for that most likely lies in devastating contraction of materials that hardware components are made of during temperature shifts and their physical properties that favor warmer environments.

Of course, in the end it's still up to me to decide whether I prefer a healthier laptop or some fresh winter air on a peaceful sunny day. For now I'll stick to the latter.

My Special Hairy MacBook Pro

I have very seldom written about technology-related subjects, the last remotely tech-colored post was about a view on blogging vs microblogging - though I feel that I should add another perspective or two to that topic - but even that one was strictly Internet oriented. Since I consider myself to be a tech-addicted geek at the core, technology is clearly being underrepresented here with so few words dedicated to it.

That led me to a conclusion that it is about time for me to stop neglecting it, starting by telling a word or two about technology that is dearest and closest to me - I am speaking, of course, of my laptop.

This slick all-silver faithful companion of mine, the very last of its breed, has already endured a number of hardships despite being with me for mere six months, since the end of July.
To get to me in the first place, it had to travel all the way from U.S. west coast, making a pit stop in the UK and has since then spent quite some time abroad in  England and Denmark.
When on the road, it spent most of the time safely tucked inside my Tim Bihn Buzz bag, experiencing a hefty amount of walking, running and jumping around in all sorts of unfavorable weather conditions and surviving even a nasty fall to the ground, all that without a scratch.

The reason for this durability lies somewhere between its Incase neoprene sleeve, the minimalistic waterproof sling bag and Apple's combination of design and material choices. Sure, it grumbles sometimes, and occasionally delves into theatrical waters by feigning death or demands a break from over exhaustion - but that is what all laptops do from time to time.

However, beside being a trustworthy companion, Toppy - as it's called - has some unique features that you won't find in a usual laptop. The most prominent one is a hair about a nail's length that is growing out of the screen with its follow-up being the letter F that looks engraved into it.

That hair is the most curious thing, I've first spotted it one day in Denmark when it suddenly appeared in the middle of the screen when I opened Toppy's lid.
My initial thought was that the screen got cracked and the thought of crack's likely widening each time I walk or run around with Toppy sent shivers down my spine.

However, after a few days of not paying any attention to the issue I suddenly realized that the crack had moved from its initial position. A close inspection revealed that the "crack" not only resembled a hair, it indeed was one.

It made me think how it coild have possibly gotten there: only two persons had Toppy in their lap long enough to leave a hair and one of them is me.
The entry point was most likely the right side of display, with gravity doing all the rest due to shaking in my sling bag.

I googled around to see how common the issue was and it turned out that while still uncommon,  it became evident that I was far from being the only person with a hairy Apple laptop.

The problem seems to lie in Apple's glossy displays and has been around at least since PowerBook times. The glossy panel covering the LCD display is supposed to be sealed - which means that any objects finding their way inside the screen are covered under Apple's warranty policy, granting you a free repair in case a hairy laptop is to much for the user to handle.

I found quite interesting stories about various dust particles and hair appearing under the displays, even live bugs crawling beneath glossy displays.
I also spotted a graphic designer who one day  found his cat's hair inside his MacBook Pro display. What a bad kitty! Pet hair seems to be a regular occurence in these not-so-tightly-sealed glossy displays while encountering human hair is not all that frequent.

Since the time of its first appearance the hair has moved around quite a bit and is now in an almost vertical position... but just how and when it decides to move is still a mystery to me.

This MacBook's second notable feature is its engraved letter F at the very bottom of the screen (below the MS Word sign on the picture). I am clueless as to when exactly it appeared but the bright mark resembles the letter F so closely that I don't have a valid explanation how it got there in the first place - unless you consider supersecret marking by Secret Service to be a valid one.
I do suspect that in this case he real reason might actually be a crack in the display, but once again I remain puzzled: how can a crack suddenly appear in the form of letter F? Unusual indeed.

However, the next issue is of more serious nature for a change. I am fairly certain that Toppy has a bad nVidia GeForce 8600M GT graphic chip, a major industry-wide problem that has also been noted by Apple.
Since the failing GPU affects MacBooks Pro and all other laptops with this particular graphic card (meaning all MBPs up to the autumn 2008 revision), mine is also a very likely victim of this sudden defect.

What raises my suspicion even further are high idle temperatures  (displayed on the picture) that Toppy has - the graphic chip with its 60º C idle temperature is nothing less than alarming.
All that means that I should get it fixed before a spontaneous self-combustion happens - or before my warranty expires (there's three years left to fix that GPU issue). That would mean an unknown amount of days without Toppy, a solution I'm far from willing to accept... but that's another topic.

Playing With AdSense And Against It

I've been tinkering with AdWords lately and after two years once again playing with AdSense adverts, deciding to pollute my blog with Google ads in the most non-intrusive way possible.
I colored them in accordance with this blog's design to meld them with the text and placed them in a way that I consider to be optimal for for balance between noticeable and intrusive or irritating. I used a combination of link ads on top of the posting area, a couple of boxes in the sidebar and a classic banner at the bottom of posting area.

Since I thought it would be nice to be able to track AdSense clicks via Google Analytics I googled up and installed this nifty little script that helps Analytics track ad clicks via its Goals feature.

I don't actually expect to get any ad revenue from a personal blog such as this one in the foreseeable future but I have set my one-year goal at skyrocketing 10$. All in all, it is a thing I enjoy doing and that's all that counts.


The irony is that I don't see the ads myself, neither do my website visits get detected by Google Analytics. In fact, I don't see advertisements anywhere on the Web, nor I get detected by various tracking software.
The thanks for that goes to two essential Firefox addons that I would recommend for use to anyone not wanting to see ads or annoying scripts:

• The first one is Adblock Plus, an add-on that efficiently does exactly what its name suggests.
• The second one is NoScript, a great security addon that prevents execution of scripts and other active content, among other things making you invisible to javascript-based tracking software such as Google Analytics
  

On Obama: Democracy Check VS Democracy Challenge

Yesterday's internets were abuzz and still are resonating with Obama's swift victory in U.S. Presidential election. It could be debated if and how historic and groundbreaking the event was, its symbolism and meaning, causes and contributors to it. While I do agree that those questions deserve their rightful attention, another not often enough mentioned assortment of thoughts comes to my mind - ironically, a view that I deem to be the most important one if we are to learn any lesson from human history in order to avoid repeating them...

Shaking off all the hype about continuity, hope and change, and shifting focus from the two main presidential candidates onto the grander voting plane which includes libertarians and other walkers on the edges of U.S. political landscape, what we bore witness to and almost one hundred and fifty million individuals participated in by casting their votes was in essence a simple and effective democracy check.

The election itself proved that the voters - even though I would not go so far as to claim that all groups of voters fall into this category (and this could be a heavily debated issue) - still believe in the electoral process and recognize its significance, believe in their own role in it and most importantly, their decisions are also founded on inclusive democratic principles.

Therefore it could be labeled as a minor thing, its only function being performing a check that on the most important of mechanisms of democracy, voting, and making sure that it is still working.

Up to this point there hasn't been any major deflection from the mainstream focus: the democracy check that I have briefly described here has been highlighted periodically since the election and got its spotlight in the media. However, what has failed to appear on the importance radar was the democracy challenge, wherein challenge does not mean the dire economic prospects that Obama is facing, neither the difficulties he will encounter should he attempt to enforce whatever change-promising policy of his.
In fact, talking about the hard tasks awaiting Obama when compared to the stakes of the real Challenge is being naive if not downright irresponsible neglection of far more important, even crucial facts and might be challenging in its own limited way but really is a faux challenge.


Democracy challenge is simply put a part which chronologically follows the check and is far more difficult to overcome (imagine an iceberg where its tip is check and what lies beneath in the ice-cold water is the challenge). In fact, it is here where democracy fails most of the time, at the very breaking point of benefits of such a rule, a point where the slope becomes too steep for democracy to continue climbing and each attempt to push the limit can only cause a fall far below.

Take a look at any number of regimes that climbed to power with promises that turned out to be empty and hence a disappointment for the voting populace which translated to a failure of democracy to them, causing a downturn in political culture, passive attitude and eventual rise of support for non-democratic rule.

This outcome applies to established democracies with a long democratic tradition while transitional and newborn democracies have much more abrupt and dire consequences to face, although the outcome is essentially the same in both cases - fall of democratic rule.
Autocrats and tyrants, extreme ideologies and personality cults thriving under their reign, their tightly clenched fist basking in gloomy effects of repression as evaporation of freedoms and pillaging of domestic finances bring the country to war and eventually down its knees.
This pattern has been observed continuously throughout history, and while the tyrants still rule in such a cyclical fashion, one after another, a properly functioning democracy at least puts an end to this vicious cycle.

To conclude my thoughts before wandering even further astray, electing Obama was only a minor step for democracy compared to the one that is waiting ahead.

And that is especially because power corrupts, as my anarchist view goes.... and absolute power corrupts absolutely, which is yet another two-edge sword for Obama and Democratic majority Congress.
My thoughts may seem grim but my hopes remain high, hopes of meeting the real Challenge face to face and taking a stand against it. Even if it fails, the indestructible seed of human hope will survive, ready to take root when the old memories are washed away.

*playing Bob Dylan's Hurricane*

The Neural Paradox

When reading my gReader the other day I stumbled upon a quite interesting article via 3QuarksDaily that immediately pushed me into another state of mind in which I was able to dive into one of my favorite subjects, rationality. What follows is a condensed version of my thoughts on relation of reason and non-reason...

On one hand, proponents of human rationality as the ultimate achievement of our brain's development are praising our this complex entanglement of neurons as the origin of our success but are at the same time extremely reluctant to acknowledge the rise and sophistication of yet another equally complex system inhabiting those very quarters, a system that is consequently just as unique and powerful, the wonderful cluster of human emotions. Why is that, due to unintelligibility of the latter?

In order to advance any further in the debate on rationality, its purpose, role and overall importance, this issue must be resolved beforehand.

In addition, this reconsideration would indubitably debunk the myth of our brain's nominal uniqueness or at least play a decisive role in bringing those who have faith in humanity but not much else to the other side of the river.

Return of the Blogger: Blogging vs Microblogging

This blog has been a shameful posting desolace for the past few months (all the way from March) and although I could instantly come up with a plethora of explanations for my lack of posting, only two of them have the validity to deserve being mentioned here.

The first one is my decision to successfully complete the academic year at the faculty in order to be able to go study abroad - for which purpose a considerable amount of free time had to be sacrificed and blogging was one for many activities that were thrown into the basket of temporary irrelevance.

The second one is partially related to the first reason, at least as far as the perceived lack of time for blogging is concerned, though in all other aspects it really tends to question the purpose of blogging and forces one to reexamine this once well respected activity that has turned into yet another Internet fad via a process of "mainstreaming".

To call out the culprit by name, I am naturally talking about Twitter - or better yet - twittering. Though this will inevitably turn into an Internet fad as well (according to El Mano it already has), I strongly doubt that Twitter or any similar service such as FriendFeed and Jaiku would lose their appeal to me due to a more convenient way of expressing myself like it happened with blogging for a while.

Round one

My main issue between tweeting and blogging was that the former became not complementary to the latter but a supplement for it instead.
The newly formed relation between the two certainly seemed quite convenient for a certain period of time, especially when I was focused on passing all eleven exams I had left, though as time passed I gradually began realizing how limiting this short form of communication can be and decided to do an above-mentioned evaluation in the form of a long anticipated blog post...

I admit that I'm predominantly twittering these days, and there are several other-than-time-based reasons why I take it to my liking: it shifts my focus from a coherent, delayed type of writing to an instantaneous one where the mood bursts have an opportunity to stand out (which undoubtedly leaves a lot of room for sociological analysis and experiments).

Beside the possibility to express your mood, a network of users sending short instant text messages offers an excellent information flow without any obstacles or regulation, which is an absolute blessing for cell-based group communication with great potential to use the (mobile or any other device) distributed information to your own liking, for example creating ad hoc meetings.

Communication Trends

If I had to find a suitable parallel, the most accurate one would probably be comparing YouTube vlogging and Stickam with a pinch of Seesmic. The interesting thing to point out here is the nonlinear development that both text and video communication of his type had - on the Internet, video messaging didn't evolve from text-based services but instead had a side by side evolution and only recently merged with it. On the other hand, they both had a similar pattern of development: from focusing on larger chunks of information towards satisfying more and more instantaneous communication needs, finally leading to the smallest acceptable information amounts.
Another related trend that I've noticed is the constant need for services that encompass all other existing services and aggregate their information. What becomes of this development is a horizontal order in which the sources of information are seemingly dictated by the new emerging aggregators who in fact act predominantly upon demand.

Round two

Since the discussed minimization trend has all but gone unnoticed, various fancy terms and definitions that reflect understanding of this development have been coined for such services during the last two years. Probably the most suitable (though a tad pretentious) is microblogging - as Anand Rajaraman defines it, "microblogging is semi-synchronous publish-subscribe messaging", according to which services like the Indian SMS GupShup dwarf Twitter with their enormous user base.
The inevitable debate about blogging and microblogging that sprang up as a result of dilemmas similar to my own is a pretty ancient (measured in Internet time) one and I doubt there is much that hasn't been said about it yet, which leaves me to elaborate my own standpoint in order to avoid any repetitions.

To continue with comparison of the two, a brief reflection on my past blogging posts is required.
Things that I would be blogging about a year ago, for example running, are now included in my twitter updates. This means that microblogging can successfully supplement the diary function of a blog - be it the pure facts-stating part or more private observations as well.

Twittering is perhaps less thoughtful and reflective though the limited 140-character message size that causes it at the same time pushes one towards increasingly compressed messaging which in return successfully counters the lack of above mentioned thoughtfulness and reflectiveness. The micro version of blogging therefore remains far less time-consuming and straight to the point while staying just as personal as real blogging.

Ding Ding Ding!

Even though this seemed to be a strong rational argument in favor of microblogging at first, I later began realizing that the worshiped micro platform of communication is only able to realize one array of needs someone like me might have. Forcing thoughts to be expressed in only one way brings development in terms of creativeness of expression in that particular format but neglects all the others. It is as if only one branch of a tree would be given a chance to grow and blossom while all others would eventually dry up - the problem of this is that the single branch only has a limited direction, reach and capacity of growth, no matter how big and beautifully complex it gets, thus wasting tree's resources that would be more beneficial elsewhere.

Though that may seem self-evident, I never gave it much thought before I started writing this blog post - another reason in favor of blogging. In general, I've come to a conclusion that services should adapt to forms of expression and not vice versa. Their users are then given the possibility to do the opposite and bing these service to their creative limits.

An interesting idea for the latter that I had when looking at the silly amount of fictional Star Wars characters as users on Twitter was to start a highly entertaining series in its microblogging narrative form, a step above the fake Richard Dawkins (who unfortunately got deleted after several complaints) or Fake Steve Jobs in the blogging sphere, though the most suitable thing to compare it to comes from videoblogging: the LonelyGirl15 series. While we have yet to see any such use of microblogging in practice, it surely gives some much needed backing to arguments for sustainable micropublishing.


The Loser and the Winner

After all conclusions that I have already drawn, the real winner of this clash is anyone who realizes that there actually is no feud between blogs and microblogs since they represent two different approaches to communication with the possibility of blending through old-fashioned service mutations or the horizontal order approach.

I was a loser in this respect for quite some time, turning into a twitter evangelist, completely substituting blogging for it and attempting to convert everyone to join my ranks along the way. Though I did think of my blog, I only wanted to use it as a service that binds together together and periodically posts them in a blog every now and then, essentially trying to reverse the way horizontal all-encompassing services are created. Blogging services unfortunately weren't created with that in mind, nor should they be.

What I'll try to do from now on, however, is use both of them, each for their own purpose and undoubtedly far beyond that - after all, the services are there for us to test their limits.