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The Register: "Because of the exceptional brilliance and innovation evident in today's pop offerings, discussions of dwindling consumer interest in vapid, predictable cliche products would clearly be out of place. No, the industry is doing everything right, so the only possible explanation for a loss of revenue has got to be the pestilence of Internet piracy."

This morning (Thursday, 10am) I'm taking the Interislander from Picton to Wellington. Translation: I'm finally going to the north island! Having been on the south island almost exclusively since February, and with only two months left here in this beautiful country, I figure it's high time I get up north, see the sights, and catch up with friends. Crossing one-way, with Delilah, is about US$100. That's why I haven't been bouncing back and forth between thw two islands... :)

Obviously my cash supplies are dwindling by now, so don't expect much in the way of touristy-activities (kayaking, horse-trekking, boat rides, scuba, etc.). Of course, things like that could still surprisingly manifest, and I wouldn't say no! I'm mostly planning on catching up with friends I haven't seen in a while, and doing two more Vipassana courses (September 10th - 21st and September 25th - October 6th). That's 3 solid weeks of disconnectedness (I can't wait!) so perhaps I can rope Jonas in for some more guest-blogging... you game, bro? Otherwise, this place will quickly become a cobweb site. ;)

Eric Norlin has a new TDCRC up, re: digital id. Check it out here.

This is definitely bad news. Several of us (brothers Goehl, Craig and myself) were in San Sebastion, in the heart of the Basque country, back in May, 2000. I recall going to a very shady pub one night, which we later discovered was ETA's primary San Sebastion hangout. I think it's the dodgiest pub I've ever had the fortune to visit. Yes, even dodgier than CJ's.

I just added the "Think!" American flag to my site template (on the left). It first appeared here on September 17th, 2001. Ed Cone wrote about it back in April, in the News & Record:

"The Think! flag was created by the writer and software developer Dave Winer in the days after 9/11. 'It's the combination of love, strength and thought, which is the best of the USA,' Winer wrote at the time on his Internet journal, Scripting News. The image is unabashedly pro-American, and the challenge to exercise our brains and our freedom to use them is bracing. It ought to become the symbol of our national commitment to complexity."

It's there as a reminder for both you, my audience, and myself, to think and act objectively regarding America's role in the world today. The WHOLE WORLD, not just North America, not just the continental US, nor your state, your town, or your house/car/job/personal life, but the WHOLE THING. All the people, plants, animals and places. There are 287 million people in the US, but there are over 6 BILLION of us total. And they all matter, no one less than any other. There's no "them," whoever you think "they" may be, nor is there any "us," whoever you think "we" may be. I choose to live in a world of people, not a world of nationalities. You can to. Just think it, do it, live it, in all facets of your life.

Some of you seem to think I'm anti-America these days/months/years, as most of the links I post here show America in a negative light. Not so; I'm only down on specific aspects of America (name-that-bad-news from the past year), aspects you probably don't hear about from the mainstream media. I'm attempting to bring them to your attention via this weblog. I encourage all of you to send me any links you'd like posted to the site, or better yet, start a weblog yourself. You have a voice, a potentially public one. Use it, as I am, as many are.

(this is partly a reply to a long rant one of my good friends sent me via email regarding the whole war on terror thing and my post about the UNC Islam book debacle)

David Suzuki: "The European Union has banned the use of antibiotics in animal feed, but it is still permitted in North America."

This is one of the reasons I've gone vegetarian, folks.

Patrik Jonsson- "Edgy first college assignment: Study the Koran."

One of my cousins (Mary Ellen, middle, tye-dye shirt) is a freshman this year at UNC; in an email the other day she wrote to verify that yes, a heap of people were most definitely upset by this. Rampant intolerance and close-mindedness never cease to amaze me! Get a frickin' CLUE, America! There's a helluva lot more muslims in the world than there are white Christians! Open your minds, just a tiny bit, PLEASE! The best thing we can do regarding the supposed "war" we're in is learn about the "other side," not retreat to our (your) own dogma!

Patrik Jonsson: "This block-long warehouse is the lost sock drawer of the world's airline travelers."

Richard C. Hottelet : "On Iraq, the administration has abandoned one of the cardinal principles of common sense: When you're in a hole, stop digging."

Brian Foley: "Litmus test for human emotion: How did Americans feel after being bombed on September 11? Expect similar reaction from Iraqis and others, especially in the Arab world, if they watch U.S. forces rout Iraqi troops and wreak 'collateral damage.' This anger and resentment will be exploited by those who recruit terrorists."

David Buchbinder : "The fact that special forces troops now double as baseball coaches in Orgun-e perhaps illustrates just how unconventional warfare in Afghanistan has become."

John Perry Barlow: "Over the last 30 years, the American CEO Corps has included an astonishingly large percentage of men who piloted bombers during World War II. For some reason not so difficult to guess, dropping explosives on people from commanding heights served as a great place to develop a world view compatible with the management of a large post-war corporation."

Kevin Marks: "The president of media giant News Corp. warns that the Internet has become a "moral-free zone," with the medium's future threatened by pornography, spam and rampant piracy. Speaking Tuesday at an annual conference organized by the Progress & Freedom Foundation, Peter Chernin decried the "enormous amount" of worthless content online.

Two words, Peter. 'Temptation Island'."

Joel on Software: "There are not a lot of software companies to work for in Denver. So when the key designers of QuarkXPress 5.0 got sick of being treated like interchangable code slaves, they started their own shop and quickly sold it to a smart Vancouver-based company that wrote them a blank check and let them stay in their hometown.

What they came up with is nothing short of a breakthrough in the field of personal knowledge management, an effervescent field that has not quite made it onto the radar of the buzzword maniacs. Six Degrees is gonna be Google for the desktop."

Scott Rosenberg: "What Weinberger reminds us is that every Web site, every Internet posting matters to the person who created it -- and maybe to that person's circle of site visitors, whether they number 10 million or just 10.

...

Individually, these contributions may be crude, untrustworthy, unnoteworthy. Collectively, they represent the largest and most widely accessible pool of information and entertainment in human history. And it's still growing.

In this context, statements like "Web content is dead" or "AOL Time Warner will dominate" aren't so much wrong as irrelevant. Web content is everywhere. No one can dominate the Internet. And the Web belongs to its users. That's not the end of a story, it's the beginning."

According to David Pogue, the Calculator in Jaguar supports unit conversions and up-to-the-minute currency conversions. Gimme gimme gimme!

Jonathan Christy (a friend from way back when in Marietta and a friend have gone Europe. They're doing in Europe what I'm doing in New Zealand- traveling without itinerary, the *only* way to travel!

For you Apple fans, here's my new favorite Mac punditry site, the Daring Fireball. Enjoy. ;)

USS Clueless: "Every new idea has to begin with one mind, and spread. Every idea which becomes majority was minority once. Our system permits such ideas to germinate, and gives them the chance to be spread, and if they can indeed convince a sufficiently large number of voters that they are right, they can eventually become signal."

Chuck is working at the Duke-UNC Brain Imaging and Analysis Center. Wicked.

Steve Sailer: "To 18th Century Americans, westward expansion was crucial to the development of our middle-class republic. The vast empty spaces on the frontier allowed the average American to buy cheap farmland and become his own master, a servant to no man. The problem, of course, was that the frontier wasn't quite empty. American Indians had been living on it for 10,000 years." [via Samizdata]

Phonezilla: "Then, however, I decided to look up information about junk mail on the web and found this invaluable page at junkbusters. As it turns out, the USPS offers a form - form 1500 - which was originally designed to stop the mailing of porn and offensive stuff to a household with children. However, as junkbusters points out, this form can be used to stop junk mail as it is the sole discretion of the addressee to determine what is "offensive"." [via Cam]

The George Dubya Scorecard of Evil. [via Matt H.]

Ray Ozzie, founder of Lotus and Groove: "And I've experienced enough to have become convinced that a witch's brew of revolutionary personal communications tools - IM, Groove and Weblogs - and their evolutionary mutations and outgrowths, collectively represent the "post-eMail" world .. a world in which we will all live, sooner or later. Private, public, and somewhere in-between." Read the rest.

"The US and money." [via Jonas]

Noel Paul: "How can a nonrenewable product that must be refined from its crude form, and often shipped on ocean tankers for more than two weeks, cost less than a renewable resource that comes in similar form out of the kitchen faucet?"

Wicked, Katie Barnett just scored a job at Google. Good on ya, KTB!

My boys Marco and Roel just put their NZ travel site online, check it out. We met up back in February on the Abel Tasman Track. Feels like ages ago...

Sieburg is currently learning Vietnamese in Hanoi.

Whale pictures from Kaikoura last week. Dolphins too. There's heaps more, but this'll have to do for now. And a few from the Marlborough Sounds last weekend.

Go see Signs. Definitely a brilliant flick. A warning though- you'll be on the edge of your seat the entire time.

The pictures are back online, after a brief teleconference with my technical team. Thanks for your patience. :)

Woops, looks like it's been a few days since my last update. Whale watching in Kaikoura was totally cool, we saw 3 huge sperm whales surface, breathe for a while then dive again to the depths. And a huge group of dolphins (200-300) out having fun. I've got some great photos to upload, but it appears the picture server is offline at the moment. Hmph.

I'm currently in Blenheim, staying with friends I met on the Heaphy Track a few months ago. They've got a vineyard & farm here, and I think I might settle down for a wee while and lend a hand. I've gotta earn my keep somehow, right?

Yesterday we went boating with some other Kiwis on the Marlborough Sounds, and one of these days I think we're gonna mountain bike the Queen Charlotte Track, which overlooks the Sounds.

Mike Sieburg (a friend from high school) is currently blogging his experiences living and teaching English in Vietnam. Lots of great political commentary there as well, check it out.

I'm going whale watching in about an hour. A bit touristy, I know, but Kaikoura is literally home for lots of whales. Meaning, they live here year-round (as opposed to just stopping on their migratory routes), and one can see them cruising around every day here in the South Pacific. We're also likely to see schools of dolphins, and the usual seals and albatrosses. All this wildlife is here because there's a huge continental shelf intersection/canyon just offshore, sending an abundance of deep-sea nutrients to the surface.

Several factors contributed to the apparent regression of my snowboarding skills yesterday, notably the dodgy gear (bad bindings, beat-up boards) and icy slopes. Ouch, the pains have all returned! But it was a blast. It turns out there's a group of Steiner high school kids from near Hawke's Bay, staying at Mt. Lyford for a week of outdoor stuff. A great gang, lots of fun, we shot some fun pool and they dug the iPod. :)

Now I'm off to Kaikoura.

Delilah and I crossed over the Southern Alps for (likely) the final time on this trip; I'm bound for the North Island now, but with a few more stopovers before boarding the ferry. First is at Mt. Lyford where I am now (literally, typing this in the lodge in the picture), to see if I've forgotten how to snowboard or not. Folks tell me it's like riding a bike though, but we'll see tomorrow when I hit the slopes. After Lyford it'll be on to Kaikoura, then to Blenheim to visit Robert and Peter, then to see the Marlborough Sounds. Finally going to the North Island like this, it feels like I'm going to another country... All the South Islanders are telling me I am!

Bob Cringely: "The fact that this guy can sit next to his cable modem in his boxer shorts and make half a living buying and selling freezers is a bloody miracle."