Oolong Tea

I am currently having Oolong Tea and I felt I should post something. It’s been a while. This is going to be a whatever comes kind of post.

I sometimes feel like I am not interested in anything when I hit the network. You know all that news, stats, things, books, art works, discussions, links. I suck all that stuff and the network hits me back, makes my stomach bad. That’s why I drink ooolong tea to feel better.

I recreated Nam June Paik’s 1961 recipe “Composition for Poor Man” in Brent’s new initiative Promiserver, a server for writing and evaluating experimental micro-contracts. The original recipe goes like this:

Summon a taxi, position yourself inside,
request a long ride, OBSERVE THE METER.

And here is my version:

if taxi_arrived
   if in_taxi
      success "request a long ride"
   else
      breach "position yourself inside"
   end
else
   "summon a taxi"
end
success "OBSERVE THE METER" if taxi_moving

We discussed how to evaluate this promise at Brent’s blog post. Promiserver’s debugger will probably be the first socially conscious debugger.

I will be in Detroit in May 26th - 28th. I will perform some of my visual artifacts in the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. It is going to be exciting since Detroit is the birthplace of US techno.

Today I played with the ruby screen scraper library WWW::Mechanize. It is quite handy and fast if you want to programmatically browse the web. Who doesn’t?

Tim O’Reilly asks “What Does It Mean For Public Space to Go Digital?”. It means “A Stock Market in Life”. I designed this market so that in the future when public spaces have hit counters like web sites, the exploitation of our life becomes visible, so debatable.

I think in the future everybody will know every other person in the world. You go out for a dinner, from the waitress to the taxi driver, the policeman, the chef, other people sitting in the restaurant, the speaker on the tv, you know all of them, say hi to everybody. Zero degrees of separation. Super rhizomatic society. Fully contagious. Do we need cell phones? Internet? Is it peaceful? Do we need to organize anything?

I should better go sleep.

View from my friend Mey’s balcony, Istanbul.

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