AST NIGHT I wrote a response to a very dear person (for whom I also took the picture above). It was long and somewhat personal, so I decided to reduce it somewhat and present it to a wider audience in this blog.

Maybe it would tactless of me to bring this up and show the contrarian side in me, but some of my stronger opinions are better off said than kept inside. I wanted to explain some of my childhood experiences and what led me to the way I am. I very much doubt professional side of my life matters here, so I will focus on inter-personal and generally social aspects.

As a young child I am said to have been very happy, but once I was no longer a baby I became a little more isolated, probably by choice (again, as confirmed by my parents). I was drawn to art and sought encouragement and reaffirmation through that. I am still quite skillful at arts and some might say “creative”, but I abandoned this later on. My mother wanted me to be an architect like her cousin in Florida, so that too penetrated my mind at an early stage. My mother was extremely kind to me in my younger days and I always credit her for that. When I grew a little older I would confront some of my classmates (1st grade at school even). My gym teacher explain to my mom that I was non-conformist — about which he was right. He said that in a positive way, as means of explaining to my mom that I did not blindly accept the norms and acted to their rhythm. I thought for myself and judged things based on reason. This characteristic of mine became both a merit and a point of uniqueness in my adult life, but it was further accentuated when I started working on my Ph.D. in extreme freedom (of expression and action). Much later, in the late 20s perhaps, my non-conformism would extend or evolve to the scepticism movement — if movement it can be called at all. Sceptics demand evidence for claims that are made and challenge dubious claims under the premise that progress will be made assuming we can discard disinformation and bad social practices (sexism, slavery, racism, et cetera). With that in mind, my place in this world since the younger days can hopefully seem clearer. My career path and spotty life of romance (hardly as many relationships as other people in my shoes) can be understood. It was not a priority.

At school I was known as the one who would defend mistreated teachers rather than mischievous students who tormented the teachers to impress peers. It sometimes seemed like my teachers loved me more than my non-friends classmates did (I still get along very well with people far older than myself). I did have a good number of friends, but those who were not my friends were often what I consider “anti-social”. I often wondered what the heck I was doing among those people, whom I did not agree with and wanted never to be associated with (based on their behaviour alone). It was not that I had adversity with modern/Western lifestyle; it was a particular behavioural pattern (partly brought from repressed nations, at least in terms of what’s accepted and endorsed) that I simply could not accept. When I was 16 I decided that I would redo my life and on my own I eventually sorted everything out to this effect. My dad’s view on this was similar to mine all along, but with 4 kids at this stage he did not have the freedom of choice that I did.

Let me explain from a somewhat cynical point of view what these anti-social (or sociopathic) aspects that I speak of are about. They are better explained by some examples of what’s socially acceptable and even commended at times.

1. Speeding on the road as a matter of being cool and taking pride in it, knowing darn well that it is not just a risk to oneself but the surrounding environment too. I strongly confronted people over these issues in my mid-teens, only to be met by hostility (yes, for insisting that laws are obeyed). Yeah, how dare I stand up for legal obedience?
2. Mistreating girls and objectifying them. To explain this, perhaps some contextual information is needed as these practices are in part inherited from less progressive countries, such as Saudi Arabia. In many people it is still generally “uncool” to be a gentleman, but then again, some other countries that consider themselves to be civilised have not yet dodged this medieval tendency.
3. Vocalism as the norm. Raising one’s voice and descending into shouting matches is not the exception when one loses an argument, choosing animal instinct over logic. Being a calm and normally quiet person myself, to be encircled by a pack of loud hyenas can be unpleasant. It also compels one to act alike. This too seems to be part of ancient culture, not necessary Western (speaking of a geographical trend). This vocalism extends somewhat to interrupting of a peer’s speech (sometimes using the might of one’s vocal chords), but to be fair, I see some of the same behaviour here in Britain’s finest places, depending on the person/environment at hand. It’s all down to debating culture and manners. In academia, for instance, people do not act this way, but then again, a lot of their staff lived and worked in different environments too, so there is a correlation there between behaviour and eventuality/locality. In other ways, it’s a correlation of selection, not causality; calm people are finding themselves attached to like-minded people and work peers/colleagues; those whose nature is not compatible get repelled or turned away.

These are just 3 examples, but many more could be given. In the age when “bad” means “good” (especially exemplified with black dialect in the US) we lose hope in sincerely good behaviour. It’s worse than rebellion, as rebels often have just causes to support, not something to prove through mistreatment of fellow human beings.

My rejection of militarisation is a separate but important point. One has to remember that students are not taught proper history at school. The curriculum is built to brainwash children in a particular way. Except studying of ancient history, there is — in some states — bible studies and then a time leap to the 20^th century. They are not properly taught the history and politicians now gain power by pretending to have am imminent threat of existence, thereby recruiting for free and highly dangerous labour a lot of young people who die for an imperialist, expansionist agenda driven by nationlism and self-righteous claims of permission from above. The people who are joining the army are too young and immature to think for themselves and they are well indoctrinated in school — to the point where resisting the unthinkable does not cross their mind. The army makes people more aggressive, brutal, merciless, and rough. This is not acceptable in my eyes and to participate in such a system is to endorse and strengthen it. This whole part of the rant could be written a lot more eloquently, but it would require more thinking to be coherent. The short story is, the Western industry is excessively reliant on production of objects that kill people (not farming that feeds people), at one stage or another in the pipeline (metal industry, software for “defence” purposes). I wish never to spoil my identity and unleash bursts guilt by associating myself with this self-justifying, over-hyped, and self-serving (to leaders in power) game of Risk. People who served any military around the world resent me for this stance, but as I keep insisting, had there been a just (defensive) war, where on purely humanist factors there was a cause in joining the diffusion of the situation, I would be the first to join and even carry a firearm (if it needs to come to this). In most cases, based on history, people in power brainwash the population into thinking there is constant threat (like the “war on terror”) as it gives those in power yet more power and distracts the population away from the real war — class war. It’s an old trick and it has been used for millennia. The last think a leadership wants or needs is an informed public, unionised, eager to address real social injustices domestically or internationally.

This leads me to the last point, which is about racism. It is not good inductive reasoning, it’s an appeal to animal instinct and perhaps a decline to barbarism. In most countries there is some notion of “underclass”, but in some places it seems further exacerbated by the open use of labels, which television and broadcast at large permit, ruining people’s brain and breaking social constructs (removing the glue us human beings naturally have, perhaps sympathy/ubuntu). It is divisive and it produces unneeded hostility. The unifying umbrella ceases to be welfare of our fellow humans to whom we are innately compassionate; instead, it becomes nationalism (“us” versus “them”, where “them” typically refers to other/neighbouring nations or another mindset).

What it all boils down to is this; one needs to think objectively of how to serve society in a humane, productive way. Life is a journey not of money-making but of harmonious living, ideally with the education of others to the point where they too can appreciate it and improve their behaviour despite the constant brainwash.

As a sort of disclaimer, it is possible that adolescents in more countries are more or less the same, but I only grew up in one country with one set environment and a good school, so I might be too hard on those whom I know when it fact it’s an age phenomenon, not a demographic one.

HE BUSINESS model of Facebook is truly poison on the World Wide Web and the Internet at large. It is the very opposite of what the Web was intended to achieve. At risk of stating the obvious, Facebook is a multi-player popularity game where information about one’s real friends is hidden behind walled gardens. The access to such information is conditioned upon a sort of blackmail which is giving one’s personal details away, for advertisers to spy on individual people and in turn impose on them all sorts of proprietary lock-ins and barriers, at the behest of affiliates. Rather than a society that openly shares we become a society of cliques and stalkers — people to whom the rules of society are determined by sociopaths like Mark Zuckerberg, who calls Facebook users “dumb fucks” (real quote) for trusting him.

People who never joined Facebook oughtn’t join and those who joined would be better off escaping it. Google+ is not much better. It’s just another brand and a perceived “underdog” (even though Google is the bigger company). What the Web needs is to provide people with personal space that they control. That’s what Tim Berners-Lee intended when he uploaded his physics papers for peer review; what the Web is becoming now is an advertising farm with paywalls and spying everywhere, including DPI. Then there’s SOPA and other nasty dictatorial legal mechanisms. The bad guys are winning. The Internet is losing. We are all losing, except those whom the Internet weakened while empowering the public in the nineties.

was about to give up, realising that getting justice would take far longer than it’s worth. But now it’s a matter of principle and it also provides insight into how dysfunctional things are at Virgin. It’s an opportunity to show that after nearly 5 months Virgin still suffers from bureaucracy that has the customer (me) tell and retell the story half a dozen times to half a dozen different representatives (that’s how it works in big companies). Way back in the beginning of April I was given an invalid ticket by Virgin and they still play dumb about it, even after they received many long explanations (hand-written) and paper trail that support the claim with solid evidence. After 3 visits to the counter (face to face), 3 letters sent with detailed explanations of the claim, and 3 phone calls, there is a glimmer of hope as the lady I spoke to 5 minutes ago acknowledged their mistake. What Virgin has in its hands are 2 blunders. One is the selling of an invalid ticket that cannot be used and causes great discomfort, lateness too. The other is the support team tacking nearly 5 months to finally compensate (it seems inevitable now), although it took many hours to handle a small claim that is just the fraction of the total I spent on Virgin Trains.

The moral of the story is, if you can, avoid Virgin. It’s just not worth the trouble. Your blood pressure does not need it, either.

s we have seen here before, when BT messes things up, it messes up royally [1, 2, 3]. Yesterday was another reminder of this. At 9AM, without any warning or notification, the connection went down, apparently affecting entire large areas in Manchester and perhaps Bolton. The helpline which is only ‘manned’ by a recorded message preferred to draw attention to some Yahoo! (E-mail access) problem and there was no estimated time for return of service (for those who may resort to contingencies). The less advertised number through which one can speak to an actual person later contradicted the automated messages, which preferred to pretend the connection problems were over long before these were over (the connection was said to have been resorted at 3PM). The actual person whom I eventually spoke to (based on India) was very kind, but he used the same strategy of emphasising that the phone line is fine (while knowing perfectly well that the problem is the Internet connection, not the landline). It was very hard to actually ‘squeeze out’ information and empty reassurances from the rep I spoke to. Why not be honest and forthcoming? BT was seemingly reluctant to even acknowledge that this was a large-scale failure at its end. Does reputation or the customer come first?

Eventually, 14 hours after the disruption had occurred, the connectivity was suddenly restored, no sooner than 11PM. So en entire day from morning to night was essentially without Internet and with very unreliable estimates of recovery time (if any estimates at all).

Now good, BT, not good…Many people’s job these days depend on the Internet. If you cannot provide an Internet connection for an entire day, then please at least provide reasonable status messages and estimates for restoration of service. If one expects the connection to be down for so long, a dongle or another PC (elsewhere) can be approached and used.

hat happens when the network does not function or functions very poorly? What happens when the Internet is altogether down or goes on and off almost indefinitely/infinitely? The problem need not apply to the Internet connection as a whole; it might for example be a DNS server, a particular Web site which is necessary to access, a server at work, or even a message/call which is anticipated. When there is no estimated time for service restoration one can just assume that normality will resume shortly. Only in retrospect can one decide that it would have been better to just walk away and do something else (even offline) until the problems are resolved for good.

Before going any further, it is worth naming the motivation for this post. Yes, it’s BT again. All morning so far their service has been awful; sometimes the connection goes down altogether, requiring reconnection to SSH servers (which takes a lot of time). It also leads to gaps in IRC logging, makes Web surfing a real nightmare, and so on. Connection persistence is crucial here. The rest of the time there seems to be a capacity issue, so any bandwidth-heavy process is out of the question. To be fair to BT, for the past couple of months their service has been perfect, after a rather rocky first month (weekly unscheduled hangups) and many problems with setup (explained in length in this blog).

In any event, the point worth making is that in many circumstances in life there arises a dilemma where one must decide whether to walk away from the temporary problems early on (when they first occur) or wait patiently for a while and if so, how long for. The correct thing to do — if there is at all such a thing as “correct” in this context — very much depends on the knowns and unknowns; it may also rely on communication with people who are more familiar with the problems encountered (e.g. those in the back rooms). The network of people can better assess whether to plan for a contingency offline or just carry on waiting. This is why it’s a sort of network uncertainty problem. There is never a solid solution to it and the hours lost due to downtime can only ever be minimised by becoming better informed and also preparing alternative activities to pass time (I escaped the bad connection to write this post from the City Centre).

couple of months ago Virgin Trains made an error which left me with an invalid couple of tickets. I had to purchase 2 new tickets in London and be late as a result, too. At the end of the day I approached Virgin, attempting of course to resolve this over the counter, instead being referred to customer support (by snail mail to Birmingham). After carefully writing an explanation and enclosing the unusable tickets I have been writing a couple of letters to them, passing them by post at the expense of my time and patience. They later ended up sending me a survey to provide feedback on customer support (which I did send them) rather than actually write back about the case of their mishandling. The post never came from them.

To cut this long story short, this whole experience was money down the drain and then a lot of time down the drain. I probably won’t buy tickets from Virgin Trains again. It’s not even worth losing hours like this, either in vain (like in my case) or where the outcome might be rightful compensation. I can only advise others to avoid Virgin Trains as well. After they mess up, their Customer ‘Support’ team failed to pick up the pieces. It’s a recipe for unhappy clients.

obile phones are a marvel of innovation and their small size is a testament to human achievement. But mobile phones as mere phones go a long way back, decades in fact. Their functionality today has hardly changed when it comes to core objectives like making and receiving calls. So how have people come to the point of treating them as accessories and status items in our increasingly superficial social system? Why are my colleagues advertising a phone brand in all their E-mails for example? Why are people without a phone (or a Facebook account for that matter) frowned upon? Must everyone be semi-detached to a phone? Is it a status symbol? Is that how it’s marketed? Wrist watches were like that sometimes, e.g. Rolex.

I personally no longer carry a mobile phone (or cellphone to Americans) for reasons that I explained a lot of times in many different places. I do, however, carry a PDA (it was even used to compose this post with a full-sized keyboard). It’s not something that I love to talk about as it is controversial and my view is an unpopular views. Usually I avoid naming the reasons in order to avoid a pointless conversation. But here is an attempt to cohesively explain some of the factors that led me to giving up mobile phones in 2003. I am unlikely to get one again as it is like an addiction in the sense that once one is purchased, it is hard to get out of the cycle, due to people expecting your number to work, the phone to always be switched on, and for you to be near a computer even when you are not. Moreover, there are strings like contracts, which give nothing other than more complications and paperwork. Getting a mobile phone is easy, but getting out/rid of it is the hard part, as I learned 8 years ago. Among the factors that cause discomfort, as mentioned earlier in other contexts, is the associated complications that resemble getting utility bills and having to challenge mistakes, set up direct debit, check billing addresses, handle repairs, etc. Another of course is the inability to distance oneself from work. People expect people with a mobile phone to be accessible anywhere, at any time. It is unreasonable given that the phone owner might not have Internet access at every moment of the day, which is crucial for some people to operate properly in a professional way. But then there are also the elephants in the room, which make people moody or confrontational when the subject is brought up. There are primarily two such elephants; the first is privacy and the second is health. Enough said, no? The industry which profits from mobile phone extravaganza funds research to deny the health implications of associated radiation, whereas almost any study not funded by those entities shows the opposite. It’s like the tobacco lobby back in the days. Please don’t attack the messengers just because the truth is not convenient. Also, do not be selective so as to fit one’s belief of choice; it’s like faith which overcomes reasoning, even confirmation bias. Regarding privacy, more people appear to be catching up with the problem, especially recently. Using triangulation it has always been possible for carriers to determine the position of the callers (geographically) and as time goes on and antennas density increases, the identification is further refined. In the past it was not as bad as before because carriers were not legally required and retain this information for the government. They are now, as friends who work for British telcos tell me with complete confidence. This is a serious step back which shows how hostile phones are becoming. This data is not there for the user, so it can mostly be used against the user. It never goes away, either. To make matters worse, even makers of the operating systems of the phone are now probing for one’s location. How can that ever be useful to the user? Marketing? To spin this attack on privacy as something positive people might say that it’s for one’s safety, in case someone gets lost/injured/abducted and becomes “missing”. In practice, however, It is rarely the case that the phone becomes a saviour unless a call is being made. So the privacy part of it (location recording with a long trail of history) is an entirely invalid point. Why retention?

The subject of privacy is better understood by those whose activities might be seen as subversive by some who themselves subvert society. The vigilant ones amongst us understand that privacy protects us from those who have too much power.

The one major circumstance where having a mobile phone would be invaluable is when trying to coordinate a meeting with someone out in town or some streets where a land line is not easily accessible. But that someone would have to be unreliable as people could arrange meetings and avoid being late long before mobile phones. Today’s generation got accustomed to the idea of using a phone to justify being late (people are still late, but they get reassurances and estimated times of arrival, which is not ideal either). If the train system was run like this, there would be considerable trouble.

The matter of fact is, a lot of people these days use their mobile phones for purposes they were not designed for, e.g. loud conversations about what’s available for lunch. It becomes an attention-seeking apparatus and less of a tool of necessity. People give away phones to workers or family in order for them to be contacted rather than in order for them to make contact and if they cannot be reached there is an unsubstantiated fear and paranoia. Rather than quell and suppress uncertainty (when someone can or cannot be reached) it just causes more anxiety.

Do you still carry a mobile phone? And if so, have you tried carrying none for a whole month as an experiment? It would probably not be an ideal experiment due to the tie-up or addiction mentioned at the start of this post. It’s a cyclic trap, more so than addictive computer games. Social interaction manifests peer pressure. The truth is, even without a mobile phone people can do all the same things; there are substitutes for everything and nothing ever rings to interrupt an epiphany.