It’s rather the opposite of what you’re probably thinking.

The decay of empathy starts slowly, as you first say “no” every time you’re asked for money. It accelerates quickly after that, as you simultaneously discard eye contact while pretending you didn’t hear the entreaty, eliminating the need to respond. By the end, the scar tissue covers your mind’s eye and there is no active act of refusal anymore. The blind spot you’ve grown simply and completely blocks out what you wish not to see, acknowledge, comprehend, empathize.

That — the complete hardening of oneself until you un-see the unpleasantness — is one of the worst transformative acts I’ve ever seen in myself.

My conclusion is that in between the periods of protective rationalization, embrace the shame and make something positive happen. There’s no gordian solution, just a billion brief bouts of empathy.

[comments preferred on google plus]

Without hyperbole, the most important problem in America today is that as individual citizens, we have lost our sovereignty. It is gone, lost to corrupting power of money. No matter your political suasion, everything you think is wrong with America today stems from this one root cause. Really.

The most important 90 minutes you can spend this weekend is listening to Larry Lessig lecture on this topic. He explains the depth and breadth of the corruption, and he proposes a plan to solve it.

This weekend, instead of giving more of your time and money to the entertainment industry (who have proven themselves to be actively hostile towards us), listen to this lecture, and spend some time thinking about what it means.

There’s no call to action — yet. We are planting the seeds for a grassroots revolution that needs to come.

###

Stepping off the soapbox now, I observe with a hint of irony that it is in fact the entertainment industry that has given us the best treatment of the overwhelmingly corruptive powers of institutions on people, that being The Wire.

The good stuff starts at 0:54.

Happy Platypus Friday!

The 9th annual No Pants BART ride was over the weekend, and it was hilarity all around.

Jeff and I did the entire trip from condo, walking 10 blocks to BART, the festivities themselves, and the cab ride home all without pants.

Perhaps my favorite moment of the day was when a group of 20 of us were walking down the street, and encountered this mom and toddler. She asked us what we were up to, and we stuck to the line of just forgetting (or hating) pants. The little kid starts pulling at his pants and whines, “I want to take my pants off too!” and this being San Francisco, the mom happily obliged. I shudder to think of what laws were broken in that exchange.

All in all, a lovely time, and it’s been a while since I’ve flown the freak flag.

Check the rest of the album on Picasa: NoPantsSF

We interrupt this Platypus Friday with a delightful video of otters at the Denver Aquarium.

Happy day!

I’m giving up on social networks. Between G+, Flickr, Twitter, Path, LinkedIn, and whatever else, it’s just too damn hard to manage them all. It feels like work, which is exactly opposite the point of being connected to my friends.

Whither Facebook? No, sorry. They don’t give you control over your own stuff. When computer nerds talk about “bla bla bla privacy”, just replace it all with the following question — do you have control over your stuff? Facebook doesn’t give it to you, at least not as of today, in the amount that you deserve. So no matter how much other shiny stuff Facebook might tempt you with, it’s not worth it because you’re lending them your things without the promise you can get them back. If they change in the future, great — I’ll happily change my mind. But until then, they can go fuck off.

So, what to do about photos? Because every superfluous service ditched is a step closer to sanity. After wasting two hours of my life, I’ve discovered it is possible to use Google Plus Photos to mostly replace Flickr for my primary use case, which is hosting images for my WordPress blog.

Why Google Plus?

• Lots of storage space. And it’s free too, which is a bonus. (I pay for Flickr Pro currently; it’s been worth it, but I’m just getting fatigued. Sorry, Flickr!)
• You get to choose who sees your photos.
• You can download all your photos in a batch. You can let others do so too. This is great if you want to take your ball and go home if Google makes you mad, and it also allows Auntie Susana to grab all your photos to make a calendar or mug or whatever with.
• You can embed the photos in your blog.
• It’s super duper easy to upload photos from your phone. In fact, you can turn on automatic uploads from your phone.
• You can specify a Creative Commons license for your photos. This is important to people like me who care about the open flow of information and data.
• You can get stats via Google Analytics.

So what’s the catch?

The catch is that you can’t actually do those things from the Google Plus interface today. You need to actually go into Picasa Web to manage your photos and.

With Picasa Web, you can:

• arrange the photos in an album in the order you want
• set a cover photo for the album
• grab the link to an individual photo to embed elsewhere, like a blog
• set up analytics tracking

Don’t even bother trying to figure out how to do those things in Google Plus Photos. You can’t, at least not today. Luckily, Picasa Web does see all the photos you’ve uploaded into Google Plus; you can manage them in Picasa, then flip back over to G+ to share with your circles if you want.

Feature for feature, Flickr Pro is moderately better. But in the bigger picture of “too damn many social networks”, something’s gotta give. Again, I’m sorry Flickr. I loved you for a while, and will always remember you fondly. But it’s time to consolidate and simplify.

Happy New Year!

So, it’s been pretty fun watching the internet punish GoDaddy for supporting SOPA.

At the same time, it reminds me of fighting a guy in a wheelchair; you’re not on a level playing field.

Yes, GoDaddy made the mistake of angering their customer base who are also the most likely people to actually know and care about SOPA. But their other mistake was being a commodity supplier in a monopolist list.

If you are a sports fan, will you stop watching ESPN? Will you refuse to buy tickets, memorabilia, and apparel for your favorite baseball and football teams? The MLB and NFL are supporters of SOPA too.

If you have a credit card, will you cancel it? Both Visa and Mastercard are supporters of SOPA.

If you are sick, will you stop taking Lipitor, Celebrex, and Viagra? Oh, you don’t take those? Ok, will you stop buying Advil then? All drugs owned by Pfizer, yet another SOPA supporter.

My points, in ascending order:

• A real boycott involves self-sacrifice. Taking 20 minutes to change your name registrar is not sacrifice. Please stop feeling like you’re doing something real when you switch away from GoDaddy.
• There are too many forces aligned against us to make boycott an effective technique to prevent SOPA. I’ll never buy a UFC pay-per-view event, nor use L’Oreal beauty products. I also do not plan on cancelling my credit cards, and if I wind up in the hospital, I do not plan on refusing Pfizer drugs.
• What may surprise you, dear fellow infovore, is that the web 2.0 economy is a nice toy and all, but the old boy network still has the real power. In what may be a second surprise, parts of the old boy network still respond to archaic technology, such as actual voice phone calls and real letters printed on dead trees. Cynic though you may be about the Congress, have you called or written yet?
• Money. Money is the root cause behind SOPA, and everything else you hate about The System. The only way to fight back is with money. Sorry, there is no other way around it. Full stop.

If you want to do something real, donate money. A real amount of money.You are here on the internets, you are probably affluent enough to donate real money.

We should be so lucky that in order to get what we want politically, all we have to do is buy it. We don’t have to freeze our asses off in tents, we don’t have to endure horrific pepper spraying or physical violence. We just have to send some money, and then we get to carry on with our comfortable lives, doing everything else we enjoy doing.

I recommend sending money to:

• The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation: defending your rights in a digital world”
• Rootstrikers is a network of activists fighting the corrupting influence of money in politics.

Will you join me?

For my normal friends who don’t keep up with understandably nerdy topics such as this, the summary is that:

• many smartphones include a nasty piece of code called Carrier IQ that can track all your SMS, your calls, your every keystroke, and upload that to your wireless provider
• Carrier IQ is on both Android and Apple phones, although reportedly it has been removed from recent iOS builds
• Carrier IQ is confirmed to be on Sprint and AT&T Android phones

It is completely unclear what data is being recorded and sent back to Big Brother. You just have to trust Sprint when they claim they are being responsible stewards of your data.

Excuse me while I shit dysenteric diarrhea (and sprinkle in extra amoebas for dramatic effect) into a gallon-size freezer-safe Ziploc bag and mail it to my good friends in Overland Park, KS.

I mean, the unremovable, botched abortion apps they force onto you, such as the NASCAR wart, the crashy Sprint TV dung pile, the oozing pus of a football app, were bad enough, but at least you could mostly ignore them (except when you got mysterious random notifications that the Sprint TV app crashed again without you ever touching it).

And to lump another piece of garbage like Carrier IQ in there… I would pretend to be shocked that a cellular carrier would show such a level of disrespect for its customers, but why bother.

Anyhow, enough of the ranting. Here’s how to completely re-install your phone with something called CyanogenMod which is Android without the crap. Let’s not delude ourselves — using a cell phone means you’re sending data to Big Brother, but at least with CyanogenMod, you can get a bit of a choice in what you send.

Update: Slate asks if you should even care and Manjoo comes to the same conclusion: it’s the lack of transparency that rankles.

Update 2:: Dan Rosenberg does more research on what CIQ can and cannot do. Great analysis, but as he notes, it only applies to one handset (Samsung Epic 4G Touch) on one carrier (unnamed). Carriers can apparently make CIQ do different things, so who knows what was happening on my HTC Evo 4G on Sprint? We simply don’t know. To reiterate: it’s the lack of transparency that alarms me.

Anyhow… These instructions assume Linux.

1. Download and run revolutionary. Be sure to run it with sudo, else your phone will reboot into fastboot (as expected) but your computer will just sit there waiting for something (unexpectedly). When revolutionary (on the PC side) prompts you whether you want to install ClockWorkMod, say yes.
2. revolutionary will automatically complete on the PC side, and your phone will be sitting there with a white screen and some menu options. On your PC, download the Superuser app. Do not unzip it; just leave it there for now.
3. On your phone use the volume key to navigate to the “bootloader” menu item, then select “recovery”. Your phone will reboot into the ClockWorkMod screen, which has a dark background.
4. In the ClockWorkMod menu, select the “mounts & storage” menu item, then “mount USB”. This will make your phone appear as a drive on your PC
5. Copy the Superuser zip file from above onto your phone. You can just drop it into the root directory, you don’t need to put it into a folder.
6. Unmount the phone from the PC
7. On the phone, go back to the top level menu, and then select “install zip from sdcard”. With some intelligent guessing, you should eventually be able to select the Superuser zip file on the phone; select it and install it.
8. After this is complete, you can reboot your phone.

You have now gained root on your phone, which gives you special magical powers. It is time to use your new magical powers to install CyanogenMod. But first, back your phone up. Some recommended apps are:

• Titanium Backup
• SMS Backup & Restore
• Call Backup & Restore

I also had my phone set to sync all my contacts with my Google account.

Once you’re reasonably confident you have your data backed up, you’re ready to install CyanogenMod. This will obviously wipe out your entire phone and void your warranty, but hey you don’t have to be annoyed at the infuriatingly uninstallable NASCAR app on your phone anymore.

1. Install CyanogenMod on your phone. You can find it in the Market.
2. Download latest image onto your PC
3. Copy the zip file onto your sdcard again, by mounting your phone in your PC
4. Launch the CyanogenMod app, and find the zip file.
5. After some intelligent menu guessing, your phone should reboot and install CyanogenMod.
6. Important: be sure to select “wipe data/factory reset” and “wipe cache” in the install, else your phone will hang on reboot

You’re done. Hopefully you can restore your data from backups.

After playing with it for an afternoon, Cyanogen is actually a lot nicer than the HTC Sense interface.

And, you get USB internet tethering for free. Woo!

If you run into errors, ask for help in either #revolutionary or #cyanogenmod on freenode. Good luck!

Last January through April, I pretty much fell off the face of the earth, in real life as well as online. For those that asked, I alluded to some long hours at work, but of course couldn’t say much publicly.

Well, we finally launched, and I’m quite proud of all our team accomplished.

Without question, this was the hardest project I’ve taken on in my career to date. But I was part of a great team, and we pulled together to ship.

We’re bringing free, open software to the world. This is the mission I signed up for.

Some links for your reading pleasure, take with a grain of salt:

• Vodacom press release
• OMG! Ubuntu mentions it
• TechCrunch adds commentary
• Engadget rehash
• Tom’s Hardware article