Things here have been busy busy busy….so half a big update, the rest when its written up…
Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
“James, a former police officer, said the system enabled it to warn member stores of who to look out for before crooks strike. This information could be used to prevent well know offenders from entering stores. Stores are emailed daily reports in the form of encrypted Word documents. These ‘intelligence reports’ contain photographs of suspects.”
This worries me. Specifically the use of the word ‘suspects’ worries me. Who suspects these people? What do they have to do before they become suspicious? Once someone becomes suspicious, is it possible for them ever to become unsuspicious?
There is a question of identity here, it is easy to confuse people you don’t know by appearance. Whenever I go out to a club or gig these days I am misidentified as Rob by a number of people, often people who have previously spoken to both of us.
One of us being ‘suspected’ by the above system would lead to both of us being ‘identified’, reducing his freedom because of something I’ve done is surely not a good thing?
Its worse than that though. He has lost some freedom because of something someone thinks I might do.
In this case the people doing the suspecting probably don’t have any information other than a photograph and/or a record of movements, amongst a big collection of such data.
How will the data they provide be interpretted? How can the data they provide be quality controlled? What happens if I become, in some sense, a ‘bad consumer’? (Is crime fighting the extent of the purpose of this system, or will it be extended to cover people who don’t spend any money at, say, Bluewater?)
Should I just stop being so paranoid and smile at the cameras?
To console myself for working late (again) today I bought myself some strawberry flavoured ‘Air in Chocolate’. Yum. Tomorrow, I aim to be out of the office by 9pm.
At last people are catching up with some of the possibilities of camera phones I posted this time last year…I’ll have to do some more brainstorming about what happens next…and patent it this time, not sure anyones managed to port GOCR onto EPOC yet, my port compiles but I couldn’t make the test code work.
Todays daft food is some particularly strange animal shaped biscuits with their names typed in English on them, included in the menagerie are bats, furseals, peafowls, horn-owls and mducks, along with the more normal cats and dogs and cows and rabbits. It also comes with a convenient translation table on the back (including kana pronounciation guides for the English spellings, but sadly no kanji).
Looking out for ideas for holidays when I get back to the UK I encountered this voyage to the centre of the Earth, which comes with the disclaimer that “By joining Our Hollow Earth Expedition, expedition members agree that there are NO GUARANTEES that this expedition will reach Inner earth.”
At last most of the paranoia has gone, everything has settled into just normal chilli pain, I fear I’m going to have to be more selective about my diet over here. I don’t think eating a huge bowl of four cheese pasta and a pound of boiled beef helped much, and probably the two hours of bouncing around to music from the late eighties didn’t either.
I arrived at Luna Si Soare too early, they were still putting up the decorations and hiding the resident jazz band when I got there. So I sat on the stairs in the snow enjoying watching the flakes[0] falling past the sodium lights – I could have sat there for a good while longer, but Maya-san popped out to say they were now opening.
Things were a little slow to get going, and I was cornered by a well meaning but slightly confused Japanese guy who thought I was Rob. We struck up a little conversation but it could hardly be described as fluid, he was a nice guy though, all of the non-gaijin goths I’ve met so far have been female, apart from the poor chap I accosted outside MM last time, but I didn’t really speak to him much. Not that I’m complaining since most of the girls are cute, but it is a bit strange theres so few guys.
The music was more of the same, trad-goth veering toward the more noisy ‘trad’ industrial. They even played one of the Rome Burns tracks I took along, which sounded good but with rather dirtier bass sounds than I can really appreciate on this laptop, looking forward to getting back to some real speakers!
After the close we all hung around while the club was tidied up, at which time I noticed, for the first time, the door. A remarkable contraption, the first door I’ve ever seen that opened straight – that is to say it would move directly perpendicular to the plane of its frame. There must be some explanation for this, but I couldn’t figure it out, maybe its to offer some illusion of exclusivity to the clubs normal jazz clientel, or give it a sense of security (unlikely since it would be reasonably easy to clamber over the entrance cage into the ticket office). Any thoughts?
Once the club had been returned to its pristine state we formed a line to head to Jonathans. There are ten of us and, since this is Roppongi at the end of saturday night (its around 7am) the place is practically full of sleepy clubbers, we end up getting three seperate tables. The girls from tuesday night are already in residence in the corner, but theres no space on their table. I sit with some people I’d not met before, Yuki-san and Sutsuki-san, who both seem lovely and spend most of the time playing each other (and me) songs from their CD/MD players. Neither of them seem to speak much English but that doesn’t matter, I’m sat trying to listen to them understanding what I can, which isn’t much yet.
After a while they go and someone leaves from one of the other tables so I shift over to the now spare space there, where I again don’t really understand much of what is going on but I try to make a strange pointing conversation with Isola-san, who doesn’t really understand that I’m trying to ask her what the Japanese word for salt is. It doesn’t matter, shes cuter when shes confused.
Another couple of cups of coffee and they’re all ready to hit the shops of Harajuku…we head to the Oedo line together but I leave them to it and head home to sleep, except by the time I’m back it really doesn’t seem sensible to sleep now (its around 11am), so I try to stay awake for the rest of the day…
Just as I’m giving up around 5pm and crawling into bed Rob calls to say that he’ll drop by later to leave his suitcase (he’s off for a couple of days before flying back to the states and doesn’t need to take both suitcases with him). Bleugh.
Time for a couple of hours sleep, then I need to get up, tidy up, and meet him at the station. Turns out that he is running horrendously late so I meet him at Tokyo station where he is catching his bus….its a frantic close cut thing but we make it in time and his friend arrives in time to pick up their corset too, so it all works out in the end but only with a few minutes to spare.
This week some of the guys from the project in Denmark are over learning about how we do things here in Japan – good to see them and I could wholly sympathise with their jetlag. Its an addiction I hate, more so when I don’t get the benefit of travelling.
[0] Is there something funny about this word? Netscape puts the cursor in the middle of it when I’m ctrl-right-ing but I’m reasonably sure it isn’t rendering a space in the middle of it.
Another fine mess
Today I am full of sleep deprivation, caffeine withdrawl and paranoia. I hate sundays, especially the ones where you wake up at 5pm.
Write up of Midnight Mess available when I’m less headache and more memory.
Looks like work are trying to find a ‘volunteer’ to go and work in Finland for a bit. Currently unsure of whether it will be me (most likely since everyone else in my team is pretty settled in Japan) and, if so, what timescale they’re thinking about.
Not sure what I think about the idea – there are some good things about being here but it is a long way from home. Certainly I wasn’t considering renewing my contract to stay beyond the year here, but going to Finland would change things enough that I’d probably consider staying with the company for longer.
Radio hackers hurl drive by abuse at Burger King customers
“Burger King customers visiting a drive-through restaurant had to run a gamut of abuse after pranksters succeeded in hacking into the outlet’s wireless intercom system”
Good. You know your music. You should be able to
work at Championship Vinyl with Rob, Dick and
Barry
Do You Know Your Music (Sorry MTV Generation I Doubt You Can Handle This One)
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