Roborooter.com » Writing

The Guy I Almost Was

Francis — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:00:15 +0000

I just read a short comic that caught my eye. It's a story about a guy around my age and how he manages to change his situation. Apparently it's a bit old and had dissipated for a long while. He's got a license on his site that allows me to make a backup copy. So when you click on the image below and the link is broken, you use my copy of "The Guy I Almost Was".

Telescopic Shower

Francis — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:48:11 +0000

On a side note trying to put html/js in a wordpress post is a bad experience. If the iframe doesn't work try it here.This post requires javascript and now uses an iframe so you may have trouble viewing it in an rss reader.

Where are you on the internet?

Francis — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:38:42 +0000

I've got a nice compact archive for the majority of my writings. Inspired by Steve Yeggie mentioning he found posts of 16 year old him on usenet (his chat here), I decided to look into me. I don't think there is a single other place I've written more then for here. There's a distinct possiblility of instant messaging being a larger repository of my thoughts and plans, but I'm goign to argue it's a different medium. Those messages (Adium's got 8448 transcripts going back to May 2004) are much much much less thought out. Espicially if we've been talking for hours.

So what's in my non roborooter history?

Story Arcs and my failed attempt.

Francis — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:00:30 +0000

I had a plan.

Make the Hacker Crackdown Available as a torrent file. (You can just grab the full download if you like.)
Educate about what comcast was doing (blocking torrents)
Complain that while the torrent's flowing nicely a bunch of specific people had trouble torrenting it. Specifically the Comcast customers.(Not a complete lie, the torrent had about 250 downloads as far as I could tell and at one point 17 seeds. But if you were a comcast customer using torrents you knew what was going on and wouldn't complain to me.)
Come clean, off the full download via http and remark that I actually do have the bandwidth to spare to host a large file. Probably enough to spare to host 10 full and popular audio books, but probably not 100, where torrenting could go into the 10,000's easily. If people were so interested.

For the record as of right now the torrent is still on The Pirate Bay and has 2 seeders neither of them are me.

I had goals.

To spread the hacker crackdown by Bruce Sterling.
To try to do a story arcing blog post.
To educate people about torrents and Comcast.
To be crazy like that.

I had poor execution.

I got distracted
I told people what I was up to and then no longer felt like I had to do it. Almost like success.
I didn't do it all at once — I'm not sure if that was practical but it would have gotten it done while I had the drive.
I never wrote down my plan until now.

For the record even without my help (ha!) Comcast got smacked around by the FCC. It's not law (and we'll have to fight to make it law) but it's a big first step towards net neutrality.