Month: March 2014

Float On

Float On

Byoliveridley

 

All refrains "float on", except the 9th one, which is "even if things end up"
All refrains “float on”, except the 9th one, which is “even if things end up”

Sometimes, learning lyrics is hard, and making a table out of it seems to help (disclaimer: I do not use pie charts for anything serious)

Call Direction Response
We’ll all float on Up All right, already
We’ll all float on Up Now don’t you worry
We’ll all float on Down All right, already
We’ll all float on Up All right, don’t worry
We’ll all float on Up, hold All right, already
We’ll all float on Down All right, already
We’ll all float on Down All right, don’t worry
Even if things end up up A bit too heavy
We’ll all float on Down All right, already
We’ll all float on Up All right, already
We’ll all float on Down Okay, don’t worry
We’ll all float on Up even if things get heavy
We’ll all float on Down All right, already
We’ll all float on Up don’t you worry

(Direction refers to whether float is higher in pitch than all, or lower)

Stalking my walking.
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Stalking my walking.

Byoliveridley

image

Google Now tells me I have walked 74 km in February (one of the last meaningful acts of my phone before it passed away). That’s mostly me walking from my bus stop to work and back, 3.6 km everyday, something I don’t consider exercise to the point that I undergo serious bouts of self-criticism about “not exercising enough”. I post this because I, like many around me, am very concerned about the amount of digital surveillance in our society. Everyday, Snowden’s document dump brings new revelations. Yahoo webcam images, anyone? But the benefits of benign surveillance are potentially big. I would like my phone to remind me that I am exercising, that my bus is scheduled to arrive in 5 minutes (of course, BC Transit does not have real-time information, so this is theoretical), that I am near a grocery store that has my favourite cereal on sale (this would need open data on retail prices), that my neighbour on the bus is reading the same book that I am (okay, too much!).

Cellphones are now intelligent, location and context aware. They can do a lot of good. Hell, I’ll even tolerate the use of some of my metadata for advertising and information gathering as long as it is transparent. But the data is also used by governments non-transparently to track my movements and actions, and I am deeply uncomfortable with it. Till now, my gee-whizness and fairly high belief in the value of a trust-based open information commons keeps me from closing off these data streams. If we stop trusting in the good of an open internet and stop contributing, the internet is seriously harmed.