Category: Life

One of the things I truly enjoy about Canada is how we treat the political views of others. Reguardless of which side of the political fence you’re on, discussions on the matter tend to be civil. It’s only really in naive university settings where you tend to see blind adhesion to a political leaning. And even then, its limited. As a consequence, you can have meaningful discussions. The respect we have means that on a Parliamentary level, that we’re able to move ahead in a way that balances the views of all Canadians.

It is discourse based on issues. Which is why its always shocking for me when I see American political attack books at Chapter’s. The likes of “Treason: Liberal Treachery,” or “How to Talk to a Liberal, If you Must.” Books like these aren’t about societal progress, they are not about attacking issues, but about discrediting a whole political spectrum. By doing so, you’re getting rid of the meat of politics – issues and discussion. Instead, what you’re left with, is its shell. The shell is brainless attacks back and forth. The PR part of politics.

What’s particularly dangerous about this movement is that its undermining the ability to conduct political discussion, the ability to compromise, and therefore the ability for democracy to function. Because that’s what democracy is: listening to all citizens, of all viewpoints, to move the country ahead.

You don’t see this radicalism just with books. I get FOX News, which thankfully is one of those far reaching channels that no one ever gets to. That channel is nothing more than an espousement of intolerance for political diversity. The CNN that Americans get inside their country is not much better. What’s amusing is that if you look at CNN International, you don’t see that. They’re pretty much like BBC World News. It’s as if this kind of radicalism is targeted to the American audience, because they want it.

So it is little surprise then that the lack of understanding that such radicalism pushes forth seeds hate. And with that, I’d like you to check out this link.

So, Docks is dead. It’s official. The hard drive that had all the tapes died. I still have all of the original tapes, but they’re messed up because of the skipping issue. Fuck. I can’t tell you how disapointed I am. I was really looking forward to trying to salvage this.

Here’s the script.

On page 33 of editing the latest Rice Tea draft. When its done, this will be the last draft. The changes are very minor this time round, having to do with correcting the grammar and sentence structure. My mom’s quite busy for the coming weeks, so her further editing of the book has been put on hold.

Meanwhile, I changed the page structure of the book. The first page of each chapter now has the page number on the bottom. There’s more spacing on the insides of the pages, facing towards the spine. I thought it would be a bitch to implement these measures, but OpenOffice makes it all very easy (once you know how to do it.)

Rice Tea has been all about the drafts. At first, I created a series of handwritten outlines. In the beginning they were short. The one I have on hand from 2006 was 6 pages. These grew with time. Six pages became Thirty. Thirty became fourty-five.

I began work on the actual content for the book pretty much as soon as the outlines were done. I started writing that in mid-July, and I had a first draft ready in early October. The second draft was finished just finished a few days ago, about a month later.

So this is where we’re at now. Next up is a revision of the book by my mom. She’s not a hacker, nor is she terribly savvy with technology. But she’s a kick ass linguistics teacher, and she can spot poor sentence structure from a kilometer away. Actually, she’s plain kick ass in general.

I’ve been looking at the logs for ricetea.ca, and if I’m lucky I’ll get one visitor a day. Eh well. The rest are just search bots. I have banned Websense bots from the site. I was tired of seing their bots bomb my site with fake user agents.

Picked up the new book by Mafiaboy. I thought it could give me some insights on how the RCMP handled it’s targeted hackers. To that end, it succeeded. However, I really could not recommend this book to others. The writing style is very sloppy, with poor sentence structure and an unending stream of redundant passages. There’s also lots of fluff that’s in there for what I can only assume to increase the page count. For instance, he devotes three pages to describing members of his old hacker gang, elaborately talking about every single one. Also a sore point are the numerous comments he inserts to shed off his scriptkiddy image, only to reinforce that perception at some later point with his own words.

If you want to buy the book, buy it for it’s comical value. He really tries hard to make Efnet sound like some kind of evil hackerz-0nly club. He also keeps talking about how good he was, how much damage he had caused, blah blah blah. He’ll quote CNN many times over. He’ll use superlatives when talking about himself. It makes reading this feel like some kind of ego-boosting exercise rather than a proper retelling of the events.

It’s taken nearly a month to do it, but I’ve finished the second full draft of Rice Tea. The entire text has been extensively revised.

For the most part, I found that I was being needlessly descriptive. I was also fairly technical about events in the book. Both counts have been addressed. I found that I could cut down on much of the jargon without affecting the content. I just won’t go out of my way to say that Seth downloaded the worm’s update from the repository of a honeypot project.