About that whole Pirates-going-to-jail thing…

You can show your support for the Pirate Bay by flying the Music Pirate Flag at half mast on your blog/website/forehead. Right-click and take it away!

Props to Atom X for creating it for me and you.
Music Pirate Half Mast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.makeitfall.com.

The original SVG version is here.

“Revolution is not an apple that falls from the tree when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”

-Che Guevara

A friend shared this video with me saying I had to hear it. The video is at the bottom of this post or over at Multiply. I’ve never heard of Louis C.K. before, but that guy raised an interesting debate while on the set of Conan O’Brien’s late night show. He’s saying that “we live in an amazing, amazing world and it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots“. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a truer phrase. After discussing it with like-minded people, I came to question it on some degree. Let me explain a bit. basically, CK is explaining that most of the civilized world’s dwellers are taking everything for granted. They cry in outrage when trivial things go wrong – when their Internet goes out or isn’t fast enough, when their cell phone can’t get a signal and things like that. So, at this point, he’s absolutely right.

Now think of it this way. Every single generation thinks the one succeeding it is lazy, spoiled and ignorant. We can even go back to prehistoric times when the wheel was invented and fire was found! Picture Mr. Cro-Magnon saying the following: “Oh, look at those guys using their ‘wheels’ and ‘fire’! Ooooh, look at me, I’m too good to walk and eat raw mammoth meat!” Does it strike you as out of place? It shouldn’t, because it probably happened (in grunts and other creative guttural sounds, but still). This must’ve been said by someone at some point in every generation.

So this raises the question: do we actually take our lifestyle for granted, or is it just a natural evolution of needs and habits? Are we slaves to our technologies, or do they simply improve our way of life? Could you imagine a life without Internet and cell phones? I don’t think I personally could. I was born in the very early days of Internet and cell phones were inexistent still, but within the first 10 years of my life, computers started to be a common thing, and people started to rely on it. How many jobs (and lives) currently depend solely on the computer? I know mine does!

more…

The Montreal tech scene is thriving, especially in 2008 – or maybe I just became more involved and hence notice and participate in more things. Either way, last night was Montreal’s first CelebrateCamp which was held at the newly renovated Radio Lounge on the Main. “Camp” events, for those of you who are not familiar with the term are basically a kind of “open source” unconference. Wikipedia describes it as such:

An unconference is a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose. The term “unconference” has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations.

So there, it was basically a big meeting of select people who have a marked interest for that specific event. It was organized by Austin Hill and the profits generated from ticket sales were given to Montreal Children’s hospital. We raised around 4000$ so it can’t be considered a bad thing. It was pretty nice actually, we had plenty of room to talk and meet people. I’m guessing that the fact that it was held on a Thursday night kind of slowed things down a bit, but then again people weren’t going clubbing, they were socializing. With that in mind, I have a few deceptions. First of all, most of the attendees were Twitterers. I walked in there with the feeling that I knew everyone, but that I couldn’t identify anyone. Name tags with Twitter usernames would have been great to identify people. I didn’t meet everyone I wanted to meet, mostly because I had no idea who they were. However the whole thing was organized in what, 2 weeks? So I’m considering it a success anyway. Also, people didn’t really hang around. By midnight there were about 50 of the 150 people that were there at 10 that were still there, and when the bar closed I can safely say that we were two left. Are geeks early sleepers? Or was it because it was Thursday? Or because everyone was keeping their party stamina for the Station C party the next day? Well, whatever it was, I met three people, which is disappointing.

But I had fun, and we raised 4k$ for kids. Can’t be bad.

See the Twitter tag and the Flickr tag. For an accurate tweet-recap of the party in two nice animations, head over to Michelle’s blog and have a chuckle on me.