Parents … What can I say. They start out life able to install software using MSDOS 3.3+, things get easier and easier, windows ask them questions and tell them what to do, but they seem to loose the ability to comprehend even the most simplistic tasks.

My father was, once upon a time, a rather technology savvy guy. We were the first on our block to have a Video camera, the first to have a home PC and in general technology was abundant at our house. Our business, a bar/nightclub type thing, had some pretty amazing audio/video equipment — all of it configured by the man himself.

Sadly - now he can’t even order a damn printer for himself. He doesn’t grasp the differences, he’s afraid to make the wrong choice … It’s goddamn depressing! Am I headed down this same road? Is this the Simpson Men Syndrome? Will I get more and more technologically inept as I get older?

I swear - if I start to become a technophobe in my older years, I’m jumping off the highest ledge I can find.

Had a bit of trouble sleeping … Channel surfing while putzing around on the net when I happened to come across ‘Hackers’ starting on SciFi…

Hackers always gets me feeling a bit nostalgic … Back when it first came out, we (“the Scene”) all laughed about it. The pretty colors and graphics as they hacked … The ease with which they cracked systems and moved around the networks they penetrated.

A trip down memory lane was in order and started with a Google for “6.5536″ - Amazed, that after all these years, that number just came to me without having to think twice. A magic number back in the day - the frequency of the crystal that turned a plain old Radio Shack touch tone phone dialer into an endless supply of quarters and nickels — not to mention the 300% return I got for each one of these thing I made for random others…

Whenever I trip down memory lane I always end up thinking of this:

Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers. “Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, “Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”…

Damn kids. They’re all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950’s technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?

I am a hacker, enter my world…
Mine is a world that begins with school… I’m smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me…

Damn underachiever. They’re all alike.

I’m in junior high or high school. I’ve listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. “No, Ms. Smith, I didn’t show my work. I did it in my head…”

Damn kid. Probably copied it. They’re all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it’s because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn’t like me… Or feels threatened by me… Or thinks I’m a smart ass… Or doesn’t like teaching and shouldn’t be here…

Damn kid. All he does is play games. They’re all alike.

And then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought… a board is found.

“This is it… this is where I belong…”

I know everyone here… even if I’ve never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again… I know you all…

Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They’re all alike…

You bet your ass we’re all alike… we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.

+++The Mentor+++

I first read it back in the mid-80’s and had an immediate connection to it.

In some ways it still rings true today. I guess it’s true … People never really change.

Sometimes you just can’t continue a friendship. You like the person, you typically enjoy hanging out with them, but for some reason or another it’s in your best interest to blow them off.

Last week I had to remove N. from my list of friends. I enjoyed hanging out and going boozing with her, but when all is said and done it’s just not beneficial for anyone, especially me, to continue being her friend.

N. has issues. Lots and LOTS of issues. She’s a drama queen, she’s as cheap as they come, and she suffers from a constant delusion that she deserves special treatment from everyone at all times.

Add the fact that she has no self-esteem what-so-ever, and she drinks like an Irish fisherman and you’ve got a combination that’s pretty hard to handle.

I wish her the best and hope she eventually pulls her head out of her ass - I can’t help her and I refuse to watch her painfully slow attempt at suicide.

So, my psuedo-friend, N., told me she might be pregnant a couple nights ago.

She can’t take care of herself very well, can hardly take care of her dog, lives in a studio the size of a walk-in closet, has a serious alcohol problem and is a bit less than stable (mentally, or in any other sense of the word).

It’s people like her that make forced sterilization sound like a fantastic idea.

See N. - They do make condoms just for you! I’m having a case of these shipped off to you in the morning.

I’ve found recent keyboards, for the past decade anyway, pretty damn uninteresting. Sure, many have added “ergonomics” and scroll buttons, and application keys… But overall they’re nothing special and I’ve rarely seen anyone take advantage of most of the new features.

The last keyboard, that saw major market distribution, that I’ve really liked and still have is the old Gateway Anykey.

This thing is 100% remappable and programable. It’s totally OS Independent (everything is actually in the keyboard) so it works as well on a Linux box as it does on a Wintel machine.

Why this didn’t become the standard for keyboards everywhere, I will never understand. Even Gateway stopped shipping it after a couple of years.

Enter the Optimus Keyboard.

The Optimus has been in the rumor mill for quite some time - all the big “blogs” have talked about it in the past, but it has yet to materialize.

Much like my favorite old keyboard, the AnyKey, this one is fully programmable. It even looks to have taken some layout ques from the old AnyKey, with both vertical and horizontal function keys.

But what makes this the coolest keyboard ever? Every key on this keyboard is a stand alone OLED display.

Now, rumors surfacing that it’ll be released on February 1st.

With a little luck, our friends over at GeekExtreme will have a review of this sometime in the near future.

A friend of mine from Taiwan sent these over.

I’m not sure where, exactly, this classy place is. I’m not sure I’d be able to eat here without feeling nauseous - at least you wouldn’t have to go far to worship the porcelaine.

What can I say? It’s CES week and I’m feeling tech.

Our friends over at GeekExtreme have gone and reviewed the G5 and G7 mice from Logitech.

Ok, so I’ve been using a SE P900 for quite some time now, and I’m ready for a change. The P990 is the obvious upgrade, but since they haven’t released it yet, and it’ll probably cost $800 in the states, I think this W810 might be my next phone.

The W810 combines a Mobile Phone, Walkman MP3/Media Player and a 2 Megapix digital camera. The only thing I don’t love about this is the size of the memory stick. At 512meg, it’ll require a bunch of swapping and sorting everytime my mood changes.