Monthly Archives: March 2015

Pocket Lint

by in Hmmm... | 4 Comments

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A seasonal rearrangement of clothing gave me a chance to go through some pockets, several of which included leftovers from various travels. Just for fun, I’ve invited Sherlock Holmes to see what it says about me (other than that I own too much clothing and don’t regularly empty my pockets). In no particular order:

♦ Empty mosquito spray bottle from Thailand; You’re familiar with tropical diseases. (Ha!)
♦ Sweat mangled round-trip ferry passage to Miyajima, Japan; You travel Asia in summer. (Attended a friend’s wedding at the Itsukima Shrine.  At least the bride’s Shinto-style heavy wedding silks were white — and she had two full-time attendants to help her walk, carry things and to hold a parasol.)
♦ 10-Yen pocket hand-warmers (2); You travel Asia in winter. (I usually bring a bunch back to the US, since they’re ridiculously expensive here.)
♦ Hiroshima Rail Pass; You use local transportation. (In Japan, anyway.)
♦ Vancouver Translink Faresaver cards (2); You use local transportation. (And in Canada.)
♦ “SSSS” boarding passes (2); You’re on someone’s “naughty” list. (No comment.)
♦ Air Canada boarding pass; You avoid US air-carriers.  (No “SSSS.”)
♦ Plane-side baggage tags (2); You travel in small aircraft. (Sometimes with no wheels.)
♦ AC Taxi card (Nanaimo, Canada); You use taxis in ridiculously small towns. (Friendly drivers.)
♦ Canadian currency exchange receipt; You’re not Canadian. (Still working on that.)
♦ BC Ferries walk-on ticket (also a return ticket); You don’t drive in Canada. (Don’t need to.)
♦ Japan Rail Pass; You take advantage of a non-Japanese passport.  (Gotta’ have some reason for keeping it.)
♦ Humetro rail ticket; You’re familiar with the underground civilization in Busan, Korea.  (Sometimes, it’s more fun to walk the subways in Korea.)
♦ Spiderman tissues, Osaka; You’re familiar with the lack of paper in Japanese toilets.  (Yep.)
♦ Unused drink cover from Sanctuary; You’re familiar with Tokyo underground civilization.  (Osaka’s is fun, too.)
♦ Not shown, leftover Thai-Spice Fisherman’s Friends from ChiangMai, Thailand (eaten); You get hungry.  (Actually a pretty good flavor.)

Barriers

by in Boundary Behavior, Cambodia, Culture, Identity, Luminous Aether, Risk | 6 Comments

As I ran past my old house today, some men were working on finishing the installation of a new automatic gate at the entrance to the driveway. I had always resisted a gate for the driveway, which serves four houses set in two pairs across from one another. And my neighbors across from me (who also sold their place) didn’t particularly like the idea either. But both of our neighbors at the end of the driveway had long pushed for a gate citing reasons of their own.

Placing a barrier at the start of the driveway somehow seemed unfriendly to me — or maybe even just a little paranoid. I doubt it would thwart a serious criminal-type, though it certainly adds a nuisance factor for legitimate traffic into and out of the driveway. But the course of asphalt punctured a social boundary into the properties that was otherwise delineated by nothing more than a low, stone wall. So in reality, the gate was simply an academic exercise to counter the driveway’s having created a visual breach into the bubble.

As a teen, I was once allowed passage through such a gate while accompanying a family member to a gathering where I didn’t actually belong. After some introductions, I remember sliding barely noticed between the social commerce of people wearing $1,000 sweaters and Italian shoes, the rising and falling tides of voices conveying such substance as the benefit of a particular airline’s first-class seating or a Senator’s expectation of an impending regulation. My own wisdom, mostly germane to a high-schooler dwelling in proximity to some California beaches, was slowly expelled as through the action of an invisible social peristalsis.

Featured imageEventually, I found myself deposited alone at a railing above a fortress palisade backed into a magnificent view of Lake Tahoe and the Sierra Nevada mountains. It was a Zen-like moment of sudden enlightenment, a profound awareness of being pressed against the exquisite inside of a tough film at the physical boundary of extraordinary cultural wealth. That privileged view would last for a few more hours before the means of active-transport that had allowed my passage through the membrane would once again return me to a proper place in the social scheme-of-things.

It was many years later at an ex-pat bar in Phnom Penh that my $200 rain-shell would help to identify me as one who belonged within its shelter of privilege. Isolated from the relative grit and poverty beyond, it was a safe domain in which to ignore the greater reality outside and to speak a foreign language.  This time, it was my voice that conveyed such substance as the quality of Thai Airline’s service between Chiang Mai and Bangkok, and the inevitability of a freight delay due to Thai/Cambodian border regulations.

Meanwhile, two attractive girls encouraged our continued presence with cold beer and by making certain that plates were never empty. At one point, a glance caught the curious gaze of another pair of almond eyes, and they paused in a brief moment of unspoken human contact. It wasn’t difficult to guess what social mechanism had transported them across the thin boundary that separated our tribe of wealthy outlanders from the greater reality just a short distance away. And yet, it was disturbingly easy to imagine myself on the other side of that transparent but uncompromising social barrier that differentiated our lives.

Such moments map the edges of what Dr. Christine Cheng of the Department of War Studies at King’s College in London calls “bubble worlds,” the restricted domains of special privilege granted to those who meet the standard of a particular cultural status. With passage into such associations measured by wealth, birthright (including nationality), ethnicity, institutional affiliation, and beauty, they demarcate the almost tribal affiliations of those who find safety in groups with shared understandings. But it can be a troubling experience to find one’s self in proximity to their semi-permeable limits, whether on the outside, or from within.

Most of my time in Cambodia was spent living behind the gates of a relatively secure, if not necessarily comfortable facility. The place was shared with others privileged by virtue of their foreign passports and by access to the comparative wealth they implied. But the nature of our business in the country necessitated a fairly constant interaction with a disadvantaged population. This continual push toward the edge of my own bubble-world gave rise to a powerful feeling of conflict rooted in a sense of insincerity. And perhaps a degree of stubborn independence on my part amplified its effect. As the director of an orphanage once said to me, “Don’t get too friendly with any of the kids. At some point you’re going to leave, and they’ve already suffered enough loss.”

But there’s another side to stepping across such boundaries. The same class, privilege, and life experiences that create cultural divides are also an integral part of one’s personal identity. This is why Dr. Cheng observed that ex-pats among marginalized populations benefit from the ability to periodically retreat into their own bubble-worlds. A part of one’s affective existence has to become shuttered so as to provide a safe-zone in which to validate the importance of self.

Regardless, Ms. Cheng once expressed her own “inner turmoil” at having witnessed the desperate lives of many Liberians, especially children. But she was also more cautiously self-observant. Returning home, she would respond to her experiences while also validating her own identity. Today, she educates a following generation of Western-privileged students, writes for several international media outlets, and encourages the sort of political engagement that could ultimately prevent the types of suffering seen in both Liberia and Cambodia.

For some, however, the passage through such a boundary may result in its ceasing to be sufficient to keep the individual within. Such visceral experiences can result in carrying something unexpected back within ourselves, something that may challenge our own established perceptions and values. And this is when the crossing back, if it’s even possible, may become an exercise in moral injury. So those gates we erect in the gaps of our bubble worlds can serve just as much to keep ourselves safely within as to keep others out.

It’s a questionable privilege though, living solely within the invulnerable confines of bias-confirming priorities. Neither the tranquil lakes nor the broken mountains beyond can be truly experienced without passing through the shell of protection that surrounds such places. But it’s the accumulation of these experiences that becomes a displacing force, changes a person, and moves her until she is once again pressed against the edge.

Word from the Gulag

by in Hmmm... | 8 Comments

Featured imageNot that I have much traffic to this just barely visible little corner of Siberia in the Digital Universe, but I do wish I could at least reach out and leave some friendly comments among my fellow contributors. I’m truly not as anti-social as I must appear, and do endeavor to read others’ blogs. Alas, WordPress seems to flummox my attempts at communication  where I’ve tried leaving either comments or “likes” to articles. And in general, there doesn’t seem to be any apparent reason as to why, although I’ve discovered a couple of interesting patterns.

The first is that WordPress runs a lot of “scripts,” or small programs that get your computer to do things or to communicate information. Some of these scripts are associated with actions that give the site its functionality, and others are used for logging-in and communication across its network. But there are also several that have to do with collecting data and with advertising, and at least two scripts that are associated with something known as “Kiss Metrics.”

Kiss Metrics is a website data-collection service that became notorious a while back for using scripts to re-spawn deleted cookies. A newer strategy is simply to fingerprint individual computers by running scripts asking a computer to reveal installed type fonts, along with several other characteristics that are ordinarily communicated so that Web pages can be made to display properly (IP address, screen resolution, video processing, operating system, etc…). Information is then remotely stored as a pattern against which to identify a particular computer, along with a record of that computer’s activities — a sort of cloud-service for cookies. These scripts are all blocked on my computers, but logging-in with any of my Android devices immediately results in massive download requests for font data that can actually stall them.

Most of my problems with WordPress aren’t, however, consistent. While I was in Japan recently, I rather surprisingly found myself with inexplicably full access to leaving comments. Using both a laptop computer that I also use in the US, and another computer with a Japanese operating system, I had no trouble leaving comments on several blogs. However, I did discover something interesting about clicking on the “like” button for articles.

It seems that the like-button area as indicated on the screen is not actually representative of what gets activated when the button is clicked. And this is apparently what had been causing “likes” not to function on my computers at home, since they all run software that blocks the activation of hidden elements to prevent what’s known as “click-jacking.” In at least some cases, the like-button’s activation area also partially covers all four of the buttons just above, including the Facebook like, Google+, email, and Pin it buttons. Consequently, if any of these services are also open in the browser at the same time that the “like” button is clicked, the function will also automatically activate something on those accounts as well. Hmmm…

Now back in the States, I’ve been able to get the “like” button working by disabling hidden-element protection before I click on it. It doesn’t really matter in my case, since I never log into more that a single service at one time, and I always clear cookies associated with one site before moving on to another. However, I again found that I could not leave comments, even when using the same laptop that worked just fine in Japan. And this led some speculation that perhaps my IP address here in the US had somehow become “blacklisted” with WordPress’s anti-spam service.

This can occasionally happen with a “dynamic IP,” which simply means that an Internet service provider assigns IP (Internet Protocol) addresses from a pool of available addresses whenever a user connects to service. Occasionally, an address may be used to send spam, and that information will propagate through other services which block spam by disallowing communications originating from the IP address. Of course, the easy solution for the spammer is simply to discard the old address and pick up a new one from their Internet service provider’s pool. The problem is that the old, blocked addresses accumulate in the pool and get picked up by other, legitimate users.

Assuming that might be the case, I contacted WordPress’s blacklist service, Akismet. Someone calling himself “Jamil,” with the rather interesting job title of “Happiness Engineer,” replied to my query with an electronic form that he requested that I fill and transmit. I did so, and returned a message that it had been sent on. That elicited a response from “Greg Stewart,” who then directed me to try and leave a comment at a specific WordPress site where it “…should appear immediately.” Alas, an attempt to do so was met with a whole new malfunction, where a script suddenly asked me to log into my email account — yes… my email account, not my WordPress account!

Of course, I wasn’t about to log into my email through a running script at a third-party website, so I sent a message describing the bizarre behavior, half expecting I might be told that somehow a virus had probably infected my computer. “Nick Hamze” (an ironic anagram of “mizen hack” or “iz hackmen“?) replied with the following… “Its not really a malfunction but more of a feature. We don’t want people to be impersonated so if you have a WordPress.com account under a particular email address than (sic) you will be asked to log into that account before you will be able to leave the comment.”

What the…?! But wait! Remember that hidden elements issue with the “like” button. Aha! I can only imagine what happens after logging into say… a private Gmail account. And for the likes of a service such as Kiss Metrics to be able to associate a verified email account to an individual’s computer and its activities has to be a veritable bonanza. I sent a short email to “Nick” thanking him for his time, but respectfully declining use of the “feature.”

And this leads to an apparent last chapter in my attempts to join-in with the larger WordPress community, which has been mostly by gaining access through computers at a local college. With some occasional business on campus, I’ve at times been able to leave comments on others’ blogs by logging-in through computers on the college network. However, I’ve recently discovered that most WordPress sites no longer render properly on their computers, and attempts to leave comments simply stall and never update. I don’t have a clue as to why this has suddenly started happening, but I imagine that some recent update to either the college’s servers or to their Internet browsing software probably block some scripts necessary for the sites to operate properly.

I can’t really bash WordPress for any of this since this is after all a “free” service, at least as far as my own involvement goes. And it’s apparently working just fine for many others. But it does seem to be a rather telling appraisal of the route that most of the Internet in general has taken. Leveraged for every possible bit of commercial data value, it has been monetized at the expense of both privacy and functionality. I suppose it’s a form of digital natural-selection that services which can produce a slight edge in profits will thrive, while the less profitable will be pushed to either specialize or eventually to die out. And remembering back to a 1990’s UNIX-powered “chat room,” and to a beloved but now defunct web site that for years hosted many talented writers, things have certainly evolved.