ForsakenDAemon.net

In the last few days, several of my friends have complained of losing trust, respect or caring about their friends or acquaintances, which prompted me to think about what these things actually mean to me.

I’ve always been a strong believer in the ‘a reason, a season, a lifetime’ principle. If you haven’t heard of it: Spontaneous Concept Explanation!

Basically, the idea is that you have three kinds of friends: those who are in your life for a reason, such as school friends or clubbing friends; those who are in your life for a season, such as those who you used to hang out with a lot, but don’t any more; and those who are or friends for a lifetime, like that one school friend who you can not speak to for months and catch up with and it’s like nothing ever happens. Sure, now they drink instead of taking ecstasy, and smoke cigarettes instead of weed*, but they’re still a friend, and will be until one of you carks it.

The interesting thing is when you start to think about what happens to the amount of respect or trust or care that you hold for this person. Let’s think of them as actual measurable quantities.

In the first case, none of them peak particularly highly. You have a certain amount of each one for the person (probably significantly more when you’re drunk) but when the reason passes the feelings fade, and you’ve never placed a significant degree of trust on the person, or invested a significant amount of emotional resources in caring about them. As such, the result when the relationship ends isn’t particularly impressive – things change, people move on, the world turns, your bins get taken out on Fridays and your boss is still annoying.

In the third case, the issue never comes up – the respect, trust and emotional attachment that you’ve invested is never betrayed because the relationship (read: friendship) never ends, so no harm, no foul.

The interesting case is the second case, and it’s the stage that relationships have to pass through before we realize that they’re actually the third kind. In these cases, respect and trust and caring are more fluid. We may invest a certain amount of trust in a person, and then they do something that feels like a betrayal of that trust. And you know what?

That’s okay.

in this situation, we have two choices: we can walk away, end the relationship, and cut our losses; alternatively, we can reduce the amount of trust (in this case) that we have for the person, and then continue the ongoing process of testing how much trust we should be putting in the person in the first place.

Because trust, respect and caring aren’t earned in one fell swoop. Or, at least, they shouldn’t be. We give a little, we increase it slightly, and we see whether the other person rises to the occasion. Then, when we feel comfortable, we increase it a little more, and see what happens next. Thus, incrementally, we build friends from acquaintances.

And, although a betrayal of trust, respect or emotional investment may feel like the end of the world, this model suggests that it’s not – it’s actually the necessary outcome of testing a relationship. It’s the sign that we’ve reached the limit of what this person can give at this time.

But who knows what they’ll be ready for down the track! Keep on testing, keep on trusting, keep on respecting and keep on caring. Because you never know where someone will be in a month’s time, let alone a year’s.

*Note Bene: not based on reality. No, seriously.

Mother, friend, partner, coworker, best friend, housemate, boyfriend, patient, supervisor, boss, brother, doctor, client, the list goes on.

The number of names I have for people in my life is truly staggering.

Sometimes these names have power – for example, the patient/healthcare professional dynamic is important, in terms of trust, professionalism and the implicit knowledge gradient that it encapsulated.

Without the distinction between patient and healthcare professional, care is essentially impossible. I wouldn’t tell a guy on the street about the intimate details of my home life, but I expect it from my patients and clients, to a certain extent, every time I walk in through the doors of a clinic.

The name implies a pattern of interaction – pleasantries, history, evaluation, recommendation, implementation, farewell. Lather, rinse, repeat, for every monthly, yearly, n-ly appointment from here until the end of time.

Aside from the obvious benefits of expected patterns of interaction, the name also implies an obligation towards care. If I don’t want to be there, the name of ‘healthcare professional’ obliges me to be there, providing care and supporting my patient to the best of my ability.

However, this pattern of behaviour, while useful, has the fundamental drawback that it locks two people into a cycle that one of both may dislike or find unhelpful.

In healthcare, the advantages often seem to outweigh the disadvantages – and, indeed, a sizeable amount of research and development time has gone into ensuring that patient-healthcare worker interactions are useful and productive.

In more general interpersonal relationships, however, the question has to be asked – how much does this name reflect the relationship as it is, how much does it reflect the relationship as I’d like it to be, and how much difference is there between the two?

Particularly in complex, multicategorical relationships, are names or categories helpful or restrictive? Is it more useful to treat this person as my friend or my mother, particularly in a situation where different aspects of those two categories are coming to the fore? Is this person my coworker or my friend? What makes this person a boyfriend/girlfriend over a friend (besides the obvious physical aspects of an intimate relationship)?

Indeed, is the distinction necessary? I wonder whether we would be better off focussing not on what we should do, but on why we want to do – behaving in a manner that reflects that particular person, and the individual relationship that we have with them.

No rules. No labels. No holds barred.

No worries, mate!

Martin Kingsley

At first sight, it should be a simple problem – write a web services backend to a provided HTML5 frontend to handle OAuth logins to a couple of different services, intelligently storing the authentication information and allowing posting to those services via the integrated frontend.

Oh, $DEITY was I wrong.

Firstly, OAuth has a kind of triple handshake thing going on that means that I have to reengineer the front end to load the required login pages and then handle the callback. Okay, that’s fine. Doable, if nothing else.

Then turns out that the thing that’s passed back isn’t the actual string that needs to be stored. Okay, background call to get the actual string, that’ll be fine.

Then, apparently those strings expire. Oops, nobody mentioned that. So, when they’re not valid any more, you have to pass back the original string and get a new one. But you can’t just use that, that would be silly, so both have to get stored.

Is it any wonder I’m pulling my hair out right now?

I sometimes wonder whether the purpose of an open standard is just to make it so everything is equally annoying. Which is helpful, I’ll grant them that.

The problem arises when the web frameworks that will eventually have to function within that system either aren’t set up to handle them at all or try to do too much for you.

For example, Grails has a beautiful OAuth plugin, which I’m sure works great for websites written in Grails, but which continually throws weird redirects and stuff around when I try and modify it. Cue several hours of rolling my own. Several hours I don’t have, I should add.

Ah, well – at least I don’t have to write separate handlers for YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. If only flickr would get on the OAuth bandwagon, I’d be a happy man!

After wondering for a long time what to do with this blog, I’ve decided to rebrand. I’ll be bringing my articles and some of my old blog posts over over the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, check out some of my current projects, including An Awkward Pause, Creative Innovation 2010 or The Hub Melbourne.

- DAemon

You are probably aware of the swirling debate surrounding the controversial plan to ‘filter the internet,’ figureheaded by the now infamous Senator Stephen Conroy. Much of the debate has centred around a single apparent dichotomy: ‘the right to free speech’ vs ‘the right to masturbate over photos of children being raped’ (Thanks to Andrew Bolt for that particularly pithy summation of the argument on Q&A, Thursday 26th March).

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that Australia, unlike America (the de facto standard of law in the public consciousness), has no constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of speech, let’s take this idea and think about it for a second.

Following the work of John Stuart Mill, the philosophical father of much of modern thought on liberty, we now understand the right to freedom of speech to be made up of two different rights, each with two parts: The right to hear (both to seek information and to receive that information) and the right to be heard (both to express ourselves and to distribute our expression to people who wish to receive it).

In most of the ‘censorship’ debates, the ‘libertarian’ view (namely that against the proposed filtering system) is that everyone should be able to exercise their right to free speech (as guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for which Australia voted in favour). Conversely, the ‘authoritarian’ view is that nobody should have the right to publish or distribute material that harms those who are unable to help themselves, namely pro-rape material, child pornography, etc.

Notice the subtle difference? The libertarian argument is about the right to hear, whereas the authoritarian argument is about the right to be heard.

And the clincher? They’re both right.

You see, in almost any discussion of the right to liberty (indeed, even in Mill’s own work, and also in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), the issue of ‘the harm principle’ comes up. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights probably puts it best:

In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

In other words, every basic right guaranteed to a person may be curtailed by law in order to stop harm from coming to another person.

This is the reason why we don’t have the right to publish certain kinds of material in Australia, particularly child, rape and snuff pornography. In this country, the right to be heard has already been limited, in accordance with the harm principle, so that publishing child pornography carries a maximum sentence of up to 5 years imprisonment in NSW. The reason behind this restriction is that the production of this material is inherently illegal, and so distribution of the proceeds is similarly illegal, much like purchasing or selling obviously stolen goods.

All with me so far? Basically – making child porn is wrong, distributing child porn is wrong, and they’re both wrong because the material is demonstrably criminally harmful to another person.

Here’s where it gets tricky.

You see, the two filtering strategies proposed by the Government don’t cover just material which is demonstrably harmful to others. The first, deep packet inspection of all Australian internet traffic, has unacceptably high rates of error, both false positives and false negatives, and so covers a fuzzy ball of content, centred at ‘child pornography,’ but stretching out beyond its desired boundaries.

The second strategy is mildly more confusing. The basic idea is that a constantly evolving list of content would be blocked. Unfortunately, there are references to three separate lists of content: namely ‘the ACMA blacklist,’ ‘Refused Classification content’ and ‘illegal Refused Classification content.’ Of these three, only the third, ‘illegal Refused Classification content,’ is an existing standard for material that is demonstrably harmful under Australian Law.

‘Refused Classification content,’ a superset of ‘illegal Refused Classification content,’ is a designation used by the Office of Film and Literature Classification, a government organisation, responsible to the Attorney-General’s Office, that has made decisions about the classification of literature in Australia since 1970. The members of its Classification and Review Boards are public, as are its decisions and the reasons for its decisions. Occasionally it will designate an item RC for illegal reasons – and then possession of that material will become illegal, as will its distribution. Until that point, ownership of material is legal, even if its sale or hire is not.

The first list, however, ‘the ACMA blacklist,’ is (as Senator Conroy likes to point out) a nine-year-old list of websites created by the Howard government that is designed to contain websites that either are or would be refused classification were they to go to the OFLC. The process is secret, and does not involve the OFLC at all. Indeed, the OFLC does not classify websites, but is restricted to film, printed material and video games.

But what does all this waffling on about lists and classification actually mean? Well, here’s my point. Both the rights to hear and be heard are already restricted in Australia. Every person is fully aware of this fact, and it can be seen every time we don’t have sex with children and sell videos of it in an adult store, or fail to purchase magazines filled with photos of a beautiful woman being raped and killed.

There are things that we know to be wrong. They are easily demonstrably harmful, and there is a system in place to tell us that they are such. We don’t consume them because we know that to produce them hurts people who may not be able to help themselves, and we give up a little of our right to hear to give them back their right to be heard.

But we do it willingly. We know what’s going on. We have the right to choose to give up our rights: as long as we understand what’s going on.

So, everybody out there who’s arguing back and forward over this issue, please: stop arguing two separate points! Stop arguing that authoritarians want to stop us from hearing the truth, or that libertarians want to fill the internet with images of vile crimes, and realise that you’re both right! Everybody wants to be connected, and nobody in this debate wants to further the production or distribution of illegal material.

Let’s stop arguing and find the people who are hurting, the people who have had their right to be heard taken away.

Surely that’s what this debate is all about.

Well, it’s that time of year again. It’s Valentine’s day soon – and yet again, I’m single!

So, I’m asking you to be my valentine!

Your mission, should you choose to accept it is:

Present me with an application. It’s as simple as that. Bonus points for cuteness factor or the ability to make me cry in a good way. And don’t laugh, it’s happened before!

The best (and there may be more than one category in which an application can be considered ‘best’ ) will gain the right to call me their valentine for the duration of Valentine’s day. And possibly a coffee or ‘date’ or something similar, location permitting!

Now, a bit of the fine print:

• Your application can be in any form – if I can sense it, you can present it.
• This competition is open to all people. Gay, straight, male, female, partnered, desperately seeking same, no matter where you are or what you do, I want to hear from you.
• The title of ‘Valentine’ is non-exclusive and comes with no commitment to do anything whatsoever. Although anything offered would be nice…
I don’t mind nudity, drug references, or anything else that would be considered ‘Prohibited or Potential Prohibited’ content by ACMA. Some of that stuff is actually encouraged, in fact! Just keep it tasteful. Or desirable.
• Your application shouldn’t violate any of the laws of the state of Victoria, the country of Australia, or the place in which you live.
• That includes copyright.
• Applications should be submitted by 5pm AEST on the 13th of February. I do need some time to think about it!
• No correspondence will be entered into.
• Oh, alright, some correspondence will be entered into.
• Fine! All the correspondence you want will be entered into, and yes you can bribe your way to the top.

To submit an application, send it via email to beminevalentine@forsakendaemon.net.

If you need any more details (postal address, phone number, where I will be at a certain time on a certain day), send me an email, a Twitter DM, an SMS if you have my number, or a Facebook message and I’ll let you know!

Just a reminder to all of my FetLife friends out there that the Kinky Christmas Stocking competition closes in a day or so – so if you haven’t entered yet, get out there and do it!

- DAemon

There’s a poem that I’ve been writing for months and have never been able to finish.

The poem is entitled ‘salmon skies,’ referring to those moments at sunrise and sunset when the sky is salmon pink, caught between day and night. The metaphor is for those moments in my life when I have been neither up nor down, but caught in the middle – able to think and reason rationally without buzzing away and losing focus or having to force myself to make it in the first place.

For the first time in a long time, I seem to have found focus.

Salmon skies have always been my favourite part of day. Whether it’s sunrise or sunset, I find myself drawn to the impermanent beauty of those precious few minutes.

Suddenly I feel like I’m living in a sunset. It’s not too hot, it’s not too cold, the sky is a beautiful colour that never remains quite the same, but is caught on the edge of change for hours and hours and days and days, and I just want to cry with how wonderful it is.

And then I realise that there’s nothing stopping me. And, just for a moment, I let myself revel.

But there are things to do, and people to see, and a life to live in a way I didn’t realise I wanted to be possible, and I go on living.

And it’s fucking fantastic.

Voltaic Solar Panel Bag

Latin American Techniques (Parts 1-5), Popular Variations

Jazz shoes

LiveScribe Pen and journal

Well, I’ve started getting my new site into working order. So far, there’s a new (and functional) Drupal installation over the top, and a rather nice structure that just needs more content in order for it to be really good.

I’m about to go in the shower and get ready, so this is a short one, but I did feel the need to actually write something in this new blog, since I’ve spent almost the whole day sorting it out.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with my existing LiveJournal. I’ll almost definitely keep it (I mean, it’s a paid account until like the end of the year anyway, and I want to keep my flist around) and I’ll leave LoudTwitter going, but I don’t think that I’ll post as much in it. I so want to start writing important stuff (like, real blogging! I know!) here, so maybe I’ll keep it around for the filtered stuff, but I haven’t quite decided yet.

Anyway, that’s all from me for today, I’m off to get ready for my brother’s show tonight.

DAemon.