Ambigous Data

Usually, when I use the word "ambiguous", it means that someone was not very clear in their explanation or documentation.

Having an installation procedure that can be interpreted "ambiguously" generally means I stay up long hours to "unambiguously" explain why the server is broken.

Even worse, if the two words in the title, taken together, are applied to the results of a verification test, it means some people wasted a lot of time.

But... with one of my bosses sending entertaining tweets and posting pictures from the seminar he's attending in Dubai, and I myself looking forward to a few days in London, I find myself contemplating the chosen title in a different context...

Well, in all fairness, it needs a third word. Universal. Ambiguous, Universal, Data. Meaning that data access should be available everywhere, and be so "without us having to be explicit about wanting to access it" (in the getting-access-to sense, rather than a lets-do-away-with-privacy-sense).

Currently, roaming data fees for someone using Twitter, Foursquare, Latitude, Facebook, Layar and watch a Youtube or two, could rival the gross national product of some (non-oil-producing) 3rd-world countries. And, while mobile and location-based services are cool, I find myself reprehensive of freely using them in an environment which I know my mobile device would consider "not it's home network".

This reprehension is both direct, as I wouldn't like to pick up the tab if I used my private device, and indirect, by the sense of responsibility the previously-mentioned boss would "incur upon me" after having to pay the tab if I used my corporate device to do in London as he did in Dubai.

And yes, this is a completely unfair (and presumptive) comparison. One I take creative license on to be able to make the previous paragraph work the way it does.

But... I digress...

Thinking about this makes me wonder how much "less" the telco's would make if their revenue on data would come from pure volume rather than right-to-access. Lowering the threshold would presumably increase the volume. An economics-101 calculation might prove or disprove my gut-feeling that, currently, the restricted-access/roaming model is actually cutting them out of a huge volume of (micro-transaction) revenue.

Conversely, the lowered threshold would work it's magic on the availability of, and access to, any location-based, or (mobile) social-media, applications. Where "Layar" was the first one (to my knowledge) to coin the term "enhanced reality", once "data" would become accessible to us like, say, air, would it finally become as transparent a part of our lives like text-messaging now has? Should it be?

Are the telco's really best-served by their "monopoly" on access to data? The attitude that you need to "deal with them" (and pay through the nose) before you are allowed through the gates...

Or would they be best served becoming a silent partner? Quietly receiving the millions-upon-millions of fractional parts of everybody universally adding their proverbial two-cents ambiguously from anywhere in the world?

I know I'll be posting a few opinions from London...

Which way does happiness lie?

Thomas Jefferson wrote, in the United States' Declaration of Independence, that

"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

So the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right. Everybody is "allowed" to pursue being happy.

This is great news!

Now, which way does happiness lie?

No... really... Could someone point me in its direction?

Ummm... And... if I'm not sure where happiness lies, or what it looks like, then how do I pursue it?

Modern Relics

A couple of days ago, I walked by my Project Manager's office, to check in if there were any new, hot, burning, blocking, or otherwise exceptionally-prioritised issues coming down the pipeline.

He proceeded to enlighten me on the current state of the project, which took a few minutes. While he was doing so, this esteemed-but-new-to-the-team colleague was idly playing around with a smallish purple object in his hands.

When I realised what it was, my eyes widened and the room grew cold... The surprised horror, the indignation that swept through me, the impulse to call for tar, feathers, pitchforks and torches...



This mere mortal, this ignorant peasant, was sitting there, idly palpitating the one relic of the monumental task, the epic journey that dozens of engineers had had embarked on earlier this year.


Seven months of blood, sweat and tears, practically no weekends and months of structural overtime. Having had overcome blizzards (well, snow in southern Germany in February), toxic gas (Carbon Dioxide and Halon in the fire extinguisher system), fire and brimstone (Ummm, well, the vulcanic eruption in Iceland kept some of us from leaving), Babylonian mix-ups of Biblical proportions (errr, Bavarian dialect, anyway), and the Damoclean risk of suffering massive coronary while there (fastfood and the local cuisine combined...), we had prevailed, come through and managed to return with a singular relic...

Our key to the local coffee machine...




P.S.
I guess this is why so many relics are kept in a reliquary, and not on any random desk in the office...