I recently began listening to the followup to The Lexus and The Olive Tree, entitled The World is Flat: A Short History of the 21st Century. The latter was written in 2005 so the author has had time to absorb the true impact of the internet, while it was just getting revved up when he wrote the former book. His key point in the first part (of three) of the book is that there have been many events which have caused the world to flatten. This flattening is a metaphor for a leveling of the playing field across many different industries. For example, Linux has leveled the playing field in computers by allowing poorer people to afford computers since they don’t have to pay for an operating system or programs. Fiber optics have leveled the playing field for India by allowing data to be transmited so quickly and with so much bandwidth that companies are able to do more and more abroad, allowing educated Indians to have jobs of a caliber they could not have before. You get the point.

Andrew, on a dare from some of his mates in the Galactic Irregulars, tried to outdo the Numa Numa guy with his own lip sync to a song. Personally, I don’t think it’s whacky enough. He’s driving and the music is playing while he sings to some of the lyrics. It is kinda neat to see the cars over his shoulder, but nothing that I think would unseat Jersey boy. Andrew may have once looked comical (as we all do when we are in are early teens), he now looks like someone who could probably put up a good fight. Perhaps something a little whackier would be funny, but you can be the judge!

Andrew Laine who you may know from Temporary Insanity, a site hosted on my page, asked me today to hook him up with a blog. I was more than happy to oblige, as I had offered a blog to all those hosted on my site. Within five minutes he was set up and you can now see him at Andrew’s Random Ramblings. Apparently, just like me, he’s a big Spiderman fan. As you will remember, just days ago I wrote about Spidey in a 8 April post about buying the Amazing Spiderman collection on CD-ROM.

I bought the Erace album when it first came out and I think I was just a freshman in high school if not younger. I really liked the rap put out by Gotee records courtesy of GRITS, et al especially because back then they had more of an experimental and underground sound. They’ve recently sold out, in my opinion, by sounding like every other rapper out there. But that’s not the subject of this post, so I’ll save it for another time. At the time I was unable to realize just how creative this song was. I used to play it over and over because I really liked the beat and the raps weren’t too bad.

Veil

Originally uploaded by gori-jp.

My first stop on this tour of the world was in Japan. gori-jp takes magnificent photos of his country and this is no exception. When I first saw the thumbnail for this image I thought it was a stack of mattresses. It turned out to be a very colorful building! We will surely see more of gori’s pictures in the future.

I’ve been traveling all over the world for the past month. No I didn’t suddenly win the lotto, I’m still a poor college student. But, through flickr, I have been traveling around the world through the photos of others. I really love doing this because it will be quite a few years before I can actually afford to travel all around the world, so the cheapest way is to enjoy the pictures of people who live in these areas. It has been amazing seeing the world through the lenses of these photographers, some of them have amazing quality work. This last week alone I have been to Malaysia, Iraq, and Japan. Over the next few days I will be blogging about some of my favorite pictures from around the world. This may be in addition to other posts if other exciting things happen around the world this week.

One of the most well-known Linux distributions has recently changed names! After their recent merger with Connectiva, Mandrakesoft is changing its name to Mandriva. No more Mandrake Linux! It’s Mandriva Linux now. Their URL will soon be changing to reflect this, so make sure to update your bookmarks.

Only in the Linux world can a brand name change without much repercussion. Information travels fast so everyone knows it’s the same thing. Imaging frosted flakes changing the name and mascot of its cereal. Without an expensive ad campaign everyone would assume it was a new cereal and they would lose their brand recognition. Not so with purely internet entities.

Technology continues to be an amazing force and I’m always amazed at even the little things that technology can achieve. Until I was in High School I used to read Marvel comics every month when a new issue would come out. There were only three Marvel comics I cared about: (which happen to be some of the most famous ones) Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, and X-Men.

I liked Spiderman because he was really witty. Even when he was getting beaten up by his enemies, he would still make fun of them with all sorts of wise guy remarks. I also liked the fact that he always had a lot of real-world problems. Unlike a lot of other super heroes he always had problems. His best friend’s dad goes crazy and he is constantly battling with him. Jameson, at the newpaper, is always writing bad articles about Spiderman. No matter how good of a job he does, Jameson is always dragging his name through the mud. He has issues with MJ about why he is always dissapearing. Unlike Lois Lane, she doesn’t naively accept this, she gets ticked and goes out with other guys. Also, for most of the time, his Aunt May, who he so dearly loves, hates Spiderman.

According to CNN Google will begin offering a new map service to rival and surpass Mapquest. They bought this service from Keyhole, a company with a large repository of satellite pictures of people’s houses. Some people are protesting this from a privacy point of view. I don’t see why they are protesting. It’s not as though I can pull up a live picture from your house. All I can do is see a picture that was taken at some point in the past (Google claims 6 months). I don’t see how that’s a privacy issue? Right now I could pay someone to go take pictures of your house and you probably wouldn’t know. As long as they aren’t tracking people or anything (something nearly impossible with civilian satellites), it’s not a big deal. If you look at the CNN articles you will see from the pictures that the resolution isn’t all that. It’s more of a cool geek thing than anything else. Actually, the article did mention the only good use I can see for this service, checking to see just how far that hotel is from the beach when they claim they are just “minutes away from the water”. Actually, I can think of one other thing. If you are trying to figure out which houses to visit with your realtor, you can look it up on Google and see just how big the yard is, front property, etc.

I am coming to the end of the Lexus and The Olive Tree. In part three of his book, he had a very interesting analogy for the world’s economic systems. If they were a gas station….

Japan - the gas costs $5/gal, but there are five guys who service your car. They pump your gas, fill your tires, and clean your windshield. They are all guaranteed to have their jobs for life.