When I first saw this book on Amazon.com, it was hard to control myself. The name is an obvious rip-off of Asimov's 'I, Robot' - and yet the rest of the title did seem of worth. I sent off for it and have just finished reading it.

This was a difficult book for me to review. The author starts off explaining his own experiences in AOL chatrooms which, if they were not annoying to other users, were certainly bordering on trolling. Of course, he didn't call it that, but that's exactly what it was, at least to some degree. The whole Pighed persona seemed more like insight into troll behavior rather than any sort of early comparison to a virtual world. The bad news is that anyone who has been around in cyberspace long enough sort of knows that, but the audience of the book might think that the behavior of Pighed in the AOL context was socially acceptable. In that way, I thought it irresponsible and even a nice way of defending annoying behavior on the Internet.

But I read the rest of the book anyway.

Anyone who has read my own thoughts on Your2ndPlace.com would probably understand, after reading Meadows' book, that he and I don't agree on some things - but here's the funny thing. I found it to be a good book for people, other than the unashamed announcement of the author's roots in trolldom.

In the background, while reading, I've been watching the Municipal Corporations (Amendment) Bill, 2008, and did not need to engage my brain much for it. There were the same arguments danced around in a intellectual bout of foot-stomping with even one going far enough to call the governments actions illegal (he was not permitted further along this course).

Then Senator Afifah Mohammed (Opposition Senator; Temporary) began speaking. What drew my attention, initially, was her over-emphasis and young voice which seemed to me to border on whining. Her elocution was distinctive, to say the least. But on watching her I recognized her youth, and truly - she is or was a member of the UNC-A, the present Opposition.

What made her a diamond in the rough? She brought forth numbers, demonstrated that she did her homework, and shared them in Parliament. The figures showed the disparity and also her inexperience (quoting percentages would have been more sensible and less mind-numbing), but she did bring facts to debate. She did stare at the page too much as well, showing some more inexperience in being able to speak instead of read.

But she has the right tack, I think, and may be one to watch should she actually work on her weaknesses. And all of that is if she actually wrote what she read... the Slinger Francisco reference had me wondering. A person her age does not seem to be someone who would be familiar with the Mighty Sparrow, but then... maybe she does.

Sometime in May, my PayPal account was marked for 'limited account access' - a nice way of saying that they will happily collect money for you but will not disburse it to you. This, they say, is done for the greater good of assuring that one's account is indeed secure. I wrote through their email portal on their site and explained the recurring costs I have to Linden Lab (I am Nobody Fugazi in Second Life), and they cleared that up for me. In May.

But then, in June, this limited account access came back with a vengeance. The case is PP-490-015-326, so they say, and the reasoning of the limited access is:

Jun. 11, 2008: Our system detected unusual activity on a credit card linked to your PayPal account.

I held off on writing this in the hope that they would prove what I thought wrong. And yet, almost a month later, here we are.

So I went to my bank's website, and there is no activity that was not normal. There was no 'unusual activity'; what had happened was that my old debit card from the bank had expired and I was issued a new one. I attempted to change the date, but then PayPal found that my address had changed as well - it is no longer in Florida, but now in Trinidad and Tobago. No secret, that. And their system does not permit for the change of address to Trinidad and Tobago because the alleged industry leaders in internet financial transactions have not realized that one can have a legitimate bank account in one country while residing in another. It appears to be magic to them that this could happen, as their system cannot cope.

I ran across the phrase, 'Building a More Strategic, Collaborative And Sustainable Movement' in my email a few moments ago, and at first read came up with Building a More Strategic, Collaborative And Sustainable Bowel Movement.

And I wonder who comes up with these things. But let's strategically analyze the significance of the accidental metaphor for social interaction. After all, there is waste. Let us address the waste, which we will officially call Predictably Ostentatious Objects (POO) where objects transcend the tangible and include anything that is referenced as a noun. For example, a meme.

In the context of the Internet, POO comes along and clogs up blogs, aggregators and even email. It has been known to crossover to books, newspapers, magazines and even bathroom walls - and vice versa. POO, as they say, happens. So now we need to address a More Strategic, Collaborative and Sustainable Movement for handling POO - like peristalsis.

POO starts somewhere and gets spread around. Some people sniff it cautiously, others feel it for intellectual texture, still others roll it on their tongues, and still others step in it accidentally. However POO is handled, in a collective way the world digests it in it's many forms. Someone, somewhere, rolls the POO into a nice and neat bolus that begins rolling around. It gets around to just about everyone, even in passing - the spread of POO is more and more noteworthy as more marketers than content creators participate. We get new and improved POO, which is neither. We get more efficient POO. We even get more efficient POOing. But what we don't have is a direct method of dealing with this POO other than ignoring it. In many ways, POO is dealt with like that bad smell in the elevator:

"It smells really bad! Come smell!"

No, thank you. I believe you. I believe it smells bad.

It is unclear what exactly caused the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS) vehicle to pirouette with such a lack of grace, but the grass on the tires seems to indicate a story of speed, loss of traction and grass that hopefully did not result in anyone getting terribly hurt.

Of course, this is San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago so the fairytale Hollywood plot may not have resulted in as happy of an ending as one could hope for.

The particular turn is a problematic one due to the fact that as one rounds the bend, traffic is just in the blind spot - and people have been known to hit their brakes for random reasons at random times. I somehow doubt that the TTPS driver was at fault here - it seems he or she tried to avoid a worse accident. This is a little thing called defensive driving which only seems to be rewarded in... Hollywood?

No, not in Hollywood either. I hope everyone's alright.

During the Trinidad and Tobago postal strike, one of the books I picked up locally was Freakonomics - I'd heard about it but had stayed away from the buzz; it seems everyone these days has some new form of looking at the world and a book deal to prove it¹. And so I read the book in a context outside of what was probably intended by the authors, Stephen D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. I read it from my own context which lead to my own entry on Crime in Trinidad and Tobago.

The book takes off rapidly, dispelling commonly accepted 'truths' with deeper data and a clear view of the underside of reality. It provokes the critical thinker, who it seems to have been written for². It dispels commonly accepted ways of looking at things and provides new and interesting ways to connect seemingly disparate information for useful purposes. But within it's folds, there are some things that struck me as peculiar.

Take, for example, the discussion on education. I accept socioeconomic status as a factor - globally - for better education levels, though there are many children of rich parents who seem destined to try to keep this balanced. Even so, I find it hard to swallow that there is any data that would support intelligence as a genetic trait; I don't recall that this was written within the book, but there were points where it seemed that there was an assumption based on data that I could not see. This is something I had wrestled with before and continue to³. If there is data like that out there, I'd love to see it.

One thing that has bothered me for years in Trinidad and Tobago is the inability of people to remove their own garbage from the tables at fast food outlets. It simply amazes me on one hand, as the garbage cans [rubbish bins] are located strategically in most places where, on the way out, you can simply toss the garbage into a hungry receptacle.

Is it really that hard?

The message it sends is kind of interesting. Let's say you walk into a fast food outlet, get your food and wish to sit down. At the busiest times, this means that the tables in Trinidad and Tobago are either occupied or are full of someone else's rubbish. No one likes to sit at a dirty table, even the people who leave their garbage behind, but there it is. Where this attitude comes from, the root, is not clear. But walk into any fast food restaurant in Trinidad and Tobago, and there it is.

In reading the tables of rubbish, here's what I came up with: Trinbagonians simply don't care about how they leave something behind. They don't feel any responsibility for what they leave behind, they do not feel accountable for their actions and will happily leave it for someone else to deal with. Yet, when abroad, they do not maintain this culture. Odd.

The state of the country seems to bear me out.