58bits - Other

This is scary - U.S. School District to Begin Microchipping Students - as Karen Lawrence Öqvist"s points out as well.

I remember reading about high schools offering parents access to the school's Intranet to see whether or not their sons or daughters were actually at school or not, and I thought that was worrying at the time.

Another example of the continuing cycle of media and government generated fear being used to reduce civil rights in the name of 'security'?

Reading The Catcher in the Rye , or Nineteen Eighty-Four and students today might wonder why it is that they are able to easily identify with Holden Caulfied, or wonder perhaps whether or not they are actually living in 1984; while their freedom to make decisions (and accept responsibility for their actions) is being steadily reduced.

I remember some of the things I did in high-school. The choices I made weren't always the right ones - but they were an important part of growing up for me.

Teenage years are a complicated time. We're struggling to find the balance between life at home, life at school, our need to be accepted by our peers and even our need to be able to begin to form intimate relationships with others. What happens when a teenager suffers his or her first heart-break and is too embarrassed to tell their parents about it - and can't face going to school that day; just wanting a little down-time in order to try and resolve their feelings before facing the world again. Where does their freedom to choose to do that go?

Employees are protected from surveillance at work under various regulations (Lawful Business Practice Regulations in the UK). Surely our teenagers deserve equivalent protection from surveillance at school; where they deserve the right to prove they are responsible and trustworthy before losing their freedom to choose.

On my way back to Bangkok after a long weekend in Hong Kong.

Was very lucky with the weather and had a great trip. Saw most of the major site - including the The Big Buddha,  a trip up the tram to the peak, a visit to Stanley Market and Repulse Bay plus plenty of shopping and other sites. I was really impressed.

Hard to tell from just a weekend but I'd rank HK as a pretty good place to live. Pics are here...

If I could design the future of social networking it would look like this...

I'd have a platform... some kind of service or software platform, from within which I could blog, twitter, chat and link to the people I know. I'd be able to choose exactly what information I wished to publish and when, and whether that information was published to just my friends, or to the world.

I'd be able to host the platform anywhere I choose. I could pay for it, or it might be free. If I paid for it - I'd want total control over where and how any advertising was allowed from within or outside the platform.

Imagine taking the best of LinkedIn, a decent blogging engine, something twitterish, a good chat client, a good media sharing platform for photos and videos. Add a pinch of social bookmarking - and wrapping all of that up into a very cool platform that I can use to represent me and those I choose to interact with in the online world. A sort of Bittorrent-ish, Groove-ish application for society. Goodbye MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Skype, goodbye to all of the walled garden social networking sites - and hello to my own little neighborhood in cyberspace.

The end of walled gardens like Facebook and other social networking sites is actively being discussed. What's missing is the glue in standards and software to bring together an alternative. The big guys like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo want to try and grab on to this and hold on to it for its obvious potential in targeted marketing and advertising revenue.

I hope that doesn't happen. I hope we're each able to grab on to it, to control it and to use it to build new communities and socially meaningful ways of communicating with the world.

If you've never lived in a tropical climate before - there are a few things people need to warn you about. Firstly, I live in a small apartment (well the apartment is large - but it's a small building) and the landlord and us tenants don't really like to spray insecticides. We prefer to try and keep the place clean in order to keep the invertebrate population down.

It adds a new dimension to 'snacking' and keeping the place tidy. Drop just a few crumbs of that chocolate chunk cookie on the floor - and you're in big trouble. The main offenders are small red ants. When they show I know it because a bite from one of those tiny buggers gives me a lump the size of a golf ball. I remember once in Phuket - they were in the hotel I was staying in - or to be more precise - in the walls of the hotel - and crawling out from behind the towel rack in the bathroom. I grabbed a towel (as you do) after a shower and started to dry myself off and ouch. I won't go into any more details except to say I was pretty worried for about 24 hours.

And then there's the cute little gecko house lizards. These are actually good guys to have around since they eat bugs and insects; except when they crawl into the back of your computer and die. The smell is awful. Took me ages to figure out where it was coming from :-)

Ok - I admit it - I love Doritos - especially cheese flavored Doritos. I know they don't exactly fall into the category of health food - but I could eat a bag a day no problem.

There's a trick to getting Doritos here though (here in Bangkok). Local supermarkets do sell Doritos - but they seem to come in batches - and then disappear for a few weeks. So... I buy a LOT of them when they're here - enough to last until the next wave arrive. I was sort of hopping that some clever stock or inventory management system of the bigger supermarkets would have figured this out - and order more Doritos (ala Walmart), but it hasn't worked, and I'm sure when I hit the Dorito jackpot - there are a lot of unhappy Dorrito lovers here trying to work out where all the Doritos have gone.