Connection Failure.

I noticed an article about Cosmic Strings in the current NewScientist.
I thought about what they were for a moment.
Perhaps they are the intersection between two membranes or dimensions. They might be the seam or join where two or more membranes overlap.

Earlier, I was giving some thought to the question of why some people need the Universe to have a space that it begins its existence in. Like some kind of matterless void inhabited only by a supremely bored God who is omniscient but knows nothing because there is no Universe with objects to know anything about.

I compared the Universe to a pencil. Imagine you are a small flightless insect like an ant or aphid, and you are walking along the barrel of the pencil towards the point.
This is the equivalent of traveling backwards in time.
When you reach the tip, that is the very "beginning" of the pencil. For you, it seems the entire pencil which is the only universe you have ever known, begins at the tip.
Lets just say the pencil is suspended in midair by being tied to the end of a string perhaps, so we dont have to worry about you, the bug, crawling off on to a table which would be the equivalent of another dimension.

When you reach the tip, there is no "outside". Of your Universe. You can't jump off into nothingness, because you have no concept of that direction. Not only do you lack an understanding of the physical direction, you would risk death or otherwise ending your existence even if you did know how to leap off.

So avoiding the immense crushing heat at the very beginning of our universe, if you had a time machine you would find it would only take you back so far, before getting stuck at the tip of the universe which we are inside of, like the way a drink bottle tapers. Either that or you would find that no matter how much energy you gave the machine it would only go backwards in time up to a point and then it would return to forwards in time.

Or perhaps a candle analogy would be good too, If you are the same bug and the candle is your world, you might walk towards the wick. Braving the melting wax you reach the candle flame section and realize you can proceed no further. But you do notice the flame tapers off at the end. It also flickers and you can't seem to determine where the end is... it keeps moving! And in a quantum way, appearing in different spots without traveling between them.

So you surmise this is the "beginning" of your Candle Universe and it "begins" at that tiny point at the end, and it got larger and cooler until life could exist and you could crawl around on the hard waxy bit.

But the flame isn't the beginning of the candle! The pencil tip isn't necessarily where the pencil "begins".
The thing we perceive to be the origin of the Universe is a tapered section in the time dimension. It goes there, but doesn't mean it started from there. Like a tree- it starts in the ground, not from a branch.

Not a good day for me in tech.
I did a quick search about how to upgrade from one version to the next, and found

gksu "update-manager -c"

This brings up a secret upgade button in Ubuntu's updater. So away I went, from a nicely working 6.04 into 6.1.
The download and upgrade took several hours to complete- I left it running overnight.
Several times the installer asked me if I wanted to upgrade some config file, so I said yes, go ahead.
After rebooting, it wouldn't start up. It just hung at the splash screen, waiting for the root filesystem.
What now? Off to Altavista for some answers. One suggestion was to try the x386 kernel instead of the x686.
Still no good.
I booted off my Fiesty CD. How to run a directory check on the internal hard drive? This is definitely not like OS X. By this I mean I was in big trouble. Up the creek without a paddle. I fooled around with fsck and it said something about a problem with the superblock.
Oh well. There wasn't much data on there to worry about, just a few downloads that can be done again, like Skype, Opera, Google Earth, Flash Player, Xcfe, Fluxbox and so on.
Because Ubuntu does not make it easy to upgrade from a CD-ROM without modifying the sources.list text file to point to your CD, I had to format it and install a clean Fiesty.
The upgrade to Gutsy went a lot more smoothly.

Oh, and the other reason it was a bad tech day; I couldn't log in to an OpenID-enabled site, productwiki.com, with my OpenID. The error was, "You don't own that identity". Oh yes I do.

By far the gizmos out there are getting better.

What's a saying or phrase that's never made sense to you?

"by and large". must be one of those ye olde fashionede thynges.

I have just been trying out SecondBrain which is in beta and invitation only stage. We have a combination tool that includes data aggregation, such as uploaded files... reminds me of DevonThink Pro or Yojimbo. Then there's some folksonomy tagging like Yep and the mindmapping like Inspiration. You can import your accounts from flickr, picasa, google docs, youtube plus bookmarks from delicious and even bluedot. Very nice. There is also a service suggestion button.
Once you import all this stuff you may then be able to create "collections" that let you bring all this together and then create a mindmap of all these images, movies, documents and websites.
 However there were a few dead ends i.e. server error pages. The thing delivers ASP pages, so what do you expect. I wonder if it is because I use Firefox perhaps?
I have also just got an account with Desktopondemand who will give me 1GB of space to play with. I need to compare this with the webtop offered by 30boxes which offers meebo integration and even allows you to run bitty browser so you have a browser within a browser! Trippy.
 Also on my plate are the addons CoolIris - learn to browse all over again! and me.dium which is a collaborative browsing addon that somehow overlaps with Groovynotes but it includes chat functions.
I think addthis might become more useful, especially as they are the glue between you and various bookmark-sharing services.
Unless you are collaborating, it doesn't seem natural to start commenting on a layer with JumpKnowledge or Fleck or Diigo. It might make more sense to use co.mments.com or cocomments to keep comment threads all on the same page, rather than having the site email you whenever there is a new "me too" post.

…is that most of them just aren't very good. That is, not that they aren't well-made. I mean they are pretty, and they do the job they were intended to do. But they're not even one-trick ponies, they're more like one-trick gnats.
Do we really need a Widget for every RSS feed out there? I understand. These are for people that are only interested in one thing, one news source, and they don't know what RSS is, and they don't care. Wouldn't it be better to teach them, and download a proper Feed Reader application?

The Second Problem of Widgets is that there are too many of them written as countdown timers for mundane events, like a TV show premiere. OK, once that date has passed-- Apple, Yahoo, Opera, are you listening? -- I want them out of the normal download lists and escorted to a retirement area.

Honestly, if I wanted a piece of history I think the Wayback Machine would be a better place to visit, wouldn't it?

The Third Problem of Widgets is that there are too many different kinds. Everyone's doing it their own way. Maybe I'm wrong- this could be the Future of Computing, where everything is a Widget.

I wanted to share some files. I had used box.net in the past and I was happy. The interface is quite good and it's easy to use and it's pretty responsive as well. However I got a message saying I would have to upgrade my account if I want to upload a file bigger than 10MB.

Well it's easy to have big files these days. So I popped in to MyOtherDrive.com. Only to find a Java dump instead of the site. I can copy the error text but it wont paste anywhere. Viewing page source lets me see that "Java Runtime Environment is not working correctly on your system" . Hmm. I think this might be Apple's JRE update causing the problem.

I'll have to see if I can tell it to emulate the 1.4.2 virtual machine or something. I don't know.

I'm testing out Meshly, a social bookmarking site of sorts. It's claim to fame is that you do the posting via Instant Messaging (IM) which is handy if you always have an IM client running all the time.
I wanted to get my posts to show up in netvibes, but I haven't found a module that likes Meshly's embedded HTML.
Meshly is working fine using Adium 1.0.2 and the site seems to work using Firefox 2.0 for Mac,

Also having a look at Egnyte for online collaboration. Currently comparing it with Approver and Grouptivity.
Those two sites seem to work fine in Firefox/BonEcho, but Egnyte I noticed has some style sheet/font size issues.

Although I am mostly impressed with Stikkit, the thing that will help spread its popularity are two new developments: The Quicksilver plugin and the Dashboard Widget. I'll be trying to squeeze in testing time to see if they can help without having to actually visit the Stikkit site.

Just for reference Stikkit has been working fine on the Mac with Firefox/BonEcho 2.0.x.

Update, 1 June 2007: This Quicksilver function doesn't appear to work smoothly at work, where IP traffic must go via a proxy server.