Mobile phone – On The 8 Spot

June 16, 2009

rePost:How To Disappear:FT.com / Magazine – First Person: Frank Ahearn

There are three key steps to disappearing. First, destroy old information about yourself. Call your video store or electricity company and replace your old, correct phone number with a new, invented one. Introduce spelling mistakes into your utility bills. Create a PO Box for your mail. Don’t use your credit cards and the like.
Then, create bogus information to fool private investigators who might be looking for you. Go to one city and apply for an apartment. Rent a car in another one.
The next, final step is the most important one. Move from point A to point B. Create a dummy company to pay your bills. Only use prepaid mobile phones and change them every month. It is nearly impossible to find out where you are unless you make a mistake.
This is the general rule, but some cases are trickier than others. No problem if you are self-employed, but let’s say you’re a bus driver or a teacher. Then your wages will go on your name. I once had to move a lawyer who was threatened by a former client. Lawyers need a licence. She became a legal consultant.
via FT.com / Magazine – First Person: Frank Ahearn.

June 15, 2009

Best Read:The Joy of Less – Happy Days Blog – NYTimes.com

I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).
via The Joy of Less – Happy Days Blog – NYTimes.com.

March 13, 2009

Things To Ponder: Reclaiming The Space :Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Realtime kills real space

: Image by Scarleth White via Flickr

Call me a Luddite but I think its time to fight back!
Not by isolating ourselves and not using the web and all its gifts but by trying to one up the web and making our real world interactions better. Trying to find the kinds of interactions that would flow naturally from using the web and living a connected life.
This is a new category , “Reclaiming Space”. trying to find the ways that would help make the web a complement , and not a substitute to real connections!

A government survey conducted last year concluded that eighty-two per cent of those between the ages of ten and twenty-nine use cell phones, and it is hard to overstate the utter absorption of the populace in the intimate portable worlds that these phones represent. A generation is growing up using their phones to shop, surf, play video games, and watch live TV, on Web sites specially designed for the mobile phone. “It used to be you would get on the train with junior-high-school girls and it would be noisy as hell with all their chatting,” Yumiko Sugiura, a journalist who writes about Japanese youth culture, told me. “Now it’s very quiet—just the little tapping of thumbs.”
Realtime, you see, doesn’t just change the nature of time, obliterating past and future. It annihilates real space. It removes us from three-dimensional space and places us in the two-dimensional space of the screen – the “intimate portable world” that increasingly encloses us. Depth is the lost dimension.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Realtime kills real space.