I was moved this weekend by one very special event, just a short moment in time with a very strong impact.

There was a knock on our apartment door last evening (currently in an apt while our house is getting remodeled) and it was the elderly gentleman from upstairs. He is the classic sweet and thoughtful grandfatherly type, and he was having some trouble getting his bow tie unclipped. He looked like he felt bad about having to ask for help, and it was clear he had been trying for quite some time, even to the point of having his shirt half twisted around and a few straps pulled to the point where he couldn't reach them any longer.

The way he talks has a tremor and a strong rasp, you have to pay very close attention, and he was so very thankful and repeating his gratefulness numerous times. In being caught up helping him remove this penguin suit and ribbons, I didn't even recognize or think about why he would have been wearing it. He had to repeat a couple of times to me that he had just received his 4th Degree Knights of Columbus, and it wasn't in a tone meant to explain his attire, it was glowing, the pride was so strong through his weakened voice and situation that I believe that's all that was holding him together at that moment. Childlike, innocent but with such rich and pure pride, in a being obviously alone in and not long for this world.

The work I do every day, I try so hard to find meaning in moving these bits around, in developing "web 2.0" ideals, participation, attention, sharing, communicating. In just one simple perchance gesture with a stranger, I felt more moved and connected than all of these technologies I try to help advance.

I want this to mean something, I want to do more to let these networked bitmangling devices actually help us get to know each other, to value each other, as people, as individuals. It's important for me to keep true to this moment and return here, and remember what it's like to help and get to know a stranger in need.

I realized today how much the net has deteriorated behind the scenes, after I was reveling in Sean's little shell script that would monitor /var/log/auth.log and auto-add IPs to a block list on a server when they pass a threshold of failed ssh attempts. After a quick sampling on a few of the boxes I help admin and seeing *thousands* of brute force ssh login attempts every day, and after reading Jerry's blog tonight, combined with increasing ratios of bad-to-good traffic across the board, I'm a little scared.

We're in Jail. It's as simple as that. Listening to any public IP on the Internet right now will show IMMEDIATE windows hack attempts, viruses, and as you stick around you'll see HTTP backdoor/overflow requests, ping scans, port scans, ssh root and dictionary attacks, dns/bind rootkit installers, ftp exploits, you name it. As soon as an IP is lit up, every thug and evildoer comes to try to get in. If you don't lock yourself away in a cell, batten down the hatches, hide behind someone elses big firewall gates and guards, you're toast, if not immediately then eventually.

How did it get this bad? It's ridiculous! Based on the trends, it's only going to get worse, and I don't know how such a clean and pretty looking internet will continue to cover up the sewers that all backbone pipes are right now.

The thing that frightens me most, is people will start to realize or be impacted to the point of unusability, and those that want to control the internet (copyright holders anyone? governments?) will use it as an excuse to assert their own view of who's good or bad. It feels like all of these recent murmurings of trusted computing and trusted network access might be the stink of that in action.

I hate to complain about something I can't throw out ideas for solutions on, anything I think of suffers the same take-freedoms-away... I'll keep thinking, hopefully really smart people are working on this while preserving the openness that defines the internet.

And yes, the title, Was (Not Was).

It's tempting to want to use this space to participate in the linkstorm to all the "cool stuff" or "good articles" I process on a daily basis, but that's not what this space is for and I need to be wary of that kind of mental share-rot.

This space is for me to share my thoughts, not re-distribute everyone else's, so my focus is on the thinking creation side. A list of topics I hope to touch on in coming posts are:

Open Source: Innovators and Builders, the life-cycles and social catering.

Web Chunks: "microcontent" and alternative distribution methods

Participatory Systems: Neat words, how soon before someone makes a Participatory conference and others create a 2.0 version?

Companies vs. Individuals: All companies are just groups of Individuals anyway, why all the fuss? Do we need more transparency here?

Inmates: that's us, tonight's topic :)

First fighting, and now recovering from, some deep throat/cold thing. Probably due to the seasonal change and constant immune system attack from what the kids bring home from school combined with frequent travel...

Right now I'm useless if I don't have a halls actively engaged combating the cough reflex.

First, the only relevance between the subject words might be that AJAX is often used to keep your attention focused. Other than that, they are just two micro-topics on my mind today.

I'm not sure I like the word attention in how I'm seeing it used on web topics, it speaks too much to me of an instruction, what I should be doing, particularly when I used to hear it all the time in school. What's more important when people talk about attention online, is impression. And I mean the exact opposite of how marketing people in the late 90's overhyped it, I mean the impression given from you to others. Whenever you participate, you are leaving an impression of yourself. You impress part of what you think, your pictures, your likes, your categories, your opinions. It's that impression that you leave all over the web that is important here, not your attention.

AJAX being all the rave that it is, even though it simply represents techniques many of us have used forever (and is a minor improvement upon), is a healthy little growth wave. It's far more healthy and exciting than something like, say, j2ee, even though they're not really comparable. I'm going to predict we'll see a whole marketplace next year, ajax processing appliances, ajax security, ajax accelerators, ajax routers, ajax ajax ajax. Kinda obvious I know, wish I cared enough to build some of those and get ahead of the game.