Martin Gumucio

Technical Museum in Stockholm 1952 - Philips demonstrating television.

Me and L where talking the other day if we ever are going to see a change in our lives as fundamental as internet. Our generation grew up without it while this generation never knew how life was before cellphones and internet. And the next generation, what kind of internet will they get to know?

Changes are pretty big that the freedom and openness that we associate with internet today will be an unknown to them. I heard the other day on the radio a debater making the argument “of COURSE internet suppliers should be responsible for what is going on in their networks”. To that argument I must ask why. Internet connectivity is as commonplace today as any other part of the Swedish infrastructure. You don’t close bars if people get drunk there and then drive home. Nobody would even think about threatening my telephone company if I were to pick up the phone and call in a bomb threat at the Royal Palace. Yet somehow when it comes to internet connectivity, all the basic rules we take for granted don’t apply.

We are already being spied upon on a systematic and state-sponsored degree, Stasi of East Germany could only dream of having the control over its citizens that the Swedish state is enjoying at the moment. The argument that the intelligence gathered in Sweden cannot be used to track individuals is hardly comforting, when it is an established fact that intelligence data always have always been for sale or trade to intelligence agencies of other countries.

And now, around the corner looms ACTA. The article linked to below highlights a connection I was not aware of before: That ACTA operates the same way as the Great Chinese firewall. This in connection with the recent Google/China scandal really makes you wonder. What the hell is going on?

Read this –> The Similarity Between ACTA And Chinese Internet Censorship

Fair warning: neither this post or the video attached to it are for the faint of heart. You have been warned kids!

Just like all male members of the Gumucio family I was born with Cataracts (Gråstarr) in my both eyes. This has been fine for most of my life, since its in my case was very mild. The diagnosis i got as a child was that I would not have to get surgery until the age of 40.

And now, the moment is upon me! At the tender age of 35 i find myself seeing really really bad. The deterioration started about a year ago and my recent visit to the eye specialist confirmed it. I have about 50% vision on both eyes, and will be getting surgery sometime probably during the next month.

As a positive thinking person, i cannot help but notice several advantages to my current situation:

The people that you try to avoid, you never have to pretend you don’t see them when you meet them on the street, because you don’t see them. This happens to me all the time, and I’m pretty sure that some people in our apartment buildlng have me pegged as some kind of uptight snob that ignore them. This of course is a half-truth at best.

You make new friends. As you wave like an idiot to complete strangers, trying to avoid  situations like the one described above, you are bound to be waving at people that only have a distant similarity to your personal friends or acquaintances. This also happens to me all the time, three times in fact during just past weekend. You can also factor in that I have an exceptional memory for faces, and also frequently say hello to people I haven’t met since kindergarten. They don’t wave back.  Uptight snobs!

The excerpt above is from my long long list of drafts for this blog, I must have written it before my surgery, the text for which is in another draft as it were. Read on for the full story..

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