The Hallway

Out on a Tuna Boat

2010-10-04T09:33:00.002-03:00

There's a lot of controversy about tuna fishing these days, but there's also some hope for a future in the form of ca catch-and-release sport fishery on Prince Edward Island. A couple of weeks ago I went out on the water as a guest participant for one day of the Canada Tuna Cup tournament and I learned a lot about how tuna fishing works and really gained an admiration for the people who are good at it. Here's what I wrote in an e-mai describing how the day went.

had a fantastic day yesterday out on the water. We got to North Lake just at around sunrise. Not quite a proper fisherman's hour but close enough to feel authentic. All the fishermen had this air about them, you could tell they were more excited to be able to catch tuna again than the structure of the actual tournament. We grabbed a copy of the rule sheet at the very last minute as we were heading out the door of the little restaurant where they serviced us breakfast and handed us these huge home made boxed lunches to eat out on the water.

My dad and I were invited as guests on one of the 6 boats entered into the tournament, along with a guy from the ministry of fisheries. We did our best to help out the three real fishermen with all the stuff that needed to happen on the boat, but tried to stay out of their way at the same time. Once we got out of the harbour the boat's pilot said 'hold on to something!' and engaged the engine and we just blasted off, faster than I had any idea a boat like that could go. I've never been out on a fishing boat before when it wasn't just a quiet tour of a harbour or something so this was totally unexpected but quite a thrill. I didn't even mind the water coming over the bow, over top of teh cabin and down on top of me on the deck, that's how rough the water gets when you're a normal-shaped fishing boat with that much power under the hood.

Our first stop was to fish for bait to catch the tuna with later. That means mackerel. Before I knew what we were doing someone threw a fishing pole into my hands and gave me the 20 second version of a "how to catch fish" lesson. Release the catch on the right here, guide out the line with your left thumb. One second is about a foot of depth. The mackerel are about 30 feet down according to the sonar. When you get to the depth you want, engage the catch, and start jigging the rod up and down to get their attention. If you don't feel one grab on after half a minute try a different depth. When you reel it in bring it up fairly quickly; don't let a seagull grab it off the hook on you, chances are he'll get caught in the line and then we'll have to untangle a pissed-off bird. Grab the fish as you swing it overboard, pull it off the hook upwards, then throw it in the bucket. If it slips out of your hand just slide it over with your foot and we'll throw it in.

I was the first one to catch something, unfortunately it was a too-small herring and we had to throw it back. After that, though, I got the hang of it really quite quickly. The fish are pretty small and the line goes down quite deep, so it's hard to tell at first if it's just the current or the movement of the boat that's causing your rod to pull one way or another, but as soon as you feel a real fish fighting on the other end you know right away. Granted, mackerel travel in schools and are pretty easy to catch, it's still a lot of fun to be good at something right away, and to be helping the rest of the crew get all the bait we need.

After a few minutes of plentiful fishing and one close encounter with a gannet - a crazy enormous sea bird with a frightening-looking long bill and wings that make a swan look diminutive, we pulled our lines up and were on our way again. Now we were off looking for the bluefin. One was watching the radar, looking for some arrangement of waves and lines on the screen that translate to "giant fish on the hunt for food". We sped along, even faster than before it seemed, and with the deck now wet and slippery I was doing a full-time job of trying to stay balanced, while next to me one of the other fishermen was solidly planted by the soide of the boat cutting up some of the bait with what must be a monster of a knife. I consider my 'staying out of the way' skill a pretty valuable one at this point.

That's the most excite we'll have for the next few hours. We had to try three different locations in all. They worked so efficiently you barely knew what was happening until you see the four long rods and heavy lines attached opposite sides of the deck and there's a discussion about how to launch the kite. Apparently the way to keep a live bait near the surface where you want him splashing around and drawing attention to itself is by suspending it from a kite. This also draws it away from the side of the boat so the bluefin isn't right under you when you hook it. It looked surprisingly tricky to launch the kite despite all the wind out on the water. The air blowing off of the cabin would get sucked down and cause a force of wind towards the deck and the water, Despite this they were able to get it launched and out over the side to do its thing, and we wait.

Aside: I used to be indifferent to country music. The XM satellite station that was going the whole while we waited for the mark on the radar that caused us to stop to come back was the distillation of all that is commercial and crass about Nashville country music. Lyrics that enforced fatalism, heros of songs that just had stuff happen to them instead of about _doing things_ was a common theme. It seems that for the target audience of pop country life was something that happened to you, and as bad as it gets that's how things just are. I think I was the only one who had nothing to really do that could help with the fish-finding effort or had calls to make - mobile phone reception when you're halfway to Cape Breton was apparently not all that surprising. So I was left to just sit and listen to this whole new world of music I had ignored before.

We hear over the radio that one of the other boats had a catch. a 750lb. fish, so they're done for the day. That this is now a catch-and-release tournament didn't seem to take away any amount of enthusiasm on the part of the fishermen. Our guys were thrilled that someone else had a catch already. That meant that fish were around and they weren't guarding their location or trying to be secretive at all. So we pulled down the kite, pulled up the lines and headed to one, then another spot to try to come up on a fish. Everyone was in it together and the more successful we all were the better case it will make to build a proper sports fishing industry here on the island.

We had the best mark yet on our last stop and the ones who knew how to tell the difference were keeping up the hopes of those of us who were along for the ride. The little water bottle that we used in lieu of something fancy to mark where the line with the bait was bobbing below the kite was well beyond my ability to see, but as soon as we got a bite the rest of the crew came alive to they knew how to do better than just about anyone else in the world, I'm sure. 'Get those otehr lines up' 'Bring in that kite'. To the pilot 'he's gone under the boat, get us clear!'

At this point I realized something I hadn't even considered before - to get the fish where you want him, when the fish is that big, you turn and move your whole boat. The whole time you have to keep the line from going slack, without jerking it or doing any number of things you might do wrong that I have no idea about that the fishermen knew in their muscle memory. That said, I still had the chance to man the reel for a couple of minutes. Big thick glove on my left hand to keep a huge on the tightness of the line, and massively difficult-to-turn reel to bring him in whenever he gives you any chance at all. Apparently they move through the water with only their tale in motion, which makes their already powerful bodies even more efficient at transforming strength into movement through the water. All I knew was I had to keep this line coming in and it involved more physical hard work in short but controlled bursts than I remember doing in my life. It took a pretty sadly short amount of time before I felt like my arm was going to give out and I passed control to someone else. Getting that reel around was a full-body exercise as you directly pulled against the something so massively more powerful than you, and your only advantage is classical mechanics.

The boat scores points for various achievements while the fish is on the hook. At minimum you have to fight him for fifteen minutes for it to count. You get bonus points for getting it up beside the boat, for getting a picture, and for touching it. You also have to have all of the bits that involve the fish out of water done within 30 seconds or you're disqualified from the tournament. They take the catch-and-release part very seriously and seem to respect the intent behind the rules fully. We didn't get it up out of the water but we managed to claim three points in total, which kept our boat in the running going into the next two days, which I unfortunately won't be participating in.

I'm back

2009-04-27T13:25:00.003-03:00

Okay not that I have really left, but with life as it is I have not really been blogging, but I thought I would interupt Al's long run here. Just for fun!!!
I have many things out there that I would like to comment on. Like this new swine flu, the idea of biofuels, and possibly a nice long rant about service providers that can't take your payment method, and some how make it your fault....It is 2009, get past your self. I am the customer and i am always right.....okay not really, always right, but my issues should not be yours.
But for now i just thought I would reintroduce Binnie.

+1 to Tweetie support

2009-04-26T11:44:00.002-03:00

This is why I love indie Mac developers. I just got this reply to a feature request I sent to atebits, who make Tweetie for Mac:

On 26-Apr-09, at 11:35 AM, atebits support wrote:

Hey Alex We're going to add an option to do just this in a coming version.
:)

~ash

--
atebits support
support@atebits.com
http://www.atebits.com/

-----Original Message-----
From: Alexander O'Neill
Reply-To: Alexander O'Neill
Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2009 07:01:19 -0300
To: featurerequests@atebits.com
Subject: Allow option to hide menu bar icon in Mac Tweetie

Hi,

I think it would be a welcome feature to add a preferences option in
tweetie to hide the menu bar icon. Most Mac users are quite picky
about what software does to their systems, and forcing the menu bar
icon seems out of place on the Mac.

Cheers,

-- Alexander / http://twitter.com/alxp

Tweetie for Mac is just as good as Tweetie for iPhone, which I paid for and am very happy with.

Dear UPEI Library Coffee Shop

2009-03-24T10:11:00.001-03:00

Dear UPEI Library Coffee Shop
Originally uploaded by Alexander O'Neill.

Cream Cheese is not a precious commodity. Be a little more generous
with it, please.

Evergreen Patch Accepted

2009-03-08T01:59:00.003-04:00

I love when this happens.

From: Dan Scott
Subject: Thanks UPEI! Google Book Preview patch integrated into trunk
Date: March 8, 2009 1:55:22 AM AST
To: Evergreen Discussion List
Cc: Alexander O'Neill, Mark Leggott

Hello:

Thanks to Alexander O'Neill and the University of Prince Edward Island
for posting their patch for integrating the Google Book Preview
feature directly into the record details page and making the code
available under the GPL v2.

I just committed a variation of the patch to Evergreen trunk
(http://svn.open-ils.org/trac/ILS/changeset/12465) - it needs a bit of
internationalization work before it's ready for prime-time, but it is
a great feature.

--
Dan Scott
Laurentian University

+1 to Evergreen. I haven't been able to work on Evergreen since changing my focus to Fedora-commons for now, but hope to get back to it when I can. It's a great project and it has absolutely the best-written and best use of JavaScript code I've seen.

God it feels awesome to have your work included into the main repository.

Earbuds after a trip through the dryer.

2009-02-02T01:15:00.002-04:00

Earbuds after a trip through the dryer. RIP.
Originally uploaded by Alexander O'Neill.

Update: Holy Jebus, they actually still work! Even the microphone. Amazing. Buying Apple stock immediately.

More Twitter Confluence

2009-01-31T11:20:00.002-04:00

This was part of my Twitter feed this morning. Funny example of Twitter reflecting events in real time from different perspectives..

kgs Late start to the day. Turned on NPR and guy with squeaky voice was swishing wine in his mouth and spitting it out. Outlaw that sound. 31 minutes ago from web

garyvee u can listen hear!!!!! http://tinyurl.com/b26vsm 35 minutes ago from web

garyvee I am on NPR's @weekendedition in 2 minutes anyone have a link to a website where I can hear it? tune into NPR now!!!!! 40 minutes ago from web

IslandScholar, UPEI's Institutional Repository

2009-01-25T09:26:00.003-04:00

One of the things I appreciate about working in an environment where we use and create open source software is that I have the opportunity to talk about what I do outside of work. Unfortunately I just haven't had the blogging spirit much in general lately, so there are a lot of things I haven't gotten to write about yet.

Fortunately Mark Leggott, our university librarian, who directs all the projects I work on, just posted a great write-up about IslandScholar, which was launched in December. The post is here: Link. Mark outlines exactly what the repository is for and what we used to build it, in particular it is our most polished and customized use of the Islandora front-end to the Fedora repository system, written as a module for Drupal.

Mark's post describes it better than I would, but the gist is that IslandScholar will be a central location to show the research output of the entire UPEI faculty and related bodies, with as many as possible containing links to full-text versions of the published articles. We are using a form of crowd sourcing in that faculty can go to the site and view their own citations, and are able to upload the referenced documents directly to the site, with the rights from their journal publisher shown to them right on the page via SHERPA/RoMEO, and the system will automatically convert their documents to PDF format and ingest them into the repository.

Here's an example record with a full-text document included: Relationship between objective measures of physical activity and weather: a longitudinal study.

I really like the idea that we are helping to make information more readily available to the rest of the world. Getting to not only work on and create open source software, but to be furthering the philosophy of open access to information is quite a thrill as a software developer.

More big news to come, hopefully. But either way I'll try and be more informative about what I am working on on this blog.

http://webcrawler.cs.washington.edu/

2009-01-16T21:48:00.005-04:00

Before webcrawler there really wasn't even a web. You had to basically know an address of a site and then type it in to get there, and to find that address you had to see it on TV, where the announcer would awkwardly enunciate "h t t p, colon, slash slash, double-you double-you double-you...." There was Archie for FTP and Veronica for Gopher (don't worry, kids, there won't be a test.) And of course 80%+ of your time online was spent on USENET anyway, so the web was more of a minor curiousity.

Then along came webcralwer and changed everything.

Which is why it's really incredibly sad that webcrawler is so crammed with ads that it can't even find itself on the frigging internets.

At least they don't force good old Spidey into appearing on this abomination of a zombie web search engine.

Rest in peace, little guy.

More history here.

Bash has C-like for loops?!

2009-01-12T11:32:00.006-04:00

My life just got a lot easier finding this out.

We have an OCR package and 65 directories of tiffs we want to extract the text of, and we want to run a few jobs in parallel to get the work done faster and take advantage of all this multi-core business, but obviously we don't want to run all 65 processes at once, just 5 or so.

The poor bastard who runs our scanners had a script where he had just copied and pasted the command line over and over with the different directory names.

Here's a script that does the same thing in a nested 'for' loop.


#!/bin/bash
LIMIT=65

for ((i=1; i <= LIMIT ; i = i + 5))  # Double parentheses, and "LIMIT" with no "$".
do
  for ((j=0; j < 5; j++))
  do
    imageList=" "
    for image in islmagfull/$[i + j]/*; do
      # Get all the files in the directory and build the image list to pass to the command line.
      imageList="$imageList -if $image"
    done

    ./CLI $imageList -f PDF -pem ImageOnText -pfpf Automatic -pfq 85 -pfpr 200 -of "/usr/local/fedora/abbyy/${image%.*}.pdf" &  # Ampersand means run the process in the background.
  done
  wait   # 'wait' is awesome, it just pauses until all child processes are done.  I love Unix.
done   # A construct borrowed from 'ksh93'.

I should start a wiki to store code snipits, just using the blog as a scratch pad for now.

1x09: The Battle

2009-01-11T23:00:00.007-04:00

I still love how the old Ferengi ships looked like angry cartoon characters with gritted teeth and red eyes.

In the future they don't get headaches, according to Dr. Crusher.

And here we present the debut of Wesley's stupid outfit. Mostly I just feel sorry for Wil Wheaton , who is an awesome blogger and honestly came out of this as well as anyone could have.

This is still where they were trying to position the Ferengi as the series erstwhile villains, before audiences overwhelmingly found them hilarious.

Ahh, this is the episode where they mention the "Picard manoeuvre". The Adama Manoeuvre, where he took the Galactica and brought it into the atmosphere to bomb the crap out of a planet, is a total rip-off of that.

The best part about this shot is that they had computers with colour displays in 1989 when the show was made, but chose to go back to green-on-black for something to look "computer-y".

"Data, reading picard's log file from the USS Stargazer: "'we are forced to abandon our starship, may she find our way without us.' Apparently she did, sir. So Data can't figure out that "do" and "not" can be contracted to "don't" but he can make jokes anthropomorphizing starthips.

"As you humans say 'I'm all ears'." LOLOLOLOL.

Apparently the Ferengi have the power to project thoughts into Picard's mind. Somehow they forgot how to do this in their transition to comic relief. Quark could have used that power to fuck with Odo in supremely awesome ways.

The ending to this episode: Picarad shoots the mind control device with a phaser. Yep.

The good:

The Picard manoeuvre is frigging awesome.
Yarr didn't say very much
Worf didn't say very much
Troi didn't say very much

The bad:

The Ferengi still trying to be the villains
The ending was basically "SNAP OUT OF IT, CAPTAIN". *sigh*

The ugly:

Wesley's gay pride stripes
Yarr's haircut. This will be applicable for all episodes with her in it.
Riker without a beard still bothers me. WRONG WRONG WRONG.

1x08: Justice

2009-01-06T23:13:00.011-04:00

Justice. Usually I have a pretty good recollection of what an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation is about from the season it's in and the episode name, but this one is eluding me right now. The nitro is that they have stumbled on yet another previously unknown Class M planet while out ferrying passengers about and getting milk from the store. Won't the inhabitants of this planet be thrilled to hear they've been under Federation jurisdiction all this time and didn't even know it.

The director told Gates McFadden to cross her arms to contrast with Troi's soft demeanor.

There are two things wrong with this frame:

1. They forgot to turn on the fake computer wall panels, so they just look like closets.
2. Wesley Crusher not being eaten by wolves.

Geordi: "They make love at the drop of a hat." Yarr: "Any hat." These people on this planet sound very pleasant and therefore annoying. Please please please let this episode be about the crystaline entity coming to suck their planet dry. *fingers crossed*

Oh shit they're sending Wesley down to the surface first. This is that one where he almost gets the death penalty but doesn't. Worst tease of an episode ever. I almost want to just stop watching now.

Ahh the planet full of attractive Aryans. This was a good week for perpetual Hollywood extras. At least Worf knows they must be evil. Yes we get that Riker is supposed to be a horn dog, the 'we need to establish character' moments the writers are throwing in are getting old.

They need to work this guy into the plot line where Yarr has a secret half-Romulan daughter a few seasons from now. He can be the godmother and hairstyle moral support.

Is there a website that just collects pictures of Wesley looking baffled? I smell a meme.

He only gets a hug from the alien whore, poor Wesley.

Prime directive question: We are supposed to believe these people developed warp drive? Really?

I'm pretty sure they kept this episode from being shown in syndication out of sheer embarrassment.

Why is Data shaking his head while not looking at anyone in particular? He can display subtle physical signs of confusion but can't get that "do not" can be shortened to "don't"?

This soap bubble is capable of rocking the entire ship. Once again: Inside federation space, and no one noticed before, or thougth of mentioning it afterwards. I love these old episodes for this reason.

I think it's great that even Worf is offended by the idea of capital punishment. Oh Star Trek, you secret socialist fifth column, keep it up.

Ugh, the bubble thing is "God" for the aryan rule freaks. There's some message about human exceptionalism in here but I'm not sure what it is exactly.

Aaaannnd the climax to this episode is Riker saying "When has justice ever been as simple as a rule book?". He says that, they get transported off the evil planet of love and peace, and all is well. Endings were always the worst part of this series.

Neat pattern

2009-01-05T12:50:00.007-04:00

Wasn't expecting to see any sort of pattern when testing range operations in Python, this is super cool:

>>> sum(num * num
for num in xrange(1, 10))
285
>>> sum(num * num
for num in xrange(1, 100))
328350
>>> sum(num * num
for num in xrange(1, 1000))
332833500
>>> sum(num * num
for num in xrange(1, 10000))
333283335000L
>>> sum(num * num
for num in xrange(1, 100000))
333328333350000L
>>> sum(num * num
for num in xrange(1, 1000000))
333332833333500000L
>>> sum(num * num
for num in xrange(1, 10000000))
333333283333335000000L

After that it started to take a long time to compute so I gave up.

The grilled cheese secret

2009-01-03T11:22:00.002-04:00

This seems to blow people's minds when I tell them so maybe it's not as well-known as I would have guessed. Anyway, for the perfect grilled cheese sandwich, don't put the sandwich together first and then throw it on the frying pan.

Instead, let the pan get nice and hot, throw in a healthy portion of butter and when that melts, lay two pieces of bread on to the hot frying pan and let them get toasty for half a minute. Then turn slice one over, put the slices of cheese (sharp cheddar, for god's sake) onto the now hot and buttery bread. Then quickly left the other piece and put the hot side down on top of the cheese.

This lets your cheese fully melt without having to overcook the outside of the sandwich, and your bread is evenly toasted on both sides.

Outliers

2008-12-22T09:36:00.005-04:00

Just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's newest book, Outliers, and I was totally impressed with it. I haven't read Tipping Point yet but I did enjoy Blink, so I was looking forward to this one, especially after seeing the subject matter was ironically about successful individuals and the book came out at the time when so many American success stories are being exposed as frauds.

His thesis is that innate ability is not enough to get you to success, however you define it, which means that telling a child how smart he or she is constantly as a kid will actually do more to harm their future character and chances of success than not telling them at all what their real intelligence level is. Instead he cites example after example of people we all know of as huge successes, like Bill Gates and Bill Joy and the Beatles, and dig deeper into their background to find a crucial combination of unbelievable hard work - Gates and Joy would spend nearly all their time outside of class working on computer software, and the Beatles spend a few years playing for 6+ hours a night in Germany before they ever hit it big, getting more time playing shows together than most bands ever get in their entire careers -- and one more thing: luck. Joy and Gates, for all their hard work, didn't work anywhere near the orders of magnitude harder than a lot of young programmers to follow them to justify their success. Rather, they happened to be probably the very first people in the entire world who got to program interactively on a time sharing computer system, the first to come along after punch cards, and not have to pay for their time or compete with other members of a computer centre for precious little hours on the machine. So they had a massive head-start over their would-be peers, and were helped every step of teh way by fortuitous events. This isn't a bad thing, it has to happen that someone is the first to come along and do the pioneering work when a new field opens up, or a new genre of music in the case of the Beatles.

But the thesis of the book is that these are not extra-ordinary people who would have risen from any background to become the people they were just by their nature. That is the way the American individualist hero myth would tell the story. Instead, whenever you dig in and really see the breaks and good timing of birth and circumstances that allowed these people to have their hard work be meaningful hard work, that is what creates these great success stories. The last part of the book explains how other societies have ingrained meaningful work into their cultural psyche stemming from farming methods, and how cultural background can and should be actively studied and we should see what good and bad effects it has on one's ability to succeed.

The last section of the main text is yet another go at trying to address what's wrong with the education system in America, and I don't really buy his proscription that students should be put into super-intensive year-round schooling to keep them from forgetting anything they have learned. Perhaps a glance toward successful education systems in Europe would be a better place to look than radically extending the time a child must spend in school and doing homework.

Leaving aside criticisms of rote learning in Asian education, Gladwell is only talking specifically about math scores, and in that area Asian students are measurable, undeniably better.

I don't want the fact that Asian education is also far from perfect to obscure the fact that we can learn a lot from other cultures' approach to knowledge, though. My favourite bit from the book was something that reminded me of my own experience studying math, when he described a video of a woman figuring out using a graphing program that it is simply impossible to graph a straight vertical line.. that it is undefined. It took her a long time, 22 minutes, but eventually the idea came to her and she will have an understanding of how graphing, and division by zero, works than she ever could have gotten in the usual time teachers allow students to struggle with a problem. For me in University I had a very difficult time in the classroom with some concepts, so I had to take them home and I ended up graphing every single problem assigned to me, whether it was called for or not, out on paper, sometimes doing slight variants as well. In the end it took me a lot longer to do my math homework, but I could eventually just look at an equation and instinctively tell how it should look if it was graphed out.

That's the main key to success that Gladwell says is within all our grasps, if we just learn to work and work until we actually come to a meaningful step in understanding. Probably why I love tackling a difficult programming problem, even if I know I won't have the accident of timing of a Bill Gates.

Here's a CBC interview with Gladwell about the book, let him tell it better than I can: Link.

"Where No One Has Gone Before"

2008-12-16T00:04:00.007-04:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_No_One_Has_Gone_Before

Finally getting back to watching old Star Trek TNG episodes, this is the one with the Traveller in it. Awesome. I actually don't remember seeing this one more than one or two times on TV, so it always had a weirdly etherial quality to it.

Oh god Wesley Crusher is not 5 words in and I am already annoyed.

Love the shots of the old-school computer graphics and how they integrated simple graphics on top of lights to make it look complicaed. Amazingly it still stands up and doesn't look out of place. Very nice job.

Having Geordi as a lowly pilot and some random beardo as the chief engineer is all kinds of wrong. The actor is phoning it in pretty hard, too. I wonder if he knew his gig wasn't going to last.

Best effects of the early TNG run, for sure. Though the story behind the Traveller still doesn't make any sense, at least we get eye candy. I wonder what ever happened to the matt painting.

Haha, oh Data, you still haven't learned not to quote time spans to the millisecond. One of the more charming old tropes.

Silly Wesley quote: "you mean space and time and thought aren't as what they appear to be?" This Wesley as universe-travelling wunderkind thing could really have gotten out of hand had they persued this Traveller storyline any further.

Had to throw in some video of the sweet "let's pretend we're 2001: A Space Odyssey" moment for a while. I do so love the original-series-ish tension-building music.

The mentions of "rape gangs" on Tasha Yarr's home colony are totally out-of-place attempts at grittiness. Feels very tacky.

The crazy hallucinations the whole crew is experiencing are pretty awesome, mostly for the bad French-Russian accent from Picard's mother offering him tea and teasing him about the nature of space.

*sigh* the climax of this episode is for everyone on the ship to think happy thoughts so the Traveller can get the energy to bring them home. Endings were always the worst part of this series, this one is even worse than "reverse the shield phase arrays" bullshit, but they didn't really have much more room to do much else.

Oh Christ, this is where Wesley gets promoted to Ensign and gets that goofy rainbow stripey uniform. Great episode, horrible consequences.

Lucene Search Engine Fail

2008-12-15T09:06:00.001-04:00

Lucene Search Engine Fail
Originally uploaded by Alexander O'Neill.

Lucene is Apache's search engine software project. You'd think they'd
trust it to search its own site.

Always check for off-by-one errors

2008-12-06T15:58:00.003-04:00

I just ran into a pretty basic error using a Drupal module, one that lets you post repeating events. Of course I just saw taht there was a release update and just threw it on the CHANCES Family Centre site I was working on without re-testing it. It wasn't until one of the site administrators tried to create a weekly repeating event and fortunately went to check the results that she saw there was a problem -- subsequent instances of a new event were appearing one day early in the week. This is a classic off-by-one error that every programmer on earth has made more than once in their time. ("Wait, should that less than check be a less than or equal to?")

Unfortunately when something strange happens many users think that it's a problem with something thy did and they just don't understand this big complex piece of software and they never will get the hang of it and blah blah blah. And of course no user of a site should be expected to go to a module's drupal.org page and look at the open issues to see if anyone else is having the problem. My take-home from this is to be very wary of software module updates, and to not just trust something because it is an official release of a module.

Fortunately I have a good relationship with this particular client and was happy to put in a fix for them without too much trouble, instead of them just trying to muddle through posting events one day off intentionally, which is what users of commercial software that has a bug in it would have to do.

The classic double-edged sword of open source software development, a developer might be working on a bit of code to suit his own needs, and just not do enough diligent checks that he hasn't broken some other feature unintentionally. Drupal is finally getting into active automated testing, but this won't help you if you are using a module that isn't part of the mainstream set of actively-developed modules. Maybe all this is telling me to take up the mantle of contributing in more active and complete ways to keep the modules I want to use alive.

The slow hard but rewarding lesson of Open Source.

Rogers DST Fail

2008-10-27T19:58:00.001-03:00

Rogers DST Fail
Originally uploaded by Alexander O'Neill.

Distraction Log

2008-10-25T01:12:00.002-03:00

Things I've been looking at while trying to get through watching one damn movie on my computer:

The Wikipedia page for the movie Orgasmo
The Wikipedia page for the movie Orgazmo. (Oh right.)
The FAQ for eatbabies.com.
Trying to find an etymological link between 'capricious' and 'goat'.
That dumb bitch who cut a backwards 'B' into her face and tried to blame Barack Obama supporters.
The Anti-phishing Phil game.
Watching this vid exposing paid volunteers of the McCain campaign acting classy as ever.
American? Liberal? Want to move to Canada? Check out the E.L.I.T.E. plan.

Someone threw that ball really hard

2008-10-11T15:46:00.001-03:00

Someone threw that ball really hard
Originally uploaded by Alexander O'Neill.

now

Another Evergreen update: Google Book Search previews

2008-10-02T12:18:00.003-03:00

Just thought I'd note my latest addition to Evergreen, Google Book Search previews integration.

The page about the update is here: Link.

And you can see them in action at UPEI's library site, a couple of examples here and here.

Using Google's APIs is always fun since they are generally pretty easy to implement and their example code is nice and clean.

Code release: Evergreen Customizeable Bib Records

2008-09-29T19:55:00.003-03:00

This won't mean much to most of the people who read this, but I just thought I'd point to a bit of code I've released as Free Software, it is a modification to the Evergreen library information system that UPEI runs. This code lets an Evergreen administrator easily customize what information about a book gets displayed when looking at an item in the catalog.

The project page is here: Link.

I really love the fact that I'm being paid to work on open source software as my day job. It's a feeling that your work is meaningful beyond making a client more money while toiling away in silence under an NDA.

I'm surprised how long it's taken for libraries to get onto the open source bandwagon, but UPEI is one of the ones at the very front of the pack, which is making it a very exciting place to work as a software developer.

Memos: September ember ember

2008-09-26T05:19:00.002-03:00

A few things I've been up to lately..

A few friends and I went to the Dayboat restaurant on Wednesday and all decided to go for the tasting menu. We were told by the chef before-hand to skip lunch and wear loose pants. I'll say after just the second course, which was goat cheese stuffed into little baby tomatoes, I was sure it was going to be in my top meals I've had my whole life. The wine we had recommended was Teddy Hall chenin blanc 2007. Next, they brought some teasingly delicate shrimp and scallops in a light batter and garnish that complemented it just about perfectly. There was also a beet salad that, just like most of the rest of the ingredients, apparently all were grown within about 20 minutes of the restaurant. The main course was a pork dish made au torchon, not sure what that means but it must have something to do with it being the softest, tenderest cut of pork that is physically possible to make. I'll say pretty confidently that the Dayboat is now the best restaurant on the island, ,hands down. Last year I never checked it out mostly because the menu, while all the local ingredients sounded amazing, just didn't have any dishes that I could get excited about. This year they've kept the focus on local food but the new chef has jazzed up the dishes considerably.

The funniest part was while we were all enjoying the great food we kept coming back to talking about comfort food we all liked as kids and still do, like lipton noodles and which kind of no-name chocolate chip cookies were the best to the utter pointlessness of 'golden oreos'. Perhaps it was the pleasure in eating such good food that brought back genuinely pleasant memories of food taht wasn't fancy but still had pleasing qualities to it.
My thought about the US financial crisis is that the one thing Republicans know how to do well, and that helps them win elections, is to destroy hope. And they're shooting the moon on this one. The wave of Obama's enthusiastic supporters must have been so scary that nothing short of destroying the entire economy was enough to put a stop to it.
I just re-read Infinite Jest. Sad that it took the tragic occasion of David Foster Wallace's suicide to get me to do it but I am glad I did. The themes of sadness and human struggle in the face of addictoin and bleak societal cynicism leave me shaking my head but feeling hopeful at the same time. The quest for genuine experience and expression, he seems to be saying, is what leads people to ever more harmful behaviour patterns. There's a 30-some-odd page sequence near the beginning of the book where a character overthinks himself into a state of paralysis while waiting for his pot dealer to show up that grabs you by the gut and forces you to experience the powerlessness of addictoin and the mental acrobatics we try to do to deny it.

I want to some day either find or perhaps take some time and write a comparison of DFW's depiction of Americans and that of Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut's insitence on small words and straightforward sentences would seem to be anathema to DFW's embracing of esoteric technical terms, unapologetic use of precise jargon when talking about the progression of a tennis match or how a radio transmission works, but I had the same feeling when reading the two that this was the truly most expressive and full-bodied expression I had ever read. I want to find waht it was in both of them taht triggered my empathetic reaction in that wawy.
I just got some paintings I ordered from art.com back from the framer today, I'm very pleased with them, The Studio on Queen St. Sure I could have crazy glued and ebay'd my way to framing them myself but these are going to be on my wall for years so I think having an expert do the framing is probably the best way to go for me.
I spent the last couple of days adopting some pretty heavy JavaScript code to work on IE 6. And, while I still fully embrace the new movement to just plain drop support for the ancient browser in favour of more standards-compliant browsers, I am still glad I did it as it at least forced me to go over the code again in the same way a rejected article should proof-read every sentence of his work before re-submitting it. So the work is better in the end, even though my cruel master of an editor is the browser world's senile, stuck-in-his-ways boss who makes you write for an audience of reality-TV enthusiasts.
Heroes season 3 premier verdict: I'm still gonna watch, but the writers better break out of the arc they seem to be heading in and not repeat the same inter-character and internal struggles of the first season's main characters. I hope they still go ahead with the prequel series that they were talking about towards the end of the first season. Sylar is still my favourite character. "Eat your brain? Claire! That's disgusting!" : best one liner of the whole series so far.

Funny Politicians on Twitter Moment

2008-09-17T23:46:00.007-03:00

This is a copy and paste from my twitter stream:

ElizabethMay is going home 15 minutes ago from web

jessamyn Richard Stallman's auto-reply mesage is totally strange. Why am I surprised? 24 minutes ago from NatsuLion

ElizabethMay is watching the news. 27 minutes ago from web

jacklayton the interview with Peter Mansbridge on CBC TV http://tinyurl.com/3mym2v 39 minutes ago from web

jacklayton http://tinyurl.com/3mym2v 41 minutes ago from web

I'm just imagining Elizabeth watching the news, seeing Layton on there, and getting mad and going home. Sorry, that's what happens when you take a gamble and throw all your eggs into your own riding, people forget about you nationally. I mostly just posted this because of the funny synchronisity, though.

As for the two of them, I get the impression that Jack Layton seems to grasp the potential for Twitter in keeping people interested in his campaign, I wouldn't have known about him appearing on CBC without it, for example. On the other hand he has fallen off of using it just to twitter about random thoughts like regular people use and love Twitter for. If I get the impression that they're just getting some intern to post their updates I'm going to sour on a candidate pretty damn quick.

Elizabeth, on the other hand, just seems like she is using it because someone in her circle told her it's what the kids are into these days, but maybe just hasn't crossed that line you need to to really 'get' it. There is a bit of an art to being engaging with your little updates, to the point where I would want to still follow you even after an election.

The most important thing that they are not doing is to @reply to people when they ask them questions. The mini-conversations on Twitter are what make it a social networking site and not just a glorified .plan file. (Bonus points if you know what that is. Triple bonus points if you used to have one. Mine just said "You have new Mail.")

Oh, I just discovered http://electopinion.ca/ , I am in instant love. How do I get on this train?

Testing Genius

2008-09-09T18:20:00.003-03:00

Starting point: Sleater-Kinney - The Fox

Rilo Kiley? Really? *shrug*. It still ended up being a playlist I could get behind, though, but then again all my music is good to begin with. Enjoying the rest of iTunes 8 so far. New Apple Stuff days are so much better when there's software we can all download involved.

DrupalSN joins Russia in recognizing Abkhazian independence

2008-08-27T18:53:00.007-03:00

I just signed up for an account at the new site DrupalSN.com, a Drupal-based social networking site for Drupal developers, and I was pretty impressed to see how quickly the site had moved to recognize the independence of that bit of dirt between Russia and Georgia named Abkhazia.

My trivia-nerd self is very interested in the fact that if more bodies do recognize Abkhazia that it will gain the fame of being alphabetically the first country in every list. Expect inflated numbers of internet users from there thanks to me picking it when signing up for sites I don't want to have my personal info. I scrolled down and saw they have South Ossetia, too. I should create an account and pretend to be from Georgia and do some trolling, on such a brand new site it would surely get some attention.

As for the site itself, it looks like it has some potential for showing off some of the social features of Drupal, hopefully they will share their tips on making it look nice and smooth and not hacked together like a lot of drupal sites seem to be, with way too many modules and rough edges around the themes. Maybe they could build a module for partial matching of user names that's smoother than drupal's current implementation that only lets you search by username and not real name.

I've been doing a lot of work in Drupal lately both on my own and for my new job, so I'll be keeping pretty close tabs on the latest developments in the Drupal world, crossing my fingers that some of the more annoying parts of it get ironed out.

Adopted coffee mug

2008-08-26T10:05:00.001-03:00

Adopted coffee mug
Originally uploaded by Alejandro the Great.

I adopted this orphan coffee mug when I saw it in the cupboard in the library staff room. Because first impressions are what count, you know.

Purdy and Acorn

2008-08-13T06:07:00.005-03:00

Two poets I absolutely adore are Al Purdy and Milton Acorn. Purdy I love for his nonchalant way of sneaking gorgeous turns of phrase in where the words themselves are as ordinary as you can imagine. And Acorn for his power of emotion and ability to draw you into his heart.

My father tells me that when I was very young he and Milton Acorn would go for walks with me walking along in between each, holding one hand each while they smoked cigars far above me and talked. Maybe Acorn's views about the complexity of ravens' and crows' societies have stuck with me since I find them endlessly fascinating now.

Anyway, I came across this in my general surfing tonight and had to re-post it so so you could enjoy it too. It's a recounting by Al Purdy of the arguments he and Milton would have.

"When Purdy describes how he and Acorn argued over everything, for example, you simply know it's the truth. Besides, I know these guys and trust me, knowing Al and knowing Milton, you can trust it's pretty much the absolutely accurate truth. For one thing, Milt'd argue with a fencepost. For another, Al would probably take the side of the post, if only to get Milt going . . . BUT, that's not what makes it a great poem, no. You tell me why it's a great poem."

. . . For two months we quarrelled over socialism poetry how to boil water
doing the dishes carpentry Russian steel production figures and whether
you could believe them and whether Toronto Leafs would take it all
that year and maybe hockey was rather like a good jazz combo
never knowing what came next . . .
and working with saw and hammer at the house all winter afternoon
disagreeing about how to pound nails
arguing vehemently over how to make good coffee
Marcus Aurelius Spartacus Plato and François Villon
And it used to frustrate him terribly
that even when I was wrong he couldn't prove it
and when I agreed with him he was always suspicious
and thought he must be wrong because I said he was right . . .
we argued about white being white (prove it dammit) & cockroaches
bedbugs in Montreal separatism Nietzsche
Iroquois horsebreakers on the prairie
death of the individual and the ultimate destiny of man
and one night we quarrelled over how to cook eggs
In the morning driving to town we hardly spoke
and water poured downhill outside all day for it was spring
when were we gone with frogs mentioning lyrically
Russian steel production figures on Roblin Lake which were almost nil
I left him hitch-hiking on #2 Highway to Montreal
and I guess I was wrong about those eggs . . .
("House Guest," Poems for All the Annettes, 1962)

I just ordered Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy from Amazon. I even did the shamelessly adult thing of ordering it as a hardcover just to have something nice on my shelf to hold and pick up again and again later. I should thank this rotten cat outside that won't stop wailing for waking me up, but he doesn't get credit for putting me in the mood for poetry. Lord knows how that happened.

Memos: Too Short for Twitter Edition

2008-08-02T20:50:00.002-03:00

So yeah, I guess Twitter really has killed me for blogging. Why write 3 paragraphs when you can express it all in 140 characters?

Oh well, here's a few updates for those who haven't been following my every mangled T9-phone-text updates..

I start my new job on Monday. I'm working at the UPEI library and I'm pretty excited. For teh record I never really disliked working where I was but not having a pager tying me to home will be nice. (Yeah I don't leave the house much anyway but it will be nice to not have to think 2 weeks ahead before committing to something.)
I saw The 9 Lives of L. M. Montgomery again on Thursday night. It was much smoother this time, naturally since the cast has gotten used to their parts and their lines. Also the writers made a few cuts to the second half which were definitely helpful in keeping it moving along. There was also a near sold-out crowd this far along in the season which made me really happy to see them and the theatre doing well.

There's a scene that is kind of awkward but I don't know how to improve on it. Maud's husband Ewan suffered from what we now know would have been schitzophrenia, but back then, since he was a preacher and kept being tormented by visions of his own damnation and hellfire, they called it "religious melancholia". This is a term I hadn't heard before and it's a very awkward thing to depict in a modern play, but I guess mental-illness-borne delusions are goofy enough before you examine them a century later.
I just got back from seeing Young People F***ing at City Cinema. Great film, it's only playing until tomorrow but you should try and find it if you can. It's the only movie I've seen in ages that got sex and relationships 'right', i.e., most of the time they're awkward and ill-conceived and no one is saying what they really mean until they're caught off-guard. Most romance movies make me wince because this thing they depict is completely outside of my own experience and just rings hollow, or worse as an unattainable ideal.

This movie had me laughing the whole way through but it was me laughing with the characters, even when they're being unfair and mean to each other, because I've been in a fair few of the same situations and it just felt real to me.
I'm hosting trivia at Churchill Arms on Tuesday. Haven't done it in a while so it should be pretty fun. Gotta get my ass in gear to think of more questions, though.. Maybe that's why I'm actually blogging, to procrastinate from that. OK, back to it.

I'll try and write more regularly here if I can.

Dear Discovery Channel,

2008-07-19T12:54:00.001-03:00

You could have made a perfectly interesting documentary about the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald without needing to include the "UFO Theory." Everything wrong with your programming is summed up in this one decision.

This post was too long for Twitter. I'm losing my 140 character mojo.

The Nine Lives of L. M. Montgomery

2008-06-21T17:16:00.003-03:00

I was very lucky to get a chance to go out and see this new play at the Kings Playhouse theatre in Georgetown last night. And given that I know a good amount about all of the pieces that came together to make this whole thing a success I can say that this whole event was really quite extraordinary.

The official website for the show is a good intro to what it's all about at adammichaeljames.com.

There has been a lot of work done to the Kings Playhouse to upgrade the lighting and other facilities specifically for the play, and just in time for the theatre to host the Vinyl Cafe tonight and tomorrow night. Overnight PEI goes from having just Charlottetown, Summerside and Victoria for theatre locations to having four now that Georgetown has come up so nicely.

I have only a second-hand knowledge of L. M. Montgomery's journals from my mother who has read them through when they were first published widely, so I think I come to seeing the play about the author and her imagination from a fairly neutral position. I got through Anne of Green Gables, didn't really find it too interesting, but I did really like The Story Girl and the Golden Road so I am also not one of those islanders who instinctively hate everything associated with Anne, either. This play creates a very vivid picture of the story of a talented but under-appreciated young girl who writes poetry and dreams of being published in a magazine, though her struggles with her extended family and working jobs as a teacher and newspaper writer where she inevitably puts in more work than she should because everyone around her rushes to take advantage of her talents and generosity, through her later life with similar hardships as a preacher's wife and author of bestsellers who tries hard to find a balance between her light-hearted characters and her own desire to put her own darker thoughts into writing.

While her books were aimed at children, the story of her life is a complex and interesting story, with characters defined more by weakness and struggle than by good or evil natures. The play does a very good job of highlighting the lawsuits and fights with her publisher as important contributing events to Maud's mental state without turning them into plot points or easy sources of suspense.

The appearances of her fictional characters having conversations with her, arguing about how they are to grow and develop or admonishing her for putting little bits of her own darker thoughts about life into her characters is done very well, and isn't at all gimmicky (well, there's a clever use of lighting used on Anne's hair but that was just a fun little surprise.)And I caught a few familiar lines from her writing worked in as seamless bits of dialog, and if I caught a couple surely there were many more.

Another thing that I noticed was the silent skill of the choreographer, there were at times quite a few people moving around on the small stage and there wasn't a single clumsy moment. It could certainly grow to fill a larger stage area, but they make great use of what they have.

I will confess that I will not go out of my way to watch a musical if I can avoid it. But as musicals go, the songs in this one were excellent. The style of music varied and kept up with the time period where the story was happening, and showed the cast's ability to vary their own singing to fit the styles and the different moods in each scene. The sound could have been better in the theatre, a few more mics placed around the stage and better control over music vs. vocal sound levels would be good, but they'll take care of that pretty quickly I'm sure. You can here some of the songs on the play's site here. Go take a listen.

Overall it was a great testament to what can get done if everyone involved in a project has the vision and drive to see it through, even when they walk into a dusty old theatre that no one expected could put on something so innovative and interesting.

I liked Ang Lee's Hulk

2008-06-18T08:44:00.003-03:00

There, I said it. I am a fan of the solitary, dark and booding Hulk, though, and the story of the Hulk is supposed to be a tragic one. I haven't seen the new film yet but it looks like popcorn fare to me.

The Hulk Dogs thing was stupid but it was something the studio forced on Ang Lee. And computer graphics really didn't serve the movie well at all. But there's no way it deserves the reputation it has. I understand Marvel's desire to have full control over film production now, but it's because they've found a successful formula and they're going to stick to it feverishly from now on. Lee's interpretation of the Hulk remained truer to the spirit of the original story if not the fanboy-pleasing specifics in the most important facet: the Hulk isn't a superhero, he's a force of nature.

Here's an article at Slate that talks about the same thing: Link.

PEI on Everything^2

2008-06-12T22:02:00.002-03:00

I really liked this part of the Everything^2 node for PEI:

Many (but not all) inhabitants of Prince Edward Island suffer from a strange phenomenon I call "delusional island antagonism syndrome" or DIAS for short.

Visitors to P.E.I. (or "the Island") generally fall in love with the rolling green hills, the rich red clay, the hot white beaches, and the picturesque cityscape. Those who were born and raised on the Island, though, tend to either overlook this magical scenery, or view it as tied to the oppressive and ignorant agrarian society they hate. These sufferers of DIAS consider PEI a prison to escape, not someplace to which to move.

These poor souls often operate under the (false) belief that big cities have higher proportions of cool people. This just isn't the case. Big cities do have more cool people, but only because they have more people, more people of every sort – and therefore more ignorant, rude, stupid people as well. I've met lots of cool people that were raised in weird back-corners of a rural community or even a small city; I've also met scores and scores of incredibly uncool people who were raised in the big city.

To be sure, there are some places on P.E.I. I would never want to live. There are some places here where I would never want to raise children. And I've already acclimated myself to the need to move away, to a big city, in order to go to graduate school, and it is unlikely I'll ever live on P.E.I. after that. But P.E.I. is still one of the best places in the universe to live.

I love Everything^2, it's sort of the tongue-in-cheek Wikipedia where trivia and shit-talk are encouraged as long as you can write half-way decently. I should remember to check it more.

I remember that

2008-06-07T09:28:00.004-03:00

I was talking to g. yesterday and the topic of old jobs came up, at which point I did a little google image search for a company I used to work for that sadly seems to have disappeared. But one that that did remain was an image from a tool I built while I was there on a co-op term:

At one point I used it to index yahoo.com to 2 levels down and it produced a huge graph, but one that was actually pretty easy to navigate and understand. This was back when yahoo was mostly a web directory with categories, and everything fit neatly together. For example, there was a box that said "countries" and inside it when you expanded it were sub-nodes that contained each different country listed in the directory. Imagine representing that in two dimensions.

Looks like the UNB prof who started the company went on to write a book, Information Visualization, Second Edition: Perception for Design (Interactive Technologies) Amazon.com has an excerpt as well. Very cool.

How to be Comfortable?

2008-06-06T01:09:00.003-03:00

I'm putting my answer to this Ask.MetaFilter question here so I'll remember to try and keep observing it myself... Here's the question:

How do you learn to feel comfortable with yourself?

(Anonymous because of family on Mefi.)

I'm never really comfortable. I always feel like an outsider, or that I'm doing something wrong... I can just never relax because of all this.

I have low self-esteem, it's true. I also just tend to assume I've screwed up somehow and work from there. It drives some of my friends batty, but it kinda works. It keeps things steady.

Part of all of this not trusting myself is that I assume that I have to keep myself restrained. Can't let myself go, or I'll start acting on all my other problems--start confusing sex with love, start acting out, start doing all these things. Like if I let myself go, my little box of a life will just crumble and everyone will see how fucked up I am. This, plus my natural introversion, results in a lot of automatic repression, which means a lot of things just... bubbling over suddenly. I've gotten better at not talking about my feelings too much, though... which is probably part and parcel with the problem of not feeling comfortable, but it keeps me from causing unnecessary problems for anyone else.

Oddly enough, all of this came to a head in a club. I couldn't make myself dance. I was tipsy, even,which helps, but I felt so horrifically uncomfortable... I just couldn't relax. I physically couldn't. I couldn't make myself feel comfortable. Friends and acquaintances were trying to get me up and dancing, but that only made me feel worse, like I was screwing up their night slightly just by being there.

It's not that I was stressed about work or anything... I have all the free time in the world and still feel like this.

One restriction: I have no money to spend on the favorite AskMe answers of improv classes, or therapy, so those don't really work as solutions.

I know this is all kind of vague, but it's the best description I can offer. Thanks in advance.

And my reply:

I think a lot of the answers seem to just be pulling out the standard answers to "help me not feel unhappy" but your situation is a little more specific than that and it's one I can identify with.

Something I realized was that part of the reason I expected others to be so judgmental of me was that I was silently doing the same thing to a lot of the people around me. I am not saying you are or you aren't projecting in this way, but perhaps it would be easier to learn to be accepting of yourself by practicing on other people first. Little things like paying no mind at all if my carpool mate starts to hum a little too loudly to a song on the radio, and being more patient when a family member calls to see how I'm doing and just asks the same usual questions that I had been getting tired of. That's not to say let people walk over you, but just realize that as their flaws and shortcomings do you no harm, in the same way the way you act isn't causing anyone else any real damage either, to the point that they probably aren't noticing it while you are worried sick about their perceptions.

Of course the opposite of judging others too quickly, putting them on a pedestal, won't help you either. If someone makes you feel nervous or inadequate.. well, one time this really gorgeous girl who had come up to me at the bar and wanted to talk to me was causing me to stammer a little, and I just on a whim decided to say "OK, I'm going to admit right now that I'm finding you a little intimidating". She thought that was very funny but it made her relax herself and the conversation after that was completely fluid and easy. So honesty sometimes is the easiest solution.
posted by Space Coyote at 12:55 AM on June 6 [+] [!]

Bad Keynot, Bad

2008-06-03T12:24:00.005-03:00

I confess that I love iWork '08's Keynote so much that I will often take work home with me so I can use it instead of PowerPoint to prepare presentations. However it still isn't 100% at importing and then re-exporting PowerPoint files, and will sometimes mangle things in weird ways, like putting bullet points back where I removed them, like in this Unix shell script example that I made for a course I have to give in a few minutes:

So I've had to spend the last hour frantically re-editing my presentation. Maybe I removed them the "wrong" way in the first place, I don't really remember. And it looked fine in Keynote when I was editing it there, it was only when I loaded it back into PowerPoint that they showed up. While Keynote is the best software there is for making slide presentations, little things like that are causing me some annoyance when I try to use it in a non-perfect (e.g., PC-bound) world.

Hot Dog Stand

2008-06-03T04:06:00.003-03:00

A followup to my previous post about how great the Windows 3.1 Program Manager actually was, one more little piece of nostalgia courtesy of Coding Horror: The Hot Dog Stand colour scheme:

I love little peeks into the "oh, fuck it" school of design. Probably some Microsoft product manager asked about making an option in the interface that is perhaps more kid friendly, naturally not allocating any real budget or time or design resources to such a request, but he wanted it done anyway. So the intrepid Microsoft engineer said "this ought to shut the busybody up" and threw together this lovely eye-watering creation.

Earthworms

2008-05-23T03:13:00.003-03:00

So it's quite late and I'm not sleeping, which means I'm looking at random articles in WikiPedia. One piece of very interesting information that I came across is that we actually have no idea why worms come up from the ground after it rains.

Behavior

[edit]Rainstorms

This section needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2007)

To comply with Wikipedia's quality standards, this article may need to be rewritten.
Please help improve this article. The discussion page may contain suggestions.
Earthworms are seen out of the dirt after large rain storms because the soil becomes too moist for them to survive. They need a moist environment to allow the diffusion of gases across their skin membrane, however if the soil becomes too moist the earthworms begin to drown in the water. To protect themselves from drowning they find higher, dry ground. This is why they are seen in places like driveways after a storm. However, after the storm they are sometimes unable to return to the moist soil and they dry up, and because their body is no longer moist enough to allow the diffusion of gases, the earthworms suffocate. However, this theory is rejected by some because earthworms can survive underwater for several hours if there is oxygen in the water.

An alternative theory concerning this behaviour is that some species (notably Lumbricus terrestris) come to the surface to mate. Since this behaviour is limited to a few species, as well as the fact that mating is not connected to rain, this theory does not seem very likely.

Another theory is that the worms may be using the moist conditions on the surface to travel more quickly than they can underground, thus colonizing new areas more quickly. Since the relative humidity is higher during and after rain, they do not become dehydrated. This is a dangerous activity in the daytime, since earthworms die quickly when exposed to direct sunlight with its strong UV content, and are more vulnerable to predators such as birds.

Another theory is that as there are many other organisms in the ground as well and they respire as any animal does; the carbon dioxide produced dissolves into the rainwater; it forms carbonic acid and the soil becomes too acidic for the worms and they come seek neutral nourishment on the surface.

All of these hypotheses seem to contradict each other or just are not convincing on their face. It's always very interesting to me to realize what we still don't know about the world.

Everyone's talking about Iceland

2008-05-18T18:11:00.005-03:00

This article in the Guardian, "No wonder Iceland has the happiest people on earth," is pretty effusive in its praise for the societal development of Iceland. Apart from the usual Nordic socialist paradise things we all have read about Sweden and Finland and the rest of those countries, there were a few things that seemed to be unique to Iceland.

Highest birth rate in Europe + highest divorce rate + highest percentage of women working outside the home = the best country in the world in which to live. There has to be something wrong with this equation. Put those three factors together - loads of children, broken homes, absent mothers - and what you have, surely, is a recipe for misery and social chaos. But no. Iceland, the block of sub-Arctic lava to which these statistics apply, tops the latest table of the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Human Development Index rankings, meaning that as a society and as an economy - in terms of wealth, health and education - they are champions of the world. To which one might respond: Yes, but - what with the dark winters and the far from tropical summers - are Icelanders happy? Actually, in so far as one can reliably measure such things, they are. According to a seemingly serious academic study reported in the Guardian in 2006, Icelanders are the happiest people on earth. (The study was lent some credibility by the finding that the Russians were the most unhappy.)
Oddny Sturludottir, a 31-year-old mother of two, told me she had a good friend who was 25 and had three children by a man who had just left her. 'But she has no sense of crisis at all,' Oddny said. 'She's preparing to get on with her life and her career in a perfectly optimistic frame of mind.' The answer to why the friend perceives no crisis in what any woman in a similar predicament anywhere else in the western world might consider a full-blown catastrophe goes a long way towards explaining why Iceland's 313,000 inhabitants are such a sane, cheerful, successful lot.

This is a very unique situation, and seems like as isolated islands go, Iceland seems to have done the best job of figuring out how to live with each other over the last 1,000 years or so. And it looks like more accommodating family arrangements, where divorce isn't seen as a personal failure and no one stays in bad relationships for the sake of the kids, because the kids will be taken care of by everyone in the family, seems to be the evolved best practice. I find it interesting also that while the Lutheran church did establish itself in Iceland, the Christian insistence on getting involved in peoples' personal lives didn't seem to wash with the pagan Icelanders, and they seem to be better off for it.

It is curious to compare Iceland's steady growth towards prosperity with its geographical counterpart, Newfoundland, and maybe ask why Newfoundland who also relied almost entirely on the fishery for most of its history, has not developed along the same path. I found a blog post that discussed just that, at The Head Heeb, but it seems to be offline now, so I'll copy the full text from Google's cache here:

Why Iceland and not Newfoundland?

In the emergent field of Island Studies, Iceland stands out as a highly positive example of a small isolated island society that has succeeded, admirably. Iceland's three hundred thousand inhabitants do face some problems, but by and large these are the problems of success. How can Iceland most effectively switch to a hydrogen-based economy (as detailed by Arno Kopecky in his recent article in The Walrus, "Water to Burn")? How can Icelandic inflation be restrained given the country's galloping economic growth? Is it good that Icelandic investors, flush with cash and finding nothing to buy in their homeland, have embarked on a spree of corporate buyouts in Europe?

To islanders in Atlantic Canada, used to living in some of the most economically depressed jurisdictions of North America, this is depressing. The island of Newfoundland, like Iceland, is a relatively inhospitable island in the North Atlantic famed for its fish stocks. For most of the 20th century, though, the two island nations have gone in separate directions. Where Iceland smoothly developed into an independent state throughout the Great Depression and the Second World War, Newfoundland's economic collapse prompted Britain's suspension of its statehood and eventual annexation into Canada. Where Iceland's fisheries have been carefully and aggressively managed, Newfoundland's fisheries have been famously devastated. Where Iceland is one of the richest countries in the world, Newfoundland remains the second-poorest province in Canada.

What did Iceland do right? What did Newfoundland do wrong? It all comes down, in my estimation, to the two nations' respective histories. Historically, Iceland's has been a much more homogeneous and egalitarian society than Newfoundland's, with a highly literature population united by a common language, a shared history, and political issues (the questions of self-government and nation-building, not to mention the fisheries) which galvanized the entire island. Newfoundland, for its part, has traditionally been riven by divisions: Catholic versus Protestant, outporters versus residents of the capital of St. John's, the poor versus the rich, the fishing familes versus the mercantile families. As a point of fact, in the 1948 referendum Newfoundland's pro-confederates secured their slim majority for union with Canada by invoking a Catholic threat in letters sent to the membership of the famously bigoted Protestant Orange Order. I'm tempted to conclude that the famous lack of initative taken by the Newfoundland state, whether in preventing starvation among outport children during the Great Depression or in effectively pressuring the Canadian government to regulating the Grand Banks fisheries, can ultimately be traced to this paralysis, to the fierce competition of different interest groups all demanding satisfaction. Compare, if you would, the situation of the autonomous Faroe Islands as a sort of intermediate situation, combining the self-assertion of Iceland with Newfoundland's paralysis.

Looking towards the future, it's interesting to note that although the 21st century is still young, Iceland and Newfoundland are starting to move towards a common model. Globalization is plugging Iceland ever more deeply into transnational movements, as the country's wealth has made it a destination for foreign immigration while the question of Icelandic membership in the European Union has recently been raised. Newfoundland, for its part, seems to be in the process of consolidating itself, what with the collapse of its traditional sectarianism, the recent economic boom driven by oil and natural gas, the evolution of the capital of St. John's into a prosperous metropole like Iceland's Reykjavik, and--after the tragedy of the Grand Banks cod fisheries--a new determination to control Newfoundland's natural resources. Iceland's prosperous and happy future seems to be secured, even with the complications of European Union membership and accelerated globalization. It might not be too much to hope that Newfoundland, within the Canadian confederation, might finally be catching up to its role model.
Posted by Randy at February 23, 2006 03:25 AM

Comments

Newfoundlanders have had the option of moving elsewhere in Canada to find work. Icelanders haven't had a similar option. It's not surprising that Newfoundlanders have had less of an incentive - or need - to build up their island's economy.
Posted by: Peter at February 23, 2006 09:32 AM

Also note that Iceland already had something happen that was more serious than the collapse of fishing stocks - almost total deforestation. That created a powerful constituency for ecological stewardship.
Posted by: Hektor Bim at February 23, 2006 12:13 PM

Newfoundlanders have had the option of moving elsewhere in Canada to find work. Icelanders haven't had a similar option.

Although there was a great deal of Icelandic emigration during the 19th century, with most of it going to Denmark, Canada, the United States and Brazil. I believe Iceland is one of those countries where the diaspora is larger than the home population, and a number of towns have emigration museums or memorials.

Part of the credit for Iceland's prosperity belongs to the investment and infrastructure improvements made by the Allies during WW2, and to the subsequent NATO base at Keflavik. I'm not sure why Argentia and Goose Bay didn't have a similar effect on the Newfoundland economy.
Posted by: Jonathan Edelstein at February 23, 2006 01:12 PM

Coming across what looks like an excellent, thoughtful blog that seems to have disappeared off the face of the Internet is rather depressing, to be sure.

But I think the comment about Icelanders learning to deal with almost complete deforestation, which seems to have caused them to become more innovative and contributed to the collective sense that they have to share this small space with each other and they'd better back each other up. Perhaps losing the fishery in Newfoundland was the wake up call that was much longer in coming, but Newfoundlanders seem to be coming together to make St. John's a pretty exciting place to be right now – and it's not all from the oil boon, either. (Do people say 'boon' anymore or have we all just given up that fight and just say 'boom' now? If we let the rabble win this battle pretty soon we'll all be saying "for all intensive purposes" too, mark my words.)

In the end I think we can safely blame the British. Something about British culture and values, colonialism and its short-term approach to managing resources and leaving people to fend for themselves vs. the more enlightened Nordic view that they're all in it together, combined with an evolved sense of family that seems rooted in practicality that is unique to Iceland, goes to show that they simply do it better than the Anglo world has managed to.

PROGMAN.EXE

2008-05-13T06:15:00.005-03:00

I was just reading Neal Stephenson's essay, In the Beginning Was the Command Line, which was written in 1999 and is the best-written snapshot of where the computer industry was at the time and how it came to be. Definitely still worth reading as a great backgrounder on the philosophies and histories behind things like why Windows and the classic MacOS resemble a trip to Disneyland, and how Unix is like the computer programmer's Epic of Gilgamesh. Really, it makes perfect sense and is a level of contextualization that most computer programmers aren't equipped to make but can certainly benefit from reading about.

As he was talking about the first iterations of Windows that were slapped together and placed neatly on top of MS-DOS something occurred to me: Windows 3.1's Program Manager was the best way to launch programs I had ever used on any operating system.

Yes, really. And it's for a pretty simple reason too, it's lack of sophistication.

It was almost certainly similar to what My First MDI Application.exe would look. (oops, firstmdi.exe, this is DOS days, after all.) It had windows that you could cascade or tile, and icons that stayed where you put them and didn't make any attempt to arrange them for you by default. It was big and ugly and efficient, once you got it arranged the way you like. Everyone had their programs sorted into separate windows by function, games and productivity apps and system tools all lived in their own little windows happily together, and I could get to any of them right away without having to waste any extra clicks. If I used one more frequently than another I would put it at the top so it would always be the most prominent. It wasn't very 'smart' but that meant that users actually had to be, with the ones who let their desktops become unruly piles of icons probably being the reason Microsoft felt they needed to saddle everyone with the Start menu later.

This is how the Classic MacOS treated every single folder on the hard drive, but even it made the mistake of stuffing everything into /Applications (which OS X still does to this day) and forcing you to individually open and close each individual window if you did make the decision to try and organize your installed programs by function.

Microsoft abandoned this perfectly efficient program in favour of the Start Menu, a step back that trey trumpeted as their best new feature in Windows 95. Now instead of having my programs be fully visible whenever I wanted them, I had to click Start and then Programs before I could even get a look at them. And instead of being grouped according to how I choose to group them, software companies, becoming more keenly aware of the importance of branding, started stuffing their own programs into sub-folders of the Programs menu according to the name of the company that makes them. So I have to know that Symantec are the people who manufactured my virus scanner before I could find and launch the program, instead of dropping the more descriptively-named program shortcut into my utilities folder to begin with when I loaded the program onto my computer the first time.

This is probably the reason you see so many Windows users with desktops cluttered from left to right with random icons, they want the things they access and think of as important to be immediately visible. Of course, instead of being able to just alt-tab into the Program Manager they have to minimize every single window first. (A tedious job for most computer users. Do an informal survey around your office and see how many people know the shortcut key for 'Show Desktop'. It's depressing.) Also, software companies have decided that the user is their adversary in their aim to spread their brand identity to as many places on your screen as they can, so every program you install drops a copy of its icon on your desktop in no particular order, and certainly not grouped by function.

In Mac OS X it's almost as bad. The /Applications folder is an ever-growing list of programs with quirky names like CyberDuck and Seashore. One of those is an FTP program, the other is a (quite nice) graphics editor, which I had completely forgotten the name of once when all I wanted to do was put a watermark on a PNG file, since it had been a while since I used it, the incongruous bit of information "seashore is the name of a graphics editor" had dropped completely out of my head. That's as much a knock on the tendency of software developers to go for cute over practical as it is Mac OS X's program interface.

But one thing that is becoming more and more common in the OS X world is for people to just eschew using the Finder to launch programs altogether and just hit Command-Spacebar and type the name of the program into the search box and hit Open right away, the Desktop equivalent of I'm Feeling Lucky. And as great as Spotlight searching does work, having to use it when I used to have my programs organized in a sensible way in front of me does not seem like progress to me.

I'd like Apple to please just admit that a file browser and an application launcher are fundamentally different things. The dock is well and good for maybe 20 programs, but I have way more than that I might want to run in the course of a day, especially when I crack open the /Developer folder.

So I'm going to say it again: Windows 3.1 did it best.

My Secret Weapon

2008-05-06T00:07:00.001-03:00

Yes it's another post about another damn toy. You love them.

From the "Oh of Course" Department

2008-05-03T18:27:00.004-03:00

When watching the Disney short "Donald in Mathmagic Land" (Youtube link) on my computer just now, there's a part where the narrator is showing a rifle-brandishing Donald about Pythagoras and starts to talk about the golden ratio, and shows examples of it that can be found in a pentagram and then shows the golden ratio as a rectangle, and it finally occurred to me..

That my iMac's screen was built to exactly this proportion. Yeah I'm slow.

It's interesting to visualize a typical desktop layout over top of the divisions of the golden ratio, though. Web browser or word processor on the left, email program on the bottom right, instant messenger window in the top right and contact list tucked in to the left of it. Very close to what my screen typically looks like.

PS watch that cartoon, it's very good and has some neat visualizations in it.

A few quick notes about Halifax

2008-04-25T20:41:00.004-03:00

So this is a rather belated post about going to Halifax last weekend to see Buck 65 play with the Nova Scotia symphony. Other than the fact that we had to get the tickets a couple of months in advance right when they went on sale, the whole trip was carried out like one of those random road trips everyone has fond memories of going on but no one actually does anymore.

We piled into the car, 3 of us having just come from work and grabbing a sleeping bag and kit bag with a few necessities in it from home and then just hit the road.

A guy we used to work with who now lives in Halifax was very kind to let us stay in his apartment, the apartment building's hallways felt like a hotel, they were narrow and had that stereotypical dark carpetting and muted lights. The apartment itself was the very picture of what a 20 something techie who just moved into a place on his own would look like. One couch, a couple of folding chairs that he brought out for us, very little else, oh except for the giant screen TV and surround sound system dominating the entire room. Fortunately that left lots of floor space for us to roll out our sleeping bags later on.

So after we found a place to park we set off in search of something for dinner. Here's a fun fact about Halifax: the business owners don't actually want you to go there, so they close their restaurants at dinner time on a Friday. We tried 4 places in a row with locked doors only noticing after getting excited about some item on the menu posted on the door. I'm still lamenting missing out on the stuffed blue cheese burger at one alleged place. Then the next place we thought we were in luck when we were able to walk right in and up the stairs but it turns out they hadn't even opened the restaurant for business yet, the big opening was set for the next day. No doubt they hadn't fitted a lock on the door yet to be a proper Halifax restaurant.

Ended up having a pretty surprisingly decent pasta dish called Pasta New Orleans at My Father's Mustache, given the way the place was decked out any flavour other than bland greasy burgers and ungodly spicy wings was a pleasant surprise. Still, when I walked into the rest room and was confronted with backlit wall-sized ads with scantily clad women and a TV blaring out an ad for Cialis I definitely knew I was not the target age or lifestyle demographic for this place.

We were nearly late for the concert itself after having to power walk up to the Rebecca Cohen, but thankfully we only missed a little intro piece that the symphony did before Buck 65 introduced himself.

The atmosphere was pretty interesting to observe, with the well-dressed older crowd making use of their season passes interspersed with scruffy younger music fans who packed the place in.

Now, the best way to describe what the music sounded like was to be pretty clear what it was not, which is anything like what Metallica did on S&M. In that case the orchestra just followed along with the basic melody of each song, basically a very expensive effects pedal. For last Friday's show, a couple of members of the symphony completely re-built and re-arranged the songs from the ground up to replicate the musical feel of each song but in a new and very musically in-tune way. For a few songs, especially Devil's Eyes, now that I am reminded of the song in my head, the version of it that I hear is what was played at the show. Rich was a little subdued in his vocals, sadly, not wanting to get too worked up and rumple his suit perhaps, or overshadow the musicians, but he has a great voice all on its own so it still sounded good.

Might as well stop typing and just post someone else's Youtube video from the show so you can hear what I'm talking about.

It was an early evening but most of us were pretty tired from working (haha except me) and the long drive. Another thing to know about Halifax: Once you see the inside of a restaurant on pizza corner while sober and before midnight you'll never want to eat there again. Despite being the only customers, the kids ahead of us had to take their slices back for being cold, and everything just looked unkempt and unappetizing.

I'll have to write in permanent marker on my arm "AVOID PIZZA CORNER AT ALL COSTS - ROTTEN FOOD + STABBINGS" when I head overto see Queens of the Stone Age next month.

Anyway, very glad I made the trip over for that show, I've heard from other people that the Charlottetown show he did the week before with Cadence Weapon was also incredible, but this was something unique that was very cool to be a part of.

Apparently it will be up on CBC's concerts on demand site within a couple of weeks, I'll try and keep my antennae up for it to be posted.

TV Violence

2008-04-02T07:33:00.003-03:00

I would be very confident in saying that violent TV or movies never caused me to copy such violence in real life.

Except for this.

I'm pretty sure I needed to see if I could make a sisterphone just like a muppophone.

I loved that CBC put The Muppet Show on before Mr. Dressup in the mornings right in the middle of their educational kids' TV block, despite it being gloriously un-educational.

On an aside, it looks like this skit was inspired by the mouse oran sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus.

I think the muppet version is actually more since the MP version doesn't show the creatures being battered, and there's someone crying out in protest at the end.

Here's a tidbit from the Muppet Wiki about Marvin Suggs, the mallet-wielding musician:

n the liner notes of the Music, Mayhem and More! CD, Frank Oz said:
I don't recall where Marvin Suggs came from... probably from one of the writer's meetings. But the accent came from my French friend Phillippe Gentry -- I just exaggerated it and made it really annoying. I've always felt Marvin lived in a scuzzy trailer park with his put-upon wife, and he kept the Muppaphones in a cage and would beat them regularly.

R.I.P. ChampCars

2008-03-17T21:16:00.003-03:00

The news was very confusing when it came out a few weeks ago, rattled off in a couple of lines by every sportscaster for about a day, none of whom cared enough about the sport to bother checking the copy they were handed.

The line was that the American open-wheel racing series split was over and that CART and the IRL had merged. This is of course utter onnsense. Tony George just finally won the battle with his Brickyard 400-funded deeper pockets and has convinced most of the remaining ChampCar teams to field IRL teams. After the Long Beach race CART will effectively cease to exist this year.

The split happened in 1996 because there were too many Brazilians with hard to spell names winning races, and doing it on blatantly anti-American road courses instead of ovals. So Tony George set about to create the most mediocre, boring to watch, technologically stunted racing series he could, with fat washed up drivers and any oval track that would rent him space for a weekend and called it the Indy Racing League, taking away ChampCars' right to use the name IndyCar in the process. It was at this point, and with Jacques Villeneuve moving to Formula One, that all but about 8 people immediately lost interest in the sport altogether.

CART struggled on as well, sucking up to Toyota and Honda and letting them continually raise the stakes and the cost of fielding a team just so they could have their own private pissing match that no one outside of the racing series even cared about, and which they themselves lost interest in in favour of being mid-field runners in Formula One.

The first CART season where all the racers had the same Cosworth engine was the beginning of the final end for the series. There were heroic gestures and commitments on the part of a couple of the team owners to do what they could to keep things going, selling each other chassis parts and surely some pretty heavy financial incentives on the down-low to make it worth the while for the smaller teams to bother showing up.

But the forced competition just made it hard to watch.

CART just made decision after decision that made the racing less and less interesting in its attempts to find new markets. Watching those big, bulky cars shufle their way around street courses so tight that in the Florida race the damn Atlantic cars were lapping faster was pure frustration. And rules like the pit windows that had to be explained every damn time gave the impression that all the racing was being controlled by the officials just to keep the show exciting, nearly as bad as the suspicious yellows near the end of so many NASCAR races. And silly gimmicks like push to pass buttons just reinforced the notion that the whole thing was just for show and not real racing.

It is admirable that guys like Gerry Forsythe and Kevin Kalkoven held out so long and really tried to make CART work, but every decision they made to try and save money or keep manufacturers on-board left the final product weaker and weaker, and eventually it became completely unwatchable.

Tony George's ego is only partly to blame for the death of CART, their inept concept of what people want to watch has just as much to do with it, sadly.

I hope the IRL cars can eventually turn into something resembling a graceful racing machines and not the monstrocities they are now, truck engines with barn doors strapped to the front and back, but I don't see it happening. I'll stick to F1 and the occasional sports car race.

Michael Enright and Me and the United States of America

2008-03-09T09:47:00.003-03:00

It's very funny to listen to Michael Enright light up when he gets to talk to an American politician or commentator about the state of U.S. politics and international relations. A few years ago he did a two-part interview with Conrad Black. One part was about his legal case and Hollinger International, and the second part about the book Black wrote about Franklin D. Roosevelt, and it was pretty obvious that that was the half of the interview Michael wished would last for the whole time slot. And frankly so did I.

One thing Michael Enright is just not good at is pretending to be interested in Canadian politics. And it is rather hard to be when one has instant access to the thousands of US political blogs and news sources which sound like reports from a trench war that's been being fought since the Nixon years.

Up in Canada we get the fun of having access to all the media coverage of the high-pitched political and culture war, while getting to live in a relatively sensibly-run society. For infovores like us it's much more satisfying to dive into the deep pool of conflict and history of US politics than to try and give two shits about Stephen Harper.

It's rather obvious just how deeply immersed in American history and politics Michael Enright is. Today in an interview on the Sunday Edition, Krugman made a reference to "the macaca incident" in the 2004 Virginia senatorial election, and while Krugman did a very good job of summarizing the whole incident for presumably an audience in a foreign country who would have no idea about a state-level campaign incident from four years ago, you could hear a little bit of impatience in Enright's voice that sounded like "yes yes of course, everyone knows that" but he managed to restrain himself.

Now thankfully CBC has Rex Murphy and Kathleen Petty on Cross Country Checkup and The House to pick up the slack and actually make Canadian politics seem interesting and important, So Michael Enright can be left to play in his preferred waters and make some very informative and important radio interviews that happen to catch my interest as fellow voyeur into US public life.

Just Plain Ugly

2008-03-03T14:46:00.002-04:00

Who at Microsoft thought that they needed to push out a new release of Windows Messenger just to make it look like this?

All I can think of when I see that is that it looks like KDE from 6 years ago. Not a pretty sight at all.

Is this what Vista is supposed to look like and they're cramming that same look and feel down our throats now? Because it's not making me want to run out the door to buy the upgrade, not by a long shot.

jPod Awesomeness

2008-02-24T01:12:00.005-04:00

I've really been enjoying the first few episodes of jPod, and am actually glad that they've strayed from the book somewhat, plot-wise. The new developments are something to keep someone who's read the book on their toes.

Just wanted to mention that I just adored the fact that Alan Thicke's character, Jim Jarlewski, uses...

Yes, the cool people know by looking at the power indicator, but for the n00bs,,

YES! An old-school Apple II. That kicks more ass than anyone can imagine. I loved those stickers that came with my first computer, the Apple IIGS. I stuck them on the disk drive and on the side of the monitor, I loved the reverse-rainbow Apple logo.

Round about 2000 or so Apple decided to erase any memory of the rainbow logo in favour of the single-colour blue or grey logo. Tidbit: the last publicly-viewable rainbow Apple logo was on the site of http://www.next.com/, apple's "Enterprise" website. Basically the tiny parked page they put up after Apple acquired Next technologies and Steve Jobs, essentially the bedrock of Mac OS X.

Apple II was where it was at for hackable hardware. I peeked and poked my way to some pretty bizarre shit back in my BASIC days. A BASIC call that let you alter any address in memory and stick in whatever value you wanted was God-like power.

That was a beautiful time.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

2008-02-07T01:47:00.000-04:00

Remember the video for One by Metallica? With the scenes in the old hospital of a soldier with no limbs who couldn't speak or move? And in the end he figured out how to communicate in morse code, but just kept repeating the phrase "kill me" over and over?

Well, now there's a version based on someone's real life experience, and it's so much more deep and positive and even affirming. Of course, if I had gorgeous French women hanging on my every wink I'd probably feel like hanging on for a few more days myself.

(Link to trailer)

The movie showed the process of coming to accept your own situation and appreciate the true value of an intact mind in a way that inspires by extreme, uncontradictable example.

I enjoyed very much that the whole film was in French, I haven't used French in too long a time, but it didn't take me very long to get back into the rhythm and become able to just sit back and listen and take it in and not worry about actively trying to catch each word.

I was having a pretty bad day before putting the movie on, was quite unhappy about some things that really shouldn't have bothered me as much as they did. But the experience of thinking in a whole different language made all those thoughts just completely slip away, a complete switch of my frame of reference just by changing language and taking away the words I was bombarding my psyche with all afternoon and evening. That combined with the truly hope-inducing story and the beautiful cinematography and music was enough to give my mind a real vacation from negative thoughts for a while.

It's still playing for a few more nights at City Cinema, if you are in Charlottetown definitely try and go see it.

More LED Toy Fun

2008-01-27T00:48:00.000-04:00

I'm a sucker for these things.

Another New Geek Toy

2008-01-27T00:26:00.001-04:00

Check this out..

I should be too old to enjoy things like this but it hasn't happened yet.

A week at the movies

2008-01-24T23:43:00.000-04:00

My membership to City Cinema had run out a little while ago, and since the member price has recently gone up I had decided not to bother getting another one. But after going there for the third night in four days I probably should have ponied up for one already.

On Monday I saw Control, a biopic about Ian Curtis, former singer of the band Joy Division. What I liked about it was the way it painted industrial Britain in the late 1970s. Partly with the black and white .. I was going to write 'film' but it was shot in colour and just transformed to B&W afterwards. Not sure how to refer to that. Anyway, it gave everything a sea of grey and beige tones, rather than the more stark high-contrast look of a lot of traditional black and white films. Also, the sparse sets and props they used, likely out of budget constraints. But the rooms were very bare, and everything seemed lifeless and people fittingly bleak, it all came together to make you completely understand and appreciate why someone would want to start making the kind of music Joy Division were known for.

The other pretty impressive accomplishment of the film was to convince me, for the first time, to believe a rock star when he says he never wanted to be famous. I usually don't believe it, but the way the actor playing Curtis talked about how performing and touring took so much energy out of him, coupled with the epileptic fits he suffered from, which he had only recently realized could kill him, you can empathize with a young kid who just wanted his simple contented life back.

On Wednesday I saw Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. I have a bit of a problem when seeing movies in the theatres, where if there's a really uncomfortable moment where a character is doing something utterly terrible or heartbreaking, I will start to laugh. I have very little ability to take things seriously when I know they're fiction, conceived in a writer's mind and thrown up on the screen for my enjoyment. I can't get scared at horror movies and I can't get upset when a character acts as completely evilly and reprehensibly as the characters in this film. That's not to say it wasn't good, it was excellent with some of the best acting I've seen in a long time. I just felt like kind of funny for getting such a kick out of it while everyone else in the theatre would gasp and shake their heads while I'd be barely suppressing a giggle.

And I just got back from How to Cook Your Life, a nice, straightforward documentary about a zen master who uses cooking to illustrate some zen principles to those who come to his centre.

I've always seen zen teachers like him as more entertainers than true spiritual leaders to be revered, probably because I don't believe in revering or in any way approaching worshipping another person. And I appreciate them for what they are and what they are good at, but at the same time the people who pay the thousands of dollars to go to these things often are just looking for spiritual enlightenment at the end of a credit card, just a trendier version than what they'd get at church.

But all that said, he does do a good job of getting people to live in the moment, practise mindfulness and try and let go of their stresses and worries by engaging them in the act of cooking. This is definitely much more interesting than most buddhism for yuppies sessions where you just sit around watching yourself breathe for a while.

And it's a funny example of the nature of Zen as well, that you find Zen in the simplest things, and even the most necessary things, like cooking and eating, but in that it is really nothing hidden that you will find and then reach some higher level of existence, it's just a very insistent idea that everything just is the way it is, and you might as well learn to live with it.

My version of putting that principle into practise was how I really did enjoy my quiet walk home in this Canadian winter, and being able to genuinely enjoy walking in the kind of weather that makes itself known and forces you out of your own mind and into observing every step and every breath, whether you want to or not.

1x05: The Last Outpost

2008-01-20T18:41:00.001-04:00

Back to the Star Trek Next Generation watching, it seems. This is what happens when you have a roommate who needs the TV for four hours or so to watch football.

This episode opens with an ominous introduction as Picard talks about the first encounter the Federation will ever have with a mysterious race called the Ferengi. We're clearly meant to think that these will be to this series what the Klingons were to the original series, strange and threatening.

But then they go and show, among oohs and ahhs from Geordi, who's at the helm today for some reason, what their ship looks like.

Does anyone else get the impression of eyes and teeth peeking out under a squashed Marvin the Martian helmet? Are we frightened yet?

Picard "very impressive design."

Indeed.

The planet that they're next to can drain all of the Enterprise's power, right through the shields. Mysterious super-entities don't show up as much in the later series, god love the good old days.

Data pulls up a historical comparison of the Ferengi to "ocean going Yankee traders.. The worst kind of capitalists." A little more obscure than the obvious "vulcans are greeks, romulans are Romans" theme. I still maintain that the Cardassians are a good facsimile of the French, though. I digress.

I love how everyone is so quick to snap at Data.

It's interesting how the effects and the ship still don't look dated. But if you take a good look at Data's console you can see how they did it:

Mostly static lights, including the busy-looking Nintendo control pad on the bottom left. The animated parts, on the top-left (with an upside-down Klingon symbol and writing, interestingly enough) and bottom-right are both in green-on-black, what you'd expect from a computer in the mid-to-late 80s. But still doesn't jump out as old or bad-looking when you're just watching.

Data explains the mysterious planet-trap while getting stuck in a Chinese fingertrap puzzle. The metaphors don't get much more subtle than that.

In the end Riker saves the day through diplomacy and the moral high-ground. Clearly they mean to show this aspect of his character early on.

jPod - Episode 1

2008-01-11T01:56:00.000-04:00

This year's Hollywood writers' strike has made me so eager for new TV that I have actually been eagerly awaiting the debut of a new CBC drama. But here I am, and since I am never home on Tuesdays I had to do something that most certainly was not download the first episode of jPod (Promo video | Wikipedia) on Bittorrent and watched it tonight.

First off, before any real critiquing, I will say that I found myself laughing out loud more than a few times at some pretty great lines ("If it was too easy to bury bodies, there wouldn't be any people left.") and setups, like when Ethan's stoned yoga-doing girlfriend suddenly makes it known that she could hear them talking about her through the window the moment the subject of her high-school lack of popularity was mentioned. So someone involved in directing the show definitely has an intuitive feel for what makes for funny and engaging TV moments. Not always a given with Canadian TV, and usually only found on HBO-type American shows. With the source material for the show being a novel I was expecting all the jokes to be talky quotes lifted from the written dialog, so I was very pleased to see well-executed visual setups.

The writing is good, I'm hoping the clever lines aren't just the build-up that a script writer working on a new show has of clever lines stored away in his head pouring out too quickly to sustain over the course of a TV series. Time will tell on that one. Fortunately the book contained many little sub-plots rather than one over-arching conflict that took a whole book to resolve. So the show should work well with episodic story arcs.

I found the acting to be uneven. The actors have a Gilmour Girls / West Wing way of being 'always-on' - which can be a good way of rapid-firing clever dialog, but makes the characters less like real people talking and relating to each other. But here's the problem: Coupland is probably doing this on purpose. All of the members of jPod (the forgotten team at Electronic Arts (The show may be afraid to get sued but I'm not going to bother changing names. Help I'm buried in 2nd-level parentheses.) who's members were all placed there because their surnames start with the letter J.) aside from the main character - a revival of the sympathetic everygeek from Microserfs, is living a carefully constructed identity, deciding to adopt some bizarre habit or obsession and making it their identity. But where the Microserfs characters had hope, the jPodders could all make a pretty convincing case that life is meaningless enough that either constructing a completely new person and acting as them is the only worthwhile way to approach the world. And so the overacting that got on my nerves might just be deliberate. I hope Alain Thicke's character continues to have a lot of screen-time, hopefully his Shatner-esque ability to completely hide self-awareness from the viewer will rub off on the other actors. This is a faint-hope. Right now the moments that are supposed to be sincere, like Caitlin and Ethan discovering a shared love for an old video game as cue for a romantic interest, are telegraphed so horribly you just want to get up from the room and wait for it to be over before it even begins. Pulling off making essentially contrived characters watchable will be a tough feat, it was the weakest part of the book for me.

Characters I want to see more of:

Cancer Cowboy - including the sex addiction and how it plays out
Ethan's Father
Also hoping that when they do introduce Kam Fong he will steal the whole show.
Also sad there's no trace of Evil Mark

The music was a nice touch, but it was too much 'lets grab recognizable Canadian music icons so people will feel comfortable, and I hope they dig a little deeper into the pile of great but lesser-known Canadian bands as the show goes on. And seriously, don't say "defendoid", say "Defender". You're allowed to mention real-world products, for crying out loud. Using fake names is jarring and takes away our ability to identify with their geeky obsessions even more.

I'm going to keep watching it, and there's enough of a chance that the first-episode wrinkles will be ironed out into a truly high-quality show that I'm holding out hope and telling people to watch it. At the same time, I'm also hoping Coupland will want to move on to something else at the end of the first season. I would really love if the Canadian TV industry moved towards a Channel 4-style of television production, making short runs of interesting shows and moving on to something else before it gets old.

Homemade Pizza Night

2008-01-06T23:23:00.000-04:00

Today my friend from work came over and we made the best pizza I've had in ages. A few months ago some of us were out at the 42nd St. Lounge and we got this gourmet pizza they had on the menu that had goat cheese and spinnach and prosciutto, that we all really loved. (Including Sabrina, sorry we didn't realize it had the meat on it when you asked for a slice...)

But we've been periodically reminiscing about how good it was ever since. Yes, we talk about good food the way Carrie Bradshaw talks about a nice set of abs.) But we figured we could probably do something similar ourselves, and k. had some goat cheese she got at the Farmer's Market last week. The rest of the ingredients are pretty easy, though we substituted the prosciutto with chicken just to match up with some Rachel Ray recipe or other.

The goat cheese is so soft and creamy, you don't actually need any sauce on the pizza. It's nice and sharp and full-flavoured, and it envelops the other toppings very nicely when you bake it.

K. went all out and even made a crust from scratch. It turned out perfect, just thick enough to have some substance to it without being too doughy, and it crispied up just right in the oven.

The kicker was some smoked sea salt sprinkled on top. I fear I may develop an addiction to that stuff, even though I've never been one to put extra salt on my food.

We ate that while watching DVDs of the Æon Flux cartoon, a better way to spend a Sunday evening I've yet to find.

Steak

2008-01-04T05:58:00.000-04:00

OK, so you know how revolting it is when someone orders their steak so rare that basically all they want is for the chef to walk past the grill when he's taking it to your table? Well, my friend Kelly ordered one that way today. Everyone at the table was pretty horrified, especially when it arrived. But I figured, OK, she has good taste and her craziness generally resides elsewhere, so I'm curious. So I ask if I can try a little sliver of it. She cuts me off a corner and puts it on my plate.

My biggest mistake was picking it up with my fingers. It felt exactly like something I would be touching because I was preparing food to be cooked, not to be eaten. But I was far too committed at this point not to try it.

And hoooly christ it was good. So so tender. The cooked edges gave that nice bit of flavourfulness, and inside was just soft ant springy and absolutely showed you what good quality steaks they serve at Hunter's. It just makes me want to walk up to a cow in a farmer's field and bite it. The waitress even said she made sure the chef didn't over-cook it, because chefs have a tendency to overcook steak. Perhaps they just want to feel like a part of the process.

I don't know if I'd want to eat a whole steak in this fashion, but I'm definitely ordering my next one more rare than I ever have before. Apparently The Keg restaurants give you an option of "black and blue" steak where they cook the outside very well and leave the inside nice and raw and tender. This strikes me as just about perfect since you get the most flavour and the best-tasting meat.

A random list of things that smell good

2008-01-03T02:55:00.000-04:00

Peach juice

Barbecue pork

Static electricity - like when you put your nose up to a CRT or an old TV after it's been turned off, and the air is all ionized. I don't know if that counts as a smell or not.

New plastic toys

A new RC car that drains 8 alkaline batteries at once, being driven at full speed for over 10 minutes. The smell of electricity, basically.

When a girl comes out of the shower and has shampooed her hair, but hasn't put on any other perfume yet.

Old books

The plasticy-dusty smell you might notice when you are desperately blowing into an old NES to make it work.

Chlorinated swimming pool

Freshly-ground hazelnut coffee

New guitar strings

Fruit loops and / or leather polish. It's basically the same smell.

Rainy days when the grass is green and alive

Thunder? WTF?

2008-01-02T05:48:00.001-04:00

OK I thought the first one was a snow plow making noise hitting a mailbox or something, but the second one was definitely a rolling crash of thunder. In January. I don't see any lightning out my window, though, which is too bad. I bet lightning on snow would be gorgeous.

Could you get electrocuted by just being out in the snow somewhere near a lightning strike? Is the air between the snow flakes enough of an insulator to make this not the case? I think I need to start spreading around an urban legend about this and then have Mythbusters try and tackle it. They have a lightning machine, right?

I went to see The Darjeeling Limited tonight by myself. Before seeing it I had a bit of a sense of steadily lowering expectations for Wes Anderson's movies, as each one has been steadily less interesting than the one before. I think he needs to shoot someone else's screenplay next, since he has too many cliches and character personalities that he is relying on too often. The Darjeeling Limited confirmed all of my fears in this direction. That said, it was still a funny Wes Anderson movie with humourously awkward dialog, strained relationships and interesting sets and costumes that have a timeless quality to them which I do enjoy.

OK, the thunder seems to have subsided. Oh shit there was lightning. Damnit, I stopped watching for it, too. It's quite close, too, the thunder was only about 2 seconds behind.

OK, I googled Winter Lightning, here's what came up: Link.

Can there be lightning during a snowstorm? Lightning is usually associated with thunderstorms, and therefore is thought to be a spring and summer event. Yet lightning does occur during winter, and even during heavy snowfalls and blizzards. Winter lightning appears to be unusually powerful, associated with loud and long thunderclaps. Sometimes associated snowfalls can reach 3 inches an hour. A man was struck by lightning during a blizzard in Minneapolis during March of 1996. He is still alive...and very puzzled.

Neat.

Apparently in Chinese they have several different kinds of states or descriptions of feelings of love, mostly centered around sadness. The examples given were "sorrow-love", "tenderness-pity" and "sorrow pity". Sounds ominously like something I'd probably wind up in. There's an interesting frankness about human relationships that comes through there that is a little intimidating.

No I will not fix your computer

2008-01-01T23:51:00.001-04:00

OK, to all the people who seem to be infected with this MSN virus going around: I am officially not going to help you clean out your computers to get rid of it. I'm just going to block you.

That is all.

MC CLM

2007-12-15T15:30:00.000-04:00

Last night was pretty interesting. It was our office Christmas party. There was the usual dinner and all that, but part of the night was a trivia night, which they asked me to host. Thankfully there were no requirements to do any questions about the company or anything like that, so I agreed to do it. There were 140 people in the room so it was the biggest crowd I ever spent any amount of time speaking in front of. Fortunately they had a wireless mic that I was able to use to walk around the room and interact with the crowd which I enjoy doing a lot when I do trivia.

_Un_fortunately, when someone was about to hand me the mic, I was sitting at my table telling a story that culminated in the phrase "See you in Hell, fuckers!" Figuring out the sensitivity range of that mic afterwards I realized I was about 2 seconds shy of having the whole room hear me, including two senior vice presidents and a director.

But I managed to get through the hour I was supposed to fill making fun of people and joking around and being a general smartass without swearing once, by the grace of God and nothing else. People seemed to really enjoy it anyway, and I felt comfortable with the crowd pretty quickly and realized they were into it and waiting for each question and really into the bonus questions where I get them to shout out answers. I'm told I have a way of making fun of someone for getting a wrong answer but still making them feel good, weirdly enough, but it seems to work.

But considering who was watching it will be interesting to see if they ever let me near a microphone again at work.

OK forget that thing a few posts ago..

2007-12-12T00:35:00.000-04:00

Yeah I'm the new champion of everything.

Stupid Shipping

2007-12-09T23:17:00.000-04:00

Well, I was all ready to purchase this gift pack:

Can't go wrong as a Christmas gift for the one of the Idiocracy fans I know. The $20 price tag is pretty fair as well. Except that USPS shipping to Canada is FORTY EIGHT DOLLARS. Even in worthless American dollars that's still way too much money for two novelty cans and a T-Shirt. I hate America even more than I did before today, and vote for Hugo Chavez if I could, that's how much I already hate America.

So in lieu of a hilarious gift, just watch this ad:

Encounter at Farpoint: Part 2

2007-11-29T20:52:00.001-04:00

The best part about this episode is how ominous and threatening they make the Ferengi out to be. It must not have taken the writers long to realize that they looked just a little too ridiculous for viewers to actually find them scary, and that they work far better as comic relief.

Did everything just taste purple for a second?

Another thing I really liked about the earlier seasons of Next Gen was the alien creatures who looked and acted nothing like humans. There was a lot less of that in Deep Space Nine and the other later series, as they became more of a space opera and stopped pursuing plots that even tried to explore new science fiction themes.

Encounter at Farpoint

2007-11-29T19:33:00.000-04:00

There are a few funny things about the very first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Mostly they involve things that seemed to be a big deal in the first episode but then were totally ignored. Like the fact that the Enterprise can split into two parts, the saucer section and the lower section, which had its own bridge, the Battle Bridge. Even in the episode when they first encounter the Borg and Riker orders that the ship ram right the fuck into the Borg cube, he never takes a second to think "hey you know it'd be awful decent of me to let the families and crew go home safe and sound if we separated from the saucer section before we rock'n'roll right up in this bitch."

Each of the bridge officers also made a show of pushing their consoles out and away from them before getting up, which no one ever bothered with in subsequent episodes. There was a bridge member who sat where Wesley Crusher would end up sitting named Lieutennant Torres. Surely Bolanna Torres from Voyager was named after him. I wonder if the writers who crank out things like the Star Trek Encyclopedia thought to crowbar a family relationship between the two characters.

Another cute thing was a little console for the jumpsuit-clad Deanna Troi that told her the ship was at status: green before they could go to warp 9. Totally adorable that they gave the eye-candy something technical-ish to be in charge of. They didn't take long to drop that little facade, did they? It's too bad they stuck her in the purple body suit afterwards, it never showed her nice soft juicy legs.

One thing that remained unchanged through the whole series after that, though, was that the best part of the whole episode was whenever Q was in the scene.

There's a great scene where Q puts Picard on trial in a scene they label "Mid 21st century - the post-atomic horror." There's a huddling crowd of observers to the trial who are all poor and filthy and speaking Chinese. This setting, sadly, was never re-visited as far as I know, in any later episodes of any series. Too bad, there'd have been a lot of potential to explore human nature and near-future outcomes of our own society's decisions. But it doesn't quite fit with the hooray-for-everything future outlook of the Star Trek universe.

Denise Crosby (Lt. Yarr) getting hysterical is glorious. "You BARBARIAN!" Q almost kills her, and silently kicks ass by yawning while Data examines her body to see if she'll live.

I still think Q was right in his charges - humanity are a grievously savage race. It's a shame they didn't give the charges a proper hearing.

It's still awfully cute that they think blind people have big white balls for eyes with no pupils. The 80s were a simpler time.

I'm glad that they didn't use any computer graphics instead of models back then. The show still looks remarkably modern because of it. The blue light cast by the warp nacelles reflects perfectly on the rest of the ship, where it wouldn't be until a few years ago that CG would have gotten that right without it looking like an episode of Reboot. And it's still cool to think that people actually took the time and effort to actually build the bridge and the corridors and the engine room and the rest of everything you see on the ship. That episode of Reading Rainbow where Lavar Burton takes you around and shows you everything was still my favourite half our of anything PBS has ever broadcast.

My Greatest Accomplishment of the Day

2007-11-24T14:22:00.000-04:00

WANT.

2007-11-19T13:01:00.000-04:00

http://xkcd.com/c150.html

http://blag.xkcd.com/2007/11/19/growing-up/

gabrielle says:
that is insane. he draws things that come to life.

Now, the business plan: move down to mexico, get a glass-bottomed boat, fill-er up with playpen balls and charge tourists to go out in ballpit / sea life gazing combination tours.

Librivox - Great Idea, Spotty Talent

2007-11-19T04:52:00.000-04:00

OK, new rule: I think it's really great if you want to volunteer to read for the Librivox project - Free audio book version of public domain books - but you have to be at least as steady and talented a reader as Mac OS X's new "Alex" voice. Because otherwise you're just wasting a whole lot of time, disk space and bandwidth.

I just finished listening to The Antichrist by Nietzsche (I need to occasionally re-fuel my polemic tank). The first reader (mp3) was this poor lady with a voice like a balloon being rubbed way too hard on a table. Poor girl, while listening I am imagining that this voice of hers has left her isolated and lonely and maybe that's why she reads books out loud in her spare time.

It's a good thing I've gotten used to such things, though, because otherwise I'd have missed the fantastic piece of performance art that is the last section (mp3) - read by a chap who really, really gets into the text. The energy and emotion makes it sound like he's trying to impress upon Nietzsche's ghost just how much he hates Christianity, too. This is what a fundmentalist atheist sermon would probably sound like. A great piece of unexpected entertainment.

Still, I made up a hotkey macro to dictate out a selected block of text using the Alex voice, and I think I'll end up using that rather than actually listen to the voices of those internet nerds who probably spend the rest of their online time in revert wars on Wikipedia and blogging about their cats' health problems. And yeah, there's also the huge number of commercial audiobooks on Bittorrent sites, but the overwhelming number of self-help books and dime-a-dozen fantasy novels who's print versions are the size of phone books makes finding something worth listening to take as long as the download itself. And I still read old-fashioned paper books, too, but I can't play Tetris at the same time which is a pretty great selling point for audio books.

Best opening weekend? Not what you think.

2007-11-02T02:40:00.000-03:00

So, the big news just recently was that Halo 3 had beaten out both Spider-Man 3 and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for the best opening weekend of sales, with over $150,000,000 in sales.

Well, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard just sold 2 million copies in its opening weekend, and 2,000,000 * $129 = $258,000,000. Looks like we have a new winner.

PS. I'm loving Leopard, it's an improvement in a lot of ways I didn't expect, since I really didn't have any complaints about Tiger, but the new additions are quite slick. I'll write a bigger piece about it in the next few days.

Bogart's Hallowe'en Costume

2007-11-01T17:55:00.001-03:00

2007-10-24T15:31:00.000-03:00

Things on my desk:

Giant Tim Horton's Mug
Coffee Mug from this morning
Apple water bottle
Paper cup from the new coffee machine

if a martian landed in this office he'd probably think my primary duty was consumption of liqueds.

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon

2007-10-22T21:17:00.000-03:00

I finally got a Ubuntu 7.10 CD I burned to verify, using a brand new CD instead of scrounging for unused ones at the bottoms of boxes really is a better way to go if you want reliable recordable media. Before I took it to my parents' house to upgrade my old laptop on which I installed Ubuntu 7.04 before letting them use it, I decided to pop it into my iMac on a lark to see what would happen. I didn't even expect the thing to be recognized as a bootable media but lo and behold..

The boot sequence was lasting an excruciatingly long time, and I figured it had choked, but wouldn't you know it..

I still hate this whole brownish-orange theme that the Ubuntu people have going on, but props to them for at least being the one organization not adopting pastal blue as their colour scheme of choice. I just wish it was a colour set that didn't bring back memories of an evening mixing too much Guinness with chicken korma.

The above pictures of my messy desk popped right up on the screen when I plugged the camera into the iMac's USB 2 port. The photo management program loaded so fast I thought it was a USB error before the pictures started appearing. I would have uploaded them straight to Flickr from there but the system didn't detect my Airport wireless card. Too bad. Also I didn't really investigate it but I wasn't seeing any fancy 3D Compiz Fusion effects among the icons or the windows on the desktop, so I assume that it wasn't detecting the Radeon graphics card buried inside m iMac somewhere. (Sorry PC users, those of us who don't pay more for graphics cards than for XBoxes don't tend to remember the exact model they have installed at all times.)

But I was pretty happy that the thing just booted. It's not like I was going to install it or anything, especially since my name is already on the Little Mac Shoppe's handy dandy Leopard list, and even in my 'gotta try every new Linux distro there is' days of the late 90s / early 2000s I didn't do 2 OS installs in 4 days. It's just as well, too, since booting back into OS X and getting a fully-functional desktop took less time than any single bootup phase on a fresh Ubuntu install. The Linux people really need to look into concurrent booting. It does wonders.

So that little adventure concluded, I moseyed on over to the parents' place and began the upgrade fun. Except, that upgrading was not an obviously easy thing to do. I put the CD in and it wanted to guide me through wiping out the whole hard drive. This was the default option. BAD THING.

Instead I had to manually edit the partition tables.. and it wouldn't let me do things the intuitive way, instead I got to hold the answer to "what's 16007 - 1024" in my head so I had enough partition space left to make properly-sized a swap partition. The long-standing user-friendly Linux problem that as soon as you stumble off the easy default path they laid out for you you're back in the jungle is rearing its head again. But after that it just nicely went about its business copying itself onto the partition I laid out for it.. And the neatest thing about installing from a Live CD was that I was able to surf the web while the new OS was installing itself. Now, I know I'll be too giddy watching the shiny bubbly progress bar go on its merry way while I spend my Friday evening installing Leopard to think 'gee I wonder if there's a new Slashdot post up yet?' it's still damn impressive that Ubuntu lets you do this, point for Ubuntu.

Now, after rebooting is where I notice the fatal mistake I made. Back when I installed Feisty on the Laptop, it very helpfully asked if I wanted to migrate the user profiles and documents folders from the Windows XP partition into Ubuntu. This worked great, and al lthe documents and usernames were in Ubuntu just as they appeared in Windows. Now, here's where the fatal mistake comes in: I didn't realize that instead of just pointing to the Documents folder on the Windows partition, it just copied the whole thing over. SO when I backed up the Evolution e-mail folder to what I thought was the documents folder on the Windows partition that I was going to leave alone, I was actually just copying it to the NEW documents folder on the Linux partition that I was about to obliterate. BAD BAD BAD THING. MINUS MANY POINTS FOR UBUNTU. I know I should have been more diligent and backed it up to an external drive, but I left that at home, and I was just so taken with Ubuntu's otherwise quite intuitive nature that I figured it was intuiting the same mental path I was, that why would you copy a users' documents when you can point to their old documents folder, and then he can have his most up-to-date changes in his Windows partition if he boots back into Windows and wants to do some work. Sadly, this wasn't the case, and a few weeks' worth of work and e-mails are now gone forever.

Fortunately it wasn't too bad in any real sense, since a lot of the e-mails were still sitting on the ISP's servers, but I am still bitter that Ubuntu pulled a rather obnoxious user lock-in move like that - effectively making work you do in Ubuntu invisible to Windows, at least for users who don't know how mount points work - supposedly Ubuntu's intended audience.

Anyway, all that said, the fact that in 40 minutes I was sitting in front of a fully-functional operating system that was more than adequately secured against viruses and spyware, had perfectly working installs of OpenOffice, FireFox and Evolution, and which didn't require a single driver CD for a camera or scanner or printer, is absolutely amazing. If it weren't for the partition thing then my parents certainly could have swung the Ubuntu install. There's no way I'd say the same leaving them with a Windows XP CD and a pile of driver discs and the final "oh, I hope you burned your network card driver to a CD before your system crashed" farewell.

Windows is very nearly completely irrelevant to my computing universe. And Ubuntu is starting to play as big a role in this as OS X is.

I still hate their colour scheme, though.

Handy-dandy Business Writing Pointer of the Day

2007-10-22T10:18:00.000-03:00

Anytime you think to use the word "Action" as a verb, as in "I'll action this item immediately" you can replace it with "act on", and save yourself a letter while preserving our beloved English language from turning into a pidgin cesspool quite so quickly.

Don't Verb Nouns!^TM

Kim Barlow Saturday Oct 20 @ Baba's

2007-10-20T18:03:00.001-03:00

Wow, am I ever glad I still check the front page of peilocals.com, on a whim I was wondering what to do tonight and did a double take when I saw that Kim Barlow was playing here.

I first heard her music when CBC Radio's Morning Edition had her on back in about 2001, interviewing her about living in the Yukon and how she writes her music. They played her song "Goodbye to a Boy" and it was so upbeat and humourous and witty and the music was uniquely melodic, her skilled musicianship was pretty obvious but understated - she uses a banjo as a proper country folk/music instrument, not an indie rock cliché. Her lyrics were playful and personal, the kind that make you feel like you're really able to put yourself in the shoes of the person singing them. As soon as the song ended I immediately went online and searched for how to order her CD. I ended up getting her first 2 CDs, Huminah and Gingerbread, directly from Caribou Records. When they arrived there was a hand-written note thanking me for my order. It was very interesting how ordering something online actually ended up being a more personal experience than just going into a store and buying something.

Anyway, I know this is short notice, and that only about 5 or 6 people even read this site, but if you are in Charlottetown tonight you should absolutely try and make it to the show at Baba's tonight. Also Tim Vesely formerly of the Rheostatics will be doing a set and local singer Nikkie will start things off. I'll be parked in my usual music appreciation seat probably looking like I don't want to talk to anyone just because I'm listening intently. This isn't true, please say hello :)

Update: The show was a good one, but Kim Barlow's set was a little disappointingly short. It was very cool how Great Aunt Ida, Tim and Kim all changed instruments around and played on each others' sets. I bought her new CD, Champ but haven't gotten a chance to listen to it yet. There are only a handful of singers/bands that I own more than 2 albums by, and she's now one of them.

Bogart is Famous

2007-10-19T16:20:00.000-03:00

My roommate's cat, Bogart, is in the latest PEI Humane Society newsletter, so I figured I'd let him show off a bit.

Alejandropedia

2007-10-16T23:01:00.001-03:00

Slowcoasterwikipedia
Originally uploaded by Alejandro the Great.

So apparently someone likes my conert photos, since this picture that I took at Shoreline 2005 has made it onto the Wikipedia page for Slowcoaster as of Tuesday Oct 16th 2007.

I think that's pretty sweet, especially since I only ever took pictures to give myself a visual memory of a concert that I wouldn't normally have had. Anyway, we'll see how long this stays up.

I just think it's neat.

More Michael Hlinka Drivel on My Radio

2007-10-16T09:55:00.001-03:00

A good motivation for me to get to work early is to avoid hearing this radio columnist's voice even for a second.

Yesterday's bit of warmed-over Reaganomics was about how we should all stop complaining that we don't get enough vacation time. He starts with the old saw about how if you really loved your job it wouldn't feel like work. Well, I like my job as much as any other, but I like sleeping in and travelling and going to the beach a hell of a lot more. And people with families like to spend time with them, if they're good parents, anyway. Sorry, sir, but cutesy clichés are not getting this week's column off to a good start. And it gets worse.

Hlinka's points:

- The US has the lowest number of vacation days but the highest "standard of living". He doesn't say where this rating comes from or what it even measures. I suspect he's making use of the misleading way extremes on the high-end skew up "average" numbers to make the 'average' person feel like they're better off than they are. Sure the US's GDP per capita is higher than other countries', but how much of that is actually allocated to your particular capita? Not as much as an 'average' would seem to indicate.

But then, the faint hope that he might say something sensible..

- European countries, which have the most vacation days for workers, have a higher quality of life than the United States, but says this is not related to vacation time - does not explain why. At all. It's just a hand-waving 'please ignore this inconvenient fact' kind of dismissal.

He concludes this tax-payer funded waste of my time by saying that success is not given by government, it's something you go and get for yourself. But you don't get it by letting your boss pressure you into giving up your family's trip so he can make his bogus time estimates. That makes you a slave. On the other hand, if I have 5 weeks of paid vacation in a year, I might use that time to get the gears moving on a small business I might want to start. That's real freedom and opportunity, wringing every waking moment out of your workers is not.

Christ, what an asshole.

Rockin' the 8-Bit Tie

2007-10-16T08:26:00.001-03:00

Rockin' the 8-Bit Tie
Originally uploaded by Alejandro the Great.

Thinking About Baseball

2007-10-15T23:05:00.000-03:00

I'm still sort of adrift in the baseball world, ever since the Expos were decimated and eventually moved to Washington I've had no team to call my own. But this Summer I started watching a few Braves games on TBS, just because it was more interesting than anything else on TV on a given night. And I am finding that I still enjoy baseball a lot even when I'm not emotionally invested in a single team.

It's the same right now as I'm sitting here back watching the Cleveland Indians leading the Boston Red Sox 4-2 in the 8th inning of tonight's game. Instead I seem to be, at the gut-level, cheering against whoever is batting at the time. I have always appreciated good fielding, and an exceptionally good pitcher would become the complete hilight of any team or series. A hit feels like the pitcher lost the duel, and since I'm watching the pitcher do his work all game, from his perspective, facing the batter, I seem to identify with him more than with the batter. A no-hitter would be much more exciting for me to watch than a blowout.

Watching Matsuzaka pitch with his huge repertoire of pitches he can throw is like watching a hero face down a series of challengers. (Though I'd still rather see Cleveland win and go on to the World Series, a good pitcher is my favourite part of the game.)

This reminds me of the old question I used to ponder in times past: If you could build robots and teach them to play perfect baseball, who would have the advantage, the pitcher or the batter? My guess would be the batter, where any robot that could accurately judge if a pitch was a ball or a strike should be perfectly capable of hitting the ball in such a way as to get a hit, if not a home run. So this makes the position of pitcher a little more daunting and more of a heroic fight against the inevitability that the batter will eventually learn how to hit whatever you throw at him. You have to fight the edge of physics to get a certain rotation or change in speed, and all he has to do is swing the club at the right time to beat you.

Of course there are other nights where I would be writing a post romanticizing the relationship between baserunners and coaches and the cat and mouse game of trying to steal a base, but tonight I'm particularly admiring good defence.

Eagle vs. Shark

2007-10-12T06:14:00.000-03:00

It was nice to get out and do something that's been an off-and-on comfort for me since I've moved back to Charlottetown. I went to City Cinema by myself, got my coffee and dark chocolate Zero bar, and took up my obligatory spot in the front row on the right to see a movie I'm sure most people would resent me for getting them to come with me to see.

Eagle vs. Shark on Wikipedia: Link. Coles Notes version of the plot is that Lily, an awkward and whimsical fast food employee has a crush on a customer who comes in at the same time every day and gets the same thing, and is just as short and unconversational with her as every other customer. But she paints all sorts of qualities onto him to the point that she can seem to put up with any amount of rudeness and selfish behaviour as they meet at a dress-up party and start a relationship. She then follows him to his home town and meets his strange family as he prepares to get revenge on a school bully using his martial arts skills.

This film is taking an analogous place in my mind to the film Napoleon Dynamite as the British version of The Office has to the American version. Where Michael Scott is as socially myopic as David Brent, him and Napoleon Dynamite are still portrayed as sympathetic characters whom you want things to turn out well for in the end. But in this film Jarrod is the worst kind of dork. Not a 'nerd', because as Milhouse put so well, "nerds are smart". The actor, Jemaine Clement, captures the petulant, self-absorbed, pathologically lying and completely un-empathetic social outcast that doesn't have the redeeming qualities of the stereotypical late-blooming hard-working geek.

Something else the film hits on very acutely is the unaspirant service industry class that many twenty-somethings fall into, where their social eccentricities are tolerated much more than in the corporate world, and who get by at their jobs in video game stores and fast food restaurants and come home to try and make a go at finding a life outside of work, but the lack of focus that hampers their working life leaves them floundering at hobbies like Lilly's songwriting and Jarrod's bizarre obsessions with candle-making and revenge. You see similar stories of people around here in call centres and other entry-level jobs. Not the traditional working class who could make a go at getting a decent manufacturing job and eventually support a family and take up a respected role in society. This emerging generation has no pre-set plan laid out for them. And I think the film captures the essence of young people facing a life in a world that doesn't seem to have anything to offer them eerily well.

The important progression of the story has Jarrod getting perpetually colder to Lilly to try and push her away before she rejects him, but she stubbornly keeps on believing that there's someone worth being with inside there. And what makes this movie distinct from what you'd expect from an American movie is the fact that there may in fact not be a likeable person under there. The viewer spends the whole film wishing the prick would just go away and that the poor girl would find someone who was nicer to her. It does end on a nice note, though, so don't let me leave you with the impression that this movie wasn't enjoyable, it was. But in the most awkward way of getting around to it as I can imagine.

Remember that commercial...

2007-10-01T10:30:00.001-03:00

OK, so I'm coming to the realization that some of my most cherished memories as a kid were watching commercials on TV. Like, the thrill of seeing a toy advertized, and then actually getting that Starcom or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.. that was a real tangible pleasure. (If anyone else remembers Starcom toys I'll be seriously impressed. They were the ones that had space ships with a moving part gadget that used magnets, so you didn't need batteries. Greatest thing ever.)

Anyway this morning I suddenly got a song in my head, it was kind of a chant with no words at all.. just "Oh way oh way oh way oh waaayy oh oh .. " and I was thinking it had somehting to do with a jungle setting. Then I was picturing a bottle of some sort, swinging on a vine. OK, this has to be from an ad for something, and yep, I remembered it was an ad for Cool Mint Listerine. But since the song it used didn't have lyrics, I was afraid I'd never be able to find it. And in this age of Google and the Youtubes, it is an absolute requirement that any whim or thought MUST be satisfied, no matter how ridiculous. Fortunately a google search for "listerine commerical song" brought me to the exact right answer, "Tarzan Boy" by Baltimora.

Man the 80s were an exciting time for music. You could be bombastic and not be embarrassed about it.

Also, an interesting thing about Listerine. Scope came in a rounded bottle, but Listerine came in a bottle that has an indent in the middle. Apparently this is suppsed to make it look like a barbell, to give the appearance of toughness, while Scope was meant to appeal to people who found Listerine too harsh, so that was why Listerine came out with the Cool Mint version. That's your marketing lesson for the day.

Man, they just don't make ads like this anymore. Good times.

You Pick the Price

2007-09-30T20:44:00.000-03:00

Radiohead are releasing a new album, In Rainbows, They're selling pre-orders for a Discbox to be shipped on or before December 3rd, and are also offering a digital download, supposedly to be out within ten days.

Here's the neat thing about the digital download, as discovered by Moe C.:

i added the hard copy to my basket just to see, and it was $40. i added the digital download and the price was a fill in field. there was a clickable question mark. THAT said "it's up to you", with another question mark. that one said "no really, it's up to you!"

Considering a new album from iTunes costs $9.99, And Apple and the record company would be taking their rather substantial chunk from that, which would probably not make even the $2 or so that a band typically makes off of a CD sale. So if even one Radiohead fan in five fills in the very same amount, $9.99, they'll come out ahead. Especially since this is on top of the fact that they've already sold you the boxed set.

It would be very interesting to see what the eventual average price people choose to fill in would be.

As for the album itself, I have not been paying attention to the rumour mill at all so I have not heard a thing about any hints about musical direction they might be heading in. I just hope they are heading in one, the last few albums have been good, but it feels like they haven't progressed much since the 90s. They're still good enough that I'll probably still get it sooner or later, though. They're just one of those bands that I tend to expect more from.

More Loonie Talk

2007-09-27T23:29:00.000-03:00

You know, I still find it bizarre that Canada is the only country in the world where you'll find media reports filled with doom and gloom and predictions of widespread disaster because our currency is going up. I'm picturing an obsequious little nebbishy Walter Mitty telling his boss "Oh, it's OK, sir, you don't have to pay me what I'm worth, I promise I won't go work for the nice man across the street. Yes I know it's costing me more to drive to work and feed my family and heat my home, but I'm comfortable in this little rut right here. Thank you, sir."

See, the other news that happened the same day as our dollar reached parity with the U.S. dollar was that the U.S. dollar sunk to the lowest point in history against the Euro, €1.00 = $1.40 USD. (Mac OS X power tip of the day: Option+Shift-2 will make a Euro symbol. Sweet.) This means that while Americans can buy less of our oil and nickel and lumber, Europeans can buy a lot more of it, and they can also afford to bring it over there. Tying your economy so much to one neighbour because it's easier than developing a shipping industry is proving to be a little shortsighted.

And I'm glad we're not doing anything or even making noises towards artificially creating a lower dollar. If our government did that I would personally consider that they robbed me and 30 million other Canadians of the value of our own money just so some lumber company wouldn't be inconvenienced.

Speaking of the government, if Stephen Harper keeps on paying down the debt and making sensible tax cuts - the value of the interest we would have paid given back in tax cuts is so utterly sensible it makes me weep - I may not burn him in effigy if he's elected again. Still won't vote for him though, don't worry. Jack Layton did make a good point about infrastructure, though. We don't exactly need to wait for one of our own bridges to collapse before thinking it might be a good idea to do some engineering reviews of our cities a little more often.

If Ireland can silently raise itself up so that its standard of living has surpassed that of the United Kingdom without the benefit of natural resources, we shouldn't have any trouble growing either because of or in spite of the US's weakening economy.

My Most Unhealthy Breakfast Yet

2007-09-25T10:57:00.000-03:00

So last week I was running late for work and was really hungry, so I went to McDonald's (Oh Stratford and your myriad dining choices. I hate you so.) I usually would get a muffin or maybe an egg mcmuffin and a coffee. But I was especially hungry that day and thought I'd finally try the McGriddle.

It took them forever to make, it seemed like it was taking one poor girl her whole attention for about 10 minutes. But what I ended up with actually looked kind of decent, even remotely resembling what the picture looked like.

And yes, it tasted very very good and went through me like a waterslide, as McDonald's food has a tendency to do.

But, this post is not about that monstrosity of sausage and egg and maple-syrup-filled wonder.

It's about what I made today.

You see, I hadn't slept much last night, and was up and about earlier than usual out of sheer boredom with listening to the crows and thinking about what a miserable day it was going to be.

And when I have extra time I like to have a breakfast involving slightly more than the long-suffering bowl of Oatmeal crisp and glass of orange juice.

Today I had some sausages in the freezer I needed to use, so I figured a traditional time to eat such things was breakfast, so I grabbed those, threw them in the frying pan and set them a-go. Sausage and eggs and toast is a perfectly heterosexual breakfast, I thought, a good way to start a terrible sleep-deprived day. Instead of toast, though, I just had bagels, which is fine, they're a little heavy but bread is basically bread, now, isn't it?

One problem, I remembered halfway through cooking everything that I don't own a toaster. And I was thinking of ways to actually toast my bagel, the clothes dryer was out right away because I needed to clean the lint traps. Al Gore would be severely displeased if I used the whole oven to toast a bagel with. So, my nexxt thought was to slosh my sausage and soon-to-be-fried eggs over to the side of the pan and throw the two bagel halves on there.

Cutting to the chase, they take a long time to actually 'toast' this way, but they do a fantastic job of soaking up the butter and grease and runny egg yolk in the pan. Let's hope for the sake of our collective public health that fried bagels don't become all the rage once someone sees this post.

And of course, the natural thing to do was to stack the eggs and sausage together on the drippingly delicious bagel and throw some cheese on there for good measure.

I still made fun of my roommate when he got a McGriddle, though. Because everyone knows McDonald's food is bad for you.

Facebook Job Application

2007-09-23T19:03:00.000-03:00

I got a chuckle out of this Facebook job ad. They're following in Google's footsteps in trying to attract the best people by being humourous and clever in how they advertize for job applicants. Link.

eam of government programmers to decode copious amounts of possibly illegal wiretaps. Your congressional hearing is coming up, and you need to have these wiretaps decoded as soon as possible so you can give as informative testimony as possible (and clear your posterior of any wrong doing!). Unfortunately, government programmers are not the most well adjusted, sharpest tools in the shed, and they require decisive and firm leadership (e.g. you) to guide them. Programmers are assigned integer numbers to protect their classified identities, while wiretap victims are referred to by their first names.

Due to OSHA regulations, you will always have exactly the same number of programmers as wiretap victims, and each programmer decodes exactly one wiretap. Because this is the government, to decode a wiretap it takes at least 1 server hour per letter in the victim's name. All programmers share the same secured government terminal and they can only work one at a time. Once signed in, programmers must stay at the terminal until they are finished decoding a wiretap. To make things worse, each programmer has certain personality quirks and foibles which can alter their efficiency.
Programmers with an even number suffer from vowelitosis, they require an additional 1.5 hours of work for every vowel in the victim's name.
Programmers with an odd number suffer from consonentia, they require an additional 1 hour of work for every consonant in the victim's name.
Programmers whose numbers share prime factors with the number of letters in a victim's name are struck with a severe phobia, that requires an additional 2 hours of therapy per common factor. Due to DHS regulations, the programmer must stay at the terminal while under therapy, preventing others from using it. For example, it took programmer 12 (factors of 2 and 3) an extra 4 hours of therapy to decode NORMAN's file (factors of 2 and 3).
You are given 26 programmers, numbered from 1 through 26. The 26 wiretap victims are named as follows:

Makes me wonder if they're kidding on the square just a little. They certainly make their money data mining the hell out of their social graphs to better target ads, and you know the US government has been working with telecom companies to spy on innocent people pretty extensively. This jokey job ad is at least their attempt to keep up a good guy public image the way Google's been mostly successful at doing since they began.

Something else that was interesting was the languages they would accept solutions in:

You may use any of the following programming languages:
C++
Java
JavaScript
OCaml/SML
Perl
PHP
Python
For extra credit, you may submit additional solutions in the other languages as well as solutions in languages not listed here.

Interesting omissions are C# or any other Microsoft-preferred language. Also OCaml is a neat inclusion, it's a very academic-focused language, perhaps they're looking for more specialized algorithmic experts who might usually turn their noses up at regular software development jobs.

I also liked this bit at the end:

Please send your code and solutions (and a resume) to:

{ (0xFACEB00C >> 2) in decimal format } @ facebook.com

Atta Boy, Canadian Dollar

2007-09-20T14:12:00.000-03:00

Well, as I wrote back in 2004 in the post My Prediction, the Canadian dollar has reached parity with the US dollar as of 2:00pm Atlantic time today.

This makes me think I should go buy some shoes in the J C Penny in New Hampshire that is itself bigger than the Charlottetown Mall. I imagine the parking lots near the Canadian border will have more than the usual sight of discarded Canadians' shoes as people leave their old ones right in the lot and put on the new ones to get by customs and save a couple of bucks in duty.

I'm starting to think that the credit crisis, US current accounts deficits, the strong Euro are all forming a perfect storm to deflate the US dollar. Unfortunately the Canadian dollar only looks strong when you compare it to the US dollar, but the Euro and the Yen have been growing steadily against both, only slightly less dramatically against the Canadian dollar. On world markets I suspect that most currency traders still view the two currencies as good or poor buys together, buying both or selling both at once based on what's happening in the US economy. Normally this isn't a bad idea, since our trade relationship is so tight, but I really do see the credit crisis in the US not repeating here. Sure Toronto and Vancouver have ridiculous real estate prices, but I think this reflects genuine demand, rather than inflated prices based on over-eager lending to people who turn around and spend more money than they have competing for every available home up for sale in nearly every major market.

I'm not too worried about this being too harmful to Canada's economy. What will hurt our exporters more than the dollar is simply the dismal economy down South, if people aren't building new houses because they can't get loans, it won't matter how cheap our dollar is if no one wants to by any lumber at all. But at least a strong Canadian dollar will help our ability to trade with the rest of the world, increasing our economic footprint and allowing us to engage on hopefully what will become a more open basis with Europe.

I hope Stephen Harper continues to pay down our debt and doesn't bring in any drastic tax cuts. I wonder if all the staunch supporters of Bush and his tax cuts for the wealthy realize that while they just had their taxes cut by 40%, the value of the money they now have is worth half what it was before Bush came along. But at least they still get to stick it to poor people.

Home Office

2007-09-20T01:14:00.001-03:00

`Home Office
Originally uploaded by Alejandro the Great.

The impromptu deployment command centre

Career Profile Test Thing - Now With Commentary

2007-09-17T20:00:00.000-03:00

I stole this from g. who stole it from Jenna.

1. Go to Career Cruising, www.careercruising.com
2. Put in Username: nycareers and Password: landmark.
3. Take their "Career Matchmaker" questions.
4. Post the results
5. Put the careers you have seriously considered in italics, and the careers in which you have worked/do work in bold.

Multimedia Developer - a couple of the software development jobs I've had would fall into this category. Not sure I'd rush into it again, but there's a lot of neat libraries to play with when you are on a good platform. (i.e., not windows.)
Anthropologist - This was a total surprise, can't picture myself doing the stereotypical trudging through the jungle studying primitive tribes thing, but I do like to read and write about social structures and history which would include anthropology I guess.
Professor - Ugh. No.
Website Designer - Still doing a lot of this, but more on the platform integration / project management end than the pixel-pushing.
Historian - I've always loved history, for sure. Not sure whom I'd work for or what I'd study but maybe historical writer of some sort would be up my alley.
Foreign Language Instructor
ESL Teacher - Wouldn't have the patience
Lobbyist- I'd shoot myself
Economist - I always end up getting caught up in the economics underlying whatever political phenomenon I'm reading about. I could see getting very passionate about this.
Computer Support Person - Been there, done that, buried the bodies.
Corporate Trainer - Training for what?
Fashion Designer - Ugh, what?
Cartoonist / Comic Illustrator - Can't draw for shit, but neither can Scott Adams, so who knows?
Computer Programmer - D'uh.
Jeweler - I'd be too eager to tell you how many African kids lost their arms for the engagement ring I'm making you.
Craftsperson - Total lack of visual crativity would hamper me here, not to mention little to no coordination.
Desktop Publisher - I actually have done a bit of this in my time, flyers, etc. Wouldn't want to have to deal with clients for a living in any kind of visual design job, as it's one of those thigns everyone thinks they have a worthwhile opinion about.
Potter - Harry Potter? Bring it.
Computer Trainer - I can say pretty confidently that I'm a very very good teacher after developing and delivering a couple of technical courses for work. Don't know if I'd want to do it for 8 hours a day 5 days a week but it is an interesting challenge and I enjoy the feedback and answering people's questions.
Criminologist - I get too worked up about corrupt cops and institutional dysfunction in the criminal justice system to want to be a part of it.
Venture Capitalist - I'm too pessimistic, I'd want to take your idea and do it myself because you'll only mess it up.
Electrician - Zap! no thank you.
Curator - I think my impatience for doing ESL teaching would impede me here as well.
Management Consultant - c.f. lobbyist.
Set Designer - No inspiration.

Not bad, nothing really surprising, though I'd have guessed computer programmer would have scored higher based on the way I answered the questions. Maybe I'll just go ask g. to let me come work with her doing anthropology type stuff. :)

PEI Shellfish Festival

2007-09-15T20:33:00.000-03:00

So I never thought I would have such a good time at something like the PEI Shellfish Festival before I went this year, but the entertainment and the events really were as good as the food wsa.

We got there and had a couple of free samples of mussels and chowder from the chowder competition, and then got some more substantial food. The Culinary Institute had their truck there, the one that's a fully-equipped kitchen in the back of a truck, very impressive, and they were serving mussels cooked in various ways and oysters and other things. I got Casino Style mussels, and a bowl of chowder from one of the vendors. Sadly the girl selling the chowder didn't quite know what was in it or anything, I think I sort of embarrassed her when I asked. It was pretty good, though, your basic mix of seafood chowder.

Then they announced the winner of the chowder cooking competition, and it ended up being Duncan Smith from the Claddagh Oyster House, who's my friend Kelly's husband. He was really not expecting to win, he even said that he hoped he didn't win because if he did he'd have to make the damn stuff every day, but he ended up destroying the competition. Second and third places had something like 147 points and 145 points each, very very close to each other. And Duncan's score was so high that they didn't even say it when they announced the winner, he ended up winning by more than 20 points. For a dumpling he had to get Kelly to run to the store and grab wonton shells at the last minute because the ingredient he wanted to use wasn't working out right because of the humidity today. Kelly was happiest about the prizes, which included a full set of Paderno pots and a $500 gift certificate from A1 vacuum sales, which is not a place where I think I'd spend $500 but if I had the chance I would absolutely love one of those nice canister electrolux deals that last 20 years and are indestructible.

The funniest thing about Duncan's chowder was that he called it something like "Dad's own recipe", but in reality his parents never cooked anything more ambitious than chicken nuggets and Kraft Dinner when he was a kid.

After that was the oyster shucking competition. Not the most exciting thing when you hear about it, but trust me, it's a good time to watch them up there shucking away. You had people who were first time competitors going up against experienced old pros who are repeat national champtions, and you could really see the grace and skill that the veterans had. The had the whole thing shown up on a big screen at the front so you could see in detail all the action, and spot damaged oysters and ones that weren't fully severed from the shells and other things that would result in a penalty.

In the end the penalty time was what really mattered, too. Second and third places all had very low times, 1:02 and 1:07 each I believe, but they both had 30 seconds in penalty time added on. Amazingly, the kid who won had only 2 seconds, which means all of his oysters were perfectly shucked, not something you normally find in competition where time is the critical factor. He also then went on to help beat the American team in the Canada vs. The World shucking relay competition, another fun spectacle, and again Canada lost on flat time but ended up winning because of judging and penalties.

The other big penalty was for blood on the oysters, since cutting yourself is pretty common apparently. I made sure to check carefully before eating the oysters that they brought out to the side of the stage, where I was strategically standing, to let people have the oysters from the competition, just in case.

Everyone who thinks they don't like oysters needs to try them again, and chew them this time. If you swallow them all your tasting is salty slime, that's no good, it's the texture of them that is why they're so prized. Trust me, there's a reason people like them so much.

Update: Duncan won the international portion of the chowder competition today, with a $2000 prize and trophy. He's the first islander ever to win it. I'm guessing he's going to be utterly sick of making this stuff by this time next year. I know I'm gonna have to go to the Claddagh and get a bowl soon.

It's been too long since I've seen ASCII art

2007-09-14T23:38:00.001-03:00

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"Oh, Neat!"

2007-09-14T09:40:00.001-03:00

That's right, people, I'm bring back "neat!" as an exclamation. I like the innocent wonder it conveys.

When you say "that's cool" you're making a value judgment, you're saying "this deserves to be called 'cool'." If you aren't cool yourself, you don't have the authority to deem something cool in the eyes of actual cool people.

But anyone can be awed or impressed by something and say "that's neat", since one imagines it usually being said by an innocent four year old seeing a wind-up car zoom across the floor for the first time.

I think the world needs a little more neat-ness.

Ads in CBC Podcasts

2007-09-12T15:56:00.000-03:00

I just played the latest As It Happens podcast and was pretty jarred to hear "Delivery of this podcast is brought to you by the all new Cadillac..." Hearing a CBC radio announcer voicing an advertisement is quite off-putting. You expect these voices to be giving you real news and the reputation of CBC Radio's objectivity as a public broadcaster lends these voices an air of authority and trustworthiness. This evaporates when you hear one of them reading ad copy.

Yes I know it costs money to deliver these thigns, but CBC's been able to do live streaming for over a decasde now without resorting to inserting audio ads in the content.

The way people listen to music and audio content now is no longer confined to listening to it live on a radio. As far as any listener is concerned, this is CBC radio, it's how they listen to it now. So sticking an ad in ther eis not somehow less of a transgression against their duty as a public proadcaster than putting ads in their live broadcasts.

They put baner ads on CBC.ca last year, now this, what line will they cross next?

Re-building the Pantry

2007-09-10T18:40:00.000-03:00

Of course, by "pantry" I mean the one cupboard in my kitchen I'm now setting aside for spices and ingredients to things I haven't cooked in a while but used to really enjoy making. The frozen pizzas and cans of soup are getting demoted, to make way for more "real food".

I've had phases where I'd cook every night, and make pretty elaborate dishes, intersperse with phases of going out for lunch every day and just being satisfied with a sandwich or something small in the evenings.

I basically taught myself to cook ever so slowly in the first Summer I lived by myself when I was 18 and living in Saint John doing my first co-op term at the Point Lepreau nuclear power plant. It wasn't a choice then, since NB Power paid its junior student workers, even fancy-shmancy computer science co-op students, rather little. Adding to that having to pay all my bills and also save up for school in the Fall and I can count on my fingers the number of times I ate out and picked up the bill.

Back then I didn't know much more about cooking than what I gathered by osmosis from eating what my mother made for us growing up. Now, this is nothing against her, she fed us well to be sure, but I was not overly eager to just cook the same things she always made during the first 18 years of my life. So on top of having to learn to cook with no real guidance, I also had to figure out just what kind of food it was I actually wanted to make.

So that Summer I figured out what cuts of meat were good (and / or cheap but still decent), how spices worked, which ones went with which ingredients well, all that.

Then it was back to University and the worst era of Beaver Foods crimes against human nutrition I've ever lived through. I still loved having someone do the cooking and cleaning, though. Making ood food was a pleasure, to be sure, but not an addiciton, I could live without it.

Then the Winter term was my next Co-op term at Lepreau. I had a roommate this time (what ever happened to that Greg fellow, anyway?) and an unfortunate couple of Role Playing Games I was determined to finish, just to see that 2 minutes of video I can go on Youtube and watch right now with zero effort. But I still cooked most days.

Unfortunately, with having to share the kitchen, and going to Fredericton or home to see the girlfriend most weekends instead of spending them in the city by myself, I only had a window in the evenings to cook. So I'd get home at around 5:00pm, after the 45 minute trek home from the isolated wasteland where they built the plant, muck about on the Internet for a while if I could get there before Greg decided to play Need for Speed III, then cook when it was my turn in the kitchen. But by the time the cooking and eating and cleaning was all finished it would sometimes end up being 8:30 or 9:00pm. Which left me about an hour to walk through caves and fight random battles with the same silly RPG monsters over and over until I got sleepy and went to bed for the night to get up stupidly early the next day and go to work again.

So this sort of turned me off of spending much time in the kitchen, when I didn't have a lot of time to begin with. My next work term was when I was making more decent money and could afford to eat at the Regent Mall food court (when you work in the Fredericton Knowledge Park you don't have a lot of options) and I was never hungry in the evenings so I'd just have somehting small. This has mostly been my habit when employed ever since.

The exception to this was the year or so I spent in Fredericton. I was working a lot, and going through some pretty hard times emotionally that I've never quite straightened out or really talked about, and won't go into now, but I felt like the only pleasure I really allowed myself was when I'd get home in the evenings and make a meal. I was experimenting with making different kinds of curries and pasta dishes, and loved spending a lot of time in the kitchen, because I didn't have to talk to my roommates - the air of pre-occupied urgency I took on in the kitchen kept them from expecting small-talk, and I just forgot about everything that was stressing me out and making me miserable that whole time.

Now I am not feeling particularly stressed, can't say I have anything of substance to be unhappy about, but I do have more time now, at least I have the opportunity to make the time, and I'd like to start cooking and exploring doing interesting things with food again. Charlottetown has a lot of great places to eat out, and most are pretty reasonably priced, but I now have the pleasure of a kitchen with enough cupboard space that I can call my own and a good grocery store within walking distance so I can get inspired to try something right now and just go and get what I need and make it.

I'm excited.

As a side-tidbit, if you haven't tried it. Oishi sauce tastes so good you're basically cheating.

Madeleine L'Engle, 1918-2007

2007-09-07T21:04:00.000-03:00

Wow, what do I even write about Madeleine L'Engle? I remember that her books were the first truly engrossing novels I ever read, at an age when teachers made reading into a chore and an obligation rather than what it really could be.

A friend of my mothers whom I'm still close to read me A Wrinkle in Time when I was ten. A chapter or two a day and we'd talk about it and really get into what she was writing about and what it might mean. My favourite experience with a book by far.

I don't even remember the overarching plots of the Murray trilogy, only a few very powerful and sometimes very freaky individual scenes, when Meg had to interrogate her school principal and his exact double to find who was the real one, getting into her head and trying to understand her reasoning. Or any description of Charles Wallace, the young boy who always seemed not of this world.

The fact that she wrote about young kids who were not sports stars or tough streetwise kids that you see in movies, but who were the socially awkward children of briliant scientist parents and unsure of themselves and mistrustful of authority but unsure of what to look to instead, was what made me start to feel like I wasn't so ill-fitting and maybe there were other people like me out there.

She spoke to the reader in exactl the way the person who read me A Wrinkle in Time speaks to kids, like they're people, fully capable of understanding the world around them, but without the baggage and prejudices that tangle up the paths of adults.

Tesser well, Ms L'Engle.

In the Writeroom, With Black Curtains

2007-09-03T14:46:00.000-03:00

The nice thing about working on two projects at once is that you can procrastinate and sitll be productive. Get bored working on one thing, and switch over to doing something for your other work. Eventually I should be able to finish something, I hope.

One thing I’m enjoying using right now is a little program called WriteRoom for the Mac. It gives you a completely black screen with a blinking green block cursor when you first start the program, perfect for distraction-free writing.

To make it perfect all I’d really want is to have

Doc 1 Pg 1 Ln 1 Pos 1

At the bottom-left, and all the WordPerfect 5.1 function key mappings. It has some very cool features that I hadn’t thought of but are quite useful, like the fact that your cursor is kept at the centre of the screen, instead of eventually going way down at the bottom when you start to write anything larger than one screenful of text.

It nicely hides your dock and my other programs while you work, and really helps you focus on just the text, rather than always tempting you to adjust this font or line spacing or heading style.

Back when Linux was my primary desktop OS I used to find myself switching out of X-Windows to a full-screen terminal and coding in EMacs, with no pop-up syntax completion or other features that I’m convinced have killed my brain’s ability to code without all this hand-holding.

Right now I’m messing with Facebook’s application development APIs, maybe as an experiment I’ll drop my fancy IDEs (PHP doesn’t really have much in that department anyway) and go barebones again. Taking the 10 seconds to try and remember how an API call works instead of having it pop up for me might do my memory some good.

PS there's a similar program for Windows here: Writeroom for Windows: Write Without Distraction.

Birth and Death

2007-08-30T11:08:00.000-03:00

I've had a really strange week so far. I've had to attend two funerals, one for a co-worker who died tragically and one for my Aunt Ann who died suddenly but who had a history of health problems so it wasn't completely unexpected. The moods at the two funeral services were so different you could feel it in the air.

I was a pallbearer for my aunt, and even though it wasn't really a lot of work — you carry it from the back door of Hennessey's Funeral Home about 10 feet to the hearse, then another 10 feet to the burial site — it was a very profound feeling to hold up part of a person's weight and help them along on their final journey.

My father and his brothers and sister all shared a lot of memories of them growing up, which is always a side of my fatehr's childhood I never hear about directly from him in the same way. It seems lately that the only times we get out to Georgetown these days to see my father's family is for yet another funeral. I guess when you reach a certain age it just starts to happen, or you become more aware of it.

I still don't find myself getting very upset about death when it's a natural process, I just imagine it as part of life. My aunt had a bit of a hard life but she had a lot of friends and seemed to live each day as best as she could. When she had her 50th birthday she was very happy to reach 50 years old. When you think that most people would see turning 50 as a reason to feel depressed, I think it's quite a refreshing attitude to have had.

Then in between the funerals I attended a pre-natal class as part of the information gathering process I'm doing as part of a consulting job I'm starting into for a parenting support group here on the island. All of the parents-to-be were paying very close attention to the doula giving the presentation on various ways to ease the labour process, and everyone was asking questions and discussing their new babies, and it was all a very positive and upbeat atmosphere. Going straight from being in the receiving line at a wake to that was very heartening in a way. I was left with the comfort of knowing that time and life flow along mostly the way they're supposed to.

Apple Giving in to the Beast

2007-08-28T07:00:00.000-03:00

Note: If you fail this test, the rest of this post won't mean much to you.

Anyway, I'm trying out iWork '08 at the moment and mostly I like it. Office 2004 for the Mac still doesn't run very well on Intel processors. I can start up a Parellels session, boot Windows XP and start MS Word 2003 for Windows on my Mac quicker than the time it takes for Word:Mac to load on the same computer. So I'm looking for an alternative, and the Mac version of OpenOffice.org is just in 'it's coming' mode at the moment, which leaves iWork, newly upgraded to a brand new version.

Looking first at Pages, the word processor, it seems to give you a pretty nice selection of templates, and actual useful ones as opposed to 50 different greeting cards and other bullshit you et with most word processors. But something struck me, when I loaded up the 'modern letter' template:

Arial???

Apple, Apple, Apple, a long time ago, back in the 1980s, you actually paid for the use of the Helvetica font, and now, just weeks after its 50th birthday, you switch your default font to the bastardized clone that Microsoft paid to have developed just so they could weasel out of font licensing fees? Does this mean I'm going to have to do a "select-all -> font: Helvetica" every time I create a new document? Seriously, the good version is sitting right there in the fonts bar.

I'm just perplexed, is all. Maybe I'll write something substantial about iWork later when I've gotten more of a chance to use it.

Searching for the right word

2007-08-21T06:18:00.000-03:00

A Mexican friend IM'd me today, asking for what word I'd use in English, for when you're asked to do a task, and you will do it, but not right now.

I thought about it and the best thing I could come up with was 'Mañana'.

Which reminded me of this joke:

Spanish singer Julio Iglesias was on television with British TV host Anne Diamond when he used the word 'manyana'. Diamond asked him to explain what it meant.

He said that the term means "maybe the job will be done tomorrow, maybe the next day, maybe the day after that. Perhaps next week, next month, next year. Who cares?"

The host turned to Irishman Shay Brennan who was also on the show and asked him if there was an equivalent term in Irish.

"No. In Ireland we don't have a word to describe that degree of urgency," replied Brennan.

I'm sure this is apocryphal, since it's a takeoff on what Pete McCarthy said in his book McCarthy's Bar "The Spanish concept of mañana is said to be too urgent-sounding to be translated into Irish."

A Lesson in Performance

2007-08-19T23:48:00.000-03:00

So last night was the final night of the Island Stand-Up Showcase at the Arts Guild (no, I won't call it "the Guild", buzz off, Care.) I went by myself because I hadn't gone yet and I really did want to see how Taylor and Richard and Patrick and the rest were getting on with developing their acts.

I was very impressed with every one of the performers, but for different reasons. First up was Richard Shroeter, who did a lot of his trademark stories about his wife. I like his one joke about quietly slipping his pants off when his wife asks him to take the garbage out so he won't have to. He definitely toned down his act quite a bit, maybe just for time constraints (he had the shortest set), but some of the more awkward jokes he's made, which had me nearly dying when he's done them at Baba's, might best be left to the more understanding crowd.

Then came the surprise treat of the night, when they announced Lorne Elliot as the next performer. And that's what he ended up resembling more, a performer moreso than a strictly a stand-up comedian. He started off playing the ukulele and whistling a pretty intricate rendition of swan lake. Then he did a few jokes, parodying his knack for making fun of the town he's in by exposing how generic such jokes really are, but at the same time showing he knew his way around PEI culture as well as most islanders.

Then he did something which showed off his abilities as a speaker and performer. He said "well, I'm afraid I don't have much material tonight, since it was all very last-minute, but I do have plenty of ... Guardian. He then took out a copy of the guardian, and read the story of the guy who took a chain saw to a gazebo downtown, but punctuated and timed the reading in a way that generated more laughs than should reasonably be expected from a crowd which presumably already knew all the details of the story. This goes to prove the old adage that if you can get the audience to laugh if you make it seem like they're supposed to, and you do that by speaking in a way that sounds like every other time they've heard a joke told in the past. All credit to him, it was a funny bit and he pulled it off like very few other comedians in Canada could.

Next up was Patrick Ledwell, the rising star of the night, and he again impressed me with his easy ability to come up with new material. He had almost all new jokes from the last time I had seen him at Baba's, but he still told them very very well and you could tell that they were refined and practiced. You can tell his theatre background right away, and he had the longest set of the night while never dragging in the middle. I especially liked his bits about growing up in a big family and how getting a good kind of cereal was the most you could ever hope for for a treat.

After the break were the three edgier performers of the night, Taylor, Melissa Morse and François Webber. Taylor again brought the audience into his own head very well, shared his feelings and current thought processes very effectively, and pulled off what is definitely his trademark nervousness that looks like he could burst at any time. Since I've known him for so long I think I have a good intuitive feel for when he exaggerates, and when he wants the audience to think he's exaggerating but really isn't. It would be interesting to hear the opinion of someone who was seeing him for the very first time.

Melissa was the fifth one up, and once again showed her stage presence quite nicely. She also cut out some of the more offensive material from her act, which unfortunately meant that her very funny and stun-inducing opener was scrubbed. There must have been a "no rape jokes" directive given to all the comedians. She did a good job with her material, a lot of which I had heard before but which is very definitely reflective of her and she portrays a consistent persona which makes the material work together very well.

Last up was François, who reminded me the most of what you would expect from a working stand-up comedian. He's been on the Yuk Yuk's circuit recently so that would explain it. He had very smooth segues, consistently funny stuff, and was able to naturally just talk about himself in a way that seemed less rehearsed and more just a funny person talking to you, which I enjoyed a lot.

Lorne Elliot at the end of his set made special mention that he thought it was great that Charlottetown had a little scene like this happening. (Note, he didn't use the word "scene", of course.) And I have to agree, there are very few towns of 50,000 people that can both produce and support this kind of talent. Cue them all moving to Halifax and Toronto...

Soft Reboot

2007-08-16T21:08:00.000-03:00

I had a bunch of stuff written about making a positive change in my life and wanting to seek out and appreciate things that are of real value, but it was just a bunch of cryptic bullshit and I don't want to subject you to it. Let's just say I'm taking a long-term vacation from things that have only ever made me feel bad.

	kgs Late start to the day. Turned on NPR and guy with squeaky voice was swishing wine in his mouth and spitting it out. Outlaw that sound. 31 minutes ago from web
	garyvee u can listen hear!!!!! http://tinyurl.com/b26vsm 35 minutes ago from web
	garyvee I am on NPR's @weekendedition in 2 minutes anyone have a link to a website where I can hear it? tune into NPR now!!!!! 40 minutes ago from web

	ElizabethMay is going home 15 minutes ago from web
	jessamyn Richard Stallman's auto-reply mesage is totally strange. Why am I surprised? 24 minutes ago from NatsuLion
	ElizabethMay is watching the news. 27 minutes ago from web
	jacklayton the interview with Peter Mansbridge on CBC TV http://tinyurl.com/3mym2v 39 minutes ago from web
	jacklayton http://tinyurl.com/3mym2v 41 minutes ago from web