To put the debate at rest
I did a post a little while ago about things I may have done, and I might as well at least tell y'all which were true and which weren't.

1. Skydove out of a plane whilst it was very much not on the ground.
True. Skydiving is amazingly awesome and I highly recommend it to everyone. You're statistically more likely to die on the car ride to the airport than you are during the jump. Just don't pack your own chute.

2. Got impatient waiting for a stuck chair lift and jumped off.
Bogus. I've considered many a time, but haven't tried it. My sister, on the other hand, did fall off the chair while getting on one time. In her defense, she was probably about 6 or 7, and it was maybe a 4 foot drop into several more feet of fluffy powder.

3. Had a five-month long intensive background check done on me by the Canadian Secret Service, which included a polygraph test.
True. I'd explain more, but then I'd have to kill you.

4. Juggled machetes.
Bogus. I can juggle balls or beanbags or fruit, but haven't made the leap to oblong, funky-weight stuff like clubs, knives, machetes or chainsaws. Soon, though... soon.

5. Been hit by a fastball hard enough to stay in intensive care overnight.
Bogus. I played baseball for a little while when I was a kid, before I learned how silly the sport really is. At that age, kids tended not to have the physical strength to put others in the hospital.

6. Done a backwards two-and-a-half backflip off a 3 meter springboard.
True. I did springboard diving rather extensively when I was younger, and made it to the national level a couple of times. If I recall correctly, I have even competed in the same event as Alexandre Despatie, who was so much better than I was, it's not even funny. I have also done a forward double somersault from the one-meter, and reverse and inward flips as well (where the motion is the same as forward and backwards moves, respectively, but the somersault direction is reversed and you rotate towards the board).

7. Got my ass handed to me sparring a fourth-dan Taekwon-do black belt who also happens to be both a second-dan in Jiujustu as well as ex-Military (Airborne, I think, but terribly unsure).
True. This was at a Taekwon-do tournament where the genius decision was made to put all heavyweight black belts in the same division, regardless of rank. Result? Several awesome sparring matches, accompanied by a similar number of thorough beatings.

8. Written software currently in use in Health Centers all over Alberta.
Bogus. I did work for Health Canada for a summer, and I trained about a dozen people who work at said Health Centers in how to use their laptop and work remotely with VNC-style software, but I never wrote any software.

9. Shattered just under five inches of solid wood with my elbow.
True. This is immense fun. Don't try it at home though.

10. Constructed a model car powered by pressurized water.
True. For a science project in junior high school, we had to make a self-propelled car. My dad helped me set up a one-way valve and water tank apparatus on the chassis of a busted remote controlled car. The whole assembly was pressurized with a bike pump and went surprisingly far for the size of the bottle. Made a little bit of a mess though...

And so the truth comes out. Any questions?  ¶ 11:14 a.m. 0 comments

  Grab it while it's hot, kids (or, In which I vent profusely)
You might, if you were to spend a length of time with me, think that I like Russia. This could reasonably be inferred, and is to some extent true.

I also like music, and I like getting it digitally with a maximal selection and a minimum of fuss. Therefore, I officially endorse Allofmp3.com. I think Tycho of Penny Arcade! said it pretty well:

Every one of you already knows about this Soviet music service, but the experience has been so profound that I had to mention it. Quick information for you, if you don't know what I'm talking about: imagine that you could purchase digital media "by the pound," that is to say, purchase it according to the amount of space it takes up on the hard disk. Music as raw bits, a true commodity. That's essentially what the service is.

He's right, of course. I attempted an experiment in a similar vein this weekend with a thirty-dollar online cheque, and managed to find a veritable slew of music, all of it quality. Thanks to some recent (unwelcome, unhappy, etc etc) press, however, Allofmp3.com may be hit with the big, smelly arm of the recording industry. I highly recommend you carpe diem your way over there and take advantage of same while you can.

The interesting, the truly TRULY interesting bit about the Allofmp3.com story is how ironic it is. Here we have a music service that works. No DRM, lots of selection, incredible prices (~10c per track, or 1.70$ per album, depending on encoding, as you pay by file size), the format of your choice (yes, even OGGs), the list goes on. This service is popular and people like it. (If they didn't, it would not be getting the press or attention it is currently getting.) The entertainment industry gives the Me Too! treatment to every song that hits it big, and to every artist that scores a bit of mindshare. These same suit-types actively poll North America to try and find out who is appealing and who isn't. This economic machine has even gone so far as to try and take the whole "figure out if this is quality or not" out of their own hands!* And yet, they cannot mime a successful service**, nor listen to the customers when they say what they want to save their lives. I look at this, and all I can do is shake my head. People want to be able to do what they will with the things they buy. Customers do not want to be treated like criminals. WHY CAN'T YOU LISTEN!?

In the same post I linked to above, Tycho said that in trying to shut down Allofmp3, Christmas was being stolen. I postulate that since you can't "steal" a date or zeitgeist, instead, Santa Claus is being murdered with a hatchet. And nobody wants that, do they?

--------------------------------------------
* Trust me, I am so very aware that this is just another recipient of the patented Me Too! technique, you have no idea.

** One could make the argument that iTunes is a successful music service that works, and I would merely laugh at you, and point, and laugh some more (perhaps harder this time). Here's why.  ¶ 10:02 p.m. 0 comments

  It's Oscar night again
So of course, this post has nothing to do with them. Seems Halle Berry showed up to receive her Razzy:

"They can't take this away from me, it's got my name on it!" [Berry] quipped. A raucous crowd cheered her on as she gave a stirring recreation of her Academy Award acceptance speech, including tears.

She thanked everyone involved in "Catwoman," a film she said took her from the top of her profession to the bottom.

"I want to thank Warner Brothers for casting me in this piece of shit," she said as she dragged her agent on stage and warned him "next time read the script first."

I don't know what my opinion of Ms. Berry was before, but now it's pretty darn high. I don't think too many actors even acknowledge the bombs they've been in, and at best quickly change the subject. In stepping up and taking credit for being in something as fetid as Catwoman, Halle Berry has proven that she has bigger balls than a large percentage of Hollywood.  ¶ 7:00 p.m. 0 comments

  Wikipedia vs. Britannica: It's On
There are a lot of people who easily slam Wikipedia. The notion that having a collective knowledge base to which anyone can contribute goes against so many of the practices that have been in place for hundreds of years. This is why it's easy for guys like Robert McHenry to tell you that no, Wikipedia is worthless and you should trust accredited, established institutions for your information, even something like the Encyclopedia Britannica, of which Mr. McHenry used to be Editor-In-Chief. (I couldn't imagine why he'd advocate the EB...) Fortunately, his arguments are bunk, and Aaron Krowne seems to think he can tell you why:

In this article, I respond to Robert McHenry’s anti-Wikipedia piece entitled “The Faith-Based Encyclopedia.” I argue that McHenry’s points are contradictory and incoherent and that his rhetoric is selective, dishonest and misleading. I also consider McHenry’s points in the context of all Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP), showing how they are part of a Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) campaign against CBPP. Further, I introduce some principles, which will help to explain why and how CBPP projects can succeed, and I discuss alternative ways they may be organized, which will address certain concerns.

He goes on to do so in a well-written, very readable article, which I highly recommend. (via BoingBoing)  ¶ 4:27 p.m. 0 comments

  Scott Ramsoomair is a twisted, twisted little man
Damn funny though.  ¶ 10:15 p.m. 0 comments

  Once upon a time
...there was a student. This student had a decent, but relatively unexciting job at a big company. If it were up to him, the student would probably not work at all, and spend most of his time playing video games or perhaps starting some of the various projects developing in his mind for the past little while. Unfortunately, people with jobs (the mindless, soulless living dead of society, mostly) give people who try to do fun stuff all the time a lot of flack, and the student doesn't like to make waves, so he goes along with the job at the company for now.

The company has a lot of people working for it, and to accomodate them all, they simply give them a square of space on the floor with a chair and a computer in it. The reason the company gets away with it is that they put feeble walls of foam and cloth around the little space on the floor and call it a workspace, so the workers can continue to hang on to a small scrap of privacy. Of course, if a worker is important enough, he or she gets an office with a door that can be closed so some work can be done, but those workers are proportionally very few to the number of gopher-drones in their cubicles. The student considers himself relatively smart, however, and has figured out another way to get people to not bother him as much by simply looking at the problem differently - instead of an interruption, he decides to look at it as an opportunity to not work. The student jumps at those chances whenever he can.

One day, the company decided that the tan-colored cubes just weren't working any more, and decided to replace them with newer green-gray cubes. This involved moving everyone in the area next to the student out for a little while, ripping everything up, and putting new stuff in. The day this all happened was one of the rare days when the student was ready to work like a good bee, and therefore it managed to completely foil what noble effort there was.

Carpet is stinky, especially when it gets put in freshly. Because the student works in an old tan-colored cube, he can smell all the wonderful fumes coming from the smelly carpet. For a while, it makes him kind of happy, but then it made his head hurt and his nose itch.

The grey-green cube walls are like Ikea furniture. They need to be put together, sometimes with an Allen wrench and some percussive construction. Soon, all the student could hear was the boom-boom-boom of mallets on things. This was also kind of fun for a little while since it was the sound of things getting done, but then it made his head hurt more.

The student decided that something needed to be done. First, he tried getting some Munchie mix to try and cover up the carpet smell with nacho-cheese dust. While the mix lasted, it worked not to badly. The crunch-crunch-crunch sounds of pretzel-manducating* drowned out the hammering for a little while, and the nacho-cheese is welcome at any hour of the day. Once the mix ran out, however, the student was forced to turn to other measures.

He decided that of the two evils, the hammering was worse. Taking his trusty headphones and pushing them as far as he could into his ears, he unleashed the powerful might of Ronny James Dio. Holy Diver and Rainbow in the Dark were able to fend off the pounding next door, but the pounders must have sensed that Dio had entered the fray, and they redoubled their efforts.

The student thought that maybe he would not be able to fend off the carpet smell or the pounding entirely, but maybe some combination would help. In desperation, he turned to the only olfactory remedy at hand: the whiteboard pens.

I can't tell you what happened after that. All I remember is chaos and blue mustaches and the pounding of mallets onto something that sounded remarkably squishy, and certainly un-cube-like. The doctors say that everything is a metaphor created in my brain, but I'm not crazy. One day, the student will come back, and then you'll see.

Oh, how you'll see.

-----------------
* It's like masticating**, but better.

** It's like chewing, but for the dictionary-minded.  ¶ 5:00 p.m. 0 comments

  I like this quote.
"The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe  ¶ 12:55 p.m. 0 comments

  Seriously.
I just don't understand. Spider-man just isn' t the hero I remember from my youth...  ¶ 12:47 p.m. 0 comments

  (Not) The "10 Things I've Done That Odds Are, You Haven't" LJ Game
I refuse to refer to these things as memes anymore. I think it cheapens the concept, which I think is very cool, but I digress. Since I can't think of 10 things interesting and unique enough to share on a list such as this, I'm changing the rules of the game to be more like another LJ game I saw a while ago. Some of these are real, (and probably no surprise at all if you know me in person) and some are total bullshit.

1. Skydove out of a plane whilst it was very much not on the ground.
2. Got impatient waiting for a stuck chair lift and jumped off.
3. Had a five-month long intensive background check done on me by the Canadian Secret Service, which included a polygraph test.
4. Juggled machetes.
5. Been hit by a fastball hard enough to stay in intensive care overnight.
6. Done a backwards two-and-a-half backflip off a 3 meter springboard.
7. Got my ass handed to me sparring a fourth-dan Taekwon-do black belt who also happens to be both a second-dan in Jiujustu as well as ex-Military (Airborne, I think, but terribly unsure).
8. Written software currently in use in Health Centers all over Alberta.
9. Shattered just under five inches of solid wood with my elbow.
10. Constructed a model car powered by pressurized water.

Free free to post your guesses in the comments.  ¶ 9:39 a.m. 4 comments

  Being in servitude isn't all bad
I'm really not a fan of day jobs at all. In fact, I detest them with every aspect of my being. That said, it's more pleasant to just get up, go to work and be done with it, than it is to be both broke and yelled at for being unemployed. I consider the yelling bit to be more important than the money, since I like not being hassled. Sure, I could curse society and they're backwards, luddite, puritanical ways, but that's another rant.

On the plus side at least, having day job basically lets you say "Ok, for the next eight hours, I do this." That is also a nice relief on the brain, since having something to focus on helps the day plod by. Except, of course, then you can't, don't and doesn't, respectively. Nothing worse than being stuck at work and being aimless.

For the record, the Grand and Toy Roundedge Medium pen (No. 99204) is exquisitely balanced for pen-twirling. Also, it writes nice.  ¶ 5:22 p.m. 0 comments

  It's been obvious for years
People just refuse to face it. Just about everything Nintendo does can be put into the context of a drug trip*, and Jeff Rowland has basically spelled it out for us.

Really, who needs games like Narc when you can play the original Mario Bros.?
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* This includes the explanation of why, oh WHY they made that wretched Mario Brothers movie. I am sure that to this day, Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo and Dennis Hopper, the veterans of the film, gather once a year to remember so that future generations will never repeat the mistake again.  ¶ 5:02 p.m. 0 comments

  We don't need no stinking titles
Long weekends are awesome. I spent mine on the road, up in Edmonton. Nothing really impressive, just hanging out with friends mostly and only really have the following comments to make on that:

Ein, the combination of

• Strawberry Twist vodka,
  
• McCain's grape punch, and
  
• Sprite

result in a concoction capable of stunning livestock. Any hint that the drink might be alcoholic is replaced with a taste of Jello, a loss of balance and a heady sense of invincibility. This is a dangerous brew indeed, for those who like the taste of sugar and fruit with their poison.

Zwei, Constantine is not a great movie, but at the same time, it is not horrible. Hollywood apparantly learned at least enough to stop another Alan Moore comic from being turned into something that spawned from the loins of carnal horrors that shall remain nameless, but not enough to make the film good in the classical sense (which I take to mean as being something one could heartily recommend another to go see in the theater). It's certainly worth a rental, particularly if the whole God vs. Devil fighting over the souls of man conflict is of interest. To put it on the "other movie" scale, it's certainly better than Van Helsing, and about on par with Underworld - enjoyable if you dig it and its transgressions are forgivable. If you know anything about Constantine however, and the news that Keanu Reeves is playing a character that was originally a working class Brit, then you might want to shy away. (Working class apparantly becomes "very angry asshole" in Reevesian.)

Drei, Saw is a much better movie than Constantine. It's a nicely original take on the serial killer genre, since each "murder" is really an elaborate trap for the victim, each one more screwed up than the last. Watching it in the company of friends who burst into laughter every few minutes reliving the phrase "monster snorkel" slowly killed the mood of the movie, and it's a testament to the film that it managed to resuscitate said dead mood back to life during the final 10 minutes of the movie. Definitely recommended.

Vier, flat tires are a pain the ass. I don't quite know when the tire went, but I know that it was quite flat when I got up on Sunday morning, and it was driven on while flat since the tire guys couldn't fix it because it was full of dirt and crap. To make a long story short, one emergency tire-changing, 45 minutes of killing time in Wal-mart and a couple of new tires later, I managed to have a car that was in driving condition again. Note to self, don't let this one happen again, as it is annoying in the extreme.

So that pretty much sums up my weekend in Edmonton. The remainder of it after I got home was spent playing World of Warcraft. I'm not going to bother trying to review it, for the reasons that a) I'm not that far into it (only level 9ish) and b) there's not much point. Everyone else has already said that this game is the nuts, and they're all correct, so that's that. I'm playing Juche, a night elf druid on the Nathrezim server, and I'll probably be online for many an evening.  ¶ 9:45 a.m. 0 comments

  Say what you will about Red Meat
That it's sick, or twisted, or just not funny, but when Max Cannon has a good idea... well, he has a good idea.

Wearing a necklace of human fingers (or ears) would be an awesome way to get away with shoddy workmaship, or even better, a way to get away with outstanding workmanship without having people bug you all the time. If I didn't have that pesky irrational fear of cigar-cutters and garden shears, I just might follow through with it!  ¶ 8:38 p.m. 0 comments

 

So I whipped up a quick sample of what the art style of any comic I would make in the near future would be. Very minimal, very abstract. I probably wouldn't even end up doing the whole sepia thing, and sticking to more black & white. Probably not going to be any panels, or feet (they're hard to draw, just ask Mike Mignola). I've also decided against having any words in thought bubbles, since I figure most people don't really say what they're thinking in their heads - it's more abstract than that. Still looking for any form of story ideas or plots though, so it might be a bit. Still, it's more of a start than I've ever had before.   ¶ 8:18 p.m. 0 comments

  A retro-active resolution
It just occurred to me, reading Defective Yeti's post about reading lists, that I have sort of developed my own method for choosing what to read:

1. Get recommendation from friend, random interw3b person or site or "Top X Best Books of Some Form" list.
2. Add to Amazon Wish List
3. Either:
   • Get book given as gift, or
   • Buy book in fit of impulse purchasing
4. Read

With that in mind, since the beginning of the year, I've managed to polish off a few of these books, and I think I could conceivably get the all by the end of the year. (Provided, of course, I can refrain from adding new ones, which I most certainly can't, so some discretion may be needed.) In short, it means going through about 100 books before September. (I'm not naive enough to think I'll have any sort of free time once school starts.) Could I do it? Possibly. Will I? Probably not. That's why I'm categorizing the decision as a retro-active New Year's resolution - nobody ever keeps those silly things anyways.  ¶ 3:05 p.m. 0 comments

  On grue
If you consider yourself a gamer, you should already know what a grue is, if for only trivial reasons. If you don't, I shall explain. A grue is the most fiendish monster imaginable, and was easily the most dangerous beast in any video game. You cannot kill them, nor can you hear them coming, and if you fall victim to one, your death is painful, hideous, and... well, gruesome. Grues can only survive in the darkness, however, so the way to ward them off is simple: don't wander around in the dark. If you have a lit torch, the grue won't get you. Simple as that.

Sure, you could argue that the grue was simply a device to stop you from wandering around the game world in the dark and breaking the internal logic as a result, but that's not my point. I'm talking about grue as a word, and it must be a word, or must have been a word at some point. Look at gruesome; it shares the same structure as fearsome or loathsome. Fearsome means to evoke fear. Loathsome means to evoke loathing. Therefore, gruesome must mean to evoke grue, or grueness, or grueing, or something like that. What, therefore, is grue?

My first impulse is to consult dictionary.com, and lo and behold, we have an entry for grue:

n. [from archaic English verb for `shudder', as with fear] The grue was originated in the game Zork (Dave Lebling took the name from Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" fantasies) and used in several other Infocom games as a hint that you should perhaps look for a lamp, torch or some type of light source.

So there you go: used to mean "to shudder, as with fear". But how do you grue, or more specifically, how does one conjugate grue? I grue, you grue, he grues, we grue, I/you/he/we grued, I am/you are/they are grueing? Google refuses to divine the answer, and I'm too lazy to look elsewhere. The world may never know... (One almost grues at the thought!)

I think I have a new recipient of Best Word I Learned Today. Not as good as beeves, but that one's hard to top. (As an aside, I determined today that beef refers to both bovine meat in general, as in "I like beef", but also to cattle bred for the purpose of food. Therefore, one beef is the basically the same as one cow, but that the cow is going to be eaten.)  ¶ 11:28 a.m. 0 comments

  Darn tootin'
Prime Minister Paul Martin has released his address for bill C-38, being the "gay marriage one" everyone's all hopped up about recently. I gave it a read, and highly encourage everyone else to. At several points, I could only nod my head and agree with everything he says, and I would find it very hard to listen to someone come up with arguments against.

The notwithstanding clause is part of the Charter of Rights. But there’s a reason that no prime minister has ever used it. For a prime minister to use the powers of his office to explicitly deny rather than affirm a right enshrined under the Charter would serve as a signal to all minorities that no longer can they look to the nation’s leader and to the nation’s Constitution for protection, for security, for the guarantee of their freedoms. We would risk becoming a country in which the defence of rights is weighed, calculated and debated based on electoral or other considerations. That would set us back decades as a nation. It would be wrong for the minorities of this country. It would be wrong for Canada. The Charter is a living document, the heartbeat of our Constitution. It is also a proclamation. It declares that as Canadians, we live under a progressive and inclusive set of fundamental beliefs about the value of the individual. It declares that we all are lessened when any one of us is denied a fundamental right. We cannot exalt the Charter as a fundamental aspect of our national character and then use the notwithstanding clause to reject the protections that it would extend. Our rights must be eternal, not subject to political whim.

Right on the button. If this bill doesn't pass, I don't think I'll be alone in losing some faith in Canada as a country.  ¶ 10:45 a.m. 0 comments

  In case you noticed
There's a random tag-line thingy in the page now. Six phrases in total, all culled from Coolsigs. Catch 'em all!  ¶ 10:00 p.m. 0 comments

  Who says drugs slow your mental processes?
If MacGuyver were real, he would smoke weed.

As soon as I saw that, the first thing that popped into my head was Denis Leary. If you've heard No Cure For Cancer, you know which bit I'm talking about.

In an unrelated note, Nightwish has songs on their Tales of the Elvenpath CD. (I know! Songs! On a CD! GASP!) One has a BOT-type reading a passage that I believe is from the Lord of the Ring, which is cool. Another is called Nymphomaniac Fantasia, and it just occurred to me what that would mean. Finally, "beeves" is a word. It is the plural of "beef", known colloquially nowadays as "cattle", and raising the question of what is a singular beef? Time to go eat me some roast beeves. Beeves beeves beeves. Beeves gets the award for Best Word I Learned Yesterday.  ¶ 7:36 p.m. 0 comments

  Nap-time
Indian cuisine is something that should be experienced by all. As it happens, this was the sort of food myself and a number of others had for lunch today. This was a lunch buffet, and as such brings some curveballs into the game. For example, many East Indian dishes are sauce-intense, such as curries, and need to be carefully planned and accounted for during the "serve", at it were. Unlike a typical buffet, where the size of the plate is less of an issue and the real contest is in vertical real estate, these saucy foods tend to spread horizontally. This means that if you want to try everything, or simply can't stand the thought of foods trying to annex each other's territories (Without even the use of flags! The horror!) it is important to have good recon of the foodscape before beginning. Simply put, whatever you eat needs to be put into two plates. No more. The magic of Indian cuisine is that in exactly two plates of food, unless special methods are enacted*, you will be barely able to function. When already a zombie, such as myself, this can have disastrous effects. I am not sure how I'm quite conscious enough to be typing this, which means I am either dreaming, or the food has reacted somehow with my metabolism to create a wakening effect, something which has been previously unknown to me. Compare this to beer and pizza, a potent combination capable of inflicting lethargy onto pachyderms. The beer is clearly the active ingredient here, and it might be a good thing thing that the habit of including ale clauses in work contracts died out. (Or a bad thing for the same reasons, which is my opinion. Then again, I could possibly be considered a border-line alcoholic.)

Several hours pass.

I am now fully awake. I guess it had nothing to do with the food, but the fact that I don't really wake up until about three in the afternoon. In other news, I think I have a framework for art for the comic I think I'm going to try making. Now I need that pesky "story" and "plot" thingies. Suggestions are always welcome.

--------------------------------
* Two examples:
The Belt-Ratchet: After every plate, un-notch the belt by one hole and count to five before going up again.

The Long Wait: Manage the group's eating habits so that at least one person always has a full plate, and everyone gets enough of a break between plates to continue. (NB: This technique requires good conversation skills.)  ¶ 4:34 p.m. 0 comments

  OMG teh tired
Just... wow. I feel like a right proper zombie today. One of the slows mindless ones, and not a fast cunning zombie. The slow zombies are the far better kind anyways. Sure, the fast ones have a more immediate sense of terror, since they can pounce on you and feast on your entrails before you can scream for help, but that's just slasher-flick horror. The slow zombies, on the other hand, just keep coming. You can't stop them, and their army just grows and grows. Cut one down, and now you have two half-zombies coming after you. None of this "shoot them in the brain" crap - I'm talking right unstoppable. One could argue that there kind of needs to be a way for the protagonists to win, otherwise what's the point of the zombie flick? Posh! You just need to adjust your spectacles! Clearly, you're cheering for the wrong side.

So like I said. Right zombie-braindead-tired. Almost as if the regimen of less than six hours of sleep per night just isn't enough to cut it. I've made the decision to fix this, and provided I can both remember it and follow it through, that will hopefully square affairs away for tomorrow. Today, however, remains to be survived, and it just might be an excruciating ordeal, as was yesterday. This is not because of lack of activity, or lack of direction, but simply lack of "ability to get shit done". No sooner do I do anything, than I start daydreaming, or an email arrives (which is rare, but often ill-timed) or something else conspires to keep me in a state of listless, motivation-less ennui. This is a purely recent phenomenon, and I sincerely hope it is short-lived and stomped out of my system by about... five minutes from now. The fingers are crossed. In the meantime, I suppose I'll just suck down some coffee and change the subject.  ¶ 8:36 a.m. 0 comments

  Kill some time
Play Word Association. Here's the last chain of words the internet and I came up with:

longevity, death, head, penis, large, small, teeny, tiny, tits, ass, nice, naughty, sex, hot, snot, booger, gross, poop, stain, blood, bleeding, wound, hurt, devastated, sad, happy, laugh, cry, wail, moan, orgasm, screaming, yelling, angry, me, you, he, she, wants, needs, love, tenderness, soft, fluffy, pillow, sheets, blanket, fleece, pullover, sweater, wool, sheep, animal, pig, poke, prod, rod, shaft, tip, top, lid, shut, up, down, stream, creek, brook, river, lake, water, dry, wet, clothes, naked, nudity, free, imprisoned, liberty, bell, phone, telephone, noise, abatement, apartment, complex, signal, fire, burn, ouch, pain, back, spasm, twitch, dead, still, frozen, food, eat, fat, obese, gigantic, mammoth, elephant, trunk, branch, twig, tree, acorn, squirrel, nut, job, stupid, clever, smart, aleck, funny, guy, girl, skirt, look, there, no, rape, uncool, dumb, idiot, bush, shaved, razor, sharp, dull, sharpen, point, pencil, pen, ink, squid, tentacle, tents, pole, stick, ball, cock, dick, jane, richard, gay, homosexual, straight, arrow, sling, stones, stepping, hopping, skipping, jumping, jack, jill, off, on, the, it, clown, makeup, blush, red, ruby, gem, emerald, green, apple, orange, slice, dice, two, one, all, none, at, in, deep, over, jump, high, low, valley, dale, annoying, brat, punk, band, music, soul, bunk, bed, mattress, sleep, dream, surreal, lynch, ghetto, black, widow, spider, eight, nine, ten, eleven, double, nothing, zero, nada, spanish, spic, span, pots, pans, clean, filthy, dirty, smut, horny, whore, prostitute, cheap, inexpensive, final, penultimate, what, yes, baby, smelly, cheese, milk, chocolate, tasty, good, bad, breath, life, forever, never, why, not, knot, rope, swing, swung, jungle, tarzan, king, mars, venus, women, sluts, porn, video, dvd, cd, ripoff, putz, doofus, president, corrupt, dangerous, evil, witch, bitch, woman, ho, skank, spears, justin, nipple, suck, blow, puff, smoke, eyes, open, door, ajar, stuck, caught, tricked, taken, gone, wind, fly, ointment, jesus, disbelieve

I stumped it with 'disbelieve' after 'jesus'.  ¶ 9:12 p.m. 0 comments

  Apparantly, I'm a genius.
Tickle runs an IQ test. I took it, because I was rather bored, and it turns out I have an IQ of 135 with an empasis on:

...exceptional verbal skills. You can easily make sense of complex issues and take an unusually creative approach to solving problems. Your strengths also make you a visionary. Even without trying you're able to come up with lots of new and creative ideas.

Wow. I think I'll look around to see if the internet has other flattering things to say about me. It shouldn't be hard - the internet loves everyone!  ¶ 9:23 p.m. 0 comments

  Wanna play some City of Heroes?
I got an email from NCSoft today:


Well, I'm certainly not going to turn down a chance to be in the CoV beta, but at the same time, I'm really lazy and I harbour the delusion that more than three people are reading this site. So, first one to send me an email for it gets it. Simple.  ¶ 6:19 p.m. 1 comments

  Bjork scares me
I recently aquired Bjork's latest album on the recommendation of IGN Music. Let me tell you, Bjork is Out There.

Before I go on about that, I want to mention another album that's rather Out There: Blueberry Boat, by the Fiery Furnaces. If music were food, I would make the crap you hear on the radio something like potato chips or, well, pop. Tasty, but not very filling, and in the long run, not good for you or most other people, especially when consumed en masse. Better music, like the kind that wins awards and still gets bought and listened to thirty years after it was made would be something like chicken or beef. Some people may not like it, but it has some substance and is a reliable standby that can be used over and over again, and has some versatility to it. The stuff that's Out There, like Blueberry Boat is an aquired taste, like oysters or even beer. The ones that like it, like it a lot, but on first taste everyone just kind of says "Um, okay..." Blueberry Boat is kind of like that; Within each track there are little nuggets of awesome-ness that just stick in your head, like Straight Street or Birdie Brain. All of them fit together like a tricky jigsaw puzzle, though, and it takes a bit of adjustment to get everything into place.

Back to Bjork's Medulla. This record is Out There past oysters, steak tartar, and might be classified more like haggis or snails. Medulla is like one of those experimental things that get made on Iron Chef; the ingredients are unfamiliar, it looks as much like something you would put in a gallery as eat, and initial reactions resemble less "Um, okay..." and more along "That's food?" I'm finding it really hard to get a handle on this one, but I think it's starting to click. The tracks on this one are very sparsely accompanied, with no percussion or instrumental melodies of any kind. Everything is driven by Bjork's voice, and backed in places by some bass, or various vocal noises that sound as much like someone singing as something my cat does after she licks herself a lot. Somehow, though, it works, at least for a time. I haven't been able to listen to the whole album yet, but I digest more and more at a time. Who knows? Maybe I'll say this was one of the best albums of 2004...  ¶ 5:50 p.m. 1 comments

  Because I've discovered my email is borked
I have done some retro-blogging. See, "borked" means "capable of sending to the past" or something, cuz there's new stuff there as of a couple of days ago today. Ain't time travel fun?  ¶ 8:12 p.m. 0 comments

  Puts things into perspective, no?
BoingBoing has a rather disturbing post about the differences between stealing a DVD in a store and downloading it. While I find it ludicrous that the penalties are so much higher for infringement, it's not really surprising in the slightest. I would like to know if that's the case in more countries though, or if it's just the Yankees that have lost their marbles.

Or have they? One could make the argument that downloading should be much more severe than shoplifting, since it's so easy. Anyone with an internet connection can hop on to Gnutella and grab the latest Britney Spears mp3, but it takes at least some skill and a bit of luck to walk into a Wal-mart, nick the CD and escape. The difference is, of course, that downloading music is not technically stealing. Compare it to walking into the same Wal-mart, wiggling your nose and having a brand new copy of the CD appear in your hand. Neither you nor Wal-mart has paid for this disc, and they don't lose any stock. If you originally had the intent to purchase the CD, Wal-mart lost a sale, but if you worked your voodoo just for the hell of it, they didn't and are none the worse off, aside from not being able to convince you to give them money in exchange for goods.

I think the whole infringement issue could be dealt with far more effectively if the entertainment industry were able to view infringement not as theft, but as them failing to be able to get people to buy their music. This is not a criminal issue - it's an economic one.  ¶ 2:06 p.m. 0 comments

  I've got Mono, and I love it.
Safety Monkey posted about a wonderful wonderful game today. It's called Mono, and you want it. Trust me on this one. Think Asteroids, only you shoot paint instead of rock and have to paint the whole screen.

This game is insane, and it's free. OMG GET IT NOW!  ¶ 7:31 p.m. 0 comments

  "Couple of cool guys...
"With fire in their eyes,
"Known by the names of:
"Beavis and Butthead..."

Imagine that bit sung by Isaac Hayes, with the last bit done by the oh-so-seggsay backup singer girls and accompanied by a nice 70s discomatic funkitron guitars, and you're thinking of the track that opens up the Beavis and Butthead Do America soundtrack. Now I'll be the first to admit, the movie was probably not very good. I remember it as being pretty funny, but then again, I was probably around 13 or 14 at the time, and liked a lot of things I would consider rather dumb now.

That being said, the soundtrack doesn't suck. There are some songs on there that could only have arisen out of the primordial musical swamp muck that was 1990s MTV, but the majority of them are pretty good. Ozzy Osbourne's Walk on Water comes to mind, as does Snakes by No Doubt. Rancid has a really catchy ska-type piece about rioting and AC/DC pops up near the end with Gone Shootin'. Now I agree, these are all B-side tracks (just a hop, skip and jump away from C-side, or even Q-side) but that simply means you probably a) won't have heard them and b) won't have them on any other albums you already have.

This one is probably being given away for free at some record store nearby, so there's not much to lose even if you end up having to visit the record store for it. And really, is a couple of bucks all that much to ask when you could have your very own copy of Lesbian Seagull by Engelbert Humperdinck? I didn't think so.  ¶ 10:07 a.m. 0 comments

  Superman is a dick.
In the words of Griff, "like an ass." (BLAST! That link broke. Hopefully it will come back, but in the meantime, I posted some stuff over here to further state the case.) ASS.

Seriously, I really wonder what DC was smoking back in the 60s, because I think I want some. These are messed up. I suppose they're only the logical conclusion when you spin off every single secondary character in the comics pantheon into their own series, but still. Very twisted. I can't believe how many times Supes kills Lois!

To follow the bouncing segue, (I realize there isn't one. Use your imagination.) I was listening to Velvet Revolver (VR = Guns 'n' Roses - Axl Rose + Stone Temple Pilots - (Pilots not named Scott Weiland)) and thinking of the similarities between them and Audioslave (AS = Rage Against the Machine - Zack De La Rocha + Soundgarden - (Soundgardeners not named Chris Cornell)). I think the math bits there should make the parallels obvious; they're all bands with prominent singers who ditched the front man and found another singer already detached and floating around the entertainment ether. Anyways, what other bands would make for good arithmetic if you busted them up like Lego bricks? I came up with:

U2 - Bono + The Police - (Policemen not named Sting)
Smashing Pumpkins - Billy Corgan + Pearl Jam - (Jammers not named Eddie Vedder)
Metallica - James Hetfield + No Doubt - (Doubters not named Gwen Stefani)
Pink Floyd - Roger Waters + Primus - (Members of Primus not named Les Claypool)

Submit your own! It's fun like math!  ¶ 7:46 p.m. 0 comments

  Why all the children love both Mozilla and Gamera
Yesterday: Panic and shock! Seems a bunch of unscrupulous blokes at a hacker convention managed to find a security hole in Mozilla-based browsers! In short, the hole let ne'er-do-wells spoof domain names in your browser. The address may say Paypal.com, and even have an SSL certificate, but really points to a lookalike site ready to siphon your precious moneys away from you. In the proprietary world, pulling dastardly stunts like pointing out flaws might have resulted in a lawsuit. How dare they point out problems with the program! Do you know how much business could be lost because of that?

The Mozilla community barely batted an eye. Within hours, a temporary fix was posted telling users how to tweak the hidden settings in Mozilla to disallow the hack. About 12 hours after, the Firefox and Mozilla dev teams had an update ready to patch the problem for good.

See kids? This is how you win silly things like browser "wars". I now urge you all, if you aren't running Firefox, (or Safari, or Mozilla proper, or etc etc etc) what's stopping you? It's free, has more features, is more secure, and in general, just plain better.  ¶ 1:10 p.m. 0 comments

  Ever noticed how the most random things spark rants?
I was browsing my news feeds today and I saw a comment in one friend's LJ regarding open-source and usability. Essentially the argument was that on average, open-source usability is rather poor. Because of the nature of the development, OS software tends to be feature-rich*, but for the average user, fewer features is better and easier to understand. Here's why I think that statement is bunk.

Feature-rich is always better. If given the choice between A and B, where A can do X, Y and Z but B can only do X, and everything else is equal, who in their right mind would choose B? The problems arise when A does X, Y and Z, B does only X, but B does X much better than A does. Now we really have a choice, but which has nothing to do with features. The biggest factor limiting OS development as a software movement is documentation, interfaces and attitude.

One, let's face it, developers can't write documentation worth crap, and that's just fine. They're not supposed to. Let the guys with English majors who can explain things worry about documentation. The developer's priority is to make solid code that can be understood and propagated; a totally different skillset. The problem is that the majority of OS work is done mostly by developers, and having nobody else to document the things, end up doing it themselves.

Two, when you're a proprietary software R&D group, with a budget to spend, you can do tons of research into interface design. Microsoft's UI is copied all over the place not only just because it's Microsoft, but because to a degree, what they've done is right. Those millions spent into user studies to see how people think when they sit in front of Excel haven't all just been pissed away. That said, it's possible to get an enormous amount of interface design feedback without spending any money at all. You just need to listen, and that brings me to

Three, the notion that developers know best. They wrote the software, and therefore know everything about how it works, especially things that should not be done. Because of that, when users complain about something, it's easy to dismiss them because they didn't write it and just don't know how to go about things the right way. I've done this myself: "Well, it works fine for me. You just don't know how to do it properly." As long as this attitude persists, OSS will remain less intuitive than proprietary software.

The upside to all of this however, is twofold. One, OSS has nowhere to go but up. For the same reasons that it's feature-rich, it can only get better, and therefore any concerns brought up will eventually disappear given enough time. Second, the statement that OSS is only used by geeks is more important than is immediately apparant. The majority of OSS is used behind the scenes in contexts such as server apps or operating systems, where the user does not even have to be aware of it. This means that the only ones who have to worry about usability in those settings are other geeks who know how it works and all the above concerns matter less.

So to conclude: yes, open-source software has usability concerns, but no, they are not feature-related. What's more, they are rapidly dwindling to gone at best, and temporarily resigned to less-prominent projects at worst.
--------------------------
* The reasons for this basically boil down to the fact that developers can't compete for salary, since most of the software is free. They therefore compete for prestige, or who can put the coolest, bestest stuff in the program.  ¶ 11:08 a.m. 0 comments

  This weekend is officially I Love Comic Books weekend
I've probably dropped well over a hundred dollars on comic books today and yesterday. This is probably not so unremarkable, since I haven't bought any new trades in about six months. I tend to buy in spurts as well, so perhaps I've gotten it out of my system for now. For the record, the titles are:

Planetary: All Over The World And Other Stories
The Authority: Relentless
The Authority: Under New Management
Planetary: The Fourth Man
Just A Preacher
Rising Stars: Born In Fire

I've read the first three, and plan on reading the second three shortly. In brief, Planetary and Authority are the dog's bollocks, or if that's not your thing, they are something equivalently amazing. My respect for Warren Ellis' writing ability has completely overshadowed the mind-rapingly disturbing links he sometimes puts on his site.

Planetary is essentially about a team of pseudo-superpeople who go around trying to find weird stuff. (Like the secret moon mission that took off 5 years before the one you saw on TV, or a quantum computer built in 1945, or the spider-human subterrans living under New York.) What makes it so great is that it takes advantage of the serial nature of comics by having each issue be more or less self-contained, but with ties to the other issues that weave an over-arching conspiracy theory. If you like the X-Files or Alias, you know exactly what I'm talking about, provided you subtract the pure obfuscation and the cliched campiness respectively. The first trade covers the first 8 issues or so and ends right at the beginning of what is sure to be a killer story arc, so I'm excited about the second trade which is in my hands as-yet unread.

The Authority, in contrast, is a superhero book not-so-plain and rather-unsimple. The premise is the standard "superteam saves the world" kind of thing, but rather than being "Superman saves the day, puts the flag on the White House and we go back to business as usual," The Authority does stuff, and they take whatever measure they need to to make the world a better place. That, and they are that good. I had up to now always considered the Justice League to be the top superteam ever, capable of besting anyone up to and including the War God from the universe before this one. The Authority, on the other hand, could give them a run for the money, and possibly win. You would think that a superteam whose individual members are buff enough to take down entire batallions of other superhumans might be boring, since they always win. This can be true, as the later issues of JLA has started to prove, but the writing on Authority (again, Ellis) is good enough that it doesn't get stale at all. The only beef I have with the series is that the team making it changes after about issue 12, and while I like Quitely and Millar's style, I like Ellis and Hitch's better, and for that reason, I'm not sure if I will be getting further Authority books.

Now, I still have some Planetary to read, and chicken to eat. Ta!  ¶ 4:59 p.m. 0 comments

  Dear America,
This is what all the fearmongering your government does accomplishes. It makes people afraid of chocolate-chip cookies. I hope you're happy.

Love,
Crowe
  ¶ 9:44 p.m. 0 comments

  This week, in screwed-up dreams
Last night I dreamt that I was at a MacWorld conference, and that Steve Jobs was doing his keynote speech. For some reason, it was being held at the Jubilee Auditorium in Edmonton, and somehow, Steve could see me in the balcony. I was wearing a shirt that had something to do with both Topato Potato and Timmy from South Park. I'm pretty sure it made fun of the handicapped and/or mentally ill. Steve didn't like it and wanted me to leave and in fact came up to the balcony where I was sitting to do so. Since he was doing anything at all, all the Apple-heads cheered. I managed to defend my shirt, somehow by comparing it to both I'm Communism and Tupping Liberty. Eventually, Steve Jobs went back to doing his keynote speech, I started thinking he was a pretty swell guy, and everyone was happy.

I don't know what this means, but I plan on going to Best Buy today. I hope I don't mistakenly buy anything with an Apple on it.  ¶ 1:03 p.m. 0 comments

  My new career
Listening? Good. I hereby dedicate the rest of my life to posing for a photoshoot, forgetting about it, and then suing whoever took said photos 20 years later.

I have an appointment with some very important people tomorrow so I'm off to a good start!  ¶ 12:05 a.m. 0 comments

 

I drawed a picture. It took a lot of squeezing of my Glee gland and Happiness organ. If I ever do something this saccarine again, I may need some form of armament on hand.   ¶ 11:04 p.m. 0 comments

  Must see
Kung Fu Hustle is the new movie by Stephen Chow. He is the guy that did Shaolin Soccer, which I think is a very fine movie and would like to own it someday. I also would like to do "the math" for Kung-Fu Hustle, but I don't really know how. It combines Looney Toons style slapstick with 1920s mobsters. I think it might be a musical. Also, ghosts and ninja zombies. I think there might be cowboys involved as well. You see how this movie appeals to me.  ¶ 10:02 p.m. 0 comments

  Just when I thought I might be losing interest
City of Heroes adds PvP.

(You can just tell this is going to induce a) SQUEEEEEEEE!

If there's one thing about superheroes, it's that not only must you allow for the story arcs that interweave all the badguy-bashing, something that Cryptic has done very well, but superheroes must not be constrained to smacking the little baddy-twerps around. In one sense, the arch-villains like Dr. Vahzilok serve this purpose well enough. In another, heroes need to occasionally throw down and see who's got the better stuff. The Coliseum now allows not only for individual brawls for superiority, but it allows for Supergroups to have at it. You just know that the X-Men and the Avengers are going to be at each other's thr- oh wait. Never mind.

All they need now is the ability to do the universe crossovers, and you can bet this could be realized by allowing players on different servers to somehow play with each other. That would be `teh awesome'.  ¶ 8:33 p.m. 0 comments

  Rush hour
People drive to work in the morning. That's cool, I can understand. I mean, cars are convenient, and taking you from one place to another is what they were designed for. That, and carrying things so you don't have to. I could argue that they're destroying our planet, but really that's almost a non-issue. Within 5 years hybrid cars and plant-based fuel will hopefully have made in-roads and we'll be moving to support ourselves on renewable resources, so I won't drop the Environment card here.

Rush hour though, is just beyond me. I'm sure you could explain the concepts and reasons and arguments behind it all, but I'll probably just stare blankly. Why on earth would anyone subject themselves to driving to work/school/wherever every day without fail? Not only is there the environment angle I already tossed out, but you have the road rage from having to deal with all those other idiot/maniac drivers, the construction, the accidents, the delays, the photo radar, etc. Why?

Consider the alternatives: you can take the bus, the train (most cities have a subway or other light-rail system), walk, ride a bike, carpool, and so on. There are so many other ways that don't clog up the roads with needless vehicles! That they aren't used just sets my teeth on edge, not because they simply aren't used, but because of the excuses.

"I live too far away."
"I don't want to be trapped in someone else's schedule."
"The bus doesn't go near my house."
"The train is full of dirty people I don't like. They smell."
"Public transit is for poor people who can't afford a car."

Seriously, I've heard most of these when challenged on the issue of traffic. I suppose I might have to relent if you live out on an acreage, or if you work very strange hours like 13:00 to 22:00. I accept that some folk simply can't avoid commuting, but I refuse to believe that the traffic could not be tiered or halved simply by talking with a co-worker and agreeing to pay for gas if you can get a ride. To say that you don't want to be stuck on someone else's schedule is flawed from the get-go, because simply by having a job, you're already doing just that. If what's really being said is "I want to reserve my ability to leave at any time," or "I want to be able to run errands during the day," that's a bit different. In that case, you can still carpool, but it may take a bit more doing to find someone who agrees to be flexible that way. (Maybe it's the thought of actively having to look for someone to carpool with that causes people to reject it?) To say that "bus people are dirty," or that "public transit is for the unprivileged" is just plain elitist bullshit and you're a bad person for saying so. Suck it up and accept the fact that other people are in fact people, just like you. Don't like them? Don't talk to them, or bring music and wall yourself off from the outside world. If riding the bus bores you, bring a book (and if you don't read, you should, you uncultured peon) or get an electric gizmo-doodad to play games or do some work (if you're of the workaholic persuasion, which is another mindset so totally alien to me that I recoil in considering it).

I think the biggest problem facing commuters is critical mass. Nobody is going to give up their vehicle unless they have sufficient reason to do so, which means nobody is going to do it period. The air doesn't burn when we inhale, and not spending an extra ten minutes on the bus is enough for everyone to hurry into their Jeeps and stop-and-go their way home. Me, I'll stick to enjoying my music, reading my book while I laugh at you all on the bus, weighed down in my seat by the extra money I save, and counter-balanced by the lightness of heart that comes from not contributing to a problem.

--------------------------------
* They of course cannot be quantified, for various reasons, but I'll talk about that some other time.  ¶ 8:13 a.m. 0 comments

  They lurk!
Unbeknownst to me, up the yonder top-right corner, there lies a button, dastardly in it's comuppance! 'Twould seem that it hath deposited upon my blogstep a visitor from yon other blog. From whither he or she came, I cannot say, but I found a link to mine own site there, as well as these words:

Blogger's "NEXT BLOG" feature, allowed me to stumble upon a quite interesting site, one which I have added to the sidebar. I do not know this person, and I do not know anything about him, but by just reading his blog: PopCultureVictim, I could tell that he was one cool guy. Just go read his blog.. NOW. Or die.

While this event is not the first of which I have been read by strangers, but mayhap it be the first that I have received notice of! The game is afoot...  ¶ 8:14 p.m. 2 comments

  I swear, every day is like this
Ah, the exponential decay of time within the work day. Arriving in the morning, everything whirring and humming, cruising along with the mental momentum accrued from a sleep lasting all night. Work gets done, people get seen, emails get flung across the internets and requests get serviced. The day seems a golden time.

The motion is not self-propelling however, and by mid-morning, some momentum has been lost, but not enough to slow the system down. The engine oil may have a slight discoloration, but it lubricates well enough and the pistons keep firing, keeping the motor moving until lunch time. The auric spirit of the morning has been transformed into a silver, just as bright, but not as satisfying nor of the same worth.

Boistered by the conversation around the chow trough, filled up with the regenerative power of Sandwich and Pudding, the cogs and sprockets are back to operating at full capacity, moving the electronic, metaphorical papers that comprise the inner workings of Business. Life seems well, but in truth the zeitgeist has more in common with iron pyrite than with any nobler metal, a bright veneer hiding its true lack of value.

While lunch filled up and topped off, it was not the panacea it seemed to be. Yes, fuel was added, but it was more like the stingy addition of five bucks worth of gas, or in the worst cases, such as lunch meetings involving Vietnamese noodle bowls. Those massive vats of Asian pasta and miscellaneous cow bits are crafty, often threatening to throw the utility carpet of drowsiness over the fires of production. Still, the machinery is undeterred and it forges on, albeit now at a slow, methodical plod rather than the ferocious gallop it commenced the work day at. As a starlet gives up the screen for better paying menial labour, so too has the spirit of the work day shed off its bright exterior for a solid, utilitarian diligence. It takes the form of humble iron now.

Inescapably, the day churns to a close, and less than an hour, but a shallow crack remains of the once mighty and expansive depths of time that lay before the dawn. The machine struggles now. The oil, once plentiful and smooth, then made sullied and thick, is now black, turpid and laden with grit. The pistons no longer slide effortlessly in their housings, but rather grind forcefully against the engine walls, screaming their defiance to all who would listen. Barely able to move under its own power, it takes the enticement and allure of the bus ride home to get anything done. Now totally without any form of merit, everything seems valueless, unworthy of even looking at, let alone starting to work on. Like an Anti-Midas, the gold has been turned to shit.

(The epilogue to all of this is, of course, that once home and fed, offered the chance to play some video games and given a good night's rest, you still continue to get up for work when you feel like shit the night before.)  ¶ 5:21 p.m. 1 comments

  How will you know?
A Solution! Retroactive timestamping. Now you shall never be certain when I am posting, and left forever in doubt! Such is the cunning evil of my machinations! If I could link to an mp3 of an evil laugh, there would be one here.

Ok, it's definitely not worthy of such melodrama, I know. Still, I figure there's only one person out there constantly clicking the refresh button of this here site, desperate for the word-milk from the teat that is my keyboard, (you know who you are!) so the slight discrepancies won't be noticed by anyone important. Sure, the fact that posts could be going up exactly on the hour or half-past, but that's just coincidence. At least I won't have to worry about ineffectual legalese getting slapped on the ass of my postings by some server filter.

Segue into more stuff I wrote due to boredom!  ¶ 3:32 p.m. 0 comments

  Ooey gooey UI
Because I'm doing some development work involving a GUI, I've been doing some freshening up since the horror freak-show that was CMPUT 301, a.k.a. the root of all evil, a.k.a. the worst class I have ever taken ever ever. This has so far entailed the perusal of interface guidelines for various systems, including the Macintosh. Now I am not a Mac person, let me state that up front. I have experience with Windows, Linux and Unix, in that order in terms of time spent with each, but my time with Macs has been limited to at most putzing around on other people's systems.

In going through a comparison between Windows-centric design and a Mac-centric design, I found a feature on Mac OS that I have decided is now a must-have in ALL OSs. Yes, Macs do something better than any other system, I admit it. Yes, yes, I was wrong, all my posturing about how they are inferior was for naught, Apple triumphed in the end, blah blah BLAH. Get over it.* (Asterix footnote for Macaholics only.)

The devilish bit of interface I found so striking is the Mac OS X style of application install. There is no installer program, ala Windows. There is no tarball full of files to compile ala Linux. Most profoundly, there are no files at all. Just one bundle, which you drag into a folder. That's it, and at the same time that's it. It's so simple, it's genius. One of the biggest peeves I've had of any system is the methods of installing/removing applications. On Windows, the installer programs are nice, offering a unified single point of contact for said applications, but that point of contact can break if something behind it changes (ie. a file gets renamed), and at that point, you are on the brink of that mighty steep cliff called FUBAR. On Linux, well, the less said of ./configure and ./make -install, the better. Not only is this an arcane process, but in my case it forces me to resign myself to ignorance. "Go, install yourselves little files. Flutter off to the far reaches of my computer and hide yourself. I just hope I don't need to get rid of you," I think. There are but three blessings that offer redemption to this approach, which in my eyes almost breaks even. First, with Linux, when you install it, you often get all the programs you ever use in one swoop, so there is little need to bother with this unless you're doing something specialized. Two, a number of distros come with central self-fixing, semi-autonomous program agents like portage or apt-get that act as program butlers, offering to fetch and prepare for you any package they know about (and they know of many). Three, because of the nature of Linux, a cobbled together hack job of nuts and bolts that through natural selection has evolved to be the superior OS, this style of application management has been settled upon for maximum transparency. If you know how, you can go in a see the arcane inner workings of any program, divine anything you care to learn about it and even change and tweak things for yourself, and in those respects, the unholy binary of ./configure and ./make can almost be accepted.

Red Hat's .rpm packages and Debian's .deb packages have been a small step towards the greatness that is Apple's application management, but they are as crude clay golems compared to Apple's homo sapien. While successfully providing a single point of reference for a program, they still explode into the myriad of files needed to run, all to different places. Why can't programs be archived into one big ball that can be moved around or deleted as the user sees fit? It's not efficiency, because the way I see it, having a program exist in one archive of contiguous space would be better than scattering it about. (Feel free to offer a contrary position in the comments though.) The same applies to Windows programs, and I suspect the only reason it continues is because it has been this way forever. I only hope that someone has been paying attention to all this and a Linux interface is on the way or these elements are being incorporated into existing shells with this sort of thinking in mind.

* Now that you've recovered from your "triumph", you Apple addicts aren't off the hook yet. Why did I only find out about this now? Why isn't this touted on Apple's site more prominently? You could be gaining converts by pointing out little things like this rather than how pretty your laptop is, or how well it works with your iPod. Just saying that Mac OS X is easier to use isn't enough, and examples like this could help you out considerably. I know I'm not the only one with this sort of mindset. Now go to your corner and think about what you've done.
  ¶ 2:23 p.m. 1 comments

  A manifesto
(Note - please read the whole thing before commenting. I'm aware there are flaws in my proposals, and I address the ones I can think of in here.)

If I ever start a company*, this is how I would do it:

One: OSS all the way. Everything would be open-source, from operating systems (meaning Linux) to applications (Mozilla, SharpDevelop, etc). Not only is the software cheap (okay, free) and reliable, but since anyone who could use an environment like that is likely to be a techie themselves, support costs could possibly kept lower. Employees could be trusted to more or less not break their computers and could set up their workstations to their liking, provided a few basic interoperability guidelines were met. Working on a system you can really sink your teeth into and jive with makes things easier for you.

((One-point-five: This isn't really related to company policy, but I think it's a neat idea nonetheless. Workstations would be set up on a Linux Live-CD, all issued from a default stock created to serve company needs. Users would be encouraged to make changes and create custom Live-CD working environments. User documents would be stored on a transparent intranet, while settings and workstation-specific stuff would be on a USB stick-drive. This way, not only can one work from any computer available (and I do mean any) but deployment and worker relocation would be smoother. Just eject the CD, unplug the USB stick and move to another computer.))

Two: Screw business casual. Unless meeting with clients or attending seminars or other functions, dress however you want. Sure, common decency must be held up, but that's no reason not to wear a cool hipster T-shirt you picked up recently, and is there anything really wrong with blue jeans? Comfort is the name of the game.

Three: Total transparency. When I say total, I mean total. Anything created, while still being property of the company, would be freely displayable to the public, likely under a license similar to Creative Commons or GNU GPL/Lesser GPL. The intranet would be seamless with the internet, and anyone could take a look at what's happening and either make comments or suggestions, or even take something we made and run with it. I think this would generate more interest in what's going on, provided projects are sufficiently cool (which they would be, see below). Again, comfort would be increased since there would be no need for silly security measures or needless paranoia - you can't steal what is given out freely. As well, since anyone can make comments or suggestions, this would keep the company on its toes in terms of any ethical conduct, since there would be more than enough busybodies to bring such things to our attention. (That doesn't mean we have to listen to said comments or suggestions, but it might be recommended.)

((Eleventy-seventeen: Non-profit. This is one point that I might be totally out to lunch on, since it rests on my certifiably shaky/non-existent understanding of capitalistic economics. As I understand it, companies distribute money on a input/output basis. Cash is raked in from the sale of product to customers, and dispensed to those needing rewards for their efforts. Employee salaries and maintenance costs are paid and investors and shareholders reimbursed according to their contracts or whatever other legal paper defines that sort of thing. What's left over, assuming you gathered more cash than you need to do all that, is profit and sits in the company's vaults. I don't understand why that's needed, and in my system, doesn't happen. I would find ways to distribute all that profit, whether funnelling it back into the salaries as a bonus, or towards coffers for new projects, or back to the investors, or to charities or other nice folks, or to all of the above. I simply don't understand why an abstract entity needs to hoard money. Maybe this is the way non-profits are supposed to run, or maybe companies already work this way. Maybe everything I know about economics is totally wrong, making this paragraph totally superfluous and false. I don't know, which is why the point is indexed by an imaginary number, but I'm including it for thoroughness.))

While all that is nice, I do have problems with my corporate paradise that I haven't reconciled yet:

One. Where money comes from. See, I get the fact that you need capital to get things going, and I get the fact that you need to sell something in some form or another to keep things going. Sure, I could do everything on a volunteer basis like some sort of hippy-collective, but the larger the projects you do that way, the longer they take, the more problems you hit in management and in short, the more they don't work. Touching on the total transparency thing, everything would be available for free, so one could argue there's nothing to sell. On that however, I disagree. Sure, the software can be copied and passed around for free, so therefore you don't make that the basis of your market. If there is incentive to buy a physical product, ie. by including things like good documentation, high production values, reliable support, etc. I believe that people will want to buy. Give them what they want, they will come. Why this is an issue, is because it all hinges on what is being made/sold, and of that, I have no idea.

Two. Getting investments. All those things I talk about up there are great in my mind. I understand the intentions and "whys" behind them all. As I said in the last point, you need money to make money, and gathering initial capital in just about any business venture is more or less a fancy way of saying "begging". You go around to people with money and ask for some using the promise of giving them more back than they gave you. Unfortunately, said people with the big money, likely gained in the "old" (which means what, 5 years ago? 3? Old indeed.) economy probably won't have a clue, nor care why. Selling all this to people who don't get it will probably be a trick in itself, and one that I haven't the best of plans in dealing with. Perhaps approaching ventures similar in perspective may work, but the investment/VC scene in the OSS domain is a total blank in my mind - I have no idea what's out there, which limits this though to mere speculation.

Three. Keeping our momentum to ourselves. Another problem related to the total transparency I'm big on would be keeping our thoughts to ourselves. If the methods and processes used to make petroleum products were open to the public, one could argue that the threat of another company copying said methods for competition would spur on the development of new methods, causing progress and improvement. Yes, it would stop the threat of monopoly (assuming that what you're making manages to be a runaway success, dominating the industry), since as long as one could get some capital, an identical business could be set up. Yes, it would provide a constant push for innovation and drive. Problem is, having the constant threat of being copied and outdone by someone more capable could sink the company though, which is slightly not good. To solve this, maybe a clause could be included in the license all work gets published under that while open and free for use, one must merely notify us that our ideas are spawning something new. That way, we would have the opportunity to make an offer to join up; we offer our resources in making that new idea work. If the offer is refused, well so be it. Bring it on.

So. Would you want to work at a place like that? A Crowe-topia, if you will? Is there somewhere that operates like this already? (If so, please let me know so I can apply to work there!) I think that assuming I can hire people who believe in my methods, it could work. On the other hand, see anything I said that could never happen? Any outright lies and falsities up there? Comments are open as usual kids, feel free to correct me.

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*I am aware of the irony of my proposing something like this. Anyone who knows me well would probably see it as well. If not, you aren't missing anything, so keep reading m'kay?
  ¶ 10:32 a.m. 0 comments