Wired Cola

Go to wiredcola.com

2008-01-27T23:41:00.000-08:00

Go to wiredcola.com now. There you will find finely-crafted replicas of the posts you remember from this site, only with delicious and refreshing new features and interfaces. All part of our enduring mission of enhancing synergy-leverage.

This site (wiredcola.blogspot.com) is now deprecated, and ultimately doomed.

Wired Cola is moving

2008-01-17T13:44:00.000-08:00

A few years ago Wired Cola was acquired by Globadom LLC, a closely-held venture with a simple but daring business plan.

Wired Cola will continue normal operations at wiredcola.com. As you can see, the transition has begun, though it is not complete. We expect great things to happen.

We appreciate the continued support of you, all 20 of our beloved clients, and promise to continue to be the same lovable, Cybermorphic™ corporation you already love to Cybermorph™ with.

Oh, and please buy our stuff.

Now I've done it

2008-01-16T00:53:00.000-08:00

I warned all 20 of you last year that big changes might be coming.

They are.

First manifestation: visiting wiredcola.com in the next day or two may be messy. On the other hand, it is about to be the proper repository of Wired Cola, the world's only Cybermorphic beverage/weblog/synergy leverage project, and a division of Globadom, Incorporated.

Look for exciting Web 1.4-type features coming soon, as we exit the blogspot ghetto.

You know why I did this? Because I have a 50% failure rate on typing blogspot's captchas.

In Accordance with the Apple Prophecies

2008-01-15T12:24:00.000-08:00

In a comment on my ridiculous prediction post, Andrew asks if I think the revised Apple TV qualifies as my predicted Pippin 2.

Ha ha! It's tempting to answer yes, given that the original Pippin was conceived as a combination set-top box and video game console. The Apple TV doesn't play games, but it sure does sit on top (or given today's TVs, underneath) just like a Pippin! And it brings the content, notably HD-grade content, which was always the missing link with the first version of the Apple TV.

But more importantly, I have decided that as soon as the iPod Touch and iPhone start playing the SDK-developed games that are about to show up, I will declare them to be the Pippin Portable and the P-Gage, respectively.

BTW, charging $20 for the recent upgrade to the iPod Touch is devilish, but the added apps convert that thing from an amusing media player to a handheld wifi device I actually lust after.

Oh, laptop? The MacBook Air is a supremely clever toy, but I would point out the form factor is that of a MacBook, minus a half-inch of thickness, two pounds, and lots of functionality. As an adjunct to a desktop Mac, or possibly backed by a Time Capsule, it probably looks good to those for whom the cost is not a serious consideration. The base MacBook remains the laptop for the rest of us.

I think the Air will be a successful product for Apple, but as a feat of industrial design it largely points out that the fundamental limitation on laptop size is now the screen. You could make the Air smaller, but the screen would shrink beyond what is reasonable these days.

I believe that Apple's new theory is that people who want a laptop smaller than the Air really want an iPhone. It's a good theory.

Last-second Macworld Expo Prediction.

2008-01-15T09:11:00.000-08:00

Pippin 2. You heard it here first.

Charlie the Cockatoo

2008-01-13T08:19:00.000-08:00

TLO and I went to the Macmillan Bloedel Conservatory in Queen Elizabeth Park on a lark. There, we met Charlie:

Thanks Charlie, we love you too.

Mobile Data just got cheaper. I think.

2008-01-10T00:32:00.000-08:00

Bell is sorta promoting their Unlimited Mobile data plan. It's not clear if this is purely a "walled garden" play, but the short version is that early reports say it isn't: you can just surf the web on your mobile phone's browser, $7/month, unlimited data.

Considering that current data plans range up to something roughly approximating "infinity dollars a month" from most carriers, this is a monstrous breakthrough.

The speculation when it was first announced was that this was a shot by Bell at Rogers, since the latter was soon expected to start carrying the iPhone in Canada.

If it is, it's a really clever shot: the key advantage that Bell (and Telus) have over Rogers right now is a really fast (1X) data network. Rogers has a sorta-fast data network (but GSM-based), and charges the world for access thereto.

Here's some slightly more detailed discussion from HowardForums on the subject.

As for Telus, the rumor is they will be matching this plan ASAP. Rogers? No news is probably bad news.

Charlie Wilson's War

2008-01-04T12:08:00.000-08:00

It's good. It's very good. It's less subtle than it thinks it is, and is possibly the least surprising script that could possibly come from the hand of Aaron Sorkin. I mean, he found a story about a Democratic politician who did a little cocaine and did the right thing in Afghanistan? If the story wasn't true, I would damn Sorkin for writing such a banal allegory.

If the film has weaknesses, they are at least pleasant weaknesses: gratuitous nudity (aside from one easily bowdlerized scene at the start of the movie, you could show this film in high-school civics classes), name-dropping, and slightly clumsy exposition scenes. It engages in extraordinarily shallow hindsight at almost every junction (unknown unknowns are all clearly understood by our heroes ahead of time).

The acting is uniformly solid, which may be the highest praise I can offer.

This movie deserves a more thorough critique (rather than this shallow review), especially since as a right-wing kook who liked it, I'm in a unique position to highlight its virtues, much like a Canucks fan describing what they admire about Minnesota.

But I'm lazy.

90,000 tons of Art

2007-12-31T13:57:00.000-08:00

A ridiculous discussion in rec.bicycles.racing (eventually, they all are) led to someone mentioning, in the context of personal art collections, this poster:

Which led me to declare that US aircraft carrier groups, collectively, were the greatest art installation ever conceived.

Yes, that sounds like my usual blithering nonsense, but it's actually extremely profound nonsense! Allow me to demonstrate:

I subscribe to the principle that art consists of useless crafts.

As the French philosopher Baudrillard pointed out, The Gulf War did not take place. So if carrier groups are designed for wars which do not take place, they must be works of art.

And I am not alone in this. Paul Virilio has written entire books on the intertwining of art and war. I am certain he appreciates these highly kinetic sculptures as much as I do.

In terms of most expensive art work of all time, I think its only competition is the International Space Station.

My Christmas letter to you

2007-12-24T14:34:00.000-08:00

So, I had to read back to find out what I did this year. Here's what I did:

January: I rode in the snow
February: everything broke
March: I bought a bicycle built for two
April: I helped build a tiny bike
May: I built a black bike
June: I shaved my head
July: TLO and I went to the Kwik-E-Mart
August: TLO and I went to Greece
September: TLO and I went back to school
October: TLO's curriculum came late
November: nerd! Nerd!
December: month ain't over yet.

TLO and I would like to wish you a merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year, and the dog has this to day:

What were you expecting? Dogs can't talk.

Politics and Predjudice in "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer"

2007-12-22T00:19:00.000-08:00

We are, of course, speaking of the definitive Rankin/Bass stop-motion animated version.

Please don't tell TLO I did this.

So I was watching this classic Christmas special on TV the other day, and what struck me was how much of a jerk Santa is in this story.

"Great bouncing icebergs!"

That's what Santa says the first time he sees Rudolph's rather extraordinary nose. Then he says Rudolph's nose had better not glow if he's going to be a sleigh-pulling reindeer.

What? Oh, but it's okay, because then he sings a song, which does nothing to explain why glowing noses would be a problem in flying or sleigh-pulling.

Meanwhile, in a bustling warehouse on the other side of town, Hermey the elf is holding up the production line as he dreams of dentistry.

Hermey's boss is a genuine hard case, but he has a legitimate beef: Hermey is a terrible toy-maker. Even Hermey knows it, and as he sings, "you can't fire me, I quit!" because he doesn't fit in.

I support both the hard-nosed elf boss, and Hermey's decision to quit: Hermey wasn't doing anyone any favours by hanging around in a job he hated and did badly.

Okay, so time passes, through the magic of Burl Ives-powered narration, and Rudolph is at the reindeer tryouts or something. But we interrupt that actually interesting plot point to bring you Santa being a jerk:

I can't figure out why he's hating the elf choir here, but he is. They're singing fine, and he can only cringe.

Finally, we get back to Rudolph at the tryouts.

And you know what? He's great! He can fly like nobody's business. He's a regular Wayne Rooney of magical reindeer flight.

And then the excrement hits the air recirculation device.

At this point, for the shameful act of having a red nose, Rudolph's coach, best friend, all the other reindeer, and Santa all turn on him.

You know the drill: no reindeer games, whatever those are. Reindeer MMA? Reindeer skeet shooting?

And then there's a bunch of plot we don't care about, because it doesn't touch on the thesis of this ridiculous rant. Rudolph's girlfriend sings, and doesn't sound like Marni Nixon, surprisingly.

Finally, our pair of misfits meet, sing, and become friends.

Of course they do. They're both exiles, but Hermey really isn't working out. He needs to spend some time working on his career options. But who would exile the incredibly talented Rudolph? A predjudiced idiot, that's who.

I'm going to dodge another big meaty chunk of point, as we meet homeless toys, an abominable snow monster, and King Moonracer.

This photo of King Moonracer is included only because noble flying lions are cool. What can I say? I'm a cryptozoological monarchist.

I won't spoil the funny but essentially reasonable plot which ends up with our heros acting heroic, and teaches us the awesome power of dentistry.

Returning to Predjudice Village, Santa reads the weather reports, and says Christmas is cancelled.

Like I'd want a present from that hater.

But just then, Rudolph & Co. show up from the wilderness, and now it's all "that beautiful, wonderful nose!"

Super. So Santa is anti-mutant, right up until the very moment he needs a mutant, and then the scales fall from his eyes, and Rudolph is asked to guide the sleigh, and it's happy endings all around. Even the misfit toys get loved in the end.

But what's with Santa Claus being a hateful bigot throughout the show? At least the elf boss has an excuse: Hermey is a worse-than-useless toymaker, and all the elves do is make toys. His understanding of his needs is a little narrow, inasmuch as he can't understand the need for a resident dentist until later, and as for the reindeer, well, I'm willing to cut ungulates a fair bit of slack.

But what's Santa's excuse? He apparently hates Rudolph for purely aesthetic reasons, and he completely reverses himself the moment Rudolph becomes necessary to him. Why wasn't Rudolph using that opportunity to tell Santa Claus and the coach and all his inconstant friends in reindeerdom to go stuff themselves down a lit chimney?

Well, okay, at least he gets his dream gig out of it.

Now I want to step back and get a bit meta. What the heck were Rankin/Bass doing depicting Santa as such a hater? I know it's hard to remember, but he wasn't always a sugar-water salesman . Santa Claus started out as a widely beloved Catholic saint. And now he ends up here.

It's time to take a stand! You can't just depict Santa Claus as some sort of difference-hating fool with a selfish streak and get away with it. Think of the children!

And now, it is time for some nog. Merry Christmas, and God bless us every one.

Some people think I like coffee and I'm a big nerd.

2007-12-16T16:32:00.000-08:00

Wrong! This is what happens when you really like coffee and are a really big nerd:

I'm just giving away business ideas!

2007-12-15T23:36:00.000-08:00

Ridiculous idea I thought up while sitting in the back of the car today: homeopathic products for six-moon audiophiles.

What's a six-moon audiophile? Exhibit A: a favorable review of a CD/DVD Degausser *.

For further reading (good if you want to push yourself over the brink of derangement) try their archives. The most fun is generally to be had in the accessories category.

I'm going to start by selling cables doped with a 100x preparation of palladium.

*If you're not sure what I'm on about here, degaussing (and by the way, that Wikipedia link will tell you the fascinating story of why they de-magnetized ships in WWII) is a process by which you remove a magnetic charge from an object. The metal CDs and DVDs are made of thin aluminum foil, and essentially can't hold a magnetic charge. The reading systems for CDs and DVDs involve lasers, which are essentially unaffected by unaffected by magnetic fields. On the upside, all of this means that degaussing a disc isn't likely to cause any harm. Being picky, though, I normally have higher standards for audio equipment than "doesn't wreck things."

Sick of Sickness

2007-12-14T03:10:00.000-08:00

It's been 10 days. All I do is cough.

Things I learned from Wikipedia: the Mc Donnell Douglas F-4, a wildly successful example of brutalist warplane design, had pretty much the coolest collection of nicknames ever accumulated by an airplane.

My favourite is "Luftverteidigungsdiesel," of course.

Beerwatch

2007-11-29T03:26:00.000-08:00

A quick bit of beer-tasting silliness, hopefully soon to be joined by some things-to-see-in-Victoria posting:

Anything by Unibroue is still great.

For some reason, I have drunk both of the chocolate-flavored beers the LDB stocks. The made-in-BC Phillips Double Chocolate Porter is very tasty. But from the UK, the Young's Double Chocolate Stout is even better. Both are nice beers, not just chocolaty confections, and neither is especially sweet, thus avoiding alcopop syndrome.

Carpay is in town tomorrow night, so I'll be trying the Phillips Surly Blonde Belgian Triple for the first time. Why not?

The Curious semi-disappearance of Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey

2007-11-22T19:15:00.000-08:00

In late 2006, reasonably well-known blogger Jacqueline Passey (often known by her four-barreled name, as seen in the title), wrote a post about her dating criteria, more or less.

I shall not revisit the ridiculous bunfight that set off, though blog commentary on that post continues to be the main thing that comes up when you Google Ms. Passey's name.

Out of rather idle curiosity (she used to be the girlfriend of Not Johnny Chan, who I have sort-of known since SFU), I looked her up, and found that her blog had . . . disappeared.

Well, you know the usual steps: wayback machine, a little study, no big mystery. She announced her retirement, declared that having a job and a steady boyfriend was better than having a blog, and good for her.

Though it's surprising that someone like her was willing to not only throw over the blogging itself, but after less than a year, has let the domain lapse. I can only assume that work, school, and private life are in order, and wish her well at all of that.

Though I am curious that the requiem for her blog posted on a friend's site has also been taken away. That site using fairly sequential post numbers, we can see from both the archived link on Ms. Passey's site where the post should be, and a little poking around determines the existence of posts 30 and 33, but 31 and 32 have been deleted.

And thus the interesting part. Not her reasons for not blogging or letting her domain lapse, but the surprisingly fast first-person disappearance she has made from search results, and the ephemeral nature of the web.

Of course, some very smart people have spent a lot of time figuring out plans for persistent web entities that wouldn't suffer from link rot. I fear that the Web Archive is about the best solution so far. Link rot never sleeps.

I've worked fairly hard to make my online presence persistent. It's almost comforting to know how easy it is to fade into the background noise. And to get a real life.

So, how good are the New England Patriots, anyways?

2007-11-20T12:19:00.000-08:00

Very, very good.

I know, you don't understand that link. Even I barely understand it. Okay, I don't understand it at all.

But, I do understand this: in lots and lots of normal team sports (not cricket; I totally don't understand the scoring system(s)), net points is an excellent proxy for team performance. That is, almost every team's position in the standings is closely related to its standing in (points scored - points allowed).

There are exceptions, but very few. Sometimes you'll hear that a particular team is really good in close games; that is, they win a lot more 1-goal games (to jump to hockey as an example) than they lose. This is usually a statistical anomaly, and the longer you watch such teams, the more likely statistical gravity (aka the law of large numbers) will reassert itself.

Well, that was a long runup, right? I just wanted to point out why I'm fascinated by the net points scored by the New England Patriots.

Note that they have more than double the points of the Steelers, second-best in that stat. (254 net pts. vs 124)

Note also the total distribution of this stat: The Steelers have 124, followed by teams with 119, 106, and 100. Then there's a big drop to 57 net points. The three worst teams in the league have -110, -108, and -91 points respectively. Everybody else groups somewhere in the middle, and this is of course a net zero-sum stat, since every point scored by a team is a point scored against some other team (their opponent of the day, of course).

So every team in the NFL has between -110 and 124 net points, except the Pats, who have 254 net points.

Yes, I know they're running up the scores. But no other team has demonstrated this kind of ability to score at will and in such volume. As in, maybe no other team ever.

Only the Colts seem to have given the Pats any serious challenge this year (actually, they darned near beat them!), and I think it's fair to guess that the only plausible challengers left on their pre-playoff schedule are Pittsburgh on December 9th, and themselves on December 29th, that being their last regular-season game, and having an extremely high chance of being completely meaningless except for the Perfect Season.

Nerdiness at Criticality

2007-11-13T19:18:00.000-08:00

Item: Michael "Rands" Lopp writes a resonant description of nerd behaviour. Item: Wyn describes a new sitcom featuring nerds which may not suck. I feel the need to point out here that "nerd-human relationships" is a nice coinage based on my hackneyed self-description as a person working in the field of "nerd-human relations." TLO and I are happily working on our nerd-human relationship, however. Item: I read two sports column/blogs regularly. One is Tuesday Morning Quarterback, a football column that interrupts discussions of the negative value of most punts to discuss the details of how hedge fund managers' incomes are taxed. The other is devoted to tracking the latest details of sports uniforms. Item: I spend more time thinking about new ways to reconfigure bicycles than I do actually either working on bicycles or riding them (oops). Item: I loaded the washing machine today with an eye towards whether my new technique for getting the clothes from the hamper to the washing machine was faster (probably not).

Oh, and then there's this. Cal's marching band doing a medley of video game tunes while...acting out pixels in formation?!

Nerdiness at criticality. Evacuate area.

It's the weekend

2007-11-10T00:33:00.000-08:00

I'm relaxing.

Monopolized, and loving it!

2007-11-08T18:19:00.000-08:00

Per this response to something I didn't read (which I learned about at Daring Fireball, I thought I'd comment. Because I am smart and all those full-time pundits are not! Arrogance is fun!

At the risk of getting pedantic, the iTunes Music Store (whoops, now it's just the iTunes Store) has de facto "exclusive control" of the downloadable music market. Given their market share, I don't think you can deny that.

Here's a primer on US antitrust law.

Of course, what causes government intervention in these cases is not monopoly control of a market, but rather abuse of monopoly powers to consumer disadvantage.

Apple's profits largely exist on the iPod side of the business, and Apple's monopoly power largely exists on the iTunes Store part of the business, inasmuch as using iTunes-purchased music on non-iPods is tricky (but far from impossible).

Of course, the fact that Apple has been working hard with its suppliers to REDUCE the restrictions on using Music Store content (ie DRM-free iTunes+ songs) and the fact that you can use many, many other sources (CD, any other DRM-free music source) to get music onto the iPod both grossly undercut cries of abuse of monopoly power.

The hilarious irony with Apple's situation is that they didn't get where they are because they used the iPod to leverage the market position of the Store (you do remember that the iPod predates the iTMS, right?), but rather because (and I'm pretty happy with this assertion) both the iPod and the iTunes Store were best-of-class products in their respective categories. Were, and still are.

Besides, if legal relief is sought on this matter, the first thing Apple will suggest is that its store be required to turn off DRM on all songs. And about the only thing anyone could want them to do on the iPod side is to open up the sync interface. Of course, the former is forced upon them by their record label contracts, and the latter, well they just do that because they want to. It's the only place, arguably, where Apple would be vulnerable to an accusation of abuse of monopoly market share.

Hands up everyone who thinks these changes would cause a noticeable drop in either iTunes Store or iPod sales. Zero? All 20 of my readers are very smart!

Punish the Cheap

2007-11-01T22:24:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, I bought a refurbished MacBook (right in time for Apple to update their offerings, so there you go).

Have you ever seen a photo of Apple's product packaging? Of course you have. It's so pretty nobody can resist.

Beautiful! Too bad I didn't get to keep this one. You could almost use that box as a carrying case.

Even the inside of the box is pretty. You'll have to trust me on this, but the MacBook ("MacBook Amateur"?) uses virtually the same packaging, in terms of quality and layout. Form-fitted styrofoam, nicely packaged accessories, a cute little well for the disc and documentation package.

So, what about a refurb--I'm sorry, Certified Reconditioned Product?

Very...brown. And gray.

So, the form-fitted foam inside?

Aaah! It burns! My eyes bleed!

I haven't shown the cardboard insert that sits atop this foam for holding the accessories, but it was even worse: nothing sat in it properly, and the smaller accessories actually rattled around, hidden from view in the folds of the cardboard insert, when I first opened the box.

Now, why is Apple doing this? The obvious reason is that it's a bit cheaper, and probably more universal for the short runs of refurb stuff. I think the rather generic cardboard box could hold almost any Mac from a Mini to a small iMac. And costs should matter: they offer a pretty generous discount on refurbs (more than their restocking fee, for example).

But I think this is also a marketing decision: buy the new product, get the nice box. Buy the refurb, get the crappy box. I suspect there's lots of subtle little marketing pressures that are being put on people to say "hey, you can buy this product, but here's lots of little almost-reasons not to."

Cheap people like me get punished in all kinds of ways. Some are simple and cruel, like buying a $2 vernier caliper at Princess Auto and finding out it's off by about 0.7mm. Some are complicated and funny, like my year-long quest for a power adapter after I bought a really nice bicycle headlight for $5. This Apple technique is fairly special: it's obvious and harmless.

I'll take it!

Soon, I'll be replaced by a computer

2007-11-01T00:20:00.000-07:00

Today, I was joking to one of my co-workers that at first, we were going to replace him with a computer, but then we decided instead to replace a computer with him.

Alas, I think "mechanical turk" schemes don't have much life left in them, while the age-old fear of replacing more people with computers (more or less) is realistic.

The short version of this argument is that Software as a Service, as a model for pushing certain activities outside of a company, is becoming more and more compelling. Sure, it's just another step in the whole push to use computers to automate and streamline business activities, but it's a pretty big step.

Moreover, more and more of these services are being sent out to a very few class-leading players in these services. Lots of organizations (including my employer) have dumped their web search needs on Google, while Yahoo! picks up scraps, and Altavista (I'm probably dating myself by even knowing of their existence) gets left by the wayside. In-house search engines? Let's put it this way: I routinely use Google to search websites with built in search functions (IMDB, Drupal, and even Wikipedia) because Google has faster, more accurate search results (useful hint: I typically do this by typing the name of the website, followed by the query (eg imdb joseph cotten).

That's a few examples among many. Locally, Darren Barefoot outsources his email provision to Google, thus solving his spam problem. Everybody in the world uses YouTube as their video host of choice, and it just works.

The common thread here isn't even the outsourcing. That's fairly old hat. The interesting thing is how quickly momentum seems to gravitate towards single (owing to a lack of greater precision, I'll call them "best") solutions. I think that before ubiquitous webification (and heaven knows, remembering even that is starting to date my existence; note that first-year college students this September were typically born in the same year I had my first Internet email account; they never knew a world without the Web, more or less), these best solutions were not as easy to distribute, as easily compared, nor was their superiority as easily communicated. In short, even when stuff got outsourced, it often got outsourced to stinky inferior solutions. This still happens a lot.

At any rate, something (and I may well have the essential mechanism wrong) means that it is much easier for class-leading solutions to a problem (or implementations of a new concept) to come in and just win all the marbles. And it's also easier to install this stuff. It's no longer a case of buying the server that runs the system. Indeed, it's no longer a case of renting the maintained server share and putting the application on it. Now, it's often a case of renting the service, and nobody knows what the server is. Or even what software revision you're on. Or where the IT department is.

I think in the long term, this means that a lot more job functions will simply disappear from businesses. You'll just see bigger and bigger companies decide not to bother with in-house email systems, because hey, email (and especially spam) is hard. Some of this is just greater computer literacy, to take only my narrow field: just as computers made functional typing ubiquitous, and ended the need for typists who could take dictation, SaaS and general network literacy is making the remaining necessary IT knowledge ubiquitous, and we don't need IT departments that can manage servers.

I suppose this is where I should admit I fear that the entire field I work in will disappear before I get a chance to retire. That may well be true. But I am sanguine. The heroes of IT will always have jobs, because those server farms, however concentrated, aggregated, and outsourced, haven't gone away. But just like the erstwhile auto workers, the rest of us will somehow find jobs, because it turns out when the burden of managing IT infrastructure becomes a lot lighter, the companies that shed their IT burdens will now be more productive.

The medium-term effect is that we'll all get jobs working hard on whatever thing our organization actually is best-of-class at. For locally-oriented organizations, this may largely reflect a lack of global competition (at least until a smart global competitor figures out how to encroach on that service...), and for global organizations, well, take heart from the lesson of IBM: death sometimes comes slowly. For everyone else: get really good at something, anything, and make a go of it.

And at the risk of showing myself a fool in short order, I see this as a slight thematic re-emphasis here at Wired Cola. As part of our mission to be more Cybermorphic every day, I'm hoping to figure out how technological trends are going to affect ordinary people in the future (and I'll take that as meaning anything from "it's already happened, you just didn't notice" to the end of living memory), and explain them for a lay audience. I often joke that my day job is "nerd-human relations," so the theory is that might actually be what I'm good at. Let me know how I'm doing.

When all else fails, go to YouTube

2007-10-30T21:29:00.001-07:00

A very good year

2007-10-15T19:17:00.000-07:00

This year, Al Gore Jr. had a best-selling book, and won an Oscar* and the Nobel Peace Prize. Tyler Cowen asks, has anyone had a better year?

Excellent nominations from the comments:

Tim Allen's 1994: #1 TV show, #1 grossing film, #1 on the NYT best-seller list.

Einstein's 1905: one paper that ultimately won him the Nobel Physics Prize, and three others that merely transformed modern physics in their respective (and quite diverse) fields.

Newton's 1687: Newtonian Laws of mechanics and Theory of Gravity, but I think the claim for calculus has to be diluted by his shambolic publication and precedence war he undertook.

Bob Fosse's 1972: he won an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony for three different works in that year.

Various athletes, most notably Mark Spitz (1972 Olympics, 7 gold medals, each one a world record performance!), Steffi Graf's 1988 (all four tennis "slam" tournaments, plus Olympic gold).

I think what's most interesting is people who won for multiple achievements. By that light, Graf has a not-very-interesting year, because all she did was win four tennis tournaments. Spitz had two great weeks, and in multiple swimming events.

Einstein, even though he confined himself to physics, published four hugely diverse papers. Tim Allen and Bob Fosse effectively won each of their accolades for separate works, which should count for more.

Gore's accomplishment is tricky. I think you could credibly argue that he got all his awards for the same work (or at least the same theme), and that asterisk is up at the top of this post because technically, Gore didn't win the "Inconvenient Truth" best doc Oscar: that's a producer's award. But this is rather like saying Hitchcock didn't win the Oscar for Rebecca: true, but beside the point.

Here's my sporting nomination for best year: Eddy Merckx's 1972: Tour (plus points jersey), Giro, 10 stages, four major one-day races, hour record, Super Prestige Pernod, etc.

With Eddy, the biggest complication is that you could also choose any other year between 1969 and 1974: of these, 1974 is notable for Giro-Tour-Worlds-Super Prestige Pernod and more.

But I think I have an absolute winner with Sir Winston Churchill's 1953: Knight of the Garter, Nobel in Literature, and he was the sitting Prime Minister. He also published a collection of speeches and (probably) the final volume of The Second World War, which I assume was a best-seller, though I can't find explicit reference (the publication date is also a bit iffy).

Churchill basically won the knighthood for long service (most notably during WW II), the Nobel for "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values," the Prime Ministership he held as a result of a comeback triumph in the 1951 election, and he was still publishing major literary works.

That's a pretty good year!

So I'm looking for other nominations. The thing that we're seeking (for whatever reason) is a certain diversity of triumphs. The ultimate would be something like world-class sporting, political, scientific, and artistic achievements all in a single year.

The black bike

2007-10-07T17:34:00.000-07:00

TLO's Life lesson curriculum

2007-10-01T21:46:00.000-07:00

Coping with husband/dog rebellion 101
Finding lost or missing items 200 - prerequisite: coping with husband/dog rebellion 101
The Art of Relaxation 100 - For beginners - who have never learned how to relax and feel it cannot be justified
Linguistics 100 - learning how to understand people who speak while yawning or eating

I think I will also register for Ryan's language course - as many as I can get

Life Lessons

2007-09-28T23:14:00.000-07:00

The inscrutable Maktaaq has tagged me with creating an imaginary curriculum of improbably practical courses, a sort of term or two of remedial life skills. Apparently the original idea was composed by a wyvern, but when you are reading the writings of whale blubber, that sort of thing happens sometimes.

By the way, the rest of this won't make much sense until you read Maktaaq's post. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Oh, one more rule: you have to take one course with a friend, so let's dig into Maktaaq's calendar, and choose...hm. Your humble narrator already knows how to remove spiders, already created his own board game once (it wasn't very good, but who cares), has no hair and is the regular kind of boy, can't afford the supplies fee on the divination course, already has a bachelor's degree in graphic novels, The Lovely One provides all the massagation he could ask for, and my signature is already the terror of tiny sign-here lines.

So that leaves Intensive Novel-Writing 400! It's very hands-on, and the program is supposed to be quite effective. Sure, it's banned by the Geneva Convention, but what isn't? And I could really use a less-metaphorical-than-usual hanging in a fortnight to push me to finally write a long work.

Hm. I should take bluewyvern's Social Dance for Non-Dancers. My only objection is that I did once take that, and well, maybe I needed more lessons. I should definitely not take a course in small talk. In fact, quite the opposite. My first course:

Silence 101: knowing when to shut up
A brief history of silence, techniques for keeping quiet, how to hold one's tongue, tact tactics, and the delicate art of being thought a fool rather than confirming it. No lecture: course is offered by correspondence and an in-person lab component.

But that's not the course I really need to pass. That would be this one:

Getting Things Done I & II (8 credits)
This is an intensive, comprehensive, practical program in finishing what you started. Topics covered include prioritization, time-management, the last filing system you'll ever need, practical adaptations for the real world, long-term and short-term goal-setting, doing the next thing, and includes an optional rural practicum: git 'er done.

Course resources: the book, and 43 Things.

No joke: I have actually read most of the book, and even primitively tried to implement its system. But I just never followed through with it. I'm better at finishing things now than I was five years ago, but it's still strictly Needs Improvement territory.

Programming for Web 2.0
Could I be more practical, more of the moment? This is a practical course (probably offered at BCIT) that goes from the ground up. Students will be taught the tools and techniques of AJAX and complementary app-development systems like Ruby on Rails, and how to make websites with those neat dynamically-responsive forms that are so lovely. One entire unit is devoted to making your web page mostly white, and Namng for Wb 2.0: remov a vowl.

Assertiveness 201: picking spots, taking names
In this hands-on course, the student will be taught how to stand up for what's right, how to take care of business, and how to not back down. Role-playing dialogues will be used intensively. Keen students may take an optional self-guided unit on BS detection, peer-pressure resistance, and negotiating with used car dealers.

Music 100, 200, 300, 400
In this four-part course, the student will learn to play piano masterfully, and two other instruments competently. For the practical final exam, students will be expected to form a band. Forming a punk band is an automatic Fail.

I think that would about cover it. I'd also take a non-credit Extension course in eating right and not blowing off my workouts. That would be nice.

Following all of these exertions, there is the thesis course:

Ten Thousand Hours: doing one thing as well as you can.
This is a self-directed course in which the student is given ten thousand hours to practice a skill. The particular skill to be practiced will be chosen with the assistance of your thesis adviser, who will look into your soul to suggest the thing you most ought to do.
Prerequisites: a life more ordinary, a soul, a desire to maximize one's potential.
due to the prerequisites, this course is not recommended for undead beings of any form, but vampires will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Since I don't know anybody, I shall tag some people who really ought to update their blogs: Gord (who is faster than me), Andrew Chang, Supafamous Eric, and oh, what the heck, his evil twin Ernie. Bonus Tag: TLO. I'll report back and see if she takes the challenge.

Update: After reading over bluewyvern's post, I can't believe I didn't put in a language requirement. She picked two; I'll pick three: Greek, French, and Mandarin. Aside from my personal reasons for picking Greek, it would be a tremendous joy to read the classics in their own language. Mandarin would be all kinds of practical, both for a world traveler and a Vancouverite (poor Cantonese, so quickly thrown under the tracks!), and adding French is essentially a sentimental choice, though the irony of me being trilingual and still not knowing French might be so delicious I'd end up skipping that course for purely conceptual reasons

The curious case of Raise the Red Lantern's DVD transfers

2007-09-20T12:15:00.000-07:00

Raise the Red Lantern, one of the prettiest movies ever to come out of China, has suffered from some terrible DVD releases.

But at long last, while I wasn't looking, it appears the latest two NTSC (and Region 1 or 0) editions don't suck. DVD Beaver raves: Acceptable visual quality! And subtitles that make sense!

Alas, they give and they take. The ERA release comes down hard on those who would illicitly show this video on...

oil rigs?

Stephen Fry, mobile phone reviewer

2007-09-19T23:32:00.000-07:00

Mr Fry (he's a brit, so he nae gets a dot after his social title) is Britain's most talented . . . reviewer of mobile phones?

Quite. I assure you this is the most insightful state-of-the-smartphone you are likely to read.

(Þ: Fireball Gruber.)

I'm internet famous

2007-09-18T22:52:00.000-07:00

Let's just not contemplate what was in the bottle.

Why is India so much poorer than China?

2007-09-17T00:13:00.000-07:00

So I was musing on the routine China-this, China-that coverage these days, and I started thinking, "hey, what about India?"

And then I learned something that most everyone else who has asked that question already knew: India's per-capita GDP is about a third of China's, and is about half of China's PPP GDP.

Here's lots of pretty charts, in convenient PDF format. The intro to that document suggests the issue is that democracy or no, China essentially embraced aggressive market reforms about a decade earlier than India did. Here's a roundtable discussion on the subject of whether India will catch up, by a bunch of experts.

I asked a pretty clever friend what he thought the answer was relative differences in environmental and regulatory controls. And there's probably something to that. But the other thing to note is that compared to China, India has seen far less foreign investment. Whether that is the symptom or the cause of the lower rate of economic growth (and the present rather gaping chasm in average outcomes), there it is.

I am not making this up

2007-09-12T12:10:00.000-07:00

This appears to be the real trailer for a real cartoon.

Book Club

2007-09-10T10:22:00.000-07:00

Due to an oversight, neither The Lovely One nor I had a book to read on the airplane trip back, so we bought some in Schipol.

I think she was a little weirded out that I chose This Is Paradise! by Hyok Kang.

The hook is that Mr. Kang is a rare escapee from North Korea, but even more rare, he escaped as a young teenager with his family. The book is his first-person description of what life was like in North Korea.

I finished all 200 pages in the plane with time to spare. It was compelling reading. The short version is this: the famine in Korea was far, far worse than I realized, if this account can be generalized. Hyok Kang escaped with his family to China in 1998; by that time two thirds of his schoolmates were not coming to class, either because they were too hungry to do so, too busy feeding themselves, or because they were dead of hunger.

The telling point may be that when the family escapes to rural China, it seems like an unbelievable paradise, because everyone has enough to eat. And also, that was where he first saw that exotic fruit, the banana. After four years living underground in China, they finally make a circuitous trip to South Korea.

The story is harrowing. I have some cause to doubt the completeness of the account: in one passage, Mr. Kang admits to having joined a "gang of bad boys" in China, and says rather obliquely that he became "involved in acts of violence that I now regret."

But as an unfiltered portrait of what life is like in North Korea, it's rare and done well.

Wired Cola salutes Apple

2007-09-05T21:40:00.000-07:00

Here at Wired Cola, we're all about leveraging synergy in our quest to become the most cybermorphic purveyor of fictive beverages the world™ (a trademark of Globadom® LLC) has ever known.

But this is our corporate blog, and here today, we're going to leverage a little synergy by paying homage to our friends in the marketing department at Apple ("don't say 'computer') Inc., who revealed two clever things today, one of them even beverage-related.

The first revelation we want to discuss is the Apple-Starbucks synergy. In sum, it's thus: when you get within striking distance of a Wi-Fi hotspot hosted by one of these newly upgraded Starbucks shops, a little Starbucks icon appears on your iPhone or your iPhone-minus-Phone, aka iPod Touch. Tap that poor little virtual button, and you can browse the music currently playing in the Starbucks, and if it fills you with the same joy as a Venti Mocha Frappuccino, you can buy it right there.

That's it. I'm not making this up. They're rolling it out to New York and Seattle Starbuckses in October, and wave after wave of Starbucksae will be upgraded from then to the end of 2008.

Frankly, it seems they could have done more with this. Hopefully in Starbucks 3.0 (or is that iPhone 2.5/iPod Touch 2.0?), you will be able to see the daily drink specials right on your mobile convergence device, and check the sell-by dates of the scary cookies, too. And if you like what you see, you can order and pay for it, right through your iWhatsit!

Actually, come to think of it, that's a slightly less stupid idea than the actual iStarbucks convergence that actually got rolled out today.

That brings us to the second thing Apple revealed, which has nothing to do with beverages, so I hardly know why I'm mentioning it.

Apple cut the price of the "real" iPhone to $399 today, a mere 67 days after launching the device.

Why? Dumb question: because $399 was the real price of the device all along. Mr. Daring Fireball sums up the matter in two perfect paragraphs, which explain exactly what happened.

Nonetheless, inessential elaboration is a core competence here at Wired Cola, so here goes: nobody else in recent mass-marketing nerd-toy hype vending has tried anything like this. The usual formula is that you try to make your your PlayBox Wii60 sells out within days, and is then unavailable to normal humans for months, while speculators float vast rafts of said product in the safe harbors of eBay and Craigslist.

Apple decided to be its own speculator: A million people wanted this thing badly enough to pay $200 more than Apple really needed to charge for it, and put that money directly in Apple's hands. The result was that demand was choked just enough to match supply (iPhones have been continuously available, more or less, since launch day), speculation was unprofitable and virtually nonexistent, and just as a side note, I estimate this play made about $200 million in pure profit for Apple, over and above what they would probably consider "normal margins."

We here at Wired Cola, when we hear a marketing tale like that, well, we just salute the perpetrators. Are you sure this is the same company that's doing that Starbucks thing?

Oh, by the way, here's my opinion of the rest of the stuff: Shuffles are stocking stuffers, the new Nano is ugly but functional, the biggest iPod Classic ("Classic" means "we're going to kill this off soon") is justifiable only as a multifunction detachable storage device, the Touch, at only $100 less than the iPhone, is a waste of time for Americans, but will be a hot seller in parts of the planet out of range of the AT&T network. the WiFi store may sell iPod Touches all on its own, and is a genius play that was a bit overdue.

In other words, Apple will sell, according to my carefully tuned estimates, roughly a zillion iPods in the next four months, and approximately half a zillion iPhones.

Vacation detritus

2007-09-03T22:36:00.000-07:00

Things that can be exported from Greece to the joy of others: ouzo, loukoumi, halvadopita.

Things you should leave in Greece: mastic liquor (locally, "mastiha," but the transliteration is not universal). Don't believe the review on that page: mastic liquor is weird, like a girl-drink that took a turn for the weird, and remember you haven't even started mixing yet.

Those Campari Red ads: Athens featured billboard ads with Ms. Salma Hayek touting Campari Red all over the place. Now, I am all in favour of more photos of Ms. Hayek in the world. This seems to me a great idea for civic beautification (actually, how about next year, instead of fibreglass whales or bears, we do fibreglass Salma Hayeks in Vancouver? I suppose the need for a local angle would drive the consensus to fibreglass Pamela Andersons), but in several of these ads, Ms. Hayek seems very uncomfortable with the situation. I'm not sure that's what they had in mind for selling booze.

Productivity would be nice. Musical taste would be nice too.

2007-08-30T22:19:00.000-07:00

But I don't got that right now. Must work harder.

Here's a question for you: can you sensibly judge musical taste?

I say no, but after thinking, I'll go with yes, provided that the Facebook question Mr. Barefoot references is rephrased as "do you think most people would say you have good taste in music?"

Because then you could just poll that person's friends and create a sorta-scientific meta-analysis of the collective assessment of mutual musical taste.

If you do it right, we won't all be above average.

On Vacations

2007-08-25T03:31:00.000-07:00

A vacation, of course, being that thing from which I am just returned. Well, sorta. I have a few more days off to get over soul lag. Photos will probably pop up in the Flickr stream soon. For now, some notes.

I think three weeks (more or less) was exactly the right amount of time to be on vacation. The basic problem with going from Vancouver to a small cycladic island is that it takes, more or less, 3 days to get there, and 3 days to get back. You can fudge this number a few ways, but there are essentially no direct flights that go YVR to ATH, and the ferry trip from Piraeus (the port of Athens) and Syros takes four hours by the slow ferry, maybe half that by the fast ferry, and I've never investigated the option of taking the 30-minutes-or-so flight, which is not daily). With one air connection and one boat connection to cover, your 18-odd hours of travel time will probably feature some layovers.

Syros itself was lovely. I don't know how much of this will translate for others, though: The Lovely One and I had the incredible advantage of staying at her parents' recently-built house, which is described by the locals as way out of town. In fact, it is about 15 minutes from the centre of the downtown core. The house is very close to being the most distant dwelling on the island from the main city, and is pretty rural. Our neighbours were the house across the street and 200 metres from the road, the other house 100 metres down the road, and the goats in the field below us. there were maybe two or three more dwellings within sight of the house. That was it. In the right place on our balcony, we could see the Milky Way at night.

The only catch was the Harrowing Road of Death between the house and the town of Ermoupolis, the big town. It was a near-parody of a mountain road: switchbacks, narrow, blind corners, extreme examples of contour-following on hillsides, roadway literally carved from the slope in some cases, with shoulders that alternated between the vertical cliff face and the vertical cliff drop. A few guardrails were thrown in at apparently-randomly-chosen corners, though I couldn't figure out what distinguished the selected corners from the entirely scary places that didn't have guardrails.

A Greek island in August is a near thing to paradise. We got lucky in this trip with excellent weather, just a tad milder than the seasonal norms, and mitigated always by the still-very-real local practice of siesta. How real? Most of the things you will want to see or do are going to be closed between mid-day and 1900h. Just go to the beach, or better yet, take advantage of the time to work on a nap, since it's hot, and you're going to be up until 0200h, since you started dinner at 2300h, and it takes two hours to eat.

The nearest thing to paradise would probably be the same island in spring or fall. The locals claim the water (there's maybe 15 major beaches, and as many again minor or hard-to-reach ones) is un-swimmable for about two weeks around New Years. I suspect anyone who has taken a dip in the ocean near Vancouver wouldn't blink twice at Mediterranean swimming at any time of the year.

We took two day-trips to other islands while we were there. The first was to Paros, where we overpaid heroically to rent the last scooter on the island (mid-August, revolving around the national holiday for the Feast of the Assumption on August 15th, is the high season for Greeks to go on vacation, and they go to the cycladic islands), and had an okay time. This was my second trip to Paros (we visited on our honeymoon seven years ago), and both of us felt we had pretty much done the island. The highlights for new visitors probably come down to seeing Lefkes, and maybe going to our favourite pottery shop, Studio Yria. Two notes on studio Yria: the Lefkes shop is now closed, and be sure that if you ask the way, you're being directed to the pottery studio near Kostos, not the bed and breakfast on the other side of the island (a mistake that led us on a pleasant diversion in 2000).

Naxos was different. Bigger, greener, more trees, new to both of us, more stuff of archaeological and historic interest (everything from the Naxos portal to an endless array of 6th-to-10th c. Byzantine churches, most still in use today). We liked it, and will probably return the next time.

On both our island trips and at "home" on Syros, we were complete suckers for the brown signs that in Greece direct you to a historic or archaeological site. the guidance is often vague (and seems no better in Greek than English; most road signs were bilingual), and we repeatedly found ourselves following the brown signs then then not finding our destination. On a few occassions, it became apparent that the brown signs led to a location which was very long hike from the last road. Greek footpaths are routinely little more than goat paths. None of this mattered, since the journeys really were as interesting as the destinations: at one point we followed the signs to the end of the road, walked through a semi-abandoned rural village, and never saw our theoretical goal. But on the way back I found an untended apricot tree, picked as many partly-dried apricots as I could, and ate about six or seven before TLO's wise counsel intervened. Good times!

We rented a small car (Kia Picanto with a 1000cc motor) on Syros, and scooters on our island trips. TLO and I continue to debate the merits of the car. On one hand, it was a very nice car, peppy, air-conditioned, and with plenty of room for a bag or two. On the other hand, parking was so bad in Ermopoulis that by the end of our stay we found ourselves avoiding trips downtown, which was a shame. Parking would not have been an issue for a scooter, and we continue to debate whether the Harrowing Road of Death would have been less scary on the scooter (because I could drive further from the edge of the cliff) or more scary (because, well, it's a scooter). On the gripping hand, I accepted the gift of a bicycle from one family friend, and returning to the house on a scooter might have been rather interesting.

Amusingly, the cars (including rentals) in Greece are almost universally manuals, while the two scooters we rented both featured CVT automatics (as is typical). Greek driving was characterized by a bit of loonyness, surprisingly little horn-honking, and an awareness of the very tight margins involved. You have to be aware that your car and the oncoming car will frequently just fit through the roadway, or maybe require taking turns through the narrow bit, and if there's a foot on either side of your car, it may soon be filled by a scooter or motorcycle. Our road travel was largely uneventful.

Ferry travel in Greece ranges from amusing to annoying. I'd suggest that if you take the Blue Star Ithaki (the main near-Cyclades car ferry from Piraeus), especially during the high season, that you seriously consider the few extra Euros for reserved seats, which are comfy and will save you the stress of finding what you can. TLO and I had relatively little trouble sitting on either leg of our trip to Syros, but it was a near thing. The boats we took to Naxos and Paros were a mixed bag: the Flyingcat 3 to Paros was a hot-rod turbine-powered catamaran, capable of 60 knots, making trips half as long as on the slow ferries. Internally, it was all reserved seats but not very inspiring. I loved the bilingual house magazine, Pelagos, for its surreal musician interviews.

Our other two boats were Nel Lines' Panagia Thessalene (looks like a slow ferry, but was nearly as fast as the Flyingcat; reserved seats, and generally a nice boat), and the Panagia somethingelse, which was a very slow ferry indeed, and arrived late to boot.

For air travel, we used Quebec-based Air Transat to get as far as Amsterdam (Schipol) and for the return, and Olympic Airways to get to Athens and back. Olympic was its usual comic self: in 20 years they have updated their planes, and have acceptably comfortable cabins, but there was always a slight sense that the logistics were about to go horribly wrong. I can't recommend them as a carrier of choice, but it's clearly not an avoid-at-all-costs situation. the new Athens airport, freshly built for the last Olympics, manages to be nearly as dreary and shabby-looking as the old airport, which itself was a very dreary and shabby-looking place.

Schipol, by contrast, is one of the nicer international airports on the planet, although buying food may bankrupt you (did our two sandwiches and medium pop really just cost $20?). On the other hand, the branch location of the Rijksmuseum located inside the security zone is an oasis, and admission is free. An art lover could make a case for a brief layover in Schipol just to check out the current exhibit (though if you were really that serious, surely one would make it a day, and carry on to the full museum in town?)

Air Transat was the most confusing. The food was reasonable, the service was courteous and competent, the seats were leather, and I absolutely cannot recommend them to anyone over 5'6". I am that height, and my knees nearly touched the seat in front of me. Seat pitch must be one of the shortest in the industry, and I don't know how tall people would even physically fit into the space provided. Even so, I managed to get several hours of sleep on both of their flights.

But on the other hand, I can't complain about the experience of air travel. The security checks are tedious (though the staffers at all the posts we went through seem to have their act together these days; people passed through the checks fairly quickly, and the Athenian security guard who gave me a hand-pat was courteous and had a gentle touch :).

As for the actual experience of being in a bunch of Airbuses for so many hours, well of course it's tedious and unpleasant. To make the economics work (and please point me to an airline with a really nice ROI; there's a few cheap-jet carriers making a steady living, and that's about it), Transat puts 351 coach seats in an A330. A non-tedious, pleasant option is also available, in the form of 12 club-class seats up front (more room, nice food, be wary of the last row of seats in Club, which don't fully recline), and it is priced accordingly, which is to say I gladly accepted the option of being crammed in the Ambulatory Cargo hold in exchange for being able to afford my vacation. It's ten hours of mild discomfort in exchange for several hundred dollars.

So in conclusion, I highly recommend my vacation, and if you ever have the opportunity of taking it, I recommend the experience.

Greece in pictures, accompanied by words

2007-08-10T02:29:00.000-07:00

A few days in, and Syros is still paradise. Instead of getting all the cuisines of the world, you get one cuisine, and the world's best watermelon. Instead of a thousand options at night, you get maybe a dozen, but I personally recommend the one where you listen to the crickets and the goat-bells from your balcony, and those are the only two sounds you can hear. Then lie back on the balcony, and look up at the brightest, starriest sky you'll see this side of a very serious camping trip.

The road of harrowing near-death experiences is still harrowing, but I'm beginning to enjoy driving it. The Lovely One says it's so scary that if she had seen the road beforehand, she would have told her dad not to build the house where he did. The drive takes about fifteen minutes from our place to downtown Ermoupoli, by the way.

We have been to two beaches in three days. The swimming and sunning are first-rate. My obsessive desire for a bicycle is annoying my bride and baffling my uncle. I have found an ad for one candidate, a cheap-looking Puch 5-speed that, if inexpensive, will work. But cottered cranks! Possibly steel rims! And the only bike shop in town doesn't even have clipless pedals for sale (fortunately, I bought a set in Athens. Better would have been remembering to bring my own set, as I had planned...).

We went to the movies Wednesday night with our young cousin, Vasya. She is very fluent, speaking with only a slight accent (the phonemes in Greek and English seem to be so similar that there is little trouble in pronouncing the language, and that goes either way, for native English speakers trying to speak Greek, and vice versa) and few stumbles. It was an outdoor theatre, showing Ocean's 13, and I had the obligatory Canadian-goes-to-Europe, has-beer-in-an-unusual-location experience there. It helped the film along nicely.

This trip has filled me with two emotions: a deep desire, once again, to get my affairs in order so I can move here for a long-term stay, and a fair bit of shame that I spent so little time working on my Greek language skills before the trip. TLO worked very hard for several months before we left, and the effort has paid great dividends, to the point that I am completely dependent on her for negotiating ordinary transactions. It's not that most people here can't get by with a little English, and are generally fluent if they work in any remotely touristy enterprise, but having someone with native language skills helps so much that I simply rely on her in almost every case. My skills are at the point where I get excited when I read a kitchenware catalog and figure out that "anoxidoto" ("ανοξείδωτο") means "stainless." Which opens me, of course, to the question of why I am reading a kitchenware catalog, but let's leave that to the realm of the unexamined.

Best. Vacation. Ever.

My vacation can beat up your vacation

2007-08-06T08:29:00.000-07:00

So I'm in Greece. The trip here was relatively unpleasant. We traveled through YVR, Schipol in Amsterdam, and after a 1-day layover, on to Athens.

Athens International is notable because they completely replaced the airport shortly before the Olympics: new location, completely new facility. It's a sadder, cheaper-looking affair than either of the other two, older airports we went through.

We're staying on the island of Syros, in my in-laws' newly-constructed place. It's shockingly beautiful. We look out over the sea from our hilltop vantage, with goats roaming the lower pasture and the hillsides. The food is superb, the weather is nearly perfect (it rained for 15 minutes today, which will probably make the front page of tomorrow's paper), and in every way you could imagine, the place and the times are ridiculously perfect.

The civilized culture of siesta is one I can really get into!

Maybe a new packing record

2007-08-01T12:22:00.000-07:00

With a dressed weight of about 30 pounds, almost all of my luggage fits into a single bag, which, had I needed to, I could probably force through as carry-on. The biggest impediment to that is my need to carry things like 350 mL of contact lens fluid, which, thanks to the forces of evil, is not permitted in the passenger cabin.

I devolved into a rule of fives for this trip. five sets of socks, five shirts, five pants. More or less. I think I have six or seven pants if you count things like bicycle shorts.

Inexplicably, I'm bringing four sets of footwear, including two pairs of brown leather shoes, but no runners. And I just realized I've forgotten my bike pedals. Darn.

Finding the Easter Eggs in extremely limited AIs never gets old!

2007-07-30T19:50:00.000-07:00

Minor Tweaks: the IKEA DIALOGUES.

Wherein some blogger repeatedly holds conversations with Ikea's web chat-bot, Anna.

Hint: start at the bottom of the page, with "A conversation with IKEA's online assistant, Anna" and scroll up through the dialogues.

The two greatest car chases

2007-07-27T19:20:00.000-07:00

Nobody filmed 'em better than Frankenheimer.

Regarding car chases, the French Connection, as dramatic as it looked, is not an especially sophisticated chase, technically speaking (though the dramatic element of chasing the "L" with a car is affective and effective). The chase relies on undercranking to speed up the action, and quick cuts to avoid spoiling some fairly modest illusions.

Wikipedia does say that it was filmed without permits or road closures, and thus some of the driving is in the middle of real traffic, which is probably why it could never happen today.

For convincing car chase/race sequences, Frankenheimer's two great car movies stand out. In Grand Prix, he basically invented the modern rigs for attaching cars to cameras, and in an interview with Speedvision (now Speed Channel) before his death (I think Bruce Dern was the host), he talked about how they were occasionally filming from helicopters flying 15 feet above the cars, something which wouldn't be possible today.

In Grand Prix, the action is virtually at full speed, and the effect is astounding. See a documentary here.

Also, it's fun for annoying cinephiles. Cite it as both your favourite Toshiro Mifune movie, and your favourite Yves Montand movie, and watch steam come out of their ears!

Then came Ronin in 1998, which effectively reprises the same filming techniques (sans the helicopters) but with road cars on normal roads. Despite the three decades separating the two films, I think the cars-at-speed scenes of either are only equalled by the other.

Ronin features a pair of car chases, each quite amazing in its own right. The commentary by Frankenheimer on the DVD is pure entertainment, with the director revealing that there was a stunt driver inside the car that gets blown up, among other technical tidbits.

Both movies have essentially slight plots outisde of their action sequences. As with Grand Prix, you can have fun citing this as your favourite Robert DeNiro/Jean Reno/Stellen Skarsgard movie! Or cite either as your favourite Frankenheimer movie, so they can start sputtering "Manchurian Candidate!"

Manamana

2007-07-27T13:03:00.001-07:00

At the Kwik-E-Mart

2007-07-05T01:08:00.000-07:00

A short review.

I thought the funny thing about the cartoon stand-ups is that while they looked pretty naff in person, they look really good in photos! Something about the flattening effect of photography.

As for the rest, it was...a good try. The fact that the signature Krusty-Os and Buzz Cola were an instant sell-out (along with the pink donuts, and the Radioactive Man comics) diluted the effect a fair bit. But the bizarro slogans ("rich in bunly goodness!") and the Kwik-E-Mart uniforms were great.

Of the products I saw, the Buzz Cola was a brilliant reproduction of the original, but looks a little cheap when translated into the real world. The Krusty-Os packaging was a work of genius, and I still regret not buying a box. Both were way more convincing than the Squishee cups.

Why? They played it straight. The Buzz Cola can is what it is: a can of Buzz Cola. There's a subtle "Simpsons Movie" logo tucked above the bar code on the back side of the can.

The Krusty-Os are even better, with their lovely styling and various slogans and ad copy ("the best you can expect from a TV clown.") It is as if magic hands have plunged into the Simpsonverse and pulled back a consumer product for our delectation.

The Squishee cup is less perfect. I have two versions of the cup, one cardboard and one plastic. Two different Squishee logos, and neither cup can help itself: they both add 7-11 and Slurpee logos to the cups as well, and break Kayfabe (thanks, Colby!) by putting large "Simpsons Movie" logos on the back sides of the cup. The plastic one goes one worse, by actually having a Simpsons character on the cup as well. At the risk of sounding like an idiot [that's a no-risk proposition! -ed], I'm pretty sure when Bart goes to the Kwik-E-Mart to buy a Squishee, his family members are not emblazoned on the cups.

In short, I have a feeling that had Disney's Imagineers been on the job, I would have been fully convinced that I was in the Kwik-E-Mart. As it was, I felt like 7-11's Imagineers did the job, with all that entails.

Don't get me wrong: I think they went farther than anyone had any right to expect out of a rebadged 7-11. Maybe my expectations were too high.

Fuel to the fire

2007-07-02T12:47:00.000-07:00

I know, you're sick of reading about a telephone that isn't even available in Canada. Or you have no idea what I'm talking about.

After enjoying a long and pointless conversation with a good friend who is intimately involved with the mobile telephony business (he's an iPhone skeptic; at one point he sent me a photo of his business partner picking his nose; I think he was doing this to illustrate the camera in his Blackberry Curve...), I finally found the One True Quote regarding der iPhone:

My old phone, one based on Windows Mobile 5.0, had almost every feature the iPhone has - point by point. The differences between the products (like the differences between their desktop cousins) have to do with how functionality is exposed to the user. In this matter, you'll find that Apple's product is almost infuriatingly superior.

Hey you kids in school: UI matters.

Bad Medicine

2007-07-02T09:30:00.000-07:00

For some reason, I'm thinking about health care a lot these days (No, I'm fine, thank you for asking: except for needing to lose a few pounds to get to race weight, I've never been better).

I was over hanging around Darren Barefoot's comment on the new film Sicko. This is roughly what I said there:

Nobody wants to say it so much, but as bad as the health care system in the US is (for a minority of its citizens, it should be said, as opposed to the well-covered ones), no country’s medical care system (at least the parts where the US differs substantially from the rest of the world) makes much of a difference.

What separates the developed world life expectancies from undeveloped-world life expectancies is mostly stuff like child immunization, clean drinking water, and effective treatments for diarrhea (ORT, which is pathetically cheap and incredibly effective).

What separates Cuba (and other nations, mostly in the “developing” category) from the US is probably the availability of enough, but not too much food (and not a lot of meat). Thus the average Cuban is on a calorie-restricted but not starvation diet.

The average American or Canadian or European diet? Not so much. Or rather, too much.

Meanwhile, the health care spending makes people healthier in relatively marginal ways: the rare young cancer patient benefits if we can extend their life by 30+ years, but they are rare. We can give you knee surgery and hip replacements, but those don’t make you live longer, they just make you able to play golf at age 60.

Unfortunately, all these marginal treatments are really pricey. As has been noted in the field, the last six months of a patient’s life are often the most expensive, medically speaking. This is because, well, we can’t always be sure they’re going to die, but without medical intervention we’re pretty sure they will.

Then they do, and all we have to show for our dramatic medical intervention is a lot of public health expenses.

Regarding the issue of the value of marginal spending on health care, see this slightly leftish discussion and this rather libertarian discussion. Both lean heavily on a government-supported RAND study that took a sample group of 7700 uninsured Americans, and gave them one of five types of insurance, ranging from free care, to HMO-style care, to a group that had a 95% co-pay with a capped maximum annual out-of-pocket cost (in essence, the subject would have been sheltered from catastrophic medical costs, but would have to pay virtually all of their routine doctor-visit costs).

There was almost no difference in their health outcomes. The free-care group showed a bit better control of hypertension, and had better vision (I suspect this means they kept their eyewear prescriptions up to date). Marginal value of health care and all that.

A serious examination of modern health care systems needs to be clear-eyed about what they can and cannot do for the money.

Phonecam zen

2007-06-28T21:47:00.000-07:00

Not saying where I saw that one.

Didn't stay around to meet the self-deprecating driver.

First, do no harm

2007-06-17T23:57:00.000-07:00

This is the post where I hope all my doctor friends don't read my blog. Or perhaps that they do read my blog, but don't take it personally.

Colby Cosh, editorialist for the National Post, posted a little note on his blog about an outbreak of C. difficile in Quebec hospitals.

That's a classic iatrogenic disease: the usual mode of transmission in hospitals seems to be doctors bringing it with them from patient to patient.

His editorial is pretty hard on the doctors involved in that case (and similar "forgot to sterilize the instruments" fiascos elsewhere in the country), but it should be.

Medicine, sadly, probably is in need of a bit of procedural clean-up. Rather than rehash the work of others, I'll let the incredibly smart Alex Tabarrok over at Marginal Revolution do the rest of the writing for me:

In Praise of Impersonal Medicine, on using procedural checklists to improve diagnosis and treatment, because process control is better than instinctive doctoring.

Why is Medicine so Primitive?, on how we need to make medicine much more mechanistic and procedural than it is now, because it would save more lives.

The only personal note I'd inject here is that one of my doctor friends, a bone-surgery guy deep into his career, was telling me that he's at the point where he basically specializes in one surgical operation, and he does it well.

This is probably how more doctors should be, and surgeons especially: take one operation, get very very polished at it (maybe do it for ten thousand hours?), and away you go.

When Bad design attacks...poker players

2007-06-04T22:52:00.000-07:00

This article, which I was directed to by the seriously poker-faced Terrence "Johnny" Chan, details some rather unpleasant design errors with the new cards being used in the World Series of Poker.

A quick heads-up

2007-06-03T23:20:00.001-07:00

And outside, I'm watching the oddly silent sheet lightning.

Buy my Carbon or I Kill This Kitten

2007-05-24T22:30:00.000-07:00

Somebody at work asked me about a joke I made: that I was going to turn a profit on my cycling to work by selling the carbon offsets.

That led to a long digression about the nature of emissions trading and carbon offsetting (Al Gore was discussed), and I promised to write a little post about it.

As it happens, Wikipedia (surprise) has already got a very good article which would say most of what I was going to say as a primer on the subject.

All I'd add to that is if you're not sure what I'm on about, carbon offsetting is a way of compensating for the carbon-dioxide deficiencies of your current lifestyle by paying to have your actions "offset" by carbon-reducing activities (mostly tree-planting at the moment).

There's controversy about this for reasons of practicality, verifiability, efficacy, and even ethicality. The article has the details.

Indeed, my joke about selling my cycling commute was a joke on several of those issues: how can you tell if you buy my carbon offset that I won't drive to work anyway? How much does my commute really save, carbon-wise? Wouldn't I probably take the bus to work instead of my bike if I wasn't getting paid to offset?

Hey wait, don't I ride my bike regardless of whether I get paid or not?

In principle, I should say, the questions of verification is not long-term fatal. Eventually there will be sufficient certification in the industry to establish some reliable providers of the advertised service. The ethics of offsetting don't disturb me much. But I think evaluating effectiveness (and the right quantity to assign to the offset) is going to be a bit hard and forever controversial.

Just as a mostly silly example, how about I sell not my current offset, but the threat that I will start driving my car to work again? As long as I am sincere in my willingness to carry out the threat (and my willingness to not carry it out if I'm paid...), paying me for not doing so is functionally equivalent to any other carbon reduction.

How to respace bicycle frames

2007-05-22T09:42:00.000-07:00

Today's vital new skill for you to learn is frame respacing. You do this to bike frames because, for one reason or another, frames come with a lot of different widths between the rear dropouts, and rear wheels come a lot of different widths too. Go read Sheldon's article on this; indeed, much of what you see here is a mere restatement of his superb primer.

But since I seem to not post here much, I thought I might as well do a bit of show and tell. Rather than restate Sheldon Brown's guide, I'll just tell you what I did. Assuming you've read the article above, this will all make sense, and show you a real-world example.

0) NEVER RESPACE AN ALUMINUM OR CARBON FRAME. They don't respace nicely. Ti should be doable, but I know little about messing with that material. Classically, you'll be doing this to an old steel frame, and you will probably do it to take the frame from something like 120 or 126 mm spacing to the modern road standard of 130 mm. That's what the goal is in this frame job I did today.

1) take some initial measurements to know where you're going. In this case, the bike in question is a Brooks frame previously owned by my friend Peter. He raced this frame in the 1970s. Brooks was one of the many small-time frame makers of the era: he worked in Ontario, made a few frames, and like many of his ilk, apparently found something more lucrative to do with his life. This is a typical top-of-the-line frame of the era: Reynolds 531 tubes and fork, Campagnolo dropouts, and nice but unadorned lugs. A top frame from another builder might substitute a different set of lugs, maybe Columbus or Vitus' best tubes instead of Reynolds, and possibly another brand of dropouts, but this is indisputably a world-class racing frame of its day. Eddy would have ridden no better a bicycle.

This particular example shows typical wear and paint chips for a frame that has spent more than 25 years in regular service. You could restore it, but possibly excepting unique (or nearly so) artifacts, my inclination is always to use a tool, not mount it on the wall. So when Dave (the current caretaker of the frame) asked me to modernize it, I was glad to take on the task.

This frame measured out at 118 mm between the dropouts, which means it was actually a little narrower than the 120 mm spec it would have been built to. I also took some frame alignment numbers using a bit of string. The measures (these aren't really comparable to other frames in most cases; you just use them to establish relative differences) were 47 mm and 42 mm on either side of the seat tube. That's a pretty big difference.

2) bend some frame. I use a long piece of wood (and a sock to protect the frame) for this job, but I ended up doing most of the bending with my bare hands and shod feet. The technique is to stand on one dropout and pull the other side of the rear triangle upwards. Flip frame, repeat, until everything is in the right place.

3) align frame and dropouts. I did a pretty bad job of aligning the frame. It's about as bad as when I started. The dropouts are straight, though.

You probably cannot do this on your bike

2007-05-14T12:22:00.000-07:00

For several reasons:

Remember kids, these are trained lunatics: real humans should not ride in traffic without a front brake, et cetera.

But oh wow.

In which I destroy my credibility as a movie critic

2007-05-12T12:48:00.000-07:00

Music and Lyrics is the worst dumb romantic comedy I have ever really really liked. It distinguishes itself by not introducing the Intractable Relationship Problem until late in the second act, long after a rather entertaining series of sequences between the romantic leads. Also, the creators of this movie got the tropes of 80s music videos and pop bands so bang-on that almost any other lameness in the movie was forgiveable.

Oh yeah, and it may be worth seeing for the nearly-charitable (and thus more interesting) send-up of teeny-pop chanteuses in the persona of the character "Cora."

And as for Spider-Man 3, it was much better than the reviews had led me to believe. TLO and I went out to see it at the Twilight Drive-In, and it was a treat.

For those of you who remember this drive-in's previous incarnation as the Hillcrest, the new one is out in Aldergrove, and the snack bar and bathrooms are very nice, and they still use the same great intermission animations. Here's one of them:

"Dear Mr. Dork..."

2007-05-09T12:12:00.001-07:00

Best. Autographed baseball. Ever.

It made me laugh.

2007-05-09T10:32:00.000-07:00

Random Reviewer reviews automatic light switches in Public Restrooms.

As bad as you think. Maybe worse. A wonderful misuse of technology.

The black bike

2007-05-09T09:16:00.000-07:00

More pictures on flickr, of course.

Take one Nashbar "X" frame, add their fork, and then go to town on black parts. Thus the black bike, my purest cyclocross bicycle yet.

I was able to recycle a fair number of parts besides the frame and fork, and Dave helped me with the rest, mostly issues due to this bike having modern sizes for the front derailleur and the seatpost.

It is fun to ride. I had to change the seatpost out during the first ride, though, as it stripped a vital little part. The new one should last longer.

When I'm right, I'm right

2007-04-26T23:22:00.000-07:00

I was digging through the archives of my own site for something else, when I came across this bit of fluff from three years ago:

When wondering whether Bill Murray or Sean Penn should have won Best Actor this year, I point out one thing I feel pretty confident about: in five years, Lost In Translation will have a strong cult following and be well-regarded and will age pretty well. Mystic River will be just another feel-bad movie with all the rewatchability of Gandhi and all the cult following of Kramer Vs. Kramer.

Three years later, would anyone gainsay me on this?

What is Ryan doing?

2007-04-24T21:56:00.000-07:00

Hm. Look at this:

And what is that:

That thing sure is black, whatever it is.

When packaging attacks

2007-04-22T23:59:00.000-07:00

So I'm opening a new box of Glad® Cling Wrap and taking note of its interesting and comprehensive features as I do.

The pull-away cardboard closure to initially open the box seems remarkably good as these things go. It comes away in one easy pull. I note with satisfaction the Stick Spot™ where the free end of the cling wrap goes to stick so it doesn't retract back into the box in a mess. I approve. I start pulling the Easy Start® Tab and am pleased with how easy this is even in my sleepy, somewhat addled state. As the roll tries to pop out of the box, I realize there are conveniently placed Roll Tabs® at each end of the box, and I wonder why they aren't pushed into place before the box leaves the factory, but I do so.

As I happily return to pulling the Easy Start® Tab out of the box, I drag my pinky finger across the invisible Cut You Bad™ blade on the bottom of the box, make a most unmanly squeal, and go off to the bathroom to stop the bleeding and apply a Band-Aid® brand bandage.

Glad® Cling Wrap's slogan is "Clings Tight without a Fight!™" but I can assure you it kicked my ass in less than 30 seconds.

I am inordinately proud of my role in this project

2007-04-12T18:40:00.000-07:00

A teeny tiny cyclocross bike. My own, rather larger cyclocross bike will now need building.

Aside from the process of finding a suitable rigid fork for the front of the bike (canti posts plus the right size of steer tube), converting this 20" wheeled "mountain bike" to a road machine was not that hard.

I highly recommend the 20" (ISO 406) wheel size for all manner of crazy projects. Lots of interesting BMX-based equipment is available when it comes to wheels, tires, forks, and the various other likely bits. The semi-slick tires on this machine cost us about $8 each at the local shop.

I am reliably informed that the rider of this machine has been clocked at speeds nearing 30 km/h.

More on Tandems

2007-04-05T08:29:00.000-07:00

So, as we established about a month ago, I'll buy anything.

But after a month, I finally understand what it is I've bought!

Thanks to a bit of research, a kindly James Thomson stepped forward and pointed me at this page, proving my tandem isn't unique. But note the single-sided drivetrain (chains only on one side of the bike) as opposed to my two-sided drivetrain.

But here's a museum-quality exhibit of another (Carnielli) Graziella Tandem, this time in Colorado, and with what appears to be the same two-sided drivetrain as my bike.

And here's yet another Graziella, this time being fawned over by an Italian gadget blog. They're pointing at an ebay.it auction, where the bike seems to have sold for 165 Euros.

Alas, the same James mentioned above also pointed me at this ad for the bike, which was being auctioned off on eBay. Against nonexistent competition, I successfully overpaid for this personally meaningful artifact!

I hardly ever talk about my job

2007-04-04T21:18:00.000-07:00

Because I don't want to tell tales out of school, of the "co-worker X is such a jerk" variety, or whatnot. But this anecdote shall be told because the only person who looks like a jerk is me, and virtually all my co-workers heard it firsthand.

At a meeting today, while discussing the relative merits of two user interfaces, I described the debate as akin to arguing over "the tastiest part of a booger."

The next performance review should be awesome!

DLIII

2007-03-28T21:47:00.000-07:00

I think at one point I commemorated post number 100 or something on this blog.

But given that both anniversaries and the odometric rollovers of our base-10 number system are a bit arbitrary, today we are commemorating post 553.

I'm just glad for a little sun, some good days to ride, slowly returning fitness, and all the other various blessings of a comfy middle-class life.

The comical tandem now has far more sensible gearing. Ratios other than the lowest one may now be usable.

A cyclocross frame, procured at a staggeringly low cost, is trundling towards me through the miracle of ground shipment. It's black, and it has nice-looking dropouts. Hey John: this frame needs some red paint. What do you suggest?

Now if I could just get my laptop back into one piece and off my kitchen table.

Watch this space

2007-03-27T12:15:00.001-07:00

Ever wanted a peek behind the scenes at Wired Cola LLC, where all the magic happens?

I didn't think so.

However, you may accidentally get one fairly soon. I may soon make some changes to this site which will be fun for me, and hopefully fun for all 28 of you. If you've ever heard of Drupal, you have an idea of where I'm going.

Unfortunately, the way I've organized (ha!) this site virtually guarantees that the changes I have in mind will cause some transitional headaches. This post is an attempt to explain how to minimize the damage.

For those of you who read this site via a bookmark, or by just typing the URL into your browser, there's an easy route to happiness. Just make sure your bookmark (or URL) reads http://wiredcola.com. If you see "blogspot" in the url (as in "wiredcola.blogspot.com" I predict future pain.

The good news is the wiredcola.com URL works right now. Type that in, you'll just see this blog. If I make any changes in the future, you'll still be pointing at the right site, because I own that domain.

I'd explain the technical background what was going on, but you either already know what the problem is, or you'd be bored by the explanation. It's not especially interesting, and I probably should have fixed it long ago.

For those of you reading this blog via a feed, you may reading a URL that will break, and that's my fault. The good news is that by changing your feed URL to wiredcola.com/atom.xml, you should be future-proof. It looks like the feedburner feed (whose URL is ugly) should also work fine through this transition.

The rest of this post is technical details, so I'll reward those of you who got this far with a funny picture:

Maoist vases! Yours for a competitively low price, I'm sure.

As to why I'm doing this, the short answer is that I've outgrown the Blogger structure. I've talked before about reducing friction, and thanks to Blogger's aggressive (but sadly necessary) anti-splog captchas, it's a pain to post here. The email interface is also hobbled to uselessness.

I could get around some of this friction by just hosting the blog somewhere other than Blogger's servers, but as long as I'm going that far, I think I'll do a bit more work and go to the all-singing, all-dancing Drupal CMS. The advantage is that Drupal not only allows for blogging, it also allows other forms of content, astounding levels of configurability and expandability (Drupal has lots of switches and buttons, and I like switches and buttons), and it is well-supported. I get the impression after Blogger's most recent software update (Blogger 2.0 or whatever they call it) that blogs hosted off of Blogger's site will now be second-class citizens. It's not that they hate such things, but self-hosted blogs don't have access to some of the features of the Blogspot-hosted blogs, and I suspect that this situation is not especially temporary.

In fairness, I haven't taken advantage of all the features of Blogger. I still think it's a really good service, and would happily recommend it to people thinking of starting a blog. There's no shame in it, and the price (free) is about what most people should put into their first blog.

But Drupal does stuff that Blogger can't dream of, and as far as I can tell it also does stuff that even Wordpress and Movabletype aren't well-positioned to do. I'm not sure how much of that power I will take advantage of, but I already have plans to do so.

I'm also open to suggestions on hosting. I'm strongly leaning towards Dreamhost, because they're fairly cheap ($8/month or so), and they allow good stuff like free-and-easy shell access (useful when you're, say compiling ffmpeg; I've had some pretty bad experiences on a phpwebhosting-hosted project, as that site does not allow access to gcc, which makes installing ffmpeg incredibly painful). If anyone has suggestions for a hosting service, my requirements are pretty vanilla other than that.

* * *

Hey, how about an update on that DVD-commentary project? The short version is that Apple's DVD player has enough limitations that implementing my idea will be, at the very least, hard. The next best (maybe even better than that) is probably to use VLC, which has so much configurability that it may be a matter of choosing among several possible ways of making it do what I want.

Further research is required.

The Feel-Bad Movies of the Year

2007-03-22T23:56:00.000-07:00

I somehow managed to see Pan's Labyrinth in theatres, followed a few weeks later by the DVD of Borat.

Borat you surely know about. I found it a mostly uncomfortable experience.

First, I found the movie funniest when it was most contrived and least based on ambushing the unwitting. The scenes with the bear? My favourites. I mostly felt the movie was "Americans having their patience tested," as most of the participants tried to fit Borat's increasingly outre behaviour into their default preference to be polite to him. One hint: the less screen time a person got (think Alan Keyes here) the more likely they were essentially unimpeachable in their behaviour.

The frat boys have a lot of explaining to do. They were drunk, but that's essentially shorthand for "willing to let yourself drink enough that you are out of your mind," and I think that's a pretty thin excuse.

That said, the revelation that frat boys like to drink, say stupid things, and pursue women sexually was not especially shocking.

I found large chunks of the film virtually unwatchable. The DVD menus were nice.

Pan's Labyrinth was just astoundingly depressing. Its structure, with a gritty, realistic tale of newly Francoized Spain juxtaposed against a young girl's fertile imagination, is a nice way to plot the movie, but thematically it suffers from a viewpoint that, as best as I could make out, was either hopelessly confused or dogmatically nihilistic. It was a children's movie that absolutely should not ever be shown to children. Well, unless you're a devout nihilist, in which case you could make it into a little trilogy with The Ninth Gate and The Life of David Gale. Maybe sprinkle in some Kenneth Anger for spicy weirdness. Okay, maybe that trilogy ranges a little too widely from satanism to nihilism, but you get the idea.

I'm loath to say more about the plot at the risk of spoiling it, but I can't help but read the ending as either astoundingly empty or else filled with a Marxist sensibility. Only the future matters! We will write you out of History!

I'm probably biased and over-thinking it. It's still an astoundingly depressing movie with lots of wild imagery and no character development.

* * *

Hey, since this is a movie post, ever notice that in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the only character who is not changed by the day's events is Ferris himself? He is very much the same person he started the day as.

Of course, the thing you really want to know is what happened to all these characters 10, 15, 20 years later. There's a good reason people were so eager to read Election as a pseudo-sequel to Ferris.

* * *

You're still here? It's over!

Ridiculous tech bleg: EDL or playback scripting for DVDs?

2007-03-21T12:11:00.001-07:00

No, seriously. I'm looking for a DVD player (presumably software, but hardware is interesting too) that can take a commercial DVD and a list of time/cut/scene cues for that DVD, and playback your customized cut of that DVD.

Yes, this would exactly be an open version of the ClearPlay concept.

Video editing types will recognize this as a reinvention of the Edit Decision List (EDL).

Nice to have: how about a feature where I could intermingle my own audio and video tracks? So, for example, I could play a "fan commentary" MP3 as the new audio track, or better yet at 100% volume, with the original audio at 30%, reproducing the way actual commentary tracks work? Dynamic and selectable volumes for each track would be perfect, of course.

I'd also like to be able to select in an optional second video track, or maybe even alternate caption/subtitle/video overlay tracks. So, for example, I could cut to a video clip I had created (or maybe just a title card) in the middle of my fan cut of the original DVD.

It looks like a few of the players out there (VLC) are either open or open-API enough for me to do this, and I have a faint hope that Apple's DVD player is scriptable enough to let me do this, but so far I haven't found an off-the-shelf solution.

Why? For the same reason ClearPlay does it, only more: I want to recut DVDs my way. How about the "No Adrian!" recut of Rocky? How about cutting all of the frame narrative grandfather/grandson scenes out of The Princess Bride (the "Gooder Parts" version)? We can finally fix Lost in Translation by removing the dreadful "rip my stocking!" scene, and possibly the confusingly off-note treadmill physical comedy joke (or not; make your own EDL).

The biggest problem I see is movies available in multiple DVD versions. I doubt there's a tidy way to handle that, especially since an edit may call for scenes not available in all versions. Each DVD version will probably require its own EDL, though it may be useful to be able to bundle multiple EDLs with a DVD check so that if one of the supported DVDs in the bundle is in the drive, it switches to the corresponding EDL.

Suggestions welcome.

Update: Apple's DVD Player may well be able to do most of what I want.

Stupid Cough

2007-03-18T11:38:00.000-07:00

So here I am, after half a week off work for a stupid cough-cold annoyance. No bike racing this weekend, because of a stupid cough-cold thing. No computer, because I am making a desperate last-ditch effort to revive its screen. and I'm falling behind on virtually everything.

Enough. Don't read this grumpy post. Go back and look at Guido the tandem instead.

I'll buy anything

2007-03-06T23:40:00.000-08:00

That's the only explanation:

But it's cute!

Feeling awesome

2007-03-04T23:38:00.000-08:00

New goal: be more productive.

You know what I did this morning? A bike race. That felt so good.

Never mind that I started out by crashing my bike before I even left my house (this sets a new record) by doing a clumsy brake test. Note to self: the brakes on your non-race-bikes, relatively speaking, suck.

Never mind that I finished a minute behind the main pack, which finished not too far behind the five escapees. That was totally my choice not to contest the sprint!

But I did the race in the B group. I lasted the entire race. And I did not feel utterly at sea in the pack. It was pure, simple, fun.

Fun is good!

I felt good about the race, and I was able to race pain-free, thanks to a pair of knee braces.

Self-experimentation

2007-02-20T18:37:00.001-08:00

This is an old paper. By the copyright, it's approaching a decade in print. It has been widely referenced. The pretty, as-published 3MB PDF, which includes some revisions and extra graphs.

And it may be the most important thing, at least in terms of personal transformation, that you ever read.

It doesn't tell you what to change, it tells you how to change things. It speaks to the motives and the methods for self-experimentation. It outlines general principles of figuring out your own problems, while at the same time suggesting several fascinating, specific possibilities for personal development (seeing human faces head-on, even on TV, first thing in the morning, may make you happier and more eager to do things; a less tasty diet, more or less, may make you lose weight without calorie-control efforts).

I intend to read this paper by Seth Roberts and Allen Neuringer at least once a month until I've really absorbed its lessons.

DRM Tipping Points

2007-02-19T23:07:00.000-08:00

Item: a guy who manages content for a living writes something like this. And he pretty much has to, since to say otherwise and be even half as techno-savvy as he is (and that poor slob doesn't even have an N93) would be to be regarded as having been bought, or retarded, or both.

Things of note:
-My digital satellite box's DVI output will not talk to my TV's DVI input because the TV part isn't HDCP compliant.
-At work, we're currently fighting through the amusing fiasco of providing a Region 2 DVD player so that a language instructor can play some foreign-language DVDs. Because of some specific college mandates, we can't bring in anything without a CSA sticker. That means I have to either hack up something computer-wise, probably using scavenged firmware and VLC, or I have to find some deregionalized player (probably something cheap and stupid) so we can play legally-owned DVDs.
-My laptop died. Until I brought it back from the dead, I basically couldn't sync TLO's iPod for fear of screwing up the music library. That's probably only half of a DRM issue.

This is just some random encounters I've had with some form of DRM or another. Note that in each case, the content has tried to manage me in some way that seems dubious, prevents a non-infringing use of a legal device, and mostly just makes my life stupider and more annoying.

The first thing has led me through an on-again off-again quest for an HDCP stripper. They seem to be kinda-sorta available for a couple hundred bucks sometimes. The second thing has cost a co-worker a few hours of pain and figuring, and looks to cost me some more yet. We'll have more problem-solving labour into this trouble than the DVD playback device will likely be worth. The third thing, well, I'm mostly just pissed off that my laptop doesn't have a screen anymore, and that I can't easily dump music that I own to backups. Because I have a fair number of silver discs with scratches on them.

I don't think my insight here is unique, but I do notice that what all these DRM experiences have taught me is one thing: DRM hacking is good.

I'm not sure this is the lesson that the DRMers of the world meant for me to learn. I'm pretty sure the DRM concept has rarely been thought out by implementors much beyond the "if we could make people pay for each copy, that would be more money" level, and sometimes not even that. But here I am, routinely searching out fixes in my life for stuff that would work fine except for needing workarounds to made-up problems.

I face quite enough actual, authentic, real-live technical problems in both my home and work life to not need the fake ones. But if I have to, I will work around the fake ones too. And every time I do, I get a bit of misplaced vengefulness directed towards the people who made working with technology stupider.

Was it the plan of DRM creators to induce in me hatred for creative types? Or is that just a side-effect?

The point here isn't even that DRM makes my life especially bad. It ranks rather below Hunger in Africa or God's Will or My Car's Water Pump Impeller Broke in the list of things I worry about. But I cannot conceive of it for even a moment without thinking badly of DRM, and of any "protected" content.

DRM schemes are a non-trivial part of why I have little interest in HD-DVD/Blu-Ray formats right now. If you promise me that in the future, whenever the hell you feel like it, you might just make it impossible to use your stupid protected content on my retro component-inputs-only TV, I'll take the hint and avoid buying trouble.

Was convincing people like me to not buy content the plan?

Everything broke

2007-02-16T22:46:00.000-08:00

Here is a brief list of things that have broken in the last seven days or so:

the car's water pump
my laptop's hinge
my laptop's screen
the robot vacuum
my lip (4 stitches!)
the shower cleaner (long story)
the dishwasher
my will to repair things

Worst of all, every one of those items (except the lip) has been a massive time sink with no resolution. I've thrown parts, maintenance, and time at most of these projects. The current hope is that the car will be out of the shop tomorrow, the vacuum may be under warranty, the shower cleaner may only need batteries, the stitches fell out today, I can fiddle the laptop into half-functionality, and I have no idea what will happen with the dishwasher.

Chavez Jumps Shark

2007-01-31T20:03:00.000-08:00

South America's favourite reality-TV show, the government of Venezuela, has granted President Hugo Chavez the power to enact laws by decree.

I don't post about politics [or anything else -Ed.] very often here. But some bright lines deserve to be noted.

I can do no better than the prescient Mr. Cosh, who posted this just over a year ago:

I will give Chavez supporters the same advice that their Maoist fathers and Stalinist grandfathers ignored: you can save yourselves a couple of decades by being ashamed of yourselves right this minute.

[The link is in the original -RjC.]

Doctor Robocop

2007-01-26T01:03:00.000-08:00

And it's terrible make that sort of joke about Peter Weller, Ph.D.

So let's call him Professor Buckaroo Banzai instead.

The Cableland Manifesto

2007-01-21T22:37:00.000-08:00

The Lovely One, having despaired over seeing my messy cable drawer (all nerds have a cable drawer; here's an exploded view of a typical example), was inspired to conceive of "Cableland" as the place where lost, unloved cables go.

Only a nerd would care, but the specific cable I was looking for was a mutant triple-headed A-A-A (all male) USB cable for a laptop drive enclosure. It must be in the other cable drawer. Or maybe the cupboard, or those bins, or up in the attic. Nope, I guess it's in Cableland. (Update: it was in the new bin in the spare room.)

TLO wrote the Cableland Anthem:

Oh what a tangled web we weave
When an electronic connection we try to achieve
Yet within this labyrinthine mess
Live many a cable in acute distress

Oh, where, oh where do unwanted cables go?
What refuge have they, neglected so?

To Cableland they fly and wait
A long-desired connection they seek to make

Finally, they meet
And achieve a fate so sweet,
So longed for
Oft foretold in Cableland lore

Daring Ads For Trendoids

2007-01-21T19:20:00.000-08:00

First, let me say that I think the French Connection UK brand is beyond cheeky. I gotta wonder about why you would want to wear their logo on your body.

Of course, given that it now seems okay for even teenagers to wear "TNA" clothing and all manner of other curious slogans, I think I've lost this battle.

Okay, grumpy reactionary disclaimer out of the way, this history of FCUK advertising was a pretty interesting. You can interpret this multi-year tale several ways, but my favourite is to consider it the story of one company mau-mauing the UK's perfectly reasonable advertising standards into submission on the installment plan.

But I'm like that.

The Prestige: a late and simplistic review

2007-01-15T01:13:00.000-08:00

The important lesson to take from The Prestige is that magicians are evil and should all be destroyed.

I liked it.

The Lovely One and I went to see this movie on Friday night (it beat out Rocky Balboa because it was slightly cheaper, and slightly closer. I also guessed correctly that the cheap theatre would make me sit through fewer ads, and I was right. There was one trailer and zero ads before the feature. Explain to me again why I go to first-run theatres?).

It's going to be very hard to avoid spoiling the movie, but then, I will say that I figured out the major "secret" of the film about 2/3rds of the way through, and it impaired my appreciation not a bit.

I think I can say without spoiling the film that it annoyed me when Tesla was made out as some sort of Deus ex Machina magical mad scientist, but that the film totally repaid that betrayal by properly exploring the consequences of his magic box. I can also say that key elements of the story (based on a novel by Christopher Priest and published in 1995) bear interesting resemblances to the plot of the 1990 NFB animated short To Be.

I do not go too far when I suggest that everything interesting about the Tesla box was presaged (not to suggest cribbed) in the NFB short.

But I liked the film, even though it depicted, ultimately, awful people doing awful things. It was as if a proper revenge tragedy had spun out of control: what if Hamlet's revenge was unjustifiable? What if he had only knocked Claudius down, and then their tits for tat had escalated out of hand, ultimately destroying the entire kingdom and everyone they knew? Oh right. That did happen.

When Michael Caine is playing the good guy, you know you're in a bad place.

Everyone in the film acted their tuckuses off, but in a good way. The scenery was unchewed and pretty.

Christopher Nolan directed the whole thing, and he of Memento fame managed to use his old tricks of playing with time, space, and plot deceptions without repeating himself. It was good.

Snow is for fun

2007-01-10T21:46:00.000-08:00

Read all about it.

My snow bike

My snow crank

My snow face

25 km round trip, the tires worked astoundingly well, it was probably an advantage to have my brakes accidentally both set to "crappy," because they didn't lock up the wheels.

Don't let me tell you any differently: it was hilarious good fun, and not especially dangerous. I avoided taking any risks, and commandeered several sidewalks at a fast walking pace, mainly in order to avoid cars, as they mostly had less directional control than I did.

About those Canucks...

2007-01-07T20:46:00.000-08:00

So there's, roughly speaking, a 5-way tie for first in the Northwest division, where our beloved Canucks play.

I think our division this season is the story of five rather good teams just tearing the crap out of each other. Every one of these teams is playoff-quality, but their points relative to the rest of the league are hamstrung by their lack of chances to play cruddy teams.

Or at least, I hope so. I can't find a smoking gun stat to prove it.

The obvious thing to look for is records outside the division: are these teams much better against non-divisional opponents? Maybe.

Record vs. non-NW div
Van: 14-9-0 .609
Cgy: 15-10-2 .593
Min: 16-14-1 .532
Col: 12-14-1 .463
Edm: 12-11-3 .519

That last number, by the way, is my patented "percentage of potential points" (PPP) which is:

points / (2*games played)

That's really simple, but it approximates a winning percentage like in baseball, but with a fudge for Circus Time points.

If you're wondering, the Edm PPP for all games this season is .512, while Vancouver is a .559. Calgary leads with a .575, making them the effective standings leader at the moment.

I'm not really sure what this tells us. What it really may tell us is that I haven't made any adjustments for schedule strength. Hm. Colorado has been beaten by Washington, Chicago, St. Louis (twice), Columbus.... Maybe Colorado just stinks, but that doesn't explain why they do so well against NW division teams.

In conclusion, I have no idea what's going on. The goal I'm reaching for is to find teams that will excel in the playoffs, though, and I suspect that with the heavily imbalanced schedule, there is more possibility for good teams to be masked by playing good opponents often, or conversely, for mediocre teams to look better by playing bad opponents often. How sweet would it be to play Philly, St. Louis, or LA a whole bunch?

The Polar Bear Cyclocross Ride

2007-01-01T20:44:00.000-08:00

I called a 'cross ride for today, because I'm a nut. The ride turnout was dampened by lousy weather and hangovers, but five doughty souls showed up at Calhoun's at 1300 this afternoon. Due to the disreputable outlaw nature of this ride, I will use pseudonyms to identify the participants. We grabbed some beers, filled up our water bottles (I can highly recommend Unibroue's Fin du Monde as a sports beverage), and packed a few Shaftebury's for the road. There was only one rule we abided by that day: no team kit.

We started out in a loop that retraced the three Vancouver 'cross courses: West Point Grey Academy, Jericho Beach, and Vanier Park.

WPGA was unremarkable, though in the sloppy conditions some of the steeper slopes were unrideable. "Gord" (remember: not his real name) distinguished himself by being the only one able to ride the gravel pit.

Jericho was fun and ludicrously waterlogged. The race course followed a path that involved a little drop down a short, moderately steep slope, followed by a right turn onto a wide gravel path. I came through the section third. As I got to the top, I noticed a huge puddle covering the gravel path. Ahead, I could see Dave (his real name, but there's so many Daves that doesn't identify him) and The Kiwi pedaling through the "puddle." It was considerably deeper than their bottom brackets.

Remember, at this point my new BB, the most expensive one I have ever bought, has about 25 minutes of riding time.

I cackled madly and dropped in.

I saw "Gord" and the Rocket Scientist looking over the puddle from the top. Then they committed to wet feet with the rest of us. It was the signature moment of the ride.

Fun was had by all. At Vanier we deviated from the race course rather than ride through an evilly rust-coloured puddle of unknown depths. This was a surprising turn of good judgment for a pack of riders with beer in their water bottles.

Throughout the ride, I tried to educate these fellows on the key elements of the code of Drunken Cyclocross. Mainly it comes down to "don't spill your beer" and "leave no witnesses".

We saw a few of the Bienniale sculptures, and used them as cyclocross obstacles.

We crossed the Burrard Bridge, checked out the Polar Bear swim (but did not participate, for triathlism-related reasons), yelled at people in bad French, and entered Stanley Park. Dave managed to slide out impressively on wet grass, and then said he didn't want to be known as a sketch-pilot. Work on that more, Dave! Later, Dave claimed that the beer was performance-enhancing, and made him feel warm and happy.

Coming out of Stanley Park, we raced cars around the perimeter road and won. I would commend compact gearing to any semi-serious 'crosser as a highly versatile choice: I could ride most of the courses in the 36, and the 50 was perfect for the road. The sawzall of gearing for the sawzall of bikes.

As a 'cross ride, it was a total success. We got very wet, very muddy, and very giddy. That is what is supposed to happen. I think the beer helped. There is no doubt there will be a repeat performance next New Year's Day.

Be there, or be a panty-waisted bed-wetter.

I completely rebuilt my 'cross bike last night and this morning for this ride. Oh well, it needed it. This was the maiden ride for the shifters and the new crankset.

I paid $120 for the crankset (marked down from about a $500 MSRP) and put it on a bike I got at a garage sale for $10.

This is a very abusive thing to do to a fine and pretty component.

2006 Canadian Cyclocross Championships - Men

2006-12-27T21:17:00.000-08:00


2006 Cyclocross nationals, Nanaimo, BC, Canada. November 11, 2006 This is my final video for the year, and it's way late. But it's done. Contact me if you want a link to the really nice full-res version. Thanks to EV, Norm, Jak, and Gord for particular assistance in making this happen.

Christmas Day

2006-12-25T11:48:00.000-08:00

As is traditional, we went to midnight mass, followed by a gift exchange with the in-laws.

This year, I'm sending The Lovely One off for a spa day, but she pulled off that rarest of tricks: giving me a gift I had forgot to ask for, that I would never buy for myself (too extravagant) and that I really wanted.

It's the blanket in the photo above. That is a genuine Hudson's Bay "Caribou" throw, made of pure wool, thick, dense, and fiercely warm. It doesn't even remotely qualify as a "gift for us": TLO finds it so itchy she can't come in contact with it.

The question is, of course, what a technophilic 30-something guy whose idea of thematic interior decorating would be a toolchest in every room is doing lusting after Bay blankets.

I can only put it down to "authenticity."

However madly, badly, and occasionally ignorantly, I have very specific, well-formed aesthetic ideas in my tiny skull about what constitutes the real, the proper, and the pleasing. A glib reference would be to say it's like Restoration Hardware's aesthetic, except for the goods in question not being completely shoddy crap.

Okay, so Restoration Hardware isn't the best example. Actually, it's about the worst. But I shall pass by.

Understand that this is a very personal and probably irrational definition of authenticity, which might be more properly described as "things I like."

The first element of authenticity is that the item be good. In a blanket, durability and warmth are the basic requirements. In a bicycle, reasonably light weight, functionality, and reliability are key. Well, let's just say that very few disposable things are authentic. Corn broom? Authentic. Push broom? Authentic. Swiffer? Inauthentic.

Where was I going? I like stuff that works well, lasts well, looks good (but always in a way subservient to function), and if it has a history, a story, or a particularly clever or novel design, so much the better.

I am not always a follower of my own aesthetic. I buy cheap crap too often, but I try to do it only once. I sublimate my cheapness by haunting used markets and other sources of unloved but authentic equipment. No object is more authentic, in my mind, than an alloy-rimmed early-80s steel road bicycle with mid-range Suntour components, bought for $10 and upgraded with modern brakes and calipers if necessary, and a modern Hyperglide cogset just for fun. Such bikes are utterly unvalued, but so gloriously competent that I could ride one to work, in a bike race, or across the continent, and it would do any of those things at least 90% as well as a brand new, utterly specific bike costing $1000-3000+.

Other places where I follow this aesthetic? I have a used Yamaha receiver (RX-V795B) that decodes Dolby and DTS digital signals, but doesn't switch HD-quality video. Modern HDMI/component converting/switching receivers start at about five times the price. I bought a $50 component video switch box and am still several hundred dollars ahead of the game. It is a fair trade for having to walk over to the box every time I want to change inputs.

Authenticity is outside of price, but that doesn't mean the authentic is always cheap, or even a good deal. But $200 on omakase at Tojo's is an authentic experience.

But $200 worth of Noka chocolates? A very, very inauthentic experience (þ: Daniel Rutter)

A Christmas Letter

2006-12-24T22:37:00.000-08:00

The wonderful thing about being both lazy and a blogger is that I can write this Christmas letter to you on Christmas Eve, and you'll still all get it in time for Christmas!

This has been a weird year. I could easily write it off as something like "the cat died, grandpa died, and I got fat and had a bad year of bike racing. Or I could talk about some of the stuff that didn't make it to the blog, which is even sadder, but I shan't, because there's a reason I don't blog some things.

But the point is, I'm not sad. It has not been a year of moving from high to high, but some nice things have happened. The Lovely One and I are doing okay, the nutdog is reasonably well-behaved and quite adorable, and we've both had interesting projects and plenty of work. Did I mention I haven't been fired yet from my day job? That's a pretty big deal right there.

But never mind that. The evidence is in: within broad parameters, externalities do not change your overall level of happiness very much or for very long.

This sounds like my own intuitive sense of how happiness works, so I am easily swayed by the argument. Yet in the subject of happiness, I also find myself reaching towards Aristotle, referenced in the Wikipedia:

From the observation that fish must become happy by swimming, and birds must become happy by flying, Aristotle points to the unique abilities of man as the route to happiness. Of all the animals only man can sit and contemplate reality. Of all the animals only man can develop social relations to the political level. Thus the contemplative life of a monk or professor, or the political life of a military commander or politician will be the happiest.

Hm. We feel happiest when involved in something with which we have some skill and practice? Gord? Yep, it's our old friend flow making an appearance.

So if I have a not-very-seasonal message for you, it's that whether as consolation or horrid fate, you're probably always going to be about as happy as you are. If you want to fulfill your potential, find a worthwhile activity, and Flow into it. Do it for ten thousand hours and maybe you'll get good at it.

You need a seasonally appropriate message? In the last hundred years, nobody has been more clear on the subject of Christmas than Charles Schulz. And his quote on the script of the Christmas special ("if we won't do it, who will?"), might serve as a personal motto, except that I already have one ("verum de parvis, verum de magnus").

So it's time for me to go to Midnight Mass, so I sign off. Have a Merry Christmas, and a Happy, Flow-y New Year. My gift to you is this take on Pachelbel's Canon:

Via: VideoSift

The Great Canadian Ludicrous Talking Polar Bear Adventure

2006-12-10T19:05:00.000-08:00

So someone in my household picked The Great Canadian Polar Bear Adventure for our evening's viewing. I'm not saying it was The Lovely One. It could have been me....

About 3 seconds in, I sense trouble brewing when I realize this is a live-action drama starring talking polar bears. About 3 minutes in, things take a turn for the weird: we get to eavesdrop on a mundane conversation among a couple of seals, right before a bear eats one of them!

Ten out of ten for not eliding the whole "wouldn't the Lion King want to eat most of his subjects?" question, minus several million for personifying a bear that is now muzzle deep in what was recently a personified seal! If one anthropomorphized being eats another one, is that anthropocannibalism?

You know a TV drama is Canadian when it stars the vocal talent of Megan "Anne of Green Gables" Follows. Howie Mandel, and (for some reason) Don Cherry have also been roped in. The whole thing is "Star Wars Holiday Special" levels of weird. I fully expect a singing polar bear by the second act.

He's Everybody's Second Choice

2006-12-02T17:22:00.000-08:00

This is mostly an apolitical weblog, but since I was looking for some early juice on the new leader of the Liberals and found nothing, I thought I'd write it myself.

Though some had already written this surprise scenario (candidate in fourth place in delegates going into the campaign wins), it was only written as a surprise.

So who is Stéphane Dion?

In a field which pitted the Harvard Guy against the NDP Guy against the Western Guy (the Female Guy was knocked off the ballot after the first round, the Gay Guy threw in with the NDP Guy at the same time, the Hockey Guy got eliminated in the second round, and the Really Sleazy Guy gave up even before the first ballot...ah heck, just read the Wikipedia entries), Stéphane was the Quebec Guy.

He was also the Establishment Guy, inasmuch as he was a cabinet minister under PM Chrétien, and (surprisingly) also under PM Martin. If this was to be the convention where the Liberals took their chance to make a break with the recent, fairly scandalous past by electing someone who wasn't in government under Chrétien, (best represented by Ignatieff or Bob Rae) the Liberals decided they didn't need to do that. But! He did have the good grace to be shocked (and according to Colby Cosh, not shocked, shocked!) at Sponsorship et al.

For my part, I'll make a snap judgement that any candidate who received the endorsement of Ms. Burning Crosses at any time is automatically minus one point. Balancing that is that Mr. Dion is not Bob Rae.

The Liberal party doesn't need or want, and probably shouldn't heed my opinions. And in my experience, the broad spectrum of punditry is likely to overstate Dion's weaknessess and strengths. My gut feeling (let me reiterate: largely worthless) is that things like character and network affiliation matter much less than coherent, well-defended policies.

To that end, the biggest problem the Liberals face in the near term is that they already had their dozen years, and while they did some things well (it hurts me to admit it every time, but they did a competent, if not optimal job of fiscal management) while sleazing up government pretty remarkably. Meanwhile, Stephen Harper is so far doing a boringly competent job (my favourite kind!) and history says that as long as he continues that path, Canadians will give a sitting PM the benefit of the doubt.

My sure-fire prediction, though, is that after the next election, the PM of Canada will be Steve something. Take that to the bank.

Canadian Cyclocross championships 2006: Women's Elite

2006-11-29T06:39:00.000-08:00

I was asked to drop by Nanaimo and shoot some video a few weeks ago, since the Canadian national CX championship races were being held there.

Far too late, here's the first video output.

~~Lynne~~ Lyne Bessette versus Wendy Simms! An epic battle for the women's Canadian Cyclocross Championship. The two of them were within ten seconds of each other from the start to the finish of the race, and nobody else was even close.

I hope I've captured some of the flavour of the course here: the BMX section, the crazy runup, the barn, the stairs...it was a course with a lot of stuff.

Coming soon: the men's race.

Correction: Ms. Bessette's first name is Lyne, with one "n". We apologize for the incompetence.

So, how was your weekend?

2006-11-14T08:52:00.000-08:00

First, I should apologize to everyone in the hotel: that was our dog who decided, against all past history, that every thump in the night needed to be barked at. Thanks, dog.

Second, the weekend was off the hook. You're going to see film of Saturday's cyclocross nationals shortly, but I'm here to tell you about Sunday's race.

Jungle-cross? More like Bizarro-cross! The race started with a 300m or so run. I was running (literally) second until I was demoralized by the Ironman tat on the leader's ankle. Really. There was a rideable over-the-ankles water crossing. Large chunks of the course were mowed out of a hayfield. There was a wooden bridge, and then another wooden bridge so mud-covered I never saw the surface. I made my usual "mountain bike course" joke to Noiles, and he went off. I think it's fair to claim that the course was more technical than some mountain bike races I have done.

Maybe the best part yet was being complimented by the finish line judge on my stylish dismount at the finish line. I did a double-take and realized that the judge in question was Wendy Simms, in her words, "giving back."

And now, unless I go nuts and do the November 25th race in Bellingham, I can pretend that the season is over. Time to go and watch velodrome racing, and generally just watch my weight and do push-ups for three months. Then training begins in earnest.

Funniest fake cycling news ever

2006-11-09T11:31:00.000-08:00

From The Onion: Over-Competitive Lance Armstrong Challenges Cancer To Rematch.

I often think the funniest thing about Onion articles is the headline, but in this case the article strikes a perfect balance between horribly tasteless and pitch-perfect hilarity.

Of course, the meta-joke is that the over-competitive Armstrong is famously Blackberry-addicted to egosurfing himself. Unless he gave that up when he retired (yeah right), one muses about his reaction when that story popped up.

Stewed Thoughts

2006-11-08T02:38:00.000-08:00

Somehow, I want to call the Web 2.0 era the Age of Refactoring. In many ways, I think what is going on, technologically, is that this is the era of stuff that mostly works, mostly correctly, most of the time.

I theorize that mash-up culture is a lot about maximizing the value of the present cultural resources. I guess that makes soft applications of technology, be it Google (any Google project), Wikipedia, Flickr, or whatever, attempts to mine already existing reserves of knowledge in new ways. What was that I read about digging into existing journal articles with the quest to discover new knowledge lying latent in 'em? Science and technology are full of good stories about latent discoveries (cosmic background radiation is probably the canonical one).

I am trying to say that this inward-looking jump into optimization may be a moment when we turn our computing tools on themselves in order to accelerate the growth of knowledge and understanding in the future.

Everywhere, I see people more interested in numbers and reasoning than before. Should I credit Bill James, sports books, Freakonomics, or the mysterious rise in IQ scores?

Is our children learning?

I credit video games.

Training advice for the young novelist

2006-11-03T11:42:00.000-08:00

I've liberated this from its original home in the comments on this post by Wyn. Most of the inside jokes are literary-exercise jokes. The only other useful bit of background info is that Wyn just ran her first marathon this year.

Remember that writing a novel, the marathon of literature, is all about the training.

I recommend you start off this december with just some interval sentences: quickly written, short bursts of text. As you progress through early spring next year, you will do drills that include six-word stories alternating with paragraphs at least once a week, and you'll write a short chapter every Sunday morning.

In the final phase as you progress through late summer, you will be writing novelets, and by fall, novellas.

If you're interested in speed, Hemingway cadences are highly recommended. Some writers earlier in the century used to use Joycean training methods, but these are now discredited as counterproductive in the more reputable literary-training journals.

Finally, by next November, you will be ready to write your first novel. Most people do a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story for their first novel, and it's a good choice. So take Dave Eggers as your pace bunny, and go to it.

Remembering Victor Cousineau, my grandfather

2006-10-23T01:54:00.000-07:00

COUSINEAU - VICTOR (VIC) JOSEPH
January 5,1921 -October 21, 2006

Vic, a smiling presence in the lives of all who knew him, passed away peacefully at St. Michael's Hospice in Burnaby.

He is survived by his son Denis (Vivian) and daughter Gisele. Grandchildren Ryan (Rebecca), John, Michael (Marjie) and great-granddaughter Olivia. Adopted grand-daughter Tammy (Jeff) Chesman, & her children, Molly & Sean. Older brother Cler (Pearl) and adoring sisters Irene Crook and Lillian Jackson, and many nieces and nephews.

Vic was predeceased by his wife Marie (1976) and son Gerry (1968) and 10 of his brothers and sisters.

Vic was born, raised, and worked in Vancouver, he spent 35 years as a postman. In his retirement he was an avid dancer at Century House and Bonsor Rec Center.

Vic lived life to the end and will be dearly missed by all who knew him.

A memorial service will be held at Burquitlam Funeral Home 625 North Road on Saturday Oct. 28th at 2:00pm.

In lieu of flowers a donation to St. Michael's Hospice Center or Canadian Cancer Society, would be appreciated in Vic's memory.

An open letter to Dustin Sacks, creator of Lux

2006-10-17T10:44:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Sacks:

You horrible, horrible man.

On October 14th, you sent me a copy of your Risk-y computer game, Lux (I say "Risk-y" because it is unabashedly inspired by Risk, but it is so expandable, networkable, re-mappable, re-skinnable, re-ruleable, and whatnot as to make cloning Risk the starting point, not the endpoint). You touted this as a "friendly" gesture having met me at Barcamp, and as a promotion of your Luxtoberfest, er, promotion.

After a quick try that night, I set it aside for a few days, and then started playing around midnight last night.

I stopped playing at 6am. Then I slept for a few hours, ran an errand, and by 10am I was installing more maps and plug-ins.

I can feel my life slipping away uncontrollably. I played Lux instead of working on actual, lucrative projects. I played Lux instead of working on cyclocross videos. I played Lux instead of bloody sleeping like a normal human being!

Dustin, if we meet again, I'll buy you a beer for creating such a superb and well-implemented little game, but then I'm going to do that tapping-the-bottle-to-make-it-foam thing to pay you back for this lost day. Which is threatening to turn into a lost week.

So, um, thanks a lot.

Warning signs for the cybermorphic future

2006-10-16T12:43:00.000-07:00

Given that I haven't managed to post anything else here for, um, forever, I thought I'd just link to this mildly amusing article on Warning Signs for Tomorrow. I believe the sign shown here accurately applies to this blog, that page, reality TV, cats wearing clothing, and maybe every blog everywhere.

On a personal note, my excuses for the light blogging and lack of new cyclocross videos (rest assured, the footage has been taken) are, in order: laziness, visiting my grandfather in the hospital (advanced carcinoid syndrome is not much fun, but he's still in good spirits when he's strong enough to talk. It's a Cousineau thing), and a lucrative impersonation contract, once again adding to my long list of odd jobs.

Wired Cola consulting: no job too odd; we can be bought, and we're cheap!

33

2006-10-05T16:03:00.000-07:00

They say it's my birthday.

For my birthday, the CBC gave me the Canucks versus the Red Wings. In useless standard def! Argh! What next, a show that consists of nothing but Rick Mercer making fun of BC?

At this point, it's not that HDTV even looks really good, it's just that standard def makes my eyes bleed.

Why yes, I am spoiled. Thank you for noticing.

In a few minutes, I'm going to Guu for my birthday dinner. Because it's delicious. and because I can't stand to watch the game in SDTV.

Canadian TV: just the ratings

2006-10-02T20:35:00.000-07:00

The answer is here. The question is "where do I find weekly ratings data for Canadian television?" The reason is this engaging debate on the CBC blog.

BBM is reasonably generous with its data, providing not only the current week, but also archives going back as far as 2003.

Being who I am, the first thing I noticed is that the CBC is a non-entity in the ratings. When I dug into a random week in March, it had four shows in the top 30: the early hockey game, curling, the late hockey game, and a Monday night primetime movie. It's not pretty: the only thing generating a mass audience on the CBC right now seems to be sports.

I also found BBM's radio ratings on the same site (current Vancouver ratings are on the last page of this PDF).

CBC radio, if you're wondering, is more popular than its visual counterpart: fourth-best share in the region, though a much lower-ranked reach indicates that the typical CBC listener is loyal to their station, while non-CBC listeners studiously stay away. The FM station is pretty well-rated, too. The big dog in Vancouver radio is still CKNW, but QMFM, while having a slightly smaller share, actually has a greater reach (reflecting, I suspect, its status as the unofficial default radio station of every office in town).

So enjoy the numbers. Tell me what you find.

Escape Velocity Grand Prix of Cyclocross video

2006-09-26T23:47:00.000-07:00

The EV GP of Cyclocross, right there at the West Point Grey Academy in the heart of Vancouver. I'd like to thank Stephen Cork for setting this up, and David Penner and Jeff Ain for doing a bunch of supplementary video, too. Once again, this is the Men's A race, but there's a pretty good chance I'll do a follow-up video for the other categories.

I'm a little baffled: this doesn't seem to be as high quality as I was hoping for, but so it goes. It looks fine in the original, so I'm blaming Google Video.

The race itself was fast and fun, except for the steep, brain-bendingly power-dependent parts.

Here's Tobin's photos. Here's Greg's photos. Here's the results et cetera

Customary weekly note

2006-09-18T00:30:00.000-07:00

Let's do some follow-up and ruminations.

Item: the Fort Langley CX video was one of the most popular things I've ever put here. Glad you all liked it. There will be another one after next weekend's Grand Prix of Cyclocross.

Item: my mother-in-law is so addicted to Brain Age that she's going to get her own Nintendo DS.

Item: The order from LED Shoppe arrived. The batteries seem just fine. The $5 charger I ordered works, but only does 2 batteries at a time. Hm. The two bicycle LED lights I ordered are both pretty chintzy, and I can't recommend them: both required some amount of fiddling to get working, and one sorta works, but doesn't really work properly (it has an extra-blinky blink mode and no solid mode). Also, no smiley stamp on the envelope this time.

Item: I need to get some pictures up of the (obviously) now-complete Bianchi crossover cross bike, tentatively named "Azzuro Sporco" (1.5 beta). It worked quite capably in the CX race, though the rider did rather suck.

Item: I need to lose weight, and gain core and upper-body strength.

Item: I need to work better, and train some skills into myself.

Cyclocross Video: Fort Langley Cyclocross Classic

2006-09-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

For your delectation, the Men's "A" race in just over 5 minutes:

This is the Fort Langley Cyclocross Classic, race #1 of the BC CX Cup, which happened September 10, 2006. I rode in the B group just before filming this, and can assure you this course was as fun as it looks, though very decidedly non-traditional. Race winner was Symmetrics' Andrew Pinfold, in the yellow and black jersey.

The song (Re Your Brains) was provided by Jonathan Coulton, whose routinely delightful songs are made available under Creative Commons license, and I thank him for that. Go listen to his stuff.

Thanks to Masi-Adobe for putting on the race, and Aldor Acres for providing the venue (they're also good for pumpkins and Christmas trees!), and The Lovely One for indulging my dirty cyclocrossing misadventures.

And I hope you'll be inspired to come out to my club's cyclocross race, happening September 24: the Team Escape Velocity Grand Prix of Cyclocross. In contrast to Fort Langley, it will be Euro-style all-grass, wide-open course. It's gonna be epic.

You don't have to keep reading, the rest is about creating the video. I was able to borrow a pretty nice miniDV camera for this race, as opposed to the various digicams I used last year, and it helped. I really had the song in mind before I made the video, so I laid down the music track first, and tried to track and time the edits against that. I think the result was mostly good. I knew my own race was going rather badly when I realized I was thinking about how I would assemble this video while pedaling down the fast gravel sections.

I have a very nice, very large version of this video if anyone cares for it. It would fit on one CD, but you'll get a nice, 480p, 30fps version of the video with very clean sound. Perfect for sponsor presentations or whatnot. Let me know.

Cheap NiMH batteries: I'm telling everyone!

2006-09-07T21:49:00.000-07:00

This isn't a shopping blog, but I actually found a deal so good I feel like using this space to endorse it. Or brag. Either way.

My club-mate Johnny Cheung suggested an entirely gimcrack website called LED Shoppe as a source of a cheapo Bluetooth USB thingy. And he was right! The sucker cost me about $8.25 in Canadian funds, shipped.

From Hong Kong. Or to put it another way, I don't know how they're making money, except to assume that their unit cost on these little electronic bits is, to a first order, zero dollars.

But while that's a good deal, then they sent me a note about a smoking hot deal, which I took advantage of: 5-packs of AA or AAA Ni-MH rechargables for...C$5.86. Again, that's the shipped, all-taxes-included price. 4-battery charger? Same price.

If you check, you will find that that pirce is not only incredibly cheap for rechargable batteries (of any type, really), it's cheaper than typical packs of name-brand non-rechargable alkalines.

Did I like this deal? Um, I just ordered 30 batteries, a charger, and two bike lights from them.

I wish I was getting some sort of referral deal for posting this, but sadly, no such scam was available. In "revenge," I'll give you the coupon codes I got from them via email:

5% off any order of 3 or more items: 3MORE
10% off an order of $30 or more: 1030
15% off $60 or more: 1560

The selection in the shop largely runs to small computer peripherals or electronic odds and ends, or LED lights in the middling-quality zone. The key seems to be items that are small enough to be cheaply shipped via regular post. Check it out. Have fun. Tell 'em Wired Cola sent you. I don't think it will make any difference, but maybe they'll start reading my blog or something.

Oh, the kicker that sold me on this place? The package with the Bluetooth dongles in it arrived complete with a friendly smiley-face design stamped on the mailing label. I think this place is probably a living-room business run by two teenage girls with atrocious web skillz. But they pass the savings on to you!