Somedays I find myself alone downtown. Today was one such day. It wasn’t till 2:00 till I decided to venture off into the city in search of something to break what would otherwise become a monotonous day. A book in hand, I made my way to the Montreal Bread Company. I like the sandwhiches at the MBC a lot. The coffee is good too. The only drawback to the place is that it’s pretty pricey. I spent $15 dollars on my Cajun Shrimp BLT and Americano. MBC is a nice place to sit and read. Its in Yorkville and has fairly big patio, which is nice if you like to people watch. I just wanted to read, so I sat inside, sipping on a coffee and working away at my book of the moment. Yorkville is a strange place. A middle aged Chinese woman sat with her family across from me. She was wearing LV pants (I could tell because of the LV logo plastered all over them) and some Channel sunglasses. She was quite the sight. Every so often someone would pop in, a Lululemon bag in hand, to order something new. The girls in Yorkville would be pretty if they didn’t all walk, talk, and look the same. At around 4:00 I decided to wander around again. I started making my way to Bloor, but decided to double back to Cumberland cinema to see what was playing. Sunshine was due to start in 20 minutes. I hadn’t seen a film by myself in quite some time.
The last time I watched a film in the cinema by myself, I was waiting for some friends downtown, and decided to kill the time by watching Go. I must have been in OAC at the time. That’s a damn long time ago. Today, on my day alone, I decided to watch Sunshine. Sunshine is a beautiful film. I can’t recall the last time I found a movies special effects so captivating. It doesn’t hurt that there is a whole more more to the film than its FX budget. The movie is the latest film by Danny Boyle, the man behind Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, and Shallow Grave. The premise is simple: the sun is dying, and a small ship has been sent off into space to re-ignite it. The film isn’t campy sci-fi: it’s a thrilling-ass thriller. My heart is still beating fast. Once the film really gets going it moves at such a fast pace. The ending is incredible. I’ve been told the film has got mixed reviews, but I can’t imagine why. The acting is solid, as is the plot. It’s a very exciting film. And, as I mentioned, it’s really stunning to watch. I can’t recommend this film enough.
I bought Delicious Library a good while ago, but put off importing all my books into the damn program till today. It was about half way though the scanning process that I realized the best way to scan stuff with the iSight is to pass the barcode over the faux-scanner bars moving from the top to the bottom. When I started doing this, the program did a much better job of scanning things. Now that I have everything in this system, i’ll hopefully be able to track my DVDs a bit better. (Right now, my system of emailing random people asking if they have my DVDs works, but I don’t think that scales well.) I have way more books than DVDs, but I don’t really lend them out. (I’m sort of neurotic about my books.) Sadly, Delicious Library actually doesn’t let you do too much interesting stuff with the data it collects. Its a very bare bones application. Version 2 has been in the works for what feels like ages. Hopefully it is a worthwhile upgrade. (I suspect it will be.) As it stands, Delicious Library is essentially a really slick list. Still, sometimes that’s enough.
A bunch of us went and saw Superbad today. The film was kick-ass. It’s about a trio of high school boys trying to pick up booze and make it to a party, all in the hopes of laying the mack down on their respective love interests. Of course, it’s a lot more involved than that. It’s pretty damn funny. All the leads do a great job. You need to watch this movie.
Update 2016-08-04: I watched the film again last night with Shima. How had she never seen this movie? Like a fine wine, Superbad has aged well.
I love opening my mailbox and seeing a new issue of Harper’s sitting there. (One of the perks of subscribing is that you get issues of the magazine a couple weeks early.) I like getting Harper’s because I’m treated to articles like, “Schoolhouse Crock: Fifty Years of Blaming America’s Educational System for Our Stupidity.” It’s like the magazine was written just for me.
I finished reading The Culture Struggle last week. As the title suggests, the book is about the conflicts that arise from, or are rooted in, culture. The book is comprised of 4 sections, each section contains a few short essays. Despite the subject mater, it’s a fairly easy read.
The book begins, more or less, with a discussion on how the dominant class within a nation use culture to reinforce its interests. The book ends with a section on hyper-individualism, which is probably the most America-centric section of the book. The end ties into the start of the book in that the culture of individualism that is so prevalent in the United States is what helps perpetuate much of the inequity that exists in the country. Individualism is the cultural base that helps the dominant moneyed class maintain there position in society. The middle two sections of the book are on imperialism, the subjection of people, and racism. (There are two chapters on violence against women which are insane; I need to look up the source he cites because the facts he spits out sound so unbelievable.) The chapters on racism are quite good, examining how slavery, amongst other things, was made palatable. Parenti also touches on how the dominant class will sometimes try and instigate racial strife so as to redirect anger that would rightly be directed at them. So, for example, you have poor White workers complaining about immigrants stealing their jobs, not about those who control all the money. The middle two chapters of the book were what I found the most interesting.
The topics may sound a bit heavy, but I found it to be a fairly easy read. The essays in the book are all quite short: Parenti makes a few points, and then moves on. The book as a whole is really a series of observations, and interesting topics for further discussion. Any essay in this book could probably be turned into something far more substantial. On the whole it’s a great read; it leaves you with a lot of things to think about.
[Siracusa’s list of enterprise desires for the iPhone] is, to be blunt, horseshit. It’s apologist blathering to cover up a failure of imagination and ambition. And it’s saying that people cease to become people when they’re at work, and are instead Enterprise Employees.
The emphasis here is mine. This is a tiny point from a much longer article by Anil Dash on developing products for the enterprise market. I thought it was interesting he didn’t feel a need to argue this point: obviously you are the same person at work that you are at home; to think otherwise is ridiculous. To many this idea is axiomatic. In reality, its a reflection of the cultural norms within a capitalist society. For the vast majority of people in the world, work does strip you of your humanity. Our relationships to our coworkers, our bosses, and our customers, can’t be called “human” in any sense of the word. People do become enterprise employees when they arrive at work. Those of us living in the West live in a world built by people who were interested in preserving their wealth, and the modes of production that allow them to continue generating wealth. Think about how important property rights are in any country that operates with a capitalist economy. Property rights are of paramount importance. Think about the cultural norms put in place to explain away poverty and inequity in these countries. Poor people are poor because they are lazy. Rich people are rich because they work hard. These are 18th century puritan Christian ideas that are no longer questioned. Finally think about how we can reach a point where working in a cubicle farm can be called being human.
Why doesn’t undo work at all in iTunes? Erase a song from a playlist and that’s that. Actually, worse still, erase a whole playlist and that’s that. Why have an undo item in the edit menu if it doesn’t actually do anything.
When programming, related functionality should be grouped and declared in their own header files, with definitions of functions in their own source files. Dividing your source code neatly in this fashion allows code that requires this functionality to (ideally) #include just the definitions it needs, and no more. You should be able to look at the #include directives in source file and header files and understand the dependencies of the code contained within; you should be able to see the relationships between the functions in your program. If you are lazy about the file structure of your source this becomes difficult. Don’t be lazy.
[ed. I think i’ll make this into a bigger post on how to clean up messy projects.]
Today I met up with Mezan and Steph for lunch. My long weekend was made extra long by my taking another day off. (I’m not being completely lazy, I have to see the dentist in about an hour.) On my way out I checked my mail: the mail box was empty. I cursed Koyono under my breath, and left for downtown.
I ordered the Slimmy from Koyono on the 16th of July. For those paying attention, that’s almost a month ago. I suppose I’ve been spoiled by stores like Amazon and Indigo, which manages to ship an order out in a couple days — tops. Koyono let me know my order was good to go on the 27th, 11 days after initially placing my order. When I got back from the dentist I checked my mail box again: the wallet had finally arrived. (So it spent another 11 days in the post.) I had actually planned to write them today, complaining about how slow the whole process was. Now that I have the wallet, I don’t feel like doing that anymore. I suppose it’s cool to take your damn time shipping out a product if it’s as slick as this Slimmy Wallet: I can’t picture someone taking it out and still harboring ill feelings towards Koyono.
The Slimmy is a small wallet you’re supposed to keep in your front pockets instead of your back. It’s a fairly thin wallet. The one I bought is in black leather with a red lining, and it looks quite nice. It comes in a static bag that contains the wallet and a little card suggesting what to put in your new wallet. I’m replacing a wallet i’ve been using for the past 7 years: It’s going to be a weird couple of days.
This is a brief guide for those who want to build and install Git under MacOS X. The install process is fairly straightforward. The only hiccup is that the development environment for MacOS X doesn’t come bundled the Expat XML Parser. I’m not sure who these instructions will be helpful to, as most people bothering to install Git probably know what they’re doing.
Update Sep 12th: Ruprecht is currently doing a good job of avoiding any and all all-candidates debates. There is one scheduled for the 25th of this month he is refusing to participate in thus far. Apparently various community group leaders have been ringing his office up trying to get him to commit. They’ve had no luck thus far. He recently skipped an all-candidates debate on Gold Hawk Live. Yesterday he was at a DigIn meeting, but apparently left before it actually got underway. I wonder if he is worried about people actually hearing what he has to say. Ah the life of an incumbent.
Update Sep 25th: The all candidates debate was today. Ruprecht opted to show up, which was great; it was an actual all-candidates meeting. Even representatives from both communist parties where there. Tony is amicable enough in real life, but he just doesn’t deserve the job he has. He’s been at his post for years, but doesn’t seem to have effected any real change in the area. My vote is probably going to Paul Ferreira. Not only does he have a lot of experience, he was easily the most well spoken of the candidates at the debate.
I wasn’t sure when, if ever, I would watch the Simpsons film in the theatres. The show hasn’t been that great in ages. Saturday night I found myself at a drive-in in Oakville. I knew what movie I had to watch. The film was much better than I had expected. It can’t compete with episodes of yore, but it is certainly a big step up from the sort of stuff they have been producing recently. The story begins when Homer adopts a big, and kind of goes from there. It does feel like a feature length film — albeit a very short one: the movie clocks in at under an hour and a half long. The art is actually a bit better, using tricks from Futurama to give some scenes that quasi 3D feel. I think the film is worth watch if you are a fan of the show.
I knew I had to watch Once Upon a Time in the West after seeing a short clip of it set to song My Body is a Cage by the Arcade Fire. The clip is really well done, but is essentially a four minute long spoiler for the movie. That sucked, but I’m of the opinion that if the only worthwhile thing about a movie is a twist at the end, it’s not a particularly good movie. (Obviously it’s always nice to be surprised, but a movie should be more than its last 5 minutes.)
Once Upon a Time in the West is a film by Sergio Leone, who is probably the most famous director of Spaghetti Westerns. He gained fame for his “man with no name” trilogy of: A Fist Full of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Once Upon a Time in the West was the film he made following this trilogy. It is an incredible film. A lot of people are of the opinion it’s his best film. It’s certainly one of the most beautiful films I’ve seen. The cinematography is amazing. Leone has a very interesting style, using very tight head shots or very long shots for much of the film. The music is sparse and simple, but key points in the film are heightened by the sudden appearance of a more exciting score. The film stars Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda. Fonda, famous for playing good guys, was cast as the villain. (Apparently for audiences of the day, the initial shot where this is revealed would have been quite shocking.) Bronson is a man with no name chasing him down, for reasons that aren’t clear till the final moments of the film. (This is what is ruined by the Arcade Fire clip.) Claudia Cardinale plays the leading lady of the film, and she is smoking hot. Meow. Jason Robards rounds out the cast as the bandit with a heart of gold, who befriends Cadinale and Bronson. Once Upon a Time in the West is a slow and thoughtful film. It is almost 3 hours in length. The pacing is perfect. I could keep going on about how awesome the film is, but i’ll stop now. Suffice it to say I think you should watch it.
Using Yahoo Pipes to Filter and Merge Flickr Photostreams
As far as I can tell, Flickr doesn’t make it particularly easy to view all the photos in the various groups you have joined. At a minimum, you need to browse each group’s photostream. A somewhat better solution is to subscribe to these photostreams via an RSS feed. Even then, there is the problem of seeing the same photo multiple times because it has been posted to several groups you subscribe to. (For example, I shared this photograph I took of Shima with the BlogTO, Torontoist, Toronto, Toronto Photobloggers, and I Shoot Film Flickr Groups.) If I subscribed to all 5 feeds via RSS, I’d see the same image 5 times. (And obviously I’d see the same image 5 times if I was surfing the Flickr website.) This is far from ideal. BlogTO and Torontoist in particular get cross-posted to all the time. Presumably lots of people, like myself, read both sites. I wanted a way to view the photostreams of both sites, but filtered so i’d only see unique photos.
Shima finally watched Requiem For a Dream. I’m not sure if she’s regretting watching it now. It’s a hard movie to forget. It’s easily the best film on addiction out there, and one of the bleakest movies I’ve ever seen. (And I’m all about bleak and depressing films, so that really does mean something.) The film stars Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connolly, and Marlon Wayans. They all do stellar jobs — Wayans included. The plot traces the downward spiral their lives take over the course of a year as they each succumb to their vices. It’s good. I think everyone should watch this film once. You’ll never ever want to do heroin, I guarantee it. I’m not completely sure why I own the film. I’ve seen it way more times then is probably healthy.
Gary and I went to the Drake hotel past Friday. Gary had never been before. We were more or less killing time till Krishna bought his Harry Potter book. We’re standing by the fire place, drinking some beer, when I spot Tiff’s friend Amy. (This is the second time I’ve seen her out and about downtown, the previous time was at the Rat Race event. It’s a small world.) Amy was sitting with a friend on one of the few remaining sofas in the lounge. They were waiting for some DJs to start spinning in the underground. They weren’t too impressed with the lounge; Amy mentioned how out of place she felt. I took a good look around.
The Drake is a very strange place on a Friday night. The crowd looks to be transplanted right from the clubbing district. I imagine it’s full of people who don’t want to pay the cover for This Is London. There were plenty of cocktail dresses and dress shirts to be seen. (For some context, I was wearing my blue Sri Lanka cricket jersey and had some seriously scraggly hair.) Everyone was snapping photos of themselves — to put on Facebook no doubt. The music was really good: it was all old school hip-hop and R&B for the most part. Not that the crowd was dancing mind you. They weren’t doing much of anything really: people were mostly checking each other out while lining up to get to the Sky Yard. The act of lining up to move between floors at a place is straight out of clubbing district. (“Dude, the 3rd floor of Inside is hype, lets go.”) So the Drake on the Friday takes everything bad about the clubbing district and moves it to West Queen West. Well, at least there is still no cover. The Drake is totally different on a Wednesday.
The Underground was a much different scene. They were playing that sort of hipster dance music thats popular with the kids nowadays, with all all that boom boom and scratching scratching. You know? People were actually dancing. It had a much more laid back vibe. I quite liked it. Gary and I didn’t stick around too long. Krishna called to say he had the book and so we were off.
When a blog allows comments right below the writer’s post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody … nobody … would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words.
Now that’s a little fatalistic: if Spolsky ends up with a bunch of “noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish” whose fault is that? If you are too lazy to maintain your site, then yeah, I can see why turning comments off would be a great idea. But it’s a bit of a disrespect to assume your readership is too ignorant to post a thoughtful remark in your space.
My site is low traffic enough that it’s easy enough for me to trim comments I think are a waste of space. A busier site like Daring Fireball or Joel on Software would probably get a sea of comments, but even then there are all sorts of schemes one could put in place to make managing this sea easier — moderation and throttling are the first two ideas that come to my mind. John Gruber actually has a very simply means to allow a limited subset of his readership to comment on his site: he could make commenting an option only for paying members of his site. Turning off comments completely is of course easier, but to pretend that doing so improves the experience for yourself and your readers is disingenuous.
Until it is truly easy for true back-and-forth conversations to take place via disparate weblogs comments are the best way to go.
Of course, I don’t read Daring Fireball to hear what some schmuck on the Internet thinks of the latest thing to come out of Gruber’s head.
A nigga never been as broke as me (I like that)
When I was young I had two pair of Lees (besides that)
The pin stripes and the gray (uh-huh)
The one I wore on Mondays and Wednesdays
While niggas flirt, I’m sewing tigers on my shirt
And alligators
Ya wanna see the inside, huh, I see ya later
Here come the drama, “oh, that’s that nigga with the fake” — blaow!
“Why you punch me in my face?” stay in ya place
— Sky’s the Limit by the Notorious B.I.G.
I’m reading through Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason — which I can confirm could be renamed An Assault on the Bush Administration — I just finished reading Nemesis, and I watched V for Vendetta again with Shima last night. I now feel like starting a riot, but then I live in the idyllic wonderland that is Canada: I’m not sure what’d I’d riot about. Why don’t Americans riot? This is what I can’t understand. You have a government that clearly operates in its own interests, not in the interests of its people. There is blatant cronyism in most everything the Bush administration does, from the laws it passes to the people it protects. Democracy is supposed to be by the people for the people. I don’t know what is up in America now, but it certainly can’t be called a Democracy. Now if the poor were getting less poor, they might welcome the slow march towards fascism, but as far as I can tell this isn’t the case. It is amazing what you can convince people they want. I need to read Manufacturing Consent one of these days.
I finished watching Smallville Season 5 last night. I’ll probably buy Season 6 when it comes out on DVD. I have to admit that Season 5 is certainly a step up from Season 4, but on the whole, it was still pretty disappointing. You can put Erica Durance in a bikini, or you can put her in a shower, but that isn’t enough to carry a whole season. In the earlier seasons, Lex Luther was constantly conflicted about the choices he makes and the things he does. This conflict makes his character interesting, and warms the audience up to the character. By the 5th season this internal conflict is all gone, and with it one of the best things about the show. The relationship between Clark and Lex is purely antagonistic for most of the 4th and 5th season, which also removes one of the more interesting elements of the show. Lana and Clark get together and break up for what must be the billionth time, which is fast becoming a very tired plot point, and one the writers can’t seem to get over. I’ve already talking about how stupid Chloe’s character has become. Season 5 took me ages to get through. There was no real drive for me to finish it. I feel like I’m going through the motions with the show. Smallville used to be a really great show. I think the first three seasons were really solid television; at times it was melodramatic, but for the most part it was very enjoyable, and the plot and characters were interesting. I love the show so much I’m willing to put up with 2 seasons of mediocrity in the hopes they’ll turn things around in Season 6.
Shima and I finished watching the first two seasons of the American version of the Office last night. I was skeptical at first about how good the show could be — the original is beyond excellent — but was pleasantly surprised to find it is actually a very entertaining show. The premise is exactly the same as the original version: the show is set in an office with a horrible, but well meaning, boss; there is a smart dorky witty sensitive guy in love with the receptionist, who happens to be engaged; it’s filmed the same way, as a sort of faux-documentary. That said, the supporting cast for the American show play a much larger role in the story, and there are a lot more side-stories than in the British version of the show. The plot of the American Office moves in the same general direction as the British Office, but is distinct enough to not feel like a rehash of things you have seen before.
After the first few episodes, one really feels that the American characters (Michael Scott, Jim, Pam, and Dwight) are in fact fairly distinct from their British counterparts (David Brent, Tim, Dawn, and Garret). The characters are essentially the same archetype, but they aren’t played the same way. There are moments when the dialog coming out of Carrel’s mouth matches something Gervais would say, but for the most part Carrel’s “boss” and Gervais’ “boss” are different. Dwight manages in someways to be even more ridiculous than Garret; they are both funny in their own ways. The people doing the American show were smart to not try and duplicate the British show verbatim. In addition to the original main cast of characters, the other characters on the show are great — in particular Angela, the uptight Christian accountant. I think she’s my favourite character on the show. (I’m also a big fan of the temp, and his bizarre relationship with Michael.)
The show was very funny, and just like the British version of the show it could be quite poignant and touching at times. The actors all do a really amazing job. Season 2 of the American Office ends with quite the cliff hanger, so I am dying for Season 3 to show up on DVD. The show is well worth watching. I’m not sure if I like the American Office more than the British version, but I like it quite a lot.
Is it just me, or does Season 5 of Smallville feature way more chicks in the shower scenes then the previous 4 seasons. I’m watching episode 20 of season 5 now, which features Lois taking a steamy shower in her flat above the talon. Meow.
I finished reading Chalmers Johnson’s Nemesis last night. It’s a very interesting book on the decline of American democracy and the rise of American imperialism. The book posits that America can keep its empire, or keep its democracy, but it can’t have both. Johnson does a great job of outlining the various things he feels have contributed to the decline of democracy in the US. The main gist of his argument is that increased militarism is incompatible with a health democracy. With respect to this, he discusses the creation of the CIA (essentially the presidents private army), the ever expanding network of US army bases globally, and the militarization of space and the inordinate amount of money spent on weapons research. Nemesis was quite interesting to read. You may want to check it out. I’m on to The Assault on Reason, which thus far looks to be Gore’s attempt to catalog and discuss the reasons why Americans are so dumb now, but apparently turns into a scathing attack on the Bush administration. Nice.
