12 March 2012, lunch time
I watched The Men Who Stare at Goats last weekend. My cousin who was with us had seen it before, and felt it was a bit, “meh”. I read the list of stars and couldn’t imagine the film being anything less than awesome: Jeff Bridges, George Clooney, Ewen McGreggor and Kevin Mother-Fucking Spacey all hanging out in the same movie? How could this possibly be meh? The movie is about a journalist, played by McGreggor who meets a self-proclaimed US army trained psychic warrior, played by Clooney. They have an adventure together, and along the way you learn all about how Clooney’s character ended up as a psychic. I loved the film. It’s so weird and funny. It feels very much like a Coen brothers film, but it’s not. The movie is enjoyable, short, and on Netflix: that’s a winning combination.
The official The Men Who Stare At Goats website.
Movies
7 March 2012, evening time
GitHub recently fell victim to a security hole in Rails, the web application framework they use to build their site. A user of their site exploited the security hole and gave himself commit permissions on a repository that didn’t belong to him. I’m sure it was no coincidence that the repository that he chose to mess with was the official Rails repo.
Read the rest of this post. (444 words)
Technology
6 March 2012, early morning
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
This weeks episode of RadioLab about Escape is particularly good. As I’ve said before, RadioLab is sole reason I now listen to podcasts: it’s incredible.
[1] Quotes
10 February 2012, lunch time
The entire series, 140 characters at a time.
I rewatched the entire (original) Dergrassi series a few years ago with Shima. The released a few DVD collections that I knew I must own. The show still holds up today. While watching the shows I would craft 140 character reviews/summaries to post to Twitter. Here they are, collected. You’ll know you’re a true Degrassi fan if they make some sense.
Read the rest of this post. (1823 words)
[1] Television | Toronto
8 February 2012, mid-morning
This American Life excerpted part of Mike Daisey one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” to produce a one hour podcast about how are tech-junk gets built. To say it’s a little bit bleak would be an understatement. It’s a full on Dickens novel crossed with some dystopian science fiction. Dasisey’s focus is on Apple, but at this point chances are good that Foxconn has made anything electronic you may own. The podcast is amazing and you should definitely listen to it.
The response to this story has been a bit all over the place. Most Apple blogs I read seem quick to let you know that HP and Dell and all those other shitty PC manufactures also make their junk in China. John Gruber actually linked to a (very old) article by Krugman about how shitty jobs in the 3rd world are better than nothing. I guess?
The New York Times has a great companion piece to this article that touches on why manufacturing has moved to China. It’s not simply a matter of costs. You really can’t produce the sorts of gadgets we enjoy today anywhere else in the world. This seems to be the most pulled quote from the article:
“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”
I bought a backpack from Goruck recently. I bought it because they are well reviewed backpacks. They also happen to by made in the USA. Goruck has written about this on their blog a few times. They had a post about how their GR1 is made. They’ve also written about their second factory, complete with goofy pictures of their staff. This side of things didn’t enter my mind at the time. Now that I think about it, my backpack is perhaps the only thing I own which I’m pretty confident was made ethically.
[1] Technology | Politics
6 February 2012, late at night
The Decent is one of those movies it’s best to watch knowing as little about the film as possible. So, i’ll just say that the film is about a group of thrill seaking women who go spellunking in a cave. It’s filmed so well. I don’t think i’ve ever felt so claustraphobic in a movie. The shots of the women crawling through the tight crevises of the cave will creep you out. I quite liked the film. Most scenes are quite dark, being illuminated solely by the gear the women are carrying. (Well, at least it looks that way.) The lighting is another thing I found quite creative about the movie. I quite liked this movie. It’s on Netflix, so you can watch it right now!
I’d link to the official The Descent website, but I think it gives away too much of the story.
Movies
3 February 2012, mid-morning
True Grit was great. The very excellent and funny Hailee Steinfeld plays a young lady trying to catch the man who killed her father. She hires a marshal, played by Jeff Bridges, to help her in her quest. She also meets a Texax Ranger, played by Matt Damon, who is also looking for the same man. That could all be pretty heavy, but the film is actually quite funny. Between the humour things are more sombre and dark. The contrast between the comedy and drama probably makes the comedy more comedic and the drama more dramatic. Like most Coen brothers films the writing is great. The acting is really solid. I hadn’t seem a movie of note in quite some time, so this was a good movie to start the year off with. This is definitely worth watching. I’m now curious to see what the original version of this film is like.
The official True Grit website.
[1] Movies
1 January 2012, late morning
Happy New Year everybody. 2011 was pretty action packed. Hopefully 2012 isn’t the end of times.
1 December 2011, early morning
Damn it felt good to shave this morning. My moustache is gone. So ends my first, and perhaps only, Movember. I learned that if need be I can in fact grow a meagre moustache. (A beard is definitely not happening.) I raised more money than I had expected. A big than you to the anonymous donor who gave me my first $50, and to Tiff, Mezan, Carvill, Ryan and anonymous donor number two. If they cure prostate cancer, we will all know who to thank.
[1]
I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
— George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia.
1 November 2011, early morning
I’m participating in “Movember”: http://ca.movember.com/ this year. Movember is a fund-raising event where men agree to grow moustaches during the month of November in exchange for donations towards prostate cancer research. My co-worker organized a team and was trying to get people in the office to join him. I’m not sure how successful his recruitment efforts were. No one wants to grow a moustache: they are ridiculous. I shave bi-weekly, so this didn’t seem like that big a stretch for me. I’m also Sri Lankan, so by all rights I should be walking around with a moustache year round. Why not participate? And it’s for a good cause! My dilemia is that I shave so infrequently because I can’t actually grow much in the way of facial hair. I’ll be curious to see how pre-pubescent I look at the end of the month. With all of that said, please donate to me and my Movember team!
24 October 2011, early morning
Parents who can’t control their crying babies should be made to pay reparations to all those sitting around them. How inconsiderate of them.
— Shima’s friend and planning all-star, @jasontsang
I’m sure in a previous life I have complained about a crying baby on a plane or a train. “Why won’t their parents do anything?” Now I have a baby. Here’s the thing: if it was so easy to get a baby to stop crying don’t you think the parent would get their baby to stop crying. Do you think parents want to listen to their baby cry? Trust me when I say it’s no less annoying if it’s your own baby who won’t be quiet.
How are you going to reason with someone that craps their pants in public and doesn’t respond to their name? It’s a challenge. There are certainly lots of things you can try and do to console a baby, but the only sure fire way to get a baby to stop crying is probably something along the lines of diazepam. If you think you can rock a baby to sleep, or that some warm milk will get them to shut up, you are in for a rude awakening if you ever have a baby of your own. Mytilli will cry because she is tired, while laying down in bed. Mythilli will cry because she is hungry, while inches away from Shima’s breast. How does that even make any sense?
Shima and I have more or less fled restaurants when Mythilli has started to get cranky because no one wants to eat with a baby wailing in the background. That’s the considerate thing to do. If we were stuck on a plane? Well, that’d be a long flight.
[7] Life
13 October 2011, lunch time
Shima asked me last night why Denis Ritchie’s death was important. His two main contributions to the field of computer science are the C programming language, and being the co-inventor of the UNIX operating system. Almost everything you use that is running on anything that remotely resembles a computer is probably running software that was written in C. UNIX basically shaped the direction all operating systems that followed it took in their development. Everything Apple makes is running on top of a UNIX operating system (BSD). The vast majority of servers that power the internet are running a UNIX operating system. I don’t you can really overstate the importance of Ritchie’s contribution to the world we live in.
[2]
7 October 2011, lunch time
I now live in a riding with an NDP MP and an NDP MPP. How did that happen? I never thought the day would come. Like most of Toronto, Davenport was a bright red riding when I moved in. The mostly useless Tony Ruprecht had been my MPP for the past 5 years. He’d been in this riding since 1999. (He’d been an MPP since 1981! That’s some staying power.) His not running in this election may have been in part due to Mario Silva’s loss in the federal election. It’s quite likely that even with an incumbent running the Liberals would have been voted out of Davenport. Ruprecht was far from popular amongst people I know in the area. My hope is that Jonah Schein is more energetic than his predecessor, a low bar to be sure.
McGuinty’s win in Ontario is probably a good thing for the province. I don’t want to imagine just how scorched earth things would be if Hudak had managed to fair better this election. Ontario really doesn’t need another “common sense” revolution. Shima and I don’t have a TV, so I only saw one political ad this whole election. It was for the Liberals, and it wasn’t an attack ad. It featured McGuinty in front of a white background telling you the viewer that, despite his being an unpopular figure, the Liberals were serious bad-asses who had accomplished this and that. It was simple yet slick, and very on point. I suspect in the last few weeks the message resonated with voters. (I feel like the provincial Liberals keep a very low profile most of the year.) McGuinty should be congratulated for coming back from some pretty dismal poll numbers early in the campaign. The Liberals were really on the ball this election.
Of note is that Toronto’s so called Ford Nation looked to have no interest whatsoever in the provincial conservatives. My guess is that two things are at play here. One, Fords many recent fuck-ups may have soured Toronto on his friends. Second, Toronto is a city full of immigrants. Calling these people foreigners is probably going to sour the city on your politics. You can’t win Ontario without winning in Toronto: nicely done, GTA. Well, except for Thornhill. That place is the worst.
[1] Politics | Toronto
5 October 2011, evening time
I have a soft spot in my heart for people afflicted with cancer. It’s a horrible wasting disease, and a very hard illness to outrun. Steve Jobs has passed way today from his long battle with pancreatic cancer. The world has lost a true visionary.
His commencement speech at Stanford is well worth listening to if you haven’t heard it before.
[1]
22 September 2011, early evening
I always take note when Blansdowne is used in the popular press. I’ve been trying to get people to call my neighbourhood Blansdowne for a while now. It’s actually been far more successful a venture than I had imagined. BlogTO started calling the aera Blansdowne ages ago. (You can see me in the comments patting myself on the back.) Torontoist followed suit some time later. Even TorontoLife has used the name, though somewhat incorrectly—they are so lame. Today I learned that Spacing is making Blansdowne buttons. Not stupid-ass Bloordale Village buttons, but Blansdowne buttons.
That’s what I’m talking about, people.
[1] Bloor and Lansdowne
24 August 2011, early afternoon
Canada is a great country, one of the hopes of the world. We can be a better one – a country of greater equality, justice, and opportunity. We can build a prosperous economy and a society that shares its benefits more fairly. We can look after our seniors. We can offer better futures for our children. We can do our part to save the world’s environment. We can restore our good name in the world. We can do all of these things because we finally have a party system at the national level where there are real choices; where your vote matters; where working for change can actually bring about change. In the months and years to come, New Democrats will put a compelling new alternative to you. My colleagues in our party are an impressive, committed team. Give them a careful hearing; consider the alternatives; and consider that we can be a better, fairer, more equal country by working together. Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done.
My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.
— Jack Layton, in an open letter to the country.
Jack Layton passed away this week. My co-worker sent me a message while I was away in New York to let me know. During his press conference he looked to be in pretty bad shape, but I didn’t think things would move so quickly. Cancer is like that, I suppose. Jack Layton was an amazing politician. The NDP are now the official opposition party of Canada, I suspect largely due to his charisma. His death is a real loss for this country. We have so few truly engaging political leaders.
[2] Politics | Toronto
2 August 2011, late evening
“These overnight text editors don’t reflect well on the genre or the platform. We are raising the bar, elevating the standard.” — Bare Bones Software President Rich Siegel in 2005
A lot of Mac users you meet today switched as Mac OS X matured, over the last 7-8 years or so. I switched when Windows 95 came out. I sincerely enjoyed using various flavours of DOS on my trusty 486. Windows 95 launched with a series of shitty betas (you had to pay for) followed by a snazzy ad campaign. Though I was a young man, I could tell that Windows 95 was a piece of junk. I did the sensible thing and switched to a Powerbook 5300cs running System 7.5.3. Believe me when I say, “it was dope.”
I used my Powerbook during my first term of University. By this point Macs were running OS 9. I would write Java programs in BBEdit and build them using the OS 9 Java toolchain. Programming in Java on a Mac in 1999 was pretty horrible. BBEdit on the otherhand was pretty great. I used it as my text editor of choice throughout university. (At least when I was working on my Mac. On the school’s Unix machines I used Vim.) The last big project I worked on using BBEdit was my compiler.
This blog has been around long enough that I can look and see when I first linked to the then new TextMate. Upon its launch it was greeted with a lot of confusion and mixed interest. Between 2004 and 2006 TextMate went from this fringe application used by a few people to basically the defacto text editor for the Mac. BBEdit’s core userbase always struck me as people who had used it prior to the launch of MacOS X. By 2006 lots of people were coding up the next hot Rails app on their brand new Mac using TextMate. 2006 was when I switched from BBEdit to TextMate.
The latest version of BBEdit launched with the release of Lion. It brings with it a slew of new features and updates. TextMate on the other hand hasn’t had any real updates of note since 2007. Any advancement in the application really came from its bundles. With the launch of Lion came a wiki page for TextMate outlining what was broken and possible work arounds. TextMate 2 has been in development for something like 5-6 years. I stopped using TextMate a little while ago because it started to feel sluggish on my iMac. I now exclusively use Vim. (MacVim to be precise.) I remember reading the Rich Siegel comment in 2005 and thinking he was being a bit of a dick. It took 6 years, but it turns out maybe he was right about TextMate.
BBedit 10 is now priced at a pretty aggressive $40. I’m curious to see if it can win back its place as the number one text editor on the Mac.
[1] Technology
29 July 2011, late evening
Photography
14 July 2011, early morning
As in past years, Shima and I travelled to Montreal for the weekend. This year was a little bit different in that we had a baby tag along with us. (This was Mythilli’s second big trip: the first was to Windsor for a wedding reception.) We flew with Mythilli, who was quite well behaved on the flight. (Though, it’s not like a 5 month old has any real control over any of their actions or behaviour.)
I wrote this on the plane ride:
Shima and I are boarded on our flight earlier than everyone else, since we now have a baby. We aren’t seated next to each other because we were so slow to check in online. A pretty blonde lady sits next to Shima, who was too slow or polite to ask her to trade seats with me. Shorty after a tall handsome man approaches me to take his seat next to mine. I ask if he wouldn’t mind trading seats with my wife and he agrees—of course, who wouldn’t give their seat up to a young lady and her baby. He swaps places with Shima and is now sitting next to the pretty blonde lady. The rest, as they say, is history. Well I assume so, they have been chatting the whole flight. Shima and I plan take full credit for their future marriage.
Travelling around the city with a baby is eye opening. Montreal is so incredibly inaccessible, much more so than Toronto. (And after travelling around the city with a broken leg, I can say that Toronto sets the bar pretty low.) We carted our stroller up and down stairs, over turnstiles, and through the rough terrain of Montreal’s streets. In previous years we would take the metro around the city, but on this trip we walked most places because the Metro is such a pain to take with a stroller. I don’t know what people in wheelchairs or with broken legs do in the city. I assume they are carted to the edge of the city limits and left to fend for themselves.
The trip was exhausting, but lots of fun. Montreal is a great city. (One that looks to be on the verge of falling down at any moment.)
Life
Shima: We left a toy on our flight to Montreal last Friday.
Him: What kind of Toy?
Shima: A girafe.
Me: It’s a squeaky toy.
Him: You mean a Sophie?
— Our conversation with a gate attendent from Porter. Apparently everyone knows what a Sophie is.
Me: Why are you carrying a dog
Him: It’s a wolf.
Me: Why are you carrying a wolf?
Him: I’m a taxidermist.
— My conversation with a fellow holding an embalmed dog.
5 July 2011, early morning
I was listening to Marco Arment’s show on 5by5 yesterday. Normally it is pretty on point, but yesterdays show seemed so wrong about Google+ I thought I’d say a few words. (A few of the Apple tech blogs that I read seems to be hating on Google+, seemingly because it’s from Google or because they hate social networks. This 5by5 show just stands out in my mind since I spent so much time listening to the damn show.)
To start off, Marco hadn’t even used Google+ when the show was recorded. Many of the tech blogs I read are also critical of the service despite not being invited to use it. Criticizing something you haven’t used before is silly. I would think that goes without saying.
Marco felt that Google had nothing to offer beyond what Facebook currently offers, all the while lacking the user base Facebook currently has. He talks about how if he could log in to Google+, he’d expect to see 4 geek friends, each talking about the testing out the site, and that’s about it. Meanwhile, even his Grandmother is on Facebook. My mom is on Facebook. That’s some serious market penetration. That said, she wasn’t on the site anywhere close to day one. Facebook at launch was full of Ivy League kids, and it expanded from there. Like today, when it launched there was a big well established player with a huge user base. People move from network to network when there are compelling reasons to move. I used to use ICQ, then switched to MSN, and am now settled on Google Talk. Each switch happened organically. All it really takes is a couple people who you have to talk and their communication medium of choice will usually win out. The question is whether Google+ will snag that set of key people. I would add that these sorts of social networks don’t have to be a zero-sum game. If the user base for Google+ never moves beyond a bunch of nerdy boys and girls that isn’t the worse thing ever. I suspect for many people, a social network their mom isn’t on is actually a compelling feature.
It also seems clear to me what Google is trying to do to differentiate itself from Facebook. Without looking at their crazy demo site, here are three things that come to my mind after using the site briefly and reading some blog posts from Google.
- Google is quite up front about how it plans to share what you post to the site. I commented upon logging in for the first time that all the requests to use this and that information were creeping me out, but they were really doing nothing different from Facebook, they were just not being secret about any of it. Google+ also has a very clear model for how you group your friends and family, and share information with them. Facebook’s privacy controls are inscrutable. Worse, they seem to be obfuscated on purpose.
- Google makes it very easy to export your data out of Google+. (It plans to make it easy to export data out of all of its services.) Facebook is a black hole for your stuff.
- Google makes it very easy to delete your account, and everything associated with it. You don’t have to find a page on WikiHow explaining what you need to do to delete your account. You don’t have to understand what deactivating your account means. You don’t have to wonder whether your account is actually gone or not. This is actually the one thing I like most about the service.
I don’t think I’ll use Google+ any more than I did Facebook. I don’t think Google is any less creepy than Facebook. Still, I can see that Google+ is a well thought out and well executed product, especially for something that just launched. I think it has a good chance of doing well. (Assuming they let other people use the site, anyway.)
[4] Technology
19 June 2011, early evening
Today is Father’s day. This is the first year I celebrate the day as a father. Shima made me t-shirt to commemorate the occasion.
That’s what I’m talking about.
[1]
26 May 2011, early morning
I gave Rdio a very brief whirl this month. Foolishly I signed up for the site ages ago, so I had already eaten up my chance to use the free month they give new users. I forked up $9 for their unlimited streaming subscription for your desktop and mobile devices.
I use Last.FM to listen to random music from genres I like, but am not that familiar with. For example, I love the Blue 6 radio station when I want to hear some solid Club Monaco House music—music that is played at Club Monaco stores. I realize now that this is actually all I really want from a streaming music service. I like to own the music I enjoy. It’s very rare that I’ll be hooked on an album, want to listen to it for a week or two, and then never listen to it again. Having to keep paying a subscription to listen to my music isn’t appealing to me. Rdio does artist based radio stations as well. I’m not sure they work better than Last.FM’s. (I don’t think they are worth the premium i’d have to pay over Last.FM’s.)
The Rdio application requires Flash, as does Rdio’s web interface. I actually don’t even have Flash installed on my MacBook Air. So their native client doesn’t work on my Air at all, and the website only works in Google Chrome, which ships with Flash installed. Last.FM has a pretty shitty Mac client, but at the very least it is a proper native Mac application. It’s other big advantage over Rdio’s is that it can stream music to my Airport Express. Not being able to use Rdio with my Airport Express is a big let down. I listen to a lot of music in my living room on my bigger speakers using via my Airport Express.
All of the griping aside, Rdio is a pretty amazing service. I can see how it would appeal to a lot of people. The website and iPhone application are pretty amazing. They make it very easy to queue up music to listen to later, create playlists, collaborate on playlists, hear what your friends are listening to, etc, etc. It’s a much bigger service than Last.FM. Right now it’s just more than I need.
[1]
