DarrenBarefoot.com

State of the MP3 Address, Part 2

Here's part two of my article on peer-to-peer networks, file trading and the evils of the music and movie industries from the Yaletown View (and, apparently, the Kitsilano View). As I said last month in the introduction to part 1, my geekier readers are probably more familiar with these topics than I am, but some of you in the general populace might enjoy it:

Last month, I discussed the history of file-sharing from Napster to Kaaza. Additionally, I described the various tactics that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have used try to put a kibosh on it. From suing 12-year-olds to tiresome ads before movies, the RIAA and MPAA have dealt with Napster and its successors in all the wrong way. They’re employing the same panicked approach that has failed repeatedly throughout the twentieth century. Radio, television and the VCR are all technological innovations that the music and movie industries originally fought, but eventually proved to earn them enormous amounts of money.

Recently, the music industry has finally agreed to offer their customers legal download services. Unsurprisingly, the most popular of these services is offered by a company famous for technological revolution.

The iTunes store from Apple opened about 10 months ago, enabling customers to purchase and download digital copies of songs for US $0.99 each. The iTunes store has sold 30 million songs since it opened. That number sounds pretty impressive, until you consider that that’s the equivalent of about 2.5 million CDs. Or consider that roughly three billion songs are downloaded from file-sharing networks every month. 30 million sounds a drop in the digital ocean.

The iTunes store isn’t available to Canadians yet. However, you may have seen ads for puretracks.com. They’re flogging digital music north of the border, and just sold their 1 millionth song. That’s only about 80,000 CDs worth of music. I think Vanilla Ice still sells more records than that.

Part of the problem with these legal download services is something called digital rights management (DRM). To thwart copying, DRM limits how you can use your downloaded files. DRM typically restricts where you can listen to music, how often you can transfer that music among computers and other devices and who you can distribute that music to. DRM is what makes some popular CDs unplayable in computer CD drives, and what prevents you from buying a DVD in Paris, bringing it home and watching it in Vancouver.

As Cory Doctorow, spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), is fond of saying, “no customer got out of bed this morning and said, 'Damn, I wish there was a way I could do less with my music and videos.’

DRM has a history of failure. The most recent example is floppy disks. In the late eighties, software companies tried to prevent users from copying the floppy disks that contained their products. Often these approaches would render the floppy disks useless, frustrating their customers. Eventually, manufacturers gave up on ‘copy-protected’ floppy disks.

On the other hand, open formats earn companies money. The introduction of the audio tape and the VCR caused great tumult for the music and movie industries. Imagine their surprise when these formats turned into massive new revenue streams.

So, if legitimate DRM-based download services aren’t the right approach, what is? Consumers continue to illegally download files, and corporations continue to sue them. How do we break the cycle?

The EFF has an idea. They want consumers to receive the same kind of deal that radio stations enjoy. They want consumers to pay a small, monthly ‘voluntary licensing fee’—say, US $5—to the music industry. In return, file-sharing music fans will be free to download whatever they like, using whatever software works best for them.

This approach has appeal for everyone involved. Consumers no longer have to fear litigation, and can build deeper, more robust file-sharing networks than ever before. The RIAA receives brand-new, recurring revenue, and doesn’t have to waste more resources penalizing their customer base.

The EFF is throwing around some pretty heady numbers. The estimated gross revenue of the recording industry is about $11 billion. If the 60 million Americans who currently use file-sharing software paid US $5 a month, it would translate into $3 billion of pure profit—no CDs to ship, no online retailers to cut in on the deal, no payola to radio conglomerates—for the music industry. Clearly, not all 60 million people are going to opt in. If one-third of file-sharing Americans bought into this service, that’s $1 billion in net profit. People are willing to pay for music—they’ve been doing it for 100 years.

With every revolution in technology, the entertainment industry has had be dragged, kicking and screaming, to the money tree. Though their unwillingness to learn from past mistakes is astounding, I’m hopeful that someday soon they’ll recognize that file sharing is a blessing, not a curse, for their industry.

Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness Updated

After months of neglect, I finally updated the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness. The new Hall has 37 images (well up from the previous 15) and is easier to navigate, thanks to the excellent free image-management software, JAlbum.

Since I launched the Hall, I've been meaning to cite this bizarre press hit I got on it from the Italian Libero News. I asked my Italian-speaking ex-pat friend James to translate a paragraph:

The man who makes sense of senseless instructions is the American blogger Darren "Barefoot". On his site, he has listed about 15 examples gathered from here and there. First in the list is a figure tripping over a curved line that extends out from a big box. The caption reads: "If you drop this packing box on a dog, be careful you don't trip over its tail."

Regular readers may recall that back in August, 2003, I got Slashdotted. Fool that I am, I've submitted the revised Hall to Slashdot. While I don't like my odds of acceptance (I'm batting about 3-for-11 for story submissions), I figured I'd chance it.

UPDATE: I see that my story submission was accepted by Slashdot, but it hasn't been posted to the front page yet. Once it does, this site will probably get jacked for a few hours as the Slashdot Effect kicks in. I've warned my ISP, but there probably isn't much they can or will do.

NewsMap

Via BoingBoing, we find this amazing tool that renders news as a 2-D map. From the creator's notes:

The GoogleNews aggregator is an amazing piece of software, not only aggregates almost every single online newspaper, but it also combines news stories into clusters so that when the same story is repeated among several news sites, it files and displays only one to you - no mater how different the actual text that makes the article is. Even the same story, told from completely different points of view, gets filed as one single entry.

Newsmap utilizes a treemap algorithm to dynamically create each view, and the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster.

This does for breaking news what MusicPlasma did for music--depict a lot of data in a way that's easy to consume.

Left Behind and the Christian Economy

Left Behind is a 12-book series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins which offers a literal, bloody version of the Book of Revelations. The twelfth and final book, Glorious Appearing, goes on sale today. Collectively, the books have sold more than 40-million copies, supplanting John Grisham as the most popular novelist among adults. There was also a feature film starring Kirk Cameron that, oddly, failed miserably.

I haven't read these books, but I'd like to read at least one (there's an excerpt from the first book here). The pro-America sentiment might be a bit hard to swallow. One article I read (not available online) indicated that the books render Satan as Russian and demonize (quite literally) the EU.

While Left Behind is relatively mainstream, it serves as an example of what I call 'the Christian economy'. Millions and millions of dollars are exchanged among Christian businesses in Canada and the US in a sort of parallel marketplace. I'm speaking here mostly of media products--books, television and movies. It's fascinating to me that all of this creative material gets produced and consumed but, with rare exceptions, doesn't get recognized by the mainstream media.

San Fran and Grouse

Julie went to San Francisco in February. She took a bunch of photos, and I've posted the best ones here. The reason I included this one (yes, those are the local sea lions) was to tell the following anecdote.

In 2000, when I worked for this company, the Vancouver development office went on a team-building exercise down to San Francisco. We spent a day in the main offices, shaking hands with all the marketing, sales and tech support folks. That evening, we all went out to Neptune's Palace on Pier 39 for dinner. It's on the second floor of the building in the aforementioned photo.

That night, I had horrible food poisoning. I was up half the night with a nasty stomach ache. I knew things would improve if I vomited, so I stuck my finger down my throat and went to it. Suffice it to say, I missed the following day's team-building event, a treasure hunt that, according to my fellow employees, was pretty goofy. The moral of this story: avoid Neptune's Palace like the plague.

The photo at the top of this entry is one I took while up at Grouse Mountain (a couple of others can be seen here). It's not a yeti, it's a snowboarder flying down the hill. Despite it's appearance, I didn't actually apply much Photoshop magic to this photo. I like it's somewhat ethereal quality, so I left it as is. Click the thumbnail for a desktop wallpaper-sized version.

Gnomedex 4.0

Nominees for the Great Canadian Song Contest

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how Dave Pollard was seeking the most Canadian of songs. He's assembled a list of 76 possible songs, which need to be reduced to a list of 12 finalists. Being an imbecile, I volunteered to be one of the judges. In the nex week I have to listen to all 76 songs and chose my 12 favourites. A quick assessment shows that I own or have heard 24 of these songs. At the end of this post, I've added the list with the ones I've got covered in bold.

If anybody has a copy of, say, Frédéric by Claude Léveillée or Wade Hemsworth's The Black Fly Song, let me know.

01 A Case of You    Joni Mitchell
02 A Real Canadian Girl    Stompin' Tom Connors
03 Acadian Driftwood    The Band
04 Ah que l’hiver    Gilles Vigneault (Pauline Julien)
05 Alouette    Traditional
06 Ambulance Blues    Neil Young
07 Banks of Newfoundland    Francis Forbes
08 Barrett’s Privateers    Stan Rogers
09 Bobcaygeon    Tragically Hip
10 Bud the Spud    Stompin' Tom Connors
11 C’est l’Hiver Demain    Robert Charlebois
12 Canada centennial song    Bobby Gimby
13 Canadian Dream    Rheostatics
14 Canadian Railroad Trilogy     Gordon Lightfoot
15 Canadiana Suite    Oscar Peterson
16 Coldest Night of the Year    Bruce Cockburn
17 English Bay    Blue Rodeo
18 Far Too Canadian    Spirit of the West
19 Farewell to Nova Scotia    Traditional
20 Fifty Mission Cap    Tragically Hip
21 Five Days in May*    Blue Rodeo
22 Four Strong Winds    Ian Tyson (Ian & Sylvia)
23 Frédéric    Claude Léveillée
24 Gaspésie    Félix Leclerc
25 Gavin's Woodpile    Bruce Cockburn
26 Good Fortune    Weeping Tile (Sarah Harmer)
27 Grandfather Song    Gerry Alfred & the Medicine Beat
28 Heather Down Road    Maria Dunn
29 Helpless    Neil Young
30 Hillcrest Mine    James Keelaghan
31 Hockey Night in Canada    Lynn Miles
32 Horses    Rheostatics
33 Je Reviendrai a Montréal    Robert Charlebois
34 Jolie Louise    Daniel Lanois
35 L’hymne au Printemps    Félix Leclerc
36 L’Independentriste    Robert Charlebois
37 La fin justifie les moyens    Jean-Pierre Ferland (Ginette Reno)
38 Lakeside Park    Rush
39 Land of the Silver Birch    Traditional
40 Le Plus Beau Voyage    Claude Gauthier
41 Life is a Highway    Tom Cochrane
42 Little Lambs    Marc Jordan
43 Log Driver’s Waltz    Wade Hemsworth
44 Lukey’s Boat    Traditional (Great Big Sea)
45 Midwinter Night’s Dream    Rheostatics
46 Mon Pays (C'est l'Hiver)    Gilles Vigneault
47 Montréal    Lucie Blue Tremblay
48 My Country Tis of Thy People You’re Dying    Buffy Sainte Marie
49 Northern Wish    Rheostatics
50 Northwest Passage    Stan Rogers
51 Okanagan Okee    Stompin' Tom Connors
52 Pirates of the Saskatchewan    Arrogant Worms
53 Powderfinger    Neil Young (Cowboy Junkies)
54 Prairie Town     Randy Bachman (Neil Young)
55 Rise Again    Leon Dubinsky (Rankin Family)
56 River*    Joni Mitchell
57 Roses & Blue Jays    Buck 65
58 Runnin' Back to Saskatoon    Guess Who
59 Sainte-Adèle, PQ    Jean-Pierre Ferland
60 See the Sky About to Rain*    Neil Young
61 Snowbird    Gene MacLellan (Anne Murray)
62 Something to Sing About    Oscar Brand
63 Song for the Mira    Allister MacGillivray (Rita MacNeil)
64 Song of the North    Susan Aglukark
65 St Jean Port Joli    Lucie Blue Tremblay
66 Sudbury Saturday Night    Stompin' Tom Connors
67 Suzanne*    Leonard Cohen
68 The Black Fly Song    Wade Hemsworth
69 The Crawl    Spirit of the West
70 The Hockey Song (The Good Ol’ Hockey Game)    Stompin' Tom Connors
71 This Heart That Lives in Winter    Lynn Miles
72 Un Canadien Errant    Traditional (Leonard Cohen)
73 Waiting in Canada    Jann Arden
74 Welcome, Welcome Immigrante    Buffy Sainte Marie
75 Wheat Kings    Tragically Hip
76 Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald    Gordon Lightfoot

Bad Week for Entertainment Corporations

All three of these articles come from the defenders of our digital rights at Slashdot:

• Two university researchers found that file-sharing has no significant impact on CD sales. "Oberholzer-Gee and his colleague, University of North Carolina's Koleman Strumpf, also said that their 'most pessimistic' statistical model showed that illegal file sharing would have accounted for only 2 million fewer compact discs sales in 2002, whereas CD sales declined by 139 million units between 2000 and 2002. I've also written about this here, with part 2 coming out on April 1.
• The Australian music industry has just had its best year ever, and they don't want you to know about it.
• 18 to 34 year-old men are watching less television (New York Times registration goodness required). That's certainly true of me--I spend all day in front of this silly computer thing. It's not directly discussed in the article, but I suspect the popularity of reality TV shows have had a minor impact as well. Most of the popular ones--American Idol, The Apprentice, Top Model, the sundry ones related to marriage and romance (not to mention Queer Eye, etc)--definitely skew toward a female audience. I know lots of men watch them, but I suspect that demographics-wise, a majority of viewers are female.

Hell Houses: Get Scared, Get Saved

Via Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools, I learned about a documentary called Hell House.

Churches in the midwest construct vast "hell houses" to scare visitors to Jesus. Originally begun as a response to Halloween haunted houses, these elaborate stagings, crammed with theatrical effects and high-school actors on October 31, try to outdo each other in their ultra-realistic depiction of sin and horror.

My curiosity was piqued, so I did some research. I found this exhaustive site (caution, fancy menus require IE) which dates from 1999, which includes a detailed description of a visit to a Hell House. There's even a short video from a news broadcast. I also found this page, which provides a virtual tour of a hell house:

The First Room visited was a funeral home with a funeral in progress. A young lady laying in a casket, mom, grandma and sisters weeping for their lose. They seen how Satan had deceived this young lady into believing that she was born a lesbian and she had died from aids. A demon jumps out from behind the casket and informs the group how he had convinced her into believing that this was the way she was and how they had led her into hell without the hope of escape.

Bummer.

According to this page, apparently you can also buy a ready-made hell house kit:

New Creation Evangelism, Inc of Clearwater FL sells a Judgment House™ kit. Its literature describes it as "an 8 scene drama that makes people aware of the reality of heaven and hell." It shows "them the joy of having a relationship in Heaven with Jesus." Also shown is hell, "the ultimate haunted house, which is where they will spend eternity if they do not accept Jesus Christ as their personal Savior..." Their kit is more expensive than the one for Hell Houses; it costs $250 U.S. But for this expenditure, a participating church becomes a Covenant church. They receive a new script each year, attend a training conference. Also included is a manual, advertising kit and telephone support.

This page rocks. They provide detailed stats of the efficacy of the Judgment House--"Experienced 18 salvations per hour of presentation!" I'd also like to see that manual:

3. Once you have reenacted the calamitous car accident, lay prone in front of the over-turned car. If you are portraying a teenager who has accepted Jesus Christ, strike a beatific expression and look skyward.

OR

If you are portraying a teenager who has rejected Jesus, writhe on the stage floor and beg for mercy.

4. After a minute, stand and direct audiences to Room 4, the Hall of Queer Evil.

But I jest. It's not my intent to mock any form of Christianity here. I just think the concept as a pedagogical strategy is totally absurd. Scare people back to Jesus? What a medieval concept. When in modern human history has this strategy been effective? Surely this runs counter to principles central to the Christian faith. Converting people through fear is, well, pretty fascist. I hardly think that seeing a couple of men kiss (though apparently it's actually a man and a woman in a beard) is going to set someone on the path to a healthy spiritual relationship with God. And if it does, what kind of act of faith is that? "I believe because I'm scared out of my wits?"

I'm reminded of the reason why cathedrals are so awe-inspiring--the builders wanted to convert people the moment they entered. At least in that case they built the majestic instead of the horrible.

Here are a couple more sundry articles on the phenomenon. I like the photo in that last one--clearly, the demon's make-up is based on Rob Zombie's.

My Danish Socks Arrived

On March 18, I wrote about the elegant idea that was 10socks.com. Well, today my socks arrived. That's pretty good--11 days from Frederiksberg to Vancouver.

I've got pair #10 on right now, and they feel great.

NealeNews

Via Jim Elve at BlogsCanada, I discovered NealeNews, compiled by Brian Neale. I see that he's inexplicably emulating the format of the very popular and influential Drudge Report. I always thought that the Drudge Report looked like a cross between the National Enquirer and MyFirstWebSite©.

While NealeNews is an admirable pursuit, I'm not sure what it offers that Google News doesn't. Plus, as far as I can tell, there's no RSS feed.

Scuba Cycle

Via Gizmodo, we find this wacky diving bell cum motorcycle. Very Bond:

Scubadooing means you don’t need to wear a mask or a mouthpiece as in diving, and the air tank and diving weights are on the ScubaDoo, not you! You are seated on your ScubaDoo, with your head and shoulders within a clear dome, your air constantly replenished from the Scuba tank, enabling you to breathe normally! Manoeuvrable? You bet! At a rate of 2.5 knots you’re able to ride amongst the spectacular underwater world, or remain stationary while you feed the fish.

Great. All those asshats who race around on their SeaDoos are going to do the same under the water. As the surfer loathes the SeaDoo, the diver will come to hate the ScubaDoo.

Lunch Among the Digerati

Boris Mann kindly invited me to an impromptu lunch at Urban Thai Bistro. In attendance were Robert Scoble (look at this photo, and then this one, and tell me he doesn't look a bit like Philip Seymour Hoffman. I see that others think so too), Stewart Butterfield (involved with Flickr, Cal Henderson (another Flickrer, an Englishman who, remarkably, doesn't support a single Premiership--or any other league--football team), Lauren Wood, Tim Bray and sundry unURLables, including Tim and Lauren's son, Andy, Robert's wife Maryam and her friend Shadi.

Much was discussed--Sun vs. Microsoft, Flickr, social software, the beauty of Vancouver, Vancouver real estate (does any conversation occur in this city where that doesn't come up?), this Vancouver weblog conference idea, how people are going to view their photos in 20 years, etc. Both Boris and Tim have posted entries about the lunch which cover more ground than I am.

Also, it turns out that Boris is from both my former schools--Sentinel Secondary and UVic. I didn't get to confer with him on who we mutually knew, but I'm sure there will be gossip to exchange.

100 Movies That Deserve More Love

An insightful article (via MetaFilter) on movies that have been, for whatever reason, shunned, ignored or otherwise disdained. Here are some of my favourites. Having read the whole article, there are about 50 I'd like to write about. I'm apply some self-restraint:

• Nightwatch (1997) - Features one of the freakiest sequences in recent movie history, and the gruesome removal of a thumb. And, of course, what's a Ewan McGregor film without Ewan McGregor’s bald-headed hermit?
• Gattaca (1997) - Pretty popular among geeks, but it's one of the most stylish, well-acted sci-fi movies of the decade.
• Equilibrium (2002) - Silly premise, but a great looking film and Christian Bale has Jedi cool pouring out of his ears.

• Contact (1997) - A particularly thoughtful sci-fi flick, and Jodie Foster's 'eureka' moment out among the satellite dishes is extraordinary.
• The Edge (1997) - As the article notes, 'a solid film'. Quality acting, and a Mamet script.
• Ronin (1998) - An exceptional film, with some of the finest stunt driving I've ever seen.
• LA Story (1991) - To paraphrase the article, if Richard E. Grant’s clanging testicles don’t make you laugh, what will? A witty, funny if occassionally too-cute movie.
• Rounders (1998) - I know nothing about poker, but this film felt well-researched and very legit. Quality acting, and, sadly, the high-point of Gretchen Moll's career.
• The Mosquito Coast (1986) - It's nutty and a bit rambling, but there's some fine work from Peter Weir.
• 25th Hour (2002) - Another exceptional film, with strong performances from the entire cast and directed with wit and boldness by Spike Lee.
• Beautiful Girls (1996) - A charming, sentimental film with endearing performances from Natalie Portman and Timothy Hutton.
• Pump Up The Volume (1990) - I fell hard for Samantha Mathis back in the day. These days, she's reduced to playing Frank Castle's wife, who gets gunned down before the 10-minute mark of The Punisher.
• Kissing Jessica Stein (2001) - A witty film that might have been written by Woody Allen if he were a thirty-something bi-sexual woman.
Posted by Darren at 11:19 AM | Comments (3)

Here's a Sentence You'll Never Hear Me Say Again

"I'm in Canadian Living magazine."

Back in early February, I wrote about taking French lessons and an idea I had for an educational Web site. Somebody who knew somebody read it, and I was contacted by the writer who was writing an advertorial (big JPEG ahead) for Les Rendez-vous de la Francophonie, an nationwide series of events "celebrating the French language, culture and community throughout Canada." The advertorial is about Anglo-Canadians learning to speak French. So, we did a little phone interview, and I sent her some photos and there I am in the April issue. I took those photos myself, with a timer. C'est bon, n'est-ce pas?

Survey: A Weblogging Conference in Vancouver?

While lying in bed this morning, I had an idea: Why not organize a conference about weblogging here in Vancouver? After showering, it still seemed like a good idea, so I figured the next step was to do some market research.

I threw together this little survey (thanks to Tom Murphy for the survey site recommendation). If you're a weblogger in British Columbia, or somebody who's interesting in blogging, please take a minute to fill it in. It's only 9 questions, and 7 of those are multiple choice.

More importantly, spread the word. I'm going to email some people, but the more respondents, the better. After all, we don't want to throw a party if no one's going to come.

Right now, I'm imagining a single-day conference in Vancouver no earlier than this fall. There would be some kind of fee to get in (there's a question in the survey regarding how much folks are willing to pay), but there would also be some free introductory sessions for those newbies interested in the basics of blogging. The survey lists a bunch of proposed conference topics, but I'd be keen to hear what others wanted to hear about. There's also a spot on the survey to include your email address, if you want to be notified if and when we actually schedule the conference.

UPDATE: In case you're a search engine user and have happened upon this page, you might be interested that this notion turned into Northern Voice, a blogging conference in Vancouver in February, 2005.

Here's Something I Bet You Didn't Know

Navigate the Streets?

I got an email from 'Tim' (no last name), promoting Navigate the Streets (caution, Flashiest house in Flashtown ahead). It's apparently:

An urban race. Compete in teams of two. At the beginning of the race, you receive a list of clues that, when solved, reveal checkpoints around the city. There is no set course. Compete on foot or use public transit. The team that visits all the checkpoints and returns to race headquarters in the fastest time, wins! When you reach a checkpoint, take a photo of it with a digital or polaroid camera to prove that you found it. Winners of each race gain free entry, accomodation and airfare to the Canadian Championship.

It's apparently 'The Amazing Race' at a local level. I did a little digging and found Mike Steinbaugh, who apparently built the blog for the site. Tim's last name is apparently 'Shore'. No relation to Pauly, I hope.

Here's what I'm confused about--is this a profit-making enterprise or good-natured Participactionish event? Are they trying to get people out to exercise, or are they just using them as a massive focus group for new products? It sounds like a fun idea, but the answers to these questions would got a long way to determining whether I'd participate or not.

I see that this nutty race is associated with Right to Play, a Canadian NGO "committed to improving the lives of the most disadvantaged children and their communities through sport for development." Why'd they contact me? I don't even know any disadvantaged children.

Link Round-Up: Gadgets

Today we've got links about gadgets:

• RFID tags are going to change changing the way we consume. Here, your sushi bill gets calculated by tags glued to the bottom of plates. Nifty. (Thanks, Engadget).
• Here in BC, they're using a robot to harvest thousands of trees from the bottom of flooded reservoirs.
• This is remarkable stuff, and it could actually reduce the suicide rate at Simon Fraser University (a concrete nightmare, where bleak sci-fi TV shows and movies are often shot). Technically speaking, not a gadget, but cool nonetheless.
• E-paper is finally here! Sort of. (Thanks, Taint.org).
• It's the HoverHoover. The HoverVac. The HooverHoverVac-u-matic. Whatever. (Thanks, Gizmodo).
• Don't like the alarm clock? Not down with aromatherapy to wake you up? How about pillows and blankets that light up? Bye, bye, seasonal affective disorder. (Thanks again, Engadget).
• It's a Wifi hard drive. Why would I want one of these again? I suppose it's preferable to the cabled external drive, but is it that preferable?

Bonus link: Another non-gadget, but still cool. People have been talking about using converting shipping containers as housing for those who have none. It's an interesting concept, and here's an article and a how-to. This company offers quik house, the mansion version, which converts 5 containers into a 2,000 square foot home.

A Linux PVR for Sale

While I'm familiar with TiVo and ReplayTV, I've never really been that keen on the subscription model. I really like the idea of having a hard drive-based VCR, but I don't want to be beholden to companies for a monthly fee and all that that relationship assumes. The show scheduling and predictive recording are a nifty feature, but I've managed without them for 15 years of the VCR. After all, I barely have time to watch the shows I want to tape. When am I going to watch the shows that TiVo thinks I might like? Incidentally, are TiVo or ReplayTV even available in Canada?

Via Slashdot, from Australia, we find the Home Media Centre. Like the TiVo, It's basically a computer built to record and playback TV shows. Of course, they too are shipping without commercial skipping functionality, but that's easily fixed. That's pretty much what I want--a simple device that can record TV shows and play them back. I don't want a computer sitting beside my TV, and I don't want subscription services. They offer the scheduling features via an Internet connection, but it doesn't appear to be a requirement.

[UPDATE:] I just noticed this salient design comment from the Slashdot discussion thread: "When are they going to realize that if I am going to buy something meant to go into my home theater, it needs to fit in. That means is should be ~19" x 2-5" not some silly ass cube, it looks like a bookshelf unit." Indeed...why go out of your way to build something that doesn't fit in with every other audio and video component on the planet?

Five CDs

Yesterday, five CDs arrived in the mail from Amazon.ca. Having listened to them all, here are my encapsulated reviews:

• Natalie Merchant - The House Carpenter's Daughter: Merchant's newest album is her first independent release, and quite a departure from her VH1-friendly solo material. This is 'a collection of traditional and contemporary folk music', and Ms. Merchant sings everything from a mid-nineteenth century Baptist hymn to a Fairport Convention cover from the sixties. Merchant feels strongly about preserving folk music's heritage, so this album is much an archival and promotional effort as anything else. If historical folk music is your thing, you won't be disappointed.
• 10,000 Maniacs - Campfire Songs: This is a compilation of the 10,000 Maniacs most popular songs, combined with a second CD of obscure or previously unreleased recordings. I own most of their CDs, and thanks to Napster and Kazaa, I'd heard almost everything on the second CD. Nonetheless, it's handy to have it all in one place and remastered. Together, the two CDs provide a decent retrospective of this folk-rock band over their 15-year career.
• Sarah Harmer - All of Our Names: The difficult second album. Technically not her second album, as she was in a popular Canadian band for years before she went solo, but it still has the same cachet. It's a more introspective album, and less immediately-likable than her first. Those are often the kind of albums that reward repeated listenings, and I suspect this one will be no expection. She's an excellent, witty lyricists, and there are clever surprises in every song. Take these lines from "Things to Forget": 'But holidays are made for reading / and remembering things that are worth repeating'. [UPDATE] Incidentally, there's an Internet-only TicketMaster pre-sale for Ms. Harmer's show in Vancouver (don't ask me why) today until 10pm. The password for the pre-sale is 'sarah'.
• Nellie McKay - Get Away from Me: Ms. McKay is a 19-year-old white girl from Harlem, and appears to be a fresher, less maudlin Tori Amos. Her debut double (!) album is just nutty--it moves from rap to lounge-singing to pseudo-seventies anthems with ease, and is concerned with, in her own words, "a love of dogs and a mistrust of men.". I'm not sure if I like it, but it's certainly diverting, and one of the more original albums I've heard in a long time. She, too, appears to be something of a nut--check out the interview videos on this page (she also seems way older than 19--has she been de-aged by the fountain of youth that is the Columbia Records marketing department?). She has very ill-advised hair in those videos.
• Cassandra Wilson - Glamoured: I saw Cassandra Wilson in concert at the Chan Centre a couple of weeks ago and was blown away. Compared to her, every other vocalist I've ever heard has just been saying the words. I didn't write about it at the time because it was such a perfect concert experience that I had very little to say. Her band was extraordinary, and she never missed a note. This album is her latest top-quality offering, a mix of barely-recognizable covers (because of their inventive instrumentations) and originals.

Free Culture

The Loneliness of the Midlist Author

Martine points to a whiny, occasionally-ludicrous Salon article (advertising goodness ahead) written by an anonymous 'midlist author' who seems to think the world owes her something. Martine also references the Salon letters page, where among others, Neil Pollack takes the author to task. Science fiction author Charlie Stross applies some hard numbers and frank reality to the discussion, and references a number of other people joining in on the ass-whooping. John Scalzi puts it best: "are authors as a class this disconnected to the real world?"

The author of the Salon piece is both naive and hasn't studied her history. Everybody from Shakespeare to Dickens supplemented their income, and didn't expect to be living solely off the avails of their 'art'. The assumption that she should be able to and that everybody from her editor to the bookstores are out to get her, is deeply offensive. Just because you think yourself an artist doesn't entitle you to anything.

To sum up the collective responses to this article: honey, shut up and get a job.

Wood, Not Flesh

Via BoingBoing, we find this fascinating video (and this high-speed AVI) of a table saw that can differentiate between flesh and wood:

The SawStop system works by recognizing the difference in the electrical properties of wood and a user. The system induces a high-frequency electrical signal on the blade of a table saw and monitors this signal for changes caused by contact between the blade and a user's body. The signal remains unchanged when the blade cuts wood because of the relatively small inherent electrical capacitance and conductivity of wood.

If they'd had this badboy back in the sceneshop in Theatre 105, I wouldn't have volunteered to sort screws with the girls. Incidentally, 'sort screws' isn't a euphemism for anything--it's literally what you think it is.

Link Round-Up: And the Kitchen Sink

We haven't had one of these for a while, so there are links-a-plenty to clear out of the bookmark folder:

• A Slate article on graffiti in Iraq: "Turkey and Iran are a split turd."
• Everything you ever wanted to know about Irish megaliths (and sundry other antiquities). Thanks, Taint.org.
• Best computer pranks ever (not really).
• Sorting your friends and family on the dwarf-elf/ninja-pirate matrix. I must get on this.
• NYU students build swimming pool in their dorm. Strong work.
• How Sports Illustrated manages 16,183 photos from the Super Bowl.
• This meme has had its day, but this Crimson Room game is still nifty. Thanks, Donna.
• Japanese reading mobile novels on their cell phones, avoiding use of 'difficult words'. Is that Tolstoy I hear spinning in his grave?
• It's the Bovine Rectal Palpation Simulator.
• Interesting article predicting the demise of the video game industry. I don't think that's going to happen, but the writer makes some salient points. Check out the screenshot comparisons halfway down the page.
• Rog gets a vasectomy. Don't miss the haiku version of that post, it's classic.

Sarah Harmer on the Radio

Back in January, I wrote about attending an in-studio show by Sarah Harmer for CBC 3. It apparently aired this weekend, and is now available on their Web site (Flashticity ahead). I've just received her new album, All of Our Names, from Amazon, and will be posting some thoughts on it and other CDs in the near future.

You can also check out the video for her new single here. You know, over the last few years, I went from thinking that videos were cool to thinking that they're ridiculous. After all, they're just 3-minute ads for the artist. It's particularly bad for non-pop artists. Could Ms. Harmer look more awkward? She looks like she's in the middle of a bad dream.

The Goddamn FAQ

I'm a regular poster on alt.sports.hockey.nhl.vanc-canucks. That's a Usenet discussion group. For anybody not old or nerdy enough to know what those are, go here. People have been debating trades, discussing uniform designs and lusting after local media personalities since December 12, 1993. In Internet terms, that's the Cambrian period.

Sometime in the newsgroup history, a FAQ for the newsgroup was started. It's entitled the Goddamn FAQ, as in "in answer to your question, read the Goddamn FAQ". This is where it gets a little weird. Part of the FAQ describes how members of the newsgroup have adopted a particular Canuck player as a pet. There's nothing to adopting or owning a pet--mostly, you just claim him and he's yours. My pet is Canucks General Manager Brian Burke. I'm think Burke has done a great job with the team on a limited budget, and regularly defend him in newsgroup discussions.

This is a long-winded introduction to a site I just discovered, and have nothing to do with: BrianBurke.com. This is a fan site for the Canucks GM--not a player or a coach, but the GM. Does anybody else think that's a little weird? No weirder, I suppose, than claiming Canucks players and staffs as housepets, but I thought it was strange. It's a nice-looking site, though.

Good-Natured Yuck Fest or Biting Satire

I'll change subjects in a minute, but first I wanted to reference Saved, a new film starring (gulp) Mandy Moore and (quadruple gulp) Macaulay Culkin. Now I like a decent teen comedy as much as the next guy (though I prefer the term "teen comedy" to be bifurcated by the term "sex"), but I watched the trailer for this movie and am kind of perplexed. The IMDB listing describes the plot this way: "A girl at a Southern Baptist high school finds that her pregnancy makes her an outcast."

This comes from the lads at Tagliners, who seem to share my confusion:

Is there any hope? So far I'm thinking a feelgood Christian morality tale about the values of friendship. And God, or Jesus, or something - I mean it's not like that sort of thing goes down well at the box office these days, oh dear me no; why would MGM put out a movie like this right now? Because they're desperate and only have the Bond franchise to fall back on? Surely not.

My Ideal Seat

When I go to a movie, generally my first priority is to see it with as few other people as possible. I don't mean friends or family here, I mean that I to minimize the total number of audience members. This objective is, of course, opposed by my eagerness to see films when they're released and when the print is fresh.

I got to a lot of weekday matinees--the earlier in the day, the better. I usually go by myself, and generally there's very few people in the theatre. When I arrive in the theatre, I undertake a complex, subconscious evaluation to determine where to sit. There are many factors, but the most important is the noise potential of my fellow cinema-goers.

To try to quantify this evaluation, I've created the following diagram. It displays a typical audience and illustrates the scope of each group's perceived 'noise threat'. As you can see, single men tend to be very quiet (silent really, except for the rare cell phone call) while middle-aged women and teenagers tend to be chatty.

Careful Who You Shush

As a frequent movie-goer and lover of silence, I politely ask people to be quiet all the time. Why anyone ever talks in a movie is beyond me. Unless it's to say something like "your pants are on fire", you should keep your mouth shut. In part, I think the VCR revolution is reponsible, because people become accustomed to watching movies at home and talking all they want.

And I practice what I preach. My friends and family know that if they say anything to me during a movie, they won't get a response (and may get a smack). It's interesting, too, that everyone complains about people who talk in movies. Surely some of these complainers are also talkers, aren't they?

Regardless, in light of my shushing practices, this article is worrying:

A moviegoer was severely beaten after he shushed another man in the row behind him during a showing of "The Triplets of Belleville" at a downtown Ann Arbor theater Saturday evening, city police said. The 51-year-old victim was hospitalized with multiple fractured ribs, a collapsed lung and several facial lacerations that required stitches, police said.

Minor Sports-Related Announcement

Everyone's a Designer

Alison's rant is a common complaint of design professionals:

Anyway, the bottom line is, the customer is always right. But the customer comes to us for a reason. They can’t do it themselves, they need us. So please, offer your input, give your feedback, tell us what you want to accomplish; but let us be the expert, that’s why you hired us. Let us do our job. You’ll get a better product in the end. I promise.

This is really true of any contracted consultant, designer or otherwise. Sometimes, despite your best professional opinion, the customer will do what they want. There's nothing you can do about that except clearly explain why you disagree, and write it down somewhere so that they can't blame you when things break horribly later on.

Darren's Poetry Corner:

It's a very busy day in DarrenLand, so I'm foisting old material on you. A couple of weeks back, I recorded my first audioblog while messing around with my microphone. At the same time, I recited The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which I have more or less committed to memory. I doubt anybody's going to listen to my crappy reading of the whole thing, but somebody might want to hear a couple stanzas:

• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (MP3, 4.0 MB, 5:47)

Good luck with that.

Living Dead Unseat Reborn

This is a bit surprising: Dawn of the Dead replaced The Passion as the #1 box office draw this weekend. Looking down the list, however, I see that the Dead distributors wisely picked an excellent week to release the film. The only other major releases were the dubious-looking Taking Lives and the promising-looking Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The latter's success depends on a classic word-of-mouth campaign, and was released in about half of the theatres that Dead was shown in.

As a result, Dawn of the Dead gets great press for topping out the box office. I'm not sure why people are going to this movie--it's pretty much your average zombie flick, and 28 Days Later is superior in every way. I'd say that Dead and Taking Lives had similar consumer visibility, and I would have thought that Ms. Jolie, Mr. Hawke and Mr. Sutherland would have more draw than Sarah Polley (did my favourite indie starlet need some cash?) and Ving Rhames. Plus, with Angelina as the straight girl's favourite fantasy, I would have assumed Taking Lives had more cross-gender appeal.

But, then, I went to Dawn of the Dead this weekend, too.

Local Plug #2: The Wedding Pool

Several of my former classmates from the UVic theatre department are founding members of theatreSKAM, one of BC's finest small theatre companies. Last night, I went to see their latest production here in Vancouver, The Wedding Pool.

As with all of SKAM's productions, it was stylish and technically excellent. They're very fine performers. Lucas Myers, who plays one of the leads, is perhaps the finest actors I've seen onstage under the age of 35. The play is directed with a laid-back wit by the playwright, Ami Gladstone.

SKAM's work is always rife with theatrical (and meta-theatrical) trickery, and this play is no exception. Nearly all of the lighting is practical--coming from onstage sources that the actors control. It's a nifty conceit, and works very well 90% of the time. Occasionally, the lighting effect can really flatten out the staging, but it's a minor quibble.

My other quibble is about the script. Though funny, pacey and pop culture-savvy, it's pretty light fare compared to much of SKAM's other work. It falls victim to a certain he-said, she-said Sex in the Cityness. The audience seemed to really enjoy it, but I would've preferred something with a little more meat, content and theme-wise.

Regardless, it's a decent (and brief, at 65 minutes with no intermission) night of theatre. More information about the show is here.

Local Plug #1: Get Your 80s On

My dear friend Mercedes is part of Theatre Tart (caution, Flashy Flash and the Flash Bunch ahead), a theatre company here in Vancouver. They've done a couple of shows for the Vancouver Fringe, and did Transit of Venus (an excellent play about science--one of my favourite kinds of plays) for Presentation House in North Van.

Next Tuesday, Mercedes et al are holding an 80s-themed fundraiser at the Caprice night club on Granville Street. Doors open at 9:00pm, with dancing, drinking and airband contest to follow.

Because it's a total throwback to the 80s and it's difficult to drag me to the nightclubs, Mercedes has assured me (in the presence of my wife, no less) that I can touch her inappropriately. Just like high school (if you check out her 8 x 10s, you'll see why this is a draw).

Haiku Reviews

Over the past couple of weeks, I've seen a number of movies. I haven't written about them because they've all been pretty unremarkable. Still, I wanted to post a quick haiku summary of each. Here they are, in order from quite bad to pretty good:

I feel dirty
Is Buffy's little sister
a sex symbol now

Desert racing Man-horse love affair
Aragorn has a pistol
and fewer sidekicks

Zombies shouldn't run
Slicker and stupider than
the original

Girl abducted
Mamet's movies are clinics
in storytelling

A Digital Travel Diary in Africa

When I travel, I usually write a travel diary. I've had varying degrees of success with actually doing the writing, but up to now I've always taken a journal and a pen.

Sidebar: The travel diary I've used over most of the past decade (I'm not very prolific on trips) has this nifty felt cover than my sister Lynsey made for me.

I'm going to South Africa for three weeks in May. Because I won't be doing much after dark (avoiding trouble from both animals and humans), I'll have more time to write. As such, I'd like to have the content in a digital format that I can later (when I return to Canada) do something with--save to my PC, upload to a Web site, whatever. To do this, I need a digital device that can store some text. Here are my criteria:

• It has to be cheap. It may get stolen, lost or eaten by a hippo.
• It doesn't have to be fancy. I just want to be able to write, edit and store text. It doesn't have to translate into Afrikaans or play 'No Woman, No Cry' when I've got appointments or store my photos.
• I don't want to access the Web with it.
• Size is a factor. The smaller and lighter, the better. I realize that smaller and lighter means more expensive, so I'm willing to compromise.
• I'm not crazy about stylus input. I'd prefer a keyboard model.

Grand Theft Auto: Your Town

I had this idea in the shower this morning. I expect some version of it is already happening, so in sharing it I'm hoping somebody might point me to the appropriate projects. As you may know, the popular video game Grand Theft Auto is quite a franchise. They continue to set new games and expansion packs in different cities.

Imagine if you could play Grand Theft Auto (or any similarly urban game) set in your town, where your town is any settlement on the planet with more than, say, 5000 people. Here's how I think it would work:

There's a big trend in encoding the world through GPS. Geocaching, the Degree Confluence Project, and so on are all interesting examples of our collective need to represent our real world digitally.

Somebody develops some software that enables the average human to describe a building using a digital camera and a GPS device. The software has to be simple enough for any techophobe to use, and should enable people to generate a decent 3-D rendered model of the exterior of a building, buildings or city block. Basically, you'd input GPS data about the building, and then wrap images of the building onto a wire frame. More skilled volunteer project managers in each city would tweak the renders to make them look decent.

People work collectively, building a replica of their downtown. Ideally, each participant renders the block or blocks around where they live. Because they're familiar with these urban spaces, they can provide the highest level of detail and insight into the area.

Rockstar Games, the makers of Grand Theft Auto, provides an API into their games. This enables people to associate game events and locations with any city map. In the original game, say a major sequence occurs in Central Park. Why can't it occur in Stanley Park or Golden Gate Park instead? Indoor sequences are associated with appropriate buildings. There may be some fudging here, but as the grass roots game-modding community has proven, that's okay.

Obviously there would be plenty of hurdles--social and technological--to overcome to make this work, but I like the concept. An open-source, detailed rendition of your city is a great resource, and has applications far beyond gaming. Virtual tourism (yeah, right), historical archives, education, mapping--there's no end to the virtual world fun that could be had. Imagine being lost in a foreign city, taking a digital photo and plugging it into the PalmPilot. Software compares your photo to the city database, and tells you not only what corner you're on, but what direction you're facing.

Not Enough Fibre

Bah. Apparently one of the fibre optic cables that services my building has been snapped. Earlier, there were guys with a big white truck going down a manhole outside my building. Either they're fixing the problem, or putting a packet sniffer on the connection to scan for terrorists.

Either way, I've been without Internet access since lunchtime, and will be for the balance of the day. I eventually gave up waiting and went over to my wife's office to borrow a PC there. If you've emailed me and expect a prompt response, you had better call me instead.

Update on Ms. Yanor's Site

This is pretty shameful. Maybe her blog page features an old column, but there's no indication of that. Regardless, she shamefully has lifted entire sentences from this New York Times article without attribution. Here's a chunk of her entry:

Schopenhauer wrote that its presence in a person's heart was a clear sign of evil. but scientists who study schadenfreude take a more charitable view. however contemptible schadenfreude may seem, they say, we are programmed to feel it. when an event happens, say, in the form of a sudden job loss, the argument goes, people are prone to the same emotions they might experience if that overpaid colleague of theirs got into trouble with the boss. of course, not everyone feels schadenfreude at the same events or to the same degree. research has shown that people with low self-esteem are more susceptible to schadenfreude than those whose self-regard is high. and while some may bask in this glee unapologetically, others might quickly feel ashamed of it, and successfully shut off their schadenfreude valves.

And here's the original source material that she stole from:

Philosophers through the ages have pondered the nature of schadenfreude. Schopenhauer wrote that its presence in a person's heart was a clear sign of evil...But scientists who study schadenfreude take a more charitable view. However contemptible schadenfreude may seem, they say, we are programmed to feel it...

When that event comes, say, in the form of a Congressional investigation into possible insider trading, the argument goes, people are prone to the same emotions they might experience if that overpaid colleague of theirs got into trouble with the boss.

Of course, not everyone feels schadenfreude at the same events or to the same degree. Research has shown that people with low self-esteem are more susceptible to schadenfreude than those whose self-regard is high. And while some may bask in this glee unapologetically, others might quickly feel ashamed of it, and successfully shut off their schadenfreude valves.

Inexplicably, she's dispensed with proper grammar and punctuation in her weblog entry. Is this to conceal her crime or just to personalize the material?

This isn't the original act of plagiarism that Ms. Yanor was caught for--that was a piece about snowboarding baby-boomers. Given that piece and how freely she steals from the Times here, I wonder just how often she's 'borrowed' her column from another source. You'd think that after this story broke to the national media, she might take this particular theft off her site.

UPDATE: As somebody pointed out in the comments, Ms. Yanor has removed all of the content from her site. I expected this, so I saved a copy of the schadenfreude essay discussed above. You can see it here.

Lucky Strike Out

For the past three years, Angele Yanor has written a mediocre relationship column in The Vancouver Sun. I rarely read it, and when I did I was unimpressed with the writing quality and content. It seemed to me like a lame attempt to exploit the chick-lit fad of Sex in the City.

It turns out that Ms. Yanor had plagiarized at least two of her columns (according to the radio report on the CBC) from the New York Times. An investigation is ongoing as to the extent of her copying, and the editor-in-chief of the Sun was heard on the CBC bemoaning the amount of work the cross-checking involved (surely there's a cheap and easy technological solution to that problem).

I may have judged her column prematurely. If she indeed lifted a lot of content from the Times, the quality must be better than I thought. On her site, Ms. Yanor rather laughably argues that she "never called herself a journalist". Ah, well, so long as you publish regularly in a major newspaper but don't profess to be a journalist, ethical considerations don't apply. Is she aware of the irony that the bottom of her blog page reads "content may only be published with prior written consent"? There's no indication of actual copyright, so the text's origin may be up for grabs.

Here's a tip for all you budding plagiarists out there: if you're going to copy verbatim from another newspaper, don't pick the most popular one on the planet. She was writing about relationships, after all. Surely there are a million and one other adequately-written columns that she could have raided.

The Simple Ideas are Best

Via Dervala, I found 10socks, a site that sells boxes of 10 pairs of numbered socks, all of the same colour. Why are they numbered if they're all the same colour? I'm not really sure, but the very absurdness of it really appealed to me. So, a box of twenty black socks is winging its way from Denmark to my door. I will report back on quality and comfort when they arrive. If they pass muster, I'm never buying dress socks in a shop again. If not, they'll make excellent gifts for my friends.

What art thou that usurp'st this time of night,
Together with that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march?

Lo, tis pair #4, worn with capri pants and steeled determination.

What Microsoft Wants

The Convergence of Porn and Mainstream Cinema

Here's a DVD review (not particularly safe for work) for an X-rated film called Loaded. What's interesting is if you watch the trailer that eventually loads at the bottom of the page (the trailer's only R-rated, but still not safe for work), it looks like a regular feature film. There are way more gun fights, car chases and explosions than sex. As expected, the acting is glaringly bad. But this is kind of jarring, given the Hollywood look and feel of the film.

From a marketing perspective, I'm not sure about the niche they're trying to fill (no pun intended). It's basically just a bad B-movie with (presumably) lots of sex. All of the data I've collected about preferences in erotica suggests that men want to watch sex, while women want to watch a story that includes sex. Given that this story ought to star Steven Segal, I doubt many women would be interested.

By no means am I recommending this film, but it's a rarity, in that it's an X-rated film that one could mistake for the latest straight-to-video action flick. Hollywood has obviously become more risque over the past 50 years, and the rest of the world is far less Puritanical about sex on-screen. Will porn and Hollywood merge somewhere down the line? The violence in Hollywood is already ridiculously pornographic...why not add the sex, too?

Growing up, my parents were far stricter about the violence I saw in film and television than the sex. This is a sound strategy, I think. In adulthood, I'm not opposed to sex or violence in film--just gratuitous sex and violence.

Mark Cuban's Weblog

Via Just a Gwailo, we find that Mark Cuban, the unorthodox owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has started a weblog. This, in itself, isn't all that interesting if you're not interested in the foibles of professional sports ownership or the life of a billionaire. What is interesting is the effect it has on Cuban's relationship with the media. Here, he describes a pre-game chat he had with journalists (while riding the StairMastter, apparently):

[The journalist asked] ”How are we going to ask you follow up questions?” I explained that he could email me directly or from the site, but that I would most likely post his question and my response. “Is the league sending a message that they didn’t want you talking to reporters?” Ding ding ding. Give him a lollipop. I went on to explain that this was the best way for all of us. They could get all the quotes and information they needed. “Will this be just you writing it, or will you dictate it to someone else?”

The satisfaction of knowing that each will have to explain to their editors what a blog is — and argue for who knows how long about whether or not BlogMaverick.com is an attributable source — crept over me and that jaunt on the gauntlet flew by.

The other aspect of his weblog that interests me is its democratizing nature. Up to now, if we wanted to hear from a team owner (or any corporate official in any industry), we generally heard it through the filter of the media. The owner told the media, and the media told us. They decided which quotes to include based on the story they wanted to tell.

Now, Mark Cuban is speaking directly to his customers. We are getting it from the horse's mouth. Not that I'm a Mavericks fan. Or even a bastketball fan. Regardless, I applaud his frankness and willingness to buck the system.

What Did the Aussies Do?

To deserve this plague?

Agriculture officials say the insects hatched in northeastern Australia after heavy rains last month. They began migrating south, feeding on newly spouted crops of oats and alfalfa. “A thick haze of them came through over the weekend and chomped their way through our oats crop overnight,” said Bev Dennis from her farm in Tomingley, 340 miles west of Sydney.

Check out this photo of a poor woman sweeping up (or is she raking?) locusts as if they were pine needles or somthing.

The Internet Knows and Remembers

Over at Agent Number One, the author (a gay Vancouverite) has received some hate mail from a random person in the States. That's certainly unpleasant, but not unusual (though, being an elitist white, straight male, I receive a disappointingly small amount of hate mail).

Here's the power of the Internet. I'm more than happy to point out that this email came from one Ryan Zazzara, whose email address is ryanz2002@hotmail.com. Mr. Zazzara apparently chose not to obfuscate his name.

This site has half-decent Google clout, and his name doesn't seem to be anywhere else important on the Internet. In the future, whenever anybody searches for Mr. Zazzara, they'll find this entry, and then click through to Agent Number One, where they'll learn what a small-minded asshat he is. Future employers of Ryan Zazzara take note: the Internet never forgets.

Auto-Postcards

Modern Postcard sends postcards. For you. You can design it yourself, or choose one of their zillion designs, and they'll send out postcards to whoever you want. As a mainstay of small-business marketing, this is a great and affordable way to do direct mail-outs.

I'm only mentioning them because my friend Rob recently used them to promote an event for his company. He was extremely happy with the service he received. As he said, "95% of my customer service experiences are lousy." These guys fell resoundingly in the other 5%.

Region-Free DVD Players

A while back, I explained about hacking your DVD player so that it will play DVDs purchased in any region of the world. Finally, some clever Japanese folks are selling region-free DVD players (this page is work-safe, but other pages on this site may not be). They could probably use a new copy writer:

Watch DVDs from all over the world with the Lasonic DVB-8092 transportable DVD player, a great unit that's small and light and great for anyone without a lot of space. We chose to carry the DVB-8092 because of its excellent design and extensive feature set, and of course because of it's very affordable price. J-List customers are very important to us, so we've taken our time and chosen well.

These would be especially handy for immigrants, ex-pats and those with global tastes in film and television. From the good people at Gizmodo.

Adrian Aucoin on the Bertuzzi Hit

Here's a rare perspective on the Bertuzzi incident. Adrian Aucoin is a former teammate of Bertuzzi, and so has insight that every sports columnist in North America (including those who never watch a game of hockey) lacks--a view from the ice:

It's hard to say definitively whether the resulting injury should be taken into account when deciding on punishment for a player's action. Sometimes a little slash can hit a guy in the right spot, and he might miss months with a broken bone. A lot of other times you can punch a guy as hard as you can, and really try to injure him, and he doesn't miss a game.

I don't agree with everything Aucoin says, but it's interesting to hear something from a player that is longer and less cliched than the average sound bite. I'm not overly keen to discuss it further (there's already been plenty of debate on this site and elsewhere), but I thought I'd pass Aucoin's article on as it wasn't something I'd seen before.

Electric Assist Bikes

As part of our St. Patrick's Day Off (like Ferris Bueller's, but with fewer snakes), we went for a bike ride in Stanley Park. As we don't own bikes, we went downstairs to the main floor of our building and rented them from a Russian fellow at JV Bike. It's a brand new shop, and they actually specialize in electrical assist bicycles and scooters. These are basically bikes that have an electric motor which can assist in your pedaling.

I wasn't particularly keen on being electrically-assisted (not before a couple drinks), but they only had one normal, non-electric bike, so I got one of these. I liked this model because you could determine how much assistance you wanted. In fact, you can even set the assistance to a negative setting, meaning that you work harder to charge the battery. Plus, it has generative braking, so that you recharge the battery when you brake. I wanted to get some exercise, so I barely used the electric assistance. When I tried it, though, it made a significant difference. It was much easier, for example, to pedal up a steep hill.

I've only done a couple of multi-day bike trips, but I could see how this technology could really extend the distance you can ride each day. Even if you used it for ten minutes per hour, it would essentially give you a rest while you still made progress. Of course, this advantage would be offset by the weight of the battery and the additional maintenance challenges that an electric bike might pose.

In truth, I'm not sure downtown Vancouver is the right market for these bikes. Vancouverites love their exercise, and generally don't like to 'cheat'. Still, it may appeal to the tourists.

Toilets are Cleaner than Computers

Given the state of my keyboard (I believe I can see tiny microbial skyscrapers), this is no surprise:

Keyboards have somewhere in the region of 3,295 germs per square inch, followed by the mouse, fax machine and photo copier, which respectively have 1,676; 301; and 69 germs swarming across every square inch. Other unclean areas are water fountain handles and microwave door handles, the study noted. To put the figures in perspective, the average toilet seat in America has some 49 germs per square inch.

Of course, most of the time, you can't actually see my desktop (both actual and virtual), anyway.

Sterling on Globalism and Stuff

Cory Doctorow has posted his slightly-odd 'impressionistic transcript' of Bruce Sterling's talk at SXSW. It's a little difficult to absorb, but worth reading for its random wisdom:

There's a spinning wheel on the Indian flag -- Ghandi's wheel, with which he made his own clothes to frustrate multinational English clothes corporations. Not only was he relentlessly against offshoring, but in order to effect change, he spun his own fibres. Always! He was always making his own clothes with his own hands all the damn time: he made that simple cruddy loincloth with his own hands.

I've always wanted to go to this festival/conference, but have never actually gotten around to doing it. Next year, I think I'll go. Is it always in Austin? I suppose I could do worse in terms of an American city.

Free Gift from El Al

Apparently a passenger on Israel's national airline, El Al, was surprised to find a pistol in his luggage:

Security officers sometimes put replica guns in luggage to keep bag checkers on their toes, Haaretz says. In theory, the weapon would be discovered during checks and removed, leaving passengers none the wiser. This handgun, however, appears to have slipped through the net.

Should I be more worried that they do this sort of thing, or that they missed the gun?

Happy Paddy's Day

The Great Canadian Song Contest

Speaking of things great and Canadian, over at How to Save the World, Dave Pollard (whose theme song might be "Things Can Only Get Better") is hosting the Great Canadian Song Contest. He writes

A few years ago, the late, great Peter Gzowski of the CBC asked his listeners to nominate the best Canadian songs of all time. He played many of the nominations on his show, and had a small panel that whittled down the nominations to a top ten list. I don't recall all ten, but believe #1 was a Nova Scotian song called "Rise Again"...To qualify for nomination, songs must be written and performed by Canadians, and refer at least peripherally to Canada (see examples below).

An admirable pursuit. He makes several suggestions, and I figured I'd add to the list. Some of these choices are personal more than populist. Others, I think, have legitimate shots at making the final twelve, if not winning:

• "Powderfinger" -- written by Neil Young, performed by the Cowboy Junkies. I like this convergence of multiple Canadian bands, and this is a gorgeous song with very Canadian themes: "Daddy's gone, my brother's out hunting in the mountains/ Big John's been drinking since the river took Emmy-Lou".
• "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" -- Gordon Lightfoot. This one has to make the shortlist.
• "A Case of You" -- Joni Mitchell. Diana Krall does a nice version of this: "On the back of a cartoon coaster / In the blue TV screen light / I drew a map of Canada / Oh Canada".
• "50 Mission Cap" -- The Tragically Hip. A tale that merges a long-dead hockey hero and World War II flying aces--what's more Canadian than that?
• "Good Fortune" -- Weeping Tile. I've written about this song before, and it'd probably go on my desert island disc: "Explored a cave into the bay /
  Along Canadian shield coast".
• "Lukey's Boat" -- Great Big Sea + the Chieftains. There needs to be at least one Celtic tune from the Maritimes on the shortlist.
• "Song for the Mira" -- A lovely folk song about the Mira river in Newfoundland, originally by Allister MacGillivray but popularized, I think, by (gulp) Anne Murray.
• "Four Strong Winds" -- Ian Tyson. It's been covered by everybody, but it's a great song: "Guess I’ll go out to Alberta / Weather’s good there in the fall
  Got some friends that I can go to workin’ for".

In fairness, there ought to be something by The Guess Who on the list, but I really don't care for them. What about the Band? Were they all Canadian?

Biggest Box Set Ever

For a mere US $2,220, you can own the entire criminal ouevre of Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer:

On Monday, the King County prosecutor's office made available 109 DVDs of interviews with Gary Ridgway, who was sentenced Dec. 18 to 48 life sentences without the chance of parole after earlier pleading guilty to killing 48 women in the Green River serial murder case...The disks, which can be viewed only through a computer, also include video footage of field trips Ridgway took with detectives to sites where he dumped bodies.

Isn't there some kind of abridged 3-disk set? What about the director's cut that adds 24 DVDs of previously unreleased material?

Greatest Canadian Ever

While I lived in Ireland, I watched this entertaining series on the BBC called Great Britons. It was kind of a historical American Idol (or Pop Idol, as it was first known in Britain--the US imports all of its best reality TV from Europe). They ran ten one-hour documentaries about ten great British people through history. The documentaries were pretty informative, and each episode had a media figure who acted as an advocate for the person. Then, the public voted on who they favoured.

The show had some major statistical problems. How, for example, did they account for the increasing popularity of the show? The final episode received a far greater viewership than the first. Regardless, it's reflective of the British's love for the mundane that they almost gave the crown of greatest Briton to one Isambard Kingdom Brunel over such luminaries as Shakespeare and Darwin. Sure, designing railway bridges and trans-Atlantic steamships is impressive, but does it compare to discovering evolution and the most important literature of the last millenium?

Like 21 other countries have already done, the CBC is running the same sort of series to seek out the greatest Canadian. Who would be on the short list?

• Pierre Elliot Trudeau
• Sir John A. MacDonald
• Wayne Gretzky
• Farley Mowat
• Neil Young
• Terry Fox
• Glenn Gould
• Charles Best and Frederick Banting
• Margaret Atwood
• Joni Mitchell
• Maurice Richard

My money's on Trudeau. Not because he necessarily deserves it, but he'd be the people's choice.

I Almost Forgot

SOOTHSAYER: Beware the ides of March.
CAESAR: What man is that?
BRUTUS: A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.
CAESAR: Set him before me; let me see his face.
CASSIUS: Fellow, come from the throng; look upon Caesar.
CAESAR: What say'st thou to me now? speak once again.
SOOTHSAYER: Beware the ides of March.
CAESAR He is a dreamer; let us leave him: pass.

Sennet. Exeunt all except BRUTUS and CASSIUS

Caesar, dude, pay attention to the little things. God's trying to tell you something. Thanks to Becky for reminding me.

Another Flowers Update

Swearing Celebrities

A Non-Tacky Irish Bar

Last night, in celebration of St. Patrick's Day (a bit early), we went with eight of our closest friends to the Morrissey Irish House, for the drinking of the Irish elixirs. Much Strongbow, Guinness and Jameson's was consumed. The usual pick-up band of celtic musicians swelled to double-digits, creating a veritable Irish symphony orchestra, with multiple bodhrans! They played all of the classics--The Foggy Dew, Haste to the Wedding, Lukey's Boat (in truth, a song from Cape Breton, not Ireland) as well as a version of Van Morrison's Moondance that hopped more than it swung. There were even drunken attempts at Irish dancing (hands at your sides!).

The Morrissey is that rarest of establishments--an Irish bar outside of Ireland that isn't brutally tacky and ingenuine. They achieve this effect by not trying too hard. There's a minimum of vintage Guinness ads, hurleys on the wall and leprechauns. In fact, it's a happy convergence of Vancouver modernism and Irish traditionalism. They do, apparently, have all the right things behind the bar.

Speaking of Guinness, apparently demand for the creamy black stout has exploded in Africa. In response, they've had to open a brewery outside of their traditional site in Dublin.

The Crazy French Lady on the 31st Floor

A New Model for Video Stores

I recently awoke from a lengthy dream in which I was preparing for an exam on Tuesday on, among other novels, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. In light of the fact that I graduated from university in 1996, this is slightly peculiar. In the dream, as a study strategy, I went to a video store to rent the movie.

When I awoke, I had a new model of video stores in my head. Why are video stores massive spaces with rows and rows of empty cases? It's inefficient for the business because they rent all that space, and inefficient for the consumer because the search procress isn't optimized.

In truth, all you need is a counter and a few couches. You provide consumers with books--big photo albums--which have copies of the DVD case covers in them. Maybe their organized into new releases, or by genre, or nationality, or whatever. The consumer comes in, sits down, grabs a book, pages through it, and chooses the movie they want.

The next step would be to replace the books with tablet PCs. Because, traditionally, the positioning and amount of a video on the shelf give you a lot of information. Is the video good? Popular? Available? The tablet PCs could provide this information through a simple interface. It could also, then, enable you to do complex queries on the store's stock. For example, "show me all the Brad Pitt movies that received at least 7.5/10 at IMDB.com and aren't rated R".

I doubt the video stores would do this, but it should then be a pretty simple task to expose their stock database to the Internet. Like the library, you could assess whether a movie is in without leaving your bed. Which, incidentally, is where I'm typing this entry. The video stores would be reticent to provide this data because it would reduce the opportunity to cross-sell you on crappy DVDs or candy.

Maybe this model already exists? I could see it in a city like New York, where real estate is extremely expensive.

The Walrus

Walrus is a new Canadian magazine that aspires to be a north-of-the-border New Yorker. They've got a ways to go. However, because new ventures in publishing can use all the help they can get, I subscribed. This month's issue features a well-written if somewhat self-congratulatory essay by Michael Adams called 'Continental Divide'. Unfortunately, they haven't posted the text online, but I'd recommend picking up an issue (CAN $5.95 at discerning newstands everywhere). The essay makes a convincing case for the increasingly divergent attitudes of Yanks and Canucks.

A couple of decent articles which are posted online are Falling To Pieces, about Gary Kasparov's loss to Deep Blue and The Last Great City Dump, about Yellowknife's garbage-dump-cum-yard-sale.

Link Round-Up: Moving Pictures

Today, links about movies, videos and other moving images:

• Movie studios get sued for inventing critics to provide glowing quotes for crappy movies (thanks, Movie Marketing Blog).
• The future of movie watching? This short video blew me away (thanks, Coudal Partners).
• From Becky, we learn that two Judy Blume novels are going to be made into movies. Despite my straightness, I read all of her books growing up. My favourite was Then Again, Maybe I Won't (Polish the Bishop).
• A deeply insightful list of television tropes, idioms, and devices. After a quick look, my favourites are the Hard Work Montage, Ho Yay and Applied Phlebotinum.
• What if they made a porn movie without the sex? What if the plumber showed up, fixed the sink and then, when the fresh-out-of-the-shower young housewife couldn't pay, he put this one 'on the house' and left? Not really safe for work, because your coworkers will think your watching the non-genital-bumping section of a dirty movie.

Bonus, unrelated link: I've achieved sixth seventh in a Fark Photoshop contest--my highest placement yet. My image is here.

You Can Always Move to India

Slashdot cites this CNN article that discusses how an increasing number of Americans are apparently moving to India to follow the work:

Instead of protesting against the offshoring of work that might have gone to U.S. firms like his, Dunn, 55, has decided to get in on the game. Call it a case of, "If you can't beat them, collaborate with them." Recently, Dunn found himself contacting head hunters in Bangalore -- southern India's Silicon Valley -- where many information technology (IT) and other white-collar jobs have sprouted in recent years.

I can't imagine that the money's good, but MonsterIndia currently lists 193 jobs for the query 'technical writer' throughout the country.

Rock 101 and Terry Fox

I had the following frank exchange of ideas with Robin LaRose at Rock 101, a popular radio station here in Vancouver. I emailed the station with this:

Tonight I saw your TV ad that seemed to review the last 25 years of Canadian history. It's shameful that you chose to include Terry Fox in your marketing campaign. You know what? He didn't die trying to run halfway across Canada so that you could use his image to sell your radio station. In the future, I'll be listening to a radio station that can respect Canada's heroes, not exploit them.

I don't really listen to Rock 101, but explaining the ramifications of a company's misdeeds is a cornerstone to a good customer complaint. Mr. LaRose replied thusly:

Thanks for your email and comments. To clarify, it wasn't our intention to exploit Terry Fox in any way shape or form. Programming chose those specific images to solicit an emotional, proud and to some degree, "local" connection with the Classic Rock 101 adult demo that remembers those "proud" moments in time. The music selections in the tv commercial also reflect several decades of rock history with adults 35-54.

To which I replied:

Thanks your response. Your goal clearly was to exploit Terry Fox's image. That's how advertising works: a company associates its products with concepts that the consumer feels good about. What, after all, does Terry Fox have to do with rock music? I think it's deeply inappropriate to use one of Canada's heroes to sell your product. I've cc'd the local chapter of the Terry Fox Foundation, as I thought they might be interested in our discussion.

Later in the day, I was pleased to be cc'd on this carefully-phrased email from Darrell Fox, the national director the Terry Fox Foundation, to Mr. LaRose:

I will not comment on your rationale for including Terry's image in Rock 101's recent TV advertisement. However, I will say that it has been our experience over the past 24 years that those wishing to use Terry's name, image or likeness have approached The Foundation for approval before pursuing initiatives that feature his profile. We have been told that it is out of respect for Terry Fox and the philanthropic nature of his mission that prompted them to contact us for consent. We truly appreciate their kindness. I am hopeful this information is of interest to you.

Ha, ha, I got Rock 101 in trouble. Asshats. You may recall that I made similar complaints to GMC and Bell Canada about inappropriate Remembrance Day advertisements.

Another Update on Flowers for Al and Don

Huh. It seems the California Supreme Court has ordered an immediate halt to gay marriages in San Francisco. Bummer. As the donations have pretty much dried up anyway, I've suspended the PayPal donation button. We're planning on donating US $1000 to Lambda Legal, and $500 to the Lesbian & Gay Rights Project. That leaves about $2250 left for flowers. Tomorrow, we're going to try a little test run in Portland, Oregon. If that works, hopefully we can spend the balance of the money there in the next week or so. If not, we'll fall back on our plan as described in the FAQ: hold the money for a week to see if the landscape changes, and then donate the balance to charity.

In the meantime, I've added a ton of emails from happy recipients of bouquets to the messages page.

First Rollerblading Venture of the Season

I'm still learning (having not gotten very far since last summer), but I managed not to injure myself or any pedestrians today. I did a little damage to a young birch tree, but it should recover.

I did have an odd, brief conversation with a scruffy stranger. I was slowly (for I have no other speed at this point) rollerblading along the seawall, and he was walking in the other direction. As we near each other:

HIM: Is today Thursday or Friday?
ME: Thursday.
HIM: Thanks.
ME: Yep.

Weird, eh? I guess it's just a grosser variation of 'what's the time', but I've never been asked that by a stranger before.

The New Yorker on Hockey

To cleanse our palette of that unsightly incident with a certain Italian-Canadian, I recently discovered that the current New Yorker has three witty, short pieces on hockey in its Talk of the Town section:

• Does America really want a president that doesn't back-check? I think not.
• Hockey dials the number of a girl it used to know and gets her machine. “Candace, if you’re there, pick up.” Candace waits for Hockey to finish, then erases the message.
• The Professor, Igor Larionov, watches that lousy American hockey movie. "They should have showed a little bit of what happened inside the Soviet camp. But I know American movies are always like that."

All well-written pieces. Who knew that Senator Kerry was a hockey man?

The First Time, Professional Style

Speaking of virgins (to make much of time) Belle du Jour, the well-read London call girl, writes about a 19-year-old client whose come for some professional advice.

He: "It's my first time."
Me: "First time with an escort?"
"First time, full stop." (much fumbling ensues)
He: "Do tell me what to do. That's why I wanted it to be a call girl. Girlfriends never say anything useful."

She writes very good dialogue. Apparently she's got a book deal, which is a bit disappointing. Now she'll be all mainstream and we'll learn who she is. Isn't that always the case with artists (so to speak) you discover early in their career?

Abstinence Not Really Working Out

Via Bree and BunnyFactor10, we find this BBC article. Apparently young Americans who pledge to remain virgins until they marry have the same rates of sexually transmitted diseases as those who do not:

But they are much less likely to use condoms, the research found. "It's difficult to simultaneously prepare for sex and say you're not going to have sex," the study's author Peter Bearman told the AP news agency.

The pledgers are actually probably having considerably less sex, but they're also using considerably less birth control. Disappointingly, it's a false conclusion to draw that your conservative virgins are getting as much tail as your average kid raised by hippies.

Acting with the Camera

Some strong writing about film critics' failure to really examine the craft of acting (right here, guilty as charged), and how cinematography has changed how actors work:

Film criticism infrequently considers whether real life is a valid criterion for judgment. It almost never reflects on the possibility that what makes a performance memorable can be precisely what makes it not believable: i.e., the larger-than-life mannerisms and bits of business with which an actor will embellish a role. Critics praised Sean Penn for the realism of his "prison yard hunch" in his Oscar-winning performance of Jimmy Markum, the ex-con in Mystic River. But why are hunched shoulders the sign of having been in prison? How many reviewers are familiar with ex-cons? Penn's prison yard hunch is as much a fabrication as Marlon Brando's Godfather mumble, and probably just as far from reality. It represents our idea of something, not necessarily the thing itself.

He hits the nail on the head when he says "to the extent that acting does seem more real today, it's because the camera moves so fast off the face that it shaves off any sliver of inauthenticity." When actors only have to be 'in the moment' for a second at a time, acting is more about mugging. Check out British cinema--particularly the work of Mike Leigh--for superior performances with long, long takes.

Offshoring Panic

This PDF report (and the lengthy discussion that follows) comes from the popular technical writers' email list that I subscribe to and, rarely, actually read. Basically, it's a study that lists a host of professions that are at risk of getting offshored (does a less-attractive verb exist?). You can read the summary list of professions here. Quick, look for your job!

I'm confident that offshoring will continue to grow. The costs savings obviously outweigh any downside in terms of decreased quality or increased administration. Fellow list member Bill Swallow says it better than I can:

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Run-of-the-mill tech writing is easily outsourced, as is most programming, testing, and the like. We're the factory workers of the 21st century; if you can build a process out of a series of tasks and enforce standardization, you have yourself the means of automating much of what you do and can outsource the rest wherever you'd like. Don't believe me? Look at the dynamic shift in how Tech Writers work and the tasks they generally perform over the past 50 years. We leapt from pencil-wielding authors to electron-spinning jack-of-all-trades in that time span. Change is inevitable, and money talks.

So, what's a tech writer to do? I'm not really a tech writer anymore. I am occasionally, but these days I do far more work in marketing. Why? It's more interesting. Also, marketing is much harder to outsource. Generally it requires cultural savvy, business knowledge and intimate awareness of market forces. These are difficult to acquire from India or China.

Generally, I advise technical writers to diversify as much as possible. In addition to their core writing and editing competencies, every tech writer should be able to:

• Build a decent-looking Web site
• Design professional-quality marketing collateral
• Write effective advertising/marketing content
• Meaningfully contribute to user-interface design (I'm not talking spelling mistakes here--read some books and apply what you learn)
• Review code, and have a general sense of what it does (this extends to being able to write an API guide based on that code)
• Understand and competently discuss your company's business situation

In short, as a technical writer, you should be able to write, design, publish and manage all of the written materials for a company. That's going to make you a lot more indispensable to an employer.

Raccoon Lebensraum

Nazi raccoons have taken over Europe!

Raccoons released by Hermann Goering in Germany in 1934 to "enrich the Reich's fauna" are threatening to succeed where their Nazi benefactors failed by conquering Europe. They have become so successful that German authorities revealed this week that raccoon numbers are now at record levels - with more than a million in Germany alone.

[With bad German accent]"Zey are zuch beautiful creatures. They vill make ze countryside alive with zeir beauty!" If you're unemployed, apparently Austria is hiring raccoon hunters.

Bertuzzi and the Law

In addition to the usual drama of the NHL trading deadline, hockey pundits have been busy discussing the goonery that occurred down at Vancouver's GM Place last night. For those non-hockey fans, Vancouver Canuck star player Todd Bertuzzi sucker-punched Colorado Avalanche player Steve Moore, and then drove him into the ice. Moore fractured a couple of verterbrae, suffered a concussion and has multiple lacerations to his face. He'll be out for months, but will apparently make a full recovery. There's video of the incident here (WMV format, unfortunately).

Bertuzzi's action was in part retribution for Moore's dubious hit on Canuck player Markus Naslund, who sat out a week and a half with a concussion.

There has been much ringing of hands, Bertuzzi has been suspended pending a league disciplinary hearing on Wednesday, and the Vancouver police are investigating. The hearing will determine the duration of Bertuzzi's suspension, which I'm guessing is going to be about 14 games.

While this was a cowardly, idiotic act, and Bertuzzi deserves a lengthy suspension, why are the police becoming involved? There are plenty of good reasons to keep the law out of this incident:

• Players participate in hockey with an expectation of heightened violence. Clearly, acts (dozens of them each game) that would get you arrested outside off the ice are permitted on the ice.
• There have been many, many other incidents where players suffered long-term injuries because of dirty plays that have gone uninvestigated. Two that immediately spring to mind are Suter's crosscheck on Kariya and Claude Lemieux's hit on Chris Draper. Why is this one exceptional?
• The Vancouver police department has plenty of more important, meaningful work to do than expending considerable resources (and they will be considerable, given the media attention this affair will receive) on investigating a nasty hit in hockey game.

In short, the law is being applied in a very peculiar fashion, and only by the Vancouver police department. Other cities permit similar (or worse) incidents go uninvestigated and unpunished.

Link Round-Up: Everything on Heaven and Earth

The bookmark file has gotten backed up, so here you go. A big list of the obscure, the commonplace, the undiscovered and the overmemed:

• Beautiful, strange Flash movies that make you re-examine the nature of typography.
• Eagles are now killing caribou--are SUVs next?
• Some IT department's Web cam. It never shows anything interesting, but I strangely addicted to checking it every couple of days.
• Plastic surgery gone wrong (thanks, DoubleCool).
• The geek's bong of choice (complete with temperature gauge--thanks, Gizmodo).
• Photoshopping ol' skool, using Polaroids and a skewer.
• Canada needs colonies of its own (thanks, James Bow).
• Practical advice on setting up a threesome. Good luck with that.
• God negotiates a screenwriting credit on The Passion (thanks, Sean Bonner).
• Fascinating insight into movie marketing.
• "Dumb-ass things I did when I was a kid."
• MOBA - art too bad to be ignored (thanks, BoingBoing).

More on the Irish/Canadian Musical Exchange

Further to my previous post about Sarah Harmer and Damien Rice, I see that my favourite band on the planet, the Cowboy Junkies, will be visiting Dublin in support of their new album on June 1st at Vicar Street. From their Junk Mail (hee, hee) newsletter:

All shows will be "An Evening With Cowboy Junkies," which means we are supporting ourselves. The first half of the show will be acoustic; the second set will be electric. Jaro Czerwinec, our accordion player from the TrinitySession days, will be joining us, as will our longtime sidekick Jeff Bird.

No opening act. Be still my beating heart. Unfortunately, my beating heart and I will be back in Vancouver by then.

Whither World Book

Via Slashdot, we find this story which, in truth, deserves Fark's tag. It turns out that encyclopedia sales are down:

"Sometimes my mom uses it as a coaster," says high school senior Andy Ng of Daly City, Calif. In the age of the Internet, encyclopedias are gathering dust, and most families with young children don't even consider buying the space-hogging printed sets anymore. Even digital versions struggle for attention.

I have fond memories of our set of late-seventies World Book encyclopedias. I liked everything about them--their rich chocolate finish, the gold leaf on the top of the pages, how the final volume, W-X-Y-Z, seemed to hold so much more promise than all of the others.

In my youth, I'd take a couple of volumes along on long car trips to read. Even at a young age, I was torturing my family with facts. I remember how my brother and I once fought over one book (he no doubt wanted it simply because I was enjoying it), and we ripped the first page of the K volume. Didn't tear it out, mind you, just ripped it. Ever since, I'd feel a little pang of guilt when I was looking up Kilimanjaro or Alexander Kluge.

I do own Encarta, which the article references. I'm not keen on depending upon Microsoft for factual information. For example, you can just smell the bitterness in this excerpt from the entry on Apple:

In August 1997 Apple reversed its traditional opposition to Microsoft and announced a business alliance with its longtime rival, a move seen by some commentators as an attempt by Microsoft to counter allegations of monopolistic practices in the computer industry. This new collaboration did not prevent Apple from giving hostile evidence in November 1998 in the US Department of Justice's prosecution of Microsoft on monopoly charges.

I have Encarta because a friend works at Microsoft, and got it for me for, like, six bucks. I use it occasionally when I want to get a brief summary of a person, place or thing. For example, I used it the other day to get some background info on Mileva Maric. When I don't know exactly which fact I want, but want to learn more about a subject, Encarta is faster and more reliable than the Web. Wikipedia is a close second, and I often use it as well (here, for example, is its entry on Ms. Maric). Wikipedia enjoys much deeper linking, which is a bonus.

As a side note, I see that Encarta shares its slogan 'more useful every day' with Hotmail. While this has never been true of Hotmail--it's been getting less useful since day one--it's far truer of Encarta, which offers weekly (weekly!) updates.

Sarah on Sex in the City

My Irish friend Sarah has a short treatise on the conclusion of Sex in the City. I've always had mixed feelings about this show. On the one hand it's extremely witty and well-acted (despite the Doogie Howser device), but on the other hand it seemed to render most of the men on the show as incomplete, deeply-flawed or otherwise gobshites.

Sarah reaches an interesting conclusion about the show's themes:

Between Samantha's breast cancer, Charlotte's infertility and Miranda's obvious happiness in her imperfect husband and move to shock-horror Brooklyn, there is no doubting the core message: SETTLE, FOR ANYONE, QUICK!

Newspapers: Going, Going, Going...

As you know, the state of newspapers (particularly the online variety) are is a favourite topic of mine. So, I enjoyed this article about the declining state of newspaper readership, and the particular problem that online versions present:

Most printed newspapers' circulations and readerships meanwhile continue their steady 40-year declines. More than 80 percent of American adults read a newspaper each weekday in 1964, but only 58 percent did in 1997, according to the Newspaper Association of America. In 2003, an estimated 54 percent read a newspaper each weekday. Most analysts predict that fewer than half of adults will read the paper every day by the end of this decade.

That article (rich, pleasingly, with hyperlinks) references The 1 Percent Solution?, which discusses the conversion rates of offline readers to online ones. Remaining on an Irish theme, it cites The Irish Times (a very good paper, in my experience) as an example:

Ireland.com logs 2,338,593 unique users monthly. After four months marketing paid access, the site generated 6,000 paid subscriptions, a conversion rate of 0.25 percent. Even if all subscribers chose the most expensive rate, Ireland.com would generate only $156,000 per month, or jut over $2 million annually, from subscriptions. That won't go far.

Yowza, 0.25 percent? That's pretty crap, isn't it?

Canada-Irish Cultural Exchange

Speaking of Ireland, I recently noticed that we're swapping up-and-coming singer/songwriters.

Irish folk, on March 29, go see Sarah Harmer (she finally revised her site) at Whelan's. For the non-Irish folks, Whelan's is a great, historical small-music venue in Dublin (where I was introduced to the excellent Gemma Hayes). Sarah Harmer (as I've written about recently) is a great Canadian folk/rock singer (not dissimilar to Ms. Hayes, actually), who I'd highly recommend.

Domestically speaking, my Irish colleagues encourage me to go see County Kildare's own Damien Rice at the Commodore Ballroom on March 30 (irritating opening act du jour--the Frames). MusicPlasma puts Rice close to Badly-Drawn Boy and Kathleen Edwards. I'm going to go check him out.

I note, thanks to Silverroad.org, that Ms. Harmer is playing the Commodore on May 9. Damn, I'm in South Africa. Ah well, it wouldn't be quite as intimate as the CBC or HQ (now apparently called Spirit) in Dublin.

Celtic Fest, Vancouver Style

It's odd, I think, how well all-things-Irish have been exported to the rest of the world. This is in part due to the exodus of Irish immigrants in the 19th century, but clearly there's something pretty compelling about Celtic stuff. There isn't a city in the free world that lacks an Irish bar, and everybody seems to celebrate St. Patrick's Day like their family name is O'Malley.

Vancouver, for example, is probably the least Irish city in North America. Yet, it's inaugurated CelticFest 2004, celebrating the culture, arts and music of the (so-called) Celtic community in a 6-day event. I'm all for a good street party, but this feels a tad ingenuine. In fact, it feels like a thinly-veiled marketing campaign by downtown merchants--check out the list of venues.

Regardless, I did notice this oddity in the festival program:

Sunday, 3pm - 4pm
Gaelic Football - Ireland vs. Australia
Gaelic Rules VS Aussie Rules in Andy Livingston Park

I trust this actually means 'the Irish locals' against 'the Aussie locals'? It should be good for a laugh. In a uniquely Vancouver tradition, you have to walk collectively walk the field at Andy Livingston Park to look for discarded heroin needles.

Link Round-Up: Marketing Ventures

Things corporate and marketingish:

• Via Metafilter, this is a clever, disruptive marketing campaign from Volvo. It's a very convincing faux documentary about how 32 families in a small Swedish town buy the same Volvo on the same day. Download the Quicktime or WMV version, then read about the debunking.
• One of my clients runs this interesting project in Ireland: foneblog.ie. I particularly like this study of employee tattoos at a cell phone shop.
• A colleague of mine who is an excellent illustrator is now working on this Vancouver restaurant site.
• Sergey Brin on the state of Google.
• Via Engagdet, we find the ludicrous-looking (and sounding) Nostromo N52. Is it a game controller or a disciplinary device? (Is it named after the ship from Alien?)

Bonus, unrelated link: This gorgeous online clock, which features animaed GIFs of each second being written and erased.

My First AudioBlog: The Concert-Goer's Dilemma

I finally played around with my audio software that came with my audio card, and figured I'd try an audio posting. As I mentioned in my previous post, I went and saw Liz Phair on Friday night. If you're so inclined, you can listen to me discuss an aspect of the concert by clicking the link below:

• The Concert-Goer's Dilemma (MP3, 2.5 MB, 3:29)

I'm interested in opinions about the audio entry in general. Do you like it? Should I post this way every once in a while? Or is it just inane and I should stick to the text? There's no risk of my going entirely to an audio format, but I just thought I'd experiment and see what ye mighty readers (and now listeners) thought.

Liz Phair at the Commodore

On Friday night, we went to see Liz Phair at the historical Commodore Ballroom. I bought the tickets on a whim earlier in the week, and I guess it's a reflection of how far this indi-rock goddess has fallen that she couldn't sell out a 900-seat venue in Vancouver.

For my money, Exile in Guyville is one of the best, most original rock albums of the nineties. On this homage to the Stones' Exile on Main Street, Phair writes witty lyrics about middle-American nobodies with great pop hooks. Since then, her follow-up albums have been increasingly dissappointing. Her latest release saw her hook with 'The Matrix', the songwriting duel behind Avril Lavinge's debut.

On Friday night, it was pretty easy to tell which songs The Matrix had written. They're deeply mediocre pop tunes with vague lyrics and some fancy vocal processing. "Red Light Fever", "Favorite" and "Rock Me" are all pretty awful songs, and a long way from "Fuck and Run" or "Divorce Song". The one exception from the new album was the song she closed the show with. "HWC" is a jaunty pop song in praise of the beauty benefits of oral sex.

The whole show felt kind of over-produced. I was concerned when I spotted the lack of a microphone stand at stage-centre. Ms. Phair, like Brittany Spears and Madonna, apparently prefers a throat mike. Throat mikes aren't very rock and roll. This, combined with the constant hot white lights focussed only on her (her band played in a kind of semi-darkness) made the show feel more poppy than hard rock.

Liz Phair's songs are short. And while I'm the first guy to complain about lengthy instrumental sections in live performances, I wouldn't have minded if they'd stretched out one or two beyond the two-and-half-minute mark.

Live music is the great equalizer, and a lot of Phair's songs' subtleties were last as she raced through them. There were a few highlights, including "Uncle Alvarez" and the aforementioned "Fuck and Run" (which emerged in a segue out of the Cars' "Just What I Needed"), but she more or less sounded exactly like her CD. And that's not why I come to a concert. I want to hear the artist push herself--play new material, re-invent old material--basically, surprise me.
Instead, Liz Phair played a terse, poppy 80-minute set (yes, that includes the encore).

I used to think of Liz Phair as a dirtier Sheryl Crowe. Now, tragically, she's barely a dirtier Avril Lavigne.

Skill-Testing Questions

Becky, a displaced American in Saskatoon (poor thing), writes of her consternation over Canadian contests:

And the best thing of all, regarding Canadian contests -- the skills question you're forced to answer if you win. Hmmm, let me get this right -- in order for my to claim my free donut at Tim Horton's, I have to answer an addition, multiplication, and division question?

In Canada, if you win a contest, you haven't actually 'won' yet. First, you have to complete a skill-testing question. Usually this is a straight-forward math question that anybody who remembers their orders of operation from grade 8 could answer. For example:

2 * (18-4) + 4 = ?

As this article explains, it's a peculiarity of Canadian law:

Under the Criminal Code, it is illegal to hold a lottery without a licence. Giving away a prize based on chance alone -- a random draw, for instance -- is considered a form of lottery. The contest industry invented the skill-testing question to get around that restriction. If a contest includes an element of skill, it is no longer considered purely a game of chance.

"It's a loophole, basically, and to the best of my knowledge Canada is the only country that has that requirement," said Toronto lawyer Brenda Pritchard, who is co-authoring a book called Advertising and Marketing Law in Canada that devotes an entire chapter to contests.

Like most things, I think the laws are different in Quebec.

Whack the Penguin, the Sequel

Via Fark, we find the complete history of the Yeti-Whacks-the-Penguin games. Also, there's a low-grav, very gory variation and the sequel, which has a guest appearance from a killer whale.

I was going to note that this is zoologically speaking, incorrect, as orcas typically don't make it into the arctic. On the other hand, this killer whale is serving up penguins for a yeti to hit with a snowball, so I doubt the rules of ecology apply.

Feminism and Nannies

In response to an article in Ireland's Sunday Business Post by one David McWilliams, my friend Sarah writes cogently about nannies and housework here and here. Coincidentally, I had just finished reading this excellently-written treatise on the same subject from Atlantic Monthly. I sent the Atlantic Monthly article to Sarah, who replied:

What is absolutely clear is that David Mc [expletive removed] Williams read it too and ripped off entire paragraphs for his article in the Business Post and got paid for it and there's me like an eejit trying to write stuff to get published.

Tangent: This comes as no suprise to me. When I lived in Ireland, it always seemed like somebody was cheating. I guess that's what 800 years of oppression does to you.

I highly recommend the Atlantic Monthly article. It's long, and cites a lot of books (it appears, somewhat unwisely, in the magazine's Books section), but it effectively articulates the working mother's philosophical crisis. As a liberated post-feminist, when I return to the workforce and hire a nanny, am I not just contributing to that nanny's exploitation? It debunks a lot of myths (with apologies for the nested quotes):

So here we have the crux of the problem: ask an upper-middle-class woman why she is exploiting another woman for child care, and she will cry that she has to do it because there's no universal day care. But get a bunch of professional-class mothers together, and they will freely admit that day care sucks; get a nanny. This was a truth that Naomi Wolf—feminist, Yalie, Rhodes scholar, big thinker—learned the hard way after giving birth to her first child. In Misconceptions, Wolf reports:

I never thought I would become one of those women who took up a foreordained place in a hierarchy of class and gender. Yet here we were, to my horror and complicity, shaping our new family structure along class and gender lines—daddy at work, mommy and caregiver from two different economic classes, sharing the baby work during the day.

Her dreams of parenthood, apparently formed while tripping across green New Haven quadrangles on her way to feminist-theory classes, were starkly different: "I had wanted us to be a mother and a father raising children side by side, the man moving into the world of children, the woman into the world of work, in equitable balance, maybe each working flexibly from home, the two making the same world and sharing the same experiences and values." She had wanted a revolution; what she got was a Venezuelan.

To lower the brow of this conversation slightly, whenever this subject arises, I always think of Melanie Doane's paean to the conflicts of the modern woman, Happy Homemaker.

I'm Not an Illustrator

I'm helping some colleagues of mine apply to a grant program for their new theatre company. Mostly, I'm just editing and designing the proposal document. However, they also needed a name and logo for their new company. Though they didn't go with my suggestion ('Girl on the Tracks Theatre'--how could you not like that?), they asked me to whip up a temporary logo for 'Larger than Lemon Theatre' (I know, I know).

While I know my way around Photoshop and have done a fair amount of graphic design work, I'm definitely not an illustrator. The more abstract the project, the less capable I am. Given my limited skills, I was pretty happy with this result that I drew (well, moused) from scratch:

Update on Flowers for Al and Don

Things have fortunately cooled off in the world of flower delivery. We're up to US $14,280.68, and I imagine we won't increase that very much. We've already spent US $10,542.28 on deliveries (and a cake) through next Tuesday. We're planning on making a US $1000 donation to Lambda Legal and are kicking around a US $500 donation to the ACLU's Lesbian & Gay Rights Project, so that leaves about US $2300 left to spend on flowers later next week.

This fine self-portrait is done by Pike. He's about 5 or 6, and along with his family, has made a number of trips to delivery flowers for us.

Ultimate Frisbee Season is Starting

And my team is recruiting apparently has more than enough players. Bit of a mix-up there. If you're interested, you can sign-up as an individual at the Vancouver Ultimate League.