Our adorable daughter, almost 2½, is strong-willed. This leads,
occasionally, to meltdowns at the dinner table. Lauren and I both feel that
neither screeching nor throwing things is acceptable. When her brother, now 9,
was dealing with similar issues, we found that “time out” was an
effective corrective. He found banishment such a shattering
experience that our bargaining power, once he got the linkage between
crime and punishment, was tremendous. With the girl, not so much. When
banished, she sits in the corner and burbles in a cute kind of way. And
recently, when she’s getting toward the end of dinner, on a few occasions
she’s slipped out of her chair and said, in her adorable little munchkin
voice, “Now I go time-out, bye.” She toddles over to the penalty box,...
If you’re interested in the ongoing financial calamity, or maybe even if
you’re not, and whether or not you think you understand what happened, I
highly recommend that you set aside a few minutes to read Michael Lewis’
remarkable
The
End.
I find myself, off and on, suffering from unmanageably severe anger at the
financial professionals who paid themselves millions for driving the economy
into a brick wall at high speed, then walking away while we pick up the
pieces.
Reading The End didn’t help. So what are we going to do?
Lewis of course first burst onto the scene with
Liar’s Poker, all
about the Eighties flavor of Wall Street, and I’ve sung his praises here while
reviewing
Moneyball. He’s an outstanding writer and good at picking
the right subjects to cover.
The...
Some words and pictures about ApacheCon 2008 in New Orleans.
Opening Eye Candy
This one’s not too far north of LA.
Like many hotel windows, mine had a view occupied in large part by other
hotel windows. On the first morning when I got up, though, they weren’t boring.
The Conference
Let’s be controversial: I think the really important tech conferences in
the world of Open Source are
OSCON,
RubyConf,
PyCon, and
ApacheCon. The Linux conferences seem
to have become very biz-focused, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
In that lofty context, ApacheCon is maybe struggling a little, compared to the
others.
But there are a lot of good things.
First, the conference has a hefty travel-assist budget,
so a lot of people are there on merit rather than their employer’s expense...
I must open with heartfelt thanks to all of you for the
passion and drama and rhetoric and personality you’ve offered each other and
the world, in the political-theatre context, for the last couple of years.
Unless the tools of Statistics
have suddenly become empty shells, Mr. Obama will be your forty-fourth
President; I’ve
said my piece on why this is
probably a good thing. Here’s some more.
Barack himself, if you ignore the ethnic glamour,
the remarkable gift of gab, and those cartoonist-friendly ears
(they’re not the same size!), seems little more on the face of it than a
mainstream-Democratic-party politico with unusually good management and
marketing skills.
The Movement
But I think there are two things about this election that are special.
First, the Obama campaign,...
This is not of the remotest interest to anyone who doesn’t live in
New Westminster, a
small city near Vancouver that doesn’t think of itself as a suburb.
It turns out my old friend and colleague
Matt Laird (who, by the way, provides
hosting for this
Web site as a sideline job) is running for city council
there (the election’s on the 15th).
I’d think voting for Matt would be a no-brainer. He’s bright and
honest and super-energetic and is totally dedicated to civic involvement;
always pursuing one good cause or another. Near as I can tell, his motives
are more or less pure public-spiritedness. This package sounds like exactly
what you’d want in your local government,......
This month Wired magazine advises everyone to
pull
the plug on blogging.
Last month, Technorati released the
State
of the Blogosphere 2008.
Next month in the Atlantic,
Andrew Sullivan will publish
Why
I Blog (well, it’s October right now, and Sullivan’s piece is clearly
labeled “November”). Me, I blog less these days.
Wired
They like death notices; remember
Kiss your browser
goodbye!, announcing, in 1997, that “The Web browser itself is about to
croak.” To be replaced by ...wait for it... PointCast. Which, for the vast
majority who don’t remember it, was a screen-saver. The strength of
Wired has always been engaged reportage, not prognostication.
But really, Paul
Boutin is a smart guy and he should know better.
Paul says blogging has been superseded by Facebook and...
Of the Lost
Souls I mean. It was so much fun it shouldn’t be legal. This post is
here so I can post a funny picture of myself and meditate, once again, on
the profusion of digital recordings of, well, everything.
Here’s your host:
Photo credit: Sue, one of my band-mates.
You can also get the flavor of the event with a
Flickr
Search; I recommend following that link, some of the pix are fantastic.
And there’s
video
too—on one of the fire-show sequences, you can hear the band.
I found
one that
shows our band in action.
I’ve come to expect that everything public and quite a bit of what’s
private too is subject to capture and posting. Last night it got on my nerves
a bit, for the first time. What happened was, after the parade part and the
accompany-the-fire-show part, the...
I mean
Parade
of the Lost Souls, which happens next Saturday October 25th on Commercial
Drive here in Vancouver.
I’ve
paraded before; once
again I’ll be part of
Russell Shumsky’s West-African drum
ensemble, layin’ down the dance beats.
Assuming the weather co-operates, it’s a blast; come on out and......
Voting via ongoing October 20th, 2008 at 10:00
Yes, last week we had a
Canadian election.
Not much changed, so it wasn’t a very satisfying experience. For the first
time, I’m warming up to the notion of tinkering with our voting system.
What Happened
Before the election, we had a
Conservative minority government, with
the
Liberals,
New Democrats, and
Bloc Québécois on the other
side of the aisle. After the election, we had... well, the same thing. Only
with more Tories and fewer Liberals.
In practical terms, this probably strengthens the Tories’ hands, because it
takes all three other parties to unite against them to force another election,
and Canadians aren’t going to be in the mood for one for a couple years at
least.
The most disappointing thing is that the Tories are completely Part Of The
Problem when it comes to...
On a recent weekend we took the
Seabus over to
Lonsdale Quay. The
Seabus is both romantic and reliable, a rare enough combination in this
world. On the way back, I took a photo of the big container-handling
cranes.
I don’t know what proportion of Canada’s import/export business these
things wrangle but the numbers are big; this is the busiest port in Canada (and
also on the whole West Coast of North America) measured by tonnage.
William Gibson fans: the closing scenes of Spook Country are
set right around......
London via ongoing October 14th, 2008 at 10:00
I spent four days there last week and enjoyed it. Herewith words and
pictures.
I stayed at the
London Bridge Hotel, a
perfectly decent place just at the south end of that bridge. Since
my visit last May, they’ve
upgraded the WiFi and made it free; good on ’em; plus the breakfast is
excellent.
The City
Mornings, I walked northward across the river and considered The City,
which is the part of the city at the north end of the bridge. It’s under
construction.
Well, for the moment anyhow. Times are troubled, obviously; the newspaper
headlines scream crisis and panic every morning and afternoon. I spent time
talking to finance people, Sun customers, worried people but not the names you’re
seeing in those panicky headlines.
London is about money and it’s been about money for a...
Canada’s
40th
General Election is tomorrow. I’ll be voting
Green; here’s why.
The Tories
The Conservative party has been running the country, as a minority
government, for the past few years. They’re not very lovable but they’ve been
mostly reasonably competent.
On the other hand, they’re awful on environmental issues, they
have a sprinkling of Republican clones who’d turn hard-right given the
slightest chance, and Prime Minister Harper is a control freak whose
Cabinet-level team isn’t that impressive.
In our local riding, they’re irrelevant, there’s no chance a Tory could
get elected here. In fact, we’ll represent a net loss for them, since the
Liberal we elected last time crossed the floor to join the government.
The Liberals
I kind of like Liberal leader...
Unthematically grouped!
Actual Tabs
Track the Canadian Election
here.
Lauren’s
take
on that election.
Google is exposing their
2001 index. I did a
vanity search of course, and turned up a forgotten thirteen-year-old chunk of
my past:
Tim Bray's Hyperlink Totems
(1995). I believe
Carl Malamud must be
responsible for the fact that that link is live. Whatever Carl’s working on,
I’m in favor of it.
Vermin,
being a deep-ecological view, with belly laughs, of how we go about sharing
our planet with other members of the Animal Kingdom.
PhotoStuff
RawWorkflow.com has a neato utility for extracting
JPEGs from RAW shots, super-fast.
While on things photographic, here’s a deep pixel-peeping look at what
happens when an otherwise-good camera maker contracts the megapixel-count......
Twittery via ongoing October 3rd, 2008 at 10:00
Last night, after the Canadian election
party leaders’
debate, the analysis had a section where they graphed Twitter responses to
various verbal sallies and bons mots. Innovative and useful I thought;
admittedly a bit left-leaning, if only because smart well-connected young
people tend to lean left. Then when I got to work this morning, someone
sent me a pointer to Charles Arthur’s
What effect will the financial crisis have on the tech sector?
in The Guardian; it quotes my
Twitter stream, twice.
Once again, the
spectrum of human
communication shifts......
The
numbers, considered carefully,
make an Obama win look like a safer and safer bet.
Herewith a Canadian spectator’s opinions as to why this is
and why it’s a good thing.
Why?
Seems pretty obvious to me. Most Americans didn’t pay much attention to the
election until the conventions. Then 50 million people watched the
big speeches and first debate.
Prior to that, most people had seen pictures and brief film-clips of Obama
and, and had been aware of some of the Republican framing efforts: “He’s this
young black guy with a Muslim middle name and big ears who gives fiery
speeches and whose pastor was a kook. Weird. Maybe dangerous.”
Then Obama delivered a nice even-toned convention speech.
And during
the debate he was this perfectly normal American politician, saying all...
Rules via ongoing September 25th, 2008 at 10:00
Business failure is much in the news. I have personal experience,
having on a few occasions been in the management of a hard-pressed company
that needed money to stay afloat. I learned
the Golden Rule: He Who Has The Gold Makes the Rules. I’ve also
been there advising people trying to deploy money to save a
troubled business. I learned something else: making good rules is......
I’m speaking at
FOWA and will be a London
resident October 6th through 9th. Any meetups or drinkups or geekfests or other events I
shouldn’t......
Driving via ongoing September 19th, 2008 at 10:00
Like most people on the left half of the New World, driving has informed
and constrained and enriched my adult life. I’ve enjoyed it. Indications are
that mine will be one of the last drive-everywhere generations. The shape the
tribe settles into may be more pleasing, and strengthening local
culture is a fine thing, but the loss of the
time-behind-the-wheel, with the music playing, going places, well, it’s
sad.
One time years ago I even wrote a terribly long (pages and pages) poem
about driving; here’s the beginning:
To walk is best of course. And I
would rather drive than fly. Would turn
Earth's curve beneath my tires. Would burn
Earth's blackened past in engine fires;
burn time that space is measured by
from edge of map to edge of sky.
Now? Now, we’re looking at $100...
It’s on
Main Street
near 14th Ave. They make a damn fine chicken
Shawarma.
The place is a little odd inside; apparently once a French bistro,
the shift to Middle Eastern cuisine seems not to have involved a redesign.
But it’s cheery and comfy and lets you be part of the Main Street scene.
Hey, while writing this, I learned that the dude who makes the awesome
lunches is “Mori” Momenzadeh Tameh and
is little political issue all by
himeself.
Anyhow, you can’t beat it for a quick tasty nutritious bite on that part of
Main; which is saying something given the number of nearby......
Being a photo of a sunlit salad at the
restaurant in the
Teahouse in Vancouver’s
Stanley Park.
It was a fairly standard tomato-mozz salad, and not bad at all if not quite
up to the presentation. The same could be said of the whole meal but then the
presentation, on the plate and especially out the windows at sunset, is beyond
fantastic, so that’s very weak......
Treeset via ongoing September 6th, 2008 at 10:00
Being a photo of the sun approaching the horizon with no clouds
to serve as a canvas for its setting rays. But there’s a little tree.
I went out to take pictures of the sunset and it just doesn’t work right
without clouds. Still, I got any number of ridiculously-dramatic shots of the
ripe prairie grasses in sideways light. I’ll run one or......
Horizon via ongoing September 5th, 2008 at 10:00
Being a photograph of a Saskatchewan hayfield and a cloudy sky.
This taken within a couple of minutes of that shot of the
storm-beset barn. Damn,
it was......
After this goes live and until I get around to
publishing next, it’ll say “(3001 fragments)” on the
ongoing
front page, which the majority of you who
are currently looking at a feed reader never see. Three thousand is a lot. But
they’re coming slower than they used to; does this trend lead to silence?
Check
the numbers; August had the lowest post frequency
since I lurched into motion in February of 2003. It’s not just me, there’ve
been a few successful bloggers writing, over the course of 2008, about slowing
down; for example,
Petite
Anglaise this very morning.
In The End, Silence?
Well yeah, we’re all gonna die someday. But for now, the thought of not
having a writing space on the Web, whether anyone reads it or not, makes my
blood run cold.
I’m totally not going to...
Being a photo of the sun’s rays spilling over the mountains onto
Howe Sound, taken from a
boat pulling out of
Horseshoe Bay.
There seem to be a lot of random pretty-decent nature shots in the August
folder; I’ll run ’em till I run out, because the Internet can’t have too......
Turning via ongoing August 31st, 2008 at 10:00
We left summery August Vancouver for a week on the prairies, where
blazing heat and lashing storms alternated, thunder often in
the distance.
Here are two photos of a small barn illustrating the heat blazing and
the storm lashing.
We came home to driving rain and an August night so chilly
we turned on the furnace. The sun’s come back, but right now, as
September shuffles in, we’re going around a corner and you can’t not feel it.
The
light, especially in the earlier-and-earlier evenings, has turned; the smells
have turned; the wind has turned. The leaves? No, they haven’t yet, but
they’re getting ready to; with all the other changes my eye’s startled every
time it looks up and sees green, green,......
I’ve always had a weakness for cowboy fashion, and when we visit
Saskatchewan, we always drop by the big
Cowtown store in Regina to do our
bit for the
Prairie economy, not that it needs it what with grains and potash and
petroleum all booming.
The store is pretty big, but it’s the smallest of the buildings clustered
around the
Masterfeeds parking lot.
Masterfeeds actually owns & operates Cowtown, and downstairs there’s
more animal food than anything else, along with a weird assortment of exotic
pets; you can pick up a tarantula or chameleon along with your horse chow.
Upstairs though, it’s Western Wear.
I like denim and checks and plaids and, and I’ve never understood why you’d
want buttons on a shirt when you can have pearl- or black-fronted snaps.
Jeans
There’s a rule...
I was writing that
Tech Tab Sweep and
regretting the absence here of
all the nifty non-tech links I’ve been twittering. I
think it’s lame to gateway your Twitter feed into your blog, but I decided
it’d be worthwhile to go back and pull a few out for those who
might be entertained but don’t read Twitter. Some of these are
superultrajuicy.
Interesting new online culture magazine:
Culture11.
Superelegant Japanese photoblog:
ダカフェ日記.
Billmon is back!
Extreme Pentax lens porn:
Discussing the Pentax DA 35mm f/2.8 Macro Limited Lens.
Tasty new Sigma lens:
Sigma 50mm
F1.4 EX DG HSM review.
Lovely story, lovely pix:
Elephant Bang Bua Thong.
The aerial walkway at the UBC Botanical garden is open... gotta see it.
Ultra-stylish card-reader for your Mac Pro:
Nervian.
Taking a...
Cottage? via ongoing August 15th, 2008 at 10:00
If there’s anyone reading this who’s felt some empathy with the recent
flurry of
Cottage Life posts,
and who’s from around here: there’s another waterfront property just around
the corner from ours for sale; near the north point of Keats Island (Wikipedia,
map,
keatsisland.net).
Serviced, a couple of hours from downtown
Vancouver (boat only). Not perfect, has issues, needs work. But pretty
unique, I think. The reason I’m plugging this is I’m hoping someone with kids
gets the
place; ours could use some playmates. If you might be interested, contact
me and I’ll put you in touch with the......
I have always for some reason, been sweet on donkeys. I’ve published some
fetching donkey
photographs in this space, and have visited the
Donkey Sanctuary in Devon
on three separate occasions.
Herewith a donkey-centric book review, travel recommendation,
and French word that needs a better English translation.
Donkey Wisdom
That’s the book: in full,
The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World
by Andy Merrifield; a present last Christmas from my Mother, who knows I like
them.
Merrifield likes donkeys a whole lot, perhaps more than I do, and has
wrapped a thin and enjoyable (note that I do not say “but enjoyable”;
thin is good) philosophical discourse around the species. He has plentiful
recourse to every literary and scriptural donkey that you’ve ever heard...
Most of these Cottage Life posts are going to be on the cynical side; with
luck, good for a laugh or two. But there is a reason we do this, and here it
is. With a furniture recommendation.
They say “peace and quiet” but you can have a whole lot of peace even with
background noise. What with the waves, and the big trees speaking the wind,
no oceanfront is never really silent. And we are after all less than an hour
from Vancouver; the body of water we face on is best seen in the map at the
bottom of the
water taxi schedule;
there is never a daytime moment when the view is boat-free; and on a busy
holiday weekend, it can be noisier than our central-Vancouver
neighborhood.
But still, the noise is mostly natural and mostly pleasant to the
ear, and does not have the urban...