sernaferna

Twitter Followers After One Weekend

2011-11-21T14:18:00.000-05:00

Should be self-explanatory:

Dipping My Toes Into the Warm Waters of Social Networking

2011-11-21T09:58:00.001-05:00

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m one of the few people on the planet who’s not on Facebook. And when I say “one of the few on the planet” that’s not much of an exaggeration—there are currently more than 800 million subscribers on Facebook, which is 11% of the world’s population. A staggering number. 11% of the people on earth have Facebook accounts. Is there any thing else that 11% of the world’s population has in common? Religion, for sure; I’m sure there are other things that that many people have in common. But not many.

Anyway, not the point.

In case you’re getting excited and firing up your browser to load up Facebook and “friend” me or “poke me” or put graffiti on my “wall” or whatever it is you do on Facebook, don’t get ahead of yourself. I still haven’t created an account. Sorry, I know it’s inconvenient for you, but I promise I’m not doing it to slight you.

Although... it might seem that way, because aside from Facebook I have taken on other social networking services in a big way:

I’ve obviously been blogging for a long time. (Since March 17, 2005—over half a decade, people. And although this particular blog is mostly dormant these days, I do have the Bible blog, book blog, and now even a quote blog, which are all pretty active.)
I’m on LinkedIn
I’m on Google+, and very much liking it
I’m using Yammer, which is a social networking site specifically for use within corporations/organizations, so our messages are only for each other, not for the world
I just today signed up for Twitter, although I doubt I’ll be tweeting much; it’s more so I can follow the tweets of others. (A common use of Twitter these days, I’m led to believe.)

So... with all of this social networking stuff going on, it might be simple stubbornness that’s preventing me from signing up for Facebook. (Even if I love Google+, it doesn’t change the fact that everyone I know is already on Facebook. Again, not much of an exaggeration; my mom is the only person I can think of off the top of my head who’s not on Facebook...)

Does that mean I’ll be signing up for Facebook any time soon? Frankly, I might not have time; what with following the new posts on Yammer and Google+ and keeping up with the twits I’m following, where will I be able to find a couple of hours to set aside for creating a Facebook account? And wouldn’t that be the biggest irony of all? After so many years of my friends telling me (nay, demanding me) to create a Facebook account I am now not creating one because all of the other social networking sites are consuming all of my bandwidth...

Roll up the Rim

2011-05-02T09:29:00.001-04:00

Well RutR season is over, which means I get to post to my blog again. (Does this mean I won’t post again until 2012? Possibly. I haven’t even posted to the Bible Blog in… wow… over five months!)

The results are in the spreadsheet. I’ve removed the link that was in the sidebar. Because of travelling for work and numerous other factors, I didn’t participate in the contest that much (meaning I didn’t go to Tim’s that much), but I guess the good news is that it means my win rate was pretty good.

Roll up the Rim

2011-03-28T14:55:00.000-04:00

To my surprise, I’ve had numerous people asking me about my Roll up the Rim spreadsheet for 2011. I didn’t realize it was so popular, but apparently it is. I’m not drinking at Tim’s as much as usual, though, so it’s more bare-bones than usual. But if you want to see it, it’s online here.

Enjoy!

I Know, I Know, It’s Been a Long Time

2010-11-25T18:23:00.002-05:00

Since it’s been longer than I’d like to admit since I last updated this blog, I guess it’s time I finally posted to catch people up on where I am in life.

First of all, I’ve dumped the iPhone, and gotten the phone of my dreams. In order to get it I had to find an unlocked version on eBay, so that I could use it on the Rogers network. (Andrea inherited the iPhone, but I don’t think she’s really liking it.) Any time I’ve told anyone that I swapped my iPhone for the Pre they’ve been shocked. Flabbergasted. They think I’m… strange. But I’m not looking back; I love the Pre. The only advantage the iPhone would have for me is that there are more apps for it, but I don’t need many apps in the first place. (I’d love a better Google Reader client for the Pre; other than that, there aren’t any apps I need that I don’t already have.)

Next, I’ve [finally] started using Gmail as my primary email address, instead of my ISP’s email. (I won’t put my address here, but it won’t surprise anyone. Fairly easy to guess, is what I’m sayin.) I’d had the Gmail address for a while, I just wasn’t using it for anything. But I was discovering that it was getting more and more easy to use the Gmail address than my ISP’s email for almost everything. Then I found that it was easier to use Gmail from my iPhone than my ISP’s email (I was able to receive email, but when I tried to send it gave me weird error messages, and told my my password was wrong even when it wasn’t)—even though Rogers gives specific instructions for setting up your email on the iPhone. The instructions just don’t happen to… you know… work. Whereas Gmail works great. Then I switched to the Pre, found that I had the same issue, and said forget it; why am I bothering with my old email address? I’ll just use Gmail. So far, I’m loving it. And there are advantages to having all of your email “on the cloud” (instead of having some on the email server, and the rest in your PST file at home).

Next, and more exciting than anything I wrote about so far, we finally took a vacation. (Yes, you heard me right: a vacation.) We took a Caribbean cruise, on Carnival, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It was with Andrea’s family—13 of us altogether, which is why a cruise made so much sense—and we took lots of pictures, which you can see here. You’ll notice that none of the pictures include any people, they’re all scenery and landscapes. That’s because the pictures that include people are private, so that only friends and family can view them. (If you have a Flickr account, and are a friend or family, let me know your Flickr ID and I can add you to see them. Not that they’re spectacular or anything, but still… It’s nice to see.)

Finally (for the purposes of this blog entry), and most importantly, I got a new job. (I’m pretty sure I never stated the name of the company I work for on this blog, so I’ll continue the tradition and not state the name of the new company I’ll be working for either.) It’s essentially the same type of work I do now, for slightly better money. The main thing is that I’ll be moving from client to client, which I miss (I’ve been working for the same client for almost eight years), and I’ll be doing a lot of traveling. Anyone I know in my field who’s done a lot of traveling has burned out, come to hate it, and warned me vehemently that I’ll grow sick of it too. That may very well be, but until it happens, I’m going to enjoy it. I haven’t done a lot of traveling for work, but when I have, I’ve loved it, so I definitely haven’t grown sick of it yet. I start on Monday, and, as you can imagine, am very excited about it.

Wave (Again)

2010-08-25T11:10:00.000-04:00

I read another article today about the demise of Google Wave. In some ways, I think the author missed the point of Wave—but, at the same time, neither did the author deny that. In fact, it was part of the point of the post: What was Google Wave? What was it supposed to be for?

The author didn’t seem to get what Google Wave was, and believes that Google might have overhyped it; personally, I believe that a lot of the hype was justified—Wave was meant to replace email, and IM, and maybe even documents—but I definitely agree that Google’s message on Wave was muddy, at best. Their press seemed to be saying, “Google Wave is great! It’s amazing! It’s revolutionary! It does… well… some stuff. And it does it really, really well! And you should use it! And if you do… then maybe you’ll figure out what it is that Wave does.” It’s hard to get people excited about something when they don’t know what it is.

The author of this article said something similar:

Not only did Google fail to define Wave, it also promoted it clumsily. I’ve written before about Google’s strange habit of releasing lots of products with overlapping features—Wave, for instance, shared traits with Google Talk, Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Buzz. Wave seems to have lost out in this internal fight for users’ attention. It was Buzz, not Wave, that won a prized place inside Gmail, where it could instantly win lots of attention. Wave, meanwhile, was actively separated from Gmail—if someone wrote you in Wave, you wouldn’t get any notice in Gmail. Google eventually added e-mail notification for Waves, but by that time the ship had sailed. Wave had already been defined as an online ghetto—no one was there, so why should anyone join?

I definitely agree with this. Especially about the integration issues between Gmail, Wave, and Buzz. From the outside looking in, it seems that Buzz might have won some political wars within Google that Wave lost; it probably would have been a bad idea to integrate both Wave and Buzz into Gmail at the same time, but putting Buzz inside Gmail got it a lot of immediate exposure—even though I believe Buzz still isn’t getting used as much as Google would like—whereas Wave, as the author says, has become an online ghetto.

Google Wave, We Hardly Knew Ye. Literally.

2010-08-07T09:54:00.000-04:00

Google has decided to pull the plug on Google Wave, because it hasn’t seen the level of adoption that they would have liked. This is unfortunate, because, as my readers know, I very much buy into the Wave concept. I would prefer to be using Wave over email, prefer to be using it over IM, and in a lot of cases prefer to be using it rather than creating documents. I was also looking forward to using Wave to write my blog posts.

I’d even begun work on creating a Wave gadget, but was hindered by some features that weren’t yet available—such as the ability to dynamically set the width of the gadget—but were being “worked on”. (I now see why they weren’t so quickly developed.) I had some ideas for other gadgets or robots, too; I probably would have ended up implementing all of the plugins I’d written for HTML-Kit as Wave gadgets/robots.

The thing is, despite my excitement about Wave, and my willingness to create a gadget, and the fact that I would prefer to use it, I barely ever do. And I don’t use it for the exact reason that Google is shutting it down: nobody else is using it. Wave is all about communication and collaboration—if you’ve got nobody to communicate with, if you’ve got nobody to collaborate with, then it’s not going to do you any good. The very first adopters of email, back in the day, could only email people with access to the network and email accounts of their own; for everyone else, they had to send actual letters. Same with Wave; I could “wave” with other people on Wave, but for everyone else—which is practically everybody—I have to use email and IM.

I’m not sure if it’s time yet for Google to shut it down; something like this would naturally take a long time to come into its own, and I’m not sure it’s been long enough. (Not that I’m expecting Google to read this blog post, and say, “Hey, serna’s right! We should give Wave a few more years!”) You can’t “get” Wave unless you’re using it, with other people who use it, and since hardly anyone is using it, very few people yet “get” wave or use it for anything useful. It’s not like Google Maps, where you can take one look at it and say, “Hey, that’s useful! Look, you can drag the map around with your mouse, and zoom in and zoom out, and you can search for things nearby your location, and…” It’s something that you’d need to use for a while, and start to realize how it gradually takes over where you used to email, or IM, or write a document, now all you’re using is Wave. Eventually you’d get to a point where there would be a minor level of irritation when you have to communicate with someone who doesn’t use Wave—but the thing is, most of us who buy into Wave have been constantly in that state for a year or two.

Just this past week, I had a conversation with a colleague. My manager had sent an email, and there were some Reply Alls and some replies sent only to me, and then my colleague IM’ed me to talk about it further. And during the conversation she said, “See, we don’t need google wave, we already act as if its all one communication device.” To which I had to respond, “But if we had Wave, we wouldn’t need this side IM conversation. You could respond right within the Wave, but make it private so that only I’d see it.” Really, there would have been no need for the Reply Alls, there would have been no need for the IM conversation—or multiple conversations, if others were discussing it as well—and if anyone had been away from their desk and came back, they wouldn’t have seen an Inbox full of emails, they would have see one, consolidated wave. My colleague is right, we don’t need Google Wave; we already have email and IM. But then again, we don’t need IM, either; we could just send little emails back and forth all the time for our conversations—so why do we use IM? Because it’s easier. And if we had Wave, the set of conversations mentioned in this instance, spread across emails and IMs, also would have been easier, and nobody would have had to fire up MSN Messenger.

My point being that people still don’t get Wave, and how could they if they’re not using it, and why should they use it—or how could they use it—if nobody else is?

I definitely understand Google’s “release early and release often” philosophy, and I can see why they rolled out Wave the way they did—only to a few hundred developers first, then to a preview audience, and only recently opening it up to the world—but unfortunately, because of that strategy, the main use for Wave over the last year has been a lot of navel gazing. A thousand people talking to each other about how great Wave is, and wishing they could get their friends and colleagues to use it so that they could start using it for real communication.

A Short Post, Pointing to Long Stuff

2010-07-02T21:12:00.001-04:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about postmodernism, lately, especially the Christian’s approach to postmodernism, and evangelism in a postmodern world. Here’s why.

It started with a series of talks by D. A. Carson, on Evangelism in the 21^st century. It’s a three part series; you can listen to the audio (MP3 format) by clicking here, here, and here. (I got these links from a page devoted to D. A. Carson talks, which can be found here.)

This prompted me to read the book The Gagging of God, also by Carson, which I posted about on the Book Blog.

Finally, I also listened to a sermon by Tim Keller, on giving the Gospel in our times, which you can listen to here or watch here.

See? Much shorter than my usual posts. Of course, going to any of the links I provided will consume a good amount of your time…

Voice Recognition

2010-06-21T09:30:00.001-04:00

I read a nice post on Coding Horror today about voice recognition—and the fact that it’s still not here yet. (And may never come.) I’m not sure what I can add to his post, though, other than just saying “me too” over and over.

Atwood mentions the Google app you can get for your iPhone, and its voice recognition feature. My experience has been slightly different than his—I’ve found that it works remarkably well—but at the same time, I think of it more like a novelty, not a real useful thing. It’s fun to pull it out and speak into it, and have it automatically perform a Google search for me, especially if I want to show it off to others, but when I want to actually search for something… I pull up Safari, and type it into the Google search text box. (If I had my dream phone, I’d just do the search right from the phone’s “desktop” and not even pull up the browser until I found a result I needed!) I use Safari instead of the Google app with its voice recognition for a couple of reasons:

It’s faster. Safari loads faster than the Google app on my iPhone, and if I find the result I want, it’s going to end up loading Safari anyway. So it’s much faster to just start with Safari in the first place, and cut out the middle man.
Add to that the times when the voice recognition doesn’t work, and you have to do the search over and over, vs. just typing it in and getting it right the first time.

Plus there’s the whole speaking at your phone thing. Aside from the coolness factor, is there actually any benefit to saying your Google search at your phone, instead of typing it in? Any benefit whatsoever?

I was also right there with Atwood when it comes to dictation. He mentions that someone had had the idea of having him and Joel Spolsky use voice recognition software transcribe their podcast, and I was thinking of when I was looking into doing something similar for our church. We were going to start putting our sermons online, and I was thinking that having a textual version of the sermon would be very handy for things like Google searches, so I was playing around with Microsoft Word’s speech recognition. Which, again, is very good. But… not good enough, it turns out. In fact, I was trying to do some tests, using Microsoft Word, and one word that it could just never get right was “verse”. Imagine trying to transcribe a sermon without using the word “verse”! (To get a feel for why this is important, go back through any of the sermons we’ve got online, and see how often the pastor is referring to this or that verse, as he refers to passage after passage.) It’s possible that the speech recognition might have done a good job, and I’d just have to go through and correct it, but I’m with Atwood on this one, too:

Maybe it’s just me, but the friction of the huge error rate inherent in the machine transcript seems far more intimidating than a blank slate human transcription. The humans may not be particularly efficient, but they all add value along the way—collective human judgment can editorially improve the transcript, by removing all the duplication, repetition, and “ums” of a literal, by-the-book transcription.

I actually approached it very optimistically, but in my testing quickly came away with the idea that it wouldn’t work out well in practice. (What we ended up doing is coupling the pastor’s sermon notes with the audio for the sermon. It’s not the best solution—pastors often end up straying from their notes, so the notes won’t always match up with the actual sermon—but I think it’s a good compromise.)

So even though I sometimes find the iPhone’s text input kind of annoying, I’ll still choose it over the Google voice recognition any day. And do—every day.

Incentivizing Work

2010-06-01T16:46:00.001-04:00

I read an article by Joel Spolsky in which he was talking about gaming incentive plans. If you haven’t read it, go and check it out.

Joel was looking at one side of the incentive problem: If you try and get a result by incenting people, they’ll learn how to get the incentives, regardless of whether they’ve actually produced the result—they learn to game the system. But what about the other side: What if people didn’t game the system? What if they really did try to produce the result you were looking for? And what if you promised them that the quicker you produced it, the higher the reward? That is essentially the free market system in action, right?

Actually, it turns out that doesn’t work anyway. It’s not just that people will game the system and work around the incentive model you’re creating, it’s worse than that: the incentive model doesn’t work in the first place. Hence a talk by a guy named Daniel H. Pink. I found out about him from a post on Coding Horror; if you head on over to that post, you’ll see two videos from Daniel:

The first one is from TED, and is longer, but more informative.
- As a side note, I just recently heard about TED, and I’ve found a lot of interesting talks on a variety of topics. After you’ve seen one or both of these Daniel H. Pink videos, feel free to browse around the TED website for other talks. I’m sure you’ll find something interesting.
The second is a shortened version, which is sort of a summary of the things said in the first one (but has prettier pictures).

Google Wave

2010-05-19T14:55:00.001-04:00

Google Wave is now open to everyone; anyone with a Google account can log in, without having to sign up and wait for them to approve you.

And, in honour of them opening it up to the general public, they put out another one of their little “About Wave” videos.

Kathy Sierra at Business of Software 2009

2010-05-10T16:44:00.001-04:00

I originally got this link from a post on the Joel on Software blog, and thought I’d share it with you. It’s long—54 minutes—but if you develop software, it’s worth watching.

Bread crumbs?!?

2010-04-29T09:57:00.001-04:00

We walked out of our door yesterday morning to find that someone had put bread crumbs on our front porch.

Why? I have absolutely no idea.

Regular Expressions

2010-03-29T19:47:00.000-04:00

I’m sure I’ve mentioned regular expressions (regex) on this blog before. I love ’em. (Note: If you’re not a computer nerd, you don’t need to know what regular expressions are, and can ignore this post. If you are a computer nerd—in any area of computer science—you definitely should know what regular expressions are. But… you can probably still skip this post.) Such a powerful technology, and it’s already built into most programming environments. (Or even the command line, if you use any operating system other than Windows—grep anyone?)

However, much as I enjoy the power of regex, there is no doubt that the syntax is a little… opaque. For example, suppose you want to validate that an email address is in a “correct” format. You could write some code that does the following:

check for the presence of the @ character (there should be one and only one)
see if there are any dots (and whether or not those dots occur before or after the @, because there may or may not be some before, but there has to be at least one after—but a dot can’t be the last character)
Check for special characters like the dash, and make sure it doesn’t come right before the @, or right before a dot. (It can exist, it just can’t exist in those special spots. e.g. you can have serna-ferna@somewhere.com but you can’t have sernaferna-@somewhere.com or sernaferna@somewhere-.com.)

And there are various other rules you might need to check. You’d probably need one or more lines of code to check each of these rules. Or you can just validate the address against a single regular expression, in one fell swoop. One line of code (in most programming environments), and you can do some very complex pattern matching.

For example, in Java, assuming we have a string called emailAddress with the address we want to validate, and a string called EMAIL_REGEX_STRING with our regular expression, we could do the following:

if(!emailAddress.matches(EMAIL_REGEX_STRING)) {
  // handle error
}

From a coding perspective, this is a lot simpler. With one line of code we can validate that email address, and the validation can be as complex as we want it to be. The regular expression can include all of the rules mentioned above, and more, all in one string.

I bring this up because I was given just such an expression today, to validate an email address. It does, indeed, validate all of the rules mentioned above. Unfortunately, it looks like this:

(?i)^[a-z0-9`!#\$%&\*\+\/=\?\^\'\-_]+((\.)+[a-z0-9`!#\$%&\*\+\/=\?\^\'\-_]+)*@([a-z0-9]+([\-][a-z0-9])*)+([\.]([a-z0-9]+([\-][a-z0-9])*)+)+$

Wow. Not so readable, eh? Just to understand it, I had to try and break it up, piece by piece, and figure out what’s going on. This is the result, with some pseudo comments in there:

(?i)                                // make the regex case-insensitive
^[a-z0-9`!#\$%&\*\+\/=\?\^\'\-_]+   // string must begin with 1 or more of the characters between the [ and ]
(                                   // next section...
  (\.)+                                // if there is a dot...
  [a-z0-9`!#\$%&\*\+\/=\?\^\'\-_]+     // must be followed by one or more of the characters between the [ and ]
)*                                  // ... section happens 0 or more times
@                                   // followed by an @ symbol
(                                   // next section...
  [a-z0-9]+                            // one or more characters of a-z or 0-9
  ([\-][a-z0-9])*                      // optionally followed by dashes, followed by a-z and/or 0-9 characters
)+                                  // ... section happens 1 or more times
(                                   // next section...
  [\.]                                 // a dot
  (                                    // followed by...
    [a-z0-9]+                             // 1 or more a-z or 0-9 characters
    ([\-][a-z0-9])*                       // optionally followed by dashes followed by a-z and/or 0-9 characters
  )+                                   // ... 1 or more times
)+                                  // ... section happens 1 or more times
$                                   // must end here

Still pretty bad. It’s no wonder that people take a look at regex syntax and decide they don’t have the time to learn it.

The worst part is, I think there are some mistakes in this expression, but I can’t even be sure! Can you really have a ` character or a dollar sign or an ampersand in an email address?!? Or am I even reading that right?

Two Videos From Shad

2010-03-27T13:55:00.001-04:00

Andrea showed these to me today, and I thought I’d share them with y’all.

Pretty Lattes

2010-03-26T14:23:00.001-04:00

For a while, when I was looking for a change, I was using the following display picture in MSN Messenger:

(It may even have been during Roll Up the Rim to Win season.)

When we were in Ottawa this week, for a short mini vacation, we stopped in at a coffee place that actually decorates their lattes like that.

Google Wave and Novel Pulse

2010-03-26T09:40:00.001-04:00

I have long been saying—possibly here but definitely in other circles—that one of the key things that will help Wave technologies take off is when other companies/organizations start incorporating the federation protocol into their services. People aren’t going to log onto Google Wave to communicate for business—or at least, not many of them will—but they will log onto their corporate wave servers to do so. The example I keep using is when Microsoft incorporates the technologies into Exchange Server (if that ever happens—obviously it’s early days).

I was pleasantly surprised to see today that Novel has already started in this direction, with their Novel Pulse product. I hadn’t expected it to start happening this early, but I’m glad it is.

Gnome 3

2010-03-18T11:39:00.000-04:00

For the Linux geeks out there, Gnome 3 has been released, and there is talk of making it the default desktop environment for Ubuntu. You can take a tour of it at the Gnome site, or view the Cheat Sheet to see descriptions of a whole bunch of features. (I first read about it on the Works With U blog, complete with screenshots and a screencast.)

It looks like it has the potential to be either:

Very cool, or
Very annoying, or
Both

It would be nice to see a new paradigm for desktop environments, instead of the old taskbar at the bottom (or top) of the screen with buttons for all of the open windows. So I’m hoping that this will be one of those things that people get used to quickly, and wonder how they ever lived without it. But only time will tell.

Twitter

2010-03-15T08:18:00.001-04:00

I haven’t yet become a twit—is that the term for someone who uses Twitter?—so I have avoided saying much on this blog about Twitter. However, Joel mentioned something in the context of a larger post and it made me smile, so I thought I’d share it:

Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.

Joel’s Taking it Offline

2010-03-04T15:20:00.001-05:00

I’m not sure if I should actually write this post. Everyone else who reads his blog is probably doing the same thing, and I’ll just be one voice amongst a million. But I’ve already started typing, I might as well finish…

Joel Spolsky has decided to stop blogging at Joel on Software. Which gives me mixed emotions.

On the one hand, it was a great blog, with many great, classic posts on software development. Many of those classic posts became part of the books, Joel on Software and More Joel on Software. I can’t remember how I first came across Joel’s blog, but as soon as I read it, I was hooked.

On the other hand, Joel hasn’t been writing that much on the blog lately anyway. By lately, I mean, oh… a year? Two years? More? The thing is, I started following him too late. However it was that I came across Joel’s blog, it was through some link to one of his classic posts, which I read, and thought, “Ah, now there’s an intelligent post on [whatever it was about].” Then I read his first book, and enjoyed it thoroughly all the way through. So I added his blog to Google Reader, and prepared myself for the brilliance that would inevitably follow. Only to find that he rarely posted, and when he did, it was either a post about Stack Overflow, or a link to his latest column on Inc. Magazine. It turns out that Joel seems to have done most of his great writing before I ever got on the bandwagon. (I did like the articles for Inc., don’t get me wrong.)

So I’m sorry to see him go, and I wish him luck, but at the same time, he’s got good reasons for stopping, and he hasn’t posted as much in recent times so I guess I’m not missing much anyway.

I just wish there was a slew of other bloggers out there for me to read, ready to take his place.

Another Wave Concept Video

2010-03-03T16:38:00.001-05:00

The last video I posted illustrated how a bot might be put to good use in a wave, along with a clever way that wave technologies could be embedded within a larger business process.

Today I include a video from SAP with a prototype for a system called Gravity, which illustrates a clever way that an extension can be built for Wave for integrating Wave with other systems.

I can easily see Sparx Systems coming up with an extension for Enterprise Architect UML models (or similar extensions for Rational Rose or other UML tools), or extensions for embedding Microsoft Office documents/spreadsheets/presentations, or a million other ways of integrating software with Wave through extensions.

Or, to go back to the previous example, Salesforce.com envisioned embedding a wave in their ticketing system, but they could also have gone the other way, and created an extension to embed a trouble ticket into the wave. When you load a wave, the extension could dip into the trouble ticketing system to load the information.

Chromium OS

2010-02-12T14:33:00.000-05:00

Back in September of 2008, I wrote that I’d downloaded Google Chrome, to give it a try. I didn’t really get why Google had created a new web browser—especially since Firefox already exists; why not just make changes to that?—but I figured I’d try it out anyway. And then I never wrote about it again, but since then Chrome has become my default browser. I use it all the time, only using Internet Explorer when I have to for work, and occasionally using Firefox, but not that often. Why? Two main reasons:

It’s cleaner and sleeker looking than IE or Firefox. Take a look at the screenshots below to see what I mean; Chrome takes up a lot less real estate than the other browsers, leaving more room for the browser window itself.
It’s noticeably faster, especially when it comes to JavaScript. And this was Google’s main purpose in starting an open source browser; obviously all of Google’s sites depend heavily on JavaScript to function, so they spent a lot of time on optimizing the JavaScript engine, to make those sites run faster. Gmail is faster in Chrome than Firefox or IE; Wave is much, much faster, but Wave is a special case, because it’s very much a web-based application, even moreso than Gmail.

Even preparing the screenshots below was noticeably faster in Chrome than Firefox or IE. (In fact, IE was terrible for this test; opening each new tab took seconds even before I’d loaded anything, plus a few seconds more to load the actual web page.)

So for reasons of speed and aesthetics, I have been using Google Chrome as my default browser pretty much ever since I first mentioned it, in that initial post. Because all of Google’s applications are web-based, and heavily dependent on JavaScript, they had a vested interest in making available a browser which would render those sites quickly, and provide a good experience to the user while on those sites.

But can we take that a bit further? Why yes, we can—what about netbooks? Those laptop-like things that are cheaper and more stripped down than full-blown laptops, and are only meant for those who want to surf the net? Is there any way we can improve those? Google decided that yes, these can be improved, and they came up with a new open-source operating system, called Chrome OS. (As mentioned, it’s open source; the open source project is called Chromium OS, while the final, Google-branded version that you would see on a laptop, would be Chrome OS. Just like the open source version of the browser is Chromium, while the Google-branded version is called Chrome.) As the name implies, the operating system basically is a browser.

I’ll let Google explain:

What are the benefits of this? The main benefit is speed. When you boot up a netbook running Chrome OS, you’re up and running in seconds. When I say “up and running,” I mean literally just a few seconds between the time you press the power button on your device, and the time that you’re surfing the internet. And I can verify these claims; I downloaded a version of Chromium OS that runs on a USB drive, just to try it out. As I was expecting, it’s incredibly slow overall; the OS wasn’t meant to run on a USB drive like that, and neither was it intended to run on a “regular” laptop, it was intended to run on a netbook, with a solid-state drive, and a very specific set of hardware. And yet, even with the horrible overall performance, when I pop in that USB drive and and press the power button on my laptop, it’s less than 30 seconds before I’m logged on and surfing the net. If I’m getting ready for work in the morning, and want to quickly log on to check my email or something, I can boot up from that USB drive, check my email, and shut down, all in the amount of time it would have taken to see the Windows splash screen if I were booting into Windows. In fact, if my desktop computer (which runs Windows Vista) has gone into sleep mode, it would be quicker to boot up cold into Chromium OS on my laptop than it would be to “wake the computer up” and log back in.

Here are some stats from my laptop, on how many seconds it takes for each stage of the bootup process:

Operating System	Splash Screen	Logon Screen	Able to Open Browser	Ready to Surf	Total Time
Windows XP	6	48	105	46	3:25
Ubuntu 9	5	41	8	5	59
Chromium OS	N/A	22	N/A	3	25

Note that these stats are actually skewed a little bit, because I have encryption software on my laptop; when I boot it up, I have to log onto the encryption software first, and then I get my boot loader which lets me choose Windows or Ubuntu. (The USB drive bypasses all of that, and just boots right to Chromium.) I did my Windows and Ubuntu timings from the time when I was at the boot loader, after I’d logged onto the encryption software. So there are two important impacts to this, in terms of these numbers:

Since the hard drive is encrypted, Windows is running a bit slower than it otherwise would have. It’s not actually that bad—I’d been expecting it to be slower, when I had to install the software—but based on my memory of how it behaved before the encryption software was installed, I’d estimate that we could probably shave 30–45 seconds off of the total number for Windows XP, if the drive wasn’t encrypted.
Contrarily, this means that these numbers don’t include the initial hardware loading time in the Windows and Ubuntu stats, which they should, but do include them for Chromium, which they shouldn’t (since Chrome OS wouldn’t normally have that phase of startup on a real netbook). So the Windows and Ubuntu numbers should be a bit higher, whereas the real numbers would actually be lower for Chrome OS. (See the demo videos, such as the one below, where they show someone booting a netbook cold into Chrome OS; it really is just a few seconds.)

Interestingly, I was surprised to find that Ubuntu actually shuts down a bit quicker than Chromium:

Operating System	Shutdown Time (seconds)
Windows XP	58
Ubuntu 9	11
Chromium OS	16

So how did they get it so fast to boot up? Again, I’ll let Google explain:

Incidentally, if you’re interested in more videos on Chromium, see the Google Chrome Channel on YouTube.

Now, I’m already seeing people around the net who are questioning the need for this OS, but most of the arguments against it show that they don’t understand the intent behind the operating system. Actually, it really means that they aren’t behind the idea of a netbook in the first place; at most, they might like the idea of a cheap, less powerful laptop, but they don’t get the whole netbook concept. Remember, the netbook was never intended to be your primary computer; it’s meant to be a secondary device, for lightweight internet-based stuff, not the only computer you have. If you’re only going to buy one computer, make it a desktop or a laptop and put Windows or Ubuntu or something on it; but if you’re also going to get a secondary device, for browsing or bringing with you to check your email and Facebook from Starbucks, then make it a cheap netbook. If you can get behind that concept, then you can start thinking about whether Chromium OS would be a good operating system for that device; if not, then your arguments against Chromium OS aren’t against the OS itself, but the actual concept of the netbook.

Here are the two most common arguments I’ve seen against Chrome OS, and my rebuttals:

“The whole operating system is browser-based? What if I want an image editing program, or a video editing program, or an IDE? I can’t do everything on the internet—computers have to do things other than just browsing the web!” You’re absolutely right, but netbooks aren’t intended to be the only computers you’ll ever use. If you want to edit photos, or create movies, or write computer code, use your desktop or your laptop for that. That’s not what netbooks are intended for, and it’s not what Chrome OS is intended for. (This argument really boils down to, “if Chrome OS can’t do everything, then it’s useless!” which is just silly.) But if you just want to get on the web, and check your email or check your stocks or catch up on your news or burn a few hours on Facebook or the myriad other things people do online, that’s what a netbook is for. And for the situations where netbooks are useful/intended, Chrome OS is a great operating system for that netbook to use.

“What if I don’t want all of my data on the cloud? What if I want to control my data?” Really, this argument is a variation of the first one; if you’re not the type who has your data on the cloud, then Chrome OS isn’t for you. But are you sure you don’t already have your data on the cloud? Maybe you’re not using Google Docs or Google Wave, but don’t you use Gmail, or Hotmail, or Yahoo mail? Or Facebook? For that matter, I bet even your email acount from your ISP, and even your corporate mail servers, have web-based interfaces that you can access. I have ten email addresses that I can think of off the top of my head, including my work addresses, and they’re all either web-based, or accessible by the web. But set aside the idea of having your “data” on the “cloud,” because it just clouds the issue when you start thinking in terms of information and data. The real question is: How much of your time do you spend browsing the web? You can use a netbook running Chrome OS and never touch a Google site like Gmail or Google Docs or Google Maps; if you’re in a situation where you just want to browse the web, and that’s it, that’s what netbooks are for, and, again, I think Chrome OS is a great operating system to use for that netbook. For anything else, use a real computer, and by all means, don’t use a browser for everything.

So that’s my longer-than-necessary post on Chromium OS. A lot of this post focused on speed, rather than the features of the OS, but that was on purpose, because speed is the main driving force behind Chromium OS. It is, after all, as close as possible to being just the Chromium browser, with as little “operating system” as possible getting between you and the internet.

Google Wave In Use

2010-02-08T16:14:00.001-05:00

Here’s a video from Salesforce.com, showing a great way that Wave technologies could be used in a customer service manner.

Skip Intro

2010-02-01T14:08:00.001-05:00

There are a lot of websites out there that start off with a Flash animation introduction, and then somewhere on the page—usually right under the animation—they have a link that says “Skip Intro” for those who aren’t interested in the animation. Well Google has introduced an interesting feature to their search results; see the first item on the screen:

Such a simple feature, but I bet I’ll be clicking that every time I see it, instead of the regular search result.

I wonder if people will now be looking for ways to get around that, so that people won’t bypass their animations from the Google search results? Then again, if they already have the ‘Skip Intro” link on their site, then maybe they wouldn’t care if people bypassed it directly from the Google search results; they’re trying not to annoy people who don’t want to see the animation, so people will be even less annoyed now.

Prescience

2010-01-29T09:19:00.001-05:00

I have to admit to rarely having been very prescient about new technologies. I understand technology very well, but when it comes to predicting what will take off and what won’t, I’m often off the mark.

Some examples:

I never thought Facebook would take off the way that it did. I figured it would be very popular for a while, and then everyone would move onto something else, as they did with MySpace and the various other social networking sites that had come before it. But the Facebook API (among other things) proved me wrong, and, despite my predictions, it’s still quite popular.
I underestimated how popular the iPhone would be, and then overestimated how popular the Palm Pre would be. In a radius of twenty feet from where I’m currently sitting at work there are probably a dozen iPhones, but not a single Pre. (Despite the fact that the Pre keeps winning awards for being so darned great.)
I was initially right about the Y2K bug, but then gave in to the hype and became as wrong as everyone else. When people first started talking about the Y2K problem, I said, well, it’s no big deal; maybe some reports will be wrong, and say 1900 instead of 2000, but other than that, problems will be extremely rare. If I’d stuck with that, I could have claimed I was prescient, but eventually all of the people who claimed that the sky was going to fall got to me, and I started to think it might actually be a big problem—only to have the clock turn over at 2000, and nothing happened, as I’d originally predicted.
I’ve written before (I think) about the fact that I never really cared when Google was launched. Big deal, another search engine, who cares; I already have my hierarchical list of sites on Yahoo!, what do I need another search engine for? Here we are today, and Google is so useful that many if not most people use it for their default page when they load their browser.

These are some examples; there are others. And here are two more.

I’ve already written about Google Wave, and how I think it has the potential to be a paradigm-shifting technology, which might, in time, replace email. (And IM. And documents—but now I’m really dreaming.) And I’d like to be right about it—if only so that I could claim I was prescient—but everyone else seems kind of underwhelmed by it. (Someone described it to me recently as “a solution in search of a problem”—I’m not of that opinion, obviously, but I can definitely understand the sentiment.) There’s still time, don’t get me wrong. I haven’t lost hope in it. But I would feel better if others were sharing my enthusiasm, and as of yet, they’re not.

Then, yesterday, Apple launched the iPad, which is a tablet-sized device, kind of like a big iPhone. And I’m seeing a lot of hype about it, but I’m thinking… so what? It’s a tablet. Big deal. It’s an iPhone, but bigger. (Or, if you get the version without 3G, it’s an iPod Touch, but bigger.) There have been tablets before, and none of them have ever taken off, because people don’t seem to want to use their computers like that. In fact, I remember when I first heard about Tablet PC from Microsoft, and, in another case of non-prescience, was very excited, assuming that it would be the next big thing. Here we are a few years later; have you ever met anyone who had a Tablet PC? I haven’t. I just did a Google search for “Microsoft Tablet PC”, and on the first page of results, the only pages on Microsoft’s site were one in Taiwanese, and one from Microsoft Support, so it’s not exactly a feature that Microsoft is pushing hard. So I’m not seeing the big deal about the iPad, but who knows? Maybe Apple will have implemented it in such a way that people really will find it useful. But at this point, I’m thinking that I’d rather be using a netbook than an iPad.

I should mention that some people have similar feelings about “netbooks.” Who would ever want a netbook, they ask; why not use a laptop, if you want a laptop, or your phone, if you want portability? I don’t agree with them on that; I think that netbooks actually are a good idea, for a lot of situations (and am kind of excited about Google Chrome OS). I think there’s a good market for an in between device, that’s more comfortable than a phone, but just for browsing the web and checking email, therefore not requiring the power (or cost) of a real laptop. (I wasn’t prescient or non-prescient about netbooks; by the time I’d even given them any thought, they were already very popular.)

So I’m thinking that Google Wave is going to be revolutionary, but, based on my history of trying to predict the future, am probably wrong. And I’m thinking that the iPad is no big deal, but for the same reasons, am probably wrong.

Google Web Tools

2010-01-15T09:19:00.001-05:00

A while ago I had a post in my Beautiful Code series, on Computer Generated Code. There, I was referring to things like the C pre-processor, which runs through a source code file and generates additional source code, which is finally sent to the compiler. Or, in more extreme cases, using another tool altogether, like awk, to do the same thing, but with potentially a lot more flexibility (with the power of regular expressions at hand). These days Java programmers are doing something similar with Annotations. The article also mentioned code that generates further, optimized code.

Last Fall, I came across a variation on this, in the form of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), which is a set of tools created by Google for creating rich HTML-based applications, specifically ones that make use of JavaScript and AJAX and JSON to do complex things in the browser.

One of the disadvantages to using a scripting language like JavaScript for development is that it is not a “strongly typed” language, and neither is it compiled, so some development errors will not be discovered until the testing phase. With a compiled, strongly-typed language (such as C++ or Java), some errors can be caught at compile time and fixed quickly, which reduces the number of bugs to be discovered during the testing phase. Another issue is that things often work slightly differently from browser to browser, so often you find yourself building JavaScript code that does things like, “if Firefox do this, but if Internet Explorer version 6, do that, but if IE7 do the other…”

GWT tries to combine the benefits of using a strongly-typed language—in this case Java—with the aforementioned benefits of improved user interface via AJAX. In a GWT application, code is written in Java, and UI is built using a GWT library, very much in the same way that a Java Swing application would be built. Once the application has been built and tested, it is “compiled” into JavaScript, with versions optimized for various browsers. In other words, a version is produced that will be optimized for IE6, and another version for IE7, and another for Google Chrome, and another for Firefox, etc. When the user accesses your application, the GWT JavaScript runtime figures out what browser you’re using, and downloads the correct code (and only the correct code) for your environment.

In addition, any JavaScript which is created is also optimized, whereby extraneous whitespace is removed, comments are elided, and even variable names are shortened; by compacting the JavaScript in this manner, it’s quicker for the browser to download the code, which improves performance even more. For example, a JavaScript function that might normally be written like this

//adds two numbers together, and returns the result
function addTwoNumbers(firstNumber, secondNumber) {
  addedNumbers = firstNumber + secondNumber;
  return addedNumbers;
}

Might end up looking like this, instead:

function a(a,b){c=a+b;return c;}

Obviously the first version is easier to read, and therefore easier to maintain. As a developer, I would never write code like the second version. But because JavaScript is a scripting language (meaning that it is not compiled into machine language, it is interpreted by the scripting engine at runtime), it means that every byte from that first version gets sent across the network to the browser, comments and whitespace and all. The second version, however, is much smaller, meaning that it will take less time for the browser to download it over the wire. (In this case, the optimized JavaScript is 32 characters, vs. 177 characters for the more maintainable version—something like 82% smaller. Code with a lot of whitespace and comments, and code with long variable and function names, will end up looking a lot smaller in the optimized version, because there’s more stuff that can be stripped out and reduced.)

With GWT, we get the best of both worlds, because the developer works with easy to read, maintainable Java code, but the GWT “compilation” process spits out the more optimized version in JavaScript, to send across the wire.

A typical GWT development lifecycle will be similar to this:

Developer begins developing in Java, using the Google Web Toolkit (quite probably in Eclipse, using the GWT Eclipse plug-ins)
Developer tests code using the provided runtime; at this point the code is still Java code, allowing the developer to set breakpoints and debug
Once the development is complete, the developer “compiles” the GWT application, to create the JavaScript, HTML, and CSS files
These JavaScript, HTML, and CSS files are included in the larger web application

Of course, as development proceeds, the developer may be repeating steps 2–4.

The GWT compilation process can be controlled using normal Ant built scripts, so the overall build process for Java applications can be modified to include a build of the GWT code, and inclusion into the appropriate location in the larger WAR/EAR. For non-Java projects, you can simply “compile” your GWT code, and include the generated files (HTML and JavaScript and CSS and images) in your application.

It’s similar to what we talked about in the Computer Generated Code post; the code that you maintain, and actually work with as a developer, is strongly-typed, clean Java code, with all the comments and whitespace and readable variable names that you are used to. But the code that is actually produced for use at runtime is highly optimized, unreadable code, intended to be seen only by a machine, not a human.

The limitation will be how good GWT is at turning your Java code into JavaScript code. When I did a Proof of Concept application back in the Fall, for an AJAX application we were intending to build at work, I did two versions, one in “raw” JavaScript, and another using GWT. I found that the performance of the “raw” version was better than the GWT version—but, that being said, because of the nature of the GWT libraries, I ended up having to change how I did some things, so it’s not like the code was the same in both cases. It wasn’t a strict apples-to-apples comparison.

For the real application, we decided to use GWT anyway, though, for two reasons:

Our developers are more familiar with Java than JavaScript, so the benefit of maintaining Java code instead of JavaScript was a big one. Especially since the application is a Java EE application; our Ant scripts could simply be updated to include steps to compile the GWT code, and then copy the resultant output files into the main application’s WAR file.
A lesser reason is that there is a possibility that further optimizations might be introduced to GWT, improving the way it produces its JavaScript code. It’s possible that an updated version of GWT might produce even better JavaScript output. (Although it may also force us to change the way that we write our Java, so we can’t expect it to just magically make our code faster.)

GWT has been used to build numerous products/projects—including Google Wave, I might add—so it’s being used by real people to solve real problems. But there are also people who are skeptical about it, and when I was researching the best AJAX libraries to use for my project, I saw mixed reactions to the GWT way of doing things. However, I think it’s another great example of doing something similar to what we discussed in the Computer Generated Code post. Writing code in a manner that is more developer-friendly, and outputting code that is more machine-friendly (and, in this case, network-friendly).

Google Wave

2010-01-09T16:39:00.000-05:00

It’s been a while since I wrote a fawning post about how great Google technologies are, so it’s time I remedy that, and write a new fawning post about how great Google technologies are. Enter Google Wave. I started reading about it yesterday, and I think—I’m not sure, but I think—that I’m going to be blown away by this technology.

In a nutshell, Wave is a mashup of email, collaborative document writing (a la wikis), and instant messaging. In some ways this is simply incremental change to existing technology, but I think it’s one of those new ways of looking at things that has the potential to be a paradigm shift. To see what I mean, let’s take a very abbreviated look at the history of documents, email, and instant messaging:

In the olden days, before computers were invented, people used to write documents using a pen, or with a typewriter, or using similar technologies. If they wanted to send a copy of that document to someone else, they would bring it to them, or send it by mail. That person, when they’d received the mail, could read the document, and mark it up using a pen or pencil, and mail it back to the original person. S/He could read those changes, and, if s/he so wished, write/print/type up another version of the document, incorporating any of the changes that s/he wanted to incorporate. If the people needed more immediate feedback than mail could provide, they could use a technology called the telephone to talk to each other, over great distances, for immediate feedback.
Computers brought electronic versions of these technologies. Word processors and spreadsheet programs and presentation software replaced paper documents (or, at the very least, made it easier to create them—people still had a habit of printing them out, from time to time). Electronic mail, or email, replaced mail. We developed something called instant messaging for immediate communication, for those times when email was too slow, so that we can have a real-time conversation.
These technologies changed how we communicate; instant messaging is largely replacing phone calls, even as it incorporates phone-like features (like voice chat) and improves on them (like video chat). Email is largely replacing physical mail, and the contempt we have for the speed of physical mail is apparent in its new moniker, “snail mail.” Email also changed the way that we correspond with each other; when you send an email, you can send it to multiple people, and when one replies to an email, the reply usually incorporates a copy of the original email, so that a conversation can be maintained. Email introduced the concept of reply all, which means that everyone can be included in the email conversation, and provide their input (if necessary). Emails can also be forwarded to others, even if they weren’t originally included, or, when replying to an email, you can simply add new people to the reply, if you think they should know about the conversation that’s happening.
These technologies also changed the way that we wrote documents; with the ability to do everything electronically, we now had the ability to email a document to someone else, as an attachment, for them to read electronically, and then send a reply email back, with their comments on the document. Electronic documents made it much easier to incorporate changes, rather than having to write or type out another version of the document by hand.
Soon the people making word processors and spreadsheets and presentation software started incorporating features into their products that made it even easier to do this. Things like track changes and the ability to add comments made it very easy to see what changes others were suggesting, and software got very good at merging different versions of documents together, even tracking who had made what changes.
Looking for a way to keep our documents together in one place, people began creating document repositories. More than just a glorified file folder, these repositories included features like having multiple versions of a document, and workflow capabilities, and the ability to lock a document while editing it, so that nobody else can, until you’re done and you “check in” your changes.
Even with these advances in editing, some people felt it wasn’t enough, and the wiki was born. A wiki was a web site that anyone could edit, and in some ways strove to replace the document. The obvious example is Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia that anyone can contribute to, but wikis have also been used for things like documentation for software projects. (Rather than having a series of documents that must be kept up to date, the documentation for the project is a [potentially] always up to date web site, that can easily be searched and updated.)
Despite the advent of the wiki, the vast majority of people were still creating documents, and emailing them back and forth as attachments, and using their track changes features to make changes. (Or they were simply replying to the original email, and saying things like, “You spelled a word wrong on page 4, paragraph 6. The diagram on page 9 is incorrect.”) Then Google came along with Google Docs, and gave us technology to put a document online, and let multiple people edit it at once, collaboratively. Google Docs turned documents into mini wikis. Now, instead of emailing a document as an attachment, for the person to edit and send back, forcing you to incorporate the changes, you would simply email (or IM) a link to the document, and the person would edit the document itself.

And this is about where we stand today. Wikis still exist, but aside from Wikipedia, they aren’t that prevalent. Despite the fact that I and others like me think Google Docs are cool, most of us (including myself) are still using applications like Microsoft Office to create our documents, and most of us are still using email to add these documents as attachments, to send to others. Interestingly even when we have a document repository—like Sharepoint, for example—we’re often still sending the documents as attachments; we could just send a link to the document in the repository, but in many cases someone doesn’t have access to the repository, and the document author usually isn’t the repository maintainer, so it’s much quicker to just email a copy of the document than to go through the red tape of getting the person granted access to the section of the repository that they need, to read the document. Email is, by far, the most prevalent means of communication, but instant messaging has also become an indispensable tool, both for work and personal use.

But still, even with the advances in technology we’re down to email (a replacement of snail mail, with some obvious improvements), instant messaging (a replacement of the telephone, with some obvious improvements), and electronic forms of documents (with some obvious improvements in how they’re created, but still, at the end of the day, are very much centred around the end product: the document.) Wikis are on the fringes, as a potential replacement for documents, but they haven’t gained traction as such.

So all of this to say, what is Google Wave? As mentioned, in some ways, it’s incremental technology, combining documents, email, and instant messaging into one technology. That was my first thought, when watching the hour and twenty minute long video where it was introduced. (Just in case that link expires, here’s the direct link to the YouTube video.) You can create a document, and multiple people can collaborate on it—just like Google Docs, you might say. You can receive notifications in your “inbox” when there are changes—just like in email, you might say (with a bit of an improvement). If people are online at the same time, you can see the changes they’re making as they make them, and you can send each other messages—just like instant messaging, you might say. Just like email, you can send someone a message, but when they respond to that message, they’re not limited to the usual message/response format we’re used to for email.

But here’s where the paradigm shift came in for me: email, documents, and instant messaging are all electronic versions of things we already used to do; with Google Wave, we have a potential replacement for email, documents, and instant messaging, creating a new paradigm that’s based on what computers can do, instead of simply trying to do the same old things we always did, with incremental improvements. (See this post on the Google Blog for an expansion on this.) With Google Wave, the line between an email and a document and an instant messaging conversation becomes blurred; what, really, is the difference between an email and a document? For the most part, just the length, and the means by which one can share it.

Today, when I want to communicate with someone, I have a few options:

For a quick conversation with a quick answer, I can open my IM client, see if the person is online, and start a conversation. If I want, I can include multiple people in the conversation (although most IM clients will limit this to around a half dozen people or so).
For something a bit more detailed, I can write an email, and send it to the person or people I want to communicate with. They can read the email, or, if required or desired, they can respond to it, and add their thoughts or make corrections on my original thoughts.
For something that I want to make more permanent and/or official, I can write a document, and email it as an attachment or put it in a document repository. Others can read the document, and, if required or desired, they can send an email back to me, with their thoughts or corrections. If they have permission, maybe they can edit the document itself, in the document repository, and their changes will become part of the document.

Three different ways of communicating my ideas, depending on the nature of those ideas. With Google Wave, all three of these would be something called a wave. I want to communicate something to a person or people, so I create my initial communication, it shows up in their inbox, and they can communicate back in the manner that they see fit; changes to the content, comments off to the side of the content, private messages to some people who are part of the wave but not to others… whatever makes sense. If the conversation becomes detailed/important enough, it will be shared and seen by more and more people, just like a document might in today’s world. If not, it might be a simple short communication between two people, just like an IM conversation might in today’s world.

We currently have three levels of “permanence” for our communications, from the throwaway IM conversations to the slightly more permanent emails—which are still locked in our inboxes, to be seen only by us and people we forward the emails to—to documents, which become artefacts and semi-permanent records of our thoughts or findings on a subject. Waves make these distinctions obsolete, and the only distinction in the wave world is how many people the information is shared with. (One question in my mind, however, is whether waves will have the immediacy of instant messaging; I can easily see that we might no longer need a distinction between email and documents, but when I get an IM, in today’s world, it’s something immediate, that I respond to immediately; will that still be the case, if it’s just one more wave hitting my inbox? I’m not sure.

Email has been around since the beginning of the internet, and, as mentioned, is the most prevalent form of communication on the internet. With Google Wave, we may have a serious contender for a new form of communication, with the potential to replace email. We may also have a new way of doing wiki-like things that will be more popular than wikis ever became.

It should also be mentioned that Google is doing this all open source, and creating generic protocols that can be used; this isn’t just a closed system, where you’d have to sign up with Google to get access. You can create a corporate “wave server,” similar to how we have corporate email servers today. And, just like email today, you’d have the ability to add people to your waves that aren’t on your corporate wave server (just like you can send emails to anyone on the internet), but also not give them access to waves that they shouldn’t have access to.

Unfortunately, Google Wave isn’t yet completely open to the public; you can just sign up, and they’ll let you know when you can join. So I’m going to sign up, and play with it when they let me in. Of course, it won’t really do me any good until I know someone else who uses it.

Backing Up Your Data

2009-12-18T10:15:00.001-05:00

There seems to have been a bit of a meme going around lately about backing up your data.

The first post I read was from Joel Spolsky, advising that talking about backups isn’t good enough, we should be talking about restores.

I then read a post by Jeff Atwood about his recent horror story in losing a ton of data from his blog, because of a lack of backup strategies, and then another post by someone else (whom I can’t currently remember) which was similar to Atwood’s, in that they lost a bunch of data from their blog because they hadn’t backed up. (And reading between the lines, I think Atwood felt even more stupid, because of a previous post of his, in which he outlined an extremely simple, yet effective, backup strategy.)

All of these posts seem to be telling me something, and telling me loud and clear. And yet I’m still not backup up my data.

Oh, that reminds me. My pastor sent an email yesterday, asking how to do something on the church web site, and I sent him some instructions, which may or may not have been clear; maybe I should back that up, right now before even clicking Submit on this blog post, just in case things go badly…

There. That only took a second. I should do that more often.

Software serna Loves: MSN Messenger and Google Talk (and Pidgin/meebo.com)

2009-11-18T08:54:00.001-05:00

You might be surprised to see Microsoft software on my list; I’m a bit surprised too. But I have to admit: I really like MSN Messenger. I’ve also been using Google Talk, a bit, and like it too. (Except that they still have a bizarre problem where you can’t use it without using a Gmail account.)

Part of this isn’t anything specific to MSN Messenger or Google Talk, though; part of this is just a fascination with chat software in general. They don’t call it “instant messaging” for nothing—there is a part of me that still gets a sense of childlike wonder that I can type something into my chat client, hit Enter, and have those words show up instantly in someone else’s chat client. In fact, I remember when I first started using MSN Messenger, and all of the people around me at work always had their sound on, so when I’d log in first thing in the morning I could hear all of their chat clients pinging to indicate that I’d just come online, again, virtually instantly. I work with people in various offices here in Toronto, people in Montreal, people in Québec City, and people in India; if we didn’t have chat software—primarily MSN Messenger—I can’t imagine being as productive as I am.

Now, this is normally where I’d start talking about the features I like about a particular piece of software, but honestly, when it comes to instant messaging, I don’t need or want a lot of features. Really, there are just two things I care about: it should be easy to chat, and it should be easy to send/receive files. (And even sending/receiving files is more of a convenience than anything; if I have to, I can send an IM to tell the person to check their email.)

It’s nice to be able to create a display picture, but not essential. It’s nice to be able to set a status message, but not essential. (Although we sometimes use the status messages in MSN for work; if I scan down my contact list, I’ll usually see a number of people with statuses that say things like “working from home this morning” or that type of thing.) It’s fun to be able to use emoticons—and even custom emoticons—but again, not essential. MSN Messenger has emoticons and custom emoticons, and when I use that I use a lot of emoticons in my chatting, but Google Talk doesn’t have emoticons, and I don’t miss it at all. (Maybe that’s because I’m an old-school chatter; it took years for my MSN Messenger buddies to get me to even turn on my emoticons, let alone start using them heavily.)

One feature I’m surprised I don’t use is the ability to do video chatting. This is a great feature, in theory, but I’ve never actually used it. Both MSN and Google can now do video chat—even the web-based version of Google chatting can do video conferencing (I’m not sure about the web-based versio of MSN). Maybe if I ever get a laptop for work that has a webcam built in I’ll start using it, but something tells me that even then, I probably won’t.

In terms of interface, I think I like Google Talk better than MSN Messenger because it’s cleaner and simpler (and doesn’t have advertising!), but both get the job done in much the same way:

If you want to chat with someone, simply double-click their name in your contact list, and up pops a chat window.
Chatting is simply a matter of typing your message, and hitting Enter to send the message to the other person or people. This bears mentioning because one of the first chat clients I ever used was called ICQ, and you used Ctrl+Enter instead of Enter, which wasn’t quite as satisfying. Based on my previous post on IrfanView, it’s no surprise that I like the simplicity of just hitting Enter to send the message. (Ctrl+Enter makes it seem more like an email than an IM message. You shouldn’t have to put that much thought into an IM message; just type as fast as you can—without worrying about spelling—hit Enter, and be done with it.)
Along the same lines, when you’re done with a chat, simply hit Esc to dismiss the chat window, and it will disappear.
If you want to send a file to someone, simply drag it to the chat window. If someone sends you a file, it will show up as a link that you can click to either accept or ignore, and when you accept the file will begin downloading to your computer.
Although they have different ways of doing it, both MSN Messenger and Google Talk will notify you when you get a new email to your Hotmail or Gmail account (respectively). That being said, MSN Messenger seems to integrate much better with Internet Explorer than any other browser (surprise surprise), while Google Talk doesn’t care what your default browser is.

In terms of differences between the two:

In MSN Messenger, you can add multiple people to your chat conversation; I don’t think you can currently do that in Google Talk.
Google Talk has a nice “windowshade” feature, where you can click the titlebar of your chat window, and the window will “roll up” into the titlebar so that that’s all that’s showing. (Clicking it again will “unroll” the window so you can see it again. When you have the chat window rolled up like that, you can still see the last message the other person has sent to you, so you can do this to free up some real estate on your screen, but still easily continue the conversation when necessary.

So similar to my post on IrfanView, what I really like about my chat clients is that they don’t get in my way, and they just let me get on with my chatting. This is especially important at work, where the whole point is that you want to get a quick answer to a quick question, and then move on. Something like this:

sernaferna says:
How big do the log files get before rolling over?

someone else says:
5MB

sernaferna says:
thx!

someone else says:

Then you’re done; hit Esc, the chat window goes away, and you go on about your day. Not only is your answer immediate (unlike email, where you may have to wait a while for the person to respond), but you also don’t have any extraneous emails sitting in your Inbox or your Sent Items. I don’t know about you, but if I were to have this conversation over email, I may or may not delete the emails I got from the other person, but I’m sure I wouldn’t go back and delete the ones I’d sent from my Sent Items—but those are emails that I would never, ever need to go back and find. (And since most people compose their emails in HTML these days—plus have signatures automatically appended to their emails—the size of those emails can get crazy; looking through my Sent Items, I didn’t see a single email that was less than 3KB, whereas the entire fictional conversation above would have been about 65 bytes going across the wire.) Better still, your chat client can tell you if the person is currently online, and if they’re not, you can look for someone else who is, and get your answer from them.

Now, I’ve talked about MSN Messenger and Google Talk, but there’s a special mention I’d like to give, to Pidgin (and, by extension, meebo.com). I won’t go into too much detail on Pidgin, because I’ve already mentioned it on this blog, but it really is nice to be able to combine multiple chat accounts together in one interface, even if that interface is a bit more clunky than either MSN Messenger or Google Talk. And the aforementioned usability is all there for Pidgin, too: double-click a person’s name to chat; Enter to send message; Esc to dismiss the chat window; etc. Pidgin also has a spell check feature, which I always thought I would like in a chat client—I’m fairly anal retentive about my spelling, even in chat—but now that I have it, it turns out I don’t care that much. And although I personally haven’t used meebo.com, I have a colleague who uses it all the time, and says its great.

Comments

2009-11-17T17:37:00.001-05:00

I’ve suddenly started getting a lot of spam comments in my various blogs, so I’ve taken the step of turning on the “word verification” feature for commenting. In the past I didn’t bother; whenever I got a spam comment I simply deleted it, and that was that. But lately I’m getting enough of them that it’s gotten annoying, so I’ve done this.

For the very, very few people who comment on my blogs, I apologize for the inconvenience.

Software serna Loves: IrfanView

2009-10-19T16:16:00.003-04:00

IrfanView is a free image viewing application. It can also be used to edit images—and in fact has some pretty great editing features—but it’s primary purpose is for viewing. It’s named after its creator, Irfan Skiljan.

What makes IrfanView great?

First of all it’s fast. For all of the image types I’ve tried it on (JPG, GIF, bitmap, PNG, etc.), when you open an image in IrfanView, it opens instantly. There’s no millisecond or multi-second delay, as you wait for the program to initialize itself, or load libraries—just double-click the image, and IrfanView is there, showing it. Even for a very large image, which IrfanView might have to resize for you, it’s still much faster than any other image viewing application I’ve used. If all you want to do is look at an image—and that is probably what you’re doing, much more often than editing—having it load up quickly is a big benefit. In fact, even the “filmstrip” view, built right into Windows Explorer—which caches all of the images ahead of time—is only marginally faster for really big images, even with its cache, and is actually slower for medium or small images.

This makes IrfanView feel “lightweight.” I don’t have to hesitate before opening an image file, even a really big one, because there is no penalty for doing so; I won’t lose a ton of memory, my CPU won’t go crazy, and I won’t have to waste time waiting for the image to appear. If I want to open a Word document, or a Visio drawing, I might have second thoughts, and only open it if I have to, but I don’t have to give such considerations to opening an image.

Earlier, I mentioned resizing, and this is another handy feature built into IrfanView. You can tell IrfanView how you want to view the images that you’re opening, meaning:

Fit window to image (also called 1:1 ratio). The image will be shown at its normal size, with no scaling applied; if the image is small the IrfanView window will shrink down to the image’s size, and if it’s very big IrfanView will grow to the size of your screen, and give you scrollbars to see whatever doesn’t fit on the screen.
Fit images to desktop. IrfanView will size itself as big as your desktop, and if the image is very small it will be resized bigger to fill the screen, or if it’s very big it will be shrunk to fit on the screen. (Because of the nature of this type of activity, obviously small images can get very distorted when they’re expanded this way; medium-sized pictures—especially photographs—sometimes don’t look too bad. Sizing larger images to be smaller, however, gives very good results.)
Fit images to window. Similar in concept to fitting the image to the desktop, but fitting the image to whatever size your IrfanView window is. This is the only option in which IrfanView will not resize its window to the size of your image or your desktop.
Fit only big images to desktop, or Fit only big images to window. Similar to the above, in which very big images will be resized to fit the screen (or the window), but small images are left as they are.

There are some other options too, but these are the main ones. Personally, I usually have IrfanView set to “Fit only big images to desktop”; usually, if I’m looking at an image, I’d prefer to see the whole thing at once, but that doesn’t mean that I need smaller images expanded. And, as mentioned, you get very good results when you shrink an image to fit the desktop, it doesn’t become distorted or anything. If I ever change my mind—for example, if I want to see all of the details for a large image, and want to use the 1:1 ratio—it’s a simple menu to change the way I’m viewing the image, and IrfanView will remember the setting the next time I open it. I don’t have to open a Preferences dialog, and make the selection there, and click OK to save my settings; just change the view, and it’s done. Also, because of the speed of the application, there’s not a noticeable performance impact to having IrfanView resize the image.

If I ever want to zoom in or out of a an image, without changing IrfanView’s overall setting for viewing images, I can use the + key to zoom in or the - key to zoom out. (Or, if I want to look at a specific portion of an image, I can select it with the mouse, and then click the selected portion. IrfanView will crop the image to show just that section. It’s not a “permanent” crop—it doesn’t actually edit the image itself—it’s just for your viewing pleasure. You can “reload” the image to see the full thing again.)

This next feature might not seem like such a big deal, but it’s part of the overall lightweight feel IrfanView has: Pressing the Esc key closes the application. To me, there is just something so simple and elegant to pressing the Esc key, and having the application go away. It goes along with what I was discussing earlier, that you don’t have to think before viewing an image in IrfanView. Double-click it, look at it, and hit Esc. In your mind, all you’re doing is “looking at an image”; you’re not “opening a program”, and “selecting a file”, and “closing the program”. If you’re having large images scaled down to fit your desktop, you’re not even “using the scrollbars”. You’re just looking at an image, and IrfanView is not making itself known in the process. You can close any program using the keyboard—Alt+F4 will close any program in Windows—but there’s something holistic about a lightweight image viewing program that lets you simply hit Esc to dismiss it. In fact, maybe “dismiss” is the operative word here—you’re not “closing a program” you’re “dismissing” the image you were looking at.

A similar feature is the ability to do an impromptu slideshow, using the left and right arrow keys on the keyboard. If you have multiple images in a particular folder on your computer, and open one of them in IrfanView, you can use the left and right mouse keys to view the next and previous one. (In other words, double-click the first image and it will appear in IrfanView; press the right arrow key, and IrfanView will show the next image; hit the left arrow key, and the first image will be shown again.) Most image viewing applications have a slideshow feature—and IrfanView does as well— but there’s something so intuitive about the ability to simply view the next image by hitting the arrow key. Personally, I never use the slideshow feature in any image viewing program, even IrfanView, because I find it so much easier to simply scroll through the images myself, at my own pace, instead of after a predetermined number of seconds. (Inevitably, when using that type of slideshow, I find myself having to manually go back and look at an image, because the slideshow moved on before I was done looking, or find myself impatiently waiting for the next image to appear when I don’t care much about the current one.) I suppose if I were doing a tradeshow it might be nice to have images automatically scrolling past the screen as eye candy, or maybe it would be nice to have something like that playing at a party (maybe with pictures from a recent trip), but for my own use, I simply use the left and right keys.

Along the same lines, you can view an image in “full screen” mode—meaning that only the image will be shown, not the rest of your applications and your Windows taskbar and your desktop—by simply hitting Enter. Again, so elegant! When you’re done with full screen mode, hitting Esc again will bring it back to normal. (As with using the regular window, you have options as to how you want the pictures to be scaled (or not scaled) in full-screen mode, but in this case there is no menu, so you really do have to use the Preferences dialog to set this.)

Now, although IrfanView is primarily built for viewing pictures, it has some editing features that I’ll just briefly mention:

Of course it can easily crop images, but so can any image manipulation program out there, and most image viewers. (I mentioned the ability to “temporarily crop” an image for viewing, but you can do a “real” crop as well, and save your changes.)
It has the ability to do a batch rename of a bunch of pictures. For example, suppose you go on a trip to Florida, you get all the pictures off your camera, and have them in a directory, but they’re all named something like IMG00079.jpg, IMG00080.jpg, IMG00081.jpg, etc. You can use IrfanView’s batch rename function to give them all more meaningful names; maybe Florida_01.jpg, Florida_02.jpg, Florida_03.jpg, etc.
- For a simple rename of one particular file, another handy keyboard shortcut: simply hit the S key, and IrfanView will bring up the “Save As” window, so you can give the image a new name (or save it in a different format; e.g. you could use this to convert a JPG to a GIF.)
You can very easily rotate an image, using the R and L keys (to rotate right and left, respectively), for those cases where you tilted your camera to the side, so your pictures are sideways.
There are many settings for adjusting the brightness or contrast of the picture, editing the colour scheme, applying effects like blur, etc.
Similar to the batch rename feature, I can also generate a set of “thumbnails.” If I have a number of images in a directory, I can have IrfanView go through that directory, and for each image, it will create a “thumbnail” image—a smaller version of the image. This might be useful if you were creating a website, and you wanted to have small previews of the pictures, and when someone clicks the preview you show them the real, full-sized image.
Finally—and I never discovered this feature until I was writing this post!—IrfanView can do screenshots which include the mouse. It’s very easy in Windows to do a screenshot—use the PrtScn key to get the whole desktop, or Alt+PrtScn to get just the active window—but you can’t get the mouse that way. If you want to get a screenshot which shows the user using a particular menu, for example, you can’t do it. So until now, I’ve been using other programs like Snagit for that type of work, but they cost money. I’ve now realized that IrfanView can do it too, and it’s free.

I’ve mentioned the simplicity of the keyboard shortcuts a couple of times; maybe you’re wondering why I think it’s such a big deal that you can rotate an image right in IrfanView by hitting the R key, instead of Ctrl+R or Alt+R. Why I’m so thrilled to be able to close the application using the Esc key, instead of Alt+F4. (Of course, you can still use Alt+F4 if you want to.) The thing is, it really is useful to have the keyboard shortcuts in IrfanView so simple, and every application would—the only reason most applications don’t do this is because they can’t. Almost all applications require a combination of the Alt key or the Ctrl key and some other key for their keyboard shortcuts because the keyboard is usually being used for other things, so you have to differentiate the user typing from the user entering a command. But for an image viewing program, you’re not using the keyboard for anything; any time you hit any key, it’s a command. The thing is, developers are so used to using Alt and Ctrl for keyboard shortcuts that even for other image viewing programs, they do the same thing—Irfan had to think outside the box not to use Alt and Ctrl (in most cases), and I’m glad he did. The only time he resorted to using Ctrl or Alt or Shift is when a shortcut key was already taken, and he had to differentiate. “I’d like to use R to ‘reload’ an image, but I already used R for ‘rotate right’ so I’ll use Shift+R to ‘reload’ instead.”

In summary: IrfanView is a lightweight image viewing program which doesn’t get in the way, and does everything possible to make it easy to view images. And yet, even with its simplicity, it also provides some powerful features for day-to-day image editing. It’ll never be Photoshop, but of course it doesn’t try to be.

It took me a while, on Ubuntu, to find a comparable image viewing application. I didn’t even care about editing—I’d use GIMP if I had to edit anything—I just wanted a lightweight image viewer, that I could dismiss with the Esc key and navigate back and forth with the left and right arrow keys and go to fullscreen mode with the Enter key. (In other words, I wanted IrfanView for Linux.) I finally did find such a program, and it’s GPicView. It’s even more lightweight than IrfanView, in the sense that there are no editing capabilities, although it doesn’t make it any quicker to load than IrfanView. (You use F11 to go full-screen, instead of Enter, but that doesn’t matter—it’s still just one key, rather than a multiple-key combination. It even lets you rotate left and right using the L and R keys, just like IrfanView!)

I highly recommend IrfanView for day-to-day viewing of images. Any time a program can get out of the user’s way, and simply get its job done, it’s well worth the download. The fact that it’s free, lightweight, a small download, and has never caused me any issues after years of use are all additional points in its favour.

Software serna Loves

2009-10-19T16:15:00.003-04:00

sernaferna PermaPost

I’ve been thinking about this for a while: I’m going to do a series of posts on software that I enjoy using. There’s a lot of software that I use every single day because I have to, and some is good and some isn’t. For example, I have Microsoft Outlook running at all times; as soon as I boot up my laptop in the morning I open it, and it’s the last thing I close when shutting down. Outlook is a great PIM application, which I use both at home and at work, and I’ll probably continue to stick with it (when I’m on Windows)—but it won’t make this list. This list is for software that goes above and beyond.

There are some programs that are just so well designed, so well done, that I really enjoy using them. These are the programs that I immediately install whenever I get a new computer, because I don’t want to live without them. Maybe they make my life simpler, or maybe they’re just easier to use—or more enjoyable to use—than their counterparts.

In other words, this will be a series of posts in which I unabashedly gush about certain programs.

Here’s the list (which will grow, as I add posts):

On Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize

2009-10-14T18:57:00.000-04:00

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the fact that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s the rare sort of issue that unites both liberals and conservatives: “Barack won the Nobel Peace Prize?!? He hasn’t done anything!” And I don’t have much to add to that. But I will quote a post on The Nation’s blog, from Katrina Vanden Heuvel:

I think those who argue that the Prize is cheapened are just plain silly. The Prize doesn’t go to only those who have succeeded in their efforts, nor is it a lifetime achievement award. Instead, it is often and wisely given to endorse and encourage those who are working to bring about a better and more peaceful world. As Thorbjorn Jagland, the Committee’s new Chair, said: “It’s important for the committee to recognize people who are struggling and idealistic, but we cannot do that every year. We must from time go into the real of realpolitik. It is always a mix of idealism and realpolitik that can change the world.”

It’s not a prize they give to people who have done something for peace—at least not always—but a prize that is sometimes given to someone who has promise of doing something for peace, which is what they’ve done in this case.

And, to put things in perspective, another quote from that same article:

Finally, for those who are really worried about the devaluing of the Peace Price (and this crowd includes people who’ve been bashing peace for decades), remember that Henry Kissinger is a previous winner. (Or, as Maureen Dowd put it, “Any peace prize that goes to Henry Kissinger but not Gandhi ain’t worth a can of Alpo.”)

Not that I’m arguing that they were right to award the prize to him. I’m reserving judgement on that. I just wanted to reemphasize an alternate point of view. And frankly, Maureen Dowd is right: They never gave the award to Gandhi, and they gave it to frigging Henry Kissinger. Kissinger! Frankly, if they felt that Henry Kissinger deserved a Nobel Peace Prize, then I don’t really have a lot of faith in their judgement.

My point? I have none.

No, wait! My point is this: Take the award away from Obama, and give it posthumously to Gandhi. And take Kissinger’s award, put it in a lead box, coat it in cement, throw it in the ocean, and pretend that it never happened.

Blog Comments

2009-10-13T12:54:00.001-04:00

I read a couple of blog posts today discussing the topic of comments on blogs. Two sides of a debate, if you will (except I don’t know if anyone’s actually debating the issue).

First there was a post by Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror, called Finally, a Definition of Programming I Can Actually Understand, in which he’s very much in favour of comments. A representative quote:

As I said in How To Advertise on Your Blog Without (Completely) Selling Out:
It’s an open secret amongst bloggers that the blog comments are often better than the original blog post, and it’s because the community collectively knows far more than you or I will ever know.
Indeed, the best part of a blog post often begins where the blog post ends. If you are offended by that, I humbly submit you don’t understand why blogs work.
A blog without comments is like Amazon without user reviews. Is it really even worth using at that point? The products themselves are commodities; I could buy them anywhere. Having dozens of highly relevant, informed user reviews means I’ll almost always buy stuff from Amazon given the chance. It’s a huge competitive advantage.

Jeff’s making a pretty good case that comments are an integral part of the medium of blogging; that blogs aren’t essays, per se, they’re forms of communication, and if the communication is one-sided, then it’s broken.

On the other side of the coin, we’ve got Joel Spolsky from Joel on Software fame, in an article called Learning from Dave Winer in which he argues that comments are basically just noise. I’ll post another representative quote (which actually starts with its own quote, from Dave Winer):

“…to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments may act to make something not a blog…. The cool thing about blogs is that while they may be quiet, and it may be hard to find what you’re looking for, at least you can say what you think without being shouted down. This makes it possible for unpopular ideas to be expressed. And if you know history, the most important ideas often are the unpopular ones…. That’s what’s important about blogs, not that people can comment on your ideas. As long as they can start their own blog, there will be no shortage of places to comment.”
The important thing to notice here is that Dave does not see blog comments as productive to the free exchange of ideas. They are a part of the problem, not the solution. You don’t have a right to post your thoughts at the bottom of someone else’s thoughts. That’s not freedom of expression, that’s an infringement on their freedom of expression. Get your own space, write compelling things, and if your ideas are smart, they’ll be linked to, and Google will notice, and you’ll move up in PageRank, and you’ll have influence and your ideas will have power.

So on the one hand we have Jeff Atwood with his assertion that comments are an integral part of the medium, and you’ve got Joel Spolsky with his assertion that comments are mostly noise, and don’t add anything to the discussion—that if you really had something to say, you’d get your own blog and say it there. And that the magic of PageRank would take care of adding structure to the conversation.

Long time readers (if any) will probably not be surprised to hear that I’m mostly with Joel on this one. But the conversation got me thinking. In fact, it was Atwood’s post that I read first, and only got to Spolsky’s post because Jeff linked to it. (In fact, my wife’s organization has started a blog, and I was planning to send her the link to Atwood’s post, along with a link to The Corporate Weblog Manifesto. I probably won’t bother anymore; I’ll just send her a link to this post, and say “read the posts that I linked to”.)

So I did some more thinking on the subject. I think it comes down to what kind of a blog you’re trying to create; if you’re trying to build a community, then of course Atwood’s right: comments are an integral part of that, and Atwood makes a good case that spending some time with them is an important way to build that community. Others will have their own blogs, and will also contribute to the discussion that way, but comments allow for a much more immediate way to do that. On the other hand, if your blog is more of a personal thing, and a way to get your own opinions voiced, then Spolsky is right, comments will generate more noise than usefulness.

Which also explains why I am more closely aligned with Spolsky when it comes to my blog. This blog is not intended to be a community; it’s intended for me to spout my own personal opinions, for my own personal use. In fact, all of my blogs are really more for my own benefit than anyone else’s; if nobody ever reads the serna Bible Blog it’s cool with me, because I’ll still be getting my own use out of it. Same with the serna Book Blog. I write all of my blogs as if there are readers, but I don’t really care if there really are. (That’s right: still no stat counter on this or any other of my blogs.) That’s not to say that I discourage comments, but I must say that any time I do get notified of a comment—on any of my blogs—I immediately get a bad feeling in my gut, and only after I’ve read the comment and found it to be positive (and/or helpful) does the feeling go away. When I get an email from Blogger saying “so and so has left a new comment on your post such and such”, my initial reaction is always “oh no, what now…” And that’s despite the fact that most of the comments I get these days are helpful and/or positive.

It extends even to blogs that I read; I rarely read the comments on any blog. I’ll look on Google for other bloggers who are posting about the same topic, but I don’t look down to see what the commenters are saying. Some blogs are better than others, of course. Some have active communities, where the comments will provide useful discussion and a frank exchange of ideas. (Ironically, the majority of comments I get on this blog are in that category—or, at the very least, friendly.) Other blogs will have a maelstrom of noise so powerful that after reading them it’s hard to have intelligent conversation to anyone about anything for thirty minutes after; you find yourself afraid to compliment a fellow employee’s shirt for fear of having someone jump out beside you and tell you you’re a fool and don’t know what you’re talking about and Microsoft sucks.

Perhaps it’s a nature vs. nurture discussion; maybe Jeff Atwood simply “grew up” with friendly blogs that had intelligent conversations happening in the comments, while Joel Spolsky and I “grew up” with blogs frequented by trolls with nothing better to do with their time than telling us that we’re fools.

The search feature on this blog

2009-09-28T09:26:00.002-04:00

Every time I create a blog—and how sad is it that I can even use that phrase; most people only ever have one blog—I do my best to keep Blogger’s little “navbar” at the top, so that you can use the search feature. (The one exception is the serna Book Blog, where I just couldn’t make it fit.) Really, it’s not even for your use, it’s for mine; if I want to refer to a previous post I’ve written, I want to be able search for it, and find it quickly.

But there’s one problem with the feature: it doesn’t work. You’d think that implementing a search feature for a blog should be easy; I’m not even looking for PageRank or anything, just a simple text search, but it just plain doesn’t work. Since I started this blog, there have been isolated incidents when it did work, but lately it hasn’t worked at all.

And when I say “it doesn’t work” I mean it doesn’t return any results. I can go to that little search box and type in a word, and Blogger will tell me I got no results; I can do the same search on Google, and tell Google to only look at results from this blog, and Google will find the results. How can an external search engine find results when Blogger’s own search can’t?!? (To do this in Google, use the site keyword; e.g. to search this blog for the word “multitask” you’d search for this:

Now, this blog has been March of 2005, but I won’t go back that far. Let’s just assume that the feature has only been broken since I updated to the “new” Blogger, in January of 2007. (I love the irony of linking to a post that I’d meant to delete, and never did.) Even if the feature has only been broken since then, that’s still two and a half years that the search feature hasn’t worked. And, as I say, I always ensure when making updates to the blogs’ templates to keep that “navbar” handy for my readers, because I’m always assuming that some day Blogger will fix it. It only occurred to me today that two and a half years is plenty of time to fix something as simple as a text search, so if they haven’t done it by now, they probably never will.

If I ever get a couple of hours of spare time, I guess I should remove all of the navbars, and implement search boxes on all of my blogs, that use Google instead of Blogger’s search.

Multitasking

2009-09-28T09:09:00.001-04:00

I love coincidences. Here’s another example.

I was talking with some folks on Friday about multitasking, and about the fact that the human brain just isn’t capable of it. They’ve done study after study, and it turns out that doing multiple things at once is much less inefficient than doing each thing, finishing it, and then starting the next thing. Your brain can’t do two things at once, so it has to keep switching back and forth between activities. And if you’re reading that and thinking that you’re the exception to the rule—“but serna, I can multitask just fine!”—you should also know that those studies also show another interesting factor: The people being studied always think that they’re being more efficient, when they’re multitasking, even though they’re not.

So after having this conversation on Friday, today I read a post on Coding Horror about The Multi-Tasking Myth. He even had a quote from Joel Spolsky on the subject:

The trick here is that when you manage programmers, specifically, task switches take a really, really, really long time. That’s because programming is the kind of task where you have to keep a lot of things in your head at once. The more things you remember at once, the more productive you are at programming. A programmer coding at full throttle is keeping zillions of things in their head at once: everything from names of variables, data structures, important APIs, the names of utility functions that they wrote and call a lot, even the name of the subdirectory where they store their source code. If you send that programmer to Crete for a three week vacation, they will forget it all. The human brain seems to move it out of short-term RAM and swaps it out onto a backup tape where it takes forever to retrieve.

And I can really relate to that quote, because I’ve been doing some programming lately. We want to do something fairly complex at work, and I wanted to build a reference implementation, that the developers could work from. If they got stuck on any particular piece, they could look back at my implementation, and find out how I’d overcome that issue. But I was very inefficient; it took me days to do something that should have been doable in a day, because I’m constantly being interrupted for this or that meeting, or an urgent question. And as a result of that (along with the fact that programming is not a normal part of my job anymore, and I’m out of practice), I wasn’t able to maintain any of those “zillions of things” in my head. (The Jargon File calls this “juggling eggs”.) I’d create a member variable I wanted to use somewhere, and find myself constantly scrolling back and forth, saying, “what did I call that variable?” and then, a few minutes later, “wait, what did I call that variable again?”

I very much want to turn this into a diatribe against BlackBerries, but I won’t. But I want to. So I’d better stop typing now.

Revisiting My Revisitation of Capitalism

2009-09-22T16:11:00.001-04:00

My last post had a link to an article in The Nation. Well… here’s another one. The Nation reviewed Capitalism.

The most interesting part of the article wasn’t actually part of the article itself, it was a footnote:

Editor’s Note: Stay tuned this week for a Q&A between author Naomi Klein and Michael Moore, appearing exclusively on TheNation.com

Michael Moore’s Capitalism Movie Revisited

2009-09-16T15:50:00.001-04:00

Based on a comment on a previous post, I thought I’d mention that Michael Moore was on Leno the other day. You can read an article about it here, which also includes a link to a video of the interview itself. (I was at work when I posted this, so I didn’t get a chance to see the video.)

The Palm Pre: serna’s Tale of Woe

2009-09-05T13:24:00.001-04:00

Okay, I admit it; this is a pretty lame form of “woe”.

It started in January. I saw the phone of my dreams, and wanted it badly. I mean, go back to that link to my previous post, and watch the YouTube video—isn’t that a beautiful device? It was the first phone I saw that convinced me that having the phone tightly integrated to the web was a good idea, even though Canadian cell phone carriers are thieves when it comes to how much they charge for data.

But then in February my phone died, and I had to get a replacement, so I bought the iPhone. Which is also a beautiful device. (The Pre is beautiful in a certain way, the iPhone is just plain beautiful.) But when I bought the iPhone, it had not yet been announced if or how the Pre would be launched in Canada; I still assumed that Rogers would get the Pre, because, let’s face it, Bell Mobility hasn’t had a lot of cool devices over the last number of years. So when I bought the iPhone, I made a critical mistake: Assuming that Rogers was going to get the Pre—and that I could switch to the Pre when it came out, and let Andrea take my iPhone—I agreed to sign up for a three year contract with Rogers, so that I could get the iPhone cheaper.

So when Bell announced that they were getting the Pre, and when I found out that Rogers wasn’t, I was disappointed; I didn’t want to have to switch my service to Bell. But the real pain came the week that Bell was launching the Pre. I was getting all excited; I went to Best Buy, because they had those little plastic display models of the Pre, so that I could touch it. I read up some more literature and watched more videos of the Pre in action.

And then I called Rogers, to deal with that pesky three year contract issue.

“How much would it cost me to break my contract, if I left now?”

“Well, let’s see. It would cost you $400 to break your voice plan—$20 per month, to a maximum of $400—and an additional $100 to break your data plan—$X per month to a maximum of $100. So it would be $500.”

“Oh. Well… thanks for your time.”

So no Pre for serna. I’m not paying $500 to break my contract. (I would have been willing to pay something—I’m not sure how high my limit would have been, but something—but $500 is too much.)

Palm will be launching a GSM version of the Pre in Europe later this year; some are mentioning the possibility that Rogers might also launch a GSM version around the same time. That would be nice. But in the meantime, I’ve got the iPhone.

Which raises the question of what Andrea is going to do; she wanted the iPhone, when I was done with it. Her phone is lousy, and doesn’t always work. What do we do about her? Do we wait until Rogers [hopefully] launches the Pre, and then do what we’d originally planned to do? Or does she give up her phone altogether, and go to Bell, and get the Pre herself?

Who knows. When my heartache wears off, we’ll think about it some more.

Capitalism: A Love Story

2009-08-25T08:38:00.000-04:00

A new film from Michael Moore.

CT Scan

2009-08-12T12:28:00.001-04:00

I’ve already written about my cystoscopy, last year. They never found anything, but my urologist is still on a witch hunt through my insides, trying to find something wrong with me. He sends me for an ultrasound every six months, but he’s not getting enough information, so he decided last week to send me for a CT scan. (This is the one where you lie on a table, and they pass you through a big donut-looking thing. If you click the previous link to the Wikipedia article, you’ll see a picture.)

There was surprisingly little preparation I had to do, before the CT scan. I wasn’t supposed to eat for about six hours ahead of time, but I was allowed to drink “clear liquids”—which, interestingly enough, included coffee, as long as I drank it black. (If I were to put cream or milk in it, that wouldn’t be allowed.)

I showed up at the hospital, filled out the form, and signed a form that indicated I agreed to the risk that was incurred by injecting radioactive dye into my system. I then had a short wait in the waiting room, before they brought me to the change room. I changed into the hospital gown—I’ll refrain from making the usual comments about hospital gowns, but in this case I was allowed to keep on most of my clothes under the robe; I just had to remove my pants. Another short wait—I’d brought a book, but I didn’t know what was ahead of me, so I might not have been paying that much attention—and then they brought me to the room.

She had me lay down on the table, on my back, and explained to me what was going to happen, while she put the needle in my arm that would be used for injecting the dye. (I was looking away when she was putting the needle in, because I always do, but I distinctly heard her say the word “whoops” while she was doing it. Later on, when I looked at my arm, I saw two distinct needle marks, so she obviously missed the first time.)

But she seemed to be repeating herself, because she mentioned some things that were going to happen a couple of times. And she told me that when they injected the dye, I was going to feel warm all over—especially my arm, where the needle was located—I was going to get a weird taste in my mouth, and it was going to feel like I was peeing. Which is fine, that all makes sens— wait a second! Did she say that it would feel like I was peeing?!? It suddenly occurred to me; the whole reason I’m here in the first place is that I have bladder problems—what if I did pee? But she laughed and assured me, “Nobody ever has!”

She had me put my arms above my head, and then she ran the bed through the donut. When I had passed through the other side, she hooked up the drip with the dye to the thing she’d put into my arm. (When you read that, are you shuddering as hard as I was when I wrote it? Anyway…) She went into the other room, and they did a pass without any dye in my system. There was a pre-recorded voice that came from the machine, “take a deep breath and hold it,” and then, “breathe normally.” It sounded very natural, for some reason, not pre-recorded, except that the second message, to breathe normally, was a bit cut off.

I have no idea why I included that little detail. It’s not important.

After the first pass, they told me they were going to inject the dye, and I felt it entering my system. I felt myself warming up all over, and a bit of the taste in my mouth, but it really wasn’t bad at all. Another pass through the donut, and then they disconnected the dye drip from the needle in my arm, and had me lie still for six minutes.

Then came the strangest part of the whole experience: After I’d lain there for six minutes, she came back in, and had me roll over. But she had me completely roll over; not roll over onto my stomach, but roll over onto my stomach and then keep rolling over, until I was back where I started. It’s like they were afraid that the dye might have settled at the bottom of my body, and wanted to mix it up again—which is, I must say, a fairly disturbing thought.

She had me put my arms above my head again, and rolled my bed through the donut, where she re-attached me to the dye drip. So it turns out that she hadn’t been repeating herself, earlier; they were doing some things multiple times. Another pass through the donut, and then they inserted more dye.

This time it was different, though. The first time they’d injected dye, it had been a mild warmth; this time, I felt my body getting hot. I really got the taste in my mouth, and I saw what she’d meant about feeling like I was peeing. (It didn’t feel exactly like that, but it was a feeling that was reminiscent.) Not only was it stronger this time, but they just kept shoving it in. Long after I’d thought it would stop, I could still feel it pumping into my system.

Finally, I went through one more pass of the donut. At that point, it was over. She pulled the needle out of my arm, and explained that there wasn’t really anything I had to do; just drink lots of liquids, to help clear the dye out of my system as quickly as possible.

In retrospect, I hope that I did drink a lot of liquids; I don’t like the idea of having radioactive dye sloshing through my system any longer than it has to be.

Tim Horton’s

2009-08-12T08:54:00.001-04:00

I’ve changed locations at work recently. Luckily, the new office still has a Tim Horton’s in the lobby. (Actually, it has two—it’s not so much an “office” as it is a “campus”.)

Unfortunately, the people working at the new Tim’s are… somewhat forgetful. For example, following is a typical conversation:

Tim’s Lady
Can I help you please?
serna
Can I get a medium double-double?
Tim’s Lady moves to the cream and sugar station
Tim’s Lady
Was that one cream and one sugar?
serna
No, double-double.

Wow. In the space of 10 seconds—if that—she can forget the order. If I want something else—maybe a double-double and a frosted cinnamon roll—then forget it. I need to order one thing at a time.

This on its own wouldn’t be worth posting about. But there’s a twist.

I often get my lunch from this Tim’s, since I don’t have time to go out for a real lunch. I never get my bread toasted—but once, they messed up the order, and toasted the bread anyway. Okay, no big deal; I’m not fussy. But now, the one thing that they remember about me at this Tim’s is that I like my bread toasted when I get my lunch there. Every time I order a sandwich there, the woman making it is surprised that I’m not getting the bread toasted.

You know what? On second thought, even with this twist, it probably wasn’t worth posting.

Tapped

2009-08-06T09:18:00.000-04:00

A trailer for the documentary Tapped. I hope it gets a lot of mainstream play.

Niagara-on-the-Lake

2009-07-22T09:24:00.001-04:00

I should have posted these a while ago. Andrea and I and a bunch of her cousins went to Niagara-on-the-Lake (NotL) a couple of weeks ago, for a winery tour/tasting, which was great.

While we were there, we went to the lakeshore, and noticed that from NotL you can actually see the Toronto skyline. I immediately pulled out my iPhone to snap a couple of pictures, only to find that the resolution on my phone isn’t nearly good enough to capture it.

Pictures with a different border have extra “notes” associated with them, on Flickr.

If I look really carefully at that first picture, I can see a pixel or two that might be the Toronto skyline. It was very apparent in person, but the iPhone camera just wasn’t powerful enough to capture it.

I did get some better pictures, though. We stepped back into the trees, and I managed to get a couple of nice pictures of the sun streaming down through the leaves.

K'NAAN

2009-07-20T09:30:00.001-04:00

Andrea has introduced me to a number of artists before they ever became popular; M.I.A. for example, and Lady Sovereign. The latest artist she’s introduced me to is K’NAAN.

An excellent example video is the one for Dreamer:

Two more examples, that I won’t bother to put here, I’ll just link to:

TIA—another example of a video that just perfectly fits the music.
ABC’s—not the cleverest video, but a great song, and it showcases his skills on the mic.

iPhone Revisited

2009-06-29T16:33:00.004-04:00

I just realized that I posted a “first thoughts” post on the iPhone post, but then I never posted about it again. What about my second thoughts?

First, and probably most importantly, it’s a lot more stable than my old phone was. That’s not saying much—the old one was terrible—but still; it’s nice to have a phone that works, and just keeps on working. Every once in a while, I do have to turn it off and on again, but it’s rare. (I think I’ve only turned it off maybe three or four times since I had it. That’s including the first time or two that I did it just for fun, when I first got it.)

One thing that annoys me more and more as time goes on, though, is the “auto-complete” feature they have when you’re typing. It’s just a bit too aggressive in when it decides to “auto-complete” what it thinks you’re trying to type. It works like this:

You start typing, with the virtual keyboard, and as you go, it tries to figure out if you really meant to type what you typed, or if you typed it by accident. For example, if you start typing “thr” it assumes that you probably meant to type “the” since the “r” is right next to the “e” (and “the” is a word whereas “thr” isn’t). This is all well and good, and most mobile devices have functionality somewhat like this. The difference, though—and it seems like such a small difference, but it turns out that it really is a big deal—is this: How do you tell the iPhone that you want to take its suggestion, instead of what you typed? On most devices, you’d probably hit Enter or specifically choose the word they’re suggesting, but on the iPhone, you hit the Space bar. So if you type “thr” and then hit Space, a funky little animation will pull out the “thr” and drop in a “the” and everyone’s happy. Except… what if you did mean to type “thr”? What if you’re working on a project called the Thermite Holding Reactor, and you keep using the acronym THR? Well, then what you have to do—every time you want to type that acronym—is type in THR, remember not to hit the Space, click a tiny little X to cancel the suggestion (see the screenshot below), and then hit Space to continue on. My problem is that I am a pretty fast typer, and it’s very hard to stop myself from hitting Space when I need to, so I’m constantly having to back up and re-type what I wanted to type.

There is one nice thing, though: if you type “thr” and hit Space, which replaces “thr” with “the”, and then backspace and type “thr” again, the next time you hit Space the iPhone won’t auto-correct that word again. It’s smart enough to realize that you just un-did what it had done, so it doesn’t do it again. Of course, the next time you want to use the “thr” acronym somewhere else, it will. There are some specific examples that have been bugging me:

I have been working on a project called BARRT, and every time I type BARRT—for example, if there’s a BARRT-related meeting that I want to put into my calendar—my iPhone keeps correcting it to “BARRY”.
Every time I try and use the word “wont”—which I am wont to do, from time to time—it changes it to “won’t”
Any time I type “txt” (yes, I’ve started to use some of these short forms when text messaging), it changes it to the all uppercase “TXT”

So the reason I started to type this post in the first place is that they’ve released updated software for the phone’s operating system, and it has some great new features. Well… when I say “great,” some of these features should have been there in the first place. I haven’t installed the update yet, but I’m looking forward to the following, at the very least:

You can now copy and paste. This should probably have been there in the first place, although I’m amazed how well I’ve been able to get on without it.
Notes can now sync with Outlook. I was surprised this wasn’t there for the first release, either.
You can now do voice memos. Before the iPhone, I’d never had a PDA that couldn’t do this—although, to be fair, the iPhone never marketed itself as a PDA, so I guess you can’t fault them for not having some PDA features. (I guess that would apply to syncing the notes, too.)
You can now send pictures over SMS. (It’s actually called MMS, when it contains more than just text.) I was shocked when the iPhone couldn’t do that; every camera phone does that these days. Not that I have much use for it, but still… how could they not include that feature? Anyway, I already ranted about this in my “first thoughts” post; the point is, with the upgraded operating system, you can.
Calendar can now connect to web-based CalDAV calendars, like Google Calendar and Yahoo! Calendar.

That last one is the one I plan to play with the most. I find that it’s a bit of a hassle to keep syncing my iPhone to Outlook every night, so I simply don’t—which means that I have to enter all of my appointments by hand, usually twice (once in Outlook and once on the phone), so I sometimes get lazy and miss typing some into the phone. Maybe I’ll find it easier to update a web-based calendar like Yahoo! or Google, which I can do throughout the day, and then sync to that? (Especially if I can get Outlook automatically syncing to one of those services.) I plan on spending some time trying to figure out the best way to keep both instances of Outlook (work and home), my iPhone, and my calendar(s) all in sync. (I’ll probably also start using both Google Calendar and Yahoo! calendar—I don’t currently use either—and see which one works better.)

Which will be great practice for the Pre, which I’m still looking forward to.

Wow, this was a long post, wasn’t it? It must have been all pent-up inside me, since I so rarely post these days…

1,000 Posts Coming Up

2009-06-23T10:09:00.001-04:00

As I posted my last post, I just noticed: I’ve posted 926 times to this blog. (This post is 927.) So pretty soon, I’ll be writing a summary of my first 1,000 posts to the blog.

Time flies.

Update

2009-06-23T10:07:00.001-04:00

I haven’t written here in a long time. Whoops. Some things have been happening, I just haven’t found time to come here and write them down. (Nothing really exciting, but still, things.)

I’ve changed offices, at work. I used to work in North York, and I’m not working in Mississauga. (Same company, just a different client and a different office.) I’m hoping this is a temporary move—I miss the people I used to work with—but we’ll see. On the plus side, though, the drive is much shorter. Especially on days when I don’t carpool with Andrea, I can make it to the office in fifteen minutes in the morning, and make it home in twenty to thirty minutes in the afternoon. (As opposed to forty-five minutes to the North York location—or maybe thirty on the way home, if I took the 407 toll road on the way home.)

We had our choir concert, a couple of weeks ago. I did a terrible job, this year, of advertising it to my friends. I did send some emails out to my coworkers, but I didn’t email most of my friends. But it went very well; we did an actual musical this year, and I think the folks in the choir did a really good job. Usually, for our concerts, we have a series of skits/scenes, interspersed with songs in between, but this year we did an actual musical. (Which was mostly like a normal concert—scenes interspersed with songs performed by the whole choir—except that some of the scenes had singing in them as well.)

Shortly after the concert, though, Andrea and I got a bit rundown. And then we heard that Andrea’s sister had been “exposed” to swine flu, and I started to get paranoid. To make matters worse, Andrea got a strange pain in her left arm, and suddenly I also had a strange pain in my left arm! swine flu! Isn’t one of the symptoms of swine flu muscle pain?!? Except that Andrea’s sister—the one who has supposedly been “exposed” to swine flu—never got sick. And neither did Andrea; she was rundown for a bit, and then she was fine, even though my sore throat continued. And her pain went away, even though my arm was killing me. And then we remembered: I’d recently started doing handstand pushups; it’s pretty easy to pull a muscle doing those types of pushups. I probably just pulled a muscle.

So I didn’t have swine flu. (Not that I was worried about it in the first place. Even if I’d had it, I wasn’t worried; it’s just the flu.) However, my cold did cause me to miss a bunch of stuff:

I missed a church business meeting on Friday evening, even though I was up for re-election as Deacon. (I was voted in anyway.)
I missed a family reunion on Saturday afternoon, that I had been greatly looking forward to.
I missed a reading by Andrea on Saturday evening.
I missed my god-daughter’s birthday party on Sunday afternoon.

I can’t think of anything else right now, but I’m sure other things happened recently, too.

Rainbow

2009-06-02T18:41:00.001-04:00

Okay, look, I know. Rainbows are about as cheezy a topic as you can get, when it comes to photography. But I’m posting these anyway, because this was a great one. I couldn’t get a good photo that showed the whole thing—lousy camera phone—but I could see the whole thing, end to end.

Someone definitely enjoyed their parking spot

2009-06-02T18:28:00.000-04:00

Is it a bad sign when you move to a new office, and find an empty Smirnoff bottle in the parking lot?

Advertising

2009-06-02T18:24:00.000-04:00

Is it true that they advertise differently to women than they do to men? I guess it is, based on this ad for an LG phone—one that was in the men’s room of a bar.

Roll Up the Rim, 2009

2009-05-12T12:59:00.001-04:00

I just realized that I never put up a summary of my RUTR winnings. For those of you who care about such things, enjoy.

Jim

2009-05-11T13:48:00.001-04:00

My step-father Jim passed away on April 30^th. He had been sick for a long time—I think I’ve mentioned it here before—so this wasn’t unexpected. My mom has now dealt with the death of two husbands; my father, who died suddenly of a heart attack when I was young, and now my step-father, who finally succumbed to a long illness.

I’m not really sure what I want to write about it, so I’ll just put down some random thoughts.

I went back to Chatham on April 26^th. We knew it was the end, by that point; he wasn’t really conscious, because they were keeping him comfortable by giving him lots of morphine. So there wasn’t much I could do for him, but I could provide some relief to my mom. She was in the hospital 24/7, but with me there, she could leave for a couple of hours to go home and get a shower, and maybe run some errands.

I probably spent more time with him in that last week than I did for the last few years of his life. Mostly I just sat by his bed, reading a novel—The World According to Garp, if it matters—and helping out when I could. Occasionally he would wake up and ask for some water, or some ginger ale. Or ask me to turn the fan on. Or he’d take his oxygen mask off—he hated wearing it, although he did better with it than many other people do—and I’d ask him to put it back on, or help him put it back on.

And occasionally he would stop breathing. Those were the tense moments for me. I’d be sitting beside the bed, hearing his laboured breath, and suddenly it would stop. I’d look over, wondering if it was the last moment, and then he’d start back up again. And then I’d breathe my own sigh of relief, and go back to my book.

Speaking of which, as mentioned, Jim was very good at keeping his oxygen mask on. He had to wear it all the time, and it became very uncomfortable, but he mostly kept it on. Once in a while, though, just for a break, he’d take it off. He may not even have been conscious of doing it; it was just a reflex, and he wasn’t that lucid to begin with.

But any time he’d do it, I’d give him some time, and then say, “Jim, you have to put your mask back on.” And he’d normally just put it back on. Once in a while, he’d be unable to do it, for whatever reason; the tubes would get tangled up, or he just wouldn’t have the strength. When that happened, I’d help him put it back on.

And I learned how useless I am, when it comes to caregiving. A simple thing like helping someone put their oxygen mask on was difficult for me. Because he had the mask on all the time, he had started to develop sores above his ears, where the elastic went across, so the nurses had put some kind of salve on them, and some gauze under the elastics. It took me a few tries to try and get the gauze right. All you had to do was put the gauze under the elastic, what could be easier, and yet I didn’t find it intuitive.

Once, when trying to get the mask back on, it was giving me some trouble, and I apologized. “Sorry,” I said to him, “I haven’t quite got the hang of this yet.”

“Me either,” he replied.

Another time, when putting the mask back on, I accidentally let go of the elastic, and it slapped into him, right on the sore spot above his ear. That was possibly the worst part of the week, for me; inflicting more pain on him was the last thing I wanted to do!

I got home from the hospital, the first night I was in town, wondering what I would be able to have for supper. It was 9:00, and nothing is open at 9:00; so I decided to stop by Sobey’s and pick up a steak, which I would BBQ for myself. My parents keep the BBQ in the garage—so that Jim could BBQ even when it’s raining, or in the winter—so I went out there to fire it up, and start cooking. And that’s when I realized: All of Jim’s oxygen tanks were in the garage. I was sure that it wouldn’t cause any kind of… you know… explosion, if I lit the BBQ. And yet… not so sure that I could bring myself to do it. So I brought it out into the driveway, instead, and did my steak there.

Later on in the week, after Jim passed away, we were all at home and Mom decided that she wanted steak again. Susan’s boyfriend Craig was there, and I mentioned to him my hesitation to start the BBQ around the oxygen tanks, and he told me not to worry about it; he and Susan had been smoking in there, and there hadn’t been an explosion, so we’d probably be fine. (He works in HVAC, so I figured he probably knew what he was talking about. And I was happy to keep the BBQ in the garage, since it was raining out.)

Eventually the end came, and it was how I had always sort of assumed it would happen: He passed away quietly, in the night. Mom was sleeping beside him, on her usual cot. The nurses woke her, to tell her that he was gone, and in her groggy state, she didn’t believe them at first.

I’m not sure, but I think this was the best way for him to go. Mom was there, with him, but she was asleep, so she didn’t have to witness his final moments.

Although Jim was my step-father, he wasn’t… how do I put this… he wasn’t the “fatherly type.” He wasn’t the type to teach me things, or do fatherly things like that. He did, however, teach me one thing. Sort of. I learned how to tie a tie from him.

I never knew how to tie one, so when I moved out and came to Toronto, he pre-tied one for me, and loosened it, and I brought it with me. Whenever I needed a tie I would slip it over my head and tighten it up. Eventually, though, I wanted to learn how to do it myself, so I “reverse engineered” it; I slowly untied it, in such a way that I figured out how he’d done it. And that’s how I learned to tie a tie.

However, it wasn’t the “proper” way to tie a tie. Either he did it in a more simplistic way, or I just didn’t get it right, but any time I tied a tie, it always came out slightly wrong, because of the way that I tied it.

Before Jim’s funeral, my uncle saw the way I’d tied my tie, and showed me the right way to do it. I saw this as highly ironic; one of the only things I ever learned from Jim was how to tie a tie, and when I went to his funeral, I showed up with my tie tied in a different way than what I had learned from him.

Jim had some tattoos on his arm, and on the knuckles of one of his hands. He’d always had them, as long as I’d known him; he must have done it very young. In fact, it seems to be a family tradition, because most or all of the men from his side of the family seem to have done it.

What I didn’t realize, however, is that he was embarrassed about them. I found out when we were making funeral arrangements, because he had requested that my mom have them fold his hands over each other, to cover up the tats.

That’s all I can think of to say on the subject. But I was also tasked with giving the eulogy at his funeral, so I’ll round out the post by including it here.

On behalf of the family, I’d like to thank you for your love and support at this time. We’re here to remember the life of a man whom I recently described as the strongest, most stubborn man I ever met, Jim Titus.
In theory, this should probably be the easiest eulogy to give. I know that Jim wouldn’t want me up here for too long, and that he wouldn’t want us to dwell on him, so I should be able to get out of here pretty quickly. In practice, though, I have the task of summing up the life of a very complicated man, and I don’t know if I could do that even if I had an hour. (I promise, I won’t be an hour.)
Actually, if any of the men in the room ever had their hair cut at Gord’s barber shop, they may know Jim better than I did. He didn’t have a whole lot of hair to cut, but what he did have, he liked to have it cut at Gord’s, because he loved shooting the breeze with the other men there. Which always shocks me, when I think of it, because Jim was a man of few words. The idea that he’d spend an afternoon shooting the breeze is surprising to me. To give you an idea, let me recreate a conversation I had with him every year, on the phone, on his birthday:
“Hello?”
“Hi Jim, it’s David. I just wanted to call and wish you a happy birthday.”
“Thanks. … Do you want to talk to your mother?”
Part of the reason that he didn’t like to talk might have been that he was going deaf. Well… selectively going deaf. It was hard to have a conversation with Jim, if you were in the same room with him, but if you were talking about him, when he was in the kitchen, he could apparently hear you perfectly. Mom had mentioned times when Jim was in the hospital, and she’d be out in the hall talking to the nurses about his medication, and he’d shout from the bed to correct them on what medications he was on.
Jim was a maintenance millwright at Eaton Yale for over 35 years. He also became the Union Steward, while he was there, and I know that this gave him a lot of pleasure. I only got to hear about issues from his side, of course, but I got the impression that Jim was very interested in fighting for what was right. He would fight for his people, and whenever he won a battle on someone’s behalf, he would come home very happy. He would get annoyed with people who wanted to fight for silly things, and I think the main reason is that these little battles would get in the way of his fighting for important things. There are a number of people in this room who I never met until this weekend, but I heard Jim mentioning your names at the dinner table, as he thrilled about the victories he won for you.
While he was at Eaton work took up much of his time, but the rest was devoted to family. Anyone who knew him knew that his family was very important to him. Jim had two sons—Eric and Danny—and two step-children, myself and my sister Susan. He also had a granddaughter, Kate-Lin. I know that Jim was very proud of all of us, and especially proud of his granddaughter. And when the family expanded—when Eric added his wife Marla, and I added my wife Andrea, and Susan added her husband Craig—Jim was more than happy to include them as part of his family. Jim also loved the pets in the family, especially his dog Charlie, whom you’ll notice in many of the pictures around the room; when Jim did relent, and allow his photo to be taken, he usually wanted Charlie—or his new puppies, Sam and Seth—in the picture with him.
Speaking of pictures, it was difficult to find pictures of Jim to put up for you, because, even though we have thousands of pictures back at the house, most of them were taken by Jim himself, so there aren’t many that include him. He had an amazing ability to capture great pictures, and although he went through a few cameras, and did trade up from time to time, he didn’t spend a lot of money on camera equipment. He just had a good eye, and skill with whatever camera he was using. Eric and his wife Marla were commenting just the other day that Jim’s pictures of their wedding were just as good as the photographer’s.
But I haven’t yet mentioned the most important person in Jim’s life, my mother and his wife, Carmen. (Jim’s nickname for her was “Charmin’.”) There were times when Jim might have been called crotchety. There are times when he might have been called grumpy. But there was never a time that I ever doubted his love for my mother. Jim was incredibly supportive of Mom: when she went back to school at the age of 37, when she opened her own law practice, when she joined the Rotary; in anything she did, he was always supportive.
As you all know, Jim had some health problems, which eventually caused him to leave his job. However, this did not stop him from living his life. Quite the contrary; whereas many people would have decided to take it easy, and catch up on their TV, with whatever strength he had, Jim used his free time to the best of his ability. (That’s not to say he didn’t enjoy his TV. I’m still ashamed to admit that at one time he used to not only watch, but tape, the Jerry Springer show.) But Jim began taking trips with Mom; he joined the Masons and the Shriners; he helped Mom out with Rotary. I’m sure many of the people in this room never even met Jim until after he’d retired, because you met him through some of these activities. The idea of stopping to rest just honestly never occurred to the man. He also took up coin collecting with a passion—which was a huge blessing for the rest of us, because it finally became easier to buy presents for him, at Christmas. Probably the strongest memory I’ll have of Jim is him on Christmas morning, Charlie on his lap, using a magnifying glass to look at his new coins. Other presents, which he was supposed to be opening, would gather at his feet, as he’d examine his new find.
All of his energy worked out to my benefit, because one of the areas in which he directed his energy was cooking. Jim was always a great cook, and my side of the family will probably miss him most when Easter and Thanksgiving come around, because he could cook a turkey like nobody’s business, and he made amazing stuffing. I’m hoping he passed on some of his recipes and expertise, but even if he did, none of us will have the natural skills in the kitchen that he did. It was just one of his gifts.
As mentioned at the beginning, this was a poor summary of Jim’s 61 years with us; it’s very slanted toward my own memories of Jim, and doesn’t even begin to touch on his life before entering my family. Everyone in this room could probably come up here and share a story or anecdote about how he touched our lives.

However, whatever your individual memories of Jim, it’s safe to say that we’re all remembering the same man. There wasn’t a “public Jim” and a “private Jim,” Jim was the same man for everyone who met him. A man so full of life that even now, seeing him in this room, it’s hard to believe that he’s not going to get up, tell a joke, and go back to the kitchen to make coffee for us.
I think the biggest testimony to his life, however, is that I’m up here talking about the many things he did, and not his illness, or his time in the hospital. He spent much of the last couple of years in and out of hospitals, and I’m very happy to note that that’s not how I was remembering him, as I wrote this. Jim accomplished a lot; he touched a lot of people’s lives, and he helped to shape ours, and I’m grateful to say that that’s what I’ll remember about him.
I might have cried, as I wrote this, but I spent more time smiling than crying. And he would have wanted that, too.

Omelet (Pt. II)

2009-04-01T17:29:00.002-04:00

Wikked Lil' Grrrl says:
My sympathies on your omelet. My friend Jessica also commiserates.

sernaferna says:
lol

sernaferna says:
Tahnk you.

sernaferna says:
And thank Jessica for me, too.

Wikked Lil' Grrrl says:
Done and done.

sernaferna says:
It ended up being not too bad, for taste - a little burnt on the bottom, but that was it.

sernaferna says:
I'm sure Jessica will be relieved to hear that. hehe

Wikked Lil' Grrrl says:
I'll make sure to let her know

makes me want eggs, though.

Omelet

2009-04-01T10:07:00.000-04:00

I’ve gotten pretty good at flipping an omelet. Sometimes it’s a little messy, but often I can just get it right where I want it, landing perfectly in the pan.

But there are other times when it just doesn’t work well at all.

All Kinds of Death

2009-03-24T10:05:00.001-04:00

Er… I think the following headline might be a bit misleading:Don’t eat that burger! You might die in a car crash!

Change Machine Located Here

2009-03-23T13:07:00.000-04:00

This might be my favourite useless sign of all time:You may have your own favourites; my intent is not to argue about which signs are more useless.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU

2009-03-19T15:08:00.000-04:00

Roll up the Rim—Do I Write About Anything Else?

2009-03-19T15:06:00.002-04:00

Wikked Lil' Grrrl says:
10.7% win rate? Cut your losses and walk away right now.

sernaferna says:
lol

sernaferna says:
Was talking to someone this morning. She rulled up her FIRST rim today, and won a coffee.

Wikked Lil' Grrrl says:
I have never EVER rulled a rim and won.

I've ROLLED a few and won... but never rulled and won.

sernaferna says:
Hold on, I can't type for a few minutes until my laughter dies down. \

I like the way you think!

2009-03-17T09:23:00.001-04:00

Here’s a conversation which demonstrates why people develop gambling addictions.

Roll up the Rim
INT: serna and a colleague are at the office; serna is holding a Tim Horton’s coffee
Colleague
Have you won anything yet?
serna
So far, I’ve won two coffees and a donut. Which puts me at about 12%.
Colleauge
You should buy more!

Hence the title of this post.

Roll up the Rim 2009

2009-03-06T16:25:00.001-05:00

Roll up the Rim season has started again. And as usual, I’ve put up a spreadsheet online. (There is a link over on the right-hand side of the blog.) But I’ve already messed up: I missed not one, but two coffees! I had two yesterday, and forgot to roll up the rim on both of them.

Apple vs. Palm?

2009-02-14T13:02:00.001-05:00

While I’m thinking about the iPhone, I thought I’d link to this article from engadget, which talks about the lawsuit between Apple and Palm. When I’d first heard that Apple was suing Palm, my immediate thought was, “Oh no! That might delay the release of the Pre!” Luckily, this article shows that it’s a bit more complicated than that. I’m hoping the Pre won’t be delayed at all.

iPhone: First Thoughts

2009-02-14T12:52:00.000-05:00

In my last “I want a Pre when oh when will they release the Pre” post, I mentioned the possibility of getting an iPhone, “just until a better phone can come along.” Not too long after writing that post, my phone died. When when I say it died, I mean it died—it couldn’t do anything.

So I took my own advice, and got an iPhone. The good news is that the best combination voice and data plan that I could find is the one that Rogers offers for the iPhone, so it worked out nicely. And, when the Pre finally gets launched, I’ll be able to slide that into my iPhone voice/data plan, and slide my iPhone on over to Andrea (who shares my plan), and everyone’s happy.

So what are my thoughts on the iPhone, based on a couple of weeks of usage? Read on.

First of all, the user interface is great. It’s very intuitive, and I can see why the iPhone (and iPod Touch) have been so popular. What you have to remember, though, is that Apple has never marketed the iPhone as a “smartphone”—it’s just an iPod with a phone built in. So it’s a little hard to get used to the fact that there isn’t much you can customize on the device; you use it the way Apple intends you to, end of story. (An example: To my knowledge—and I’ve looked—you can’t change the sound that the phone uses when you receive a new mail, or when you get a text message. You can create custom ringtones, and assign different ringtones to different contacts, but you can’t change the sound that’s used when you get a text? What’s that about?)

Accessing the internet is also done well. Apple made a great choice: Any time you try to access the internet, the phone looks for wifi networks first, and if it finds one, it tries to use that. Only if it can’t— or if it’s a network you don’t have connection info for—it will then fall back to the 3G network. Speaking of which, the 3G network is as fast as Rogers’ marketing would have you believe; there’s not a noticeable speed difference between the 3G network and wifi.

And, while we’re on the topic of the internet, the built-in web browser (a mobile version of Safari) is also great. Just like anything else on the phone, you can tell that the engineers really “got” the whole paradigm of the user interface for the iPhone. Similarly, the Map application (with GPS) is pretty good, and I like the way they do SMS. I didn’t so much like the weather app, but The Weather Network had a better one, which was free, so it wasn’t such a big deal, and I don’t like their Notes application (which doesn’t even sync with notes in Outlook), but I’m sure I’ll soon be downloading a better one.

Speaking of downloading apps, here’s my biggest problem with the phone, although it wasn’t a surprise: Everything drives you to iTunes. Want to get a cool application? You download it from iTunes. (There are many, many free ones, so you don’t necessarily have to spend money, if you don’t want; so far, I haven’t paid for anything from iTunes, even though I have to log in with my username and password to download anything.) Want to get a ringtone? Go to iTunes, buy one for a dollar, and then spend another dollar to convert it to a ringtone. According to Apple’s documentation, you’d think that’s your only option. (Luckily, I found an article that explains how to create ringtones for free, using the iTunes app on your computer. Unfortunately, it didn’t work at first; I created three ringtones, and only one would transfer to the phone. I must have spent a couple of hours on it, before I read a bit further in the comments for that article, and found out that your ringtone has to be forty seconds or less, and two of mine were over. Fixing that got me working, but the frustrating thing is that one of them was only over by a few milliseconds, so it was hard to track down.) Even to sync the phone with Outlook, for my calendar and contacts, it goes through iTunes. (And synchronizing takes a long time; two or three minutes, compared to the few seconds it used to take with my old phone, using Microsoft ActiveSync.)

Another cool feature—which should be the most obvious feature—is that I have a phone that can play music again. My last phone could play music, it had a mobile version of Windows Media Player on it, and I put in a 1GB memory card to load songs onto, but the problem is that the device was buggy, and WMP would stop playing music after a couple of weeks of usage. (The song would “play,” and WMP would control everything just like normal, but no sound would come out.) So just the fact that I can listen to music from time to time is a nice plus. And, along those lines, I like the way the headphones work, that came with it. It’s very intuitive to use them to listen to music, and/or answer the phone (using the built-in microphone, which doubles as a button for playing/pausing music, and answering the phone).

There is one more downfall, though, and it’s one that I can’t fault Apple for: Before buying this phone, I had already done all of that research into the Palm Pre. So I keep expecting the iPhone to be able to do things that the Pre will be able to do, and it doesn’t quite work as I’d expect it to. For example, I was surprised to find that I can’t get photos off of the iPhone onto a computer, unless I do it through iTunes! I can plug the phone into Ubuntu, and Ubuntu will recognize it as a camera, but it can’t find the photos. Similarly, the only way to get pictures onto the device are to take them with the built-in camera, or transfer them through iTunes. Oh, speaking of photos, there was another limitation that absolutely floored me: The iPhone can’t send or receive images through SMS. What?!? Phones have been doing this for years! Why would Apple cripple that? The only way for me to send someone a photo from the phone is to email it to them. Now, it’s great that I can send and receive email from the iPhone, but sometimes I’d really just prefer to send it as a text message. And if someone tries to send me a photo over SMS, all I get is a text message from Rogers, saying, “by the say, someone has sent you a picture. Go to picturemessaging.rogers.com from your phone or from a computer to view it.” And the really frustrating thing? I can access any website on the internet using Safari on the iPhone—except for the picturemessaging.rogers.com site from Rogers! So if you ever send me a picture in a text message, I won’t be able to view it until I’m able to get to a computer. Frigging ridiculous.

Anyway, I don’t want to end on a rant, because I really do like the device. The phone works great, the apps are great, and the user interface is great. I just can’t wait for the Pre to be released, so that I can get my hands on a real smartphone.

The Sudden Disappearance of Seetha

2009-01-22T09:48:00.001-05:00

There is something I’ve wanted to write about for… well, a few years now. But I wasn’t allowed to. Andrea has written a novel, called The Sudden Disappearance of Seetha.

The books is currently available on Amazon.ca (and Amazon.com for that matter). It won’t officially be released until January 27^th, but you can pre-order it.

However, even though the book isn’t supposed to be released until January 27^th, it was spotted in Yorkdale! We stopped by yesterday to see it.

My Next Phone? (Pt. III)

2009-01-19T13:11:00.001-05:00

I think I’ve been behind the curve. I’ve been resisting getting a phone that’s so dependent on the internet—meaning that it’s dependent on my cellular carrier’s ridiculous rates—but that’s the wave of the… er… present. It definitely hit me during the video I linked to in my last post. (And, incidentally, now that I’m in Windows, I notice that I didn’t get the symbol right in Pre. So I’m not going to bother trying anymore. It looked weird in Firefox on Ubuntu, it looks weird in Firefox on Windows, and it’s just a square in Chrome and IE on Windows.)

Maybe I should have gotten an iPhone when it was still cool. I mean, I’d rather wait for the Pre, but it’s not going to be released until “the first half of 2009” and I don’t know if they’ll release an unlocked version (like they did with the Centro). In fact, they have some kind of exclusive launch with an American carrier, so there’s a good chance that they won’t have an unlocked version—meaning I could be waiting a long time for the thing to get released.

I might get stuck getting an iPhone just until a better phone can come along.

My Next Phone? (Pt. II)

2009-01-17T12:05:00.000-05:00

For my last few posts, I’ve been putting up images and videos. I should have warned my readers not to get used to it, because my blog is still mostly text-based, but unfortunately, I didn’t. And I got a comment from a friend of mine, saying that I should keep doing that. So he’s going to be disappointed, because I doubt most of my posts in the future are going to have images or videos. (Sorry Stephen.)

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I found another video of the Palm Pre̅. (I apologize for the weird symbol above Pre̅; I’m not sure if that’s the right character to use for that e̅.) It’s a very long video—over an hour—but it shows off the device very well. (As it should, since it’s the unveiling of the device at CES.)

My next phone?

2009-01-10T12:53:00.001-05:00

Anyone who’s seen the iPhone knows that it’s very cool technology. Just from the commercials it looks great, but if you’ave actually gotten your hands on one, the impression is backed up; it’s impressive.

But I didn’t want one, because it’s not really built for synchronization, it’s built for doing everything over the air. (It can synchronize, but, surprise surprise, it syncs with iTunes.) Which means that you need a good data plan from your carrier—and Canadian cellular service providers are outright thieves when it comes to data costs for cell phones. Rogers came up with a temporary, kind-of-reasonable service plan when they released the iPhone in Canada, but it still wasn’t great when you compare how much we’re paying with Europeans, or… well, anyone else in the world. (That article is probably out of date, but I’m pretty sure the main point still stands.)

But I need something. The phone I’m currently using has gotten worse and worse over the years. (Does software actually degrade over time? Whenever I use a smart phone based on a Microsoft operating system, it seems so.) So I wanted to get away from a Microsoft-based device; what does that leave? RIM? I don’t want live email, which is the thing that device is built around. As mentioned, I don’t really want to do everything over the air; I just want to sync with Outlook (or whatever), which leaves out the iPhone, and also the forthcoming Google device.

So I pretty much settled on the Palm Centro. I haven’t used the Palm OS before, but from what I understand, it’s a lot more stable than any Microsoft-based operating system—especially the mobile ones. But today, I found a new phone, that might become my next phone (depending on when it’s released).Unfortunately, again, their plan is not to do synchronization—they want to do everything over the air. This seems to be the trend, which means that no matter what phone I switch to, I’m going to have to set aside a large portion of my salary going forward to paying my cellular carrier.

Trees—Merry Christmas! (belated)

2008-12-30T11:31:00.000-05:00

I don’t post photos that often, mostly because I don’t carry a camera around with me.

Wait a second… yes I do! My camera phone. I just don’t use it that often. But my last day of work I happened to look out the window, and saw these picturesque trees.

A New Filter For serna

2008-12-30T11:24:00.000-05:00

I’m not a huge fan of Starbucks. In fact, I hate their coffee. (I do like the ambiance, though.) However, there is one exception: I like their egg nog latté. So I went in last week for such a drink, and came away with a warm place in my heart for the whole franchise. (It won’t last.)

Here’s why:

A New Filter For serna
by sernaferna
creative input from Starbucks
INT: A Starbucks.
serna is standing in line. He notices a display of reusable coffee filters, priced somewhere around $4.99, and picks one up.
serna
(to himself)
Hmm.
Realizing that he has needed a reusable coffee filter for some time, he keeps the filter in his hand, as he heads up to the counter.
Starbucks Lady (SL)
Can I help you?
serna
I’ll take an egg nog latté and this filter.
SL
Sure!
Attempts to ring in the filter.
SL
It’s not ringing in. I’m going to need to consult my manager.
serna
(full of Christmas cheer, and even more patient than usual)
No problem.
Starbucks Lady goes into the back, and discusses the issue with her manager.
She comes back momentarily.
SL
Well, it looks like the filter is on us today! We can’t figure out how to ring it in.
serna
Sweet! Thanks very much.
serna takes his latté to a table, to drink it. He notices the Starbucks Lady taking down the display of coffee filters, so that she won’t have to go through this again.

So I currently have a warm feeling about Starbucks because they gave me a free coffee filter. And I’m even happier about it because when Andrea looked at the box, it said $14.99, not $4.99—and which is a more reasonable price for a coffee filter, you have to admit—which means they saved me even more money than I’d thought.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite fit my coffee maker. The lid won’t close.

But what the heck. It was a free filter, and the only tradeoff is that some of the steam escapes when I make my coffee. (And it’s a bit louder.)

Fun video

2008-12-21T20:39:00.000-05:00

I thought this was kind of fun. Hopefully you do too.

And it's still only 1:30.

2008-12-10T13:36:00.000-05:00

The first question Andrea asked me this morning was, “Do you need to be at work on time today?” Which usually signifies that she doesn’t, and she’s hoping we can sleep in a little—and that’s usually fine with me. As long as I don’t have any early meetings, I love sleeping in. And I didn’t, so we did.

Unfortunately, the first thing I did when we got in the car was turn on 680 News, only to find out that there was an accident on the 401, they’d shut down the express lanes at Jane St., and the whole highway was a parking lot all the way from Dixie out to Allen. And, since I drop Andrea off at the subway, this meant we’d have to get onto Wilson, and take that all the way over to the subway station.

This meant almost two hours in the car, an hour and a half of which we spent behind some idiot in a Camry, who didn’t know how to drive. (When you come to a red light, here is the procedure you should follow: advance up to the back of the car in front of you, leaving a couple of feet of room, and then stop the car. Period. Done. Wait until the light turns green, and the car in front of you moves, and then follow. Don’t leave two car-lengths in front of you, and edge up inch by inch, wasting your gas and frustrating the people behind you.)

Luckily, we had to pull off to get gas, which meant that we could get out from behind the person in the Camry.

After I dropped Andrea off at the subway, I was able to get back on the highway, and then, since I was past the accident, the highway was empty. No cars anywhere. Smooth sailing, right?

Wrong. I got on the DVP, only to find that there had been an accident there, too. So again, traffic was slow. And the best part: At one point, I drove by a flock of birds, and something spooked them, so they all took off at once. And as they did, they all decided to drop a little present on my car. I don’t know if they also hit the cars in front and behind me, but they got me all over the place. There are now dozens of big, green, gross patches on my car, from their poop. I wish I was exaggerating, but my car is covered. It was a large flock of birds.

I finally got to the office around 10:45. I was supposed to join some colleagues for lunch, but I needed to catch up on my work, so I decided to eat at my desk. I went down to the caf to grab a BLT, which turned out to be terrible. The toast was burnt, they used the spines of the lettuce instead of the leafy part, and the bacon… well, the bacon was fine. They just didn’t put it onto the sandwich with love.

So that’s my day as of 1:30. I’m not going to ask what else could go wrong, because on TV, any time someone asks that question, bad things happen.

The Heart, the Hospital, and the Family

2008-12-09T21:11:00.001-05:00

Wednesday

It was becoming all too common, this type of trip to the hospital. Congestive heart failure, a call to the ambulance, and a quick trip to emerg, followed by a move to ICU, and then PCU. Maybe he would spend a couple of days there, and maybe he’d spend a week; it depended on how serious the failure had been. Occasionally, it wouldn’t just be congestive heart failure, it would be an actual heart attack. He usually couldn’t tell the difference, unless it was a major heart attack. They’d run their tests at the hospital, and let him know.

This time it was different. It was a heart attack, a major one, and the doctors told his wife that she should prepare for the worst. There wasn’t anything else they could do for him, medically speaking, except make him comfortable. It was news she had been dreading for too long; for the past year he’d been into the hospital about once a month, and she knew that it had to be a matter of time before his last trip to the hospital. She steeled herself, and then called the kids, being honest with them but careful to hide any of her own feelings about the matter. (Which were confused anyway.)

The kids—one in Toronto, three hours away, and one in Ottawa, eight hours away—immediately cleared their affairs, and began the trip home. And meanwhile she sat with him, as she’d done many times before, feeding him water and ice chips, and being there for him. He may or may not have realized that she was there, in his drugged state, but that didn’t matter. She was there.

The son was the first to arrive, in the early afternoon. He and his wife made their way to the ICU, and went in to sit with them. There wasn’t anything they could do but sit; the job of feeding him ice chips and water was already taken, and he wasn’t able to do much talking. Not that he was communicative at the best of times. They just sat with him, and tried not to think of it as watching him die. His son wondered about the state of his soul; was he ready? If not, it might be too late.

Early in the evening the three of them left for a quick supper, and then returned to continue their vigil. News was a scarce commodity; doctors were loathe to give it and were never present anyway; the nurse practitioners were more willing to give news, but they were hardly ever present either. When news did filter down to the family, it was difficult to know which news was important, which was accurate, and which was simply opinion.

Later in the evening the daughter arrived with her boyfriend (who went to the house, to give the family their privacy). The son and his wife left the room, so as not to crowd it, and the daughter took her turn sitting with him. The family was spread between his room, a waiting room, and the house, but they were all thinking the same thing: “I wish there was something I could do.”

Nobody knew what would happen, but everyone feared that it would happen soon. Most prepared to stay throughout the night, but his wife knew better. They couldn’t do anything for him at the hospital, so it would be better to go home and get some sleep. Around midnight she passed this advice on to them, they took it, and they left. She stayed behind, however, to be with him through the night, and continue to feed him ice chips and water.

Thursday

The kids woke up the next morning to see a note from their mother on the kitchen counter. She’d come home for a few hours of sleep, but would they please wake her at 10? They didn’t have to, however, as she woke up herself, shortly before they were supposed to do so. Once everyone had showered and had some breakfast—and once they’d made a quick run to Tim Horton’s—they set off for the hospital.

Thursday was much the same as Wednesday afternoon had been. News rarely came from the medical staff, and when it did, it was bleak. They spent the day at the hospital, except for a brief trip to a restaurant for an early supper.

As the day progressed, he seemed to do better, to get stronger, to become more coherent. But nobody let their hopes get too high; the phrase that kept sticking in the mind was “there’s nothing else we can do for him, except make him comfortable.”

Friday

Friday started much like Thursday had. The family woke up, got ready, and went to the hospital. But things changed a little on Friday afternoon: his doctor called, and said that he wasn’t going to give up hope. Although the hospitals in Canada weren’t able to do anything, maybe the hospital in Detroit could? They have medical technology there that we don’t yet have in Canada—such as an artificial heart, that can be used during a long operation—and maybe that technology could be used to give him hope?

He would start the paperwork, and start talking to the people in Detroit about a bypass. The family accepted this news with cautious optimism, reluctant to give up on their pessimism, after it had become such a part of their lives. And anyway, there was time to think about it, before a decision would have to be made. Nothing would happen before Monday, at the earliest, since there was all the paperwork that had to be filled out.

His doctor had already sent x-rays and other materials to the doctors in Detroit, and the doctors in Detroit were beginning the paperwork. He’d go to Detroit, they’d examine him, and they’d talk about next steps. It was beginning to look like he might be in an ambulance as early as Saturday, but they had changed their minds now, and maybe it would be an angioplasty instead of a bypass.

Again, the family left the hospital for a quick, early supper. In the middle of supper, his wife got a call on her cell phone, from his doctor: The American doctors were still working on it; at this point, they were calling all of the Canadian hospitals, to confirm that there was nothing they could do. (OHIP would pay for an operation in the States, if it’s something that no Canadian hospital could do. But if a Canadian hospital could do something, then of course he’d be sent there, instead.) Since the family had already been through this with the hospital in London, they knew that there was nothing they could do, so this was just a formality.

Then they returned back to the hospital, they were surprised to find that he had had visitors. (Visitors who had brought some very nice chocolates.) But they were absolutely floored to hear that the plan had changed again; he was no longer going to be sent to Detroit, he was going to be sent to London, and he was going to be sent tonight. And in fact the ambulance would be there any minute, and they needed to get him packed. London didn’t have an artificial heart, but London had specialists, and London had a CCU, so he’d be in good hands in London.

The kids cleared out, his wife made sure he was packed, and then his wife and daughter got in the car, to head for London, to meet the ambulance there. Unfortunately, it turned out that “any minute now” was wishful thinking. It was hours before the ambulance picked him up in Chatham, so his wife and daughter waited in the waiting room in London for a long time.

Saturday

The family all met up near London, at a relative’s house. His wife reported that things were promising. The doctors in London were very annoyed that they hadn’t been consulted, when he made previous trips to the hospital. Of course they could do something for him! The options currently on the table were now an angioplasty, a triple bypass, or maybe even a transplant.

And so he stayed in London. There was nothing else the kids could do, so they left to go back home, and await further news.

Who knows how long the saga will continue—but it probably won’t be posted about here. At least not in this level of detail.

Two Movies

2008-11-18T13:12:00.001-05:00

I went and saw the new Bond flick Quantum of Solace on Saturday night. It was great. I exchanged some text messages with James about it, and he only rated it a 5.1, but I give it a 7. (I assume he was rating it out of 10; that’s what I was rating it out of.) The theatre was packed. I went to the 6:30 showing, and got there at 6:00, thinking I was being so smart, and would be able to get a good seat. I walked into the theatre, with sixteen pounds of popcorn in my hands, to find that there were hardly any seats left. Luckily I was by myself, so I managed to find a seat. (And also luckily, it was near the back. I hate sitting at the very front—it hurts my neck after a while.)

Then, on Monday night, I went to see Burn After Reading. On Rotten Tomatoes the “Top Critics” only gave it 56%, whereas the general population gave it 75%. I can see why the critics rated it so low, but I can also see why the “regular folks” rated it so high; personally, I liked it. It was “quirky”. It took a long time to build, but once it started building, it just kept going and going. Started out very slow, and then got faster and faster with the pace. But this time, the experience in the theatre was the opposite: I was the only person in the theatre.

This seems to be a habit of mine, when it comes to George Clooney movies. The first movie I ever saw him in was Ocean’s 11, which I saw with Jeremy. If I remember correctly, the theatre was empty with the exception of him, myself, and one other woman. (Actually, “habit” is too strong a word, because it only happened the twice. I saw him in Michael Clayton, and the theatre was pretty full, and his other movies that I’ve seen—Syriana, Ocean’s 12, and Good Night, And Good Luck—I saw at home, on TMN or DVD. Oh, and I guess you could probably count South Park, since he did a voice in that; I saw that in a very full theatre. Also with Jeremy.)

Post 900

2008-11-18T12:56:00.001-05:00

I don’t really have anything to say, except that this is my 900^th post to the blog. Another hundred posts, and I’ll be posting a “best of the last 500 posts” post.

Which, at the rate that I’m posting these days, should be some time in the year 2012.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

2008-11-15T14:12:00.000-05:00

If you’re a member of a certain socio-economic subset of the population, you have to claim to love old movies. (You don’t have to watch them, you just have to claim to love them.) So, as a matter of duty, I have a copy of 12 Angry Men on my DVD shelf, and a copy of Citizen Kane, and probably some others as well. Not to say that I didn’t enjoy those movies—I wouldn’t have bought them if they weren’t great—I’m just aiming my finely-honed sarcasm at myself.

I might have another movie to add to the shelf, if I can find it on DVD. I’d never seen Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf before today, and it was a great movie. There are two things that might stop me from buying it, though:

I don’t know if Andrea would like it
I don’t know if it would be as enjoyable the second time around.

But my DVD collection aside, if you claim to love old movies, check this one out.

Oh, one more thing I am forced to say by law: They’d never make a movie like that today.

Antiperspirant

2008-11-14T09:56:00.002-05:00

Most bloggers don’t write about antiperspirant at all, but this is my second post about it. And do you know why? Because I’m a rebel. I don’t follow the blogging crowds, I do my own thing. (Then again, the first post was more than three years ago, so maybe I’m not that much of a rebel; I’m too scared to take on these challenging topics more than once within a year…)

I tried a new antiperspirant today, and realized too late that has a very strong smell. (For my Guyanese readers, it “smells high”.) It’s not a bad smell, just a very strong one—especially for someone like me, who doesn’t wear cologne. So every once in a while I catch scent of it, and think to myself, “who the heck is wearing that perfume?!?” Only to think a few seconds later, “oh yeah, it’s me.”

I hope the smell doesn’t carry. I don’t want to annoy everyone else in the office. Not that it smells bad, I just don’t like people wearing cologne/perfume in the office.

Spam Comments

2008-11-10T11:26:00.001-05:00

All of the sudden, today, I’m getting bombarded with little comments on my blogs, on posts that don’t seem to warrant comments. Commenters are leaving little comments like “people should read this,” and “well said,” and “you write well.” And, like I say, they’re mostly commenting on posts that don’t seem to be anything special.

And then the penny dropped, and I started clicking the links for people’s names. They’re all apparently spam bots, leaving little comments randomly on blog posts just to get out links to their web sites. So I’m trying to delete them as they come in, to keep my blogs clean of bots. We’ll see how well I do trying to keep up…

“Star Wars”—an a capella tribute to John Williams

2008-11-07T13:41:00.000-05:00

Enjoy!

serna’s Thoughts on Obama

2008-11-06T09:57:00.000-05:00

All around the world—quite literally—people are writing about the new president-elect of the U.S., Barack Obama. And why should I be left out? I’ll add my voice to the noise.

First of all, I’m pleasantly surprised that he won. Up until a few days before the election, I was hoping that he’d win, but expecting McCain to pull it off. (This was very much driven by my reaction to the 2004 election; I was very surprised when Bush got reelected, and it made me cynical, so I was expecting the same to happen in 2008. In retrospect, I can see all of the reasons why Barack won, but at the time, I wasn’t expecting it to happen.) It was only in the last few days of the campaign that I started to believe that Obama could pull it off, and even then I was amazed to see the margin by which he won. 349 electoral votes vs. 163 is a landslide victory, in my mind.

Speaking of his margin, Bush claimed to have a “mandate” from the American people when he got reelected, even though he was elected by a tiny margin, but Obama cleaned up. This my friends, was a mandate from the American people. They’ve clearly spoken, and I’m hoping that they’ll be heard by their representatives.

And let’s celebrate the fact that the Americans have their first black president. (Andrea and I are cynical about this ever happening in Canada.) This is no small thing, and it’s not just a symbolic thing either. It really is important, especially for black youth. There aren’t enough role models for them to follow; they’ve been told for years that you can be anything you want to be, but reality has not seemed to back that sentiment up. Now that a black man has been elected president, they have a very concrete role model that they can follow. (A video I linked to in my previous post touches on this.) I suppose you could say that this is still symbolic, even if it is important; I won’t argue the point.

There’s another piece of good news, and Andrea and I were discussing this morning: Obama’s win will send a message to people that change is possible. Maybe—and this is probably wishful thinking here—maybe this election will get people to start thinking about the possibility of a third party candidate. Americans really have a two-party system (and Canada essentially has a two and a half party system), but that’s not inherent to the process, it’s just because people don’t want to vote for any other parties for fear of throwing their votes away. But going forward, maybe they’ll start thinking about someone new—someone who actually will want change. I mean, despite all of the rhetoric, Obama will probably be a fairly centrist president. (For example, he’s not going to push for universal health care, even though a huge portion of the American people want it.)

So this is all good news. Is there bad news? Yep.

Further to my previous point, People have been talking about Republicans vs. Democrats as if it’s a battle between good and evil, without stopping to consider that both parties are extremely similar in their viewpoints, on almost all issues. Whether they know it or not, the American people would probably have been better of with Ralph Nader as president, instead of Obama. (Although obviously they wouldn’t have gotten the black role model that I discussed above.) I’m definitely glad that he was elected, instead of McCain, but in many ways, an Obama presidency won’t be much different than a McCain presidency would have been. (People have already been saying to Andrea that “imperialism now has a black face”—the point being that American foreign policy isn’t going to drastically change under Obama’s leadership—which isn’t much to be proud of.)

That being said, I also feel sorry for Obama, because it won’t be long before he’ll be getting blamed for the issues he’s inheriting. People sometimes have short memories, and it won’t surprise me if people are claiming, a couple of years from now, that everything was fine before Barack took over. It’s almost guaranteed that the Republicans will start blaming him for America’s economic problems, and claiming that he’s making America less safe—especially when we get a bit closer to the 2012 election—but that’s to be expected; what will be sad is if the general population starts to agree with them.

Also, get ready for Americans to start patting themselves on the back, and getting self-righteous about the fact that they’ve elected a black man president. Race was obviously a huge deal in this election—and I’m impressed with Obama’s handling of it—but it won’t be long before people will start saying that it didn’t matter that he was black, and that Americans—to quote Stephen Colbert—don’t see race. Colbert is calling this one early (in his own inimitable way), and I think he’s right: it won’t be too long before pundits will be saying that this proves racism doesn’t exist anymore in America.

But negatives aside, like most other people in the world, I’m happy Barack was elected president. And who knows? Maybe he really is more progressive then he’s let us believe, and just kept it hidden, since he had to play the game. That would be nice, but there’s no reason to assume it’s the case, other than wishful thinking.

Barack & Curtis: Manhood, Power & Respect

2008-11-03T20:29:00.000-05:00

I don’t have first-hand experience with these issues—obviously—but I found this a very fascinating video. Very insightful.

Ras Trent

2008-10-31T10:55:00.000-04:00

I once posted a rant about NBC pulling their videos from YouTube. (I’m too lazy to go back and find the link; do a search, if you want to find it.) But their site has gotten much better; you can now view the videos—even if you’re in Canada!—and you can embed them. For example:

Construction Season is almost over

2008-10-29T17:30:00.001-04:00

How do you know when winter is starting? Because serna’s lips are chapped all the time. I need to get some better lip balm. Blistex just isn’t cutting it anymore.

P.S. You’re welcome. I know all of my blog readers have been fervently worrying lately, saying to themselves, “When oh when will serna post about the state of his lips?!?”

A comedy of BBQ errors

2008-10-21T11:06:00.001-04:00

As planned, I cooked a roast on the BBQ last night, and used the side burner. It wasn’t exactly smooth sailing, but it did work.

First of all, here’s how I cooked the roast: It’s called the “indirect method” of cooking on a BBQ. You turn on one side of the BBQ, but not the other, and you put the meat on the side that’s not on. In other words, it’s not the heat from the flames that is cooking the meat, it is the indirect heat inside the BBQ. So you do the following:

Season the grill. (It’s a good idea to do this every time you cook—although I don’t always do it. I didn’t last night.)
Get a drip tray, and put it under the BBQ racks, on the side that will not be on.
Turn on the other side of the BBQ, on medium heat.
For best results, you should be using a meat thermometre, which will tell you when the meat is done. I have a nice one, from President’s Choice, that I just tell I’m cooking beef, and I want it cooked “medium” (vs. well done, or whatever), and it knows what internal temperature the meat has to reach. It’s got an end that you stick into the meat, and an electronic part that sits outside the BBQ (connected by a wire which must be burn-resistant). If you’re using one too, you should stick it in the meat.
When it’s up to temperature, put the meat in the BBQ, on the side that isn’t on (above the drip tray).
Wait for the meat thermometre to tell you that the meat is done.

If you follow these steps, you’ll end up with a great roast. Also, you should resist the temptation to keep opening the BBQ, to look at the meat, because every time you do, heat escapes. Just let the thermometre do its job.

But here’s what happened to me:

First of all, I turned on the BBQ, and then, just for fun, I decided to try the side burner. I wasn’t ready to cook the potatoes, yet, but I figured I’d give it a shot. And to my great chagrin, it didn’t work. (Didn’t I just write that yesterday? Every time I want to test it, it will work, but every time I want to use it, it won’t.) Luckily, though, I grabbed a lighter, and was pleased to find out that I can start it manually; it’s just the lighter button on the BBQ that doesn’t work. (Even though I can clearly see the spark, whenever I press the button.)

So I put in the meat, and went inside to… I don’t remember what I did. Watch TV or check my email or something. Maybe I was peeling the potatoes. And a little while later, I went out to check the meat, and saw that it was lightly raining. I figured I’d better cover the electronic thermometre, so I went inside and got a little plastic bag, which was the perfect size to put on top of the thermometre like a little tent.

Now, my back door doesn’t open directly onto the back yard, it’s too high. So there is a set of wooden stairs that goes down to the lawn. On my way back into the house, the bottom stair—which has been getting ready to give way for a long time—finally broke. So now, any time I use the stairs, I have to bypass that step.

A little while later, I went out to check on the food again, to find that the little plastic bag tent had blown off the thermometre. So I went back in the house and got something to rest on top of the bag, to hold it down in the wind. (There wasn’t a lot of wind, but a bit.)

A little while later, I went out to find out that the bag had blown off again—but this time, it blew onto the BBQ, and melted against the side! I pulled off what I could, and then ran inside to find something to try and scrape off the rest. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get it off. (Plus, since it was raining out, I tracked water and mud all over the kitchen.) The bag was red, so I now have a big red rectangle on the BBQ. I hope it’s not going to smell every time I turn it on.

I went in and got another plastic bag—although I wasn’t able to find one small enough, like the last one had been—and got more (and heavier) weights to hold it down.

By the time I was ready to put on the potatoes, there was no more drama to be had for the night. I started the side burner (with the lighter), and put them on to boil. They actually boiled and cooked quicker than they would have on the stove, even with the rain. (I put the cover on the pot, so that the rain wouldn’t get into the potatoes too much.) And I did a pretty good job of timing it, too, because I got the potatoes to finish just as the meat was finishing. When I took the pot off and brought it inside I realized that it was covered with black soot, but that came off easily in the sink.

And as for the roast? It came out beautifully.

The BBQ again. I hope this isn’t going to become a saga…

2008-10-20T14:26:00.001-04:00

I wrote that the side burner on our BBQ wasn’t working. On Saturday, Andrea and I finally got around to borrowing her dad’s van, so that we could bring it back to the store, and either get it fixed, or get a refund. (Or rather, she finally made me get my butt in gear to do it.)

But before we did, I decided to try it one last time. We’d look pretty dumb if we got there and it worked, eh? Well, fortunately or unfortunately, it worked fine. So either:

It was too windy the first time I tried to use it
God just doesn’t want me to use the side burner on our BBQ, and it’s going to work every time I test it, but not when I actually want to use it

So we’re planning on cooking as many meals as possible on the BBQ for the next week or two, to keep trying it out. (If it works, but only intermittently, we can still take it back.) Tonight we’re going to try doing roast beef, and I’ll cook potatoes on the side burner. (I hope it’s not windy tonight.) (I also hope it’s not cold tonight.)

Google Talk

2008-10-14T11:16:00.001-04:00

I regularly praise Google products on this blog, but that doesn’t mean that they’re perfect. I’ve been trying for a few days now to get Google Talk working, but it just… won’t. (I have a friend who has got a new job where he can’t use MSN Messenger anymore, but can use Google Talk. I thought I’d give it a shot, so we could keep in touch. Well, other than email, I mean.)

My problem is that I already have a Google account, but not a Gmail account. I use my regular email account as a sign-in name, and use that for the Google services I use (Blogger and Google Docs, mostly). So can you use Google Talk if you don’t have a Gmail account? Google says yes; according to this page:

If you’d like to sign up for Google Talk for an existing Google Account:
Sign in with your Google Account email address and password at https://www.google.com/accounts/Login?service=talk.
Enter your desired Talk username and click check availability! If your chosen name isn’t available, you can select from the suggested alternatives, or enter another username and try again.
Optionally, enter your first and/or last name in the appropriate fields. If you enter a name, it will show up on your friends’ Talk contact lists instead of your username.
Click Continue.

Sounds good—except that it doesn’t work. When I click the link, I don’t get prompted to enter a username, and I don’t get an option to enter a first name or last name. I just get… well, not much of anything, really. I get a page called “My Account” where I can’t really do anything.

So if I’m going to keep in touch with my friend, I guess he’ll have to try and configure MSN Messenger to work through his proxy. (Eric, have you tried using Pidgin? It can connect to MSN Messenger—even through HTTP—and Google Talk, and probably any other chat services you use.)

Joke

2008-10-10T11:40:00.001-04:00

I know, I haven’t posted in a long time. At least, not here. (I have been posting to the Bible Blog—although a bit less than usual—and to the Book Blog.)

And I still don’t have anything to say. (It’s my SOP to only say something when I feel I have something to say. Which isn’t a good way of doing things when you’re a blogger—isn’t it a blogger’s duty to fill up the internet with incessant garbage?) So I’ll try to make up for my silence by posting a joke that I heard recently.

There are two older gentlemen, let’s call them Roy and Bob. Roy is telling Bob about a great restaurant that he was at the night before.

“It sounds great,” says Bob. “I’d love to try it out. What was the name of the place?”

“Hmm… the name, what was the name?” Roy says to himself. “Red flower… red flower…”

“Carnation?” replies Bob.

“No, red flower with thorns…”

“Oh, you mean rose.”

Roy’s eyes light up. “Yes, rose, that’s it!” He turns to the woman beside him. “Rose, what was the name of the restaurant we went to last night?”

Nuit Blanche

2008-10-06T14:42:00.001-04:00

We went to Nuit Blanche on Saturday night. It was… disappointing. If this is the state of Toronto’s art scene, I don’t expect us to be leading the world when it comes to art. (Not that I consider myself an expert, of course, so don’t just take my word for it.)

However, we managed to have a good time anyway, even without the art. For that matter, since I’m not a big patron of the arts, it might not even have made a difference if the art had been magnificent.

Flickr

2008-09-30T17:22:00.001-04:00

A colleague of mine was having trouble sharing her photos in Flickr, and, since we weren’t too busy this week, we spent quite a bit of time working on it together. (I believe she’s got it all set up properly now, in case you were worried.) She made me a “contact”, and I’ve spent hours watching her pictures. (I say “watching” because when I’m in a conference call where I don’t have to do much, I go to one of her picture sets, and just turn on the slideshow, and let it go by while I listen to my call.)

So now that I’ve been watching all of her photos, I’m starting to think that I need to go on vacation again soon, so that I’ll have more photos to put up in my Flickr account—which, these days, is mostly consisting of book covers from the serna Book Blog. Not that I expect that to happen any time soon; no vacations planned for a while. Maybe I should finally go and scan in my wedding photos, and share those…

BBQ redux

2008-09-30T15:29:00.000-04:00

I finally got a chance to use the side burner on my BBQ last night—or so I thought. We decided to make curry, the very thing I’d wanted a side burner for. I got everything prepared, and went into the back yard to start up the BBQ, only to find… that I couldn’t get the side burner to start. The main burners started fine, but the side burner wouldn’t. (I did test it, when I first put the thing together, and it worked at the time.)

The thing is, though, that I don’t know if it’s defective, or if I just didn’t hook it up properly. Either one, in my mind, is very possible. It’s a cheap BBQ, but I was never really sure from the beginning if I’d hooked up the side burner properly. (It seems like the venturi tube might not be connected correctly—there’s a big gap which may or may not be necessary, although I can’t see any other way to hook it up—but I can’t find any instructions/diagrams on the net to help me figure out if it’s connected properly or not.)

I tried using the main burners, but the pot was too far away from the flame, so the oil wasn’t getting hot enough. I had to resort to bringing it back inside, and doing it on the stove.

A shindig, and getting my writing analyzed

2008-09-19T14:35:00.000-04:00

Andrea had a “thing” to go to last night, and I went along too. It was for some organization that works with non-profit organizations in Toronto; if they want a space to do a fundraising event, this group can provide a space for free, and hook you up with deals for food and drink. Seemed like a good deal, at first glance, although I’m not posting the name of the organization, in case it turns out that it’s a rip off.

The space itself was excellent. Top floor of a downtown building, with an amazing outdoor patio that goes all around the building. (Actually, now that I think about it, I think it was only three sides of the building. But still, it was really well done.) It was weird being there, though, because it was supposed to be for non-profit organizations, and everyone there looked… well… rich. They obviously weren’t grassroots organizations; they were the big organizations, that everyone has heard of. (The ones that have so much money they don’t need this type of service.) Just watching them all interact, and seeing how they were dressed, it seemed a lot more like a bunch of CEOs getting together than people working for non-profit organizations. So of course I was uncomfortable, because I’m never comfortable around rich people.

But one of the things they had set up was a woman who will analyze your handwriting, so Andrea and I gave it a shot. Of course, everything that she told me is what I’d expect to be told; I’m intelligent, I’m independent, I’m a leader not a follower, etc. I’m pretty sure she’d say the same stuff to everyone. (You’ll never hear her reading someone’s handwriting, and say, “Oh! You’re not very bright, are you?”) And, since she did both Andrea and I together, it turns out we’re perfect for each other. (Again, although I’d find it hilarious, I doubt she’s ever talked to a couple and said, “wow, you guys might as well just break up right now.”)

She did tell me one negative thing, though: The paper asked me to write my favourite saying or philosophy of life, and I put “Nothing is ever easy.” (If you know me in real life, you’ve probably heard me say that. Many times.) She thought that was too pessimistic, so she crossed it out, and wrote, “everything is always easy”—which is just silly. We all know that everything isn’t always easy.

Anyway, I hope that the organization turns out to be good for small organizations, and that Andrea ends up hosting some events there, because I wouldn’t mind going back.

The BBC Lost Land of the Jaguar series

2008-09-17T14:05:00.001-04:00

Because Andrea and her family are Guyanese, every once in a while I get sent a link to some Guyanese-related site, or show, or whatever. We recently got sent a link to a BBC series, called Lost Land of the Jaguar, which someone has helpfully put up on YouTube. (The preceding link is to the BBC’s website, not YouTube.) It is absolutely fascinating, having to do with the Guyanese rainforest—perhaps the only above-ground place left in the world where nature is still untouched by modern-man. (If not the only, one of the only.)

Andrea and I watched the first two episodes last night, and will probably watch the third episode soon (schedule permitting). Unfortunately, YouTube limits you to about ten minutes per video (unless you sign up for a paid account), so the episodes are in ten minute segments; however, I’ve created a couple of playlists, which should make it easier to watch them in one contiguous group:

I haven’t yet created a playlist for Episode 3, because I’m not sure if it’s fully uploaded yet. When we’ve watched it, and confirmed how many pieces there are to that episode, I’ll create a playlist for that one, too. (I guess you can watch out at my YouTube profile page, for the next playlist to show up.) The first episode was seven videos, and the second one was six, so I’m not sure how long the third one will be.

I would have preferred to simply link to the BBC iPlayer—so that I could be sure that the videos wouldn’t get taken down, as they might on YouTube—but they don’t seem to have this show available online.

Quantum of Solace redux

2008-09-10T11:00:00.001-04:00

There is another trailer online for QoS:

Unfortunately, based on the two trailers I’ve seen so far, it seems like a great action movie, but it doesn’t feel like a Bond movie. Hopefully I’m wrong—after all, I’m only basing these feelings on a couple of trailers.

Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats

2008-09-09T11:38:00.001-04:00

I found this blog entry to be very interesting. It’s about a paper that has been written on distinguishing those who can program from those who can’t. (The blog entry contains a link to the paper itself, too, which is here.)

I should say that the intent of the paper is not elitist. “We can program, and you can’t, so don’t even bother to try.” But programming is something that people seem to have either a natural ability for, or… well… don’t. As the authors of the paper say:

Learning to program is notoriously difficult. A substantial minority of students fails in every introductory programming course in every UK university. Despite heroic academic effort, the proportion has increased rather than decreased over the years. Despite a great deal of research into teaching methods and student responses, we have no idea of the cause.
It has long been suspected that some people have a natural aptitude for programming, but until now there has been no psychological test which could detect it. Programming ability is not known to be correlated with age, with sex, or with educational attainment; nor has it been found to be correlated with any of the aptitudes measured in conventional ‘intelligence’ or ‘problem-solving-ability’ tests.

That quote is followed closely by this sentence, which I rather enjoyed:

We point out that programming teaching is useless for those who are bound to fail and pointless for those who are certain to succeed.

The authors talk about three significant hurdles that students encounter, when learning to program: assignment and sequence; recursion/iteration; concurrency. They then go on to say this, which I found very interesting:

…. Assignment and sequence … hardly look as if they should be hurdles at all: storage of / remembering information and doing one thing after another are part of everyday patterns of life and thought, and you might have expected (as at first do most teachers) that students’ experience could be analogised into some kind of programming expertise. Not so: it is a real hurdle, and it comes at the very beginning of most programming courses.

I’m sure, when I was first learning to program, that I became frustrated with fellow students, when they couldn’t figure out how assignment works. I guess this paper explains both sides of the coin: why my fellow students couldn’t get it, and why it seemed so obvious to me.

But enough preamble. Let’s talk about the test itself. It consisted of questions such as the following (click to see a bigger version):And the authors found these results:

We could hardly expect that students would choose the Java model of assignment … but it rapidly became clear that despite their various choices of model, in the first administration they divided into three distinct groups with no overlap at all:
44% used the same model for all, or almost all, of the questions. We call this the consistent group.
39% used different models for different questions. We call this the the inconsistent group.
The remaining 8% refused to answer all or almost all of the questions. We call this the blank group.
We did not interview our subjects to determine anything about their group membership, so we do not know whether students chose consciously or unconsciously to follow one strategy or another, nor how conscious choices (if any) were motivated, nor what any particular choice meant to a subject who made it. We have no information about how group membership correlates with earlier education, employment experience, age, sex, marital status or indeed anything else.

The great thing about the study is that the test was administered twice: Once before the students had had any computer programming studies, and once after they had completed their first course. (The authors aren’t really sure whether it was planned to give the test prior to instruction, or if it was a happy accident.) They found that the results were fairly consistent: People who fell into one of the three groups before taking the course tended to fall into the same group after taking the course.

Interestingly, the authors then talked about using these groups to predict who would be good programmers, and who wouldn’t. I would have expected that the “consistent” group would be the most successful programmers, but I would have been in the minority:

Speculation is part of science, though, and those to whom we have recounted this tale have usually been ready to try it. Told that there were three groups and how they were distinguished, but not told their relative sizes, we have found that computer scientists and other programmers have almost all predicted that the blank group would be more successful in the course exam than the others: “they had the sense to refuse to answer questions which they couldn’t understand” is a typical explanation. Non-programming social scientists, mathematicians and historians, given the same information, almost all pick the inconsistent group: “they show intelligence by picking methods to suit the problem” is the sort of thing they say. Very few, so far, have predicted that the consistent group would be the most successful. Remarkably, it is the consistent group, and almost exclusively the consistent group, that is successful. We speculate on the reasons in section 7.

And what do they feel are the results of this study? First of all, they feel that they have a predictive test, as to who will be a good programmer, and who will not.

[One of their graphs] suggests that it is extremely difficult to teach programming to the inconsistent and blank groups. It might be possible to teach them, if we concentrated on trying to persuade them to see a programming language as a system of rules (though the evidence in section 6 below seems to suggest otherwise).
The consistent group seem to be much easier to teach. We speculate that they divide into two groups: the very successful ones find programming easy and may perhaps be those who ought to follow a conventional computer-science education, with lots of formal content; the moderately successful perhaps are the software engineers, those who can program but can’t imagine that they will ever enjoy it, and are content to submit to management discipline and to be drowned in UML (ugh!).

As a side-note, why does everyone hate UML?

I don’t know how scientifically accurate this study will turn out to be, or if the authors will attempt to try it in a larger experiment with more subjects, but I found it interesting nonetheless.

Quantum of Solace

2008-09-07T00:43:00.001-04:00

The new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, is coming out in November. I don’t know a whole lot about it, but the trailer is up on YouTube. (It was actually put up way back last June, but as always, I’m behind the times.)

It doesn’t grab my attention the way the previews for Casino Royale grabbed my attention, but I’m looking forward to it.

Finding Parking in Toronto

2008-09-04T20:36:00.001-04:00

Every once in a while I have to drive downtown, and my biggest hassle is usually “where can I park?” Unfortunately, my first impulse is to go to the Green P Parking website, but it turns out that their site is lousy. I’ve never satisfactorily been able to use it to find a parking lot near where I’m going. (It’s been a pet peeve for a while, and I finally sent them a long-winded email with suggestions to improve their site.)

However, just as my blood was getting its hottest, I found a great site: StopFinder. It’s a mashup that uses Google Maps; type in your destination, and even what time you’re going and how long you’ll be staying, and it will give you:

All of the parking lots in the area—something that the Green P web site cannot do, I can’t stress that enough—with the closest lot highlighted for you
Prices and hours of service for each of the parking lots
Colour-coded rankings of the lots’ prices
Bus and subway stops in the area, with links to the TTC schedule, so that you can figure out when the bus will arrive

It looks like this:Of course, now that I’ve put up a specific destination in that screenshot, knowing my luck they’ll tear down the club that’s currently there, and build some kind of sex club or something, that will last for twenty years. And anyone who comes to this post will be wondering, “why did serna put up a link to a sex club?!?”

So there you have it. If you’re going somewhere in Toronto, and want to know where to park or how to take the TTC there, try StopFinder.

Grilled Asparagus

2008-09-03T16:59:00.001-04:00

Wow, this is my third post of the day. I’m on a roll!

I’ve already posted a recipe for some great burgers. Now it’s time to post a link to a recipe for grilling asparagus on the BBQ.

Actually, there’s nothing revolutionary about it. I’m finding that when it comes to grilling vegetables on the BBQ, the steps are usually the same:

drizzle the veggies in olive oil, usually combined with lemon juice
grill them on medium heat, usually about two minutes per side

And this asparagus recipe is the same. (No lemon juice, in this case.) The only thing I did differently from the recipe was that I didn’t use as much salt as the recipe’s author had suggested—even though s/he said to “trust” him/her that it wouldn’t be too much.

Some day, I’ll post my instructions for grilling the perfect steak. Unfortunately, I tried it again last night, and, although it came out great, it still wasn’t perfect.

Chrome

2008-09-03T15:56:00.001-04:00

Since I’m always behind the curve when it comes to writing about new stuff, I guess I should mention—a day or two after everyone else has—that Google has introduced a new open-source web browser, which they call Chrome.

Now, you might ask yourself: Why has Google built its own web browser? Isn’t there already an open-source web browser, called Firefox, which by most accounts is pretty darned good? And if you want to do something interesting with the browser, couldn’t you do it by creating a Firefox plugin? (e.g. Ubiquity.) And Google expected that response, and put up a page saying why they did it.

But the thing is… I still don’t get it. I mean, I read the page, but it didn’t really answer the question, in my mind: Why did Google feel that they need their own browser? Why couldn’t they build on something like Firefox? I went through the little demo videos on their features page, and although it seems like a great browser, it also seems like it’s just a series of incremental improvements over Firefox or Internet Explorer 7. Not something revolutionary.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m definitely not saying that I think this is a dumb idea. Most of the folks over at Google are a lot smarter than I am, and I’m betting they had a good reason for doing this. And I’m also thinking back to when Firefox first introduced tabbed browsing, and how I didn’t think it was such a big deal, because that was only an “incremental improvement” over having multiple browser windows open. (“You’re just trading multiple buttons in your Taskbar for multiple tabs in your browser,” I thought, “What’s the big deal?”) But now I can’t imagine not having tabs in a browser.

In any event, I’m downloading Chrome, and will give it a try. (I’ve written too many love letters on this blog to other Google products not to give it a try!) I’m prepared to be blown away, but expecting to find “just another browser”, maybe slightly better than Firefox. Time will tell.

Coincidences

2008-09-03T15:25:00.001-04:00

I’d thought I’d posted about this before, but apparently I haven’t. So I’ll do so now.

I get a lot of coincidences in my life. (e.g. see this previous post, for a perfect example; I’m often thinking of a particular Simpsons episode, only to turn on the TV the next day and find it playing.) I’ve sometimes thought of creating a “serna Coincidence Blog”, to document all of the many coincidences I encounter.

Knowing me, the following will probably happen:

I will hesitate for a long time—mostly because I won’t be able to settle on a blog template to use.
I will finally do it, because for some bizarre reason I love creating blogs, and I just won’t be able to help myself.

So… yeah. Stay tuned for that.

The BBQ: working great

2008-08-30T19:29:00.001-04:00

Well, it’s been over a week. And how’s the BBQ doing? As a matter of fact, it’s doing quite well. Unfortunately, the very first thing I tried was steak, and it didn’t come out well. (A bit more well done than I like, even though I followed instructions which should have made it medium. It wasn’t bad—I still enjoyed it—it was just too well done.) We’ve also done lamb burgers from President’s Choice, which were great, lamb skewers (also President’s Choice, also great), zucchini and eggplant, chicken with BBQ sauce, salmon steaks and salmon kebobs, and finally, burgers. Everything has been great.

Speaking of which, if you want a really good recipe for making burgers, see this recipe. You won’t regret it.

What I haven’t yet done, but hopefully will soon, is try making curry on the side burner. As it is, I’m too busy enjoying the flavour of the BBQ on my other foods, but using the side burner for curry was one of the selling points of this BBQ for me, so I owe it to myself to give it a try.

BBQ

2008-08-20T13:22:00.001-04:00

We finally—finally!—bought a barbeque. We’ve been living in our townhouse for over three years, and all that time I’ve wanted a BBQ, and now we finally have one.

One of the main things holding us up was that Andrea’s dad had a used one, that he had volunteered to give us, but we never got around to digging it out of his garage. So we finally went and picked it up on Sunday. (Actually, we went on Saturday afternoon and wiped and hosed it down, to get rid of the dust, and then picked it up on Sunday, after it had dried off.) Unfortunately, it turned out that it didn’t work. The burner wasn’t connected properly to the hose from the propane tank, and I couldn’t figure out how to connect it properly. Plus, it was pretty rusty in there. So we decided to go and get a new one, because I didn’t want to mess around with propane connections. Which, in retrospect, I’m happy about, because we also wanted a side burner, which the free one didn’t have.

I had been thinking about getting a Weber. That seems to be the cream of the crop, when it comes to BBQs. However, although Weber BBQs last forever, they are also very expensive. So, after much soul-searching, I decided that it wasn’t worth the money; even if a cheaper BBQ didn’t last forever, it would probably still be cheaper in the long run.

Once I’d made up my mind to get something cheaper, I actually thought about getting a President’s Choice BBQ, from Fortinos. For about half the price of a Weber, I could get a BBQ with a side burner. There was a good chance that it would be a piece of crap, but, on the other hand, President’s Choice is pretty good, so there was also a chance that it would be a good, lasting unit. But we finally gave up, and got a Sterling, which is even cheaper. Who knows how long it will actually last; I’m hoping it’s not a disposable BBQ! (Obviously, if we have to buy a new one every year, we would have been better off getting a Weber…)

Anyway, you probably don’t care about all of that. I got it put together on Monday night, which wasn’t as bad as I’d been led to believe. It took an hour or two, but very little cursing. (I did end up with one extra nut and bolt, which I couldn’t attach; the holes in two pieces of metal that it was supposed to connect together wouldn’t quite line up. But there were three other sets of nuts and bolts keeping them together, so I don’t think it will cause any problems.) I also couldn’t get the lighter button to work, but wasn’t overly worried about it, since we have a lighter.

I had been hoping to fire it up on Tuesday, and cook something. (I’d been further hoping that the “something” I cooked would be a nice, juicy steak.) Unfortunately, we had leftovers in the fridge that we had to eat out. And, since I’m an adult now, and I have to make mature decisions, we decided to eat the leftovers first, and maybe cook something on the BBQ on Wednesday. I did take the opportunity to season the grill, though, and I also figured out why the lighter button hadn’t worked. (I’d missed connecting a wire. And it’s a good thing I figured it out, because the wire was within the BBQ—or very close to it, anyway—and probably would have caught on fire or something.)

I’m crossing my fingers, hoping to be able to cook something tonight. (I’m also crossing my fingers that I’ll be able to cook it well—it will seem like a terrible waste of money to have bought a BBQ, if it turns out I have no BBQing skills.)