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.
Is it a bad sign when you move to a new office, and find an empty Smirnoff bottle in the parking lot?
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.
I just realized that I never put up a summary of my RUTR winnings. For those of you who care about such things, enjoy.
My step-father Jim passed away on April 30th. 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.
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.
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.
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.
Er… I think the following headline might be a bit misleading:
This might be my favourite useless sign of all time:
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. \
Here’s a conversation which demonstrates why people develop gambling addictions.
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.
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.
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.
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 27th, but you can pre-order it.
However, even though the book isn’t supposed to be released until January 27th, it was spotted in Yorkdale! We stopped by yesterday to see it.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.)
I don’t really have anything to say, except that this is my 900th 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.
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:
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.
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…
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.
I don’t have first-hand experience with these issues—obviously—but I found this a very fascinating video. Very insightful.
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:
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?!?”
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:
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:
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:
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.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.
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?”
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.
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…
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.
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.
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:
There is another trailer online for QoS:
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:
That quote is followed closely by this sentence, which I rather enjoyed: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.
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:We point out that programming teaching is useless for those who are bound to fail and pointless for those who are certain to succeed.
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.…. 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.
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.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.
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.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.
As a side-note, why does everyone hate UML?[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!).
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.)
Posts
All Comments
Click here for more information on my book, Beginning XML, 4th Edition, from Wiley.
If and when I write more books, I’m sure I’ll link to them here.
