the eyrea

#fridayflash: but it's a lifestyle

2011-12-16T06:00:00.000-05:00

The thing that makes noises in the morning is... making noises. Idon't like it. It sounds like a very big and angry squirrel barking.

The thing won't stop making noises until she wakes up andforces it to stop, so unfortunately I have to work withthe thing instead of destroying it, at least for now. I sound the alert, right in her ear, andshe tries to hit me (but she misses, because we do this most morningsand I'm ready for it), then she rolls over and makes the thing quiet.

Some days she falls back asleep after we go through this,then she wakes up later and runs around in a panic before heading outthe door. I don't like that either, so I jostle the bed to make herfinish waking up.

She says what she always says when she'sangry at me. I get out of striking distance. Then she looks at thenow-silenced thing and gets up on her own. She heads to the washroom.I didn't actually feel like waking up myself yet, so I find the warmspot on the bed and settle in for a late-morning nap. I hear thetoilet flushing.

I do not like the thing, because it makesloud angry noises. She doesn't seem to like the thing either, for allthat she allows it in the room. Today I will try to knock the thingto the floor again. It's harder to do than it sounds, because it'stethered to the wall.

The shower is running. She won't comeback in here for at least another ten minutes. Bliss.

Shemade the angry sound from inside the shower! I'm not even inthat room! The shower sound stops, so I lift my head to listen andwatch for what will happen next.

She appears in the doorwaywith a towel wrapped around her, dripping water everywhere. I lift myhead to get a better look, because she's got the angry face on, andnotice one of my mouse dolls in her hand. It's completely drenched inwater. She squeezes it and a puddle forms on the hardwood.

Oh.Oh right. Mouse dolls aren't supposed to go in the shower. This hashappened before.

She takes a step into the room. I leap offthe bed and run under it, making for the spot in the exact middle,under the headboard, that I know from past experience she can'treach.

I hear the angry sound again, and then ridicule noises. I do not like being ridiculed, but it means I will not get hauled out from under the bed.

She leaves, and then I hear the shower again. I come out from under the bed carefully, in case the shower is a trick. Sometimes she runs water to hide the sound of food being released from the metal traps.

No, she really doesn't seem to be around. But there is water all over the floor! I take a running leap over it, and just get a little bit on one foot. Ick. I eat some food and drink some water in case I need to hide under the bed for the rest of the day. The mornings the thing makes noises she usually leaves for the whole day, but it's good to be safe.

The shower stops, and she sees me by my food and water. She makes good mood noises. I signal the food and water are getting low, just in case. Sometimes she leaves with more bags than usual and doesn't come back for two mornings.

She cleans out the water holder and refills it, then does the same with the food holder. I should be good for another two days. I check the food and water while she goes back to the bedroom.

She comes out wearing the clothes that mean she's going to leave. She picks me up and strokes my head. I let my chest rumble to show I mean no harm, and she's still making good-mood noises, so I must be communicating effectively. Then she lets me down, and I notice that there is a sunbeam on the couch in the living room, so I go sit in that.

She's about to leave when she goes to the living room, picks up the little window in the black case from the table, and taps at it for a few moments. I look after she leaves, and the glyphs are:

SheHasACat: I wish I had my cat's lifestyle. [tweeted at 7:30am from Twitter]

I tap the window a few times, but all that happens is that the glyphs vanish, and a creature who looks like me appears. It's not moving, so I don't get concerned.

I figure it's time to go back to my sunbeam.

#fridayflash: picture tour

2011-12-09T06:00:00.000-05:00

This is another description exercise, along the lines of prose sestina but using different methods. I wanted to play around with showing versus non-showing, action versus stillness.

The bottom frame of the window sits level with the sidewalk outside. The window is unusually large for a basement apartment, and passers-by could easily look in if it weren’t for the lace curtains that Helen has hung up inside. She’s proud of those curtains; they were sewn from her wedding veil, but she did a good job when she made them over to fit in the window.

The door to the apartment is four concrete steps below the sidewalk. The door has some small panel windows in it, but they’re frosted and so otherwise unadorned.

The pine coat rack almost stands in the doorway. It supports Helen’s beige winter coat, her brown felt hat, and the old black umbrella that probably used to be Gene’s. The hook furthest from the door has tomorrow’s dress hanging from it so the wrinkles will have a chance to fall out.

Today’s dress is white cotton with a small print of violets, washed so many times it’s as soft as old bedsheets. Helen likes it because it’s comfortable, especially now that she’s thinner, but the full skirt keeps getting caught under the legs of her chair when she changes position.

Helen sits at her old hall desk that stands next to the coat rack, right under the lace-curtained windows. She’s writing a letter and looking at photos. That is, she looks at the photos she’s arranged on the little ledge at the back of the desk for several minutes at a time, then out the curtains for several minutes more, the lace printing shadows of roses and ferns across her face. The sunlight that steals past the curtains makes her white hair glow. Every once in a while she seems startled to discover the pen in her hand, notices the letter-paper as if it just fell from the ceiling, reads what she has written so far, and adds another paragraph, or maybe just a half-paragraph, because the photos distract her and start the cycle all over again.

The corner between the desk and the night-table is piled with books. Some of them were definitely always hers. Others may have been Gene’s. She’s put the books that make her happy near the top. The ones on the bottom are mostly bait to lure the mice and the mildew away from anything important.

The night-table is adorned with a china lamp in the shape of a poodle and an old wedding photo in a brass frame. The groom is tall and handsome and wears his blonde hair in a crew cut. The bride is a brunette, and her long lacy veil with its pattern of roses and ferns has been wrapped around the happy couple’s feet.

The coverlet on the white-painted twin bedframe was originally sized for a double bed. Helen cut the excess width of fabric off and hemmed the raw edges by hand, using green thread to match the background leaf pattern. Her favourite cabbage rose fell right on the cut line. Some things just can’t be helped.

A three-tiered chest of drawers sits opposite the hall-desk on the other side of the bed. Helen’s clothes are hidden in it. On top are more secrets – photos of the man and woman from the wedding picture laughing in a Hawaiian-themed nightclub, at a backyard barbecue, in front of a living room Christmas tree. The barbecue and Christmas photos are in colour, but they’re faded.

The chest of drawers shares the wall with an upside-down milk crate that keeps the pantry items and dishes off the floor.

Helen hung the excess strip of fabric from the bed coverlet over the door to the shared bathroom. Mr. Braemar, her neighbour, does not always remember to close and lock both bathroom doors before he does his business, and Helen would rather not fight with him about something so stupid.

The wall opposite the foot of the bed has a bar fridge plugged into it, and a hot plate sitting on top of another upturned milk crate. There’s also a small sink, which is nice so Helen doesn’t have to do her dishes in the shared bathroom. She’s hung a little mirror above the sink. That way she can get dressed and brush her teeth in the morning without having to wait for Mr. Braemar to finish and leave for work.

The gap between the bar fridge and the door is empty, so the door has somewhere to swing when Helen opens it. The door is open now, and an extra sunbeam is hitting the vinyl-covered dining room chair that Helen sat in until she finished her letter. The bits of glitter embedded in the vinyl sparkle in the sun.

The photos are still on the back ledge of the desk. The shaft of sunlight narrows and vanishes as Helen closes and locks the door. She pauses to check how much change she has in her pocketbook before she heads to the post office to send her letter.

#fridayflash: from

2011-11-11T16:55:00.001-05:00

On Mars the daytime sky is pink — it’s the sunsets that are pale blue.

After over two years of not being on a planet at all, Audrey didn’t care what colour the sky was, so long as she had one over her. She paused for a moment as she stepped off the spaceliner and onto the walkway that led to the Martian welcome centre. It was strange to walk without feeling engine vibrations coming up through the floor. She tilted her head back and gaped at the huge glass dome. Fred Peters, her job contact here, had told her that eventually people stopped thinking of the domes as “being inside” and identified anywhere without an opaque wall as “outside”. Audrey shook herself and continued to the welcome centre. It was going to take a while to get used to this.

She scanned the crowd for someone looking like the photo of Fred Peters that was on the employee intranet, then noticed a teenaged girl holding a sign that said “Audrey” on it. The girl made eye contact with her and smiled.

“Are you Audrey Fremantle? I’m Sarah Peters, Fred’s daughter. My dad got called into work at the last minute, so I said that I would come and meet you.” Sarah put away the sign. “It doesn’t happen that often.”

"Nice to meet you, Sarah.” Audrey guessed the girl was about sixteen. “Thank you for stepping in.”

"No problem — I’ve never met someone who was actually from Earth before. You know the government will move your things to your residence, right?”

Audrey nodded. “Right.” She paused as Sarah’s words sank in. “Never? Both your parents were born here?”

Sarah nodded. “I’m third gen. All my grandparents were part of the construction crews that built the first domes, but they had all died before I was born. My older brothers can remember them a little. Want to have a tour of the colony, or do you want to go straight to your residence?”

"A tour would be great.”

Sarah led Audrey out of the welcome centre to a trio of glass tunnels. They stepped onto a movator, sort of like the ones at Earth airports, except this one had chairs. The two women sat down, and Sarah started pointing out things.

"I picked this tunnel because it gives you a good view of the dome layout, and it’s nice and long so we can talk about what you want to look at. The government area is over there — that’s where we live, and where your residence is too. I used to go to school there, but now I take the tunnel to the university area. The senior high schools are in the same location.”

Audrey compared the two dome clusters, but from this distance they looked identical. She supposed there would be better identifying landmarks once they were actually inside the domes.

"We’re going to go through the agricultural district now,” said Sarah. “This is my favourite place in the colony.” The movator slid past a field of tall plants. “Those are sunflowers. You can eat the kernels, and you can cook with their oil.”

"My mother used to grow sunflowers in her garden on Earth,” said Audrey.

Sarah looked surprised. “Really? I didn’t know they’d been exported to Earth.”

"They’re not, they were exported from...” Audrey started to say, but Sarah was pointing out a field of spelt, carefully explaining to Audrey what spelt was and proudly announcing it was a Martian staple.

Yeah, on Earth too, thought Audrey. She peered at the spelt. Maybe it was a Mars-specific strain invented to be grown under glass domes, but to Audrey it just looked like plain old spelt.

They trundled along more domes filled with fields of beans and strawberries. Each time, Sarah’s explanation indicated that she believed the plants were native to Mars, and that Audrey would never have seen them before.

“Ooh, the botanical gardens!” Sarah jumped off the movator. “Let’s walk around!”

Audrey followed Sarah into a walkway that led to a dome set out as a formal garden. There were plaques in front of each kind of plant stating what its common and scientific names were, but not mentioning that all of them, down to the last shrub, were transplants from Earth.

Sarah had stopped explaining what everything was when Audrey started reading the plaques out loud, but Audrey was still troubled by the misconception. After all, the reason why she was on this three-year research stint with the government was to ensure Earth-Martian links remained strong.

She decided to take her stand by a clump of rose bushes. “These are lovely,” she said. “I used to grow the exact same variety outside my townhouse on Earth. This kind’s from England originally, as I recall.”

Sarah smiled, but Audrey could see it was forced. “Those are Martian roses. Everyone in my family volunteers here. I planted that bush myself.”

"The plant is Martian, sure, but as a variety —”

"They’re Martian! It’s true, everything they say about Earthers is true! You’re all in total denial that Mars is Mars, you think this is all just Earth under a bunch of domes!”

Audrey tried to recall everything she had ever learned about staying calm. “The colony’s been here a long time,” she began. “Certainly long enough to have its own identity and culture.”

"I know,” said Sarah.

Audrey tried again. “On Earth, roses grow all over the world, but they’re from Asia, mostly.”

“These are from Mars.”

Audrey pointed to the emergency hatch at the end of the garden path. “If these are Martian roses, open that hatch and see how long they last without the dome’s seal protecting them.”

Sarah muttered something under her breath and stomped back towards the movator. Audrey caught only a few swear words and decided not to push it. She was here as a researcher, not a teacher.

The roses were lovely, though. She envied the Martians' ability to control the climate so precisely, thanks to the domes.

She heard Sarah shouting something, but couldn’t make out what it was.

Then she noticed the abrupt temperature drop, and how the wind started blowing.

#fridayflash: prose sestina

2011-11-04T18:53:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to try this out for a while — an exercise in description and point of view. I've come across similar stuff and always thought it was fun, and of course as a device it's been used to create entire novels. No points for guessing what kind of establishment I was in when I wrote it.

Inside the café are chatting couples. There are elderly women browsing magazines. Most of the people in the big, overstuffed armchairs are frowning into laptop screens.

The baristas repeat their phrases of greeting, of order confirmation, of giving change. They stand behind cash registers with more computing power than the Manhattan Project. They operate espresso machines bristling with spigots and knobs. The steam hisses and the pucks of spent coffee get dropped into a little drawer attached under the counter. Tea bags are dunked into cups of freshly boiled water.

The walls of the sitting area are exposed brick. On the long wall there is a triptych showing the inside of a café. The tables are populated with chatting couples, with elderly men leafing through newspapers. Most of the people in the big, overstuffed armchairs are smiling into laptop screens.

The baristas pose cheerily behind brass cash registers that were antiques even at the time of the Manhattan Project. Some peek out behind espresso machines bristling with spigots and knobs. Steam floats above the machines, and above the fresh cups of tea being handed to grateful customers.

The walls of the sitting area are smooth and perfect. On the long wall there is a mural showing the inside of a café. The tables are occupied by chatting lovers holding hands over their cups of cappuccino. There are elderly grandparents sharing cocoa with small children. Most of the people in the big, overstuffed armchairs are reading books.

There is no cash register to be seen, but the two visible corners of a black iron box suggest that this is long before the Manhattan Project. The lone barista manipulates the brass apparatus of the espresso machine. A waiter wearing a long white apron stands at the counter, waiting for a demi-tasse to be filled.

The walls of the sitting area are exposed brick, where they are not covered with bright posters suggesting the work of Toulouse-Lautrec. Gas fanlights illuminate the scene. A larger poster hangs just behind the order area of the espresso bar. It shows the inside of a café.

#fridayflash: waiting

2011-10-28T14:53:00.000-04:00

Matthew crossed the threshold to the drawing room. Both his grandparents glanced up to see who it was. The effect was immediate — his grandfather stood and cried out, while his grandmother shrieked and burst out weeping into her handkerchief.

Bloody hell, thought Matthew, it’s only been three years since I last saw them, and Mum and Dad said they were sending photographs.

His grandfather made a visible effort to calm himself. “Matthew, my dear boy, we thought you’d be arriving with your father. Come have a drink with me in my office.” As they strode out of the room together, his grandfather rang the bell and whispered, “Mrs. MacFadyen will take care of Nan.”

Matthew followed his grandfather across the cavernous main hall and up the central staircase, wishing that he’d just shown up for the pheasant shooting with his father instead of agreeing to start his visit a week earlier.

They reached the office, insulated as ever from the world in thick layers of mahogany and red velvet.

“How do you like your whisky, Mattie?”

“Just with soda,” Matthew said, biting his lip. “I’m Matthew, Granddad.”

“Eh?”

“I’m Matthew.”

“Of course you are,” said his grandfather, fixing the second drink. “What did I say?”

“You said Mattie.”

His grandfather tried to put the stopper on the whisky bottle, but his hands were shaking too much to get it into the bottle’s neck. Matthew gently took it and replaced it for him.

“You sit down. I’ll carry the drinks.”

His grandfather sank into the wing-chair on one side of the fireplace. “You’re the same age now that he was when....”

“I know.”

Matthew spent the rest of the evening listening to his grandfather ramble on about Uncle Mattie. How he’d adored his much-older brother, Matthew’s father. How he’d been top of his class, an excellent athlete, a friend to everyone. How he’d been one of the first to sign up when the Great War started. How his letters had shown that he’d written home regularly, even if their delivery was less so.

And now whatever’s left of him is under some Belgian farmer’s field, thought Matthew.

Of course his father had named his eldest child and first son after his beloved brother. It was just awkward that Matthew would so strongly resemble his namesake.

He fixed his grandfather yet another drink, carefully adding just a little more soda than last time, and a little less whisky. The stories would just get more depressing if the old man got drunk.

He handed the tumbler to his grandfather, who took a sip, made a face, but didn’t say anything. Matthew sat down. At some point the butler had been called to light the fireplace, and it was relaxing to stare into the flames.

“We see him around the house, you know,” said his grandfather suddenly.

“Who?”

“Mattie. But always outside. That’s why it startled us earlier — we thought you were him and that he’d found a way in.”

Matthew forced himself not to roll his eyes. “It’s probably just someone looking for work, Granddad.”

“We’ve been seeing him for twenty years,” said his grandfather. “Both your Nan and I. At first we didn’t want to tell each other because we each thought we were going mad, but then we both saw him at the same time. The MacFadyens have seen him too, and they never knew him when he was alive. He’s always wearing a long tan coat and brown trousers, just like you did today. And he never ages. He’s always a lad of twenty-one.”

“I’m sure there’s a rational explanation,” said Matthew, making a mental note to never wear the tan coat around his grandparents.

The mantlepiece clock chimed. “Look at that,” said his grandfather. “I’m sure your grandmother has gone to bed already. We should turn in. Fresh start in the morning.”

“Good night then.” Matthew finished his drink. “Which room did my bags get put in, do you know?”

His grandfather opened his mouth to speak, then hesitated.

Matthew nodded. “Uncle Mattie’s room. Do you mind if I borrow a book to read?”

“Anything you like, my boy. Good night.” His grandfather waved a hand at the bookshelves, got up and left.

Matthew scanned the bookshelves. He settled on a Dickens that looked like it could have been a first edition, then headed down the hall to the wing the bedrooms were in. There weren’t any lights on, but he knew the way well. Nothing had changed in the three years he had been abroad studying.

He reached automatically for a light switch by the door, then remembered that his grandparents still used gas. He cursed softly under his breath, and stretched out a hand. Sure enough, there was a little table near the door with a candle set in a brass holder and a box of matches.

Matthew set down the book, lit the candle, and shut the door. Now that he had made it to the bedroom he realised he didn’t feel sleepy at all. As much as his grandfather had promised him a fresh start to the visit in the morning, he had a bad feeling about being here alone with them.

He put the candle on the bedside table nearest the window and parted the curtains. It was so overcast that he couldn’t see anything but his own reflection staring back at him in the window. He studied his face, wondering what he could do to make his grandparents more likely to remember he was their living grandson. He glanced down at his clothes with reproach. He should learn what colours Mattie wore and try to avoid them. It would be difficult since, of course, what had suited Mattie now suited him.

He looked at the window again without lifting his head, and was surprised to notice that his hair was parted in the middle. He always wore it parted over his right eye. He raised a hand to part it the usual way and then gasped. The reflection in the window still had both hands at its sides, and its expression hadn’t changed when Matthew had gasped.

Then the reflection raised its own hand and reached through the window...

#fridayflash: the timeline

2011-10-21T20:52:00.000-04:00

2039: Scientists working at the University of Melbourne successfully teleport a coffee cup from a dedicated departure pad to a dedicated arrival pad. Later that same year, they work with another team in Wellington, New Zealand to teleport another coffee cup, this time with a note in it laying bets on which team will win the Rugby World Cup. The New Zealand team confirms the coffee cup and note arrived safely, and in their original states. This proves that a) long distance teleporting is possible and b) teleporting two things at once will not "blend" them or stick them together. The Australians win the Nobel Prize for physics that year, but lose their bet.
2040-2045: Development of the technology continues. Pads may now be built large enough to accommodate a shipping container.
2047: The first commercial teleportation pads are rolled out around the world. Ship's captains, seamen, and freight airline pilots demonstrate in New York, Hong Kong, London, Mumbai, and elsewhere, claiming the technology will destroy their industries.
2048-2053: Shipping via teleport becomes the norm for anything but very large items. Several industries are transformed as shipping costs flatten — the Australian corporation founded by the scientists uses a global flat fee, scaled only by the size of the item to be shipped, rather than weight or distance.
2053: a dock worker in Hamburg shows up for work drunk, gets sacked, screams he's going to kill himself, and runs into a departure pad just as a shipper hits the teleport button. Much to everyone's complete shock, he arrives in Johannesburg with the shipping container alive and unharmed. The teleportation company owners hold an emergency meeting to discuss human and animal transport on a large scale. The South Africans arrest the dock worker for entering the country illegally, and decide the least expensive thing to do is deport him back to Germany the same way he arrived.
2053-2055: Countries around the world start using teleportation as a method of deporting illegal refugees en masse. Human rights groups complain that often people are deported to countries they did not come from, without being able to speak the local language and with no means to either return to their home country or find a new safe haven.
2056: the teleportation company applies a global firmware upgrade that checks the DNA of any organic matter on the destination pad. If more than two kilos of it belongs to any single human, the pad will not operate until it is removed. Shipping companies complain this slows transmission speeds to unacceptable levels — one tenth of a second instead of one hundredth.
2057: the first "parallel" teleport networks are set up using discarded and reverse-engineered components. After two fatal accidents, one involving a political leader who encouraged the alternative network, the Australian company decides to allow licensing and franchising of the pad centres. They insist, however, that there be one global network, pointing to the problems caused with the Internet when countries tried to split off and form their own.
2058: the first public transportation pads are rolled out. No more than four people are allowed on a pad at once, and destination keycards have to be paid for in advance. Most pads are for only one person to use at a time.
2060: Suburban areas around the world get retrofitted so that their residents can walk to the nearest pad centre in a reasonable amount of time. The average fitness levels of North Americans and Western Europeans improve for the first time in decades.
2062: The automobile and train industries run a smear campaign against teleportation, resurrecting the old twentieth-century slogan "Getting There is Half the Fun" and claiming teleportation uses more energy and is more polluting than internal combustion vehicles. Unfortunately for them, the scientists who own the teleportation company have been studying energy consumption and the total carbon footprint of their technology almost from the start, and have hard numbers (and a good ad agency) to refute this. They start a counter-campaign aimed at families: "Never have anyone ask 'are we there yet?'".
2065: teleportation leads car driving in terms of kilometres travelled. More and more neighbourhoods are becoming "car free zones".
2070: most countries have laws banishing the few remaining cars to rural areas. No one notices much.

nature in nature exhibit

2011-10-18T23:20:00.002-04:00

This past week saw my friend Cathy's first-ever photo exhibit, hosted at The Gladstone Hotel's Art Bar. Just because I heard this question asked over and over again during the evening launch event, I feel obliged to mention off the top that none of these images have been Shopped at all. It's just Cathy, a DSLR, the plants, and a lot of patience. She doesn't even use a fancy lens; she says it's just a case of getting right up to the plant until the camera is almost touching it and then getting the focus right. The depth of field is very shallow, so the backgrounds look like they were painted in, but it's the shot construction giving that effect.

The photos filled one brick wall:

And two plaster walls:

I love how the rather plain gallery space shows up how much the photos are full of colour and texture. They aren't just "pretty flower" photos — most of the plants used for the photos are either dead or dying — but it's like the title of the exhibit says: the nature in nature is exposed.

Cathy found a way cool mod dress to wear to the launch event:

There was a good turnout —lots of interesting (and interested) people showed up:

The exhibit ended today, but if you want view/purchase info, you can contact Cathy via the info on her Twitter home page.

#fridayflash: freedom

2011-10-14T18:29:00.000-04:00

Here's this week's #fridayflash. Please leave comments/critiques!

John glanced at the clock on the microwave. He still had fifteen minutes to get to work. No problem; it was only 7:30, and the queues wouldn’t be that long this time of the morning.

He yawned, slugged back the remains of his coffee, and stuffed the last bite of toast into his mouth. Fortunately he’d had the wherewithal to leave his overcoat, hat, and briefcase by the door; it was a habit he was trying to keep, but some nights he forgot. He pulled his work keycard from the outside pocket of his briefcase and stuffed it in his overcoat pocket — the people behind always hated it when someone fumbled for their destination ID. On the way out the door he grabbed his house keycard from the row of hooks by the door and tapped it against the scanner in the hall to lock up.

On the street there were a fair number of people at the cafés and fast food outlets getting breakfast, but the commuter queues were only three or four people deep on the boulevards. A streetcar grumbled by with commuters who had less than the minimum transport length of ten kilometres to travel. John checked his pocket watch, which told him it was 7:40. He supposed he had enough time to get a coffee to go; the stuff at the office was awful, and there weren’t any cafés handy nearby.

There was a long queue at his favourite café, maybe a dozen people, but it moved quickly. John waited for another streetcar to pass so he could cross the road to the transport boulevard. He paused to admire the street. In some neighbourhoods they had just built right on top of the old parking lanes, but where John lived the old lanes had been resurfaced with paving stones — nicer for people to walk on than plain old asphalt. They’d added some trees in cement planters too. It looked good. You’d hardly know that ten years ago cars used to run on the same streets.

John picked a queue that looked like it was shorter than the others, then waited his turn. The commute was moving well this morning. A woman in a blue suit and a grey fedora was directly in front of him. John met her often, but didn’t know her name. He nodded hello when she noticed someone was behind her and glanced back. She smiled at him, and John smiled in return. Maybe in a few more weeks he would get a chance to ask her name.

It was the woman’s turn to commute. She stepped through the turnstile doors onto the pad, made a quarter-turn to the left, and reached back to tap her work keycard against the scanner. John always had fun watching how people used the transporter. Some people positioned themselves to suit the location of the departure pad. Some people planned how they would look when they arrived. The woman vanished in a burst of white light.

The turnstile doors hummed and the indicator light turned green, telling John the woman had transported to her destination and it was now his turn. He pushed his way through the doors, letting two fingers hook through his briefcase handle while the other three held his cup of coffee in the same hand.

Through the glass walls that surrounded the transport pad on three sides, John could see a young couple struggling with a beat-up couch on one of the oversized cartage pads. He rolled his eyes and wondered why they didn’t just rent a furniture cart like normal human beings. “Always has to be someone doing it the hard way,” he muttered to himself.

He reached into his coat pocket and tapped his work keycard against the scanner.

He was never sure if he actually did blink, but it felt like he had. One moment he was standing on the boulevard in front of his condo building; the next he was in the lobby of the office tower he worked in.

John stepped out the exit doors of the arrival pad and glanced at his watch. 7:45. He was doing well. He still had fifteen minutes before the morning status meeting.

He walked to the elevator bays and tapped his keycard against the elevator scanner. The elevator ascended to his office’s floor and he got out. As he reached his desk, he could hear Mike from Accounting complaining about his commute again.

“Twenty minutes today,” said Mike to Agnes, who was doing her best to pretend she was interested. “Twenty minutes, at seven in the morning! Don’t you think that’s insane?”

“You have to learn to keep calm about it, though,” said Agnes. “The cops are starting to crack down on queue rage.”

“People should be ready,” said Mike. “If they’re in the god-damned queue, they should be ready. Otherwise they’re just part of the traffic problem.”

John started his computer and sat down, leaning back and taking his first sip of coffee. It was still too hot to drink, so he hung his coat and hat up and made sure he was ready for the morning meeting while he waited for it to cool down.

“Hey John,” Mike called from across the office floor. “Got lunch plans today?”

“Just going home.”

“You always go home.”

“It’s cheaper and the food’s better.”

“Even with paying for transport four times a day instead of two? Are you sure?”

John grinned and headed back to his desk.

He checked his e-mail, dashed off a few quick replies, then locked his computer to go to the conference room for the status meeting. As he got up, he took a quick glance at his desktop wallpaper.

It was a photo of his father with his first car — a petroleum-burner that had constantly needed repairs. Whenever he took a good look at the photo, John remembered what his father had said when John was growing up: “You’ll never know. You’re never going to know what it feels like, to get that kind of freedom from owning a car.”

No, no he wouldn’t.

#fridayflash: what's in the name

2011-10-07T21:11:00.000-04:00

This is my first foray into #fridayflash. Just something light this time — let me know what you think!

Ellen locked her apartment door behind her and sighed. It had beena rotten Friday rounding off a rotten week at work, and she waslooking forward to a night of TV-watching. As she prised the high-heeled shoesoff her feet, she tried to figure out if she would be better offmaking herself dinner, or using the last of her patience to waitfor pizza delivery.

The phone started ringing as she hung hercoat up. She was expecting a friend of hers to call about seeing a movie Saturday, so she picked it up without checking caller ID.

"Yes, am I speaking to Mrs. Stilzkind?" said avoice that sounded like it was coming from far away, over cheapequipment and a bad line.

Ellen hobbled to the couch,wishing her toes wouldn't take so long to straighten out after shetook her shoes off. "Mrs. Stilzkind is my grandmother," shesaid, "but just skip to your sales pitch."

"Sorry,ma'am?"

Ellen rolled onto the couch and gingerly pressedher toes into the cushions, wincing. "What are you trying tosell me?"

"Oh no Mrs. Stilzkind, I only wish toinform you of an excellent offer to have your home re-insulated withstraw. High-tech straw insulation is a wonderful way to invest in anenvironmentally-friendly product that will put money in your pocketthrough reduced heating bills—"

"I live in anapartment," said Ellen.

"I beg your pardon, Mrs.Stilzkind?"

"I live in an apartment, and Stilzkindis my father's name, not mine. Also, I'm not interested. Good-bye!"

She pressed the disconnect button and dropped the phone on thefloor, letting her arm hang off the edge of the couch. Supper, shedecided, would have to wait until she could bear the thought ofstanding up again.

The phone rang.

Before she couldstop herself, Ellen picked up the phone, pressed the answer button,and said, "Hello?"

"Good evening, Mrs.Rumpole," said a smooth, confident voice. "I'm calling toremind you that it's time to put your garden to bed for the winter.Castle Greenhouse has a great selection of straw mulches that can bedelivered right to your back door—"

"Mrs. Rumpoleis my mother's name, not mine, I live in an apartment, and I'm notinterested. Good-bye!"

She hit the disconnect button so hardshe had to press it a few more times to make it pop up again. Then shedropped the phone on the floor and stared up at the ceiling, anddecided that ordering pizza wasn't such a bad idea after all.

Ellenwaved her hand over the floor, trying to find the phone, but it hadbounced and rolled away when she dropped it. She made herself rollonto her side so she could see where it went. At first she thought ithad vanished, but then she spotted it halfway under the couch.

Shepicked up the phone, and was just getting into a position where shecould comfortably dial with her other hand when...

The phonerang.

Ellen considered answering and then immediately hangingup, but she didn't want to put the caller on hold by accident andwind up talking to them after she'd ordered her pizza.

Shejabbed the answer button and said, "Hello?"

"Goodevening!" said a voice with far too much energy in it. "HaveI reached Mrs. Romila Stilzkind?"

"There is no suchperson," said Ellen, wishing she didn't have such good phonemanners.

"Ah!" said the voice. "I waswondering if you'd say that. Please, I am a floor supervisor at thesales centre that both Enviro Insulation and Castle Greenhouseoutsource to. We don't usually do this, but I couldn't help butnotice that you were contacted by two of our staff tonight, but undertwo different names. You told us that Stilzkind is your father's namebut not your own, and Rumpole is your mother's name, but not yourown. Please ma'am, if only so we can correct our records, what isyour name?"

"Rumpole-Stilzkind!" said Ellen.And she turned off the phone, unplugged its base unit, took thebattery out of her cell phone, and turned off her wireless router.Which is to say, for all intents and purposes, she disappeared fromthe world without a trace.

cognitive dissonance when the rubber hits the road

2011-09-18T20:55:00.000-04:00

I am a car owner. I hasten to add, that I am only a car owner because the public transit infrastructure where I live is so painfully underfunded that I need one. To me, the best kind of car is one that couples in a row to run on tracks, preferably with a bike rack compartment somewhere handy.

So every once in a while I wind up reading some articles about cars (mostly to see if they're going to die off finally). Recently, I discovered this article by Ian Law, writing for the Wheels section of The Toronto Star (3 June 2011). He gives a lucid, solidly-argued explanation for why drivers who are not passing should stick to the outside lane. Even when there are three lanes. Even when the outside lane disappears from time to time, forcing drivers into what was the middle lane, but is now the outside lane (ie: how most Southern Ontario highways are constructed).

Funny thing, though: there's a 12 September article also printed in the Wheels section of The Toronto Star entitled "The science behind traffic jams". It gives three behaviours (mass behaviours of groups of drivers, not individual driving behaviours) that cause traffic jams. The first two behaviours are about how changing lanes causes traffic jams.

So we're supposed to drive in the outside lane (what most Golden Horseshoe drivers think of as the "merge lane") and change lanes when that lane disappears into an exit ramp (and it will), yet changing lanes is what makes traffic slow to begin with.

Personally, I agree with Law that usually the outside lane is for driving in. The problem is, it seems that the Golden Horseshoe does not have "usual" highways. I remember when one of my brothers came home from a motoring vacation in Germany: the first thing he wanted to tell me about was how much easier autobahns were to navigate than GTA-area highways, because you didn't have to worry about exiting by "accident", even in high-volume traffic. That meant out-of-country drivers like him who weren't sure when the exit they wanted was going to come up could stay in the outside lane, confident they would remain on the highway until they were ready to leave it. You can't drive like that in the GTA —you'll wind up on a local road, trying to figure out how to get to the next on-ramp.

Look, I took my driver's test same as everyone else on the road (er, at least I hope they did), and I know perfectly well the right lane is supposed to be used except to pass. But that behaviour is simply not supported by the road designs in this part of the world.

When I got my first car (at age 32), I hadn't driven more than once a year for about five years. I made a point of sticking to the right lane like glue so that all the other drivers could go around me and not worry about me getting in their way as I learned how to navigate Toronto and area by car instead of by public transit. Anyone who's driven here knows it's not the handling the car part that can be stressful, it's knowing how the different roads (and the lanes that make up those roads) are going to change in the next two kilometres.

I tend to be a middle-lane driver now, much to the chagrin of Law and others who think like him. I see it this way: if there are three lanes, the outside lane is for merging and exiting, the middle lane is for driving, and the inside lane is for passing. I know that's not the letter of the law as handed down by the Ministry of Transport. I also know it's the only way to get from Point A to Point B around here without having to change lanes a lot.

And changing lanes a lot, as studies have shown, causes traffic jams.

YOU MUST LEARN

2011-08-07T19:59:00.002-04:00

The cliché is that those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it. There's another cliché, though, the one about history being written by the victors. In this case it's not so much the victors as the advertisers, though, and historical accuracy is not in their selfish best interests.

I've seen lists like these in some of the computing magazines etc., and they always have one or two things wrong with them. First of all, they're often inaccurate, and rush too quickly to get to the star names. It's like they're worried their readers will stop reading if they learn something new.

Second of all, they're often confused. They'll start way early in the timeline, or way late, like a student who didn't exactly understand what their own thesis statement was.

This is my timeline for the development of personal computing. Don't let your eyes glaze over, 'cos unless you're a computer science major (or act like one), you may learn some surprising things. Besides, if you're reading this blog, it means you're taking a break from on-line games or porn or your friends' status updates or whatever else you usually look at.

The rough sketch for what we now call the personal computer (or tablet, or smartphone, or whatever) was published in July 1945 by someone called Vannevar Bush. He wrote about it in an essay called "As We May Think" in The Atlantic Monthly, and it's still available on-line today. It's as good and accessible a read as anything that magazine publishes now. Bush gives a series of small examples, which, while interesting, leave you thinking, "okay, so....?" until he puts them all together and delivers the knockout punch at the end.
That July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly was read by, amongst other people, a man named Douglas Engelbart. Once he finished serving in the Pacific theatre of the Second World War, he went home to the US and started working on creating some of the things Bush presented in his essay.
Engelbart invented the mouse in 1963. Bill English carved the first prototype out of a block of wood. Engelbart patented the mouse in 1970, but the patent papers were filed in 1967.
1968: The Mother of All Demos. Engelbart demonstrates using the mouse, display editing, copying & pasting text, hypertext (links), and multiple windows. The whole thing is video conferenced, so that those who want to see the demo but can't attend in person can watch on closed-circuit TV.

Please pause and re-read that last entry. All of that stuff was working well enough to demonstrate live in 1968.

Oh yeah: in 1969 Engelbart (again!) helped start ARPAnet, which eventually became what we now call the Internet. I don't think it's a big exaggeration to say that he's shaped to a very large extent everything the world thinks of as "normal" in a human-computer experience, and yet most people haven't heard of him. Luckily he seems to be a force for good.

And that is where I'm going to end my timeline, because from where I'm sitting, everything that comes afterwards is a long, slow, painful crawl to commercial acceptance from that 1968 demo. If you look around Doug Engelbart's site thoroughly, you'll see that his overarching aim has been to augment human intelligence. That we were stuck with the 1968 paradigm for so long (albeit with prettier video interfaces) is a tad worrying.

Where is computing going now? On the one hand I'm glad that innovations like the gesture-based commands in the Wii and Kinect systems made it to market, because I think a thinking environment that encourages us to use all of our bodies instead of being hunched over a desktop is a good thing. On the other hand, it's a tad worrying that these are coming out of the gaming world, which means they might be a hard sell in the business realm. After all, back in the 80s PCs themselves sometimes had to be purchased at large corporations as "word processors" or "adding machines" to avoid refusals from the accounting department.

Notice I made it this far without mentioning Bill Gates or Steve Jobs (or even Steve Wozniak). Notice how young Gates and Jobs were when all this was happening. Bush's essay was published ten years before either of them were born. I don't mean that Gates and Jobs haven't contributed; I just mean that there was already a lot in place by the time they started working on things.

The advertisers tell us that computing is changing very quickly, and that we have to run to keep up. Given that the idea came in 1945, was realised by 1968, and then didn't catch on until the 1980s, I'm not so sure.

there are things you should know

2011-06-28T23:38:00.001-04:00

I remember the first subway posters I saw for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I can't remember exactly what they said, but somehow I got the impression that it was a horror novel. Since I don't generally read horror, I just decided to be pleased that a book was getting so much advertising space, and sort of ignored it after that. Every once in a while the poster would catch my eye again, and I'd wonder what all the fuss was about, but was never really tempted to read it.

Then I read an article... somewhere. I think it was this Quill & Quire article. That led me to some Googling, and let me find out a bit more about who Stieg Larsson was, and who Eva Gabrielsson is. I also learned that those subway posters had misled me — the Millennium trilogy are a series of crime novels, and strongly feminist ones to boot.

And all of a sudden I had to read these novels. Once I finished the first one (in a day and a half of drop-everything reading one weekend), I started evangelising about them and telling everyone I knew that they had to read them too. Even I thought I was being obnoxious about it.

Every time I did a recommendation, though, I mentioned about what I had learned from my on-line news-reading: how Larsson and Gabrielsson had been a couple for decades, how they had never married so that Larsson's place of residence could be obscured, how the Swedish government doesn't recognise common-law marriages for what they are, which means Gabrielsson got nothing of Larsson's estate. She still receives nothing of the profits from the sales of the Millennium trilogy or its spin-offs.

I was thrilled to learn that Gabrielsson has written her own book: "There are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me. The ever-wonderful Carla and J-A went with me to the Swedish Consulate-hosted event to launch the book in Toronto. Gabrielsson spoke and answered questions for an hour, then signed books. It was a thought-provoking and positive way to spend Midsummer.

Gabrielsson was very thoughtful and articulate during the presentation, and already J-A and I have had some spin-off discussions based on some of the things she said that night.

I finished the book in the two days after I bought it that night. It's written in a very concise and clear style (it's not surprising to learn she's an architect by profession). Most of the book is about Gabrielsson's and Larsson's life together, rather than the aftermath of his death. There's a lot of warmth here, and a reassuring amount of humour. There were also a lot of surprises, although mostly those were in the final chapters (my head is still reeling from the "contractual" marriage proposal, if that's not too much of a spoiler).

It seems to me there are a lot of people taking the attitude of, "all the inheritance was done legally, they weren't married, suck it up." At best, this is a blatant failure to recognise the difference between what is morally right from the letter of the law.

"There are Thing I Want You to Know"... explains what is morally right, and why, and manages to be a damn good read at the same time.

Which is why everyone who has read the Millennium trilogy — and everyone who wants to fight the good fight — should read it.

there's worse things than dead air

2011-04-17T09:18:00.001-04:00

I heard the news this morning that CKLN is off the air — again. As I write this, the radio station's web site says that there will be a statement Monday, and that the fight with the CRTC (and within CKLN itself, really) isn't over yet.

I'm glad there are people out there fighting the good fight, but I'm worried that there are not enough people seeing the big picture. This is not the first time this sort of conflict has happened, and not just at Ryerson University, CKLN's physical home and the sponsor that makes them "campus/community radio".

In 1992-93, I finished up two degrees at the University of Western Ontario while working as a volunteer at CHRW, their campus/community radio station*. Western was always a weird fit with the campus/community radio paradigm. The university is notoriously conservative and known for not interacting with the city it is situated in. It sits on the top of its hill, supposedly once a golf course, with a big black metal fence around most of the main campus. The fence is supposed to keep would-be rapists out, but as a day-to-day architectural feature, it felt more like it was keeping the public out when they wanted in and the students in when they wanted to explore the larger community.

It was almost twenty years ago and would take a long time to explain, so I'm not going to go into all the details here, but it happened like this at CHRW: a group of station volunteers felt that the then-new station management was barely following the letter of the station's Promise of Performance (the "contract" of content the station must fulfill to remain on air), and certainly not the spirit of it. Management said that as volunteers, we had no say in the matter and should shut up and follow orders. Volunteers spoke out against changes at meetings. Management retaliated by summarily removing volunteers from shows, and by threatening volunteers with suspensions or expulsions if they continued to speak up. There were several incidents of a volunteer showing up to work their shift, only to discover that the timeslot had been given to a completely different show without their prior knowledge. Typically the new announcer didn't even know the shift hadn't been designated vacant.

Then management told the concerned volunteers that they wouldn't speak to us unless we had a group name, so some people made one up for the purposes of communicating. But when we went to the university ombudsperson and the CRTC to follow due process, they said they couldn't help us because the channels we were using were for individual students and citizens, respectively, and since we were now an "official" group we didn't have the right to follow those processes.

It ended with the station finally banning everyone they could name from the station for life, including me. It was supposed to be in retaliation for a peaceful demonstration that had been held to protest the management changes. I never attended or took part in planning the demonstration. I wasn't even in the city of London, Ontario when it happened — I was working a five-week teaching contract in Toronto.

The part that still hurts, besides the "guilt by association" summary dismissal, is that there was at least one time where station management argued that I shouldn't be allowed to attend the volunteer meetings and ask questions because I wasn't a volunteer. This despite the fact that I had paid my dues, filled out the paperwork, was listed on the volunteer roster, and had my station ID badge photo taken by the station manager himself. But I was the (then) girlfriend of an announcer with a long-running show, and somehow that meant that I wasn't a person in my own right in the sphere of station politics. That attitude was present and obvious long before the dispute started, even amongst people who prided themselves on being left-wing and feminist. Maybe that explains why I decided to fight management.

Afterwards, a lot of the people who had been fired from their volunteer positions over the dispute discussed alternative ways they could reach their audiences, often joking wryly about the need for an alternative to a supposedly alternative radio station. Using very low-wattage transmitters, the kind that real estate agents use to broadcast information about houses as you drive or walk by them, was considered, but ultimately not tried because of practical considerations. Internet radio was experimented with a bit (yes Virginia, even in the mid-90s there was internet radio — it was just a much bigger pain to create, transmit, and listen to). Ultimately most of the "concerned volunteers" went on to other community-based projects where their skills could be put to good use. For the first few years after the firings, there were several ironic incidents where a new volunteer from CHRW would call a former volunteer about a project they were working on and request an interview, only to be told that the former volunteer could not accept in good conscience because of the lifetime ban.

We also discussed going back on air after enough time had elapsed for forgetting (we didn't expect forgiveness), but there didn't seem to be any point.

The dispute was given some coverage on CBC radio. At the time we were disappointed that coverage of the CHRW situation was being truncated, but the sad thing was we lost coverage because there were other, similar disputes happening at other campus/community stations throughout Canada. From where I'm sitting, CKLN's latest news is another episode in an ongoing saga.

There are two things about it I find particularly troublesome:

Many of the people with power at campus/community stations — the power to take on and fire volunteers, the power to set content policy — don't know the CRTC regulations about such stations, or don't understand why those regulations are in place. There seems to be this idea that campus/community stations should be just like commercial radio, except "belonging to the students", who are encouraged to think of them as a public-broadcast version of last.fm (Don't get me wrong — I love last.fm. But it ain't campus/community radio, and it's not supposed to be.)
This has been going on for over twenty years (CHRW was hardly the first), but it only seems to make the news when a station is threatened with being reprimanded for CRTC infractions. I've been told that's because the mainstream media sees campus/community stations as competition. If so, they're being beyond ridiculous. Campus/community radio stations don't have the broadcasting wattage, the resources, or the advertising enticements of commercial radio by design.

There's more to consider, like accessibility, community representation, and other considerations, but this post is going long. I'll finish by noting one thing: see that black-and-white logo on CHRW's web site, up at the top of the home page? I was surprised to see that they were still using it — it came in around 1991. The original, which used a sans serif font, was created by a volunteer who did graphics for television. But he became one of the concerned volunteers, so the Times New Roman version you can still see on the station web site was created. That way management could claim that they had made the logo themselves, and not accepted it from a volunteer they then summarily dismissed.

* And no, I never had my own show, although I did guest sometimes when an announcer couldn't make their shift because of vacation or illness. I actually volunteered to learn how to work a mixing board and other radio engineering tasks — but what happened with that is a blog post for another day.

decadence done right

2011-03-16T22:17:00.000-04:00

With the major exception of dark chocolate, I'm not a big sweets person. I actively dislike boiled sweets/hard candy, and a lot of the desserts on menus leave me cold. I mean, honestly, so you threw a bunch of brownies, fudge, and caramel on top of a chocolate cake and called it "sinful" — I don't believe in sin, and it's just not that good. You can't just pile a bunch of sweet stuff on top of each other and claim it's a tour de force. My favourite restaurant dessert, which I have had at a restaurant precisely once, is three fresh strawberries dipped in dark chocolate. That's all anyone needs if the rest of the meal was good.

A few weekends ago the ever-knowledgeable J-A and I ran errands on Queen West, and we had Indian food for a late lunch. I'm used to Mumbai Indian food, which has enough heat to please most people, but isn't overwhelming. Our food was well-prepared, but it was so mild I had to wonder if there was any spices used in it at all. J-A suggested we go to Dufflet's for dessert, and I said that sounded like a great idea. I figured I'd just get a cookie or something small.

Dufflet's was packed to the rafters when we got there — not surprising on a rainy Saturday afternoon. So we trooped over to the Red Tea Box instead.

I'd never been before. I didn't even know it was a place you could get tea and dessert at. From the streetcar, it always looked to me like a very impressive cake-decorating place (although of course they do that too). Inside was like an art gallery by way of a tea shop. J-A checked that a table was free while I wandered around the part of the floor where they sell cookies and other goodies to go. There were square cookies iced to look like pictures of Japanese cherry blossoms, gingerbread men iced to look like little Japanese girls wearing kimonos and cute smiles, petit fours with pictures of pandas. Every single piece was amazingly well-crafted.

We took the outside customer's route to the back building where the tables & chairs were, and were seated at a table with vintage overstuffed porch chairs on either side of it. J-A ordered a mulled pear drink with a fruit tart, and I got black assam tea with a honey saffron cake.

J-A's order was a poem of aromatics. The bowl of mulled pear juice came with a sprig of fresh thyme floating in it, and the tart had all the expected wonderful fruit flavours plus some twists that couldn't be explained by the visible ingredients. Unfortunately, the photo I took of her order came out blurry, but I did get some good snaps of my honey saffron cake:

Yes, that's a cake. And those decorations on it are royal icing made with 24 karat gold. It was several minutes before I could bring myself to cut into this, it was so beautiful and perfect. The blue icing came off the cake in one colour-saturated piece, but I ate it anyways (and turned my tongue and teeth blue, which was fun in and of itself!). The cake inside was light and flavourful, and the honey saffron cream filling was gorgeous.

Was it expensive? Yeah — the beverages and desserts came out to $17 per person for the two of us (the honey saffron cake alone was $12). But as affordable indulgences go, that's not too bad. That's 9.6 Kit Kat bars out of the vending machine at work. The one-time experience of eating this cake was far more enjoyable than 9.6 Kit Kat bars spread out over the course of several weeks. I'd rather just remember eating the cake than have a Kit Kat bar, and I used to really like Kit Kat bars when Rowntree still made them.

I can't see myself going for something like this more than a few times a year, but each time will be very much appreciated. This is what a treat is supposed to be like, people.

Help, please: Somewhere on the interweb is a wonderful video about a woman who is just finishing lunch with her new boyfriend when he has to leave early. He tells the server to let the woman have whatever else she wants for lunch and to put it on his credit card. She then agonises (in a very, very funny but true way) about whether or not to have some cake for dessert, finally decides to indulge, and is just getting into the cake when her boyfriend returns... but I won't spoil it for you. What I need is to find this video again. It is absolutely hilarious, but it's funny because it's true, true, true. I've just tried Googling for it, and am coming up with nothing. Anyone have any leads? Please? Pretty please?

the virtues of being ready

2011-03-05T10:21:00.001-05:00

I received a letter from Descant magazine sometime during my business trip. It mentioned that the formal launch of the issue with my story in it would be 1 March, and that it would be in bookstores shortly thereafter. It's available at Book City, Chapters/Indigo, and various independent shops. If you like ghost stories, definitely check it out.

Since the story is in final form and officially published, I thought now would be a good time to blog about its making. In some ways it's at least as spooky as the actual story.

Late one worknight, I was surfing the web. Most of me was already asleep, and there was one part of me that kept looking at the clock on the computer desktop and thinking, "really ought to get to bed". But you know how it goes: one more link, oooh that sounds interesting, one more link...

The last link was an interview between Neil Gaiman and... someone. It was a promotional interview for The Graveyard Book, and at one point, either Gaiman or the person conducting the interview said, "No one expects a ghost". The other person agreed.

I honestly can't remember who was quoted as saying what, and I've never been able to find the interview since. I suppose if I dug through Gaiman's blog enough I'd eventually find the link again, but it's never seemed worth it, because of the two things that happened next.

The first thing was that some part of my still-conscious or subconscious brain found the statement "No one expects a ghost" very offensive. As an awake person writing this now, I have no idea why. I just remember feeling very angry about it. I even remember saying out loud, "They do too!"

And then Mary Beth started telling me what happened to Avery. Judging from her voice, she was at least five years older than the ten-year-old child in the story I wrote, but I could literally hear her in my head. She had that distinctive accent only used by people of Anglo-Saxon descent from Wellington or Halton counties. It's probably died out now with the influx of people in the new subdivisions there. I've never been able to imitate that accent out loud, but apparently one part of my subconscious knows exactly what it sounds like.

I opened up a word processing file and started writing down what Mary Beth was telling me. The first three-quarters of "The Expected Ghost" started off basically as dictation-taking. My conscious brain was able to guide things a bit — I picked the name "Avery" deliberately, taking it from a totally different web page I'd read earlier in the day — but a lot of it was just taking the words down without crafting them at all.

It would be more romantic to say I stayed up the rest of the night taking down that first draft, but the truth is eventually I looked at the clock and realised I really had to get to bed, so I reluctantly saved the file, shut the computer down, and caught some sleep. I finished the rest of the draft the following evening. One of the first revision jobs I had to do was to make sure the seam line between the subconscious dictation and the deliberate "awake" writing was invisible.

I got to write a ghost story that a ghost told me about. As far as "craft" goes, I can't say I'd recommend this as a usual method. It's far more likely the writer would just fall asleep on the couch than get any work done. I'm very lucky that I had the wherewithal left to open the word processor and start writing instead of thinking, "good idea, shall have to figure that out tomorrow". That seemed to be the biggest lesson — when it arrives, write it down.

banking in the shadow of Disneyland

2011-02-19T21:22:00.000-05:00

I just spent ten days in Orlando, working as part of an implementation team that was launching some software for a bank. Sunday was our only day off, and whilst sitting by the pool, chatting with co-workers, I pointed my cell-phone camera up and took this photo:

Since the other nine days of the trip were spent working 10-15 hours per day in windowless rooms lit by fluorescent tubing, it seemed a well-deserved break.

Per company policy and my own ethical standards, I can't tell you about the people I worked with (although they were all, to the last one, excellent, wonderful, and lots of other positive adjectives), or any details about the implementation (except to say it went very well). But I can tell you what I was thinking about during the few hours when I was awake, not working, and not with co-workers. I was thinking about Baudrillard's assertion that Disneyland exists to obscure the fact that America is Disneyland.

The hotel we stayed at is in the heart of the tourist area. Partly that's because tourist areas are where the hotels are, and partly that's because data processing centres for banks tend to be in less-expensive parts of town — which in Orlando's case means they are close to the major amusement parks. Every morning, just as the sunrise was making the eastern sky pale, I would pile into an SUV with my colleagues and watch the strip malls, countryside, and orange groves slide by, the same way you watch the singing animatronic models slide by when you're on the "It's a Small World" ride. We would leave the office after sunset, and pick a restaurant to eat at with a different theme from the previous night's venue, the same way people staying at the Disney resort do.

The motels I stayed at as a kid in 1978 are all long gone, but the architecture of their outdoor, terraced room entrances is echoed in the newer hotels, which were all built around ten years later:

The rooms were designed for families with children to stay in, or for university students who wanted to save money by bunking together. They are all suites, with a living room (the sofa folds out into a bed), kitchenette, full bath, and full-sized bedroom:

This living room area always reminded me of the Florida scenes from Jim Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise, even though its decor is the faux-luxe of the mid-80s rather than the leftover-from-the-60s portrayed in the film.

And that's how everything outside where we were working felt: like a film set, like an amusement park. The Floridians I worked with had some wry comments about "tourist Florida" versus "living Florida", and I believe them.

The exact border between the end of the parks and the start of the real, unsimulated Florida was impossible to pick out.

amazons are made, not born

2011-01-24T22:34:00.000-05:00

I am, according to my doctor, exactly 175cm tall. That's almost-but-not-quite five feet nine in Imperial measure; the actual fraction is five feet, eight-and-nine-tenths inches or something awkward like that. Since the average Canadian woman is only five feet four, that makes me stick out as a tall woman, at least in this country.

Being a woman, I talk about personal safety with my friends from time to time. It's just the usual stuff that gets distributed in those "safety tips" e-mails that float around the internet — how to carry your purse so that a mugger will decide you're not a good target, how to keep your cell phone handy so that you can call for help quickly but not get noticed by a cell phone thief, and so on. While we're on the topic, we might discuss toxic relationships, domestic violence, what to do if someone tries to assault us. Not something to dwell on and get paranoid or hateful about, but information needs to be shared, right?

It never fails, though: there's always a more petite friend who will turn to me and say, "You're lucky. You're tall, so you can protect yourself better."

This blog post is about why that is complete and utter nonsense.

Yes, I'm fully aware that many sources (like this one) will mention that women can be at risk because of their smaller size (they should say "on average", but this is rarely included). But consider: being tall just means that I'm tall. It doesn't turn me into Wonder Woman. I am most definitely not stronger than the average man my height or even a few inches shorter than I am. I don't have any special innate self-defence skills because I have long legs. It doesn't increase my pain threshold, or how likely I am to get bruised or broken when struck hard enough. I have no idea how to throw a punch, or how to shield myself while I'm throwing it.

If anything, I would argue that being tall puts me at a disadvantage to some extent. I can't move as fast. It takes longer for me to duck. It's harder for me to escape if I'm in a tight spot.

I've also got the myth going against me. I'm tall, so I'm supposed to be at a lower risk. If I do have someone smaller, man or woman, assault me, and I try to defend myself, what do you think is going to happen to me if my assailant claims I started the fight?

The thing is, height doesn't make might any more than might makes right. There's this weird perception out there that just because a woman is tall, that means she has other physiological attributes normally associated with men her height, like relatively greater strength. There's a whole host of other ways this assumption manifests itself in non-violent situations, but that's a rant for another day.

Meanwhile, stop thinking that just because tall people can reach the top shelf without a stepladder, we can "fight back" any better than shorter people.

Pitouie reviewed

2011-01-18T12:31:00.000-05:00

Just sit right back and read a tale, a tale of a fateful trip...

Pitouie (Derek Winkler) is one of those novels that's hard to describe without revealing important surprise plot points. The blurb on the web site of its publisher, The Workhorsery, probably does the best job possible of explaining it without giving anything away. My version goes like this: in the present day there is a small, obscure, independent island nation in the South Pacific. In the early 70s, there are men working at a DEW station in the high Arctic. The common thread between the two settings is how far large corporations are willing to go to see their profit line jump a few points, and the, ah, absurdities that can lead to. Some of the absurdities are funny. Some are chilling.

Pitouie is not for those who believe that the corporate sector provides all that is good in this world (okay, they ought to read it, but chances are they would have a hard time not being too annoyed to finish it). For the rest of us, it offers a lot of laughs, excellent storytelling, and some sobering ideas to ponder after the last page is reached. The plot follows a "crazy enough to be true" line that has made the book difficult for me to describe to my friends — twice I've been asked to clarify if it's fiction or non-fiction.

And maybe that's the point. The story is a tall tale about tall tales, about what humans are willing to believe if the right details are added in. There's even an official web site for the South Pacific island of Pitouie, nudging the story of the novel out into the virtual real world, if not the physical one.

The writing is straightforward and clear — good, accessible subway reading. Character development? Nah. Lars, the radar operator at the DEW station, has a character arc, but most of the rest of the characters are only there to push the plot along. Even Otis, the main character of the South Pacific thread, just seems to be present so he can ask everyone else what's going on and reveal the story.

The story lives up to its top billing, though. It starts with a simple enough premise, but after three chapters I was hooked, and I found the final half of the book difficult to put down.

If you want some light, fast-moving reading that still offers food for thought (lots), check it out.

how soon we forget

2010-12-30T18:10:00.000-05:00

Hey Canadians!

Remember the National Do Not Call List registry?

It was (is!) a web site where you could register your phone numbers — home phone, cell phone, the works — and make sure that companies didn't tie up your phone lines trying to sell you crap. There were some exceptions, which are very clearly explained on the web site, but overall it meant that those after-dinner sales pitches were off your phone and out of your face forever.

In theory.

I don't know about you, but of late it seems to me that I've been getting more of those stupid calls. Since I've been spending my winter vacation at home feeling ill, the resentment of dragging myself out of my sickbed just to find out someone who can't pronounce my last name wants to pitch a chimney flue cleaning service at me has been, uh, increasing. Just ask any of the poor saps who have called me lately.

Then I remembered that the DNCL was only good for so many years, at which point you had to re-register your number. Aha! Must be that time. So I went and did it, and the web elves who work for the government served me up this page:

(In real life, my actual home phone number displayed, of course.)

Okay, so if I, and everyone else who hit the registration web page as fast as they could, are good until 2013, then what's with the increase in phone solicitations?

Two possible explanations.

One: companies that you already deal with are allowed to call you up and pitch more stuff. So are politicians, newspapers, charities, and a bunch of other organisations. I have learned that if you say the magic words, "I do not accept phone solicitations. Please take me off your list," you can get these calls to diminish, but it takes many tries before it works.

Two: just like many people predicted, companies that indulge in telemarketing just waited a few years until they figured things had settled down, and have quietly started calling people again.

Consider this a public service announcement. If your number is a Canadian phone number and you are registered on the DNCL, you can complain about unsolicited calls via the web link I gave above. You have to know the number that called you, which is a pain for people like me who don't have caller ID, but it can be done.

If you have a Canadian phone number and are not registered yet, you may still do so using the link at the top of this post.

And if you get companies calling you, especially if they sound like some offshore outfit with a poor grasp of which country they're even calling, you can always use the magic words, "I do not accept phone solicitations. Please take me off your list." A professional marketer told me if you use that phrase, any self-respecting business will remove you from their list, because they know it's a waste of call time to try to contact you for a sale. If the person calling you doesn't understand what you mean (the caller I had this afternoon found the statement confusing), just say, "Add me to your kill list." That's telemarketing lingo for a list of numbers the auto-dialers will skip because, again, they know they won't get a sale by calling that number.

It can be a hard slog, but it's worth it for the peace and quiet. Don't forget.

the grinch is my hero

2010-12-20T11:08:00.001-05:00

There has to be something redeeming about enduring a six-week headache every bloody year.

If you're one of those types who loves Christmas cheer, Christmas decorations, Christmas presents, Christmas dinner... and especially if you feel offended by those nasty, awful Christmas haters, consider this (true) story that happened when I was in third year university:

Late April, a prematurely warm and humid night, sometime around two AM. At the single student's apartment building — a 300-unit set of real apartments, not dorm rooms — drunken louts are lurching and bellowing in the front drive. They're drinking on the front lawn, they're making an insane amount of noise, and they're doing an excellent job of keeping every other resident who wanted to sleep or study from doing so.

A woman on the third floor who is trying to prep a defence of her master's thesis decides she can't take any more. She sticks her head over her apartment balcony and offers the revellers alternatives to keeping the whole building awake. They could go to a friend's house. They could go to a bar. They could go to one of the empty fields of undeveloped land nearby and party out of earshot. She understands that they're done their exams and want to celebrate, but surely they can understand that not everyone else is on their schedule.

Two of the partiers hurl abuse and gobs of spit, but a third one walks over to where the woman's balcony is, beer bottle in hand, and tries to be philosophical.

"You've got to learn to loosen up," he tells her. "This is the time to enjoy yourself, when you're young. Plenty of time to work hard later on."

"But I'm defending my thesis tomorrow," the woman says. "Please, at least let me get some sleep."

The exchange repeats a few times in the way that such exchanges do, until the philosopher decides to expand his statement.

"What I figure is this," he says. "You've only got so many years to live, right? But no-one ever knows how many. So you might as well enjoy them as much as you can." He takes a pull from the beer bottle for emphasis.

"But I want to defend my thesis." The woman is pleading now. From the sixth-floor balcony where I am overhearing this, it sounds like she's in tears.

There's no point in calling the campus police. It's Sunday night and they're thinly staffed on weekends, especially during exam time. It could be dawn before they show up. There's no point in calling the community police either. Unless someone has punched someone else out, they'll claim it's a job for the campus police.

Eventually the louts did get tired and packed up the lawn party that night, but imagine if they hadn't for six weeks. Imagine there were louts all over the place, doing the same thing. Imagine they had their own set of songs — start with Alice Cooper's "School's Out" and work from there — that only got played during exam time. Imagine retail stores trying to cash in on the post-exam euphoria and having special sales to mark the occasion.

Then remember the Grinch at the start of Seuss's famous Christmas book, complaning about the noise.

Religion, tradition, or rite of passage, it doesn't really matter. If those who need to escape it can't, it's a nightmare, and it's irrelevant how much the participants enjoy it, or how big a community majority they are. If they have left no way to escape, they are being louts, no matter how charitable and moral they may be otherwise.

Yeah, the Grinch capitulated in the end, but that was because he was an anti-consumerist who found an overlap between the Whos's moral framework and his own. It also took heroic efforts on his part to get there.

I don't want to shut down Christmas, not any more than I would want to shut down a group of undergraduates celebrating the end of the school year. At the same time, I don't want anyone to shut me down, either. But that's what happens, every year.

So go ahead and celebrate if you want. Just be mindful of the neighbours.

truth in advertising

2010-11-16T22:18:00.000-05:00

My mum sent me this collection of vintage ads with the comment, "The younger generation will never believe these ads actually ran!"

Would it were true.

The only ones that surprised me were the pop ads aimed at babies, especially since they were all about making sure Junior would "fit in" with his peers as a lifelong sugar addict. Even so, I can see it — there's sugary breakfast stuff out there today aimed at (slightly older) kids and their parents that makes claims about giving youngsters "an energetic start to their day" or some such euphemism. The cigarette ads... we've all heard about the cigarette ads, and I'm old enough to remember seeing the "you've come a long way, baby" Virginia Slims ads in the National Enquirer at my grandmother's house, and Marlboro Man billboards during holiday road trips to the States.

That leaves the Del Monte, "wish list," and Kenmore Chef ads from this lot. Domestic cleaning and cooking products are still aimed at women (just not at their husbands for the purposes of buying for women). Also, I know a lot of women of the "younger generation" who will pretend not to be able to open a damn ketchup bottle just so they can get a guy to do it and honestly say he "does stuff" for them.

In fact... maybe we should run ads just like these, except in the present day and for present-day situations. Let the truthiness come out, and then see what happens.

vive la resistance!

2010-11-07T22:00:00.000-05:00

It took me a week to recover, but the last week of October had a lot going on, not the least of which was Samhain/Hallowe'en. The cool part was that all of it was inexpensive, accessible, and yet somehow exclusive.

The Sunday before Hallowe'en I met up with the other members of a book club I belong to. Instead of having a book to read, we told each other about books we'd read that we really liked. I brought the books I wanted to talk about along, as did most of the people who attended, so we got to look at cover art and read back-cover blurbs as well as hear about the books — something that will come in handy when I go to look for the books other people mentioned that I want to read.

We met in a café on the Danforth, so the entire cost of that outing was just the tea I bought. Not bad for an entire afternoon spent discussing my favourite subject!

On Wednesday I went to the latest Hutch House Concert, hosted by the ever-cool Cathy & Darren. It was great checking out new (to me) music, and was a lot of fun. The sound quality was noticeably impressive — nice and clear even though we were sitting in an average-sized rec room with the dropped ceilings you always get in houses with forced-air heating. I think any concert I go to now where I don't get to sit on a couch with the musicians less than five metres away is going to be disappointing.

The week wound up with the latest edition of West End Stories on Saturday night. The ever-amazing Joan and ever-inspiring Tara showed up, and a good time was had by all. We stuck with ghost stories/weird tales for the evening in honour of the season. I told the true story of an strict atheist who saw a ghost, and discovered there are only four degrees of separation between the wrestler The Iron Sheik and me (if only I could tell my grandparents — they loved to hate him).

So, three fun events... which wound up costing me less than $25 to attend in total. Try doing that at the local shopping mall!

fiction from fiction

2010-10-22T21:43:00.000-04:00

A short story of mine was accepted for publication in Descant magazine! It won't be published until Spring 2011, but it's my first publication and only my third submission, so I'm very pleased.

It's a ghost story, and it's based on a small cemetery near where I lived when I was in high school. I only ever had the guts to go in it once or twice — even in broad daylight, even though it has good sightlines and is on a major intersection, the place is creepy. The earth directly over each grave has sunk an inch or two lower than the rest of the ground, and is always of a squishy texture if the weather is above freezing, while the ground between the graves is always firm. It's a very disconcerting place to walk.

There was one headstone I vividly remembered from my high school years. It was white limestone, cut with block lettering, and dedicated to a woman who had died 1919-1920. She was the mother of several children who were all also listed on the tombstone. They had all died within months of each other.

At the time I thought it was odd that this had happened, since 1919 is relatively modern times. Then I learned about the Spanish flu pandemic and thought, "Aha! That's what happened!".

So yeah, my ghost story has to do with a farmer's graveyard and the Spanish flu pandemic.

Recently I made the drive back to Brampton to get some photos of the graveyard. Since I lived there, they've put up strip plazas both behind the graveyard and across 15 Sideroad from it. The one behind the graveyard has a much lower elevation than the cemetery itself — there's a retaining wall about five feet high at the northern edge of the parking lot. Which means, yes, the most southerly graves are right beside a parking lot retaining wall (and some do go right to the southern edge of the cemetery)... and the tops of the coffins are slightly higher than the top of the parking lot pavement, assuming those sunken areas I mentioned earlier indicate the total amount of settling.

I lucked out with the light for the photos I took — it was about an hour before sunset. The sky was clear, so everything was washed in a warm gold colour. Take a look at the slide show below if you're interested.

The big surprise was.... my Spanish flu tombstone didn't exist. In its place (or at least, where I remember it being placed) was the red granite Campbell stone. It records a woman and two men, but as you can see from the ages, they weren't mother and children. Apparently my brain invented those. It was a good lesson about getting inspiration from real life sources — since the trip out there, I'm a lot less worried about "copying" things than I used to be.

Do you have any super-vivid memories of things that never existed (or existed, but not at all the way you remember them)?

a directive

2010-10-16T21:55:00.002-04:00

For the American Moderns class I took in university, I had a professor named Geoffrey Rans. He told my class... being our lecturer, he told the class a lot of things, but I made a point of writing down something he told us as he was assigning our mid-term essays:

Go for the authors you like.

Celebrate them.
Justify them.

When you've got four senior-level mid-term essay assignments staring you in the face, that's very heady stuff.

It's dangerous to pin a change in direction to a remark a prof makes off-the-cuff, but the truth is my attitude towards books has become a lot more extroverted since then. In elementary and high school, I thought of books as secrets only I got to know. Jacob Two-Two and the Hooded Fang? I took it out of the school library so many times in a row that Mrs. Zimmer, our librarian, forgot to stamp the renewal date on the card once and I got in trouble for it being overdue. I now own a copy of the same edition that was in Brisbane Public School way back when. But I don't remember telling anyone why it was so great.

Ten years later I was doing the same thing with another of Mordecai Richler's when I read Joshua Then and Now. To be fair, I tried to tell a few people about that one, but I got a lot of eye-rolling and, "But it's not for a class? Are you nuts?" in return.

Consequently, I never tried to tell anyone about Oh Happy Death, at least not until my friend Deb played Crocodiles by Echo & the Bunnymen for me. And I never did find an excuse to rave about how great La Peste was (still tied for first with L'Etranger in my personal Camus list).

Still, one tries, and one does improve. A big milestone was when I was able to rant about Samuel Beckett's Murphy and Watt so successfully that a co-worker thought they were films (um, it wasn't an office where people read much). Speaking of films, it was a lot of fun to tell people that if they liked Cronenberg's takes on Naked Lunch and Crash, then they really should read the books. Somewhat evil, but fun.

This past year I've waved copies of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, You and the Pirates, and Dark Matter under other readers' noses and tried to make it very, very clear that it was important to their lives to read these books. Dark Matter itself was a gift from the ever-literary Howard & Rhonda.

I remember thinking, even as I scribbled down what Rans had said in the top margin of my notebook, that it was odd the phrase he used was, "Go for the authors you like," instead of "Go for the books you like." For most readers, most of the time, it's the book they know, not the author of it.

Right now I'm reading Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril, and I think I'm finally starting to understand. Reading it isn't just learning about an amazing science fiction writer — it's re-learning all those SF books I used to take out of the public library and nosh through the way the other twelve-year-olds used to nosh through a bag of Pop Rocks. It's hard to believe now, but I was the only girl I knew who read science fiction.

But that's the best part: if you go for the authors you like, justify them, and celebrate them, you will find other readers like you, and the amount of justifying and celebrating will only increase from there.

dedication dithering

2010-10-09T13:05:00.000-04:00

I have a painting by bill bissett that hangs over my bed:

It was bought directly from bill, in bill's apartment, and has a dedication from bill written on the back.

The dedication is not to me. It's to my ex, who bought it when I wasn't present. When he left me, at the last dividing-up-our-stuff session, he glanced at the painting (then gracing the living room) and said, "You want that? You always liked it."

I was astonished. "Sure, I'd love to have it."

"Keep it." And that was that.

What do dedications and autographs mean? I used to think they were souvenirs, reminders that the you got to meet the someone who had created the something you liked so much. To discard the signed something would be to discard the appreciation that led you to seek out the signing in the first place.

I've learned it hasn't always been that way. I've seen someone use a dedication or autograph to steal a book from someone else ("Oh, when he signed it he put it to me, not you. I guess he misunderstood. I'll get you another copy"), to make the fake authentic, to commodify something as insignificant as a paper serviette.

Above all, in the downloadable age, what does a signature mean anymore? And what's to sign if nothing is in a version one can touch? I've heard stories of people getting their iPods signed, but I've never known anyone who's had this done, and it seems silly to get something signed when you'll be lucky if you can even get it to work in twenty years' time.

So what's really of value? The signature or the signed?

how i found time to post this blog

2010-10-03T22:14:00.002-04:00

Usually I hate it when someone gives time management advice, or evangelises about a time management system. Most of the ones I've come across aren't flexible enough to adapt to different work situations, involve spending as much time managing the thing as they do using it, and don't scale well.

I do even worse with the common suggestions for writing routines. Keeping a word count minimum and/or writing first thing in the morning have the opposite effect: I get so wound up about meeting the goals that I don't write at all. Deadlines can help — I've sucessfully completed NaNoWriMo more than once — but all this stuff about "goals" and "milestones" leaves me clammy.

Sure as I started out this blog post with the above paragraphs, I think I've found a method that works, at least for me. It's called the Pomodoro Technique, and it's been around for twenty years. But it's new to me, and it seems to be new to the people I've been evangelising to telling about it.

Instead of worrying about your word count, or letting the whole whatever-it-is at hand loom over you, you just concentrate on working steadily on one task, for twenty-five minutes straight, without interruption. When the twenty-five minutes are up, you take a five-minute break to do other things. Then you start the timer for twenty-five minutes again. Each twenty-five minute work period plus five-minute break is called a Pomodoro. The details of how to apply the technique are available for free from the Pomodoro web site.

Note: I have no idea how good or bad the stuff they're selling on the site is. My enthusiasm is strictly for the free book you can download. I also found a free timer for my cell phone that was made to manage Pomodoros. Apparently there are several out there for both phones and computers, although the book just recommends a regular kitchen timer.

What I like is that the technique gets rid of all the anxiety that was making me freeze up. I wrote five nights out of seven last week, and got 4,631 words completed — 369 short of the 1,000 words a day x 5 days a week I was aiming for previously (and failing miserably to obtain). I only wrote one Pomodoro per day, averaging 840 words per session. At two Pomodoros per day, someone could comfortably win NaNoWriMo writing at that rate.

Every technique has its pros and cons, of course. But if your current routine isn't working for you, Pomodoros are definitely worth trying.

kicks

2010-09-25T12:26:00.000-04:00

I think it works like this.

Sometimes when I'm knitting in public, people will stop and say something like, "I wish I could do that, but I'd never have the patience." My standard response to this is, "a stitch only takes about .75 seconds to create — how much patience do you need?"

It's all about mindset. Sure, an average adult sweater has about 40,000 stitches in it, but if your satisfaction is at the stitch level, that means you just get a kick every .75 seconds about 40,000 times before you have to think about making something new. Talk about cheap thrills, right?

There's a another payoff level, though, and it's when you finish something. That kick can vary, depending on how difficult the execution was, how physically big the item is (very tiny and very large items have the biggest kicks), how desperately you need to finish the damn thing, and how valued it will be by the intended recipient.

A couple of Sundays ago I made this floor cushion:

Since I am nigh-phobic about machine sewing, this was a big accomplishment for me. I still pet the thing like a toddler with a new plush toy, and haven't actually placed it on the floor since I took this photo.

About a week after that I made this necklace and earring set:

It took all of a Monday evening, but I got to use construction methods I don't normally use. It felt pretty good to finish it all in one night.

Now, when I'm supposed to be working on my novel, I'm writing this blog. The blog's a nice quick hit of satisfaction — the template will make it look pretty on the web, I put two nice colourful photos in it, and I got to write something and call it done.

But it's a one-kick wonder. Once it's done, I don't get anything else out of it.

The novel, on the other hand, is sitting just shy of 20,000 words. I know by the time I finish rewrite #2 it will be real, actual novel-length. That's the plan, and although I still think it's a good plan, recently I've been frustrated because I want that "it's done! it's ready to pitch!" kick. But it's not ready for that yet, not nearly. I don't mean in a perfectionist-writer way. I mean in a gotta-finish-the-damn-story way.

In the meantime, I have to remind myself that I can get 500 decent words' worth of story-telling out in about half an hour. 500 decent words in 30 minutes is 16.67 words a minute. How much patience do I need?

if this is not an exercise, could it be a....

2010-09-17T22:18:00.000-04:00

I'm still thinking about the act of reading, maybe because I spontaneously wrote a first draft to an illustrated children's book this week. I put all the snippets of text that are now waiting for illustrations into a numbered list for ease of reference ("the last sentence in #9 should be the first sentence in #10, don't you think?"), then ran the whole thing through a reading comprehension test to make sure I was writing for the right grade level.

It turned out I was writing at the right grade level, and it's all well and good, except... I'm not sure how all these numbers got in the way of reading.

Throughout my life I have been accused of both reading too quickly and reading too slowly, of skimming too much and of reading in too much detail. I know people who will not take a book seriously simply because it has a very low page count — or a very high one. When I tell acquaintances that I write (or knit, or bake, or sew) they always want to know what I call "baseball information": how many words do I write a day? how long does it take me to knit a pair of socks? how do I find the time to bake my own bread?

I call it "baseball information" because that sport is famous for being more statistically analysed than most others. It's also a reminder that writing, knitting, baking, sewing, and many other tasks are not baseball — they do not break down easily into statistics, and even if they did, the statistics won't tell the questioner what they want to know.

It doesn't matter how many words I write in a day. It matters whether the words, once written, are any damn good. It also matter if they are not good, but can be salvaged by editing. I find it fascinating that far more people want to know how many words I write a day than want to know how much time I spend editing them.

I have been knitting socks for almost twenty of my thirty years of knitting, and I still have no idea how long they take to make.

Since I stopped watching things as they baked in the oven when I was five, baking takes hardly any time at all. In the case of bread, the human spends much less time working on the bread than the yeast do.

Even if I bothered to do a statistical analysis of these tasks, the numbers would not tell you: how good my writing is, why hand-made socks will always be better than mass-produced ones, how much fun it is to make bread. Numbers are certainly important — they tell you how much yarn you need for a pair of socks and how long to bake the bread, for starters — but they are not the whole story and were never meant to be.

Never mind how long the damn book is. It's good. The number of pages was important to the editor, the publisher, the book designer, the printer. Their only benefit to an end-user is if that end-user is a consumer, not a reader. There is a difference.

sanctuary vs. sanctimonious

2010-09-10T13:16:00.001-04:00

The Eyrea closed its borders for a while. A certain list of things happened at once: I got sick, every blog topic on my list seemed ridiculous, and I got very frustrated with how much time I was spending on the blog versus how much time I was spending on writing my novel. That Toronto was also heading into the height of harvest season (the physical Eyrea is a heavy supporter of local farmers) contributed to the break as well.

The hiatus was actually very productive. I revamped my novel plans, figured out a new blog schedule, and did a lot of reading. I also spent a lot of time thinking about the act of reading, and the fallout that happens when that act doesn't get thought through properly.

For instance:

I was one of those kids who learned how to read nigh-instantly, not gradually. There are plenty of people like that — any given university English class has tons of people who did the same — but I know from teacher's college that we're not usually accounted for when elementary school curricula are planned.

When I was about eleven I borrowed The Hunchback of Notre Dame from the school library. The librarian praised me for starting on the classics at an early age. My teacher praised me. My parents praised me.

This is how I learned two important things. One: not nearly as many people who think they know the Hunchback story have actually read the book. Two: if a book with sex, violence, and cruelty in it is old enough, the age for which it is appropriate lowers.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame isn't exactly Flowers in the Attic, or even Lady Chatterly's Lover, but it does have:

a man attempting to seduce a woman and getting as far as taking her blouse off

a woman bound to the back of a cart wearing nothing but a slip, trying to keep it from falling down by holding on to the top edge with her teeth as she is paraded through the streets of Paris

a crazy old woman kept in a cage... just because she's a crazy old woman

There's more where those examples came from, but the point of this blog post isn't to ban Hunchback from elementary schools. Even as I was reading it I was thinking, "I'm too young for this stuff." But I read it anyhow, and as near as I can tell there were no permanent scars as a result. Sure, I lost faith in the wisdom of grown-ups, but that was about due to happen anyhow.

My point, if anything, is to offer a public service announcement to remind grown-ups that children do not grow up in a happy never-never land, and that, try as they might, adults are pretty bad at deciding what is and isn't "appropriate" for a given book-reading kid. There's a difference between protecting kids and isolating them, after all.

Also: The Hunchback of Notre Dame is an excellent read for anyone who likes Gothic horror, and would make a nice back-to-back with Frankenstein. Read it if you're old enough to get away with being seen carrying it.

an open letter

2010-08-18T07:01:00.002-04:00

Dear Mr. Hartling of Rogers Consumer Marketing:

I recently received a letter from Rogers, signed by you. In it, you promised me my choice of one of three options to receive television transmissions from Rogers instead of from Bell.

Let's get one thing perfectly clear right off the top: I'm aware that this is a form letter, that my name isn't "Resident", that the letter certainly wasn't personal. It's 2010 already. You have to give me some benefit of the doubt.

You said you missed me, and wanted me to come back. You said I used to be your customer.

There's marketing, sir, and then there's laziness.

Instead, I got a mass mailer that said you missed me. Yet you, or more precisely, your database, had never known me. Which I guess is how I wound up being called "Resident". So how can you miss me?

This is about the point where you might be thinking, "It's only an ad. Don't be so goddamned serious about it."

Yes, it's only an ad. But it's an ad that was a failure right from the pitch line.

Isn't the whole point of ads to make us feel like these mass-produced products and services, this remarkably narrow set of choices, are tailored just for the individual being pitched at?

one followed by 100 zeros

2010-08-13T06:00:00.001-04:00

I started using Google search shortly after its launch in 1998. At the time, Alta Vista sometimes found what you wanted (and sometimes didn't), Yahoo still indexed sites by hand (and censored, so we were told), and the rest... I don't even remember, because quite frankly they sucked. I was teaching basic HTML classes to high school students, and one assignment was for them to compare search engines. People tended to use two or three and switch between them, depending on what they were looking for.

And then word went around about this search engine that was named after a number, and the number was named after the first couple of syllables that came out of a kid's mouth when his mathematician uncle asked him for a name. Any search engine with a moniker that massively nerdy was worth checking out.

What: the Google search engine.
When: since it was in beta, so 1998-ish.
Who: at first me, whoever told me about it, and whoever I told. It seems funny now, but I do remember being an enthusiastic word-of-mouth evangelist of it.
Where: on dial-up. Google's famously minimal search page was well-appreciated for that alone. I also liked how they repeated the letter "o" above all of the page numbers between 2 and n-2.
Why: It loaded quickly. It responded quickly. And, astonishing for 1998 but still appreciate now, you could actually find what you were looking for. Besides, the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button still makes me smile, even though I never use it.
How: lots of different ways, depending on what you want to know. It translates! It converts! It calculates! It maps! And so on.

Bonus: It's become so entrenched, so easy to use ('til the next thing comes along, but in my humble opinion that hasn't happened yet, bada boom bada Bing), that there's even "duh" parody sites.

genius

2010-08-11T23:40:00.000-04:00

I picked up a copy of You and the Pirates at the Small Press Book Fair this summer. I'm about 150 pages in and loving it, so it will probably show up in a later blog post, but for now, take a look at the book cover I bought from The Workhorsery (the publisher) at the same time:

It's cloth, it's sewn, and it has the publisher's logo silkscreened on the front. So even if you don't happen to be reading You and the Pirates or another Workhorsery publication at the time, you can still flash their logo. The cover fits a lot of the books I own, so I expect I'll be doing that a lot.

When you're not reading your book, the cover is held in place with a button and an attached piece of yarn. This keeps people who read on the subway until the last second (like me) from dog-earing their book when they jam it into their bag and run out the doors.

Here's my alarm clock propping up the book to show the built-in bookmark (and a bit of the lining fabric too).

I wish I'd bought another in the other colour they had on hand.

plastic degradable cognitive dissonance

2010-08-09T21:38:00.000-04:00

In case it hasn't been desperately obvious, here in The Eyrea we like to be environmentally-friendly without being uptight about it. The most joy, it seems, comes from being practical and keeping things simple — being thrifty saves way more trees than any complex substitution scheme of one overconsumption for another.

One simple way to check on the environmental friendliness of something is to keep in mind the four Rs:

Reduce
Reuse
Recycle
Rubbish

For anyone who missed the public service announcements, those are in order of preference. It's best, garbage-wise, if you use less stuff. If you have to use stuff, try to use it more than once. If you must toss it, try to make sure the stuff you have to toss can go in the recycle bin. Tossing it in the garbage is an action of last resort.

The problem is, once the last resort is taken, a lot of things sit in the landfill and just stay the way they were pretty much when they were first tossed. Plastic bags especially seem good at preventing things from doing what we'd like them to do: rot. People who study these things have all sorts of stories about opening garbage bags dumped in landfills in the 1970s, and the grass clippings inside are still green. That's because the plastic has prevented the grass clippings and other organic materials from getting at the natural forces that let it rot. Things like sunlight, damp, and bugs can't do their work with the plastic in the way.

So some bright spark came up with a plastic bag that biodegrades. That means it will rot, eventually, on its own. Sounds great, right? The grass clippings or whatever will be free to rot, and the plastic bag will break down into its component parts. With any luck, those component parts won't even be toxic.

Look at that four Rs list again.

The problem with biodegradable plastic bags is that they're too stupid to know if they're in a landfill or not before they start biodegrading. "Reuse" is a whole two steps above "Rubbish" — that's a long way on a four-item list. Hell, I've got Eaton's shopping bags from when they still had the skinny-lettered logo, before they switched to the boldfaced one just a few years before they went under. Those bags are over fifteen years old.

A biodegradable bag starts to biodegrade in a matter of months. Here's how I found out:

Before it started breaking up into little crumbs of brittle white plastic, this was the bag I used to bring my pashmina shawl to work in the wintertime. It was packed flat with the layers of clothing you see with it for the summer. When I first found the bag with the chewed-looking holes in it and damage scattered all about, I thought it was mouse damage. I've lived in three places that had mice, and believe me, it took a long time for me to come down from the ceiling and discover that it was another type of laboratory inhabitant entirely who had caused this.

I picked up all the big pieces that I could and threw them in the — yeah — garbage, but a lot of the smaller bits were too little to pick up easily. Every time I touched one, it would break into smaller crumbs.

Vacuuming helps a bit, but the machines have a hard time picking up the bits.

See all the crumbs stuck to the underside of the vacuum? Just because it's biodegradable doesn't mean it's not still plastic. Think of the susceptibility to static charges and the overall clinginess of a typical plastic bag. Now imagine several hundred plastic bags that are all about the size of a thimble, and which break apart if you or a vacuum cleaner touches them. Right.

I've managed to track white plastic crumbs throughout my entire apartment, and so far I'm only grateful that I don't have any pets at the moment. The only cleaning solution I can think of is to buy a lint roller that uses those sticky paper things (yeah, I know, more landfill) and roll it across any parts of my floor that have plastic crumbs.

If anyone's already dealt with this and has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Gmail

2010-08-06T22:26:00.000-04:00

After the actual Google search engine, Gmail was probably the first Google app I started using. I'd had it to the teeth with my Bell Sympatico internet connection, and was shopping around for a new ISP. That meant my sympatico.ca e-mail account would be going away. I didn't really want to use Hotmail because I used to train people on how to do tech support for it (along with sausage and journalism, the workings widely-deployed web apps should not be seen by the weak-stomached).

At the time, too, maximum attachment sizes and maximum mailbox sizes were pretty punitive for web-based e-mail. Besides that, some web mail clients were trying to police their users by not allowing files with certain extensions through. Since I'd been using PKZip since DOS was the norm on PCs and tended to write some of those "forbidden" files myself (like .JS files), I was pretty annoyed at just about everyone offering web e-mail.

I begged an invitation to Gmail off the person that told me about sometime in the summer of 2004 (my absolute earliest e-mails are long gone, and not terribly missed). What made me sign up was:

their maximum on-line mailbox size was (and still is) bigger than most other web-based e-mail clients
they had keyboard shortcuts way before anyone else
you can use the Google search tool to hack through your inbox and find messages
even though the infamous "keyword targeted ads" are there, the interface is much less flashy and therefore tends to load more quickly than the competition's
the ads themselves are not entirely bad — I usually get ones for Wired.com, which I read anyhow.

I don't know if the numbers would back me up on this, but I suspect Gmail is also Google's most popular tool (after the search engine). It seems like a lot of people have accounts, even if they're not primary accounts. That's easy to manage, because Google lets you grab mail from other accounts and will even label it for you. You can even reply back using Gmail, but say it's from the other account. I manage three accounts from one Gmail address, and it works great.

Gmail was also the first web mail app (that I know of) that encouraged you not to file away things in folders. Instead, you just kept everything in your inbox and then searched through it when you needed something. When Gmail came on the scene, this was weird, and outright frowned upon at the offices I worked at. Now it's the norm, and other e-mail apps have had to improve their search capabilities to keep up.

Gmail's account capacity is now somewhere in the neighbourhood of 7.5 GB (they keep increasing the inbox size gradually), they've recently added a task list feature, and the contacts list has improved a lot from the early days. They also have integrated chat now. This is different from the ill-fated Buzz, which seems to have been some sort of Twitter competitor and that no-one I know ever took too seriously. They don't seem to have a lot of downtime, and, although I noticed that my on-line inbox only goes back to 2005 now, they don't seem to lose accounts a lot. From what I have heard, when they do, it's game over, but that's just another reason why you shouldn't trust cloud computing and should always have a backup mailbox.

Like anything else that's free, if you think you could use it, you should check it out.

lammas

2010-08-04T12:45:00.001-04:00

The beginning of August was marked by the celebration of Lammas, at least amongst those of us who celebrate it. Lammas, or Lughnasadh, celebrates the first harvest of the summer. It's considered a fire festival because of the time of the year it's held, but thanks to the intense, humid weather, most people I know who observe it try to generate as little heat as possible.

Lammas is the corn festival. People who celebrate it make meals where grains dominate the menu, and little to no meat/protein is eaten. The idea is to celebrate the foods that are harvested at this time, so that means corn, wheat, rice, potatos, barley.

This year, that got me thinking.

Grain is some of the easiest food in the world to store and keep. Mass grain storage gave humans an excuse to form the first cities. It works well both as a sweet and a savoury, and is the considered the staple food in one form or another around the world.

If you need to eat in transit and you're in a hurry, what do you pick up? The easiest things to get are all grain-based: pastries, muffins, sandwiches. Portable food means grains.

Most places take advantage of grain's long shelf life, and offer prepackaged stuff that may have been made days before it got to the shop, waiting for you to squint at it and try to figure out which cellophane-wrapped bundle is the lesser evil.

It's not just monotonous. It sucks. And you deserve better.

We haven't had rationing on this continent for over sixty years. We need to stop acting like it's okay if that's all we can get.

this blogging century

2010-08-02T10:22:00.001-04:00

Ironically, I had another post about numbers all lined up for today, but when I hit the Blogger dashboard to start writing, I noticed that this is post #100.

It took two and a half years to get here. A lot of bloggers hit post #100 after a hundred days of blogging, but right from the start that was never going to be me, and I had planned it that way.

The whole point of The Eyrea was that it was to be an anti-Facebook. No-one (especially not me) was going to get reminded that they hadn't talked to this or that person in a while. No-one would be compelled to log in every freaking day just to stay caught up... with what exactly? No-one will ever be tempted to play Farmville or whatever the hell the game of the week is. For a while I had a link to the non-Facebook version of Scrabulous, but I took it down and I'm not even sure it exists anymore.

The one thing on Facebook I entered data into on a regular basis was my status update, so I signed up for Twitter. My Twitter feed hit 1,000 posts several days ago. I thought about having a little fanfare for it, but That's Not What Twitter's About.

I guess I feel more compelled to point out the hundredth blog post because, with only a few exceptions, I actually try to find topics I can thrash out in writing. My DIY blog has at least one photo on most entries; this blog rarely has even that (although I agree more visuals would spruce the place up a bit).

This is the part in a typical "milestone" article where the author muses about what they've learned. I'm not going to do that, because I always find that part narcissistic, and I already use the first-person pronoun too much around here. But if people want to comment on something that they've learned since March 2008, whether in the blogosphere or anywhere else, that would be very, very cool.

Cheers. And thanks for reading.

a google of reasons

2010-07-30T23:00:00.000-04:00

I've said here before that I try to be nobody's fangirl. That's including software and web sites. That's especially including software and web sites. They're like bad boyfriends — as soon as you decide they're perfect, you discover this nasty side to them that's a complete turn-off.

I do, however, use an awful lot of Google's on-line tools. I even switched to Chrome as my default web browser, away from Firefox. Here's a list of all the tools I use. Some of them I use every day, some only a few times a year, but they're all in regular rotation:

That's fifteen things, and all of them except for one involve cloud computing, which I am on the record as being sceptical of. I had no idea that I'd joined the Google universe that completely. I like to think I check things out and choose the best tool for the job, not just the one that Google makes.

But you know? By and large these tools are the best ones I've found out there. My usual criteria list is:

Can be used on Windows, Ubuntu Linux, Mac OS, or Maemo ('cos I use all of these)
Has the feature set I want
Is preferably free, or at least has a usable free version
Is stable "enough" (Note: I don't believe any software is completely stable)
Is easy enough to use that I can recommend it to someone without spending the rest of my life helping them with it
Does not require users to buy into the entire universe just because they want to check out one thing (I'm looking at you, Facebook!)

At first I had an idea that I could review all the Google tools I use as one of my blog series, like I did with document processing or basic Linux applications. But fifteen... that's over five weeks, and those tool/application posts take more time to put together than the average post.

So I'm going to start posting a Google tool entry every Friday instead. Let me know what you think.

Gadget reduction

2010-07-28T18:54:00.001-04:00

Anyone who isn't a blatant Luddite these days risks getting the epithet "gadget freak" (okay, "gadget whore", but I have some problems with that term) thrown at them. It doesn't take much — just have some idea how most of the features on your cell phone work and you're on your way.

Personally, I don't understand why people spend hundreds of dollars on something and then barely learn how to use it. For one thing, the more you know about a single, well-chosen gadget, the fewer gadgets you need.

The need for a separate cell phone and MP3 player disappeared a while ago. To those about to complain that MP3 software on phones suck — not if you get the right phone they don't. So there's one gadget gone.

Not everyone wants or needs a pocket-sized computer, but I do. I used to carry around a paper notebook, but my handwriting is sufficiently awful (and has been since I was a little kid, thank you very much) that typing is by far the best way to go.

And if you're going to carry around a pocket-sized computer — a Nokia N900 in my case — it makes sense that it should have a SIM card slot and a phone application, yes?

So now I have a single gadget that plays MP3s, lets me do things like write this blog post on it, and acts as a cell phone. And it fits in the little book bag I just made, not to mention a coat pocket.

More gadget consolidation can be had, though. Cameras need to be considered. Nothing can replace a good SLR, of course, but for quick snapshots... Again, a lot of phones have awful cameras (and they wonder why people don't video call more!), but there are decent snapshot cameras built into some phones. My Nokia gadget has a Zeiss lens, flash, and takes remarkably nice snapshots. They're much better than my old snapshot camera's, anyhow. I even found a free app to downlod to make them look like film photographs.

Okay, so now I have no separate MP3 player, cell phone, PDA/netbook, or digital snapshot camera. Last night, when I was browsing through the list of free apps available for the N900, I found a utility that lets me emulate remote controls. If I could put all those away, I could clear up my coffee table space and save on batteries. That would be... five more gadgets out of my life.

Eight gadgets in one. Only one set of batteries to recharge/replace, one item to remember to bring along, one potential little solid-state box for the garbage bin when its time finally comes.

It would make being a geek downright virtuous if I had been able to skip right to having the N900 in the first place.

is this the start of the breakdown?

2010-07-26T06:00:00.001-04:00

I finally got around to watching the film Memento this past weekend. Don't worry — I'm not going to review a ten-year-old film. I just want to reflect on why it took me ten years to see it, because there are some purposeful reasons.

People have been recommending Memento to me a lot since it got released. The reason why is because for a while I had a difficulties with short-term memory. It wasn't because someone had given me brain damage by smacking my head into a mirror, though — it was because for pretty much all of the 1990s I never got enough sleep. I'm not going to get into why here, because it's not the sort of thing I'm going to blab about in public. Suffice to say I made do with 3-6 hours a night for just about ten years. I'd have a catchup day where I could sleep in maybe 3 times a year. That was it. The rest of the time I was stumbling along. It got to the point that I had been tired for so long and impaired by the lack of sleep for so long that I couldn't figure out why I was so tired all the time.

I am constantly shocked by how poorly people understand the importance of sleep, and how willing people are to attribute the effects to other things. I was told (at age 24) that the cognitive impairment, memory loss, chills, and lowered immune system were from "getting older." I was told that the irrational cravings for sugar and rapid weight gain were because of my own "lack of willpower". I now know that all of this stuff was related to the sleep deprivation. Don't believe me? Google it, or at least start with this Harvard Magazine article. Thankfully, I got control of my sleeping schedule back around when Memento was released and can now sleep as much as I need to in order to be healthy. That this blog even exists is proof of that — back in the 90s, posting three times a week like this would have been impossible.

The thing is, there are lots of people who live like I used to. They get just enough sleep to stave off collapse, and the rest of the time they're running around, trying to get done an impossible list of tasks. Often they've been burdened with too much to do from too many places. I used to work with someone who was taking care of a sick parent, doing all the household chores, taking care of her kids, and working full-time for a while. Things finally came to a head when she got seriously ill herself.

It's easy to say that those who wind up in situations where they're exhausted and overwhelmed need to learn better delegation and time management skills. It's harder to understand what it's like for the exhausted, sleep-deprived person. Things that are supposed to be short-term turn into long-term, and there's no time or energy for the long-term. Their problem-solving skills have been stolen from them by lack of sleep. Often the demands are coming from several different areas, so it's difficult to determine who to say "no" to. Friends and family are slow or unwilling to see the extent of the damage being done, and can't figure out why the person is "different."

Culturally, there is still far too much bragging going on about how little sleep this or that A-type personality needs to keep going. It's almost always an exaggeration, and it's not apples-to-apples as a comparison because it doesn't take into account how much work — efficient work — is getting done during waking hours.

The Harvard Magazine article I linked to says that all North Americans are part of a mass sleep deprivation experiment. More of us need to figure out how to be in the control group. Unless you've lived it and recovered from it, it's very hard to grasp how frightening it really is.

and I thought "dog bites man" was funny

2010-07-22T22:48:00.004-04:00

Today during a coffee break I walked by a TV set that was showing one of those 24 hour news stations. I spotted a headline that said something like, "Controversy after dog receives communion at downtown Toronto church."

As a Catholic school survivor, this struck me as really, really funny. By the time I made it back to my desk, I had the whole scene in my head:

Doddery, nearly-blind old priest shakily holds up a wafer during a hot summer's Mass. What little breathable air that is left in the church is being gasped at by the parishioners as they wait in line for communion. The St. John's ambulance staff outside get ready for that Sunday's heat stroke victims.

A dog has trotted into the church through doors left open in the hopes of admitting a thus-far absent breeze. He butts in line in front of a twelve-year-old boy too shocked to see a dog in a church to do anything, and before anyone thinks to speak out stands on his hind legs in begging position, triggered by the sight of the wafer raised just the way his master lifts a Milk-Bone into the air at treat time.

Priest: The body of Christ.

Dog: Woof.

The priest places the wafer on the dog's tongue and gets ready to present communion to the next person. It strikes him that the elderly man he just served had an awfully hairy face, but it takes all sorts to make a world. He decides it's nice to know some people still receive communion hands-free, the old way.

As it turns out, this is one time that the truth is less funny than the fiction. It wasn't a Catholic church at all, but an Anglican one. This makes it less funny. First of all, a lot of Anglican churches have a day where they bless their parishioners' pets once a year, so a dog in an Anglican church is less funny. Second, Eddie Izzard already covered most of the relevant topics about how the Church of England is funny in his "Cake or Death" monologue:

Although, if he'd had a dog get some cake, that would have been even funnier....

reassuring... i think

2010-07-21T06:00:00.001-04:00

In my own personal top ten of "things I wish people would stop asking me," there is an entry for "which famous author do you write the most like?". I hate this question because I honestly have no clue, but I know when it comes time to query the current novel-in-progress I'm going to need a good answer. The ever-reading J-A says my short stories remind her of Ray Bradbury a lot. That's extremely flattering, but since I still can't see it myself, it doesn't help me much when it's query-writing time.

That's why I was very interested when @tdoerr had a link to a Toronto Star article about I Write Like, a web site that compares text you paste into a text box to sample works by fifty different published authors. That's a small sample, but with better data it could actually become useful. After all, there's always a difference between who you wish you wrote like and who you do write like.

I ran my blog entry about my theory of Facebook's real agenda through I Write Like, and it told me:

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Given what Doctorow himself writes about Facebook, that's not really surprising. But he's one of my favourite authors, especially for non-fiction, so hey, I'll take it!

Even I can tell most of my fiction isn't like Doctorow's though, so I ran my current favourite short story (a ghost story set during the Spanish flu pandemic) through the I Write Like analyser, and got:

I write like
J. K. Rowling

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I love Rowling's character development and how she handles mystery plots. Neither of these are evident in my little 2,000-word short story, but I'd much rather have a comparison script decide I write like her than James Joyce (another option on this site).

Which leads me to conclude: if I ever get down on my writing, I can just run a page or two through the analyser. Sure, it's all BS and about as accurate as, well, one of those silly Facebook quizzes, but its response and another cup of tea might be all it takes to get going again.

found

2010-07-19T06:00:00.001-04:00

Where: the Bar Italia upstairs ladies' washroom, the top left corner of the mirror over the sink.

When: at the most recent Descant launch.

What: Besides a sticker with the panel of a comic on it, beats me. A graphic novel version of The Fly, maybe?

Who: Given that Bar Italia has espresso cups with comics on them, it might have been the restaurant's idea. Or not.

Why: I don't normally take photos in washrooms (although that does sound like a coffee table book waiting to happen), but this caught my fancy. You don't see a lot of comic book art in ladies' washrooms, more's the pity.

another season, another Descant launch

2010-07-16T12:48:00.001-04:00

Some people get hooked on sitcoms; I get hooked on literary magazines. I love short fiction, so I hit the bottom shelf of the magazine section pretty regularly. I also have three subscriptions to different magazines.

One of these is Descant, and as I write this paragraph I'm sitting in the upstairs lounge of Bar Italia on College Street, waiting for the launch of the latest issue to start.

I don't know if they've done this for the entire forty-year history of the magazine, but for as long as I've been following them, every launch has been in a different venue — always one appropriate to the theme of the issue. Last issue's theme was "dance," and the venue provided space both for some live performances and videos. It's always something different, yet it's always exactly right.

The launch is over, another lovely night out, and I try to tap out more of this blog into my phone.

This issue's theme is "summer and smoke." The readings included tales of travelling through Viet Nam, rules for conduct created by a used bookshop owner, funeral barbecues, poetry about going postal. The first two readings were hilarious (I'm making up my used-book list now), the last two thoughtful and imagistic.

And, as usual, I think it all just makes me love the written word a little bit more.

Kobo coda

2010-07-14T06:00:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday I gave my mum the Kobo I won at Book Summit 2010. It was an interesting study of both usability and the inaccuracy of stereotypes.

My mum is pretty computer literate. She knows how to build web sites, use Photoshop, and create multimedia presentations. She's an MS-Excel power user, and is comfortable talking about hardware specs on laptops.

So it gave me pause when I was the one who wound up installing the Kobo synch software on her machine.

Explaining how to use the Kobo itself to her was easy, even with my toddler niece sitting on Mum's lap and trying to help push the buttons (the gadget-fascination continues to the next generation). My mum's only comment was, "That's all there is to it?" We decided to move to the next step of loading the synch software on her laptop.

We went to the Kobo web site. We found a very aesthetically pleasing, clearly-written page that extolled the virtues of the software, but noted nothing about where to get the software from.

"Where do you buy books for this thing, anyhow?" Mum said, so we took a break and bought a copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Buying the book from Chapters/Kobo was easy, but once it was bought we couldn't figure out how to download the ebook file.

At this point we were both getting confused and worried. Sure, checking the Kobo's on-device manual probably would have helped, but, as my mum pointed out, you can't power on the Kobo while it is attached to a computer, and we didn't really want to undock it until we had no other options to check.

My mum gave me the computer to fiddle with, and I checked the Kobo folders Windows could detect over the USB link. Sure enough, the required software was on the device all along. It wasn't in a very obviously labeled folder (I was hoping for something called INSTALL), but it was there.

The installation app itself was a joy to behold. It started with a device operating system upgrade, then installed the synch software on the laptop. All along the way, the instructions were provided in wonderfully clear text plus easy-to-follow diagrams. Everything worked like a charm. Sure, I've been updating firmware on various devices almost as long as firmware has existed, but I have to say I appreciated this process like no other. The instructions make it easy for any newbie or casual computer user to follow the steps, yet at the same time treat the user with respect. If all technical writing was this good the world would be a far better place.

Best of all, when the synch software itself finally launched, it immediately discovered that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had already been purchased and promptly added it to my mum's library of Kobo books. I clicked the "synch" button on the software, and the ebook was added to the Kobo device.

My mum's been reading the book on the Kobo ever since, and she loves it (mostly the device, but also the novel). Her only concern so far is how to share the device with my stepfather. He reads mostly nonfiction, and she reads mostly fiction, so probably they won't want to read the same book at the same time, but arranging reading time on the device itself could prove to be difficult.

I think I know what he's getting for Christmas already.

Coda to the coda: For any readers who are bursting to say, "Why didn't you just follow the damn instructions? It says the software is on the device!", here are a couple of points to ponder.

Yes, the Desktop page does state, right near the top, "The Kobo Desktop Application comes preloaded on every Kobo eReader." It doesn't say which folder it's in, though, and it doesn't have any technical how-to information (or a link to the same). That was the sort of text my mum and I were scanning for when we went to that page. People who are reading in a hurry for how to install something are going to skip right past that sentence, which is what we did. If you want to call us idiots and not typical users for doing that, that's cool — it won't be the first time and I'm sure it won't be the last.

Again, once the user finds the software to install, the experience is absolutely superb.

do the math

2010-07-12T21:37:00.003-04:00

It's bloody difficult being pro-transit in Toronto. Twenty (erm, getting on thirty) years ago we had the best public transit system in North America. Then, due to a number of factors — including a provincial government that was elected twice on a platform that included gutting the provincial capital — it's gotten worse and worse. "Why should Toronto have that when we don't?" was the question, and the answer was "They shouldn't." Never mind that over ten per cent of the entire country's population lives here, creating an urban area very different even from Canada's other major urban centres.

Still, it's my home town, and I like my home town to be as car-free as possible. I do own one of these money-pits, simply because the lack of urban planning forces one to, but the fewer places I have to walk, bike, or take public transit, the happier I am.

It's the places that are difficult to get to by public transit that make it impossible to always do that.

The Golden Horseshoe — the span of Lake Ontario shoreline reaching from Hamilton to Scarborough — has several different transit systems, which technically all link together. You have to pay again at each changeover, and just getting to a changeover point may necessitate several transfers, depending on where you live. What people who usually drive everywhere don't understand is that every changeover, and even every internal transfer, causes another delay. Besides having to add in waiting for the next bus/train/whatever as travelling time, the public transit-taker has to re-settle themselves into the new vehicle each time.

Travelers also have to make sure, in order to minimise transfer times, that they have all their passes/tokens/tickets lined up and ready to go. Unlike in Europe and some cities in North America, the Golden Horseshoe transit systems still mostly achieve this by having people queue to talk to someone at a booth. The only fully automated points-of-purchase often have queues as long as the ones at the booths, simply because there aren't enough of them.

Last spring I mentioned taking a combination of tram and train from my Amsterdam hotel to Schiphol Airport on a Good Friday. I covered 30 kilometres in 45 minutes for about five bucks, give or take some leeway on the currency exchange, and taking into account that the cost of living is slightly higher there. I had to transfer twice: my total was one tram ride to a changeover point (Amsterdam Centraal), buy a train ticket from an automated kiosk with no queue time, and then get on a train after a few minutes of wandering platforms before I found the right one.

To do the same trip here costs about the same, but it takes 90 minutes on a good day. Do I need to mention the vehicles aren't as clean and the whole thing feels more like an endurance test than a commute?

Here are some sample per-week (five working days) cost breakdowns to travel 35 km using two systems in the Greater Toronto Area using public transit. The example trip is from Toronto to Mississauga. If you want to get an idea of how much it costs someone using public transit to cover 35 km, just add any two of the items in the list together:

$46 a week for the GO
$25 a week for Missy Transit
$30 a week with a Metropass ($121 a month divided by 4 to get a weekly average)

If you think the two-system comparison is not a good example, remember how many people commute between Mississauga/Brampton or vice versa and Toronto every day. Or Richmond Hill. Or Markham. A lot of them wind up taking two transit systems just to get to where they're going.

Every.

Freaking.

Day.

It's not unusual for the price of employment being to spend most of the rest of one's waking hours on buses.

In comparison, it only costs $30 a week in gasoline to drive the same distance using a medium-sized car. Yes, that's $30 a week, period. Sure, there are maintenance and other ownership fees, but if you own a car anyhow... why would you take public transit?

It's not for the cost savings, that's for sure. It has to be because you believe in it.

five-dimensional polyhedron, maybe?

2010-07-09T20:29:00.003-04:00

Once upon a time, back when radio stations would play "MacArthur Park" because it was actually on the charts, there were three malls that could be traveled to easily from Erin, Ontario. Mall shopping was one of those things that needed to be done when the local Zellers in Georgetown didn't quite have what you wanted.

The closest one was Shopper's World in Brampton. Back then it was a single long corridor with major shops at either end, plus one short corridor marked with a geometric wall mural. We went there for clothes, to pick up cold cuts and rye bread at the German delicatessen, and so my parents could get their drivers' licences renewed, back when the entire driving population of Ontario had to get that done during the same time period, instead of by birthdays.

The second closest mall was Bramalea City Centre. This was a dark rabbit warren, two floors of walkways lit by the illuminated shop signs. We would deliberately stand in front of Japan Camera to read something on a piece of paper because they had the brightest sign. The ceiling was covered in huge, tinfoil-coated tubes held in place by yellow rope. My parents said that this was to reflect the light. It didn't work very well. It was more like someone couldn't decide whether to build a market or a disco until they were almost finished.

The third mall was hollow in the middle, and it was our (the kids, that is) favourite, because there was a playground in the outdoor centre area. This mall had two levels and burnt orange tile flooring like City Centre, plus lots of backless stairs that I was afraid of, because I was always afraid I would fall down the backless part of backless stairs. Somewhere in its bowels was a lower level with a cinema. We once waited over an hour to see the first Superman movie before my mum gave us many admonitions not to talk to any strangers, walked to the front of the queue, and came back to tell us we were going home because the next two shows were already sold out. There was also a very dark food court (again, only lit by the signs from the food vendor stalls) with white chairs that had curlicues on the back. It was always very busy whenever we went.

We would almost always exit the mall by the Woolco. This discount department store had two levels, and you could take your shopping buggy between levels because instead of escalators they had movators on ramps, and special wheels on the shopping buggies that locked when they were on a slope. We often got some broken chocolate bars from the little candy booth on the second floor before heading for the parking lot.

This third mall was possibly even bigger than City Centre, and I had got lost in the smaller Shopper's World when I was three, but my mum pointed out that you couldn't get lost in the third mall because it was a giant two level square. That's why they called it Square One.

If you live in the Greater Toronto area, you probably know what has happened to Square One and the City of Mississauga that surrounds it. First they filled in that outdoor playground area, so the mall was less a square and more a sort of windowpane shape. Then they put in additions, and more additions, and "big box" outbuildings that are still being built and added as I write this. The City of Mississauga has mushroomed into one of the worst cases of suburban sprawl ever seen on the continent, and Square One reflects that. Instead of being the mall you could never get lost in, it now has street-style signage along its many corridors so you can pick your way through and, with some luck, find everything you went there for.

The Woolco is now a Wal-Mart. The old cinema has been replaced by two new ones. Except for The Bay, Sears, and maybe Zellers, I don't know of any shops that have been there from when it opened.

Square One is an odd place. Some of the department stores have hardware departments, but there is not a single dedicated hardware store amongst all those shops, nor a lot of other shops and services you would expect to see in a central shopping zone. Even though the complex is surrounded by high-rise condominium towers, the nearest supermarket is just over three kilometres away. I believe there's at least one pharmacy in it, but as I write this post I can't think of where it is.

What it does have are tons of clothing shops, costume jewelry/trinket shops, music/movie/video game shops. There are also lots of places to get cheap fast food, including what I believe is a reinvented version of that dark food court we used to go to. None of the stalls have the same vendors, and the layout is completely different, but I think it's still the place.

The reason why I think it's the same place, even though it now has a skylight just beyond it and bright artificial lighting within, is that I still sometimes automatically take a shortcut to it. I can't describe where it is, because I always seem to find it by feel, but if you duck past some utility doors, go past the public washrooms (rather hidden now), and go down a flight of stairs past where some of the fast-food joints cache their extra inventory of burger buns, you'll wind up right beside the Dairy Queen.

The floor tiles in that little corridor are still burnt orange. It has to have been there all along.

the World Wide Wrong number

2010-07-06T22:21:00.003-04:00

Wrong numbers used to be pretty straightforward. The caller would ask for someone who didn't live in your home, you'd explain using a standard polite phrase, and they would apologise and hang up. Easy. There were some loopholes, as immortalised in certain Hitchcock films, but they weren't common. If you lived in a small town, it wasn't unusual to know the person who had called you by accident anyhow.

Cheap long distance started to change that. There's less reason to check a number carefully if the financial penalty for screwing up is reduced, but there's more reason to dial a number incorrectly if you can't look it up in a phone book. (This applied to the era before the WWW, of course.) So we all started getting wrong numbers from people who lived the next town or two over.

The proliferation of non-phone devices changed things a bit more. If you've ever been forced to take your phone off the hook in the middle of the night, just because some aspiring fax spammer fat-fingered your home number into their overnight transmission list and set the retries to the maximum, you know what I mean.

Then "phone plan options" appeared, and something new started to happen: the reverse wrong number. You'd call someone, realise you had the wrong number, apologise, and hang up. Unluckily for you, you'd just accidentally called someone with both an unlisted number and caller ID. They'd call you back, and the conversation would go something like this, at least if you deal with such situations the way I do.

Me: Hello?
Them: Why did you just call me?
Me: Um, other way around — you just called me.

(This is the part where they get whiny/panicky/irate.)

Them: Nooooooo, you just called me! And I have an unlisted number!
Me: Hm. I did just try to call a friend of mine, but I dialled a wrong number.
Them: But my number's unlisted!
Me: Doesn't mean people can't dial it by accident. After all, my number's unlisted and you called me.
Them: But that's because I have call display.
Me: Yeah, but now you've invaded my privacy by recording my unlisted number and calling it. I could report you for harrassment. What did you say your name was again?

[Click]

Just about when the paranoid people finally figured out what their optional services really did, all those new (no longer that new) area codes were added. Toronto finally had a succinct way to identify conservative suburbia — the "905" — and having a 416 number became a status symbol in some circles. Plus, calling a wrong number became a lot more easy and common than it used to be.

I got some experience with just how easy and common it was when some guy named Kevin got a cell number the same as mine, but with a different area code. It was right at the beginning of a long weekend, and I got lots of late-night calls from drunken young men, giggly (and also drunken) young women, and irate older people who wanted to know who I was and why I was answering Kevin's phone. After two nights of interrupted sleep, I got a call from the Humber OPP asking for Kevin. The police were the only ones I called back — to confirm that they had the wrong number. I never found out who Kevin was, but I hope he learned how to party without getting on the radar of the provincial police.

That brings this narrative up to the present day. Phone services on the interweb have proliferated. There are plenty of phone number searches, and now there are VoIP services like Skype. In the same way that you don't need a TV set anymore to watch TV, thanks to computers, you no longer need an actual phone number to make a phone call. As my mother now puts it when I call her long-distance over Skype, "the call display said 'unknown caller' so I figured it must be you."

And it's that flexibility, that global reach available to anyone who has access to an internet café and a cheap long-distance card, that is making wrong numbers get really, really weird.

In the past year I had a call from people who said they were in Constantinople and who claimed to be friends with my nephew. I don't have a nephew and they did have a wrong number, but it was a long, convoluted discussion before I felt I could hang up politely. (I don't like to just hang up. People hit redial, and now they're annoyed at you for being rude.)

I've also had a call from someone who thought I was their long-lost half-sister (this one wasn't so much a wrong number as a wrong relation), and a lot of calls from people who get very confused when someone with a Canuck accent answers the phone. This last group is almost always very polite and apologetic — I hope they reach their intended party.

One last note: drunk dialing has been around as long as there have been phones. My maternal grandparents were painfully aware of it — their phone number was one digit off from the local taxi company, so they got plenty of calls at closing time with people saying things like, "Yeah, pick me up at the Rose & Crown[click]". It's just that now there are more phones around (and, arguably, more recreational chemicals), so drunk dialing is reaching new heights/depths just like all the other wrong number dialing we do.

My new Nokia N900 still doesn't have a SIM card in it (my old phone still works, so I'm being lazy about dealing with that), so it can't receive or send phone calls except via Wifi and some VoIP service like Skype.

Last Saturday night found me watching one of those lovely, chick-flick Jane Eyre film adaptations. It was right about the part where the hero and heroine finally have their one kiss of the entire movie when all of a sudden my phone started ringing and buzzing.... as if I was getting a call or something.

So I picked it up and checked (I figured I'd accidentally set an alarm for the wrong time)... and it was a Skype call. From France. Since I don't know anyone in France who would call me at midnight Toronto time, I just hung up. But this caller was redialling so fast it was as if I had never touched the End Call button. Finally I just turned off the Wifi.

I got two chat messages from my French caller. One was in the French version of texting shorthand, and I have no idea what it said because I don't know the standard abbreviations for French text messages. The other was in regular, if ungrammatical, French, and I could read that. It said "repend moi" (answer me).

Pro tip: if you're going to drunk dial, be polite. You never know when you're going to call a semi-bilingual former teacher in Canada by mistake.

If you have any favourite wrong number stories, please add them to the comments!

want to speed up web access? block Facebook!

2010-07-04T20:59:00.005-04:00

Back when I was researching the most efficient way to commit Facebook suicide, I came across an article about how Facebook can pursue you even in the non-Facebook afterlife. I made a note to try it out once my account was good and gone.

The account is officially dead, so I went ahead with the next step and blocked "www.facebook.com" in my router's firewall settings. These settings were originally designed for parents to keep children from porn sites and the like. It felt pretty strange blocking myself from a site that I never use anyhow, but I was curious as to why people were recommending it in the first place.

Adding the domain to my settings took under five minutes. It would have taken under two if I had known where in the router's settings I needed to do the data entry.

After the router restarted and I was back on the web, I headed over to my favourite on-line magazine web site to do some light reading. To my astonishment, the site loaded much faster than it normally does, so quickly I checked the status bar on my browser for an error message. Nope, nothing. So I scrolled down the home page to see if there had been a noticeable revamp of the layout or something else to explain the speed. Everything looks the same, except for what's shown in the screen shot below, and that was my doing:

I knew from the "www.facebook.com" test I did after the router reset that the block is very fast — the router is very quick to check and invoke the blocked URL settings (which is about what you'd expect, but it's nice to see it in action).

Traditionally pulling in information and displaying it from disparate URLs was known to slow down page loads, but this was the first time I'd ever really noticed it since switching from dial-up to DSL over ten years ago.

Out of curiosity I went to a couple of my favourite newspaper sites. Same thing, and for apparently the same reason.

Now, I'm not nearly enough of a propeller-head to do the measurements and attach some numbers to this, but what I thought would be a "set it and forget it" ethical stance against a site that had annoyed me turned out to have some immediate, positive benefits.

It was tempting to see what would happen if I blocked "www.google.com," but I didn't. Why? Mostly because, while I refuse to be anyone's fangirl, Google doesn't bug me nearly as much as Facebook does. But that's another blog post.

Dracula could have saved the Titanic

2010-07-02T21:39:00.005-04:00

I finally finished something I was reading on the Kobo I posted about a couple of weeks ago (just because you're carrying around 100 books on a device the size of a greeting card doesn't make you read any faster, and I tend to read two or three books at once). I had to give up on Canterbury Tales because the formatting of the verses and the footnotes left a lot to be desired, so instead I worked my way through Dracula.

The only version of Dracula I'd ever read before was a magazine-size comic version when I was about eight. Since then I've seen two film versions (by Werner Herzog and Francis Ford Coppola — the Herzog one is my favourite). Since I was a 17-year-old in North America in 1987 I also saw The Lost Boys, but I try to forget that as much as possible.

None of these three get across something that is glaringly obvious when you read the original: the reason why the story is novel-length is that the main characters keep screwing up all the time.

At first you can forgive them. With the exception of Van Helsing (I'll get to him in a moment), all of the "good guys" are Modern People of Modern Places: four proud citizens of the Glorious British Empire and an American. They're as any gadget freaks of our own times — Mina has separation anxiety if a typewriter isn't at hand for her to use, and Seward prefers to voice-record his diary on a newfangled phonograph than write or type it out. Jonathan takes Kodaks of the house he has selected for the Count as a matter of course. These people are logical, scientific, and love to document their lives. They share their journals with each other quite freely — a good reminder to anyone who thinks that social media is a new thing.

Where they fall down is when they are faced with something that does not fit neatly into their modern lives. That, of course, is vampirism in general and Count Dracula in particular. As horrified as they are of all the blood-drinking and wolf-controlling, it seems to me they are more horrified still that those superstitious peasants they love to pity may actually be onto something.

Science, or so I have been taught in science class, is a balance between two states: confidence that one has figured out how something works, and scepticism when something has not been absolutely proven. When someone using the scientific method is presented with a phenomenon that does not fit their theory, they're supposed to be willing to alter the theory. Even when no contradicting phenomenon exists, any scientific fact is always supposed to be footnoted, "until we learn better." Sometimes the "learn better" is that we learn more subtleties of how whatever it is actually works. Sometimes we have to be willing to throw everything we thought we knew out and start over again.

In Stoker's novel, Dracula gets as far as he does and causes as much damage as he does because the characters are slow to leave their old assumptions about what is safe and good and workable behind. Only Van Helsing, who is both a learned scholar and someone who is willing to get at the kernel of truth under the superstitions, is able to figure out what the Count is and what must be done to stop him. Still even he believes, again and again with all the other "good guys," that modern convention will make them safe just because it is modern convention.

I would love to make Dracula mandatory reading in a first-year engineering or physics class, with a single assignment attached to it: list all of the places where the heroes had evidence before them they should have taken seriously, but discounted out-of-hand because it didn't fit into the tidy world they normally inhabited. That is, when faced with evidence that the theory was wrong, they assumed that their observations must needs be incorrect, not the theory.

So the Titanic sails off with not enough lifeboats because someone with the power to decide these things concludes that "virtually unsinkable" is the same as "unsinkable," rather than doing some simple math to figure out how many lifeboats they do need should the worst happen and something shows up which all their safety design precautions don't take into account. Or a patient has an appointment at a doctor's office and gets told that there's nothing to worry about, just because the patient's symptoms don't fit into the neat little diagnostic box the doctor learned in medical school. This last example has happened to me personally — it took me over a year to get a CAT scan that proved something I had described to several doctors was a fact, and not just my imagination.

A lack of scepticism and a tendency to throw out contrary evidence can kill people. Much better to learn that from a fictional tale of blood and mayhem than the real thing.

you couldn't make this stuff up

2010-06-30T21:27:00.003-04:00

Fiction writers always have to walk a tightrope. On the one hand, they need something in their writing that will grip readers. Often this "something" is unusual, an element that lifts the story from the humdrum of the familiar. On the other hand, if the writer includes too much incredible stuff, beta readers and editors (and readers, if it makes it that far) will typically slap them down for being silly, unrealistic, or failing to suspend disbelief.

Something that frustrates me as a writer is when reality dishes up a series of events within a timeframe that no-one would believe if it were a written as part of a fictional story. I believe in giving readers a fair experience — interesting, hopefully entertaining, but fair.

So it hurts when reality shows it can give us any damn thing it feels like, far beyond what would be considered plausible in fiction.

Last Monday was a day for Torontonians to gingerly check up on each other, especially if you knew people (or were a person) who would have been out protesting. "Are you okay?" and "What did you see?" were questions that were raised often. I started keeping a running mental list of everything that happened the week leading up to the summit debacle, and then started adding all the things that were due to happen either during the following (current) week, or the following weekend. It's pretty impressive:

Already happened

Thunderstorms — more than we're used to this time of year
A tornado touched down in Midland. This is not actually in Toronto, but it's close enough that it's "in the area."
We felt an earthquake. Okay, the epicentre was some ways outside of Ottawa, so we just got a little tremor, and even at the epicentre it wasn't a very big earthquake, but since it's been about ten years since we had a noticeable one, it was newsworthy.
The G20 rounded out the week.

Going to happen in the next few days

We're having a royal visit — and not just any royal, but the Queen herself. Interestingly, the hereditary monarch of the entire British Commonwealth needs less disruptive security than the bunch of suits who were supposedly elected by the same great unwashed who were protesting against them.
It's Canada Day tomorrow. I wonder how the protesters who sang "O Canada" and then got rushed by police as soon as they finished singing feel about that.
Oh, and there's tall ships and horse races and all the other "stuff" you'd expect to find in a Canadian city this time of year.

Imagine all that in a fictional story. Chapter 1 introduces the characters, the fence around the hot zone going up, the thunderstorms. Chapter 2 has the earthquake and tornado. Chapter 3 the riots happen, Chapter 4 is Canada Day, Chapter 5 establishes the Queen as an active character, then in Chapter 6 there's a bit of a lull where the tall ships show up and the horse races are run. Maybe the main characters can take in the ships and horses while something nefarious happens in the background.

How does it end? I don't know. Written out that way, it sounds like a discarded outline for Good Omens, before Pratchett & Gaiman decided to tone it down a little and stick more closely to the central Antichrist idea.

Anyone want to share some "so crazy it must be true" stories in the comments?

that's great -- it starts with an earthquake...

2010-06-28T16:54:00.006-04:00

The politicians, the protesters, and the hooligans have been discussed better in articles like this. But, as with any man-made mess, there's more to it. Here are some snippets of the "more" part:

don't forget your bar code

Friday night I'm at a pub in Mississauga, toasting the week that was with a virgin margarita. Someone's cell phone rings, and a side conversation ensues that sounds odd enough that the rest of us keep pausing the conversation so we can try to make sense of it all.

The conversation ends and we get told, "A friend of mine can't get home because she forgot her ID."

"She's in the hot zone?"

"Yeah, her boss said it was ridiculous to work from home for the week, so they've been like the only business around that's open. She's going to call me back if she can't find her photo ID card."

later the same night

"How are you going to get home?" I'm the only one who lives past the hot zone.

"The big loop," I say. "Huronontario to the 401, 401 to DVP, DVP to Lakeshore and home."

No-one tells me I'm being ridiculous or overly cautious. They say I'm being sensible.

I see four OPP cruisers and SUVs on the way home, riding in a pack. I also see an OPP cruiser with a car that's pulled over. When I was a kid living in Erin ON, this was normal, because the OPP were the local police. But this is Toronto, and it is not normal. It's certainly not normal to see so many OPP vehicles together at once.

Closer to home, there are seven or eight vans parked on the lawn beside Lakeshore Boulevard. A proportional number of police officers — five or six per van, so say 35-45 of them — stand amongst the vans, just casually watching the traffic go by. I don't get a good look because I'm driving, but I'm struck by how the whole tableau looks like a photo from a double-page magazine spread.

word of mouth

Saturday afternoon my mother calls, and asks me in two or three different ways if I had been downtown this weekend. I answer "no" in two or three ways, and ask what's up.

"It's downtown," she says. "It's on fire."

That's not strictly true, of course. But some things are on fire that should not be, and that's what's being shown on TV.

My mum starts listing all the major intersections that are being affected by the riots, and I keep saying, "That's not in the hot zone or the main protest area... that isn't either.... that isn't either" like I've nominated myself to be some sort of truth-teller.

The conversation finishes with me reassuring her that I live 12 km away from the downtown core and so should be fine.

The next day I find out I am less than 5 km away from the nearest detention centre and that my local supermarket has been boarded up for the weekend.

don't believe

After I get off the phone with my mum, I call a friend of mine who lives downtown to see how things are on her street and find out what's going on. She says things are pretty quiet where she is (Bay & Wellesley-ish), but things "don't feel right." She's been watching the TV news too, and says what's being broadcast looks fake.

"They're too conveniently close to the CITY-TV building. The whole thing looks like a dance. Whoever they are, these guys mostly wanted to be on camera. None of them are holding signs or shouting slogans either — can't even tell if they're protesting or just smashing the place up."

choices

My youngest brother and sister-in-law live downtown, but they deliberately planned to be out of town for the G20. I call and leave a voicemail on my brother's cell phone, just so he won't be surprised when he gets home. He texts me Sunday night to say that they had checked Canadian news and Twitter feeds before they headed out.

He decides that it sounds like things have calmed down enough, and goes straight home. My sister-in-law decides to stay at a friend's place overnight and comes home in the morning.

so what?

Torontonians are used to getting their lives disrupted by out-of-towners. They come, they complain Toronto thinks it's the centre of the universe, they leave their garbage all over the place, they whine that the city is dirty, and they leave. We get that at least every weekend. In the summer, we get it all week.

We're used to protests. They happen all the time, and, surprisingly enough, they are almost always peaceful. Note that, for the most part, the G20 protests were too. Media estimates are that 25,000 people protested, but only a few hundred caused the property damage.

Torontonians are used to chaos, too. We were part of the Big Power Blackout, SARS, garbage strikes, and TTC wildcat strikes, and we took it all in stride. For the power blackout, news reports commented on how little vandalism and looting there was.

This was different. As the editorial I linked to at the start of this blog concludes:

The idea that this was an effective way to show off Toronto to foreign guests is bewilderingly stupid.

Canadian authorities created a city no citizen could recognize and no visitor could admire. Then, they allowed a pack of brutes to trash it.

I don't want, ever again, to have to reassure family members that I live far enough away from riots that I'm safe. Or tell other family members that their homes may have been damaged by rioters while they were away. Or have to check on friends and make sure they have enough groceries to last the weekend in case they have to barricade themselves in. This is Canada, dammit, and our job in the world has been to help people escape police states.

Now it looks like we're one ourselves. I, for one, will never forgive this government for what they did to my home town.

we need to talk

2010-06-24T21:43:00.003-04:00

Today I got the Nokia N900 I ordered. I decided I wanted to get one as soon as they came out, but there were the usual ordering shortages, early-adopter angst, and all the rest. Besides, watching other early adopters has convinced me that the best thing to do is read all the reviews and then wait a few months.

The Eyrea normally has a strict policy of not upgrading gadgets unless and until there is a damn good reason. "A newer, shinier one got released" is not a damn good reason. The N900's predecessor, the still-working N800, eliminated the MP3 player from the "stuff I cart around in my purse" list, plus gave me a simple word processor for when inspiration struck and I was standing up on a TTC bus. Turns out it's handy for other things I find of value, like keeping a calendar, making a usable calculator handy, and surfing the web at Starbucks. Plus, erm, Mahjongg and Tetris. Games don't seem important until you realise they're the only thing between you and the overwhelming urge to throttle the annoying person three seats away from you on the subway.

The N900 does all the things the N800 did (the only loss seems to be handwriting recognition, which I probably won't miss in the long run), plus it has GPS and a built-in phone. So now I can quit carrying around a phone, too. It also has a camera with a flash and Zeiss lens. Maybe I can quit using my little digital camera too.

A phone. That means I can ditch my old cell phone and just use the N900 as a pocket wireless gadget, a simple word processor, a calendar, and all that other stuff.

But before all those gadgets can be shed, the ugly stuff has to happen. The data transfers.

Sure, the N900 has a USB cable connection, plus Bluetooth, plus WLAN, plus of course the phone connection, plus a microSD slot. Sounds pretty connected, right? Not quite.

The USB only shows the microSD card.

The microSD slot on the device is internal, right beside that nice Zeiss lens on the phone.

The Bluetooth.... works like Bluetooth. All the usual "sure this device is wide open but I can't see it la la la", or "I can see it, but I'm not going to talk to it" inanity that besets Bluetooth. Or else the Nokia is willing to talk, but the other device won't, even thought it's wide open and can recognise the Nokia is trying to talk to it.

I'm not picking on the N900 here. I'm not even surprised. This is what often happens when older gadgets get folded into a single gadget, or even when you just do a straight one-to-one upgrade.

The good news is they're getting better all the time. The bad news is they weren't better before.

At any rate, I'm sure I will get everything figured out eventually. When I do, I'll post about the solutions here, rather than the first-night-of-acquisition problems.

Update: Aha! I gave up for the night, and powered down the device, but left it charging on the USB from my computer. The laptop detected both the microSD card and the main storage! This would probably be highly boring if I just read the manual cover to cover first instead of just browsing the index. It would also be less fun.

So if I can get it on my laptop, I can get it on the N900. Okay.

Kobo review -- includes instant DIY case info!

2010-06-22T23:00:00.000-04:00

The first time I did any research on ebook readers was around 1994-95. E-ink was already being talked about, as was desktop synchronisation. Since the Web only started in 1995, people were talking about downloading a lot more than they were doing it.

I never got to actually handle any of the ebook readers I checked out back then. The first reader I've had a chance to take for a real test run was the Kobo I won at last Friday's Book Summit. The main place they seem to be sold in Canada is Chapters/Indigo.

The Kobo got its initial check-out over some post-Summit libations on a patio by the lake. The company that makes the Kobo is very smart about getting on a new customer's good side right away. The reader comes out of the box with enough of a battery charge for an initial play session, and 100 books are pre-loaded so you can start reading right away. There is only one page of settings to adjust, and then you're ready to read.

I already read ebooks a lot — I put free (and legal!) downloads from Craphound and elsewhere on my Nokia tablet, mostly PDFs. So I'm used to reading novels on a colour screen about the size of an slightly-larger-than-average smartphone. Given that, these are the things that jumped out at me about the Kobo:

Positives

I managed to choose the right date & time settings, adjust the reading font, flip through the catalogue of loaded books, choose a book, and start reading without ever looking at the manual. Having said that, taking a careful look at all the edges before you start playing with it in earnest is a good idea. Some of the buttons are so discreet that it isn't obvious where they are. Once you know where they are, they're easy to use and remember, but it's more pleasant to find them before you want to use them.
The device is light, light enough that you can comfortably hold it in one hand and read with it while waiting at a TTC stop for a long time — which is exactly what I did with it after I went to the Small Press Fair last Saturday. It's also more than light enough to read comfortably lying down.
It is also completely easy to read in bright sunlight. That TTC stop I just mentioned didn't have a shelter, and it was about four o'clock in the afternoon on a very bright day. No problems at all.
I didn't time it, but the battery seemed to charge very quickly. Although I've read about people having problems with battery life, my unit seems to be fine. Then again, I'm used to having to recharge my Nokia tablet every day because I use it so much, so I'm easy to please in that regard.

Negatives

I can read the Kobo fine under natural light and fluorescent tubing (ironic, since the latter gives me eyestrain headaches), but it seems too dim when I have lamps with energy-saving lightbulbs on at home. I knit, read on paper, and bead under the same lamps, so I know that normally they provide enough light. The Kobo seems to do better under the halogen reading lamp I have by my bed.
The navigation rosette (they call it a D-pad) doesn't always interpret a "next-page" click correctly. If my thumb really loses the mark, I can wind up in a menu or at the home page without meaning to, and have to wait for the book to load again to continue reading. So far it hasn't happened often, but if I did it a lot it would be annoying.
The desktop software, which is an essential install on your computer if you want to buy books for the Kobo, does not have an official Linux version. That means I can't buy new books for the device, because my home computer and my Nokia tablet/phone all run Linux.

About that last negative point: Kobo does have an unofficial Linux distro of its software. Unfortunately for me, it's compiled for 32-bit processors, and my laptop has a 64-bit processor. However, I want to take a moment here to thank them for thinking of Linux users. Just because we decided not to give money to Microsoft or Apple doesn't mean we won't cheerfully buy things from other companies!

Because I can't buy new books for it at the present time, I decided to give my won Kobo to my mum. She runs Windows, so she'll be able to install the required software just fine, and she's been coveting a Kobo (and specifically a Kobo) for a while now.

"You're going to need a case for it," I said when we talked about it over the phone. "I've been reading the reviews on the Chapters web site, and everyone says that protecting it from any accidental drops is very important."

"Does it feel fragile when you use it?" she said.

"Not for reading with it," I said. "But when I brought it along on the TTC, I was really glad my backpack had a pocket almost exactly the same size. I could see it getting smashed or cracked if you're rough with it. Probably true for all of these things."

"I'll have to watch out for that," she said. "Well, stick it in an oven mitt in the meantime until you give it to me. I'll have to figure out whether I'm going to buy one of those Roots cases or just sew my own."

I've talked about it on my other blog, but let it be known here as well that I don't come by this DIY stuff all by myself. A lot of it is inherited. Mum's completely right — the Kobo fits perfectly into a standard-size oven mitt, and gains a little eccentric je ne sais quoi that appeals to me, like when women use tea kettles or other found items as purses:

If I tie a length of grosgrain ribbon or seam tape to one side of the mitt and a button to the other side, I'll have a strap to keep the Kobo from slipping out if the oven mitt gets turned cuff-side-down, at the cost of less than 15 minutes of work! (Oven mitt: $3.99 for a matching pair of two at Canadian Tire.)

how's your reading health?

2010-06-20T23:25:00.003-04:00

As I mentioned last post, one of the sessions that I went to at Book Summit was "Reading in the Digital Age." Somehow I had the impression that it would be about writing for digital instead of paper media and how that shifted story structures. It turned out I was wrong, but that was okay, because the presentation encompassed that and a lot more.

The presenter was Raymond A. Mar, who works at York University. He also contributes to the blog On Fiction, which I immediately added to my Google Reader list as soon as the session was completed.

Mar and his colleagues have been comparing the effects of reading fiction on the brain, comparing it to the effects of what he termed expository writing. This sounds similar to what I was taught at teacher's college to call "transaction writing" — non-fiction works like essays.

It turns out that reading fiction has measurable, beneficial effects. People who read fiction are better are social tasks, and better at recognising emotions. The research also shows that watching films has the same effect, but not watching television (there are a lot of theories, but they haven't figured out why yet).

I'm not going to try and repeat the entire presentation — you had to be there, and besides, I'm not a professional in neuropsychology, so I'm bound to get some things wrong.

I am, however, a recent reader of CP Snow's Two Cultures. That book recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, which is how I got to here about it. CP Snow was either a novelist who worked in science, or a scientist who wrote fiction, depending on how you want to look at it. He noticed that he was just about the only person he knew who had an interest in both fields, and he was appalled both by his science friends' lack of respect for the power of fiction, and his artist friends' lack of knowledge of basic scientific facts. He presented the "two cultures" idea originally at a lecture he gave at Cambridge University, then expanded it to book form for publication.

The interaction of science and art is much different from how it was fifty years ago, and the version of Two Cultures that I bought and read points out that most of Snow's examples were actually from when he started his career in the 1930s. Nevertheless, I thought it was interesting (and, okay, dismaying) that the newspaper articles I read asked people working in the arts science questions like "why is the sky blue" and "what is the Second Law of Thermodynamics," but it seemed as if no-one was asking any scientists what novels they'd read recently.

I was encouraged to have what sometimes gets called a "well-rounded" education. I kept taking math and science subjects long after it became clear I didn't have the talent to pursue a career in them (except for chemistry. For some bizarre reason I always found chemistry easy.). Since then I've become the woman with the English Lit. degree who likes to read about science. I really did finish A Brief History of Time (which has a very beautifully-written ending, by the way), and wish they would just hand that book to high school students who prefer arts subjects instead of forcing them to take bewildering physics classes. They'd learn more. I did — the first three chapters more or less cover my Grade 11 physics class curriculum.

Bottom line: people need to engage in both the arts and sciences to make sense of the world and each other.

awfully wonderful day

2010-06-18T21:10:00.003-04:00

Today I went to Book Summit 2010. The very first thing I learned there is that the adjective in the name of the conference is misleading. Sure, books are a very big part of the overall mix, but there was also a lot of discussion about printing, drawing an audience in the mass- and web-based media, the neuropsychological act of reading and how it affects the reader's social skills, and.... lots of other things that I would blog about except that, four hours after it ended, my head is still exploding, albeit in a very positive manner.

In a way, it was the perfect fun day for bookworms. First, we got to learn about e-readers from a technological/gadget point of view. Then we got serenaded with parodic songs about copyright. If that doesn't sound funny to you, you can't have been there.

Then we all dashed off to the two information sessions we had chosen for the morning (mine were "Books and the Media" and "Reading in the Digital Age"). After a yummy, healthy lunch, we went to our selected afternoon sessions (mine was "The 21st Century Writer"). The day wrapped up with a panel discussion, and the giving away of the door prize. It was a Kobo Reader, which I (ulp!) won. I never win door prizes, so that part was a bit confusing.

My inner bookworm child feels like she just went to the best party ever. There was even an afternoon ice cream break. Nothing like wandering into a panel discussion on the future of publishing while your inner child is busy exclaiming, "We got ice cream and now we're going to talk about books some more! Wow!"

I started to read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales with the Kobo on the way home — since the tales pre-date Gutenberg's press and are being included free on many e-readers it seemed like the right place to start.

There was at least one profound idea to absorb every quarter-hour or so, all throughout the day, and you may have noticed while reading this that I've been trying to avoid getting into them. I'm sure many of them will be fodder for at least one blog post in the future, as will a review of that Kobo reader.

For now I'm still trying to absorb it all. The most clear take-away so far is that whatever form the things we call "books" take in the near or far future, there will always be stories to tell, and we have to remember that's the important part. It was as good a root cause analysis as I've heard lately on any topic.

Many thanks to the organisers, presenters, and other attendees. I am so grateful I got to be there with you and learn so much.

does TV exist anymore?

2010-06-16T22:44:00.002-04:00

I remember when my parents bought our first colour TV set. It was in 1980. Somehow my father convinced the delivery people to come out to a rural address during the Christmas-New Year's week frenzy so that we could have it in time to watch the Rose Bowl Parade.

Colour TV, of course, had been around since the 1960s, but my parents refused to buy a colour set for the first twenty years because, as my dad put it, "the technology wasn't there yet." We didn't get the see the NBC peacock unfurl in colour, but we didn't get to see sitcom actors with unnaturally orange skin either. We waited until the technology was acceptable, and then we bought into it.

The only significant difference between the new TV and the old one was the colour display. Everything else — the channels we could get, the time the shows were on — stayed the same.

Recently I got my first flat-screen TV. The old CRT-style set I had was a hand-me-down from my brother's girlfriend's grandmother (in the Eyrea, we're all about reuse before recycle — the set is now in its fourth home at an aunt's). It became very clear, however, that with this box — can we still call them "boxes" when they're nowhere near cube-shaped anymore? — didn't just involve a change in display technology.

Since I am old enough to remember 1980, it should come as no surprise that I am also old enough to remember the consternation of those who wanted to get into video games but were facing having to buy a TV set at the same time as a Pong console, because their set lacked the necessary plugs (or even the bit where you connected the forked wires to the screws) to connect the console to it. The new set has two HDMI jacks, two sets of RCA composite/component jacks, an SVGA jack to connect a PC with, and I forget what else.

Which means, to me, that it's not really a TV set anymore, even though according to the setup menu there is an aerial buried in the thing somewhere.

It's a display monitor. Right now I have four inputs and one output (sound to my stereo) attached to it, and I haven't nearly used up all the jacks (ports?) yet. Of course, The Eyrea has always been a cable- and satellite-free space, so no actual television broadcasts ever come across any transmission medium. The TV part is entirely disabled, and there's less than ever to mark that it's not there.

I know millions of people still have cable or satellite subscriptions, still think about how many channels they have access to, still gossip about reality shows. That seems to be the part that makes the mainstream news (also available on the same TV channels, or their newspaper subsidiaries), most of the time. But I know I'm not the only one who has decided to do without that particular media delivery system, and has instead gone for the local-network-with-single-display-and-no-streaming setup.

Anyone with a somewhat up-to-date system can do the same thing: just kill the broadcast downlink. Use the internet instead for when you want new data, like the latest headlines, weather, gossip.

I am very curious to see what will happen if and when a critical mass of people decide to do that. After all, the technology is there now.

the iPad anti-review

2010-06-14T20:57:00.002-04:00

I haven't seen an iPad except in review videos. I haven't touched one, tried one out, or gotten within ten feet of one (unless I was sitting next to someone one the subway who had it in their knapsack and I didn't know).

Because I like to read about technology and because I am a geek, I've been hearing a lot about them, including full-on debates about their merits and drawbacks well before anyone outside of the Apple development group even knew what the thing was going to look like.

And I have to tell you: I'm confused.

So this... thing is like a lightweight tablet computer. Okay, other companies have had those out for a while, except those companies include a keyboard.

But, so I'm told, it's not about the feature set. It's about what you can do with it.

The early adopters have all been blogging about how the iPad can be used to watch movies, listen to music, surf the web, read books. The ads I've seen are big on that last one, although the bloggers I read seem to be doing more movie-watching. Actually, most of the iPad-owning bloggers I read just seem to be chanting "Shiny! Shiny! SHINY!" at the moment, kind of like in that issue of The Tick where the bad guy hypnotises The Tick by placing that chrome apple in front of him and.... hey. Chrome. Apple. Hypnosis. I never picked up on that before.

But I'm still confused.

If I want to watch movies, I watch them on my TV set. My TV set can play all the file formats the iPad can (and more) thanks to the media box I have plugged into it. If I'm travelling I watch movies on my Nokia tablet. Yeah, the screen is smaller than the iPad's, but it's dead sharp and the gadget weighs less than half of what the iPad does. If I'm on a long trip, I might have my laptop with me, and that has a bigger screen than the iPad, although since I own a biggish laptop yes, it does weigh more.

If I want to listen to music, I can use that media box again if I'm in my living room, or use my Nokia tablet if I'm not. If I'm on the go, I don't want to listen to music on something that is too big and heavy to hold comfortably in one hand for long, sorry. Ideally I want something that tucks into a pocket or small purse.

If I want to surf the net... you get the idea. I just don't see what this thing is for, besides fleecing consumers.

Maybe if someone owns a netbook and they want to replace it with something a bit flashier... I could see a market existing there. Netbooks are often sort of alternative computers, backed up by the real thing. The iPad matches them (kind of) in weight and form factor.

Otherwise, I can't really see why it exists.

top 5 pens

2010-06-10T20:24:00.010-04:00

My favourite day-to-day writing instrument has got to be the keyboard on my Dell laptop. That statement is misleading, though, as it hides the significant pen fetish I've developed since about the time they let us stop using pencils in elementary school. I've had a lifetime of bad handwriting coupled with a constant desire to be writing, and that has led to some very strong preferences regarding pens. I've certainly tried out enough, hoping to find the magic writing stick that will make my scribble legible to other people (and me!).

#5: V Pen by Pilot

I wrote with a Skrip fountain pen for most of university. For once this wasn't just being pretentious, but because my handwriting improves a tiny little bit when I use a heavier, non-ballpoint pen. I think it's because it forces me to slow down. The V Pen by Pilot is lightweight (bad), but it's also the only disposable fountain-style pen I've ever been able to find. It's also extra-fun to lend to people, because they see and feel the plastic case and then are confronted with the fountain pen nib when they write with it. I really do like the stroke of a nib across the paper as opposed to the run of a ballpoint. It just feels more "right."

#4: found Cross pen

I found this smaller-than-normal Cross pen on a Mississauga Transit bus seat, way back at the turn of the century. For a lightweight, narrow, ballpoint pen (which is three strikes against with me) it writes remarkably well. I alternate between trying to keep it nice and saving it and trying to use up the ink so I can replace the bright blue with my preferred black.

#3: Pierre Belvédère

The ever-thoughtful J-A got me this pen as a birthday present this year. It's a ballpoint, but it's a wide-bodied, heavy ballpoint. So far I've used it to write out a short-short story inside a birthday card (seemed appropriate), and the heft and balance make it very nice to write with. When I finally get around to trying to re-teach myself handwriting, this is definitely the pen I'm going to practise with.

#2: wooden commemorative

It's not unusual for teachers to receive commemorative pens or other academic tools as retirement gifts. This pen, and all the other pens that go with it, are unusual because they were given to teachers when they got their first full-time contract. It was presented at the adult education centre I spent the first four years of my career at. It was, in a lot of ways, a great place to work — except that the Harris government had just made a lot of funding cuts to education, which meant that even basic items like photocopy paper were in short supply (our principal had to beg boxes of paper off other schools the first semester we were open under the new rules), and all the teachers were on short-term, dead-end casual contracts. If we wanted to have a teaching job with a career path (plus things like health benefits and merit increases), we had to get a full-time contract at a school for teenagers. Leaving was always bittersweet — not because any of us particularly hated the idea of teaching teenagers, but because we had to leave a perfectly good job arbitrarily just because some politician wanted to score points.

Each pen has a real wood barrel with the name of the "graduate" on it (that's what we called it when someone went full-time), and has a carved solid-wood case. The cover of the case has the school's logo and motto: an open book next to the words "In pursuit of lifelong learning."

#1: a practical glass pen

I've had this pen for almost twenty years now. It's made completely out of glass, and is based on designs that were popular in the 18th century — sort of after quills but before steel nibs. You dip the nib in the ink, and the spirals of the nib "catch" enough ink to write comfortably for about five lines of text. Then you dip again, and continue. The pen itself only cost about twenty dollars, and the bottles of ink are available at any decent art supply shop.

I've written a lot with this pen, including some lengthy letters. It is light and narrow, but the ink delivery method makes me write like no other pen does. The feel of the inflexible glass sliding along the paper on a thin layer of ink is a sensation like I've got from no other pen, even my fountain pens.

I wish I could cite where I got the glass pen from, but the shop went out of business shortly afterwards. There's no maker's mark on it or the box it came in (long gone anyhow). I've seen other glass pens, but they're almost always just for show, rather than actually writing with, and often have lovely, colourful, fantastically-shaped barrels that would not be comfortable to write with for long.

What are your favourite writing instruments? What makes you want to write with them?

if you're reading this, you may already be a hippy

2010-06-08T23:32:00.005-04:00

To those who read both my blogs (hi Carla!): this one is getting cross-posted because it overlaps the topic scope for both of them.

The meanings of words shift all the time. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be annoying if you enjoyed using a word in its previous sense and now can’t. I know of one grandmother who got pretty upset when her grandson’s parents told her she could not teach her grandson to call a cat by saying, “Here, pussy pussy.” You understand.

Things float the other way, too. Things that had one label stamped on them can have an entirely different one stamped on them once the previous one fades. This can be good, bad, or indifferent, but it can be very annoying if the new label doesn’t quite describe the original thing as well as the old label did. Perceptions change, practices change, and eventually the thing itself is in danger of changing.

One word that illustrates this is hippy.

Hippy comes from “hip,” as in “with it.” It grew to encompass a lot of things — do some Google searches if no ready stereotypes come to mind. It also grew to encompass a lot of things that pre-date its inception as a word.

There’s a nice point in a Philip K. Dick short story (whose title I am too lazy to look up) where one character assumes another is a hippy because he has a beard. The third character who has introduced them later explains that the “hippy” is actually a conservative — he has a beard because he has a nasty case of barber’s rash.

Hippy-ism (hippiness?) spread over all sorts of things that became associated with it, whether they were exclusively for hippies or not. Things like pacifism, or home schooling, or growing your own food, or doing things by hand. People forget that there were conscientious objectors in both world wars, that community schools are a relatively new innovation, that the working classes/peasants always grew their own food whether they were “farmers” or not, that doing things by hand was once a sign of thrift and quality products rather than a sign of “dropping out.”

When people ask about my parents and/or my childhood, they often comment that my family must be hippies. We had two big vegetable patches and a small orchard, and lived in a house my dad and his brother built. My mum sewed a lot of the clothes I wore. My brothers and I had wooden toys our grandfather made us. And yeah, politically we often (but not always) wind up on the pacifists’ side.

A quick glance at some family photos, plus some extra contextual information, shows how wrong that perception is. My mum worked at an office and was (still is) a twinset-with-pearls type. My dad was a fan of Elvis and the Rat Pack. Besides, long hair can get in the way when you work in construction. The garden? The sewing? The wooden toys? Both my parents were avid gardeners who didn’t have a lot of money when I was a kid — growing veggies was fun and practical. Same thing with my mum and her sewing. And of course my grandfather made us wooden toys — he was professionally trained as a finishing carpenter and worked as one almost his entire career. The pacifism isn’t exactly unusual in people who grew up in countries that have been occupied during wartime, and both sides of my family experienced that.

Over here in North America, safe insulated attacked-twice-in-100-years-but-not-invaded North America, all those things, those activities, add up to being a hippy, at least for those who don’t know any better. An entire ethic of thrift, practicality, and simple do-it-yourself-ness has been buried under a catchword.

It goes further than that. Are you a woman who doesn’t remove her leg hair, pit hair, or (ahem) hair in other places? Get ready to be called a granola-cruncher, even if (like the character in the PK Dick story with the barber’s rash) it’s because you have sensitive skin. Actually, with the hysteria aimed at those with pubic hair these days, it might be something worse than “granola-cruncher” if you happen to be wearing a bathing suit at the time.

What if you make an effort to eat less processed food, or if you like making basics for yourself like bread, jam, or soup stock?

What if you prefer to make your own music (or listen to your friends make some) instead of buying whatever is at the top of the list on iTunes this week?

It seems to me that it doesn’t take much these days to be a nonconformist. The weird thing is that there are an awful lot of people being nonconformist in these things, or myriad other things.
So are we all hippies now? Or is it time to do a collective semantic readjustment and admit that the label is not only inadequate and misleading, but also passé?

writing goals vs. writing normally

2010-06-07T07:23:00.001-04:00

I still have it in the sidebar: the 1,000 words a day tag that Debbie Ridpath Ohi over at Inkygirl made. I also have a spreadsheet showing that it doesn't actually work that way in The Eyrea. By now the data is pretty conclusive.

Don't get me wrong — I am writing. Progress is never what I want it to be, because what I want it to be is a full-time job, and that's not happening in the forseeable future. But there's also a perception factor that bothers me. It's taken a long time to come up to the surface, but here it is.

I went through a long period of time where writing was normal in my head, but I was literally afraid to write anything down because it would be deliberately interrupted ("you're doing that and there's dirty dishes in the sink. Shows how much you care about our health"), or read when it was barely beyond note-taking ("what do you mean 'first draft'? fiction is meant to be shared, and you left the notebook on top of your desk"), or diminished (the word I hate more than any other in the English language is "hobby." There's a reason for that.).

It doesn't actually matter if I make 1,000 words a day or not. I have to write something, because if I don't I'm not going to move ahead with the story (and, worse, wind up being that most despicable of beings, the poser). But what matters, what really, really matters, is whether or not writing is normal. It's a symptoms-versus-disease thing.

If writing isn't normal, it will take a larger-than-should-be-necessary amount of willpower to sit down and write. The writing will be more exhausting, more frustrating, and more of a chore than it needs to be. Writing is always work, but if what it takes to make it worthwhile is another entry on a spreadsheet, there's problems.

If writing isn't normal, all the stories will be stillborns. They will suck and while a certain amount of editing will prettify the ones that came closest to term so that they can at least be presented for critique, they will never get to be grown-ups loved by strangers to the parent. They will always be potentials buried in shoeboxes, long before they had a chance to bloom and make their own way in the world.

But:

If writing is normal, then 1,000 words isn't a marathon, but a pacing marker so that the writer doesn't blow their wad too soon.

If writing is normal, then the text's growth rate is regular and steady.

If writing is normal, then you don't need a badge on your blog to make it that way.

When I started this post, I wasn't planning on taking down the badge (I may still check in to Ohi's roll calls from time to time). I think it will be gone by the time this post gets published, though.

The Eyrea, both this visible blog-space and the private virtual and physical spaces behind it, is a place where writing is normal. Anything that contrives past that will wind up being a hindrance, not a help.

resistance culture

2010-06-01T22:52:00.004-04:00

Perfect timing. 31 May, the day designated for the "Facebook suicide" I decided to take part in, happened to be the same day as the latest instalment of West End Stories. I got to have my resistance culture and enjoy it too!

The wonder of West End Stories is that it is a routine of novelty. Every month, without fail, this is what happens:

The café opens up. People start to arrive and order refreshments/meals from Erin, who takes care of the food & drink side of things.
Howard, the ever-excellent host who presides over the chaos, appears. He puts tea lights on all the tables for the proper atmosphere, greets everyone who's there, and stands out on the sidewalk looking for all the world, as the ever-perceptive Rhonda put it, "like an expectant father."
A little after 7PM, Howard manages to herd all the cats (audience) and gets us to be quiet long enough to welcome us to another night of West End Stories. He quickly goes over the rules (anyone can tell, everyone else will listen), then tells us the story he always starts with. I won't spoil it for newcomers by telling it here — you'll have to come and listen for yourselves.
The first teller goes up and tells their story. Then the next, and the next, until a little after 8PM. A ten-minute break ensues where people go to the washroom, get more refreshments, and chat.
The second half proceeds with more story-telling until nine-ish. We all try to clear out quickly so Erin can finish cleaning up and get home at a decent time.

It's what happens in the two sessions that is so amazing. No two instalments are alike, yet you're nigh-guaranteed to have an entertaining night out if you attend. This last time we sang together, listened to a guitar player, learned about a web site where you can leave love letters to your favourite urban streets, heard a Sufi story, and more. Lots more.

Every time it all, miraculously, hangs together. No-one knows who will tell what, no-one knows what order the tellers will go up and tell in, but somehow it always works out. It's the opposite of rehearsed, yet it feels put-together. Casual, laid-back, but put-together.

I give the credit to Howard. He sets the structure every time, creating this "safe place" where first-time tellers can and do regularly go up and tell stories in public that they may not have even remembered until the evening got underway. Howard is a wonderful story-teller himself, so he can easily fill in when people get shy and won't volunteer, plus he gets help from experienced, superb story-tellers like Pat, Norm, Harry, and Ariel (who has to be heard to be truly appreciated).

It's hard to explain to people who have never experienced anything like it how accomplished it all is while you're there. We've been so conditioned to leave sharing stories to the professionals that we forget that people used to spend evenings this way all the time.

Come see. Come hear. And if you live too far away and won't be visiting soon, try creating your own.

i think i understand now

2010-05-31T07:05:00.002-04:00

Warning: contains the word Facebook.

One of the biggest banes of a commuter in Toronto are "jumpers." Those are people who commit suicide by leaping from subway platforms, or off bridges, or just about any other way they can get in the way of a lot of people who just wanted to go to work and get their job done. It's a particularly selfish, dramatic way to off oneself, and it keeps happening because Toronto is sufficiently crowded that it's also very effective. There's been a few cases of successful (physical) intervention, and several more cases where the jumper wasn't successful. Yes, there are worse things than suicide — there's the agony and humiliation of being pulled off train rails while the innocent people whose day you were about to ruin watch you carried away with your self-inflicted injuries.

Public physical suicide is one thing, but the virtual kind can be overly dramatic too. As I posted last, I'm all for people deleting their Facebook accounts en masse to protest the way that the company has mucked with its users. I've said it before but I'll say it again: just because you sign up for a free service doesn't mean you signed up to have your trust abused. That's why this morning I said, "good-bye, cruel social network", and my Facebook "identity" ceased to be.

I don't know if that means that what's left of my account will wind up on the consecrated server or the unconsecrated server, but I do know that the "suicide" is a massive relief. Ironically, once I made my decision, I wound up spending more time on Facebook these last few days than I had over the last six months. And you know? There's a lot that still irritates the hell out of me.

I will not miss having to explain to my friends who are allowed, even encouraged, to use Facebook at work that I cannot reply to them during workdays via Facebook, because it is banned at the office and my company is very strict about personal internet use.

I will not miss finding notification e-mails in my inbox about messages from people I don't know contacting me via Facebook. They leave me scrambling through my privacy settings, wondering how on earth I wound up on their contact list when I have all my settings cranked to the max as "friends only," or even "no-one." I just got another one today. Turns out in this particular case a real-life friend of mine invited me to an event via Facebook, although she's not the host. The host, in turn, sent out a mass message to all invitees, whether they had RSVPed or not (I hadn't).

I will not miss people asking to be my "friend" when I have never met them in person.

I will not miss people claiming they know my Facebook page, yet they haven't noticed that it's been empty of all the content I could delete for months.

On the other hand, I am very much looking forward to saying, "Facebook? You're still on that?"

Jumpers typically have a poor idea of what they're leaving behind. They can never have any idea of what they're really going towards.

In the virtual world, things are different. My Facebook identity has been brain dead and on life support for over two years, even if no-one else noticed much. Today I pulled the plug.

I know exactly what comes next, because I've been living it for over two years now. And it's great.

PS: Check out the screen shot (also at the top of this post). Apparently no account gets a quick and painless death on Facebook if the user initiates it. At least by leaving at the end of the month it'll be easy to count the days and then check if it's really gone. I am going to wait more than 14 days, though, just in case the way their servers count it is different from how time passes in real life.

pay no attention to the man behind the web site

2010-05-29T21:04:00.003-04:00

Warning: contains a word not usually used in this blog. The word in question is Facebook.

The dust seems to have settled now. Again.

If anyone out there besides me has been reading this blog from the beginning, then you know that the main motivation for starting it was my complete and utter dislike for Facebook. I joined it sometime in the summer of 2007, back when it was supposed to be a way to keep in touch with friends and family (in case you missed the memo, it's not anymore). During the course of my never-ending search to find a decent writing critique group, I'd stumbled across a group of Facebook fans, who were so enthusiastic about it I thought I should at least give the thing a try. Besides, there were some people from high school I always wish I hadn't lost touch with.

I've ranted about what I dislike about the site before, so I won't go through it here again. Suffice to say that the user interface drove me crazy long before the constantly-changing privacy settings did. Truth be told, most of the time I was actively on Facebook I had my account pretty much wide open, because right from the account creation process the site didn't pass the sniff test when it came to being able to trust it.

Every time Facebook goes and changes something, a certain percentage of people get up in arms about privacy. Facebook seems to ignore them for a while, and then, when the media attention reaches a certain pitch, they apologise and make some overture to show that they're "listening."

The last bit was about changing some default privacy settings again. As usual, the changes had to be opted out of, rather than opted in, and so everyone who didn't like the new defaults had to go to their privacy settings and update them.

Here's the part people seem to be missing: If you have to go in and close something off or opt out, it's already too late. You've already been exposed. Your privacy, what's left of it, has already been compromised. The spammers and scrapers and marketeers have already cleaned you out.

So, it's not about privacy. What's it about then?

For one thing, check out this interactive graphic. Yeah, I know it shows how the privacy elements have shifted over the years, and I just said this wasn't about privacy. But check it out anyhow. See how things keep changing, year after year?

Now take a look at this web page that shows how Facebook's mission statements have changed over the years. A mission statement is something most companies rewrite every five years or so. Facebook has been around for less than ten years, but look at how much the mission statement has changed.

Imagine a bank doing this. At first, your funds are safe in your saving account. Then, your funds have been transferred to a mutual fund without your prior knowledge or consent, and it's only after several thousand likewise enraged depositors demand control of their money back that the bank reluctantly agrees to redeposit funds back in savings accounts. "We listen to our customers," they sigh, "but they're missing out on such a great opportunity to earn more with their money. We weren't trying to do anything wrong."

Of course they were doing something wrong. They just broke several laws. They did something with your money that you never told them it was OK to do, and if you have any sense at all you would immediately clean out and shut down all your business with them and go elsewhere. Yes, technically another bank could pull the same thing on you, but the world runs on banks, and it's a rare person who has the means to do without them.

Facebook does the same thing with the data we provide them. (We think of it as sharing data with our friends and family. Really we're giving data to Facebook and they're letting our friends and family see it.) They've changed the on-line yearbook that early adopters signed up for to something that is supposedly like Twitter, yet continues to be much more cumbersome.

And, unlike Twitter, where you can back up your tweets (although it's awkward), there's no good way in Facebook to get your data back. There's not even a good way to delete it. The first time I made an effort to clean out my account, just over two years ago, it took me days of pecking away at different aspects of the UI and ditching all the data I had entered. Yeah, I know it's still lurking on a Facebook server somewhere, but again, that wasn't the point. The point is that Facebook breaks user interface standards (again) by making it only easy to add information, like a bank that lets you deposit your money into a savings account but never make any withdrawals or transfers, even though you supposedly can. No wonder leaving Facebook has been compared to leaving a cult. Of course, if Facebook deems it reasonable, they'll delete stuff from your account themselves, again without your knowledge or consent.

Mark Zuckerberg claimed recently that Facebook does not sell users' personal information with any other parties. They don't need to. They just network with their "partners" (again, something else users have to opt out of in a way designed to make it difficult to do so) so the "partners" can connect the dots themselves, with your (forced) consent. This is like the crooked body repair shop that slips in a form authorising repairs your car doesn't need into a sheaf of forms authorising repairs your car does need, and then, when you complain about the extra work and higher cost, claiming that you agreed to it, so you have no recourse.

For the last two years, I've had an empty Facebook account strictly so that people who manage their event invitations from there could include me on their lists. Lately, that's been happening less and less (often people will use an invitation and and e-mail), so I think it's time to delete my account. I'm going to do it on 31 May, which has been chosen by a lot of people as Leave Facebook Day. Oddly, it's been called "Facebook suicide" a lot. I think of it more as "Facebook freedom".

The ever-wise Howard has spoken eloquently at West End Stories about "resistance culture" — of cutting the established circuit of "us providers/you consumers" and engaging in opportunities to blur that dichotomy. Time to take it on-line.

is self-reflexive narcissistic?

2010-05-24T21:49:00.002-04:00

Per my usual policy, I e-mailed the ever-cool Cheshin to tell her she had been blog-mentioned. I don't have a perfect record for it, but I figure it's just courtesy to tell the people you mention on-line that you name-dropped them. The only exceptions I make are for a) people whose blogs or sites I can just link to; b) people who are sufficiently famous they sort of expect to be mentioned without knowing about it; and c) dead people, for what I hope are obvious reasons.

Cheshin wrote back to thank me for telling her about the post. "I keep forgetting you have a blog," she said, and that sparked off a mini-discussion we had about keeping blogs. Because truthfully, either my friends forget I have a blog, or else they tagged me on Google Reader so some software could remember for them. And no, I don't mean that in a whiny way. You don't do this stuff expecting to actually get a readership.

Bloggers take a lot of piss, both on- and off-line. Apparently no-one in this world is interesting unless they are either already famous or can blog about what they do for a living. The world's foremost amateur enthusiast about Topic X has a steep cliff of credibility to climb before they can be considered a worthwhile source of information, no matter how many citations they include. Basically, no-one cares about your opinion so long as you give it away for free and don't run it by a professional editor.

Sturgeon's second law applies to blogs just as well as it applies to everything else, to be sure. It does not, however, apply to blogs more than anything else. Humanity has gone through previous phases where large percentages of the literate population got on their hobbyhorses and rode towards whatever battle they beheld in their minds' eyes. It's happening again.

There's nothing especially wrong about it, but each individual has to manage their own blog-reading and -writing load. For someone who posts about three times a week (or tries to), maintains not one but two blogs, and has subscriptions to dozens of blogs by other people around the world, I try not to take the whole thing too seriously. You have to treat it like Twitter, or TV shows — if you miss it, you miss it. There are some amazing blog posts out there, and some consistently amazing blogs, but there are many paths to whatever intellectual enlightenment you can get from them.

meals & the modern office

2010-05-20T21:05:00.004-04:00

My birthday happened recently, and the ever-cool Cheshin mailed me a box of prezzie stuff. I could do a whole blog series on all the things that were wrapped up inside — Cheshin is ever-cool in gift selection as well as a whole host of other things. But that would be too much like those people who show off their shopping sprees on YouTube, so I'm going to focus on the lunch bag she got me.

I had an Elle lunch bag a while ago, and while I loved the idea of schlepping my food to work in something that wasn't a leftover plastic bag, I had a hard time fitting everything in that I wanted to bring. The thing is, calling these things "lunch bags" is a little like calling the laptop I'm typing on now a "word processor" — sure, it can do that, and its ancestors did that too (some of them), but it does a whole lot of other things besides. It's just not a good description anymore.

Here's all the things I fit into my new cool lunch bag this morning:

back row: bowl for breakfast, bowl for lunch entree, salad dressing cup, tea cup

front row: apple, hunk of extra-old cheddar, utensils, two slices of malt loaf

I'm not just toting lunch. I'm toting breakfast (mostly yogourt parfaits this week), lunch (risotto with fiddleheads and grilled chicken), dessert (malt loaf), and a late afternoon snack (the apple and cheese). Usually the apple and cheese winds up being the last thing I eat for the day, in case that sounds like a lot of food to you.

So basically I'm fitting three meals into one "lunch" bag. Breakfast is eaten at work because I hate eating in transit, and it's not nice for whoever winds up sitting beside you on the subway. Lunch is the one meal everyone who works days expects to eat at work, so hopefully it's self-explanatory. I'm one of those people who gets suddenly and extremely hungry around 3-4pm, hence the apple and cheese.

Those little lunch bags that are meant to hold a tiny salad, half a sandwich, and a small cup of no-added-sugar fruit cocktail aren't going to cut it, though. Besides, I don't know anyone who can live off that for a 8-10 hour workday who doesn't have, ah, "food issues." That might be all they bring with them, but you can bet they're making at least one trip to Starbucks during the day.

At last lunch bag manufacturers are catching on:

All the food, the containers, the utensils, and the cup packs into this bag (I even stuck them in there for the photo for truth in blogging). I have room for more if I needed it. Yesterday I brought soba noodles with shrimp in peanut sauce, and had a container of peanuts packed as an extra. I still had room for more stuff.

The bag fits regular-size chopsticks easily, which is also a nice plus.

Cooking for yourself and toting the results instead of running out for food makes sense on a lot of different levels. I've been pretty strict about bringing lunch in five days a week for a few months now, and already I'm noticing my tastes starting to change. Not that the doughnut shop across the road doesn't make nice sandwiches, but home-made is better, and probably healthier.

Office workers tend to eat two if not three meals during today's working hours. Much has been made of how unhealthy "deskfest" can be, but lots of people only have time to eat at their desks or not at all. It's probably better on all counts if fewer of these are take-aways.

the elephant in the room of bags

2010-05-12T20:56:00.005-04:00

I got my first reusable shopping bags back around 1990. Back then, I mostly used them for putting the plastic shopping bags into on the way back from the supermarket. I lived on-campus in a single-student apartment building, and the nearest place to get groceries required a long bus ride and a long walk to schlep everything back home. Plastic bags often wouldn't survive the trip.

The net bag on the top left is the same design as those early bags, although I probably bought it a few years later because it isn't ripped up. Below it is one of my earliest logo bags. Its original purpose was to hold all the paper I got at the conference advertised on it. In the bottom right is a 90s-style DIY bag I crocheted out of dishcloth cotton, and above that is one of my first retail logo bags. Incidentally, the LCBO bag is equally divided into four pockets on the inside, the better to carry your wine bottles and liquor (although it's awfully heavy if you actually fill all the pockets with bottles of booze).

Sometime in the early noughties, reusable shopping bag manufacturers stopped caring so much about using ecologically-friendly materials like unbleached cotton and starting using stuff that probably originated in an oil refinery somewhere. It's very strong, and since the whole idea is to keep the bags out of the landfills, I suppose I can live with it to some extent. The plastic reusables do seem to be somewhat stronger than the cotton ones, although I suspect the biggest motivator is that they let manufacturers create better advertising for the shops the bags come from.

It's hard to tell from the photo, but this Sainsbury's bag is enormous — I've managed to fit my entire week's worth of groceries into it a few times. It also has a velcro tab at the top of the bag, between the handles, which is convenient.

My favourite bags, though, are the pocket bags. These are made from petroleum-based products, too, but they fold up into a very small package and can easily be shoved into a purse or coat pocket until they're needed. They can have logos, too — the "t-bag" one at the top left comes from a tea shop.

The top two bags have their pockets attached to the bag, which makes them very quick to unfold and to put away. As a bonus, you always know where the pocket is. The two orange bags at the bottom have separate pockets (the dark orange one on the right has a loop to hook the pocket onto, at least). They're still extremely useful. I can fit all of these bags, my wallet, my keys, and my cell phone into a small purse and head off to the market as unencumbered as I was back when plastic bags were the norm.

Back when I first started using those plain-cotton net bags at the top of this post, using reusables meant that you were a radical, tree-hugging, granola-munching eco-freak. I had to fight with checkout cashiers to not give me a shopping bag most places I went. No-one knew how to handle them unless the shop had made being environmentally-friendly part of their marketing and shopping experience and given their staff training on reusable-bag etiquette.

Now, in Toronto at least, plastic bags must be sold at 5 cents apiece, and people are learning to bring their own bags. The reusables have become a fashion accessory, and come in lots of designs and colours. People swap tips on which ones are the most cool-looking/comfortable to carry/strongest.

There's just one little catch, though. Reusable bags are... reusable, and must needs be made to be durable. Except for a few that have been overloaded, or that I lost, or that I dragged across Queen St. whilst trying to catch the streetcar, I still own every single bag I've owned for the last twenty years.

That's a lot of bags. They come in very handy when I move house, but otherwise I only ever really use the pocket bags for shopping. The rest are used in an futile attempt to organise my knitting by project, but even then there are over a dozen spare bags stuffed into my front hall closet.

Most of these were given to me, rather than bought. Shops give them away as promos, or relatives give them to me because they know I don't use plastic bags.

Maybe there are still a lot of people who don't have their full quota of reusable bags yet, but at some point the consumer market is going to be saturated, with only people making a home for the first time and those who finally need replacements creating a demand for bags.

Will the reduced demand for shopping bags teach us to reduce, period? Will the superior quality of reusable over throwaway plastic finally teach North Americans that quality is more important than quantity? What do you think?

cute AND useful

2010-05-10T20:54:00.003-04:00

The ever-together Suzanne got Jake and I these mini-USB keys during her recent trip to Hong Kong. I've been coveting the one she got herself on her last trip.

The little silver thing at the bottom of the blister pack is to attach the key to your phone. There's a lobster claw clasp to latch the key itself onto, so you can remove it easily when you want to use the key.

It holds 16GB, and as an added bonus, it's cute. It has a little panorama of Parisian landmarks on it, which is ironic in a cute way, given that the company that made it is based in New York and we've only ever been able to find them in Hong Kong (although I suppose if I checked out the College St. computer strip here in TO I might find some).

The cuteness connects to something that I was talking about with my work friends tonight over drinks: manufacturers and the technology media have been slow to notice that women are into computers too. Okay, laptops come in colours now, and the EeePC was marketed directly to women and children, but there's still a lot of "tech is for guys" noise out there. C'mon people, I can't be the only person who remembers who Grace Hopper is. Tech is for everyone.

an experiment

2010-05-05T21:56:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I had two people, who were never with me at the same time, ask if I knew how many people visited my web site.

I had a response all ready. "The 'web site' is one page," I said. "I haven't even launched it yet. Not until I get the first draft of my novel done. Right now isn't the time to be fiddling with web pages. I need something to talk about first."

Unfortunately for my ego, they both had the same counterpoint all ready to fire back with. "But what about your blogs? You've been running those for over two years now."

"Those are just because I like to write about topical stuff," I said.

This is true. I do not want to be one of those whiny people who are always saying, "Oh, well if you read my blog..." But I write. And writers like to be read. Also, I agree if I'm putting it out there, maybe I should pay attention to who's glancing at it, much less reading it.

So tonight I went on Google Analytics and got tags for both my blogs and my web site. Judging from my comments rate, I'm not expecting to find a secret legion of Eyrea-visiting web denizens. But currently I don't have hard numbers of any kind.

If you have made it this far, I humbly request 30 seconds and two mouse-clicks from you. You don't have to do anything else. Really.

I need to make sure all of the analytics scripts work. One of them is on this blog. The other two are here:

DIY-eyrea
katherinehajer as-yet-unlaunched web site

Please click on the above links. That's it! You don't even have to read anything. If you load the pages, it'll show up in my report as a visitor. I'd do it myself, but I suspect Google filters my own visits out. I'll play around and see.

And no, the reports don't tell you who exactly visited or anything fancy/privacy-invading like that. Just how many people visited, where in the world they were visiting from, and how long they stayed. So if you want a personal thank-you (which I would love to give you), please leave a comment to let me know you helped out with the experiment!

teach your word processor how to read

2010-05-03T20:04:00.004-04:00

There's more I want to write about document processing (as opposed to word processing). I'd love to get into master-/sub-documents, templates, tables of contents, tables of figures, indexing, lists, and all sorts of other fun stuff. But there are other blog topics out there, and I think it's time to let this series rest.

Last time I showed how to use the basic paragraph style — known as Text Body, Default, Normal, Regular Text, or something like that — for all your basic paragraph formatting. That included the basic font, first-line indents, between-paragraph spaces, line spacing, and just about anything else you would ever need to do with a paragraph. Today we're going to look at heading styles.

I feel like I have to tread carefully here, because I have had several writers, including Published Authors, tell me that they always make separate physical files for each chapter. When I swallow my incredulity and ask why, usually they tell me one or more of the following:

Book-length document files are too difficult to navigate for edits.
I won't lose everything if the file corrupts.
My computer runs faster with smaller files.

I have yet to have an all-out debate with anyone about this, mostly because when I start to their eyes glaze over and they say it's "too technical" for them. At that point I choke back any mention that I have an English degree and learned most of this stuff to stop from going completely crazy when I was teaching English lit to high school students. "Technical." Right. Feh. But my real responses to the above three points are:

It's not unusual for software specification documents to run to 300 pages or more. I know, I've written enough of them, and so have the ever-professional J-A, the ever-cool Cathy, the ever-prolific Jake, and many others I've met through work and elsewhere. Now, 300 pages is only about half a nice fat beach paperback, to be sure, but formatting-wise, the beach paperback is bound to be simpler. I've never seen a single fiction title with use case diagrams in it, for one. 300 pages of specs is probably about the equivalent of a 900 page book in terms of formatting complexity. Yet we edit them in single files all the time. We have to, or else the cross-references, figure numbering, and other automation won't work right.How we manage this is the how-to portion of this post.
I can sympathise about the fear of file corruption. Word starts to do this somewhere in the 250-400 page mark, depending on what's in the doc, although I've also had it happen on smaller files. Cathy's FrameMaker horror stories are enough to scare people off technical writing for life (although she always perseveres in the end). But there's a solution to these crises, and it's called backing up. If you back up all those little files (and I know you do), you're going to back up the big ones, right? Right?
If your computer is running noticeably slower with word processing documents that are completely text and only a few hundred pages long, YOU'RE PROBABLY USING MESSY FORMATTING. Sorry for shouting, but it's true. Think of it from the computer's point of view: is it easier to tell it: "Any time I write a Regular Paragraph, make it indent 1.5cm on the first line only, single-spaced, in Garamond 11pt," and then shut up about it for the duration, or is it easier to tell it for every single paragraph in the book, over and over and over again? That's what makes your file slow. Use styles, and things get faster (your file will likely be physically smaller too with all those extra instructions gone).

how to use headings

See that text just above that says "how to use headings"? That's in a headings style. Yes, even blogs have styles. I didn't have to do any explicit formatting to make it look like that — I just told the blog editor that I wanted a heading, and it formatted it for me. Easy.

Word processors have hierarchical headings. Heading 1s are the top-level. Then Heading 2s are beneath them, and Heading 3s are beneath them, and so on, and so on, usually up to Heading 9. To be honest, I have never needed more than five levels of headings in my work documents. If you are writing a novel, you will probably only use Heading 1 for chapter headings and stop there.

Heading styles are convenient the same way regular paragraph styles are. You decide that all your chapter headings (Heading 1) will start 12cm from the top of the page, be in Gill Sans Ultra Bold 24pt, centred, and will automatically start at the beginning of a new page, no matter where on the previous page the previous chapter ended. Make a line of text Heading 1, and it'll just happen. You only need to set it up once.

The bonus part about headings is that you will teach your word processor to read, at least a little. Word processors have yet to truly understand human language, but they understand hierarchies very well. In OpenOffice, headings show up in the Navigator:

(I didn't add any new-page formatting because I wanted all the headings on a single page.) Click on any of the headings in the Navigator (in Word, it's called the Document Map), and OpenOffice will navigate to that part of the document. You can move from Chapter 5 to Chapter 13 to Chapter 20 to Chapter 6 with ease. Er, but maybe Gill Sans Ultra Bold isn't the best choice for heading text.

Did you notice that the heading I have highlighted in the screen shot has a "+" sign to the left of it? That's because there's a Heading 2 beneath it. If you're writing non-fiction (or heck, maybe even for fiction), you'll be using Heading 2s for sub-headings, and maybe even Heading 3s for sub-sub-headings. You can fold up or fold down headings by whichever level you want to navigate by.

If you can use headings and regular paragraphs, that's enough to create a document that is organised at the most basic level. Most word processors have ready-to-use styles as soon as you open them, so you don't have to edit any styles to get going. Remember, once the styles are applied, you can always format after the fact to suit yourself — or a set of submissions guidelines.

I hope these last few posts will be useful to someone. If you have any questions, please ask in the comments or via the contact e-mail in the sidebar.

it's supposed to be less work, people

2010-04-27T22:12:00.002-04:00

From here on in for this series, I will be using OpenOffice (OOo) for most of the screen shots, supplemented by some Google Docs. I won't be using any screen shots from MS-Word — as I've said before, The Eyrea lies comfortably within the greater province of Linux. I will, however, try to give the Word equivalent term if OOo calls it something different.

Okay, let's say you have a short story or a novel you want to write up, and you want to write it up on a computer, in a word processor. You know all about the benefits of word processors, and if you're an adult, you've probably known about them for over twenty years now. Depending on your age, you may have even had to memorise these basic features for a quiz in school. Word processors let you:

move text around without whiteout, scissors, or glue
spell-check
change your mind without having to re-type the whole damn thing (although I've heard many authors claim this is actually a drawback)
format text so it is bolded or italicised or underlined, or, gods forbid, all three at the same time
change your font in ways that neither a strong training in calligraphy or the knowledge of switching out the Courier ball for the Elite one on your IBM Selectric typewriter would ever let you do

All of this is fine and well at the atomic level, but there's more to it than that. Look at that list again. Every single item takes place at the word and letter level, the most basic level in a word processing document. Back when I was pounding out high school essays on the Commodore 64, that was fine, but the feature set has expanded considerably since then. Things have gotten more automated.

Move up to considering the paragraph level. Most novels are written in sentences and paragraphs, after all. Take a look at the screen shot of this paragraph*:

(Pay no attention to the half a dialogue you can see in the shot for a moment.) It looks like I hit the Tab key on the first line, doesn't it? I didn't. Instead, I included these format settings in the Text body style — the style the paragraph is in. Word users will probably find the equivalent called Normal in their files.

See that First line setting, third field down from the top? That's what's making the tab-like indent at the start of each paragraph. Every time I press the Enter key and start a new paragraph, the first line automatically gets indented for me. Notice also that the Spacing setting for Below paragraph is also set so that there is a small gap between paragraphs.

But now I'm ready to submit my manuscript, and one place I want to submit it to specifies they want to see double spacing. Meanwhile, another place wants indented paragraphs, but with single spacing and a blank line between them. No problem: I just save versions of the MS with the style settings changed to provide those details, just using the fields in the above dialogue tab:

Now, some clever person is going to read this and think, "Yeah, but there's another way to do that! Just Select All and format the paragraph!"

You could do that. You could stick pins in your eyes, too. It's true that most full-fledged word processors give the users multiple ways to accomplish the same task. It's also true that some ways are better than others.

If you are doing a Select All + format, it means that you are assuming that your entire MS consists of nothing but paragraph upon regular paragraph. Formatting the paragraph won't work if you have chapter or section headings, because those will get formatted like regular text too. Also, if you didn't quite Select All, or if you somehow managed to get the cursor past the point of the old end-point for the Select All (and that can be done), you will have some paragraphs formatted the old way. Formatting paragraphs outside of styles is both clumsier and more delicate.

Also, go back up to the screen shot of the dialogue box. See how many things you can adjust for a style at once? Fonts. Conditional formatting. You can even make drop caps automatically in OOo. Can you do all that from a Format Paragraph dialogue? Right.

Next up: I'll show how to use and include automatic headings, and show how that makes long documents much, much easier to navigate.

* All examples are written in Lorem Ipsum pseudo-text, courtesy of Lipsum.

consider the act

2010-04-22T23:47:00.001-04:00

It would be very hard for me to pick just one favourite part in WS Burrough's book Naked Lunch, but for the film version by David Cronenberg, it's easy. Lee and his wife are crossing a frontier between two countries via car, and get stopped by a border guard. The guard asks Lee what he does for a living, and he replies that he's a writer. The guard asks him to prove it. Lee pulls a pen out his breast pocket and tells the guard he has a writing instrument.

I love that: a writing instrument. Not a machine, not a (shudder) medium, but an instrument.

Writing is old and varied enough that writers can choose from many different instruments. I switch hit: poetry (when it comes) gets written with pencil on three-ring paper, probably because I started making it up when I was three or four and started writing it down myself when I was about six (before that, my kindergarten teacher took dictation when she heard me reciting something interesting).

The short stories, then longer stories, and then novels didn't start arriving in full force until halfway through high school, by which time I'd learned how to type. My brothers and I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas when I was 12, so I've been typing on computers all that time, and my handwriting has always been sufficiently awful that I can't imagine any other way.

Between that and all the business writing I do for my day job, I am very picky about word processors. I want them to do what I need them to do, in a reasonable manner, and then get the hell out of my way. The years of experience between the arrival of the Commodore 64 and now make me suspect that companies that make word processors don't see it that way, but I still hold out hope that someone will see it my way someday.

The following is a roundup of the three major word processors I use on a regular basis for writing. I use a couple of text editors too, mostly when I'm on a lightly-powered machine like my Nokia tablet, but I'm not including them in this survey because when it comes time to edit I always switch over to my laptop.

Aside before the reviews proper: that link to the Nokia tablet blog post? It details how I use my Nokia to write whilst in transit. It's from almost exactly two years ago, and I haven't really changed my setup since. Wow, maybe I've finally found the toolkit I like. At least until something better comes along.

Google Docs

I have to recommend Google Docs to everyone who doesn't have a computer, but can get some computer time with an internet link attached. Maybe you have internet access at your local public library, or maybe you have a friend who doesn't mind if you come over and use their machine for a bit, but you don't feel right leaving your own files on their computer. Or maybe you usually do have home computer access and your own web access, but inspiration struck when neither of these were handy, but a web connection was.

Or maybe you hate computers but need to create a typed submission?

Google Docs lets you upload word processing documents up to 500 KB in size in lots of different formats, and lets you save them in even more formats, including MS-Word and PDF. Bonus: they have hooked it up to Google Translate so you can translate your docs on the fly. I tried the English-to-French translation on an old blog post (those being the only two languages I am reasonably fluent in), and the French sounded decent, although of course not "native." I would say it was good enough for a French speaker to understand, but not good enough for everything to come across correctly. But it might be good enough to give a proper human translator a good jump start.

500KB is plenty of room for the average novel — one that doesn't have a lot of fancy formatting in it, or need to use specific fonts for text. Like any on-line editor, speed and access are both issues, but it's a lot better than some of the alternatives. As for features — again, it's fine for the average novel.

OpenOffice

I've blogged about OpenOffice (OOo) and its features before. For me, it's proven more than adequate for writing with. It supports master/sub-documents, it has style support, and like Google Docs, it's free, free, free. Unlike Google Docs, it doesn't live in hyperspace — you install it on your local machine. The full office suite runs around 100MB — not horribly big for today's machines.

I've heard some gripes on-line about OOo's feature set, but truth be told I've never had any problems with it. I wish the template organiser was a little more user-friendly, but that's about it. I don't know about you, but I only update my templates for books about... once every eighteen months? Something like that. I want to change how the default paragraphs work in my writing template, so I'll get to try it out before the next blog post.

Microsoft Word

I haven't used MS-Word for personal writing in years, but I use it at work every day for business and technical writing. Everyone in my department is a power user: we have strict rules around style and template usage. Form follows function: if we're making text big for a communication reason, that reason will be reflected in the style used (because we use styles for nearly all the formatting), and will thus be reflected in the document's structure. The ideal is that someone who doesn't read English should be able to take a look at one of our documents and be able to see the organisation of the content and understand what information may be found where.

And, like the vast majority of businesses in North America, we use Word to accomplish that.

I would never question my company's decision to go that route — I completely understand and support the business logic — but I will question what on earth Microsoft did to Office 2007. Some things are better, but some things are simply awful. It's become even harder to use some of the so-called advanced features, and template organisation is now worse than it is in the freeware OpenOffice. A lot of features I use at least once a week, like updating styles from another document or template (so, you know, a set of documents look like they're a set?) have become obscure and unwieldy.

I used to say that if you already knew Word and were nervous of OpenOffice's learning curve, you may as well buy your own personal copy of Word and write with that. As of the 2007 version, I've reversed that. Just learn OpenOffice. It will be much less painful in the long run, and you can still save as clean, well-formatted Word documents.

What about all those "writer's" word processors?

I've been reading a lot about them, but haven't tried any in earnest yet. Having a word processor just for writers appeals to some egotistical part of me. I've yet to see a feature set that can't be easily accomplished in a regular word processor like OpenOffice or Word, though. It seems like "writer's" word processors are taking advantage of the people who don't know how to use those features.

Starting next post, I aim to try to fix that.

tool up already

2010-04-19T22:25:00.001-04:00

If you've ever received an e-mail from me, you've seen my sig. It says, "Humans — the tool users." It's actually been my sig-line since about five years before I even got my first e-mail account — originally it was on a small piece of paper that was stuck to the door of my first apartment, where the name plate was supposed to go. My friends would tell each other to "get off the elevator at the third floor and look for Katherine-style snark" as directions to my place.

The full origins of the sig may get explained in another post sometime, but the reason I'm bringing it up for this post is because of the incredible respect I've learned to have for objects that augment the already-incredible power of human hands (and mouths, and feet, and now brains with the new research in thought-controlled devices). Think about how badly an alien invasion could cripple us if they just disintegrated anything that they could identify as a tool: from screwdrivers to computer keyboards to teaspoons to hairbrushes. We'd be left trying to tune up the defence fleet with shards of flint. I'm not saying we couldn't do it — I once put together a coffee table using a butter knife for lack of a screwdriver, and it held together fine for at least ten years. But it would be a lot harder, and a lot of time would be wasted while all those mechanics searched around for just the right-sized shards of flint.

Or, to revisit that butter-knife example, imagine if the aliens were more bloody-minded than thorough, and just got rid of some tools in any given family of tools. So we got to keep hairbrushes, but combs disappeared. We got to keep slot screwdrivers, but not Phillips screwdrivers. While waiting for new replacement tools to be created, people would try to make do as best they could, and there would be a lot of yanked hair and stripped screw heads.

Still sounds pretty annoying, doesn't it? Then riddle me this — why do people keep using the wrong features for the job in their word processors? I'm not talking about an occasional user who needs to tap out a letter once a year or less. I mean people for whom the word processor is a serious tool: writers.

When Holly Golightly gives Paul Varjak a typewriter ribbon in Breakfast at Tiffany's, he doesn't need to call tech support to install the thing. Instead, he kicks off his shoes jauntily, and a few scenes later is typing up the opening lines of "My Friend." There's no way Paul Varjak would have sat there and said, "Oh, I'm such a Luddite, I wish we could just use quills and vellum like Shakespeare did, I'll have to get one of my techie friends to help me...." No way. The typewriter is his writing tool, and he bloody well knows how to use it and take care of it.

Typewriter ribbons are still sold, although admittedly they are much more difficult to find these days. Pens and notepads are still as easy to find and use as they were in Truman Capote's day. Computers are the tool of choice for many, though, and that means using a word processor application.

And that means, if you are a writing human, you need to get to know word processing applications, because that's your tool.

A couple of odd things are happening, though. For one, there seem to be an awful lot of writing humans out there who never get past the butter-knife stage, and even act disdainful if you tell them there are things called screwdrivers that work even better than butter knives for the purposes of assembling furniture... they just don't want to leave their little newbie comfort zone. Even more inexplicably, certain software companies are encouraging people to not become proficient.

Next post: an overview of the tools that are out there, focusing on ones that are cross-platform (ie: I don't care what kind of computer you have — the tools I will review work with any computer five years old or less in reasonably good condition).

After that: best practices, tips & tricks, and some ideas for document processing.

what real roads look like

2010-04-14T08:00:00.001-04:00

The Netherlands is famous for how much people use bikes, but what's missing from that reputation (at least as people seem to understand it in Toronto) is why so many people bicycle. This is what I've learned from just watching people and talking to my cousins who live over there:

Bikes are much less of a pain to navigate and park than cars.
You can park dozens of bikes in the amount of space that it takes to park two or three cars.
The acquisition and maintenance costs on a bike are much less than on a car — an especial concern in these days of wildly fluctuating gas prices.

Notice that "exercise" is not explicitly on the list. Neither is "the environment." More about that in a moment.

Given the above, there is an infrastructure in place in the Netherlands to make cycling a good option. Bicycles have dedicated lanes on the vast majority of streets, which car drivers respect (see photo above). Parallel parking a car in a bike lane carries the same penalties it would for parking in a driving lane, ie: you don't do it. Notice that in that photo at the top, parallel parking in the bike lane would actually mean you were double parking. That's something even most Torontonian car drivers understand is a no-no.

While I'm going on about that shot from my Amsterdam hotel window, notice that the car lanes are only as wide as is required for a typical car. That means the lanes overlap a bit. That means drivers and cyclists have to pay attention to each other and create "safety cushions" around them. And that means no weaving through traffic just because a car-size (or bike-size) gap appears. Life is not a game of Pole Position.

The bike lanes ensure that bicycles are considered part of the overall traffic. Compare that to the Greater Toronto Area, where things are so car-centric some drivers don't even give respect to pedestrians.

Back to Amsterdam: A lot of people switch between driving their car and riding their bike depending on what they need to do and how far they have to go.

Cycling on roadways that encourage it for basic transportation means that everyone who uses a bicycle regularly gets some "free" exercise that they don't have to think about too much. In other words, it's a setting that encourages people to move around instead of just sit around. It also means that most days, in most weathers, there is less incentive to use a polluting vehicle than a non-polluting one. To any climate change deniers out there: cars were established as sources of pollution long before "global warming" became a catchphrase. Even if you are right about global warming, cars will still be polluting, and oil will still be a finite resource. Cycling helps manage resources and clears the air. Period.

For all that, when you mention cycling in Toronto, you get pigeon-holed as someone who is dreaming in technicolour and obviously doesn't have "real" transportation needs. It really is an amazing backlash mentality — this idea that doing something that happens to be environmentally friendly must needs have major drawbacks otherwise.

A lot of people cite the winter snow and cold in Toronto as being reasons why cycling will never catch on the way it has in the Netherlands. I don't buy it. Okay, sometimes it does get too cold or snowy, but that's only a tiny portion of the overall winter season most years, never mind the entire year. Most of the time the weather is nothing a good pair of cycling gloves and a windbreaker won't mitigate. The last day I was in Amsterdam, it was very windy, with bursts of rain that turned to hail a few times, but the cyclists were still out. Of course, braving the weather is something you get better at the more you do it.

From what I've experienced as a Toronto cyclist and driver (and pedestrian, and public transit-taker), true acceptance of bicycles as transportation has two things going against it: drivers and cyclists. Drivers, because too many of them treat cyclists either as invisible or as targets, and nearly all of them seem to have forgotten the rules of the road. I've had a lot of drivers tell me point-blank that roads are only for motorised vehicles, and I've had to remind them that according to our road laws that's actually not true.

Cyclists seem to agree with the drivers' assessment that they aren't covered by the road laws (even though they are), because most of them don't follow the rules of the road at all. Drivers both good and bad can't deal well with unpredictable moves that break the geometry of lane use. As a cyclist, I have actually had drivers roll down their windows and thank me because I was doing things like signalling, sharing the lane correctly, and stopping at intersections. I've also noticed a lot of cyclists riding at night with no reflective strips or lighting on their bikes or themselves. They have no right to complain if people don't see them, and they're breaking the law.

I think part of it just might be critical mass: once enough cyclists get on the road in Toronto, they will have to be paid attention to by the drivers, and the cyclists will have to start behaving. But the critical mass will have to be helped by the environment, and by attitudes. Drivers need to stop endangering cyclists. Cyclists need to stop pissing on everyone who is a non-cyclist (including a friend of mine who claimed that those who took public transportation weren't really helping the environment because they weren't taking any exercise while riding streetcars and subway trains).

Here's Amsterdam's take on that. See the buses using the dedicated bus/tram lanes? Cars use them for passing, but not a lot because they are not supposed to block the way of the public transit. Certainly the buses and trams don't get stuck during rush hour the way they do here.

It's a fucking bike. It is not a moral indictment of everyone around you who is not riding a bike at the time

One last photo above. This is a smaller side street. The bike lanes disappear because the street is too narrow for them (the dashed lines mark where one can parallel park). So the cars and bikes must share the road. And they do.

Seriously now: why can't we?

a quick visit to civilisation

2010-04-11T22:44:00.001-04:00

Okay, Torontonians, try this out as a mental exercise. Imagine a place where everything is organised without being draconian, where the citizens are cared for without being nannied, yet where all the grown-ups get treated like grown-ups. Public transit is clean, quick, and usable (even a distance of over 30 km can be easily travelled in less than an hour by frequent-interval, electrically-powered trains). Furthermore, the buildings all more or less go together, even the street food is decent, and people say "sorry" when they realise they accidentally stepped in front of you. Despite all this tidiness, efficiency, and politeness, people are more relaxed than in TO, and it's possible to spend an entire week there without seeing anyone get more than kind of annoyed about anything, at least by Toronto standards of road rage and general irritability.

The truth is there are lots of places in the world like this (arguably Toronto even used to be one of them), but the one I went to visit two weeks ago is called Amsterdam. This particular comparison is apt because Toronto and Amsterdam used to be sister cities, back when that didn't seem like a joke. They even named a street after Toronto. Did we name one after Amsterdam? We have the Amsterdam Brewery, at least. I suppose that's something.

If you click on the link to the photos I took there, you'll notice that it was mostly cloudy while I was there. I only really noticed when I was taking photos (and I hardly took any photos). The rest of the time I was on my way to or from a museum, or on my way to or from a café, or just walking around and... just walking around. I also did a lot of writing. Somehow it just felt better to be writing in a café there than here. I think it was the organised-yet-relaxed vibe.

I want to blog about some particulars in future posts. For now, here's the photos:

the source of lies, damned lies, and statistics

2010-04-10T09:06:00.001-04:00

As a Canadian blogger, you have been identified as a participant in a short survey to gain a better understanding of the Canadian blogging environment, as well as to gain your perspective on some of the products you purchased recently. Your opinion is important to us and you will be eligible to receive free products and coupons upon completion of this survey.

That was the opening paragraph of an e-mail I received yesterday. Normally for such things I just click the Report spam button, but I had just read Rude Cactus's most recent post (30 March entry) about doing product reviews on blogs, so I decided to click on the link and see what they wanted to know about Canadian bloggers.

The first thing they wanted to know was what age range I was in (35-44 in case you were wondering). The second thing they wanted to know was my gender. I love messing with survey results as much as the next person, but I was honest this time and put "female."

The page after that had a series of topics listed and asked me to rate how often I blogged about them. The topics were all what I would call "whitebread mainstream" -- celebrities, sports, fashion, things like that. The sort of stuff you see on the covers of magazines at the grocery checkout.

Anyone who's read more than one entry on this blog knows that the only topic I could honestly say I wrote about "frequently" was "Other." The next most-frequent topic I could honestly say I've written about is "technology." Most of the rest of them I had to say "never" to.

Okay, so far, so good. I'm well used to checking the "Other" box on surveys. But then things got strange. Or, if not strange exactly, pathetic.

I got asked which of a list of six fashion magazines I bought, and how often (none, less than once per year).

I got asked what brands of shampoo I had tried in the last twelve months (the cheapest one that won't dry out my hair — surprisingly, it was actually on the list).

I got asked what brand of soap I used (that time I had to put "Other").

I got asked about how I learn about new beauty products.

I have two reactions to the above.

One: I am more than the sum of my demographics. Yes, I do wear makeup, perfume, jewelry. But when it comes to my blog, I have other things on my mind. I just don't think keeping clean and being well-groomed should be things that require a lot of thought.

Two: I was very curious as to what men were getting asked about. Fortunately, I have two blogs, so I got two survey links. I also have two machines I can get to the interwebs on, so I could dodge any cleverness the surveyors might have implemented to make sure people didn't double-answer (although to me the questions were less about statistics and more about recruiting).

So I booted up my laptop, clicked on the other survey link, and answered everything the same except for the gender. For once, the questions were exactly the same. Hey, maybe the company who commissioned the survey makes toiletry products. Or maybe they were just worried about getting to their target demographic so much they didn't care what anyone else thought. As a, um, non-fashion-magazine-reading woman it annoyed me, but maybe most men would just mutter "serves me right for taking a survey" before moving on. What do you think?

My take: I know a common marketing mantra is "if they're talking about it, it's a good thing," but I'm not sure how much having people blog "I review computer software on my blog and they asked me about what freaking shampoo I use," is going to attract market share.

2nd anniversary

2010-03-20T13:51:00.002-04:00

Two years ago the end of March I started this blog, and its sister DIY blog. I was sick of F******* taking over my life, sick of worrying about who could view which "private" content of mine on-line, sick of having to shoehorn myself into someone else's cutesy categories. I wanted my on-line self back, dammit.

Okay, so I made two blogs. So what? What did that give me?

It took a lot of stress away. I like being able to check on my friends with an RSS feed instead of having to log in to a site that continues to bewilder me, no matter how many overhauls they seem to make to it. On Google Reader, Twitter, and other like services, I can scan through for not just what my friends are up to, but what my friends are up to that is of interest to me. You see, I have an amazingly diverse group of friends with lots of different interests (if you're reading this, maybe you're one of them). We don't connect with each other 100%, all the time, and we're all perfectly cool with that. So instead of getting a "status vomit" from F******* on everything people I know are up to, I can just find out what they're up to that I can contribute to and relate to meaningfully.

And, although it's not nice to say, the truth is I can keep up with my real friends out here. One of my annoyances about F******* is that I often found myself friending people that, um.... quite frankly, I didn't like very much. But they were friends of friends, or they were in the same group or club I was, or something. They sent me a friend request, and once I figured out who the heck they were, I realised I couldn't not friend them without some useless angst happening in the real world. The politics of "friending" just added the clutter and dysfunction of F*******, not to mention its general uselessness.

I still have to go back to F******* from time to time, mostly for event invitations. I wish people would just use something like Evite, but hey, to each their own. It works well enough so long as I remember to put the event on my calendar once I RSVP. That's cool.

One thing that still astonishes me, two years on, is how many people don't realise I'm not on F******* except in name. I have completely, absolutely, gutted my account. There is no material information there. For all intents and purposes it looks like a dead account. Even so, I still have people trying to friend me, and still have people saying, "Oh, didn't you see my F*******update?". Obviously they never saw mine, or else they'd know better.

The other thing that I find interesting is how many dedicated F*******ers are down on Twitter. They all say the same thing: it's too much work, and it's too trivial. Yet they all do status updates on F******* (which is the same thing as a Twitter post), and they all read the "latest updates" section. Maybe it's not so much too much work as all the same work one has to do to keep up with F******* anyhow? Personally, I've found Twitter very useful. It makes no pretenses about you being "friends" with anyone (you "follow," you don't "friend"), and it's based on interest, not a "friendship" which may or may not be artificially constructed by the web site.

I'm glad I escaped. It's a lovely on-line world out there. I love the simple things, like being able to choose my own colour schemes and link together my own web space. I love being able to tailor the information flow into something manageable. And yeah, I love feeling like a grown-up instead of a college freshman, since I hated that even when I was a college freshman.

Most of all, I love being comfortable in my own on-line skin.

evil

2010-03-09T19:54:00.005-05:00

There are some things that it is reasonable to think that you don't have to worry about as a laptop computer owner. One of those things is that you shouldn't have to fix the partitions on your hard drive just because you pressed the wrong power button when you turned on your machine without wearing your glasses.

That's exactly what happened to me today. This blog is about what happened.

Background

I was up the all of last night battling "flu-like symptoms" (to put it politely), and woke up this morning realising I'd only had two hours of sleep and still felt like crap. In the interests of professionalism I decided to take a sick day. I stumbled from the bedroom to my living room, opened up my laptop, and hit what I thought was the power button. I didn't have my glasses on at the time — I figured I'd put them on and tie my hair back while the machine was booting up, then e-mail my boss to tell her that I wouldn't be in today.

When I returned to the living room, there was a screen saying that Dell Media Player tried to set itself up and couldn't write files to the hard drive. My two immediate thoughts were, Oops, that wasn't the power button and Well, duh, I don't want you to write files to my hard drive anyways, and what are you still doing on my computer? You should have gone away when I ditched Vista 45 minutes after accepting this computer from the shipping company. Remember, The Eyrea is a Linux shop, currently using Ubuntu.

I rebooted the computer by using the correct power button, and got a GRUB 17 error. GRUB, in case you don't know already, is a utility that manages operating system loads. It comes with most home & office Linux distributions, because Linux understands that it has to play well with others. But now GRUB was broken.

Recovering

I was in no physical state to take care of a broken computer, but in between lying down and trips to the washroom I checked out the Ubuntu Forums. This is what I learned: when I hit that button with the house on it instead of the power button, some ill-conceived firmware tried to install a bunch of stuff on my hard drive, even though I hadn't explicitly said "go for it" — I'd just hit the wrong damn button. It had created a new partition on my hard drive and made it the root. That's a lot of power for something with a benign name like "Dell Media Centre." Sounds like it would just play CDs and DVDs, but instead I'm stuck with a non-functioning computer. What gives?

Luckily I had a) my Nokia internet tablet and b) an old live session CD of Ubuntu lying around. the Live CD showed me that a 2.6 GB partition had been created on my hard drive, with an embryonic version of... Windows 95??? on it. This was scary, but the Ubuntu forums had answers.

Turns out I wasn't the first Dell owner to suffer through this, and I was able to find the exact solution I needed. Here's the link if you're interested. I had to download and install testdisk and follow that path to a resolution, but it was easy enough to do. If I'd been healthy, I could have been done in 15 minutes. As always, I'm grateful to the Ubuntu community. On my own, I probably would have taken a deep breath and reformatted the hard drive to fix things. As it is, I lost no data or config settings at all once testdisk restored things.

Prevention

As easy as the solution was, I'd really rather not have this problem again. I'm backing up my files right now — I do that regularly anyhow — but once I know all my data is safe I'm going to have a look around the machine's BIOS and see if there's not a way to disable that button. No-one should have to re-do their partitions with a special utility just because they had bad aim one morning.

And now for the real rant part: I know this sets me up for the cheap shot of "you had a legal copy of Windows, why didn't you just stick with it?". I'd put it another way: if I'm running an operating system, successfully, on a computer for over three years, why should I have to worry that I'll hit the wrong button when I power it up? Linux supports every last bit of hardware on this machine — even though Ubuntu wasn't available as an OEM OS when I bought it, I made a point of making sure its specs matched those of the Ubuntu machines Dell sells in the USA. I shouldn't have to worry that some convenience add-on that was created as a marketing thing for non-techie home users would break my hard drive's ability to boot.

That isn't just a Linux/Windows/hardware thing. The same thing could happen if Microsoft ever comes out with a version of Windows that isn't 100% forwards-compatible for older software (like they already did when they came out with the NTFS format), or if I had greatly tightened the security on the machine — as is standard for machines used in the corporate world. Or maybe I just don't want Dell Media Centre installed. One button push should in no way have the power to wreak such havoc. Remember folks, this is a laptop: if I realise my mistake and try to power down before the worst happens, I probably won't have time. It takes a few seconds to get the battery pack out of this thing. That's not fair to users of any OS.

Postscript: I just looked, and the Ubuntu community spoke accurately — there is no way to turn off the Media Centre button. Looks like I better keep my rescue discs somewhere I can find them easily.

Dell, you've always been a good computer company to me, and very likely I'll buy my next machine from you anyhow, but I'd like to meet the person who came up with this design and hear a very good explanation as to why things were set up this way.

Postscript #2: I just found a link that confirming that if you get rid of the Media Center partition simply because you don't want it, and put Windows over the entire hard drive, hitting the button will wipe your root Windows partition too. So it's not a "Linux thing" at all, but a "hitting this button can cause scary stuff" thing.

all is not vanity

2010-03-04T22:22:00.003-05:00

I remember the first time I used hand lotion. I was five years old. My mother told me to hold out my hands, and she squirted a little bit of this cold pink stuff onto each of my palms. Then she mimed how to rub it into my skin, and I copied her. I remember that it smelled like roses. It was wonderful. My mother told me that I couldn't have a bottle for myself, because it was expensive and I was too little, but once ever day or two she would give me more.

What were we doing? Was it an initiation into the beauty cult? A lesson in vanity? Not at all. The truth was right there on my hands for all to see. My cuticles were ragged and bloody, more raw wounds and scabs than regular skin. I didn't want to learn to tie my shoelaces, or write for long periods of time, because it hurt. Scales of loose skin hung off the ends of my fingers as if they were trying to molt.

In high school, one of my guy friends teased me about always having a tube of lotion in my purse, and came up with some suitably adolescent and filthy excuse as to why I'd always have "lube" on me. I told him I'd quit using it for a week to show him what would happen. After three days alone, the knuckles on my right hand were ready. I went up to him before study hall started, said "Watch," and clenched my fist in front of his face.

The middle knuckle cracked into a hundred tiny cuts, as if it had been attacked with a wire brush. The cuts started to bleed.

My classmate never teased me about carrying around hand lotion again, but there are plenty of people out there who are confused about the dividing lines between comfort and vanity, health and indulgence.

A massage can be a treat to someone who is fairly relaxed anyhow, but to someone who is suffering a lot of stress, it can be the difference between being able to turn their neck enough to drive — or not. As I tried to point out above, it's a similar thing with skin moisturisers. One person's "can't be bothered" is another person's bout of eczema.

Recently I decided to try to do something about my nails again. Like my cuticles, they're dry, and they tend to split and break off in chunks once they reach a certain length. I got this stuff that looks, feels, and smells like clear nail polish, but claims to do a better-than-average job of protecting and strengthening the nails. I've only been wearing it for a day, but it's already outlasted every other product I've tried.

Understand, I don't even want long nails — they'd get in the way of all the typing and needlework I do. I just want nails that don't end at irregular angles with tender spots where the quick has been exposed.

The one aesthetic thing the nail protector chemical does is make my nails look unnaturally shiny. I don't especially like it, but it's not a big deal either. On the other hand, it reminds me of a man who was a friend of my high school drama teacher. She said he had a disease that made his nails yellow and blistering. She was mentioning him because we were talking about gendered costume, and she said he often wished that it was socially acceptable for men to wear nail polish. It wouldn't have made his condition any worse, and it would have looked better than how his nails were by themselves. His nails weren't painful per se, but because they looked so bad people often thought he was in more discomfort than he actually was. He just wanted his fingernails to be a non-issue.

For all these examples and more, though, it's amazing how many people will tell people with these medical realities that they are being "vain" if they do something about their pain and discomfort. I've even had people try to have it both ways with my dry skin situation: if I mention how strict I am about applying cream, I'm "vain," but if they notice that I have scratches on my legs that make it look like I've been attacked by a cat (except I wasn't — I just didn't wake up enough to moisturise the itchy spot and scratched myself in my sleep) then I'm "self-destructive."

It's not the means that define the vain and conceited from the simply afflicted. It's the ends. Those who are truly suffering from vanity will make themselves known by more than what's on their fingernails.

30 years' wait over

2010-02-22T22:47:00.003-05:00

When I was eight years old, the King Tutankhamun exhibit came to Toronto. It was a big deal. It was the only Canadian stop on the exhibition's North American tour.

I didn't get to go. My best friends in Grade 3 did, but I didn't. So I got to hear about the exhibit, got a book about it as a Christmas gift from an aunt who took herself and said I would have been too little (did I mention my best friends at school went?), got a tin full of death-mask shaped Laura Secord chocolates. I still have the tin and the book. But I was furious that I didn't get to go. Too little? I was a year younger and yet almost half a head taller than most of the other kids in my class.

Funny how things continue to bug you when you think it's little-kid stuff you got over ages ago. As soon as the AGO announced that King Tut was coming back to Canada, I immediately started to try to press-gang various friends and family members into going. I was not going to miss it this time!

The problem with friends and family members is that they don't always have the same bucket list you do. In the end, no-one really wanted to go.

And then I mentioned to my friend Page that I was taking myself to the Tut exhibit. I had even bought an AGO membership so I could guarantee I would get a ticket. The ever-cool Page and her husband MG said they wanted to see it with me. So I had company (and excellent company at that) after all.

The time slot I had picked was Saturday morning, at the opening of the gallery for the day. I baked scones the night before, walked up to Page's & MG's house, and contributed the scones to breakfast (they already had fruit, yogourt, and tea, glorious tea). After eating we hit the subway and were just about awake by the time we got to the gallery.

AGO staff seem to be pretty level-headed and courteous most of the time, but the morning we saw Tut they were great. I had my membership card out to show that the member's ticket I had printed off did indeed belong to me, and they let me go into a special member's-only line. When I said I was worried about losing my friends (in the much longer non-member's line), they let Page & MG join me. Membership does have its privileges. We were the first ones in.

The first half of the exhibit tried to place the Tut artifacts in the larger context of what was going on with ancient Egyptian society, religion, and art. For the first time ever (and I've seen a number of exhibits about ancient Egypt at this point in my life) I could appreciate how the artwork changed, and how realistically (or not) faces were depicted. As usual with ancient Egyptian work, I was in awe of the artisanship that had gone into crafting each piece. Some of the work was unfinished, and it was wonderful to see the rough sketches that were the start of such a formal style of artwork.

The actual King Tut part of the exhibit was laid out like the real-life tomb in the Valley of the Kings. It included archival newsreels of the tomb's discovery — the film that ended with a man wearing a boater discovering he was on-camera and giving the lens a big bow and tip of his hat really touched me for some reason —plus of course lots of artifacts and information about them. This is the first exhibit I've seen which included flat-screen monitors above the display cases showing 3D animation of the artifact in context and additional explanatory text, which I appreciated.

When we were finally done with seeing, reading, and examining everything, we went to the pub across the road from the gallery and had an early lunch. I said that the decor of the pub wasn't really all that different from the pieces we had just seen — it was just mass-produced instead of being crafted by hand. Page has a degree in expressive art therapy, and she said that people stay the same: we keep liking symmetry, we keep being attracted to shiny things. I think that's what attracts me to ancient Egyptian art: it doesn't take much to make it look like it belongs with right now.

A 30-year wait for artifacts 3,000 years old: it doesn't matter. The relevance and the impact stay the same.

fire festival

2010-02-16T19:06:00.004-05:00

Last Saturday I went to the ever-cool Cathy's & Darren's annual chili cook-off. All told there were ten different kinds of chili scattered about the kitchen. Two were on the stove, but the other eight were in crock pots.

There are lots of ways to organise a party like this, but here's how Cathy & Darren do it:

Each set of guests brings a regular-size batch of chili. That is, you don't worry about feeding all 15-20 people who attend. The Cumulative Law of Pot-Lucks will help take care of that.
Each pot of chili gets assigned a number. Next year, there will also be ingredients lists beside each pot (see below for why).
Each guest gets a small bowl and a spoon to eat with. The idea is to take a smallish sample of each pot. Reality: Personally, I had about five mini-servings and was stuffed. Still, you can tell a lot about whether or not you will like a chili just by sniffing, so a taste test for everything isn't strictly necessary.
Each guest gets a ballot, where they get to vote on the hottest chili, the chili with the most interesting ingredients, and their favourite. Ballots are anonymous and get tabulated when the sampling/eating has died down.
Cathy & Darren made sure there were lots of biscuits, rolls, bread, tortilla chips, sour cream, and dip for palate cleansing/cooling down.

During the chili sampling, people chatted about recent curling games and about how much snow there was where they lived. I sipped a tepid Tim Horton's tea that I'd bought along the way and never got a chance to drink in the car (not enough red lights). At one point someone made a curling joke just as I sipped from my Timmy's cup and saw someone else having a spoonful of chili, and it hit me: Wow, this is so... um... Canadian. In point of fact, a Texan got the popular vote, but somehow that seemed par for the course.

Once we had finally convinced ourselves to stop eating (a non-trivial task, under the circumstances), people wandered to the rec room to play Winter Olympics on the Wii. Outside, it was snowing. What, you thought we'd go out and get all gushy about how pretty the white stuff was? It was freaking cold out there. Winter walks are for tourists. Now is the time to move about indoors.

Things I learned:

It's been over twenty years since it was my job to cook for my mother and brothers, and therefore it's high time I stop spicing my chili to suit their (ultra-bland) chili preferences. Cayenne here we come.
It is possible to keep eating after the inside of your mouth goes numb, so long as you are happy.
I suck at both real and virtual archery.
I need to expand my collection of industrial music. Badly.