Planet Zone12

Diablo III: "You click things; they die."

2012-05-18T16:12:05+00:00

My brother provided the best review I've seen of Diablo III when I asked him how he liked the beta: "You click things; they die." That sums up the Diablo experience in a lot of ways.

Other people may tell you that "Diablo III: Lords of Disconnection" sums things up too, but to be honest, that hasn't been my experience. Since launch day, I've rarely had to wait more than a few minutes, and I haven't played alone at all, so it's clear many of my friends are getting in too, including some who I haven't played games with in years since we stopped playing the same games. Even on launch day, sometimes the disconnections just gave us more chance to voice chat on another server.

So I've been spending a lot of my spare time over the past few days clicking things with friends, and it's been fun. The Diablo experience, for me, has always been about playing with other people. Back when Diablo II came out, my siblings and I learned networking and bought equipment just so we could hook up our machines and click things together! My first laptop, mostly a linux box, kept its windows partition just for playing Diablo. That game was probably also one of the experiences that really fermented my opinion that the players make games a lot more interesting: We still reminisce about sitting in my parents' basement, running around with broken armour, trying to punch Diablo in the nose. That wasn't part of the intended narrative of the game at the time, but that and the Diablo-killing polka became part of our personal narratives of the game.

Playing Diablo with my siblings in the early morning of launch day was all everything I wanted out of the new game right there, especially since we don't even live in the same country anymore. We had a laugh when my sister noticed that "punch Diablo" is an achievement in the new game.

I've actually spent so much time clicking things that sometimes I go to bed with a sore hand to match my sore ankle. (This week I ditched the cane; It's been good, but tiring and my ankle now has a dull ache from use.) Obviously, repetitive strain is a bad thing, but it does make a nice testament to having fun that I don't even notice 'till it's time for bed! My only real complaint is that I can't play with more than 3 other people at a time. Good games + good friends always equals good times.

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Sketchbook – Parliament Hill

2012-05-16T13:41:45+00:00

I showed up a bit early to pick up Natasha after work, so while I waited in the car I pulled out my long-neglected sketchbook and doodled out the awesome view from the back of the confederation building. This is Parliament Hill’s Peace Tower, looking from just behind and below the West Block. (Can you guess what time I drew this?)

For a 15 minute sketch (with a bit of cleanup afterwards) it’s not bad. The perspective is wonky all over it and my straight lines are messed up … BUT I HAVE NO REGRETS!

Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not A Gadget”

2012-05-15T20:40:52+00:00

VR Researcher (and a major nerd hero in my teen years) Jaron Lanier was here at the last Ottawa Writer’s Festival promoting his book “You Are Not a Gadget”. I missed his lecture, but caught bits and pieces of similar talks he presented over Youtube, which seemed shockingly anti-tech given his body of research to date. (He hilariously rips the head off an Aibo accidentally in a video, then castigates people for feeling sorry for it) With some trepidation, I eventually picked up his book and read it myself.

In summary – Jaron spends the book pointing out how technology sometimes exhibits unanticipated negative pressure on society. A solid example he uses is the Facebook relationship status – with only five options to choose from, it forces people to pigeonhole themselves into categories arbitrarily concocted by a developer somewhere, rather than allowing people to express their relationship (from the full range of human relationships) in the terms they prefer. There’s a subtle backchannel message going on that says “Here are the categories that society has deemed normal and acceptable, and if you can’t pick one you don’t belong.” The same goes for gender (which seems to be a contentious issue lately), sexuality, political stripes, etc, etc. Humans are very rarely easily categorized into neat boxes.

He’s definitely on to something, and the book is chock-a-block full of powerful and interesting observations about technology’s impact on creativity, freedom, economics, that really opened my eyes to the subtle effects of interfaces that even I, as a UI designer, take for granted. However! While I see where he’s coming from on a number of issues, the conclusions he draws are rarely compelling. I had a really hard time reading this book, because whatever starts off as a neat humanist observation ends up degenerating into a 10-paragraph disorganized rant around the point, sometimes further devolving into a wordy tirade about the singularity. At times I felt I was swimming around in an ocean of argument without any really solid conclusions.

Maybe he’s not the greatest writer in the world – I think a lot of the problems I had with the book could have been fixed by a good editor forcing him to consolidate his arguments. (And to stop name-dropping mercilessly!) He’s a very bright man – I think he raises a lot of really interesting issues in his book, but it’s a bit of effort to get at some of them.

Customer Service and internalized racism

2012-05-14T21:59:39+00:00

I had a not so great experience with a customer service rep on one of those live-chat things today, so I sent in a complaint after suffering through statements like "when u log in with yr used id and password what does it comes?"

I got a response back, which was nice, but it included a variant on "she's a great rep but English isn't her first language"

And while they don't really try to claim it's an excuse, it got me thinking... is our collective distaste for outsourced customer service and non-native speakers part of some internalized racism?

It's got a some of the hallmarks, but I don't really think it's the core issue. The core issue is communication and failure thereof. If I'd gotten that sentence above from a native speaker (and believe me, I've seen worse chatting with folk in games) I'd still have made my complaint that she didn't seem very professional with her tendency to abbreviate words that were already three or four letters long. It still would have been a problem that despite me telling her explicitly 3 times that I was not a student, she was still telling me to click on a "student" tab that doesn't appear in my interface and thus couldn't help me with that part of the question.

So then the question is, why tell me that she's a non-native speaker? Are you just trying to make me feel guilty about complaining about her? She still did a poor job today; it doesn't really matter to me if she's normally better at it or if it's harder for her than it would be for me. I just wanted to report that so that she could be helped with her listening and writing skills, as well as her knowledge about the differing interfaces to the system.

I'm used to making allowances for poor language skills (native and non-native speakers alike) within the university system, but when communication is the job she's being paid to do, I think it's fair for me to complain when her language skills are not at the level I expect.

In conclusion, it's always good to examine internal racism, but making a complaint about poor customer service seems fair regardless.

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Planes Out of Time

2012-05-14T15:11:07+00:00

Sunday afternoon I heard a loud droning noise from above and looked up over downtown Ottawa just in time to catch a fleet of biplanes and WW2 Canadian warplanes flying in formation. I wasn’t aware of any military celebrations, but Greg suggested it could be the Vintage Wings of Canada out on a practice flight before they do a flyover for Canada Day in two weeks.

(a shot of the Vintage Wings of Canada by Peter Handley)

What a cool, unexpected sight! And how much fun must they be having tooling around over downtown doing formations? Beautiful planes!

Update: Mystery Solved – it was definitely Vintage Wings, and they were doing an “airborne parade” for the Tulip Festival. So much going on now that the festival season is in full swing!

Giraffe!

2012-05-12T23:50:33+00:00

I saw this giraffe pattern on Ravelry and knew I had to try it for the next person with a baby on the way... and a few weeks later one of my colleagues announced that his wife was pregnant with their first kid!

Crochet Giraffe
by Terriko.

I'm absurdly early -- the kid's not due for another 5 months or so -- but this worked up really quickly. Now I need to decide if I should give it to him right away and then have an excuse to make something else if the lab decides to do a shower, or if I should wait so I don't look a little obsessed.

... Oh wait, everyone in the lab watches me crochet/knit constantly during meetings. I guess he gets the giraffe on Monday. ;)

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White Grubs (Junebug Larvae)

2012-05-10T23:38:21+00:00

While I’m on the subject of grumpy news… we’re finding the Junebug grubs especially frustrating this year – our neighbourhood seems to have a scourge of them devouring our lawns in wide patches.

Natasha and I are wary about using insecticide – but we tried to dig up some of the grubs along the munching wavefront with a spade. It seems futile – there’s just too many of them, and not enough birds to come help us out with the ones we’ve missed. I’m willing to entertain suggestions. We’re losing about 6 inches of lawn every day, and while I’m at work the grubs are chewing away with impunity. (They’ve helpfully left the weeds behind.)

I looked up some entomological texts to read about Junebugs (aka Maybugs, May Beetles) but altruistic biologists seem only interested in identifying them (by the shape of their penis, strangely), and not destroying them angrily in large numbers. I think our troubles are short-lived – I’ve seen the mature beetles buzzing around our windows in the evening, so I suspect the grubs are all very close to coming out of the ground and “buzzing off”. (After, probably, exfoliating all the trees and shrubs in a hundred mile radius.)

The grass we planted in their wake is growing fast – we’ll probably have a lawn again by the end of summer. (So they can eat it again next spring?)

Update: Lots of resources!

The summary of all of them is that there’s not much you can do beyond growing a more resistant lawn with longer roots. There’s a nematode treatment you can use to kill them, but it sounds rarely effective.

Angry Day

2012-05-10T18:53:45+00:00

I’m in a bad mood already and everything is pushing my buttons today! I went on Amazon to order a used book. Check out the pricing details.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? $60.10 to ship a $6 book to Canada?
GIVE ME A BREAK!

I’ll bet the affiliate store is shifting all the costs to the item’s shipping to game the product rankings – this was one of the cheapest copies on the list with the most outrageous shipping price. Are they sending it in a first-class plane seat? Did they train a homing pigeon to bring it to me? Does it come in a rare collector’s edition gold box full of chocolate packing peanuts?

Forget it, you swindlers! Try to rip me off? YOU GET NOTHING! YOU LOSE!

Superlative Moon!

2012-05-07T17:48:18+00:00

I have a bit of a pet peeve with the way astronomical events are ‘advertised’ to the general public. I had a bad experience back in 2002, bringing a gang out to the outskirts of Winnipeg at 3am on a frosty mid-November morning to catch the peak of the Leonid meteor shower. It was great – except earlier that day the local paper ran a copy of this picture portraying the 1833 meteor shower, setting high expectations. I counted close to two hundred shooting stars in the first hour, but most of the gang packed up and left in a huff when the skies didn’t explode into fireworks.

The lunar clockwork moves along with some pretty regular precision, and that’s why I’m especially annoyed by all this hype about the “Supermoon”. The Moon orbits Earth every 27 days, and it’s in perigee & at full phase (Super!) about 5 times a year, which makes it a pretty common event. It’s the same colour and shape as usual. The supermoon is not really a big deal. Astronomers don’t even observe the event – they call it “perigee-syzygy” and it’s marked in their calendars as a particularly annoying night to try to observe stars.

With a title like “Supermoon” though, you expect some rare fireworks display in the skies – the Moon bleeds rainbows down into the ocean while a ring of volcanoes go off on it’s surface. I think the media pushing the Supermoon story are setting laypeople up for disappointment. When is it going to get Super!? It’s just the Moon – but fractionally bigger/brighter than yesterday!

The Moon’s still cool in it’s own right though. Go out and look at it just for the sake of seeing it!

On the subject of my sprained ankle

2012-05-07T17:31:58+00:00

Just in case anyone was curious, it's now been 4 weeks, and this is pretty much where my recovery is at:

(Found somewhere on the the internet)

Jokes aside, the point is that I can do most things, but stairs are still not my friend, at least not without the aid of a cane. Nor is rough ground. And I work best as a human hillclimber algorithm: maximal fitness achieved when going up or down a slope, but sideways doesn't work so well.

I wish I could say I was thrilled with the progress, but I could do most of this (except the up stairs) two weeks after the sprain, so it actually feels like I've slowed down on recovery. Still, things are progressing, and I think I can ramp up my ankle exercises to push myself a bit more!

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Gingerbread Construction

2012-05-05T14:18:24+00:00

Following a sign that promised fresh butter tarts, we ended up visiting The Gingerbread Man while we were in Manotick last week. It’s a cute store along a strip of quaint teahouses and things next to Watson’s Mill, where the owner sells gingerbread cookies and pastries. Inside the gingerbread showroom, though, is a full-on gallery of gingerbread architecture.

A bunch of years ago I heard a competition on CBC Morning featuring architects hilariously trying to reproduce their structures out of gingerbread and it put the idea in my head that you could get pretty elaborate with your cookie houses. I’ve since had the good fortune of meeting a very neat family (you know who you are) who do a traditional gingerbread building party every year – and although I’ve only been a few times, my inner architecture nerd is always coming up with unreasonable construction ideas.

I think The Gingerbread Man just inspired me to new levels of madness.

Vera’s Burger Shack

2012-05-01T16:06:42+00:00

We did a bunch of cross-city driving this weekend, but the upside was that we finally had an opportunity to stop into Vera’s Burger Shack in Bells Corners! Ottawa managed to snag the only location outside of British Columbia, it’s a rare import that’s been getting good reviews on foodie sites. Vera’s is hidden inside “The Butchery” next to the Winners and Metro on Richmond Road, so don’t go expecting fancy ambiance unless you dig counters full of flayed meats. (Vampire honeymoon spot?) There’s three small tables and a bench, which was enough to seat the pretty steady traffic they were getting while we were there.

The burgers are pretty great! Their fresh-ground paddies are beefy, not too seasoned, thick and juicy without being so huge you can’t finish one. It’s served up on a good quality bun, too, which is a big bonus. I don’t know if I’d drive across the city for one, but if you’re in the neighborhood and hungry you’re going to find a better burger here than any of the fast food joints, and they’re considerably more affordable than The Works. I heard that the Vera Sauce is crazy delicious, but I played it straight up on my first visit with my usual toppings. (Ketchup, Mustard, Relish, Tomato, Lettuce, Cheese)

Since Vera’s is inside a butcher’s shop, skip the fries and grab one of the bucher’s prepared stuffed baked potatoes – they’re only like a dollar and they’re delicious. Wendy’s has nothing on this place.

Because the burgers are grilled to order, you’ll have a few minutes wait. They have a paper form you fill out with your name and burger preferences and they’ll call you out when your food’s ready. It’s hilarious to mess with the form – they played along and called me out as Captain Awesome. Fun staff!

Dr. Who Scarf effect

2012-04-30T22:54:00+00:00

Ken sent me a text message this weekend that said something like, "Thanks again for the scarf. I've found it meets a niche in my life not unlike the towel in the hitchhiker's guide."

I think this may be the greatest endorsement ever. :)

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Capital Cleanup 2012

2012-04-30T18:06:59+00:00

Me and a gang of keeners from the office took a walk around Hampton Park with garbage bags and rubber gloves to do some spring tidying. I expected litter and found plenty, but I thought it was weird how much large-scale waste we found laying around. It doesn’t help that there’s a road construction site right nearby – but any thicket that made a suitable windbreak was heaped with jars and bottles and mats of plastic bags.

There’s definitely enough trash laying around in spring to gross you out. We found not one, but TWO mattresses blown off the Queensway. Dirty diapers. Lots and lots of Tim Hortons cups. And then you find a beautiful field of wild trilliums (Ahem: Trout lilies! ), and it reminds you why it’s worth making an effort.

Crochet Pony Pattern inspired by My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic -- Now available for free!

2012-04-29T04:57:26+00:00

As many of you know, I've been working on a pattern for making pones based on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

I finally sat down and stuck the pattern and the pictures together, so now you can all make ponies! And best of all, the pattern is free! (This is mostly 'cause I'm that kind of person, but it is complex for me to sell anything due to the conditions of my work visa here in the US. Which is to say please don't ask me if I can sell you a finished pony; I can't.)

The pattern as a pretty printable PDF
The pattern in HTML
The pattern on Ravelry
The pattern on DeviantArt (No good reason for this except that there's lots of bronies there and I might as well share where the community is!)

And to remind you, here's what you'd be making:

Amigurumi Fluttershy (Crochet My Little Pony in progress)
by Terriko.

Derpy Hooves my little pony crochet - nearly finished!
by Terriko.

More photos here.

I'm really nervous about this because it's the most complex pattern I've ever posted online and because I know other people really want it. I hope people enjoy it!

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Book Review: Truer than True Romance

2012-04-28T23:45:31+00:00

I'm not sure I've *ever* laughed so hard while reading a comic book. These stories would probably be funny satire of the romance genre on their own, but paired with vintage romance comic art they're downright hilarious. Highly recommended to anyone who's ever made snarky comments during a romantic comedy!

For the MBL crowd: this is the romance version of that Ghost Stories anime Jamie had, just as hilarious in juxtaposition but a little less reliant on the random gags.

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Book reviews: Craft books

2012-04-28T23:25:56+00:00

I don't normally review craft books, but since I've started getting them from the library and need some way to keep track of the ones I've seen and might want to get out again for projects, I figured book reviews was a good solution.

Knit Your Own Royal Wedding
by Fiona Goble

Instructions for very cute and slightly kitschy William & Kate royal wedding dolls. Lots of pictures and details in the clothing, so it's fun even if you haven't got time to knit and just want to look at the little doll dioramas. I think my favourite are the little corgis.

Last-Minute Knitted Gifts
by Joelle Hoverson, Anna Williams

As a newbie knitter, I definitely appreciate patterns for things that are small and have estimated times attached. Unfortunately, the books are starting to all blur together since most contain variations on the same hats, socks, scarves, small bags, etc. The thing that makes this particular volume stand out is actually the photography and the careful use of colour (there's even a whole section about it!)

Positively Crochet!: 50 Fashionable Projects and Inspirational Tips
by Mary Jane Hall

I loved many of the patterns, many of which are nicely modern (surprisingly hard to find in a crochet book!) though I found the "positive" sidebars totally insipid. If, like me, you find that's not your thing, at least it's easy enough to ignore. I liked the mix of small and large projects, and the couple of patterns I've tried from this book have been clear and well-written. Looking forwards to trying a few more in the future!

Simply Crochet: 22 Stylish Designs for Everyday
by Robyn Chachula

A beautifully photographed collection of nicely modern crochet designs. I haven't tried any of the patterns yet, but it looks like the instructions are very clear, and many projects are photographed from a variety of angles so that you can see the detail of the pattern and the places where joining might be tricky by instruction alone. I'm pretty sure I'm going to want to buy my own copy rather than constantly renewing the library one before I start any patterns, which is the reason I haven't done any yet.

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Book Reviews: Information Diets and Unusual Architecture

2012-04-28T19:48:49+00:00

The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption
by Clay A. Johnson

I expected the diet metaphor to get strained, but it actually worked better than I expected: consume less-processed information just like you consume less-processed food, and don't consume mindlessly and continuously. The author's approach to dealing with information "obesity" isn't the standard reactionary "Get off the internet! Go play outside!" but a more nuanced look at how to consume better information rather than just less. I particularly liked the looks into why headlines are terrible (overdone and outright false headlines get clicks, clicks = money), and how using your friends to filter information can result in a dangerously narrow point of view. I was less thrilled about how much of the examples were very American politics oriented, but obviously the author has to write from what he knows. And politics in America does provide some interesting examples of over-information warfare, as it were.

What's most striking about this book to me aren't the ideas, though (as a research scientist, going to the source and avoiding "junk" information is already part of my daily routine), but the fact that it's a life-hacking book that doesn't suffer from extreme bloat where the author repeats himself endlessly for 300+ pages. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, given the topic, that the author would be able to write succinctly, but after my experience trying to read volumes like The 4-Hour Workweek or Getting Things Done, this brevity and ability to get the point across in a nice slim volume were much appreciated.

XS: Small Structures, Green Architecture
by Phyllis Richardson

This is pretty much a tiny coffee table book filled with beautiful pictures of unusual architecture fitting the small structures, green architecture theme. Fun to flip through and see some unusual projects from around the world. If you're the sort of person who clicks on "look at this cool house!" links on the internet or just loves photography of strange objects d'art, this is a little treasure trove of neat things.

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Talent Show

2012-04-27T22:20:54+00:00

I successfully defended my title as “World Champion of Font Recognition” by figuring out that this lovely font:

though similar to Calibri in a lot of ways, is a typeface called Colaborate by Ralph Olivier de Carrois. I really like the way he’s put descenders on traditionally straight figures, and he’s put little geometric wrinkles in everything to make it feel a bit more square. The kerning pairs are a bit chunky, but if you’re willing to tighten things up manually, it’s a nice display font. You can’t argue with the price! I think I’m going to use this one for a project!

I have to identify fonts all the time, because clients never pay attention to what their previous designers told them. I’ll pull away the veil and reveal all my secrets!

My usual strategy for identifying fonts is four steps:

1) Off the top of my head. (About 80% of stuff in the world is printed in the same set of 30 or fewer fonts, and I’ve examined them all under a microscope.)

2) Try identifont – a site that lets you specify details about the font’s unique traits (angular serifs, etc) and generates a list of known matches. Pretty handy, and sometimes a good resource for learning about nice new derivatives of fonts you like.

3) Try whatthefont – a site that lets you upload an image, and the OCR tries to figure it out (almost never successfully matches for me)

4) Scour the cheap/free fonts sites to see what’s popular. You can almost always find trendy fonts on the front pages. My favourite resources are google web fonts, dafont, fontsquirrel, and abduzeedo’s surprisingly popular Friday Fresh Free Font. Take a look at the first 20 fonts on any of those pages, and I guarantee you’ll see faces that made their way into tons of recent mobile apps, skateboarding magazines, and video games.

Book Review: Zombie Island: A Shakespeare Undead Novel (Shakespeare Undead 2)

2012-04-23T18:21:07+00:00

Remember me mentioning this appalling-sounding novel about Vampire Shakespeare? well curiousity got the better of me, and I did click "Request it!" and they actually chose to send me a review copy. Here's the review I provided:

This book is like a B-movie inspired by the anachronistic touches of Moulin Rouge, only the sex scenes are outright un-sexy. It's a cheesy mish-mash of modern pop culture and Shakespearean English. It's both totally appallingly bad and yet sometimes brilliant, often funny and probably the strangest adaptation of The Tempest ever.

If you wanted anything remotely serious or delicate, this is not the book for you. (And what were you doing buying a book about Vampire Shakespeare fighting zombies with his Dark Lady anyhow?) I think it has the worst romance I've read in years (and I have a project with friends where we read terrible romance novels out loud) but if you read it all with the pacing and imagine the wooden acting of a low-budget film, it's worth a laugh. Recommended only if you like bad movies, silliness, and dubious mashups of pop culture and literature, since this rests on the knife edge of "bad" and "so bad it's good." I enjoyed it, but your mileage may vary.

I'll be keeping my copy for The Project, but I'm quite happy to lend it out to anyone else who foolishly thinks that Vampire Shakespeare and his Dark Lady battling zombies during The Tempest sounds like a good idea. I'm not sure if this is warning or endorsement, but it's only a few velociraptors or beagles shy of sounding like it could have been written by beable. Now you know.

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A Beautiful Day in the Galactic Neighbourhood

2012-04-22T04:52:40+00:00

How cool was the Stellar Cartography room in Star Trek: Generations?

I’ve had a similar project sketched out in one of my idea books for a few months, and only got around to the graphical portion this weekend. This is a map of nearby stars that I plotted out using data from the ESA Hipparcos satellite. Hipparcos did a nifty job back in 1989 (!!) doing parallax trigonometry to figure out the distance to our stellar neighbours. Really amazing data!

I just grabbed out a small slice of the data to plot here while I work out some of the details for how I’m presenting the information. I’d originally intended it to incorporate a bunch of shiny graphic embellishments, but I’m afraid there’s so much data that halos and things might have to take a back seat to readability. There’s a ton more stars left to plot, ~100,000 more in the Hipparcos set and a million or so in the Tycho 2 catalog. I’m also working on labels for high-magnitude stars, calling out stars known to have planets, and putting proper colours on each star based on their spectrum, but just tying things together in the database and calculating the XYZ data took some effort and I’m calling it a night.

I’m planning to generate a really enormous high res image someday to get a good look at our neighbours in our local arm of the milky way, but I might end up having to section it up – more than a million stars on a typical computer screen look like noise.

Rating my scientific impact

2012-04-18T17:58:48+00:00

A while ago, I saw a mention in a UNM newsletter about Google Scholar profiles and decided to give it a try. Like many people in my field, I already keep a list of publications on my website, but this had graphs! Citation counts! I wasn't too sure about this whole social-media-for-researchers aspects, but I like graphs.

I had totally forgotten about it 'till a few days ago when I got a reminder email, and upon looking at my profile I was pleased to see that my very first paper now has 60 citations. Sixty!

For context, the average citation rate in computer science was 3.75 from the period 2000-2010 (Source: Times Higher Education), and even the average citation rate for science in general was 10.81. So 60 seems awesome, even if average may be a weird number for something that I know is a power law distribution. Still, go me! I've got a few above-average papers, mostly the spam work (I was the first to apply artificial immunology to the spam problem, so subsequent people working in that space generally cite me) but I notice that SOMA's almost made it up to 30 citations, and that's the first of my papers in the web space.

It's still a pretty modest accomplishment in the grand scheme of things. Check out Paul's list or Steph's list if you want to feel small, but those are both totally amazing, exceptional people who run whole labs. For my weight class as a newly minted PhD, I'm happy enough, but I need to do more...

So now to take that pride and turn it into a totally awesome, citation-worthy paper summing up my remaining thesis work!

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Why kettles boil slowly in the US (and Canada)

2012-04-16T23:57:10+00:00

This post about kettles is strangely fascinating:

To raise the temperature of one litre of water from 15°C to boiling at 100°C requires a little bit over 355 kilojoules of energy. An “average” kettle in the UK runs at about 2800 W and in the US at about 1500 W; if we assume that both kettles are 100% efficient† then a UK kettle supplying 2800 joules per second will take 127 seconds to boil and a US kettle supplying 1500 J/s will take 237 seconds, more than a minute and a half longer. This is such a problem that many households in the US still use an old-fashioned stove-top kettle.

I actually did have people ask why I have a stove-top kettle back when I was in Ottawa. I usually said it was just habit (true) and I just didn't have space for another appliance (true) and then later when I wound up with a free electric kettle, I'd tell them that my electric kettle was terrifying (also true), but now I realize I could have said it was all about voltage and seemed *way* more into the science of my tea.

I'm doubting that all of us who use stove-top kettles actually thought about it that way, though. It's just what I was used to. I only switched a few months ago when an electric kettle was all I had while my stuff was in transit. And even if I'd cared, I might not have noticed a difference since water boils around 85°C here instead of 100°C (woo! Altitude helps protect me from burnt tongue!)

... all that said, I almost always boil water in the microwave now. 55s to hot chocolate!

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Quick Movie Reviews

2012-04-16T18:16:14+00:00

The Hunger Games (Awesome Yay!) : The film adaptation was pretty close to the book – I agreed very much with the editorial decisions to drop a lot of the introspective plot stuff in favour of the action, although it would have been nice to spend more time in District 12 and getting a feel for the world. Overall it was pretty fun! Jennifer Lawrence is great as Katniss and she hands out a proper amount of whuppins. (Most of the violence is handled off-camera, which I found sortof disappointing given how central the shocking gore was to the theme of the book)

The production design was hit and miss. I found the tech and costumes and sets lacked a cohesive vision and often felt cheap and mixed up. The camera was absurdly shaky, to the point where even I (who normally doesn’t mind) was getting uncomfortable. I get that the handheld shaky camera is supposed to lend a dynamic, action, ‘cinema verité’ look to the film, but it was awful. Directors: please stop asking for this!

Wrath of the Titans (Fun Spectacle!): Movies like this are why I still go to movie theatres. Sam Worthington runs around fighting stuff in this very linear video-gamey movie about the last dying breaths of the Greek Gods. There’s not a lot to it, truth be told, beyond the swordfighting and monsters (and an unlikely romance), but it makes a pretty great spectacle film! The effects are terrific, and I thought they made really effective use of the 3D cameras. The scene where Cronus erupts out of Tartarus as a giant lava-covered demon was particularly gorgeous – kudos to the effects team that made this movie look incredible.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Sooooo boring) : This one’s been on my renter list for ages, so I finally got around to watching it and was bored to tears. I fast-fowarded a chunk of the film looking for anything to shake up the pace, but no – it drones on for the full 119 minutes. This is my second Wes Anderson disappointment (I hated the Darjeeling Express) and I’m wondering if he and I are just on different levels or something. I enjoy cerebral films – and there’s a lot to like about his work. I love his shot compositions, and I think he has a real talent for evoking emotional, honest performances. It’s too bad nothing ever happens in his movies. Magnificently dull. I want my hour and a half back.

The job hunt: What do I want to do next?

2012-04-14T00:14:15+00:00

People have started to ask me what my plans are after I finish this postdoc, or rather the frequency with with I get asked has reached an arbitrary threshold, so I guess it's time to write about it. The short answer is that I'm not planning to start my job hunt 'till October at the earliest, but here's some more detailed information about my plans in case you, like many others, are curious:

1. I'm currently expecting to be at UNM 'till around Nov 2013, which would be the originally expected 2 years. The date's a bit flexible: the grant I'm on goes a little past that I think, and I can leave earlier if I have another offer that needs to start right away.

2. I'm focused on getting some publications out before I start the job hunt at all. I'm hoping to have results from the router work as early as next week, and I've got a plan for publishing my remaining thesis work, so at minimum I want papers for both of those to be out for review before I start looking.

3. My job hunting mode will probably kick off around the time of the Grace Hopper Celebration in October. That's not the greatest timing, but it's a good enjoy goal date for the papers to be out and the job fair and related resources available at GHC12 is an excellent opportunity that I don't want to miss. I'm happy to consider things that come up before then, but October/November is when I'll polish up my resume and start being active in my search.

4. I'd like to go back to Canada, but I do have a US visiting scholar visa that can be extended and transferred to another qualifying job. (It can be used for up to a total of 5 years, of which 2 are going to be used here at UNM.) There's some fascinating legalese around my current visa that makes Canada the easiest choice for my next job, but I'm not adverse to other countries.

5. I'm not committed to either academia or industry at this point, and I wasn't planning to make a more concrete decision on that 'till I have actual offers. You can expect me to be looking at a combination of academia and industry labs. I have one lab already on my shortlist after the last round of interviews. I turned down their offer of an on-site interview because I had decided on UNM, but if they're still taking on new hires when I'm done here I'd like to continue the process with them.

So I'm not looking yet, but do feel free to pass job leads my way if something comes up that you think would be up my alley.

Speaking of jobs... I *do* have a couple of friends looking for jobs more urgently than I am: One is a very talented programmer who's currently located in Halifax but willing to relocate, and one is an efficient mostly-windows systems administrator who's looking for a job in the Ottawa area. They're both around intermediate level, but given the job market they're willing to work more junior positions if that's what it takes. I'm happy to pass leads along or obtain their latest resumes if I can help make a connection!

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Doctor Who Scarf: Finale

2012-04-13T23:24:45+00:00

Ken modeling his Doctor Who scarf
by Terriko.

The scarf is finished and gifted! As I said in the first post, I wanted to make the scarf for Ken because he's the one who's really carried me through the new seasons of Doctor Who with his enthusiasm, even when my faith in the writers often flagged.

I hope Ken enjoys it. I'm sad I didn't manage a better photo of him -- he's usually quite photogenic when I don't mess up the focus on my camera! It's soft and warm, so at least it'll do its job as a scarf. He agreed with my choice to prioritize softness over perfect colour matching, of course. Turns out Ken hasn't watched much of the old Doctor Who, though, so now he feels like maybe he should.

Quite a few other people have recognized and liked it, at least, including my mother. Tom Baker is the doctor that I remember watching sometimes as a kid 'cause he was the one my parents liked, so no surprise that she thought this was fun (if a little crazy). And of course John wants one too, but I think he should learn to knit one himself! He's good at this sort of thing and I like the idea of him messing with people's heads when they ask, "Oh, did Terri make that for you?" and he can say, "No, I did it myself!"

The best story I heard was from my friend Andrew, whose sister-in-law asked if she could knit him anything for Christmas and he said "a doctor who scarf" and she said ok without knowing what that was. When she found out, she had to retract the offer and told him he was getting gloves or something else manageable!

I say the scarf is finished because I've given it away, but if you look at the picture you can tell I only got this far in the scarf pattern:

Just over 70%, or I think around 8 feet long? I forgot to measure it. Obviously long enough for usual scarfy purposes. It's also slightly less wide than the pattern calls for because I thought it was hilarious if it was 42 stitches wide. If I were doing one for myself I think I might make it even less wide, although I *did* appreciate being able to use it as a blanket while I was knitting on the plane. ;)

I keep saying it took me around 3 weeks, but looking through my journal it turns out I started on Mar 22, so it's actually been closer to 2 weeks. 2 weeks + 2 days in fact. This was helped by the fact that I can knit at work during seminars, colloquia and other meetings (an extra 5-8 hours of knitting at work per week), but I also spent a lot more time than usual listening to audiobooks, the radio, podcasts, and even watching TV. It was fun -- often I get so bored/fidgety when i try to watch TV that I'll wind up doing things like getting up and cleaning just to avoid staying still (which is why I usually prefer audio-only media and am so hooked on the radio) but the knitting kept me busy enough that I could actually enjoy TV on my own while John was off at collab summit. I'm pretty impressed with myself regardless.

I'm most definitely not taking orders for any more dr who scarves anytime soon, but I might consider doing it again sometime just so I can say that I made a complete one. Right now, I'm trying to lay off the knitting for a bit I work on wrangling mentors and student applications for Google Summer of Code, but I'm finding that I've gotten so used to having my hands busy all the time that I'm craving a new project. Perhaps a smaller one this time, though!

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Deathtrap Dryer

2012-04-11T21:46:54+00:00

I said on twitter:

It appears someone may have stolen our broken dryer from the backyard. The gas-powered one that was going to burn down the house. Not sad.

But someone asked on fb what's up with that, so here's the longer story:

It's a slightly longer story than fits in a tweet: The broken dryer was in the backyard since they replaced it yesterday, and we'd been told someone was coming to pick it up, so when someone rang the doorbell John showed them the dryer in the backyard and they carted it off.

But then the friend/cousin of the landlord's who'd been helping with this showed up and was all "someone's coming to pick up the dryer" whereupon John said "he's already been and gone" and Cousin was all "uhh... I hope not" and it turns out that apparently they'd arranged on fb for this guy to show up and give the cousin $20 for the dryer. But he didn't give us any money, and we didn't know to ask for it (also, I'm not sure I'd ask anyone for money for Deathtrap Dryer anyhow, but that's another story about how I think gas-powered appliances with broken shutoffs shouldn't be in use).

So then Cousin was all upset and phoning the dude because we don't even know if it's the *right* guy who came to get the dryer or whether they had this whole conversation on someone's public facebook wall and some stranger was all "huh, free dryer in the backyard!" or what. John helpfully pointed out that it could, technically, be reported as theft.

Meanwhile, I am thrilled that Deathtrap Dryer is gone, and if it burns down a thief's house, so be it. ;)

In short: We didn't have to pay someone to haul away the dangerous old dryer! No matter what the landlords call it, I figure that's a win.

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Review: Ready Player One

2012-04-10T16:17:31+00:00

I read the first few chapters of Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One” the day before I had to return it to the library, which was a big mistake because I got completely hooked and then realized my next turn in the booklending queue wasn’t going to come around for more than a month. It was agony! Luckily my friend Jen stepped in and lent me her copy before I wore the mouse button down clicking refresh on the library website.

Multi-billionaire creator of the VR Oasis, James Halliday, has passed away and left his enormous fortune to anyone who can solve the mysterious 80’s-themed puzzles he’s left behind. An subculture of obsessive clue-hunters forms, and teenaged Wade Watts, who’s been steeped in 80’s ephemera through his childhood, is single-mindedly devoted to solving Halliday’s labyrinthian mystery.

I want to give this one a glowing recommendation, but I think the audience who will take as much from it as I did are a really thin slice of the population. If you dig 80’s nostalgia, retro video games, and science fiction, this is a brilliant narrative that draws from all kinds of amazing reference material that tingles all the right nerve centers. But it’s a love it or hate it thing – I could see this book becoming an unbearable slog to someone who didn’t get the references, particularly if they were born too late to have lived any of it. I think the title is pretty clever – I suspect you can know from the outset if it’s for you.

The action scenes, mostly set in the VR world, are epic and hilarious. Despite the nerdy tone of the book, there’s quite a lot of good character development and a few twists to keep things interesting, including an ongoing virtual romance that Wade worries may not be what it appears.

A few beefs with the book – the characters have an implausible recollection of the most obscure 80’s details – having actually lived that decade firsthand I could scarcely remember most of the references and a bunch of it went way over my head. It hardly matters though – the clues are so vague and specific to situations in the book, that they’re impossible to solve until the characters work out their significance. I would have liked to play along!

Secondly, during a plot twist in the latter half of the book, Wade gets into some serious trouble, but suddenly starts magically exhibiting superhuman hacking skills that, while convenient for driving the story forward, seemed incredibly unlikely given everything we knew about him to that point. That bit of the story is entertaining, but I kept wondering what other magical skills he was going to manifest next time he was in trouble.

Overall a terrific read – it’s an early lead for my book of the year!

Sprained ankle

2012-04-09T19:32:56+00:00

I was running with my grandmother's dog yesterday and managed to sprain my ankle. I actually fell off the road in what would have been a hilarious accident if it hadn't hurt so much -- I was running along the edge of the road and managed to step half on half off the pavement, rolling my ankle badly and landing in the grass which was probably 5cm/2in below the pavement level. Aside from landing badly on the ankle, I'm fine, not so much as a scratch on my hands or a bruise on the rest of me. Buster the dog was spectacularly unsympathetic and continued on without me. So much for doggy heroism! My grandmother lent me her cane and my mother lent her her arm and we all got home safely.

I was *hoping* that it'd be a matter of hours to recover, but after icing it it was clear that I was getting a noticeable goose-egg of swelling around the ankle bone, so I'm declaring it a sprain and treating it accordingly. I didn't feel like trying to find a clinic that was open and dealing with my potentially dubious trans-national health insurance issues just to be told rest, ice, compression and elevation.

It's noticeably better today, but going through airports tomorrow will be distinctly non-fun. I should be able to struggle through security, but I'll be prepared to ask for help as I need it.

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One of Those Mornings

2012-04-03T16:24:57+00:00

I was running a bit behind this morning (after getting up a bit early – still not sure how that happens) and couldn’t find anything. So frustrating. I probably carry too much stuff around with me, but I did a bit of a spring cleaning when I switched to my bike bags this week, and somehow everything’s gotten away from me. This morning it seemed like I’d find something, and then a few seconds later elves would run off with it.

The worst thing is that our house is pretty clean – if I left it laying around I’d see it. No, everything’s tucked away in drawers, bags and closets, meaning I get to turn the house upside down looking for stuff. I never did end up finding my bag of markers. So frustrating.

[Edit: I found my markers, they're were in the car after recently taking them for a drive.]

Squirrels Moving In

2012-04-03T03:00:25+00:00

There’s a new squirrel moving in to the tree in the front yard – we had a grey squirrel for a while, but this black squirrel seems to have asserted itself and captured the territory. We’ll see how that plays out. I suspect squirrel territory has pretty flexible boundaries. There have been squirrels chasing each other around the neighborhood treetops with loud yipping noises all week.

As seen on fandom secrets...

2012-03-30T22:01:39+00:00

Spotted this on Fandom secrets while taking a break:

The text reads: "My family moved to Canada and are in the process of getting a citizenship. Secret: I cried the day we left not because I'm going to miss the US but because I knew how much more expensive shipping is to Canada which means buying fandmo stuff would be even more expensive for me. Bye bye free shipping :( I also hate the coldness but that doesn't really matter."

I find this strangely amusing. I think the next time someone asks me what I like about the US, I'm just going to say "free shipping" ;)

(I have spent so much money on Amazon, it's not even funny... Mind, that's only half about the free shipping and half about the fact that shopping here isn't great. But in case it's not clear, my favourite thing about the US is still my research group!)

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Salad Toss

2012-03-29T18:45:14+00:00

Yesterday at the office I went all-out and put together a salad bar as part of a charity lunch fundraiser for the Ottawa Community Gardening Network. 3 kinds of lettuce, 22 fixings, 5 dressings, 4 pasta salads and over 25 hungry customers later I had raised over a hundred bucks.

Weirdly, a bunch of people made a big deal about my chopping job, claiming that I’m a meticulously even chopping machine. Some of the credit belongs to Natasha, who was tremendously helpful! It took us about four hours of washing and chopping, so I thought I was getting sloppy towards the end. Nobody noticed.

The economics of salad bars (and food in general) are really interesting when you start trying to make a profit off of things. Making a salad for one person is expensive, because you have to overbuy everything. But then a second, third, fourth person can eat for free. When you get up around ten you start needing multiple heads of lettuce, multiple dressings (che-ching!) and pounds of fixings. There are all kinds of “sweet spots” where you can get just the right amount of everything to nearly please everyone, but one ingredient runs short or is overabundant. I had enough celery (one stalk) to make salad for an army, but ran out of cheese. You can make a half liter of ranch dressing for $6, or you can make five litres of ranch for $8, but there’s no in-between.

If I was going to do it again, I’d abandon the salad bar approach. It was memorable and worth trying once, but if I do it again in the future I’ll probably prepare a few “themed” salads and force people to choose, so I can control all the ingredient quantities and don’t end up with margin-killing leftovers of all the unpopular veggies. (Nobody likes poor red onion)

Incidentally – potato & pasta salads are a pretty good bang for your buck. With $5 of mayo you can feed like forty people.

Web Insecurity: Apparently consumers do care about privacy

2012-03-28T18:16:23+00:00

Cross-posted from Web Insecurity

I often get into discussions about whether people really do care about privacy, given that they give away personal information regularly when they share with friends via Facebook or other services. A recent report suggests that people do care, at least when it comes to banking and shopping:

The Edelman study released in February 2012 shows that consumer concerns about data privacy and security are actively diminishing their trust in organizations. For instance, 92% listed data security and privacy as important considerations for financial institutions, but only 69% actually trusted financial institutions to adequately protect their personal information. An even sharper disconnect can be seen with online retailers, with 84% naming security of personal information as a priority but only 33% trusting online retailers to protect it.

The blog of the Office of the Canadian Privacy Commissioner (from which I drew this quote) sums it up in the title: Privacy: Not just good business, but good for business.

But I have to wonder, do these numbers indicate that privacy-preserving businesses will be winning customers, or will we simply see claims of privacy that aren't backed up by carefully constructed systems? Do consumers really care about privacy or do they just say they care? How will consumers evaluate potentially spurious privacy claims? In Canada we at least have the privacy commissioner who brings issues to light, and worldwide we have the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but while both organizations are astute and do their best, privacy claims are something that will need to be evaluated by organizations like Consumer Reports that are used by consumers when making decisions about where they spend and keep their money. Right now, by and large, we only hear about the relative privacy of an organization when a breach occurs.

I attended a talk on Internet voting yesterday and the speaker quoted an official in DC who claimed that, "voters like internet voting, so it must be secure," which is really quite a terrifying quote if you think about it. The speaker joked, "does this mean that because my kid likes cake, it must be healthy?" It really clearly demonstrates first that users of the system have very little understanding of its safety (despite strides in the area, internet voting as currently implemented is rarely secure) but also that officials who roll out such systems have little understanding of the flaws of the system and are much too willing to overlook them for convenience sake. If this is the case with voting, it's hard to believe that business would avoid such cognitive mistakes.

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Apparently consumers do care about privacy

2012-03-28T18:12:00+00:00

I often get into discussions about whether people really do care about privacy, given that they give away personal information regularly when they share with friends via Facebook or other services. A recent report suggests that people do care, at least when it comes to banking and shopping:

The Edelman study released in February 2012 shows that consumer concerns about data privacy and security are actively diminishing their trust in organizations. For instance, 92% listed data security and privacy as important considerations for financial institutions, but only 69% actually trusted financial institutions to adequately protect their personal information. An even sharper disconnect can be seen with online retailers, with 84% naming security of personal information as a priority but only 33% trusting online retailers to protect it.

Trained Algae

2012-03-25T03:51:09+00:00

I’m still tinkering with that Reaction-Diffusion algorithm, this time training it to grow around regions I’ve marked off (kindof like pouring ink onto wax resist) so it forms shapes. It’s quite cool to watch the ‘algae’ sprout and grow… I promise I’ll get an animation up soon when I find the settings that work best.

I like that I can use something “living” and unpredictable and apply controls to it to generate art. Really neat-o.

Also – mostly unrelated to algae, I just wanted to thank a couple of people (who may not even know what they did) for their confidence-boosting remarks lately. They came at a particularly good time. When I get overwhelmed it starts getting difficult to stay focused – consequently I start feeling really stupid and in over my head. A recent project at work has been particularly challenging and it’s nice to know people don’t think I’m as big an idiot as I do.

Meltwater

2012-03-22T17:12:26+00:00

The parking lot where I work had a pretty big snow hill that’s taken a beating over the past few days of summery weather. When I was a kid, I’d spend all day out in my rubber boots stomping around and channeling the puddles all over our driveway. As an adult, I’m still captivated by the scale model glaciers slowly receding, depositing silt (and garbage) in enormous flood plains and deltas.

Douglas Coupland’s “Player One”

2012-03-22T14:55:07+00:00

I was searching for the “Ready Player One” (by Ernest Cline) ebook on the library system, and the search results brought up a titular near-miss by Douglas Coupland. Strangely, this novel was presented as a Massey Lecture, or rather, a series of lectures, one chapter at a time.

Here’s the bad news: if you’ve read anything else by Coupland, this book treads over the same well-worn paths. A bunch of quirky individuals, an apocalyptic situation, visions, questioned faith, social disorders, all territory he’s already covered in ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’, ‘jPod’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Generation X’. It felt like he’d lifted characters, chapters, and plot points from all of his previous books, ran them through a computer program that shuffles their traits, and then dumped out a novel synthesized from all his usual tropes. Even the autistic hugging machine (from jPod) makes in in fully intact.

Don’t get me wrong – I like his writing and think he’s quite clever, but this book did nothing for me and brought nothing new to the table. Hated it.

I’m going to turn the dagger just a bit more while I’m here skewering his masterpiece. After Michael Ignatieff, Margaret Atwood and Stephen Lewis’ amazing Massey Lectures about profoundly important, interesting subjects, reading a story about some people stuck in an airport was a disappointment. I’ve heard Douglas Coupland in person and he’s super articulate and interesting – if they’d just sat him down and asked him about his passion for public spaces, or his interest in west coast architecture and culture, he could have filled an hour with really interesting ramblings. Heck – I’ve paid to see it.

Small Penguin Ball

2012-03-22T03:28:54+00:00

For PAX East last year, some friends and I made a bunch of Angry Birds, which resulted in a great many games with strangers and a lot of fun. I've taken a smaller set of birds out to a few other conferences since, and when I was hanging out with some open source folk, I developed a penguin ball to toss around with the Angry Birds. At my last conference, Pycon, I crocheted up a couple of little ones to give away to my fellow GNU Mailman developers:

Penguin ball I made on the plane
by Terriko.

Small Penguin Ball

Crochet Instructions:

I use Red Heart Super Saver yarn with a K hook, but anything would do.

Start with white yarn
0: Make a magic ring (6)
1: incr in each stitch (12)
2: {incr, sc} x 6 (18)
3-4: sc around (18)
Switch to black yarn
5-7: sc around (18)
8: {decr, sc} x 6 (12)
Stuff (I use pillow stuffing 'cause pillows were on sale and fiberfill was not)
9: decr around (6) and finish off. Tuck ends in.

Wings (make 2):
Make a magic ring using 7 dc (start with one sc to get you up there), but pull it into a half-circle instead of a full circle

Eyes (make 2):
In White: 0: magic ring (5)
In Black: tie a big knot, thread it through the center of the magic ring. (I chain 3 and then tie that in a knot to make it big enough)

Beak:
0: magic ring (7) fold in half and sew together a little bit when you sew it on the penguin.

Basically, take all those things and sew them on the ball. I hide the join for the black and white body under one of the wings.

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16g USB necklace

2012-03-22T01:20:37+00:00

I decided I wanted to upgrade my flash drive and there was no reason it shouldn't be pretty, so I bought this 16G USB Flash Drive off Amazon.

It's so very shiny that when I opened it up, I decided that rather than just stuffing it into my purse, I should use it as a pendant. A few minutes, some jewelry wire, pliers, and a necklace wire I had on hand, and here it is:

16g necklace
by Terriko.

I'm inordinately pleased with myself. :)

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Knitted Kindle Fire Case

2012-03-22T00:59:43+00:00

I'm still loving my Kindle Fire, but what I am not loving is that cases are still in the $40 range, and many were too bulky or otherwise not appealing to me. So I made my own little slipcover:

My new soft knitted Kindle Fire case
by Terriko.

It's so simple that it barely needs a pattern, but in case someone wants one, I wrote it out:

Knitted Kindle Fire Case

Size 9 needles, I used Loops & Threads Impeccable worsted in colour "Seaside Ombre" and a 7" zipper (longer might be better)

Cast on 32 stitches.
This will look noticeably shorter than the 7" height of the Kindle Fire, but I preferred my case to have a snug fit. If you prefer it looser, you can add some stitches here.

Row 1: Knit across
Row 2: Purl across
Repeat 1 and 2 until you've got something slightly more than double the width of your Kindle Fire.
This was around 70 rows for me.
Cast off.

Fold in half and sew up the sides. Put in the zipper on "top" and you're done!

You can see in the photo below that my 7" zipper was actually a bit too small, so I had to leave a bit of extra space at the end so it was easy to get the Kindle in and out of the pouch. If you have a longer zipper, you won't need to do this.

Knitted Kindle Fire Case: zipper side
by Terriko.

And that's it! Here's one last photo of it on and closed:

Knitted Kindle Fire Case: side view
by Terriko.

I learned to knit about a week before making this, so it's totally a suitable project for a beginner!

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I have a second monitor at work

2012-03-21T22:54:52+00:00

My boss got a huge beautiful new monitor, so I got her old apple display to use as a second monitor today. However, it wasn't entirely intuitive to set up dual monitors on my Ubuntu machine at work: The Apple monitor would turn on for a second and then turn off, which apparently is what they do if they have no signal, but I didn't know that at first. All the instructions said to go to the ubuntu display settings and tell it to autodetect, but that didn't work because it didn't notice the other monitor. So then I went to xorg.conf, which apparently by default is disturbingly short, but I wasn't too sure what to put in. Thankfully, this post came to the rescue. In short, here's what I did:

Run nvidia-settings.
Under "X Server Display Configuration" I could see that my second monitor was there but unused, so I clicked on it to enable it and modified the settings to suit.
I had already backed up my xorg.conf so I clicked on "Save to X Configuration file." It tossed an error about not being able to parse xorg.confg, but clicking through gave me a "Save X Configuration dialog" where I could click "Show preview" and copy those settings to my xorg.conf
Restarted X11 (actually, I rebooted 'cause I was lazy and wanted to knit a row of my latest project) and poof, it works!

So now that it works, I've also customized it to match the rest of my office with the help of some window cling stickers I had on hand:

I am either terrible at being an adult or awesome at it.

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Inaction Figures

2012-03-19T18:01:19+00:00

On a lark I stopped by the comic book store on the weekend, and right at the front shelf, facing the door as you walk in, are the exciting new Hunger Games figures! The lineup: a 7 inch tall Katniss Everdeen armed with a bow and looking fearsome, a slightly shrunken-headed Peeta Mellarck with a pointy spear, and… Gale Hawthorne? The other part of the series’ love triangle? He doesn’t even go to the arena – he’s like a handsome distracting side-story.

Waaaait… these aren’t action figures. Whenever they interact they just sit around brooding all the time about relationships and being reluctant and indecisive. Who are they supposed to be aiming their weapons at? There’s like 22 people armed to the teeth and out to murder Katniss and Peeta and not one of them was worthy of action figure status?

I predict the next boring character to get the action-figure treatment is Katniss’ goat. Adventure! Excitement! Daily Milkings! Or maybe Greasy Sae, the soup lady, armed with a ladle and a dead rabbit! Or the creepy Avox girl: Push the button on her foot to hear her not say anything at all.

[Edit: Spoilers in the comments]

The Complete National Geographic

2012-03-17T17:19:38+00:00

In Grade 5 my classroom had a set of shelves at the back loaded with National Geographic Magazines, which, if you got your homework done early, we were allowed to browse through back at our desks. Mayan pyramids, man-eating sharks, mountain expeditions in far-flung locales. This kicked off a lifelong love of the magazine. I’ve been an on-and-off subscriber and for a long time would gladly pick up old issues at garage sales and library fundraisers.

The problem was I was moving around a lot in my 20s, and National Geographic have been making magazines for a long time – the size of my collection was becoming enormous and it was becoming increasingly impractical to heft the crates full of (heavy) yellow magazines everywhere I was going. Downsizing to a smaller apartment, I had to accept that there just wasn’t room for 10 feet of magazines on a 4 foot shelf. I let them go in the hopes that someday they’d be available online or something…

Enter the Complete National Geographic – a collection that takes up only the space on your hard drive, and gives you access to the entire history of the magazine, without gaps, dating back to the beginning. I picked mine up at Costco for a steal – $24. (It’s offered online for $50)

I think it’s a fantastic collection that have been digitized well, but I have some minor quibbles about the custom Adobe Air browser. More than a few times pages have mysteriously failed to load, without error messages or any indication if it’s doing something. While bookmarking is somewhat handy, some of the UI feels clunky and unintuitive, and there’s often no “cancel” button in case you change your mind.

I suspect that they did all of the scanning directly from the printed magazine, which is a shame since there’s probably a drawer (or a building) someplace packed with all the crisp, bright original photos. The ones in the collection are still beautiful, but show some age in the colour reproduction and screening technique.

The future came through for me on this one! It’s pretty rad that we can fit 1400+ magazines on a millimetre-thin disc! Now, where’s my flying car?

Home from Pycon!

2012-03-17T06:01:15+00:00

The Pycon sprints were amazing, and the GNU Mailman team got a lot of work done on Mailman 3, the web UI, and the archives. I've never done a 4-day hackfest format, and usually for the short hackfests I'm one of the volunteers helping people set up their environments so I barely do any coding myself. But this? This may have been GNU Mailman's largest gathering of Mailman core devs ever, plus other experienced hackers to boot. It was 4 days of glorious code, architecture discussions, bugs and features. It was energizing, productive, excellent and exhausting.

I'm eager to talk about the UI work I got done and what is coming next, but I think it should wait 'till after I've slept!

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Green!

2012-03-16T14:51:58+00:00

We’ve had an unusually warm and rainy March, leading to a few early surprises like these spring flowers pushing up out of the flower beds.

To be honest, I’m still not able to distinguish tulips from other bulb flowers like crocuses (crocii?) and irises at this early stage, although I vaguely remember tulips growing in this general region of our flower garden last year. So I’m going to go ahead and wager that these are, in fact, tulips.

(Pretty sure irises come up ‘wrapped’ in their outer leaves, and crocii are shorter and come up with thin narrow shoots next to the main plant)
(Update: An anonymous tipster suggests they may be daffodils! Time will tell!)

First visitor!

2012-03-10T02:55:40+00:00

I had my very first visitor from Canada this week, which was absolutely lovely. It's great to have an excuse to do touristy things, and we actually haven't done many ourselves yet so it was new to us too!

I haven't really processed my photos, but it turns out my new phone takes panoramas relatively easily, so here's a few of the phone pictures for those who haven't seen them via other social media.

Sunday: M arrives! Late due to flight rescheduling!

Monday: Visit to Old Town. J gets home from Iowa/Boston.

Tuesday: M comes to my seminar and argues about biology with the computer scientists. As she is a Real Biochemist, her perspective is rather different from the rest of the group's, and I think it helps a lot. In the afternoon, we go to the zoo.

Wednesday: The Very Large Array. It was stupidly windy in a gale-force + sandstorm sort of way, which made the walking tour more exciting and resulted in us having teased 80's hair by the time we were done. You can't really tell from the photos, though.

The photo's much bigger, btw, and I think it looks nicest on black.

The dish on the far left is the one they used for the most photogenic parts of Contact. Now you know! Here it is, closer (I was still playing with the panorama function, which only works if you hold move the phone towards the small edge, so I had to take a slice of dish here):

And here's my traveling companions (and me playing with the HDR function):

Thursday: Hiking at the Petroglyph National Monument:

The petroglyphs themselves are pretty cool, although it's sometimes hard to tell which ones are ancient and which are modern. There's a lot of more recent graffiti at the site, though the gentleman at the visitor's center said there were around 600 petroglyphs on the trail, so quite a lot were original I guess!

After that, we went to a local quilt shop which has quite a lot of southwest and native designs, making it a perfect way for M to get souvenirs *and* quilting materials at once. The lovely lady there noticed my crocheted hat and scarf and wisely gave us a tip about the yarn shop around the corner:

You can just tell from the tagline that this is going to be a store of fun people! I've just recently (as in, Wednesday) started to learn to knit and wanted to get myself some pretty yarn as motivation to practice enough to make a scarf I'll actually wear, and this was a great store to stop in to. Not so good for my usual needs of cheap brightly-coloured hard-wearing stuff for amigurumi angry birds and the like, but the point of learning to knit is to do some very different stuff than I do with crochet. And to try a pile of ravelry patterns I couldn't do before. ;)

From there, we went out to Santa Fe for a bit more tourism and dinner, which was awfully picturesque due to the lightly falling snow, but not so convenient for photography given that it was dark by the time we got there (too much time shopping!)

Friday: A short morning jaunt to Old Town for a last shot at souvenirs, then we saw M off at the airport. I spent the afternoon dealing with GSoC, taxes, and some work.

All in all, a rather lovely visit! I hope some other people will come to stay while I'm living down here!

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Decadence

2012-03-08T15:57:43+00:00

For breakfast this morning I had a still-warm Maple Bacon Doughnut in the parking lot of Suzi Q’s on Wellington. I’ve been hearing about this place all week from friends who are making doughnut pilgrimages out to the west end to try them, and it was totally worth the trip. They’ve got a bunch of wacky flavours: FrootLoops and Blue Vanilla, Toasted Coconut, Caramelized Potato Chips…

Delicious! And only like ten million calories!

Seedy Saturday 2012

2012-03-04T04:20:08+00:00

Natasha and I spent the morning attending Seedy Saturday in Britannia Park, a yearly gardening nerd event where people get together to swap seeds and stories in preparation for the upcoming gardening season. (It roughly corresponds to the start of indoor seeding time)

The Seedy Saturday event is much bigger here than in Manitoba! Although we have fewer seed providers in Ottawa, there were a number of well-attended lectures by local growers and a really big market space with lots of interesting wares and info booths.

I was most excited for the course on maximizing your small garden yields presented by Jim Thompson from Our Little Farm (notes online) – he was a really great presenter and I picked up a bunch of clever tips from his experience running a full-sized farm.

Kate Green from USC also delivered an excellent presentation, with practical beginner tips for selecting and collecting seeds at the end of the growing season. There’s a lot of very neat genetic trait selection stuff going on there that she presented in a very layperson-friendly way, I would have loved an opportunity to pick her brain for an extra few hours.

A few really cool organizations got my attention while I was there, among them:

Hidden Harvest Ottawa, a group with the brilliant idea to put together volunteer teams to harvest the fruit and nuts on local public trees to give to local food banks – super clever! They’re trying to generate enough interest to make this viable. Forward the link to your friends – it’d make an awesome fall activity.
JustFood which is a conglomeration of a bunch of neat causes, had a large presence showing off their cool programs: A Food Film Festival, the handy Buy Local Food Guide, informative courses provided by the Community Gardening Network (I’d like to take one on canning later in the year if anyone’s interested in joining me) and the super neat Plant a Row program to set aside a bit of your garden space for charitable growing.
The Ottawa Good Food Box program buys and distributes baskets full of fruit and vegetables wholesale (cheap!) to encourage people to eat healthy – very neat arrangement at the lowest price I’ve seen anywhere. Before I had the program entirely figured out I leaned in and whispered that their prices were kindof too low – to which they knowingly whispered that they’re a non-profit. Interesting!

The only bummer is that now, with an armload of cool heirloom seeds and a brain full of awesome new skills, I get home and my garden is covered in four feet of drifting snow. *sigh*

"[Being different] over a whole lifetime, adds up to an enormous amount of needless trouble."

2012-03-02T23:44:38+00:00

I'm re-reading Richard Hamming's talk on You and Your Research because I felt like I needed the kick in the pants to do great work this month after some very busy months of doing necessary but not necessarily great things.

In this reading, I was struck by this anecdote:

John Tukey almost always dressed very casually. He would go into an important office and it would take a long time before the other fellow realized that this is a first-class man and he had better listen. For a long time John has had to overcome this kind of hostility. It's wasted effort! I didn't say you should conform; I said ``The appearance of conforming gets you a long way.'' If you chose to assert your ego in any number of ways, ``I am going to do it my way,'' you pay a small steady price throughout the whole of your professional career. And this, over a whole lifetime, adds up to an enormous amount of needless trouble.

On a surface level, I've long believed this is true. I've been long primed in the art of social hacking, first by my father and more recently as a security researcher/hacker. Anyone can watch the subtle variations on how I dress on teaching days or days when I'm going to the bank and you'll note that I pay attention to fitting in to the environment and manipulating the way in which I'm perceived. But as a child of the Internet, more or less, my experimentation hasn't limited to physical presentation. Especially as a teenager, I spent a lot of time grossly mis-representing my age and gender as well and watching how that changed my interactions with folk.

But what gets me this time is the end of that quote: "[If you don't appear to conform,] you pay a small steady price throughout the whole of your professional career. And this, over a whole lifetime, adds up to an enormous amount of needless trouble." Sometimes it's important to change the system, but sometimes you just want to get stuff done.

I can dress the part, but I don't generally change my gender presentation in real life. Is my female-ness adding up to an enormous amount of needless trouble over my lifetime given that I work in a field where that's going to make me non-conforming? I suspect it is, although I'm fortunate enough that my gender presentation is often canceled out by my racial makeup (Asian girls are totally good at math, don'tcha know?) so I can console myself by saying maybe it's not as enormous as it might have been. But not every person who doesn't fit the norm for their field has that consolation prize. Are we all paying the price of being different?

It's easy to get a little saddened by this. All that time explaining that no, I really am a techie, has added up to a lot of time I'm not having amazing conversations and doing great work. But before you get too saddened about how your hard-to-hide features like race/age/gender are affecting your ability to Do Great Things, you should stop and listen to Duy Loan Le's excellent 2010 Grace Hopper Celebration Keynote. In it, she talks about what she does to fit in to environments where she felt that letting go of her ego made it possible for her to get more good work done. I think it's really worth a listen, especially if fitting in isn't just a choice of what suit to wear for you.

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Academic notes: "Detecting malware domains at the upper DNS hierarchy"

2012-02-28T23:21:50+00:00

This is the first in my series of short notes on the academic papers I'm reading. This is a paper we read for seminar last week, and I chose to review it here not only because the results are interesting but also because it's a highly readable paper in case any of you get curious and want to read along with me.

Detecting malware domains at the upper DNS hierarchy
Antonakakis, M. et al, 2011

This paper is all about detection of malware using DNS. It turns out that while "normal" domains are accessed by machines that have patterns of geographical and network locations, malware domains are accessed by a bunch of zombie machines that could pop up anywhere on any network so the dns requests are a lot more random. So if you look at DNS, you can figure out what domains are being used by malware, and you can do it on the fly as domains change without needing a manually created blacklist.

It's a pretty neat trick. Malware authors could potentially get around it by adding in more clever requests -- doing something more like facebook or google which route you to "close" servers to provide good quality of service -- but until they do, this could be a handy supplement to existing malware detection. Reminds me a lot of greylisting that way.


@INPROCEEDINGS{antonakakis2011dnsmalware,
  author = {Antonakakis, M. and Perdisci, R. and Lee, W. and Vasiloglou II, N. and Dagon, D.},
  title = {Detecting malware domains at the upper DNS hierarchy},
  booktitle = {Proc. of the 20th USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security},
  year = {2011},
  volume = {11},
  pages = {27--27}
}

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Paper reviews

2012-02-28T22:44:23+00:00

One of the big problems of academia is that though we produce some amazing things, they're often not available, accessible, or even noticeable for the general public. That is, articles may cost money to read (unless you have access to academic journal subscriptions), interesting results get buried in dense scientific language, and often few people are talking about the results outside of academia (or sometimes even inside academia).

Last year, I committed myself to writing more book reviews to share what I read with others, and it occurs to me that this year, maybe I should make more of an effort to do the same with the scientific papers I read as well. The usual caveats apply: I've got my own set of biases in research just like I have taste in books, and it's entirely possible that I'll interpret results in ways other than they were intended.

This is something I did occasionally with my web security blog (and hoped to do more), but I'm currently reading papers about complex adaptive systems, biology, security, and more. So for now, these public paper reviews are going here right alongside my book reviews, and they'll be drawn not only from my own research interests but from the overlapping ones of my colleagues. I have a lead on a paper about railway design using slime molds, for example. You've been warned!

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Microvision of Carnival

2012-02-28T17:35:09+00:00

I had a gang over to watch Rio on my birthday, which takes place in Rio de Janeiero during Carnival – a huge street-parade party that looks like a lot of fun. Here’s another chance to get a sense of that Carnival spirit in a cute film shot through the “tilt-shift” + time-lapse technique to make everything in Rio look miniature. I’ve experimented with this technique on occasion and the results are usually corny looking, but I think the bright colours and sparkly outfits of carnival lend themselves to the saturated miniature look. I found this really captivating and amusing! Watch in particular for the velociraptors, and the shark attack float at 4:30 – amazing.

I think I might have to put Carnival on my bucket list!

The City of Samba from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

Spam a la carte: "Thank you, this is the worst thing I’ve read"

2012-02-28T03:20:33+00:00

One of the spambots that hit gf this week apparently was broken and has given us All The Spam Comments at once:

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I seriously enjoy your posts. Thanks
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i can agree with the article
r u sure that is true?
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hey buddy, this is a very interesting article
Read it, liked it, thanks for it
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I am a long time ago I read your blog and has long been saying that you’re a great writer
Say “thanks” you to your parents that they gave you the world
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Subscribed to your blog, thanks
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I will not talk about your competence, the article simply disgusting
You just copied someone else’s story
All material copied from another source
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I want it to be a rap song, or at least poetry. But really, "Thank you, this is the worst thing I’ve read" is my new favourite spam phrase.

There is something interesting here, though. It used to be that spambots were more complimentary, but this one sometimes turns outright rude, abusive, and mean. I'd always assumed that the complimentary nature of spambots was to appeal to human moderators so that they'd be more likely to post the spammy link. But what about the psychology of the mean spambot?

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Press Pause Play

2012-02-26T17:26:44+00:00

I watched a very interesting documentary online a few weeks ago, and have since been recommending it to people while I digest some of the thoughts the film put forward about art and culture and the internet. This backlash against the internet seems to be a prevailing theme in the content I’m consuming lately, and I think it’s really interesting to take a break from all the hype and really think about whether things are going where we want them to.

Press Pause Play brings together a number of notable speakers who pontificate on the “democratization of culture” that we’re witnessing while all the pillars of traditional media (newspapers, television, radio) come crashing down thanks to Youtube and podcasts and ever-lowering barriers to entry. It’s worth checking out!

The documentary is put together in a slightly uneven way – we take detours from interesting subjects so the editors can interject some pointless slow-mo concert-crowd shots and bits of found-footage experimental nonsense for aesthetics sake. We see planes. We see city skylines. We see flying triangle particles and blob meshes. There should be a drinking game based around every time the camera does a slow push in on the back of some headphone-wearing kid’s head.

Draaaaank!

There are definitely big changes happening – for better and for worse. And I agree that you can’t trust crowdsourcing to choose your culture for you. (Now sitting at 35 million views, Niki Minaj’s youtube record-setting “Stupid Hoe” video is a vapid, seizure-inducing heap of popular dreck.) But I don’t think that tearing down some of the establishment is a bad thing – decades of consolidation in radio by companies like Clear Channel have severely restricted local programming, choking out young fresh artists and local musicians in favour of endless loops of Aerosmith’s greatest hits. Thank goodness the internet came along when it did – probably 90% of the stuff I listen to is from obscure bands I only found thanks to pitchfork, iTunes, hypeMachine and people’s mashup blogs.

A few choice quotes:

“… it’s a reality that many people don’t like, [...] most people don’t have talent. So for a serious young film-maker, these are very depressing times. When you leave everything to the crowd, when everything becomes democratized, where everything is determined by the number of clicks, you are by definition undermining the seriousness of the artistic endeavor.” – Andrew Keen

“If everyone’s a musician, and everybody is making mediocre music, eventually the world is just covered in mediocrity. And people start to become comfortable with mediocrity. And that to me is the danger.” – Moby

And of course, you can’t film a documentary without a bit of outrageous hyperbole:

“There’s no evidence that we’re on the verge of a great new cultural age, if there’s any evidence, [...] we may be on the verge of a new dark age in cultural terms. A new collapse of Constantinople. Where the creative world is destroyed. And where all we have is cacophany and self-opinion. Where we have a crisis of democratized culture.” – Andrew Keen

Quelab chocolate and candy hacking night

2012-02-26T07:18:52+00:00

Quelab had a chocolate-themed hack night tonight, which included a double boiler made from dog dishes, delicious chocolate pearls (I almost typed perl... such a geek), several variations on chocolate mousse, several failed attempts at a chocolate rocket (although the test fuel burned well, the fuse fizzled on the rocket itself). But my favourite part was sitting down with a bunch of fellow geeks and altering conversation hearts to be a little more geeky. We had waaaaaay too much goofing off and geeking out while coming up with things to put on the candy. The best set is probably these themed ones:

Don't blink: Dr. Who themed sweet hearts
by Terriko.

I came home craving Doctor Who and devoured a couple of episodes while putting together my crochet Fluttershy. More pictures of the hacklab and the new pony tomorrow, though; I am sleepy now.

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Quickie Reviews

2012-02-24T21:02:06+00:00

A bunch of things we’ve seen lately:

Woman in Black: Creepy! Harry Potter plays a grownup widower lawyer who has to go to a haunted house to sort through an old lady’s papers. The house is magnificently creepy and full of freaky victorian-era ephemera (a museum’s collection worth of wind-up monkeys, clowns and porcelain dolls). At first the director is patient enough to let the house and it’s creepy noises get under our skin, but then he resorts to the jumping-out-at-you-with-loud-noises cheap scares. Overall it was well put together, it’s got plenty of disturbing moments and creepy visuals, but I really felt the BOO! tactics were lazy and the film could have been much more menacing if handled in a subtler way. (I just discovered, incidentally, that this is a remake of a 1989 made-for-tv movie, which in turn was an adaptation of a stage play. Hollywood re-hash! *shakesfist*)

The Invention of Lying: Awful. I think the premise of this movie – that only one person in the world develops the capacity to lie, is super clever and amusing. Kindof the inverse of Liar Liar, where Jim Carrey can only tell the truth. But the execution is just terrible. I think Ricky Gervais (who wrote, directed, and starred) confused the notions of honesty and tact when they were putting this together. The opening act is a humiliating dinner where Jennifer Garner casually heaps insults on Ricky Gervais, followed up by his mother’s death, Jonah Hill’s suicide humor, and then his co-workers humiliate him, and he’s fired. HAHA! As far as comedies go, this one’s a stinker, and I regret not shutting it off halfway through.

Captain America: Fun! I had low expectations for Captain America, but actually really enjoyed the story about scrawny Steve Rogers juicing up on super-serum to fight the Red Skull and his uber-nazis. It takes a while before he comes out swinging, and when he finally gets going they gloss over his heroic exploits in a flashback montage. But when he finally gets to knocking heads onscreen towards the end of the film, the action scenes are pretty entertaining.

Replacing my Nexus One

2012-02-23T18:26:42+00:00

My smart phone has decided that it needs to spontaneously reboot itself 5-10 times a day, so I have decided I probably need a new smart phone. I've been very lucky to receive contract-free dev phones for free the last couple of times, but that seems unlikely to happen again.

I don't currently have a data plan, but it turns out my boyfriend has a spare t-mobile sim for which he's paying for a plan just 'cause he wants to keep the unlimited deal he's got on it. (There's a longish story about why this makes sense in his very specific context of phone plans; I'm not sure I'd do the same, but it's his money.) I'm welcome to use said sim until such a time as he needs it, (which is possibly never). It would be a pretty huge upgrade as I'm currently on a pay-as-you-go and just pay for data when I'm travelling. I don't care about changing my phone number as the one I give out is my google voice number anyhow.

So... I'm looking for an unlocked cell phone that will work with t-mobile in the US.

HOWEVER, it turns out that phones are getting bigger and bigger, but my pockets are not. I've had my N1 fall out of my pocket when I crouch down twice this week as is. Sadly, online shopping rarely tells me how huge these things are. Can anyone suggest reasonable smartphones that are not much bigger than the Nexus One? Or point me to a reviews site that includes the phone dimensions? I wouldn't mind having a physical keyboard again and I'd probably prefer something that can be flashed with cyanogenmod, but I'm hoping to not pay $500+.

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Winterman Run

2012-02-21T21:31:11+00:00

Despite some anxiety about running in the winter (I have like zero body fat and prefer winter activities where I can bundle up), I ended up participating with the gang in the Winterman relay marathon, running 2 out of 8 of the 5K legs. The weather ended up better than we could have hoped for, it must have been around -4C and we had bright warm sunshine bearing down on us all afternoon. I feel a bit like we cheated to get our shiny snowflake medals – I had expected a bitter, freezing torture-test.

Kudos to my whole team of runners, the “Unipegataurs”, but especially to Greg who set things in motion by organizing the event and taking the first 7.2km run. Go team!

I wasn’t expecting to feel sore afterwards, since I’ve been training for 10k+ runs, but I think the cold has a big impact on muscle performance. My ankles in particular were pretty tender later that afternoon, it took some effort to get up and down from the basement with our laundry. Time for some new shoes, maybe?

Towards a Nicer Internet

2012-02-18T05:18:03+00:00

I just finished reading Jaron Lanier’s book “You Are Not A Gadget” which among other things (I’ll review it in a later post) brought up the subject of internet trolls, and the powerful temptation to slag people when you’re hiding, anonymous, behind your computer keyboard.

I’ve never understood the mindset of Youtube commenters. Maybe people are evil as an anonymous collective, or maybe Jaron is right and it’s something about the way the system is set up (why is there a thumbs down button at all?) that encourages the worst kind of unhelpful, baseless criticism of people’s work. Particularly in the case of young, talented performers, this kind of denigration is the kind of thing that destroys confidence and derails artistic achievement. Every comment that wrongly tears down a ten-year-old pianist or that stomps all over a kid pouring her heart out over her guitar is one more reason for them to give up.

So here’s my humble request: It’s time we pay back some time and effort by encouraging the strangers who entertain us. Take a few minutes every day that you normally spend checking out funny cat videos, and instead write up some valid, sincere encouragement on a young person’s youtube account. I’ve already started, and it’s easy once you get going, and makes you feel like a boss. These kinds of comments get noticed and have a hugely positive effect. I don’t know how many people I can recruit onto my bandwagon, but I know I just need to get normal, positive people over the passive habit of watching – we need to start contributing.

This is our future generation of entertainers, artists, poets, writers, thespians – are you going to let an angry mob bully the next Jimi Hendrix into quitting?