Author: Kirk

It’s The Little Things That Count, Don Corleone

Sometimes it is the little things that count. Take for example the warnings to adults who are considering buying a FurReal Friends Butterscotch Pony at the Entertainment Earth website.

Requires 6 ‘D’ batteries, not included.

Now that’s good to know – you can purchase and plan to buy some batteries ahead of time. Nice touch!

Adults take note: Pony comes unassembled in box with head detatched. You may wish to not open the box around your children if they may be frightened by a box with a decapitated horse inside.

Wow, now that one is an excellent suggestion. Can you imagine the look on your little child’s face when they open the box and find a severed Butterscotch Pony head? And would you be buying this gift for a child that may not be frightened by a box with a decapitated horse head inside?

Flashy Things And Technology Of Olde

I’m no fan of Flash as you may or may not know. However it is almost impossible to consume pop culture sites today without interacting with a Flash site somehow. Well today is a landmark day – I’ve actually found something funny and interesting enough that I’m putting a Flash video link in my post directly. I’ve chosen Google over youtube though they both have the video.

Behold what happens when two geeks get together and think about old technology – stop motion capture. I’ve also never embedded any videos here before so this should be interesting.

In the spirit of hating Flash and the way it makes so much of the web inaccessible, I’m going to share a little secret with you. There exists a “bookmarklet” that allows you to download the .avi file that is played by the Flash player for many Google and youtube videos. Simply follow the instructions and you can view the videos from your own desktop, over and over – all without dipping into proprietary and close-sourced video players!

Finally, I leave you with a link to instructions on how to access the MP3 (audio) files that many Flash sites play so you can enjoy those upon your leisure too.

Hope these are as helpful to you as they are to me – which is to say extremely so.

I’ve Never Met A Blacklist I’ve Completely Agreed With

I’m a paid Shaw subscriber – they give me my daily Internet smack and so far I’ve been very happy with their services — except for their Internet phone service, but that’s another story. I was surprised to read an article the other day about how Shaw will now be blocking access to a list of sites without letting me know they’re doing it, why, or which sites.

This is, quite simply, censorship – and it is certainly for a good cause. They will be using a blacklist of sites provided by a government-funded operation called Cybertip.ca. They are aiming to reduce (eliminate?) child exploitation on the Internet, and I am 100% behind their goal. Child porn and pornography in general are not aspects of the Internet that should be ignored until they go away – they need to be addressed as the real problems they are.

But this initiative makes me a little uneasy, frankly. I have a few questions that I can’t find answers to:

  1. Was Shaw intending on telling me about this initiative? I’m paying them for access to the Internet and now, unannounced, they’ll be silently blocking parts of it
  2. What sites are on this blacklist? As a person affected by it I feel uncomfortable not being able to see what sites are included on it. My experience with blacklists is that inevitably some site ends up blacklisted that shouldn’t have been. How is the site operator to know why their traffic dropped overnight? Email blacklists like this exist in an attempt to stem the flow of Spam emails in the world – another initiative I can get behind. However they are publicly searchable for this very reason – people are put on it accidentally and as a website operator I need to be able to find out if I am listed on any of those lists to take corrective action.
  3. Who works for Cybertips, and what qualifications are required to become a person who decides whether or not my site is available to 80% of Canadian Internet visitors?
  4. Since Cybertips can only do this because it is explicitly against the law to consume this trash, what can we expect from the future? What is stopping politicians from deciding to enforce other laws in Canada this way? For example politicians are not known to stand up to powerful lobbying bodies like the Copyright Cartel in Canada (CRIA). This is giving the government a certain degree of control over what sites I can visit on the Internet – where is the guarantee that this will not become a standard practice for enforcing any other laws, whether or not I agree with them?
  5. Why is the user not given some kind of message as to why the site is not available? It sounds like anyone who tries to access a blacklisted site will simply be pushed off into some kind of DNS dead-end. No special webpage explaining the situation, or giving the person resources to report a problem or miscategorized site. Is this really the best way to handle the problem?

These are just some questions I haven’t been able to find answers to. It’s a frightening article frankly because it feels like the tip of the proverbial iceberg – we’re giving the government of Canada a new level of control over the Canadian experience of the Internet and I don’t think it is being done the right way, assuming it should be done at all.

Baffled And Disappointed – Top Ten List Gets It Wrong

We all love Top 10 lists – they can be fun, informational and succinct – like a really good parable or story. A recent Top 10 list on CNet has, however, really missed the mark: Top ten girl geeks. I think there’s some humour in there and perhaps some basic research and genuine admiration. But I think in this case the list has done a disservice to women who are trying to topple that horrible trend of geeks and computers being so strictly gendered as masculine and feminine respectively.

If the list of the top 10 geek girls in history is so sparse that the author needed to include a fictional character, a cartoon character, and a Hollwood geek-lust icon then one of two things is wrong:

  1. There is a serious lack of role models and innovators to choose from
  2. The author simply didn’t want to present an honest list

Seeing as how there are some potential list members missing from this list, I tend to think that the first possibily – that there is a lack of people to list – is not the problem.

So that leaves us with the option that the author didn’t want to make a genuine list. Perhaps it was deemed too staid and boring if there wasn’t something pop-culture-related on the list? I’m not sure of the motivations.

However I am sure that this list gives me the impression that when discussing women and computers it is OK to put them on the same level as fictional characters and cartoons. People say that the computing industry isn’t hostile to women anymore? Really?

On a related note I was elated to see that the Gnome project created a women-only opportunity over the summer in relation to the Google Summer Of Code project. Kudos to them for standing up and addressing the elephant in the room, and then for actually doing something about it!

Wow, What A Couple Of Weeks!

You may or may not have noticed that it has been almost two weeks since my last post, and that this site has been intermittently available over the last week and a half. Well there’s good reason, I swear – and it has nothing to do with my relative level of laziness!

  • The Lower Mainland (Vancouver and its surrounding burbs) was beaten about severely by the remnants of Typhoon Cimaron as it decided to slap us around a bit after passing through the Philippines. As a result over 120,000 homes were without power for at least a day, often several. Our house was without power for over 24 hours – which made for a cold night!
  • The storm seemed to have a negative effect on our house’s electric system as we are now experiencing power loss whenever we turn on large-draw machines such as the clothes dryer. So we need to get an electrician in to check things out – yay!
  • We subscribe to Shaw Phone rather than using Telus’s land-line, which also meant that for the better part of last week we were without a working phone at home – and I will certainly be talking to Shaw about that. This new service of theirs may not be as reliable as they would have us believe.
  • The water system in the Lower Mainland was put on a boil water advisory last week too thanks to the storm’s affect on the water reservoirs. Luckily White Rock wasn’t affected but that wasn’t clear to us for a day or so. However some cities are still on the advisory, and people are starting to get nasty to each other.
  • We also have been trying to sell our Mazda 626 as we’ve budgeted for that money when buying the new truck. Saturday I think we’ve found a buyer, but nothing’s written down yet.
  • I also tested for my black belt in Taekwondo on Saturday.
  • Marley’s eating solids and has a few 6-month-old pictures up.

Basically its been a really hectic and stressful few weeks. Now that things seem to be settling down again maybe I can start returning all those phone calls we missed during the outage.

You have no new messages

Oh … OK then. Back to work I guess.

NHL Gives You A Digital Choice

I’m not a hockey fan myself, but I have a few friends who are. Anyone interested in catching an in-season hockey game that for some reason they couldn’t watch live? Maybe you’d like to review a few key moments? The NHL wants to help you out.

NHL Interactive Cyber Enterprises (ICE), the digital arm of the National Hockey League (NHL), today announced a multi-year deal to provide NHL video content to Google Video. The NHL will provide in-season full-length games on delay to Google Video at http://video.google.com/nhl.html. Google also will receive select NHL classic games.

That last little bit there is perhaps the most interesting part of the announcement … for example maybe you want to look back on the 1994 Stanley Cup final: Canucks @ Rangers?

One caveat – this stuff is only free (and add-free) for the first two weeks of November. Get it while you can!

Marley Update – We’ve Got Pictures!

Just a quick note that Alisa has been diligently posting pictures of Marley and the rest of the crew (that would be Alisa, Dazy, the rabbits and myself) over the last few months. If you want to see her dressed as a chick (or a duck depending on who you ask) you should check out the Hallowe’en album.

3 months and a trip to the BC Interior
4 months
Rob and Sophie’s wedding
5 months and Thanksgiving
Hallowe’en

The earlier pictures are still available in her album, of course – this is one well documented child.

The ones posted are not the full-sized images, so if you are interested in prints just send us an email or call us and we can send you the original image or something. Whenever a new album is posted Alisa sends out an email to anyone interested, so if you’re not getting these emails anymore and you want to, let us know and we can stick you on “The List“.

OK, proud papa out.

More DRM In Your Pocket

I read an interestingly positioned take on DRM (Digitial Rights Management) today and thought it might be interesting to some of you as I know you are currently buying music and such from online stores. Online stores almost unilaterally use DRM on those files you’re buying, in case you were wondering. Apple’s ITunes store is right there at the top of the guilty list. It is interesting because it takes a look at how DRM actually hurts the consumer and offers nothing in return.

If you’re curious, its a simple 2-page article – its worth a quick read even to just gain awareness of some of the issues going on with DRM and electronic consumption.

Article title and link: “The big DRM mistake” by Scott Granneman

Welcome to Hybridsville – Population: The Bridgers

As some of you may know, Alisa and I have spent the last few weeks shopping for a new vehicle. It sounds like fun, but it’s been … educational. I think I know more about this car than many Ford salespeople out there, though our salesperson at Ocean Park Ford has been a real star. After much research and test driving, many nights of thoughts, budgeting, planning, etc, we have made our choice:

The Ford Escape Hybrid

We purchased a 2006 model to obtain further discounts on the car. Costs are everything to a growing family! This left us with very few choices for cars left in Canada (I believe there were 4 or 5 when we first started test driving the car). By the time we selected the car they had to bring it down from Courtenay – the other two are in Eastern Canada somewhere – Montreal I believe?

We were able to use an employee discount plan through McKesson to get a great deal on the truck. We also discovered that I still qualify for the Recent Graduate Program from Ford, as I graduated from my SFU degree in June 2003. And this is the meat of this post – not to gloat about our “New Shiny” as it were.

Continue reading Welcome to Hybridsville – Population: The Bridgers