shadowspar

Inasmuch as the Dos Equis Guy commercials feature Formulaic Beer-Commercial Fail (about which I've previously vented here), this is still a good quote:

(On pickup lines:)
There's a time and place for them.
The time...is never.
You can figure out the place on your own.

Douglas Crockford whines that people have baggage.

Isn't it kind of hypocritical, or at least wilfully ignorant, to build a social media website -- something of which people are a central component, and getting them in the door key to its success -- and then complain that these damned people don't behave deterministically and don't fit neatly into the system like nice little cubes?

Well, surprise! People are mushy bags of mostly edge cases, and if you're building social software, you're going to bloody well have to deal with it.

Damn users, getting to have opinions about software, instead of just using it or not!

⁰: Self-loading cargo: airline industry slang for passengers.

Today's random muzak discovery: SCANDAL.

More: FUTURE, START.

So this happened to swim by in my Twitter feed:

New Approaches To Designing Log-In Forms

This kind of thing makes me want to metaphorically grab hold of the field of User Experience Design, tell it "Here, I have someone I'd like you to meet," and drag it over to the field of Security. The converse goes for Security when (for instance) its practitioners come up with an amazing new security procedure that no user will ever follow. In fact, a great many problems would be solved if we could but make a few more introductions between disciplines. Getting Software Development acquainted with fields like Ethics, Sociology, and Social Justice and concepts like privacy, identity, diversity, and accessibility would be a good start.

From this review of Becky Hogge's Barefoot into Cyberspace:

There's a not-so secret about activists that those pursuing anti-democratic policies have unfortunately spotted: they burn out. A trade association has its choice of professional lobbyists willing to be paid to argue the cause during working hours. The supply of people willing to donate their lives to sparking protest for little or no money is much smaller, however, and the toll is intense.

(Amongst other things, the idea of getting a law degree and leaping into the current Intellectual Property fray on the side of good has a great deal of appeal to me, and this is why. There are plenty of excellent law firms taking up the interests of the monied corporations, but few folks standing up for remixers, independent artists, consumers, and so forth -- almost nobody can afford to.)

(Originally from Health & Wellness magazine.)

• 1 cup quinoa
• 2 cups orange or pineapple juice
• ½ cup carrot, diced
• ½ cup red onion, diced
• 1 cup cucumber (~ ⅔ of an english cucumber)
• 1 ea red or green pepper, diced
• ½ cup celery, diced
• ¼ cup fresh coriander, chopped
• ¼ cup fresh mint
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• salt/pepper to taste

1. Rinse quinoa, combine with juice, bring to a boil. Reduce heat & simmer, covered, until liquid is absorbed; ~15-20min. Let cool.
2. Combine everything; adjust seasoning. Chill & serve.

When we lived in Victoria, we were part of a CSA called Share Organics. One of the nice things they included along with your weekly box of veggies was a list of recipes for anything that might be unusual or unfamiliar. This was one of the ones we got with our first bunch of kale. Simple but very tasty.

Pasta with Kale and Feta

Sauté over medium heat in a deep skillet:

• 3 Tbsp. olive oil
• 2 cups chopped onions
• 1 large garlic clove minced

Add, cover and cook over low heat for 10 minutes:

• 1 bunch kale chopped

• 1/2 lb short substantial pasta such as penne, shells, fusilli

Add to sauté:

• 1/4 to 1/2 lb feta cheese, crumbled

Lightly drain pasta and add to sauté. Mix thoroughly and cook on low for a few minutes longer. Serve with black pepper.

Dr AnnMaria DeMars, former judo world champion and hardcore statistics geek, who I've followed on twitter seemingly forever:

• DrAnnMaria: If you're following me hoping to hear about business, statistics or programming you want @annmariastat
• DrAnnMaria: I have two twitter accounts because most programmers don't care about conditioning for martial arts or matwork.
• DrAnnMaria: On the other hand, with all the sexual harassment problems at conferences #OSCON maybe those programmers ARE following me here on purpose

Even more interesting than what's on your shopping list is what you run out of, because that shows what you're actually using. Sometimes it only dawns on me how differently I've been cooking when we suddenly start running out of something we've never run out of before, or how many cakes, cupcakes, scones and hotcakes this kitchen has emitted as of late when I realize that the bag of flour I'm buying is the third one this month.

Things we've run out of lately:

Cumin, oregano, ancho chile powder: adding homemade veg burritos to our dinner rotation is the main culprit here, but lately cumin seems to go into every recipe that requires dried spices...so much so that the second 3oz jar to go was replaced with a one-pound bag of the stuff. (They say never to argue with a person who buys ink by the barrel...what about someone who buys cumin by the pound?)

Onions and garlic: Incredibly enough, we used to buy onions a few at a time with specific recipes in mind, but more & more they seem to be getting into many of the savoury dishes we make each week: stirfry, burritos as noted above, iridōfu, plus we finally found egg-free commercial perogies, so we can finally eat perogies covered in fried onions again. Olio aglio eats through a lot of our garlic, as well as soup recipes, but a clove here and there seems to go into all the other veg dishes, too.

We had a good run on vegan soup stock for a while, but that's dropped off, what with it being spring now and all.

Finally, white sugar & white flour (>_<), along with the holy baking trifecta of cornstarch, baking soda, and baking powder. Oh, and vanilla extract too -- some four bottles of the stuff in recent memory -- and cider vinegar, of all things, which is what we use to turn soymilk into vegan buttermilk for baking. In the last while we've made a whack of birthday cakes including a half-sheet monster, several batches of scones for work & domestic consumption, several doz maple cupcakes for the kid's school, and (currently in the oven) choc chip cupcakes for Mothers' Day. This along with the regular Sunday hotcake routine and the occasional round of bread, buns, focaccia, or pizza. Sheesh.

It's awesome when your teacher gives you permission to suck, either explicitly or implicitly. In this case, it's the latter; no matter how little practice time I've managed to get in, I never get a guilt trip over it.

I feel like I've been either on the road or sick for all of the last three weeks, with the concomitant lack of practice having the expected effect on my technique. Nonetheless, we worked on left-hand technique that'd help me reach higher notes & lower strings more easily (elbow well to the right; palm angled well towards the fingerboard instead of facing you), tuning up my intonation on the C string, and bringing the fourth finger into play.

More practice.

B'z just announced three North American tour dates:

• 20 Jul at the Vogue Theatre, Vancouver, BC
• 22 Jul at The Fillmore, San Francisco, CA
• 24 Jul at Club Nokia, Los Angeles, CA

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG.

Viola lesson == can haz! I wasn't sure for a while there -- yesterday we got a slushy mess of late winter precip, and I, while running out the door to work and carrying my viola, slipped and fell flat on my arse hard enough to shift the viola's bridge. Fortunately it was easily fixed by someone who actually knows what they're doing with a stringed instrument (unlike me).

So, now I've got enough instruction behind me to cover all of first position with the exception of the fourth finger. This gets me from C₃ (the second space from the bottom in the bass clef) up to D₅ (the second line from the top in the treble clef). Now it's just a question of practice, practice, practice so that my fingers can get used to finding all those notes.

Didn't get a chance to use the keys to Anya's studio last week on account of a dentist's appointment on Friday and knocking my viola out of tune on Monday. Hope to rectify that in the coming week.

Still need to keep working on slurs across strings. Still have a good deal of work to do with eliciting a consistent sound -- consistent bow speed, consistent bow pressure, keeping in the correct "lane" of the "Kreisler Highway". Still need to work on planning out the bow, though this is improving. =)

Practice, practice, practice.

This passage from Descartes says a lot about my approach to philosophy, and my philosophies in general. =)

I shall not say anything about Philosophy, but that, seeing as it has been cultivated for many centuries by the best minds that have ever lived, and that nevertheless no single thing is to be found in it which is not the subject of dispute, I had not enough presumption to fare better there than others had done. And also, considering how many conflicting opinions there may be regarding the self-same matter, all supported by learned people, while there can never be more than one which is true, I esteemed as well-nigh false all that only went as far as being probable.
:Rene Descartes

First lesson in three weeks -- missed one lesson on account of going to Chicago for Drupalcon, and a second on account of March break. Didn't get a chance to practice anywhere near as much as I would have liked in the interim -- locked my practice materials in the car while in Chicago, and I spent March break glued to the coverage of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake when I wasn't peeling the kids off of the walls. While I haven't improved a lot in the past weeks, I haven't lost much either; I was surprised how easily many of the songs in the book came back to me when I've been playing nothing but scales and tunes from memory all week.

To work on for next week: slurs (still), starting in on the G string (woot!) and bringing the fourth finger into play (double woot!) Things are really starting to get to the point where you have to stretch for notes now, and while the challenge is fun, I'm still left with the feeling that things would be much easier if my fingers were just a millimetre or two longer....

In my high school days, I was an exchange student; I lived for a year in Maebashi, Gunma-ken, Japan (日本群馬県前橋市).

Although for various reasons I haven't kept in touch with anyone there, I've still been following matters very closely. Despite how long it's been, Japan still feels like my second home. My third host family's house is a bit more than a kilometer away from this radioactivity monitoring point, and they have relatives in Sendai whom we went to visit while I was there, so this all strikes pretty close to home for me.

When it comes to the problems at Fukushima #1, a lot of the foreign news coverage has been inaccurate, sensationalist, or both. It doesn't help that most of us don't have an in-depth understanding of nuclear power plants and ionizing radiation, so we don't have any context to evaluate what information we're given and try to deduce the scope of the dangers facing Japan. Moreover, the nuclear plant troubles may not be the biggest problem in the country right now -- there are still many people in Tōhoku with little or no food, water, gas, power, or heat, going on six nights now. Logistics are hugely problematic, with fuel being in short supply.

With that being said, here are some of the resources I've been using to keep up on what's going on:

• Maki (of JustBento and JustHungry fame) has been following several Japanese media sources (eg NHK, TBS) and tweeting updates in English. Unfortunately, it's not very easy to donate to Japanese charities from overseas (you need a Japanese bank account or cellphone to do so) but she's compiled a list of other ways to help.
• The students & faculty of MIT's Nuclear Science and Engineering department have been posting updates and detailed backgrounders explaining the events at Fukushima. The nuclear industry backed NEI also has updates; so too does the IAEA.
• Evelyn, a Geology Ph.D student, has been posting interviews with her dad, a retired nuclear engineeer, on her blog.

This is a hand-me-down recipe from my Papa (grandfather). Not only it is one of the best damn desserts going, it's hands-down the easiest, too; even easier than boxed pudding mix from the grocery store. Best of all, it lets you make something awesome out of the godawful strawberries we get during winter in the Great White North, bereft as they are of any hint of sweetness after their multi-thousand kilometer journey here.

So easy, it's hardly even a recipe:

• Wash, clean, and dry strawberries; slice them into a bowl.
• Dredge them in sugar: generously dust with granulated sugar, toss to mix, and dust again.
• Set them aside for a half hour or longer. The sugar makes the juices leach out of the strawberries, yielding a sort of strawberry syrup.
• Throw in a few dollops of sour cream (14% preferably) and stir the whole mess together.
• Divvy up into bowls & serve.

The timing on this often works well at dinnertime: slice & sugar the strawberries while the main course finishes cooking, and by the time the end of the meal rolls around, you're ready to lob in the sour cream and dish it up. If you want to turn down the fat numbers, better to go with a mild yogurt than some of the nasty reduced-fat "sour cream product" that lurks on supermarket shelves. Here, we just recently got a wonderful 2% yogurt that's almost as good in this recipe as full-fat sour cream, at least in my estimation.

Posting this because I'm making cake and just forgot to do this >_<

Possibly I'm the only one who didn't know about this, but somehow I'd managed to bake cakes for at least a dozen years before finding out about flouring the pans. After greasing a cake pan, sprinkle a bit of flour into it, then gently tap the pan and tilt it all around until the inside has a perfect, fine, even coating of flour on all surfaces. Knock out any excess, then pour your cake batter in. This makes your finished cake release one hell of a lot easier, especially when you're using intricate pans like character forms, bundt pans, etc.

Also, it's past 1am and I'm waiting for birthday cakes to come out of the oven. I think there is a rule that you're not allowed to engage in serious baking or pastry work until after midnight. At least, that's how it always seems to pan out here.

Le confédération internationale des boulangers et pâtissiers dit que on ne peut faire du boulangerie ou pâtisserie avant minuit.

How have I not posted this yet? I DON'T EVEN KNOW.

This is a great warming recipe for winter. It's thick enough, especially after a night in the fridge, that I like to serve it over rice like curry.

It's from the Rebar Cookbook, the best cookbook in the history of forever. Go buy it, and be sure to go eat at Rebar if you're ever in Victoria, BC, Canada. Trust me, you won't regret either decision.

Greek Red Lentil soup

• 2 cups red lentils, sorted, rinsed
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 ea large yellow onion
• 2 tsp salt
• 8 cloves garlic
• 2 ea carrots, diced
• 1 tsp cracked black pepper
• ¼ tsp red chile flakes
• 1 tbsp minced rosemary
• 2 tbsp minced oregano
• 2 ea bay leaves
• 8 cups vegetable stock
• zest of ½ lemon
• juice of 2 lemons
• 1 cup crumbled feta cheese
• 2 tsp minced rosemary
• additional cracked black pepper to taste

Sauté onion with 1tsp salt until translucent. Add garlic, carrot, pepper, chile flakes, herbs, bay leaves & remaining salt. Stir well & sauté until the until the carrots are just tender. Add lentils & stock; bring to a boil. Reduce heat and cook until the lentils are soft and falling apart.

Remove bay leaves. The soup can be puréed or left as is.

Season the soup with lemon zest, lemon juice, salt & pepper to taste. Before serving, stir together the feta cheese + 2tsp rosemary. Sprinkle over hot bowls of soup & serve.

ETA: Two things re this:

• The herb measures listed up there are for fresh herbs. We usually end up with fresh rosemary, but never fresh oregano -- swapping it out for 2tsp of dried instead seems to give a good result. =)
• Just a heads-up: how lemon-y the soup gets can be highly variable, depending on how large/sour/juicy the lemons you get are, and how aggressively you zest and juice them. I've ended up giving myself a big lemony punch in the face by dumping all the lemon materiel in without tasting, so, uh, maybe don't do that if that's not the kind of thing you enjoy. ^_^;;

What a clusterfuck telecom regulation in this country is. It's more apparent this past week than most.

First, and most noisily, was the blow-up over UBB (usage-based billing). Somehow, the CRTC thought it would be just fine if the Huge Incumbent Telco ISPs could impose data caps and per-gigabyte billing on the small independent ISPs that use the incumbents' last mile to deliver internet access. This lead to an online outcry of epic proportions, which admittedly somewhat mystifies me, given that some 96% of internet-using Canadians are customers of the Huge Incumbent Telcos and so already have data caps and UBB.

This was followed on by the Federal Court ruling that Wind Mobile's ownership structure doesn't meet the Canadian ownership requirements for a telecom company, giving them 45 days to either become adequately Canadian or pull the plug on their upstart mobile network. Wind, the most promising of the wireless startups to come out of the last spectrum auction, has the majority of its debt held by Orascom, an Egyptian multinational. Having bought the requisite spectrum, Wind's application to start offering mobile phone service was rejected by the CRTC, but the government intervened to "vary" the Commission's ruling, permitting Wind to begin operations. Now, 14 months and better than 140,000 subscribers later, the only mobile phone company that poses a credible threat to the usurious cellphone rates of the incumbents has had the rug yanked out from under them.

Canada's telecom sector closely resembles its banking industry -- dominated by several huge, well-heeled incumbents which form a de-facto cartel. None of them are interested in disturbing the status quo, much preferring to enjoy raking in profits through extortionate rates that consumers must pay if they are to participate fully in modern society. The notion of substantial foreign ownership of our telecom sector doesn't exactly fill me with glee, but it might be preferable to the stifling lack of competition that currently exists.

Innovation, in both the mobile and internet spaces, depends on having adequately fast and reasonably-priced network access. Until independent ISPs have their own last mile and can bring their services directly to the consumers, and until independent cellphone companies manage to get a toehold and can stand up against the incumbents, the ability of Canadians to use the cutting-edge applications of both technologies will continue to lag. And until we have some real alternatives to the incumbents in our telecom offerings, we'll continue to get screwed.

Made a neat spontaneous discovery tonight: first position on viola + being able to correctly place your first three fingers on the A & D strings == Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in D major! Wooooo! =)

The committee considering C-32, the copyright reform bill before the Canadian House of Commons, invited public feedback on the bill. Here's what I sent them.

Dear Honorable Members of the C-32 Legislative Committee,

If a hotelier could alter the laws which governed conduct at their inn simply by posting a notice on the door, what might they write? Failing to make your bed might be punishable by a fine or imprisonment; perhaps use of the hotel glassware to consume beverages not purchased there would be similarly forbidden. Surely, this scenario is beyond absurd, but it is effectively what the technological protection measures provisions of Bill C-32 let copyright owners do: to themselves write the copyright law that applies to their materials instead of having it determined by Parliament.

As someone who writes prose, creates software, and performs music, I understand and sympathize with concerns about copyright infringement and its potential effect on creators' income. I would welcome a legislative framework that addresses people who are trying to make a profit from large-scale unauthorized copying, but it's equally important for content users -- that is to say, every Canadian -- to be able to freely, fairly, and fully use the materials they've legitimately acquired.

To best serve society, copyright needs to strike a balance between the rights of users and those of creators. Vesting creator-authored restrictions with the force of law upsets that balance in the most catastrophic way possible.

This, this, this. A thousand times this.

A huge chunk of the reason why I am so opposed to the fiction of "intellectual property", as it's currently formulated, is because it's a formal methodology of taking knowledge -- knowledge which is collectively developed, built on the shoulders of giants, and can spread freely from one person to another -- and stuffing it by pieces into compartmentalized, commodified boxes, then assigning some entity an outrageous and obscene ability to monopolize it, a privilege backed backed by the weight of the legal system and the full force of the state. This privilege extends not only to being the only one able to make money off of an idea or work, but effectively to the ability to dictate if anybody else can use that piece of knowledge at all.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. :Thomas Jefferson

Picked up a blue 4GB Sandisk Sansa Clip+ with some of the gift certificates I got for Christmas.

It seems like such a little thing, but I'm disproportionately thrilled to have an mp3 player again. I've been without since the death of my Cowon iAudio7 (an excellent piece of equipment but for the breakage of the volume buttons). I've had one more or less continuously since 2007, and I've apparently gotten quite used to "filling the gaps" in my day with it. Chores become a lot more pleasant when you have something to listen to while doing them, and having a player on hand is a good way to do something productive, or at least amuse yourself, during times when you're waiting -- waiting for someone, waiting for an appointment, waiting for the bus, or what have you. Since I have a short daily commute now, I eat through podcasts at a surprising rate. You can get through a lot in 15 minutes here and 15 minutes there.

We all know that the rate of progress when it comes to computers & electronics is staggering, but every now and again, I still have to take a step back and boggle. I picked up the Clip+ for $35; a deep discount boxing week item from Future Shop. It's cheaply made, very light, but seems solid enough nonetheless. Despite this, it's probably more powerful computer than the first x86 box I ever owned -- the Clip+ has a 250MHz ARM processor and 4GB of storage, vs the Pentium 120 with a 1.2GB hard disk that we paid some $1800 for in 1997. The original firmware is OK enough, but the main thing that sold me on the Clip+ was that there's a port of Rockbox, the open source audio player firmware, for it.

Rockbox is a thousand flavours of awesome; I'm an unreserved fan. Out of the box, the Clip+ can play most common audio formats, let you listen to FM radio, and record from either the radio or the built-in mic. Flash it with Rockbox, and its capabilities expand a hundredfold: it now plays almost anything you can get your hands on (including MOD files, demoscene stuff that harkens back to the Amiga days!), lets you read text files (important for me, since I like to keep itineraries, booking references, confirmation numbers and the like in my player for convenient reference when I travel) and even edit them; it has games (Tetris, Asteroids, Puzzle Bobble, Breakout, and Pong clones; Solitaire, and it even plays DOOM, albeit badly) and even hacky mpeg video support (though on a tiny monochrome screen, it's only a breathtaking experience in that it can be done at all).

The open source future is here. I like this future. =)

...conveniently summed up in this single video created by EA!

I imagine the conversation went something like this...

• Dudebro 1: Hey, we've got this woman in Red Alert who's tough as nails, sarcastic as hell, and kicks a lot of ass. How are we going to expand on her character in Red Alert 2?
• Dudebro 2: She's not very hot. Let's sex her up!
• Dudebro 1: What a great idea!
• Dudebro 3: You know what would be even more awesome? In Red Alert 3, we should have her played by Jenny fuckin' McCarthy!

(The Crown rests. FFS.)