Out of my hat

My dear sister uberviolet has been twitting me about not adding her wonderful little blog to my links. Being somewhat sensitive to twitting, I have corrected the situation and given Sputnik pride of place.

In other news, I’m back in the Urban Industrial Hub that I try not to call home, even though I sort of live there. This is really just a hiatus in my vacation, since Friday has me driving off to the Big City to meet up with a couple of old classmates, and following that I’ll be back in Canada for some little time.

Today’s discovery: one of the local coffeeshops that I frequent serves what they call Good Morning Chai: it’s a chai latte with some variable number of espresso shots added in. Oddly, the result is a liquid which tastes surprisingly like a hot chocolate, with the added effect that it sets one’s head bones to buzzing within a couple of sips.

I have many head bones.

At the suggestion of the Salesman in Spite of Himself, I recently picked up a Coloretto deck. I’m enjoying about as much as possible when you consider that I’ve not yet managed to play a game with it.

Capsule summary of the game: there’s a bunch of lizard cards in various colours, a bunch of +2 cards, and a few chameleon cards. You’re trying to collect as many lizards in as few colours as possible, if you follow me; your best three colours count positively, and succeeding colours are negative. You score n points (plus or minus) for the nth lizard in any given colour, with chameleons counting in whatever colour you choose.

(Looking at the cards, I guess all the lizards are really chameleons. Good thing I’m neither a herpetologist nor a Turtle Tamer.)

Anyhow, so idleness has left my mind free to imagine. Specifically, I’m working on the rules for Coloretto Poker in its various permutations. I’ll post a page about it in a day or three, once I’ve had some time to work out the probabilities.

Here’s a cute little article about hybrid cars and the people who hate them.

It’s perhaps a little embarassing to admit it, but there’s a milestone in the development of my social conscience that was placed by Dennis Leary. Everyone in my generation is familiar, I think, with his song Asshole:

You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna get myself a 1967 Cadillac El Dorado Convertible. Hot pink! With whale-skin hub caps, an all leather cow interior, and big brown baby seal eyes for headlights. YEAH! And I’m gonna drive around in that baby, at 115 miles per hour, getting one mile per gallon, sucking down quarter pounder cheeseburgers from McDonalds in the old-fasioned non-biodegradable styrafoam containers. And when I’m done sucking down those grease ball burgers, I’m gonna wipe my mouth in the American flag, and then I’m gonna toss the styrafoam containers right out the side, and there ain’t a God damn thing anybody can do about it, you know why? ‘Cause we got the bombs, that’s why.

Satire, of course, but satire that’s to the point. Our culture takes a certain pride in wastefulness: not always — indeed, not generally — as an end in itself, but as a byproduct of making things bigger, having more. Bucking this trend — acting and shopping locally, refusing to own a car, living with simplicity — is looked at as being just a bit odd by many of one’s fellows. Why would one sacrifice the convenience of going to the Super Wal-Mart in favour of doing one’s shopping at half a dozen locally-owned shops? Particularly is one’s going to be walking or cycling around town to do it? It doesn’t make any sense if one’s conception of economic utility relates only to one’s own finances and convenience.

While I can hardly claim to live waste-free — I’ve got a ways to go before I’ve recaptured the simple life — I do try to be conscious of the choices I’m making about such things. My own decision to buy a hybrid vehicle (two years ago, which I guess makes me an early adopter on this continent) was influenced by that consciousness. If that makes me a do-gooder, then fine. I think the world could use a little more good being done.

It seems that my sister Uberviolet has joined the blogging universe.

If you’re looking for some sort of family resemblance in our blogging, look no further than her post about careless searches on eBay and my own on the same subject. Since I’m not entirely sure that u/v is aware of my blog’s existence, the coincidence of this pleases me.

The residence room that I’m working out of this month has air conditioning. It’s not under my conscious control; apparently, the AC is on during the daytime and off at nights.

I can see the logic here: the sun’s out in the daytime, and the sun is known for its ability to make things hotter. Hence, the AC is really only needed when it’s countering the evil thermal force of sunlight. Or something.

Unfortunately, this is more or less the opposite of what I personally would like to happen. I can deal with elevated room temperatures during the day, but at night I really prefer to have the air around me be cool if not cold. (I remember one apartment I lived in where the heater worked very well indeed, to the point that I would open my window in February and let my room’s temperature drop to near zero (Centigrade) so that I could get comfortable.)

I’ve been back in the Home Town for the past few days, fulfilling my filial obligations and occasionally catching up with friends from high school. To this latter end, yesterday I found myself hanging around a campsite at a nearby provincial park visiting with folks.

Now, it seems that different people have different ideas about exactly what constitutes camping. Some of the folks I was with had tents, and did a substantial amount of cooking over a campfire. Another couple were apparently sleeping in their van and doing their cooking on some sort of propane-powered thingummy. And then there were the strangers across the way, who drove up their Mercedes convertible and had a TV sattelite set up at their campsite.

My question is: if you’re going to go camping — you know, get away from it all, the great outdoors, all that crap — why are you bringing a television at all, let alone ensuring that your television has access to several hundred channels? I admit that I’m a little biased on this issue myself — I’ve never actaully paid for cable service, and it’s been over five years since I’ve lived in a house/apt. where anyone was paying for it — but still, I don’t think I’m entirely out of line here.

Or flip it around: if having your MTV is really that important to you, then why aren’t you just camping in your backyard? Can’t you just set fire to things in the privacy of your own neighbourhood?

So the voters of Canada have spoken. I’m not perfectly pleased with the results, but in my opinion there’s more good than bad there. Some comments:

• Looking right now like a minority government, which I think is a good thing right about now. Neither of the parties that could potentially have taken a majority of the seats would have done much useful with it: the Liberals are in bad need of a little correction and reorganisation, and the Conservatives haven’t even agreed on a platform yet. I know that CW is that minority governments are bad, but I’ve never seen the necessity of that. (Granted, the last one we had in Canada was when I was 4, when I wasn’t exactly paying attention to such things.)
• Even better, it’s a Liberal minority. This gives a much higher chance of maintaining some sort of loose equilibrium in the government; any partnership between the CPC and one of the smaller (left-ish) parties would be uncomfortable at best for all involved. Plus, I’m still not convinced that the CPC is as moderate as they’ve been trying to claim.
• As of this writing, the Greens have 4.3% of the national popular vote. The current laws state that parties that receive better than 2% across the country (or 5% in those ridings in which they’re running candidates, whichever is smaller) can receive public funds: roughly $1.75 per voter per year. Given the turnout so far, the Green Party has achieved this no matter what else happens with the rest of the returns; this entitles them to nearly a million dollars of public money per year (until the next election) for party-building and such things. I see this as a good thing.
• (In case you’re curious, the Greens are also the only minor party to achieve this threshold; the next best result was the Christian Heritage Party, which pulled in 0.3% of the popular vote.)
• It’ll be interesting to see how the Liberals choose to play the new situation. The traditional option would be for them to form an alliance — formal or otherwise — with one of the other parties. The New Democrats seem like the natural choice; they have the seats when combined with the Libs to (barely) make a majority in Parliament. The Bloc could work as well, but since most of the Bloc’s gain in support came from Liberal defections in Quebec, I’m not sure how well that would play in la belle province.
• There is another way, however: rather than binding themselves to another party, the Liberals can try to rule by general consensus, getting support from other parties on an issue-by-issue basis. As the most centrist of the parties in the Commons, they’re in an excellent position to do this; off the top of my head I can’t think of any actual issues that the NDPs, the Conservatives, and the Bloc would all agree on. Team Martin could keep this up until they lost a vote of confidence, which could be a very long time indeed unless the other three parties think that a new election would work in their favour.

Once the tallies are finalised, I’m going to analyse the returns from a PR (Proportional Representation) standpoint. Variations on the theme of PR have been suggested for Canada, and I’m sort of curious how different the outcome would have been had something like them been in place.

OK, this pleases me.

This is a depiction of all of the states that I have visited in my life. (The scare-quotes are because the website in question seems to be counting DC as a state.) Click on the image and you can go make your own.

Of course, if we narrow the field a bit — say, only count the states (and district) where I have slept a night, then we get a slightly less impressive picture:

It’s precisely useless crap like this that makes me love the Web so much.

Seven and a half months since the initial theatrical release, and I’ve finally watched The Matrix Revolutions.

Two hours that I’m never, ever getting back. Not even if I gave up smoking, since first I’d have to start smoking which would almost certainly defeat the point.

What a bad film.

Of course, I’m sure that all of my faithful readers have seen the flick already, and know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, then don’t worry! I’ve seen it so you don’t have to.

First of all, yeah, sequels are supposed to have a strong component of MOS (More Of Same), because that’s what your modern moviegoer expects. The classic action sequel is all about more, though; a sequel that seems like it’s badly derivative of the original can generally be counted a failure.

The action scenes were… very dull. Particularly the whole Battle of Zion’s Docks or whatever it was, which was about 90% CG and 10% characters that we don’t know and don’t therefore give a damn about. Maybe it’s part of the whole Matrix Experience thing, where the ideal viewer has played the accompanying console games and bought three DVDs of peripheral materials of varying degrees of quality, but that ain’t me, babe.

And then there’s the story. The first movie was a cyberpunk kung-fu flick, but it at least made a strong case for being considered science fiction. There was a setting there that made no less sense than most other movie SF. Reloaded messed around with the backstory a little bit, cast a whole lot of stuff into doubt, and didn’t make much sense on its own but I was willing to deal with that. After all, it was supposed to be the middle movie in a trilogy, and leaving a few balls in the air under those circumstances can be a very good thing.

But Revolutions? Screw the story, screw making sense, forget any possible claim to the title of Science Fiction. And what did they replace it with? Boring CG and symbolism with the depth and subtlety of a 7-11 holdup.

Gah. I need to go wash my mind out with something.

Dr. Orbifold is facing a fundamental crisis of identity: is he is or is he ain’t a computer geek? (He didn’t phrase it quite that way — he was grammatical, for instance — but we all know what he meant.)

I can sympathise with him here, for I, too, am not quite sure where I would fit in to such a classification. I think I can say without fear of contradiction that I was, in fact, a computer geek back in high school; I admittedly didn’t last long in a Computer Science program at my undergraduate school, but the major that I switched into upon switching out of CS was principally concerned with abstract versions of CS problems, so I’m not sure how much of an improvement that was. (Except for, you know, that I liked it much better and didn’t have to do nearly as much — well, any — programming. Except on co-op work terms, but that’s another story.)

By most definitions, though, I’m really not a computer geek any more. Certainly I’m not a professional C.G. And yet! Like the good Doctor O., I maintain the delusion that the only thing between me and a successful career in computers is an effort of will. This is, of course, wrong.

Here’s the thing: I’m good with computers. While I lost the patience for serious programming sometime before my 20th birthday, I still spend a good chunk of my waking hours in front of them and am not inclined to complain about it. I like fiddling around, I can generally pick up the hows and whys of applications with minimal fuss, and I’m willing to be impressed by kewl new innovations. And I can still speak the language, for the most part.

So I think Orbifold’s question — Computer geek? (Y/N/Q) — is ill-formed. It’s a false dichotomy; dividing the world into Computer Geeks who can immerse their minds in La Machine and make a good living doing so, and clooless noobs, is not a terribly accurate model of reality. Not everyone who really understands computers would make a good software developer. Not everyone who doesn’t understand computers is incapable of working with them. It’s more of a continuum; I’m probably something like 0.78 of a computer geek, and I’d imagine that Dr. Orbifold’s about the same.

Of course, math geek is a fair cop, and I think the previous sentence made that distressingly clear.