Random Musings and Nicknacks

There have been several changes in our house in the last week that we’re adapting to at the same time. There is the obvious (and the biggest) that Ling is in China for a month, and the three guys are here to keep the house running. But there are others too – I decided last Monday to unplug the cable and see how we would function without cable TV (that was when Ling was leaving at the end of May), and Tim has decided he wants to see what it is like to be a vegetarian. Having all of these things happen at once make for an interesting challenge.

I’m not going to talk explicitly about what it’s like not having Ling around, because that is an all-encompassing thing; there is nothing I can say to really sum it up.
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I have started to like writing down my thoughts using the iPhone Notes application. It’s fun and easy – I  feel my thoughts flowing through me while I am typing and I am motivated to write more. However, i do have one challenge: once in a while, my word is replaced with something that doesn’t make much sense. The iPhone constantly guesses the word i am typing and comes up with sugestions; I take the suggestions without proofreading them. This ends up with nonsense words in my sentences. Funny enough,  I am not frustrated by this; on the contrary, I had some good laugh about it.  I don’t know what magic Apple has to its users – they are not only loyal but forgiving.  

I’ve been wanting to write something about this for a while.

I remember when I was like 10 and I wanted to see a lot of Dragon Ball Z or Inuyasha TV shows online on the internet. I could never figure out how all of my friends would just go on this website where they could watch all the episodes 24/7. I was searching for it for a whole weekend before I met up with my friends again. Which they told me all about the website.

Youtube is very interesting. I mean, there’s hundred’s of thousands of people probably online at a time. They always seem to be on the go, watching this, watching that. And I love the competition that’s going on all the time. Everybody is always competing to be on the top. Currently at the top, its these two boys who seem to be making everything happen: Smosh.

I don’t know who they are. But I can probably relate to them. I wonder what it’s like being on the top? A lot of pressure? A lot of role modeling? But it’s really interesting wondering what it’s like. I mean, being famous? It’s a big thing, and with power comes responsibility.

Youtube has a lot of other things going on at a time too. Contests, video races, bets. It’s all there. It’s very fun to watch as the submissions into film contests turn out to be 2nd or 1st or even 1243rd. And it’s really fun voting and protesting on who should win. I mean, it’s fun writing “lol” isn’t it?

Lately on the news a study has been making the rounds stating that 27% of Americans feel anxiety when disconnected from their cellphones or the internet, and that it was more severe in younger people than older people.

My first reaction when I read some of the details was that this was a ridiculously biased study: Do I use my cell phone (more…)

It has long been a point of contention in the world that the organization that manages internet domain names is an American company (there have been suggestions that given the importance of email and web sites, it should be UN controlled).

This situation certainly won’t help settle the concerns … the US government has seized the domain name of a Spanish company that sells Cuban vacations because it violates US law.

Ars Technica certainly pulls no punches in their final analysis:

As previously noted, Marshall is a British citizen operating a business from Spain, with servers located in the Bahamas. He does not claim that no Americans ever visited Cuba, but he has stated that he was uninterested in marketing his services to the US. In this case, the Department of the Treasury was able to shut down his business without notification or negotiation of any sort. Even if he wanted to appeal the decision, Marshall has no organization to which he can appeal, save his registrar, which can simply claim to have been following government orders.

If the US intends to continue presenting itself as the guardian of Internet rights, situations like this require a bit more delicacy. By effectively shutting down Marshall’s business, the United States has committed the censorship it condemns in other nations. Even worse, the Department of Treasury effectively shut down an international business without any type of due process. Both France and Germany followed a court process when investigating Yahoo for alleged improprieties, and the company in question (Yahoo) had the opportunity to respond to the charges in a court of law. Marshall was afforded no such luxury.

Radiohead may have made the largest splash lately with an online offering however they are neither the first nor (IMNSHO) the most innovative.

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In an attempt to verify whether my seal story had any hope of being true, I decided to do some Google work and see if it had ever happened before.

Using the search term seals attacking dogs returned stories about an, apparently very famous, elephant seal who attacks anything that moves, and links in New Zealand warning people to keep control of their dogs around harbour seals because they could hurt seal pups and the adult seals could hurt the dogs in self defence. So attacks are possible.

I decided to narrow the search, and looked into seals attacking dogs vancouver, which turned in a very unexpected result — the top hit was yours truly!

This absolutely floored me — I know we use Google because it seems to give the most relevant results, and that involves covering as much of the web as possible and having an incredible algorithm for relevance, but when you consider the breadth of the World Wide Web the idea that we had been indexed in less than 24 hours from the post seems almost beyond belief. I know my legions of fans will beg to differ, but I don’t see ourlog as being one of the more earth-shattering sites on the web.

Out of curiosity I decided to run a comparison test, and put the same search term into Yahoo!, MSN (which I believe draws from Yahoo), Lycos (yes it still exists!), and Ask.com — none of them returned this site at all; they returned other articles about dog attacks or seal attacks.

I decided to go one further as Yahoo! and Ask.com allow you to specify a site to search and I specified that I only wanted to search ourlog.ca. None of them had any hits. Apparently Google is the only major search engine that had us indexed.

One might wonder about whether it is worth the effort to index a site as small as this, but here’s the thing — if you were looking for stories about seals attacking dogs in Vancouver, Google is the only search engine that gave you an article discussing exactly that, because nobody else had mentioned it.

And they pointed any interested parties straight to it.

I have become an admitted podcast addict. What is a podcast you ask? Well I’m glad you did. Simply put a podcast is a way to push serialized audio or video to your computer/phone/MP3 player without you having to go to a website and check for new content.

This is ideal for keeping up to things like the BBC news, Quirks and Quarks, DNTO, and the Vinyl Cafe — instead of having to try and turn a radio on at the right time, or remember to go to a website and download them, they are automatically on my computer queued up! Each night I decide what I want to listen to on the way to work, put it on my phone and I’m off (although I see I’ve still got Vinyl Cafe back to September … I definitely have some catching up to do!)

For a long time my favourite podcast has been Quirks and Quarks, but lately I have found my allegiances shifting – I’ve developed a new favourite, that also happens to be from the Mother Corp — Search Engine.

The topic of Search Engine is a bit hard to describe, as it is easily misunderstood. It looks at the effect the internet (and its collaborative and distributed nature) is having on society. There is a lot of politics in the show, and not a lot of technology — it is after all not about the technology, but about how the technology is affecting society, and in a lot of cases governments. From the big stories — like Burma, US elections, Scientology — to the small ones — like the Fox Network stealing a picture of a pug in a Christmas stocking off a blog to use it in a promo piece (ironic when they’re suing people for violating *their* copyright…)

It is a very new show, launched in September of 2007, and I think runs along CBC at its best — discussion and interviews about issues that not a lot of people are thinking about right now, but that are shaping the world as we do and as we will know it. It is also one of those shows that will always let you bring up interesting trivia at cocktail parties! Like how several thousand people can buy an English Football team by coordinating on the web and will make management decisions by e-vote!

The show has struck a chord elsewhere apparently — in the US it is second only to Radio 3 as the CBC’s most popular podcasts (ahh, another one I listen to regularly).

If you have a chance you should check it out — you can download individual MP3’s, or you can put it in an RSS feed, even use iTunes to subscribe to it.

Oh yeah, and apparently it shows up on this thing called radio sometimes .. Thursdays at 11:30 and Tuesdays at 15:30.

I have a tendency to talk about ideas that I have; things that I might want to do; concepts that fascinate me and I want to flesh out. Sometimes I talk about these for so long it seems I will never do anything (and sometimes that’s true!)

One of the ideas that I broached a long time ago (I’m sure everybody has heard me talking about this one) was replacing all the entertainment playing and recording hardware in the front room with a single computer that could watch DVD’s, watch TV, and record and playback live TV. In fact I have even many times mentioned MythTV a Linux based system that will do exactly that (very easy to install if you have Ubuntu Linux).

The thing is the cost of entry with hardware has always been prohibitive. As well, the idea of recording live TV has always been an issue, and so it was never cost effective. That was until now — but what has changed?
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Well, It’s been a while, and I’ve not been talking about things.
Well, about a week ago, something happened. An incident in YVR. Unfortunately, the news is eating this up like a fly in a pile of manure. Seeing how much publicity this has made, I would be surprised if the family hasn’t go time to grieve alone.

By now, most people have seen the video — taken at Vancouver International Airport on Oct. 14 — that shows Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski’s final minutes.
Dziekanski died after being Tasered by police in what, to the casual observer, appears to be an overuse of force.

Seriously, I saw this video. It seemed very vicious. I have my own opinions, but if you want to see it, go to Youtube.com and search it yourself. I don’t like sending the link. I feel its wrong for some reason…

But if you don’t want to see this, just take my opinion. It was very, very abusive of their powers. I didn’t enjoy the sight.