The Future (of this space)
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Apple has officially announced that they’ll be discontinuing most aspects of their old MobileMe/.Mac service. They’ll keep the most generally useful stuff, such as email and calendaring, but the web galleries and web hosting will end in 2012.
That leaves me in a bit of a pickle with respect to this blog. Do I move it? Or do I just start fresh? Moving it would involve a lot of work that I really, really don't want to do. (This reminds me a bit of a problem that Andy Ihnatko had way back when he maintained his website with a custom AppleScript solution. Of course, Mr. Ihnatko is a much better coder than I am and he probably didn't have pages in hard coded HTML to have to convert.)
In terms of starting fresh, I suppose I could get a TypePad account or actually use the Blogger account that is presently sitting in mothballs and gathering the digital equivalent of dust. Of those two options, I think the TypePad solution is more attractive, if only because I'd then have more control over the page layout than I would in Blogger.
Or I could sign up with SquareSpace and give Leo Laporte some referral money.
To be honest, though, I'm not altogether sure that I'll do any of this. I've found over the last few months that I have less and less to say about anything—or rather, that I can't generate any content that doesn't sound ridiculous or that I could say would be interesting and worth sharing. I've nothing.
I turned off my FaceBook account for some of these same reasons. Aside from the ever present concerns about when Zuckerberg and his cronies will make what was explicitly private suddenly public, FaceBook felt like a largely oneway stream of information. I had nothing to add, other than a comment here and there, and, to be honest, I felt very little connection to it. It felt pointless.
Damned Facebook
Saturday, 29 May 2010
I’ve had a Facebook account for a little over a year. When I signed up, I recall my brother saying something to the effect that I had finally got one. The truth is, I’m not sure that I have that much use for Facebook, and the recent privacy issues bother me, to the extent that I’ve carefully gone over the privacy settings and locked my account down tightly. Even so, I continue to worry about what data Facebook is sharing and with whom.In the time I spent looking over the various privacy options (over 170 is the number that’s been quoted in the media), I wondered if maintaining a Facebook account was even worth the trouble. To be honest, I don’t push out updates via Facebook. I’ve always preferred to do that via this blog or via more direct means, such as email or instant messaging or even through a dreaded phone call. Well, okay. I admit that that last option is a bit of a stretch.
That’s the thing, though… When you really think about it, there are a million different ways, perhaps better ways, given the Facebook limitations of text, space, and the privacy concerns, of keeping the various connections we form between ourselves intact and strong. About the only thing going for Facebook is the fact that everyone’s on it, and everyone’s on it because, well—everyone is on it.
Damned positive feedback loop.
Thoughts about Star Trek
Wednesday, June 3, 2009 @ 4:22PM
I saw Star Trek in theatres on opening weekend. (Yes, that was weeks ago and this entry is rather late to the party.) I didn’t know what to expect going into the film. I’d not paid much attention to information about the cast and I certainly hadn’t looked for plot spoilers and such, though I had heard that Leonard Nimoy was reprising his role.
So I was shocked by the events of the first hour of the film. All along, I kept wondering how it was that the situation would be rectified as, to put it plainly, it royally screws things up. And then I realized that they weren’t going to “fix” things. This iteration of the franchise would be stuck with a new status quo and the history of the original series and its sequels was being jettisoned like so much flotsam out of an airlock.
My feelings about “reboots” in long running series such as this one are a bit mixed. I recognize, first of all, that a reboot is an admission that the creative folks behind a particular piece of work have no idea what to do with all the stories and history that they have created. In effect, the weight of past stories, of past history, is too much for them to continue to bear into the future. I realize how liberating that is, but at the same time, I have to say that it’s a bit of a cop out.
Even so, I did enjoy the movie. I think it was well cast and acted, even if the Chekhov performance was laid on a bit too thick.
The Magicians and Mrs. Quent
Sunday, March 15, 2009 @ 8:10 PM
I finished reading Galen Beckett’s The Magicians and Mrs. Quent a few weeks ago. I rather liked the book, though it could stand a little bit of trimming, I think, or at the very least, a slightly quicker pace. As it was, Beckett took rather a long time before we got real inklings of the plot, though in the process he creates a world that feels very much like the England of Jane Austen’s time but which is also very radically not.
That’s the reason I picked it up, you see. I was intrigued by Beckett’s premise: a fantasy novel in the Jane Austen mode. On one level, as I think on it now, the premise is a bit like one of those writing challenges that fiction writers on the Web will give themselves every month. It’s not every day that one finds something like that on bookstore shelves. And it was by a new writer, to boot. I had to pick it up to see how well it worked.
And it largely works. It reads very much like an Austen novel, in that much of the action occurs in parlours and sitting rooms and in front of pianofortes and the plot shifts between three locales. There’s not the same degree of commentary and the language isn’t as sharp. Call it Austen light, if you like.
I think that it succeeds as a work of speculative fiction, too. I still can’t quite get my head around the notion of days and nights that vary in length from, well, one light period to the next. Much of the way we understand the passage of time is predicated on a notion that each day is more or less the same length. That’s not the case in the world of Mrs. Quent.
All of these components of the novel work very well, but there was one thing that didn’t work for me. Having enjoyed the novel, I performed a few searches and found out that this was not Mr. Beckett’s first novel. It was his second series of fantasy novels and Beckett was a new pseudonym he’d come up with specifically for the Mrs. Quent books. His use of a pseudonym is not a problem for me, of course. Rather, I’m distressed by his claim that he’s a first time author. Perhaps he was protecting himself from the reactions of critics and readers if he’d happened to fail horribly in his task. Or maybe he believed that a lot of readers might be inclined, myself included, to look on it less harshly as a first published work. Personally? I think trying to fob himself off as a new writer when he is not one is a horrible kind of deception.
New Job, New Computer
Thursday, February 12, 2009 @ 4:25 PM
My youngest brother has recently rejoined the ranks of the employed. He’s working for First Data International in their tech support department. The job is a good one, though perhaps not as good as he might have been able to get with his studies in database programming. He will be receiving a decent salary for his efforts, though, and his dental and health benefits will kick in within a few months. I’m rather pleased for him, though I note that he now complains about having to go to work, when he had been complaining for the past several months that he wanted a job and money to fund his various wants.
One of those wants was a new computer, which I spent the better part of an afternoon putting together for him. The major hiccup was a change in the ATX spec about which I was unaware. It seems that Intel’s newest processors require much more power, which I guess figures since the dumb thing is 4 processors on a single chip. Not knowing this, I had picked out an older power supply that didn’t have the right power plug for the new processor. So the dumb machine wouldn’t power up and I couldn’t figure out why until I realized that the processor hadn’t been plugged in.
This is just one of the many reasons I’m a Mac user: I’ll never have to put together a Mac from a lot of disparate parts that all need to be individually researched to ascertain their compatibility.
Still, the machine works and it’s wickedly fast. I’m a little jealous. My MacBook is perfectly serviceable for most tasks, but it’s not a gaming machine. I worry about the amount of heat it’s putting out while I play. The fans are going at full speed for a long time after I quit playing WoW and that’s not an indication that the system is handling the game with aplomb. It makes me wish that Apple would release a mid level tower—the mythical headless iMac. I doubt that that’s ever going to happen, but it’d certainly please me.
Various and Sundry Items
Monday, December 29, 2008 @ 4:22 PM
There’s just a few days left in this year and I’ve had a reasonable amount of material to write about for this blog but precious little energy with which to actually go about the process of applying the proverbial pen to paper.
I could talk about my experiences with Wrath of the Lich King thus far, which has provided a number of firsts for me. I levelled my warrior, Menoly, from 70 to 80 as protection, which wasn’t something you would have done in prior versions of Warcraft—unless you were slightly masochistic.
I tanked my first heroic instance, which turned out to be the heroic version of Utgarde Keep. I found the experience to be a bit underwhelming actually. The hunter in the party used his Volley attack for just about the whole run and there was never ever the sense of challenge that I have to figure a heroic instance run should have represented for the group. I’ve since run the heroic version of the Nexus, too, and found that to be fairly easy. The encounters really aren’t that different than they were in regular mode. It’s just that the enemies hit harder and can take quite a bit more punishment. I came to the conclusion that I should have been tanking heroic instances long ago. At the very least, I should have been running as a damage dealer, if not as the meat shield.
I’ve finished reading the latest Star Trek trilogy, which I did enjoy, even if the writer flubbed the characterization a little bit. I’m slightly relieved that they’ve decisively dealt with the Borg, who have been both a ticking bomb and a joke at the same time. A single Borg cube has routed dozens of Federation ships on multiple occasions, but a little bit later on, a single, small ship captained by a loose cannon, makes a mockery of thousands of Borg cubes. So, yes. It was about time that the Borg were approached seriously and that the whole issues was resolved, one way or the other.
Macross Frontier came to its conclusion a month or so back. I liked the ending, though I think that Kawamori copped out when it came to resolving the love triangle. It seems to me that he was building and building towards Alto choosing to be with Sheryl but at the end, Alto makes no decision on the matter, though Sheryl and Ranka both declare that they will compete for Alto’s affections. So while the important plot issue of the Vajra is resolved, the important relationship issues are not. Irritating, though it does leave room for a sequel.
Home for Halloween
Friday, October 31, 2008
I was home for Halloween. It was the first time I’ve been home on Halloween night in a good long while and it was the first time I’ve handed out candy in ages and ages.
Halloween is a bit of a bust in my neighbourhood, which I guess isn’t that much of a surprise given that there don’t seem to be very many children living in the area. Or maybe the drive to collect massive quantities of candy and chocolate is much diminished now than it was when I was a child.
First Snow 2008
Tuesday, October 21, 2008 @ 5:04 PM
It’s snowing. There’s no accumulation at the moment, it not being quite cold enough, but it’s snowing.
Election and Wrath
Wednesday, October 15, 2008 @ 4:20 PM
The Conservatives won (or perhaps lost is a better word) themselves another minority government. I am disappointed by this result, but at the same time, I’m not entirely surprised. They made their appeal to the pocketbooks of Canadians and, generally speaking, promising that your electorate will keep a few extra dollars in their pockets is how you win a Canadian election in this day and age. In the meantime, Liberal, NDP, and Green campaigns that called for more spending or environmental policies designed to reduce greenhouse gases (through various emissions taxes) were widely unpopular.
In some news that hits a bit closer to home, for me at least, Blizzard released version 3.0.2 of World of Warcraft last night in an attempt to smooth the transition between The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King. The patch made sweeping changes to character classes and talents, as well as a number of fairly important game mechanics, such as the consolidation of +damage and +healing attributes into the unified spell power statistic. As is usual for a major WoW patch, “Echoes of Doom” was fraught with major server issues and other numerous annoying bugs, one of which personally affected my mage.
Of all my characters, though, I think my priest was most affected by the changes. My priest’s talent specification has changed rather drastically, from what used to be a hybrid discipline holy build that was a relatively effective 5 man dungeon healing spec, to a much deeper holy build that, at the moment, has great group healing utility, good single target healing effectiveness, but somewhat less mana recovery. And I picked up the Lightwell talent—which I may regret, given that it requires other people knowing when and how to use it.
Overall, I think this is going to be a good patch and a good expansion. I’m still very excited about Wrath. Changes to most classes seem positive, giving people what I think they want.
CIBC
Monday, August 18, 2008 @ 5:15 PM
Over the weekend I had a lot of problems with my checking account with CIBC. I was at a fast food joint and my debit card was declined twice before I had to pull out cash to pay for the meal. The error I was given on the debit receipt was that I had already drawn the maximum amount of money from my account for that day and no more was forthcoming.
I ran over to the local CIBC branch to check my account balance and I verified that the amount in my account was correct, to more than a little relief. I didn’t have much time to pursue the matter further, though, and I figured (perhaps naïvely), that it was a one time computer glitch.
The next day, which was Saturday, I hit up an ATM at a local variety store and found myself still unable to draw money from the account. Now, more than a little worried, I called CIBC. Before I could explain the situation, I was asked various questions to confirm my identity—my account balance, bills that I’d paid, and my telephone banking password, which I’ve never used, not even once, and couldn’t tell anyone under pain of death. The agent on the other end told me eventually that CIBC had, for my protection, reduced my daily withdrawal limit to zero because some recent activity suggested to their algorithms that some sort of fraud was taking place. More than a little peeved that they had done this without bothering to inform me, I asked for a solution and was given one.
Which promptly didn’t work.
I made a second call to CIBC at the bank and was run through the same identity verification process. I gave the same answers, but this time the agent on the other end told me that I had failed the verification process and he could not help me. I should have asked the agent how it was I could pass the verification process one time, and fail it a few moments later. I should have asked how it was that the CIBC reduced me to relying for a few days on my credit card for cash without so much as a phone call. Instead, I said good bye and put my cell phone away.
A visit to the bank early this morning resulted in me being able to use my debit card again, but not once has their been an explanation of exactly what happened, nor why they did what they did without bothering to tell me. The end result is that I’m more than a little peeved right now and seriously considering a switch to a different bank.
Savages Thoughts
Sunday, August 3, 2008 @ 5:29 PM
I watched The Savages a couple of days ago. The movie, which stars Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, is about a pair of grown siblings who find they have to take care of their father, who has been absent from most of their lives, in his descent into dementia. I didn’t hear about it until I saw the trailer for it (I believe I saw it on my copy of Juno), but that was enough to pique my interest.
I liked it. It’s a quiet, understated, and earnest sort of film, and I think both Linney and Hoffman performed their roles very well. The Savages has few immediately comedic moments; the only one that springs immediately to mind is the treatment that Hoffman’s character needs for his neck. The rest of the film is a realistic portrayal of life and family drama, of sibling rivalry, and the kind of grudging care grown children have for their parents. One understands well the embarrassment felt by Linney and Hoffman’s characters during the movie night scene.
Blade of the Immortal Anime
Monday, July 28, 2008 @ 4:09 PM
I’ve watched the first two episodes of the new Blade of the Immortal (Mugen no Juunin) animated series and so far I’m quite taken with it. The animation is very, very smooth and the character designs are very faithful to their appearances on the printed page. The anime does deviate from the manga on what would seem to me to be very important points. For example, supporting characters like Hyakurin and Giichi have been introduced much earlier than they were in the manga.
I’ve also read in a few places online that people are rather disappointed that the anime doesn’t feel innovative. People complained for instance that the death scene involving Shido Hishiyasu was unimpressive. They felt that something more could have been done there than using a different background. My response to that criticism, though, is to note that Samura himself stops using ornamental death splash pages a few volumes into the series. And in fact, the killing strokes become much less graphic, much less stylized.
In a sense, the manga is rather more conventional in form than it was initially and I can’t really say that that’s a bad thing, mostly because Samura’s focus at that point is more about the narrative, more about the characters, than the flash of a splash page. So if the anime itself is tells its story in a more conentional form than some would like, I’d say that’s fine provided that it tells its story well.
Between the Covers
Monday, July 21, 2008 @ 5:01 PM
I listen to what seems to me to be a good number of podcasts, at least a half hour for each work day, though usually more. Indeed, I listen to enough podcasts that my music collection has been relegated to what I listen to when I don’t have any podcasts left to play.
The podcast that I’ve become really fond of is the CBC’s Between the Covers. The podcast is delivered a few times a week and each episode comprises a new “chapter” of a book. What’s produced isn’t actually a chapter, though; the podcast episodes are far too short for that to be the case. Instead, the producers of Between the Covers take significant, sequential excerpts from the featured novel and release the episodes in a serialized format.
It’s sort of a light form of an audiobook. The novels are abridged, but that’s all right, given that the podcast is free and the production quality is quite high. And also, I tend to think that they’ve made some great choices in terms of material to produce. It’s just a pity that some of the works they’ve chosen, such as Richard Scrimger’s novel about the year he spent as a stay at hand father, are no longer in print.
Ahune, the Frost Lord
Monday, June 30, 2008 @ 5:24 PM
After numerous attempts to summon and defeat Ahune, the Frost Lord, with Menoly, I was finally able to complete the event with my priest, Lisel. It’s an interesting encounter and there’s nothing else quite like it in the game. It’s also fairly difficult—or at least I found it difficult the first time I attempted it with my warrior.
It wasn’t so hard, though, when I made a few attempts with my priest. The reason, I suppose, is that I was performing a much different role with my priest. The encounter depends very heavily on killing off all the little elementals that inevitably run to do unmentionable things to the group’s healer. As a healing priest, I was much more able than the paladin, who was our healer in the attempts I made on my warrior, to escape the attentions of the various elementals. One of a priest’s special abilities is to temporarily decrease the amount of “threat” that they pose to all the monsters in an encounter. The ability isn’t super useful, but it does just enough, and is usable often enough, that it made a very effective survival tool against the waves of ice and air elementals. In contrast, a paladin healer can make him/herself totally immune to all damage for a short time—but that ability can only be used after a long cooldown period and then the paladin is left depending on his allies to protect him.
It’s one of the few times in a small group setting in World of Warcraft that class really, really makes a difference as to how easy the encounter is. Well, outside of the arena, anyway.
Rogers’ iPhone Service Plans Pricing
Thursday, June 26, 2008 @ 9:40 PM
Rogers has publicly announced the pricing for the various service plans for Apple’s iPhone. I was suitably unimpressed. The absolutely cheapest plan included a limited number of minutes, a smallish number of text messages, and a ludicrously low bandwidth cap for data use. The bandwidth cap is so low, in fact, that if you spent any time at all watching trailers or YouTube videos, or if you purchased a few albums from the iTunes store, you would easily surpass the cap and wind up having to pay a fairly exhorbitant price for each additional megabyte of data.
In the states, AT&T’s service plans for the iPhone all included unlimited data usage. Clearly, they want you to take advantage of Google maps. They want you to check your email, surf the web, and download the latest and stupidest YouTube videos.
Clearly, Rogers wants us to do that, too. And they want to charge us an arm and a leg for doing it.
Even if I had been planning on purchasing an iPhone, as long as Rogers has such a greedy approach to service plans, there is no way that I could justify the cost of having Apple’s latest and greatest. Apple should have found another partner in Canada. Or they should have done it themselves.
