Archive for October, 2004
Although my recent interest in the American elections has somewhat waned —with the exception of Jon Stewart’s appearances on Crossfire and C-SPAN, which were more about the media than the candidates— my wife Jenny has continued to be quite caught up in the whole song-and-dance show. I do share her concerns with all the potential negative repercussions of re-electing Bush, not only in the U.S., but the rest of the world (including Canada, where we live), and so I’d like to afford her the opportunity to share a few links and speak her mind. (Okay, darling, you can unlock the front door now. It’s cold sleeping in the Jeep….)
Jenny speaks:
I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do my best to help make the world a better place. Doug (who is also rooting for Kerry, smart man that he is) is letting me guest blog at the risk of losing some of his growing readership.
The amount of information can be overwhelming, but I’ve picked a few things to think about.
The New York Observer today endorsed John Kerry, in an editorial with one of the better summaries of why Americans should vote for John Kerry on November 2:
“John Kerry understands that disorder is dangerous in this world, that intelligence and rationality are the right partners to passion, resolve and principle. As he showed in his three focused and well-prepared debate performances with President Bush, he is a man of intensity and rationality, whose 30 years in public life have prepared him to restore America’s fundamental understanding of what it takes to be the “last, best hope on earth.” A soldier of freedom, an American idealist, a public man with a tested private soul, he seems to understand that leadership in a democracy entails eliciting the better angels of our nature, and that greatness begins with goodness and surmounts in strength.”
Link
Salon’s Eric Boehlert noted recently that Kerry’s endorsement lead is the exception rather than the norm for Democratic candidates:
“As the mountain of newspaper endorsements pile up in favor of Sen. John Kerry, including dozens from dailies that backed Bush in 2000, the Bush/Cheney campaign is dismissing the trend as no big deal. ‘Look, the Republican candidate will never win the contest for editorial board endorsements. The major dailies across the country tend to skew liberal,’ RNC chairman Ed Gillespie told CNN last week. That spin comes straight out of the GOP handbook that insists the mainstream press tilts to the left, so of course newspapers love Democrats come Election Day.
“Only problem is, it’s not accurate. In fact, the complete opposite is true. Since 1940 when industry trade magazine Editor & Publisher began tracking newspapers during presidential elections, only two Democratic candidates — Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Bill Clinton in 1992 — have ever won more endorsements than their Republican opponent.”
I encourage you to visit the John Kerry website and blog to read reasons for the general endorsements and press endorsements from Republicans and Democrats alike.
The Daily Show on the missing explosives: Bush, Cheney and Guiliani blaming the troops! What would we do without the jester to tell the truth in the puppet-king’s court?
A must-see site: www.internetvetsfortruth.org. Its goal is “to present you with these clips to help you make an informed choice next Tuesday. We hope you enjoy, and draw your own conclusions. Please help spread the word. Tell a friend, a relative, a co-worker, or Ohio.”
From AriannaOnline:
Faith Abuse: When God Becomes A Campaign Ploy October 27, 2004 This is my last column before Election Day. With less than a week to go, I plan on doing everything in my power to defeat George W. Bush (need a ride to the polls?). Then I’m going to get down on my knees and pray to a higher power. Link
From the John Kerry blog (link):
“An Insult to All Self-Respecting Wolves
Wolves are fairly intelligent animals, but even the smartest wolf can make a mistake.
On a new website, Wolfpacks for Truth, the leader of the pack of wolves in George Bush’s recent commercial wails:
“We were tricked by George Bush.”
According to their spokeswolf, “They told us we were shooting a Greenpeace commercial! When the camera crew showed up, we wondered why they were all driving Hummers. Our agent assured us it was a Greenpeace commercial and they paid TWICE our hourly steak rate. Little did we know we were being tricked into this vicious campaign attack ad.”
Very funny, but also lots of important links with important information for all those that care about both the truth and the environment.
Bush is anything but a “good steward of the land”: link
Q: what is the difference between the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam?
A: President Bush knew how to get out of the Vietnam War.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi civilian death count increases with each passing day:
New study puts civilian deaths in Iraq at 100,000 An estimated 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq as a direct or indirect consequence of last year’s US-led invasion, according to a new study by a research team at the Bloom-berg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Link
See Pro-life? Look at the fruits by Dr. Glen Harold Stassen for his take on why Pro-Life and pro-choice should both vote for Kerry on November 2.
I suggest you watch a Frontline documentary called “The Choice 2004″ from PBS, which I consider to be incredibly insightful, balanced, and well-made. It can be viewed online.
Canada’s premier investigative documentary and news program The Fifth Estate has produced a must-see documentary and companion website called The Unauthorized Biography of Dick Cheney. (Torrent) (In addition to its impact among viewers and on society, the Fifth Estate is also recognized by its peers. It has won a remarkable 227 awards, including an Oscar for best documentary, three international Emmy Awards, 28 Geminis, 20 awards and certificates for investigative reporting from the Canadian Association of Journalists and dozens of honours from The New York and Columbus International film and video festivals. The show’s credentials are almost beyond reproach.)
CBC has also aired the Canada-France co-production “The World According to Bush” (direct download and high-quality torrent), “a two-hour documentary about the inner workings of the Bush administration that will alarm even the most hardened Washington-watchers. Both fans and critics of the acclaimed Fahrenheit 9/11 will want to see this investigation of the U.S. administration.” Some choice quotes:
- “This administration has chosen to use the propaganda tools of Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels” — Robert Steele, CIA Covert Operations
- “It is starting to look like a third world republic – a banana republic that is.” — Robert Baer, CIA Covert operations
- “No administration ever allowed herself a single tenth of what has occurred under George W. Bush. None.” - Los Angeles Times.
- “This administration is behaving like pigs at a trough.” - Joseph Trento, historian.
Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels said, “The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed.” He also wrote, “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly… it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
Does this sound familiar? All you have to do was listen to the way Bush reacted to Kerry in debates. In the face of reason, Bush kept repeating the same simplistic catch phrases which made no sense if you were listening with two ears and a brain.
Perhaps what Goebbels said it more true than ever in an age when quick sound-bites are caught, taken out of context, and served up to the public with their TV dinner. Trying to make sense of what I was seeing, I’m half ashamed to admit that I had the very same thoughts as Norman Mailer in the opening of “The World According to Bush”. It is shameful to see how this administration has cloaked itself under the name of faith, and in the guise of a government-induced “terror” used the Americans’ goodwill and true faith against themselves. But God is God, not Bush, not Cheney. To question people in power is not anti-patriotic, especially while the stink of hypocrisy grows stronger.
There is hope. With your vote, with your decision, you hold the fate of the world in your hands. Use it wisely.
(If you are an American living overseas and want more information about absentee voting (you can now use fax), see the site for Americans Overseas for Kerry.)
October 31st, 2004
Fascinating. A “quiz” to help you determine which candidate to vote for, based upon your opinion on all the key issues. Sponsored by AOL News with Time magazine.
AOL Presidential Match
Apparently, I’m 79% Kerry, 21% Bush. Too bad I’m Canadian. Anyone got a spare ballot to send me? 
October 30th, 2004
I’m told by my friends across the pond that this article in the Guardian suddenly makes Wikipedia more respectable: Guardian Unlimited: Simon Waldman on Wikipedia’s Success. Not being a Brit, I don’t know if this comment was meant tongue-in-cheek or not, but the article is excellent nonetheless.
October 30th, 2004
When did scientists find the first species of hobbits?
Xinhuanet: Scientists find new species of hobbits
October 29th, 2004
(Making the rounds via email. I have no idea about the original source….)
October 29th, 2004
I’ve actually reached that (yes, very low) threshold of popularity that brings with it that scourge of open blogs, comment spam. Some huckster started posted dozens of comments on several different entries promoting a gambling site, another tried to hawk his virility wares, and a “fun-girl” invited me to her site to watch her perform theoretically-impossible (and illegal) acts on various barnyard animals. As such, I’ve started implementing measures to curb spam, including holding for approval the comments that include keywords like “poker” and “viagra”. I’m not having to look at black-holes yet (I’ve been inexplicably blocked by them in the past because of DNS glitches), but I do have my eye on the pertinent WordPress plugins for future reference.
In the meantime, if you do happen to comment on my assumed need for gambling, hangover cures, cialis, instant college degrees, a larger penis, Congoese lottery windfalls, a second mortgage, or some of that sweet-horse-luvin’, I’m sorry that you’ll have to wait for me to approve the comment before it goes live.
October 29th, 2004
Probably not news to a lot of WordPress folks, but I’ve recently discovered an excellent caching version of a del.icio.us plugin over at w-a-s-a-b-i: del.isio.us cached. It only grabs the del.icio.us feed once every 20 minutes, so as to play nice with their server.
I’ve created a new box in the menu bar at right, and “subscribed” my douglasjohnston/ammt feed straight into it, so as I trip across interesting things on the web, I only have to give it the tag “ammt” and it will appear in the box. (The Firefox del.icio.us extensions –Foxylicious and del.icio.us– are quite handy for doing this with a quick click or two.) Very nice. I’m loving del.icio.us and all the creative uses for it that people are coming up with.
October 28th, 2004
Not too long ago, when my ailing Palm was proving a little too unstable for my liking, and when I was considering getting back to “life like in the old days” (i.e., before using the computer for everything), I located my nice leather DayRunner organiser that I toted faithfully around ten years ago. As I mentioned in a previous posting, I used to be a DayRunner fanatic, and even went so far as to buy every little knick-knack and add-on that I could. Way back when, spending $20 Cdn for a packet of 25 pieces of paper (the cost of the Project Management forms, for example) wasn’t an issue, and soon my ‘Runner was busting at the seams with all kinds of organisational goodness. Nowadays, money is a bigger issue, as is my distance from any office superstore. Being the proper little Net junkie, I searched online in vain for templates: only some poor Word documents and a bunch of folks hawking print-it-yourself templates for $30 per type. I could easily find the generic contact and calendar refills in WalMart, but the rest were destined to incur real costs. So I fired up Illustrator.
I browsed through the “screenshots” (paper-shots?) of the newer forms available at DayRunner.com and decided that I could produce decent blank-and-white versions of them with modifications and upgrades. It took a little work, but I managed to produce a pretty good Illustrator CS file with fronts and backs for Project Management, Contact Log, To-Do and Notes. They were suitable for the “Classic” size of my DayRunner (8.5 x 5.5, or half the size of a regular letter-size paper), and could be easily printed double-sided, cut, and punched. Note that there are no logos or anything, and should work fine in any similar size DayTimer or generic $15 organiser.
Although I’ve drifted away from my DayRunner again, I figured that I might as well offer these files for all you paper organiser junkies out there. It beats paying $30 per file.
- organiser_templates.zip: in Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 format
Simply unzip the file, and you should have a directory of eight PDFs, a front and back each for Project Management, Contact Log, To-Do and Notes. Print off a batch of “fronts”, flip the paper over, and print an equal number of “backs”. I use a stock WalMart-bought guillotine for chopping each page exactly in half, and then use a hole-punch (make sure it’s the right spacing for your organiser!) to prep them for the organiser. Don’t tell Acrobat Reader to resize the pages “to fit” or you may not get the forms to line up properly for punching.
If anybody wants the original Adobe Illustrator CS file to make modifications, such as preparing the templates for different size paper, please email me (see my address at bottom right). I only ask that you re-distribute any modifications back into the community.
Hope this helps somebody else out there.
These template files are hereby licensed under Creative Commons.
Update : New versions of this DIY Planner can always be found here.
October 28th, 2004
I venture into Internet Explorer so very rarely nowadays, so I didn’t realise that some of my CSS was a bit too modern for IE’s tastes, and hence the problem with the menu dropping below the content on the right. Went into Windows this morning and saw the problem for the first time. I retrofitted the CSS to make it IE-friendly. My sincere apologies to all those folks using IE to view this site (about 30% of you, according to the logs)….
October 27th, 2004
- Red Herring: Wiki wars: Because wikis can be edited by anyone, the potential for bias is certainly a major issue to be overcome by their communities. Red Herring magazine looks at the more contentious issues arising in the Wikipedia (hint: politics, religion, sex).
- Wikinews is a new project aiming to be for news what the Wikipedia is for encyclopaediae. I have no doubt that this could be an incredible resource, but with such a large potential for biased reporting, it would seem best suited to niche areas or fanning flame wars. Not to mention that, unlike something that treats content as mostly static objects (for example, the Wikipedia, while growing continuously, has “anchors” for the further development of each topic), a news site must be updated constantly before people will use it. I guess time will tell whether the critical mass and bias issues are resolved.
- Bushisms from About.com. Updated frequently, plenty of pointers on other Bushism sites. Several people I know put new Bushisms in their email/forum signatures every day.
- Newsforge: Getting Started with OpenOffice.org Macros, essential for office suite power users.
- NewsForge: OpenOffice.org’s integrated development environment, another article taking the concept of in-suite capabilities a notch further.
- Garfield Comic Generator: create your own Garfield strip. Very slick. (Why this is sitting on a government-sponsored health site, I have no idea.)
October 26th, 2004
Just getting back from a few days on the road. Owing to a buggy power supply, I haven’t been able to access the Net in nearly four days. It’s amazing: here I am, around plenty of people, with full access to television, radio, newspapers and humans, and I feel completely disconnected from the world….
Business 2.0 has an article on the Firefox browser, headlined (in the typical far-fetched and sensational way) Microsoft’s Worst Nightmare. While I definitely evangelise the merits of Firefox to anyone willing to listen, it’s going to be a while before any David can take the Goliath down. Still, this article does go over a lot of the progress made recently with the browser, concentrating on the contributions of the 19-year-old wunderkind Blake Ross. While it’s nothing extraordinarily detailed or new, it’s a good summary for those folks not following this exciting story (well, “exciting” to techies anyway).
On related news, I see that the SpreadFirefox campaign to purchase a full-page ad in the New York Times for the release of 1.0 (on November 9th) has been an incredible success. Still time left, if you want to see your name in print in the NYT as a contributor. It’s a brilliant idea, and very well executed; the team should be proud.
October 25th, 2004
Continued from Part 1….
Emacs is not for everybody. In fact, I would never recommend it unless you were a geek (or a wanna-be geek), in the most absolute sense of the word.
In years past, I had dabbled in it quite a bit, and had read the O’Reilly book Learning GNU Emacs cover to cover, many times. It always felt comfortable, even though there were no menus, no buttons, and only a lot of scary white letters on a stark black background. Remembering complex keystrokes is the norm (people often joke that Emacs stands for “Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift”), and there are plenty of esoteric hyphenated commands that you can feed it in order to handle even the most complex of tasks. But I really only used the editor for handling system files or writing code even though I knew it could be used for much, much more. For my two-week “Emacs retreat”, I had a number of big decisions to make regarding how I should approach things, and what I would use….
There are two main “flavours” of Emacs: the plain-vanilla standard Emacs pumped out by the GNU folks, including the instigator of the free software movement, Richard Stallman; and the version created by some folks who didn’t quite see eye-to-eye with Stallman’s development methodologies and direction (to put it lightly), XEmacs. XEmacs has menus, buttons, graphical elements, easily updatable packages, etc. As I wanted to avoid anything with a user-friendly GUI (although some Windows/Mac people may find XEmacs anything but), I opted for the pure and unadultered GNU Emacs.
The next stage in the experiment, to figure out what I needed to do in my daily computing rituals, and find Emacs solutions to meet them. I made a list of the most important things, and proceeded to research the packages I would need to install. Here are the main tasks, and the “mode” I chose for each one (Emacs uses modes to provide functionality for each of its editor tasks).
- Writing code: Emacs supports dozens of computer languages, including my current favourites, Perl and Python. It also handles syntax highlighting, code folding, function tags, compiling, debugging, function/variable location (through etags) and more. It’s an excellent IDE, right out of the box.
- Writing technical documents: Emacs has an excellent mode called AUCTeX, which provides functions for writing, navigating and compiling LaTeX documents. (LaTeX is basically a mark-up language that comes with most Linux distributions, and is also available for Windows and Mac. It produces beautiful, structured print documents and PDF files, although it’s not easily “tweakable”.)
- Writing prose: Although Emacs is basically a text editor, it is a text editor on steroids. The basic text mode handles formatting, wrapping, split-screen windows (very handy!), bookmarks, find-replace, spell-checking, and more. If you use this in combination with LaTeX or another mark-up language, you can also create margin notes, footnotes, endnotes, bibliographical information, tables, and almost anything else you can do in a modern word processor. It’s not WYSIWYG like Word or WordPerfect, but I find it far less distracting to concentrate on the words and structure, rather than how a font or indentation looks.
- Writing HTML: There are several modes available for Emacs, including html-helper-mode, which provide syntax highlighting, help with tags, and all the standard editor features, including editing a file live on an FTP server –very important when you are constructing a live page to be used in conjunction with dynamic content.
- Email: VM is probably the best-known email client for Emacs. It takes a while to understand how to set up all the bits and pieces, but once it’s set up, you are an absolute master of how email comes and goes. Virtual folders, advanced editing abilities, insertion of form-based information, and all the bells and whistles of regular Emacs integration (such as piping information from a command line) are present and accounted for.
- Contact management: There can be only one… the Insidious Big Brother Database, BBDB. It certainly takes some getting used to, but once you have, you become spoiled by how well it integrates with everything Emacs, including planner, mail and news.
- Information organisation: This is something I have wrestled with for years, on multiple platforms. Juggling hundreds or thousands of bits and pieces of information is not for the faint of heart, and I’ve struggled with the best way to do it. Files in multiple folders become too rigid and often escape logical categorisation, a database structure means constantly performing queries instead of semi-structured browsing, and binary-format files (like those of Word) are often not searchable in other applications that need to retrieve the information. Enter the wiki, or more specifically here, the emacs-wiki mode. It’s smart enough to link pages together as you write them, you can create structured pages to group similar types of information, and it allows you to export the whole site to a website so you can access it from a regular browser anywhere? Sold!
- Planning and scheduling: Emacs comes standard with a built-in calendar that you can use to schedule events (both one-time and repeated) and a diary that allows you to make entries for every day. However, sometimes a more robust planning system is needed, and there exists an amazing planner mode that builds upon the aforementioned emacs-wiki. With it, you can create tasks, projects, notes, etc. It certainly isn’t as friendly to use as Microsoft Outlook or a Palm Pilot, but once you get used to it, it seems just as capable. As in all things Emacsey, the greater complexity means that, at the end of the learning curve, you can do things you didn’t think possible. It also allows you to export your tasks and notes to a website… see the journal of the enigmatic Sacha Chua for an example of how this works, and while you’re there, poke around for tonnes of useful “add-ons”.
- Browsing: This is a bit tougher. There is an older, buggy browser mode for Emacs called w3, but my experience with it has often been painful. The project was in the process of a major rewrite, but has since become rather stagnant, as the main developer apparently got a life (shame on him!). Instead, I selected w3m, which works in conjunction with the w3m command-line app to browse websites, view tables, download things, etc. Nowhere near as usable for most pages as any graphical browser, but it gets the job done (and sometimes much faster, as it doesn’t display graphics, only text).
- Chatting: Emacs has a number of chat client modes. As I don’t really do much Instant Messenging nowadays, I skipped over those clients (but hint: anything Jabber-related will speak to all the standard IM clients, including MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, etc.). I figured I would want to solicit advice from IRC chat rooms, so I selected ERC as my client.
- File management: Emacs comes standard with dired, which essentially allows you to browse directories, copy and move files, rename, delete, open (”fetch”), and create filters for functions such as searching, replacing, passing files to other programs, and more. Rather like Windows Explorer the OS X Finder on steroids, but nowhere near as pretty or as easy to use.
- USENET news: One of the “killer apps” of Emacs, the GNUS reader is not only great for regular USENET newsgroup reading, but also supposedly mail (although I prefer VM for the latter). Standard split-pane: threaded news items up top, the article down below. I don’t know if it handles binaries (I don’t do much of that), but it seems that the capability is there. It does allow very rapid reading, killing and filing of newsgroup content.
- Command-line: Emacs is very well integrated with the command line. Besides the ability to pipe data to and from the shell, there are at least two functions I find very helpful: it can run a program and display the output immediately in a buffer; and it has a full shell mode that runs in a buffer and allows you to use all standard Emacs functions there (for example, macros). Very powerful.
- Macros: The macros capability of Emacs puts every other editor I’ve used, even the most “modern” ones, to shame. You record your strokes as a macro, then save it to a macros file for easy access. The macro itself is in elisp, and you can go and modify it to serve your purposes however you wish. It’s a little like AppleScript on the Mac, except you have many times more functions that you may call, and the elisp language is extremely versatile. (Emacs itself is written in elisp.)
The research was done, the decisions had been made. Now, the hard part…. It was time to live inside of Emacs for a couple of weeks. Like a Buddhist monk winding his way up into the mountains, away from civilisation and yearning to confront and either reinforce or renounce his system of beliefs, I set my Linux box to reboot in text mode and put myself into the hands of the Church of Emacs.
To be continued…
October 21st, 2004
People who know me well (and some not-so-well) are well aware that I am a pretty staunch Open Source advocate. It started back in the late 80’s and early 90’s when I was using Pascal as my language of choice. At the time, there were essentially two camps of x86 programmers: the Pascal people who freely offered advice and shared their code, mainly through some gopher and FTP servers in Finland; and the C folks, who seemed to jealously guard their creations, offering libraries and advice only for cold hard cash. (Yes, I’m aware of the GNU folks, but they didn’t really show up in the “circles” I frequented.) It was an early technology lesson for me: it was through the sharing of information that I became a good programmer in Pascal, and the dearth of it made me a lousy programmer in C. Since seizing upon Linux as my favorite OS in 1994, I hadn’t turned back. Indeed, each day made me appreciate the community more and more, and (in between skewering poor Microsoft boothies at trade shows who hadn’t even heard of Linux) I acted as an evangelist advocating Linux for core techies and web development environments. So why do I find I’m using Mac OS X far more than Linux as my main OS recently?
Now, don’t get me wrong: Linux is still wonderful. I’d take a broken low-power Linux box over a fine-tuned high-end Windows box any day. It’s a matter of “best tool for the job,” and for me, Linux is by far a better tool than Windows for my day-to-day work: I still use Debian Linux instead of the Windows XP Pro partition on my workplace’s dual-boot Vaio laptop. Between virtual windows, middle-clicks, my highly-customised environment, and hundreds of useful utilities, I am far more productive under Linux even for typical office work — the cross-platform OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird are my chief applications. My webservers are LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-Perl/PHP/Python), and they perform exceedingly well, providing the ultimate mixture of server flexibility and power.
But at home, it’s a different matter nowadays. Backing out of programming and server work, and concentrating more on writing and multimedia, means that OS X –as it stands out of the box– is more suitable for my tasks, and does everything with little or no tinkering. While I do like tinkering, I find that I often take more pleasure in it than actually getting productive work done. So the OS has now essentially become “transparent”, allowing me to concentrate on productivity without distractions. I can’t go tweak-happy like I can on Linux (infinitely customisable everything), but I can pay homage to my inner geek by jumping to the Terminal and using all the standard UNIX command-line wares, including Emacs, vi, Python, Perl and the Fink-fare. But because it’s not “in my face” like in Linux, where I habitually keep at least four xterms open at any one time, it’s not a constant temptation.
Meanwhile, OS X allows me to run applications like Dreamweaver, Flash, Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator. (Macromedia: get your ass in gear and deliver those Linux versions of your apps you promised.) True, some of these do have Linux Open Source near-equivalents, but they’re not quite there yet. (I do use GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus and other solid applications for other work-related uses, though.) So, until the Open Source applications catch up, or Adobe and Macromedia applications run well under Linux, I’m going to remain in eternal “tinker” mode there, and thus not be able to get everything done at home that I’d like to do.
So I find myself at a transition point. Moving from a programmer/techie role to a content producer means that Linux, in itself, is not quite as valuable as it used to be. Right now, the range of software that runs on OS X –both Open Source and (often expensive) proprietary applications– means that it has a far broader range of usage for me. With UNIX behind the scenes, I can still seek the capabilities of the command-line to get things done in ways that I’m familiar with, and can run Apache, PHP, MySQL and other powerful Open Source server apps in a pinch as well.
OS X is thus the ultimate self-contained operating system for this stage in my life. Not an easy thing for a Linux enthusiast to admit, but that’s a fact, as embarrassing as it is for me. I’m not cut out to be an acolyte in the Cult of Steve Jobs, nor am I an Mac zealot, but I do have to say that Apple has produced an operating system that –at least for the moment– suits me and my lifestyle perfectly.
Ouch. I’m expecting a lot of flames after this….
October 20th, 2004
It just struck me that I’ve been on the Net for 20 years this month. I remember distinctly: I was fifteen years old, and a month or so into grade nine. A friend of mine that had been at some high-brow mathematics camp during the summer (I had been reading Orwell’s 1984 during the same period, I recall) and came back with a Datapac account, which was one of the only ways that an individual –at least in our neck of the woods– could access what was becoming the Internet. I had been playing around with tiny local BBSes and QuantumLink (an early large and very expensive BBS service from the States), which at least gave me menus to explore things, get little files, and drop messages into forums. My friend had almost no interest in his account, so he gave me the login and password. I fired up my Commodore 64, jumped into my Kermit terminal, and did the manual dial-up. Mere minutes later, I was face-to-face with a black screen and a blinking white cursor. I started typing commands randomly: “dir”, “help”, “list” and other logical requests gave no information, only errors. Since there were no books at our tiny mall bookstore covering this strange experience, and there were no easily-accessible online sources of information, I could only keep guessing at commands. Eventually, I started figuring things out. Like pieces of a puzzle that suddenly materialise and form part of the broader picture, each new tidbit was not only exciting but hinted at greater things to come. Sad to say, the ensuing year or two of alternating frustration, experimentation and exhilaration was one of the last times I truly had fun on the Internet. Until now.
I’ve wracked my brain many times trying to figure out the reasons why I loved my early experiences so much, compared to recent years. Perhaps it was because I was exploring a hitherto-unknown world and living by my wits. Maybe it was because everything was new and fresh and unspoiled by modern commercialism. Or, given my awkward pre-trendy-geek existance, perhaps I was holding out hope for meeting others of my preternatural kind.
But I’m pretty sure the reason is this: at that age, technology was only a hobby. As the years went on, fewer people wanted to avail themselves of my other skills, demonstrating only curiosity and fascination with my technical abilities. After finishing university and teaching English for a year-long contract, the province’s teachers’ glut forced me into taking a job with a fledgeling multimedia company, where I was responsible for producing CD-ROMs and websites. It was interesting at first, but when a hobby becomes a job, one often loses any sense of enjoyment in it. It was no different for me.
Flash-forward till last year. I’d spent ten years ping-ponging among various marketing, communications, technical and academic organisations, almost always doing consulting, producing multimedia, programming or handling technical training. The fragments of the dot-com bomb were still lodged in my skin, and most people I knew from the industry had disappeared from the face of the earth. The days of jet-setting around the continent to offer advice were long gone, figments of idealistic imaginations, and now I sat in a small town in central Newfoundland betwildered at the strange twists and turns of Silicon Valley greed and pseudo-inspired nonsense. Each day, I woke up hating myself more for putting endless hours of study and practice into skills that became obsolete six months later. For all the 100-hour work-weeks, there was nothing to show except some out-of-date machines, some vague memories of enthusiastic ventures long faded into the ether, and a burned-out and unhealthy shell of a body….
But now… now is different. The web is fun again.
Part of the reason, I ascribe to not needing to produce commercial websites any more. There’s something disheartening about expending all your creative energies to be greeted with lacklustre response from businessmen and the ultimate question, “How will this contribute to the bottom line?” I have also given up almost all programming, as most of the applications I would need to produce are already available in some form, especially in the Open Source world. While I used to enjoy the challenges inherent in crunching code, the left side of my brain would frequently seize control over the right side, and any creativity would be overruled by my steel-cold analytical machine. Imagination atrophied, and the number of times I would be struck by heart-pounding satori moments became few and far between. My recent decision to walk away from all commericalism and technical doldrum, and instead concentrate on my future in academics, was one of the smartest moves I’ve ever made.
But there’s something else, something that I’ve watched for years only as an outsider: the social and personal aspects of the web. I’m not talking about the occasional idle chatter on IRC or IM, or the god-awful “social networking sites.” I’m talking about personal presence and how it ultimately connects you to others.
I started this blog as an experiment only a month or two ago. At the time, I was convinced that I would let it slide (as I’ve seen so many others do), and that it would be successful if I only had a couple of friends tune in every few days. I installed WordPress, constructed the template rather quickly, and got in the habit of writing a few entry drafts per day while I ate or waited for something. With only an odd post here and there, my blog address mentioned in a few places, I figured a few people might wind up idly clicking on my page and finding an item or two of interest. Then something happened that I didn’t expect. When I viewed my stats for the first time a week or two ago, I found I was up to nearly 1400 unique visitors per day. I get plenty of email either wanting to chat, or giving me advice, or asking for mine. I’ve even been contacted by several of my ‘Net heroes, whom I thought would never give me the time of day. I don’t say all this as an ego boost: indeed, it’s more an illustration of how setting up an inviting “homestead” on the Net can suddenly bring neighbours a-callin’.
Meanwhile, I’m having more and more fun with web technologies that are getting increasingly creative while having less of a need for “technical intervention” (which is essentially what geeks like me used to have to contend with, in order to get anything of substance done). Wikis, blogs (writing, commenting, trackbacks), Flickr, del.icio.us, online courses, Gallery, groupware, Moodle, Gmail… for the first time I can truly enjoy the web without being a techie and having to roll up my sleeves. While I know, deep down, that I’ll always be technologically-inclined, this part of my nature is beginning to manifest itself in the best ways to use and manipulate technology, not create it, or sweat out its issues and inconsistencies to make a buck. I’ve decided to leave that to others who genuinely care about it, and I couldn’t be happier. Snapping a picture of my newborn son, and sending it the web for relatives to view, is far more intrinsically rewarding to me than slogging through any amount of code that silently powers the system behind the scenes.
I’ve found joy again. And ironically, it’s because of the very technologies that brought me to the brink of self-destruction….
October 18th, 2004
Great introductory article for newbies about RSS, del.icio.us, Flickr and Bloglines over at Newsforge: Bloglines, Flickr, and del.icio.us make RSS delectable. Haven’t jumped with both feet yet into Bloglines, but the rest I now find indespensible.
October 14th, 2004
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