I have often cultivated tastes that are a bit out of the mainstream. I’m not saying my tastes are refined or cultured or anything, because my reading list will quickly prove otherwise, but I still manage to avoid by design or accident most of pop culture. To wit:
I have never read a Dan Brown novel
I have not seen either Transformers movies
I have no cable, so no TV — I’ve not seen an episode of House, Dexter or a billion other hip shows
I don’t know most of the top ten musical acts. I’ve heard of Lady Gaga because some things are unavoidable. 😛
This isn’t really good or bad, just a thing.
To complete this random post, the Robert Zemeckis-directed version of A Christmas Carol featuring Jim Carrey that’s out this holiday season looks really really bad. I mean, astonishingly bad.
In this seemingly innocent run I “tweaked” my right calf, a factor I noted in my next two runs. At the time I thought it unremarkable enough that I did not mention it at all. This past Monday I tried running and after half a lap the sensation in my right calf was setting off the proverbial alarm bells. I quit at that point and today went to the clinic. The doctor did a bit of squeezing and found the magic spot, as evidenced by my face going through interesting contortions. The verdict: I had sprained my calf and even more brilliantly, kept running on it, which risked making it much worse.
He wondered if I had extended medical through work that would cover physio-therapy. I explained that I did not and he offhandedly suggested checking the Internet for a little self-help there. He then outlined some measures to take after running: stretching, icing the calf and so on. Oh, and that I was not to do any running for at least the next four weeks.
This, in a word, sucks. I guess I’ll have more time to write now.
I’ve marked Monday November 23rd on my calendar with “I can run now!” My one consolation is the doctor could have recommended six weeks but felt (literally!) that four weeks should be good.
“Canada is the first country to develop and implement a comprehensive approach to internet traffic management practices” — CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein
Here are the dramatic changes the CRTC is putting in place to make sure those big ol’ ISPs like Rogers, Bell, Telus and Shaw keep in line:
30 days notice required before any “network management changes”
traffic-shaping (throttling) only as a “last resort” – but still A-OK!
charging “consumers rates based on how much bandwidth they use each month, or offer discounts during off-peak hours”
The ISPs can pretty much do everything they have been doing and on top of that have now been given the green light to soak subscribers with even higher fees based on some undefined standard of usage. The notion that they would offer discounts for off-peak hours is, of course, laughable.
This has to be one of the mushiest, dunderheaded set of regulations I have ever seen. Not surprisingly, all of the major telecom companies are pretty much fine with it.
…that has the company’s name and the word “scam” attached to it as the first suggestion in Google:
My resume on monster.ca shows that my experience is primarily in IT and tech support, so it makes sense that I’d be contacted by a direct marketer of financial services that works based on a recruitment plan that isn’t quite a pyramid scheme. Tempting but no!
I got a new pair of glasses after determining that the current pair didn’t quite fit my more slender 2009 face. The frames are just a touch bigger than I would have liked but aren’t too bad. Thanks go to Nic for the picture, taken yesterday at Melriches. Getting a decent photo of me is something of a minor miracle.
And for a laugh, here’s a self-portrait I just took of me wearing my old glasses (not the ones I got in December 2008, the ones prior to that). True, I was 40 pounds heavier when I originally wore them, but still, it’s like any fashion sense I had was removed at some point by aliens as I slept blissfully unaware. The old glasses are, to use the technical term, “big ass”.
I first got online back in the late 1980s. I remember trying to play Populous over modem with a friend (we both had Amigas). Later I took my first tentative steps into the realm of BBSes and message boards, connecting through local ISPs and taking part in discussions via Fidonet. Conversations online back then were radically different than now, of course. You subscribed to topics that interested you and every few days you’d receive a new packet of messages. Using a message reader you’d sift through them, find ones you wanted to reply to and then upload your responses, which would also take several days to arrive to others. In a way, it was just a semi-automated version of writing letters. As such, posts tended to be longer and more thoughtful. You didn’t waste a reply with something terse or forgetful because it could be upwards of a week before you got anything back (it was truly a delight when new packets of messages would sometimes arrive the very next day!)
By the mid-90s computer magazines were going on about the two hot topics of the day: Windows 95 and the Internet. I was cruising along with a 14.4 modem and split my time between browsing my ISP’s file database (text-based UI only) and taking my first tentative steps on the World Wide Web using early versions of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. I was absolutely dazzled that you could do more than one thing at a time on this fancy web thing. I could view a site and download a file. Amazing! Slow, too, but compared to 300 baud modems that downloaded text slowly enough to read it on-the-fly, it seemed like the future had arrived.
BBSes began to die out as message boards started appearing and I stopped using Fidonet (I remember being subscribed to the Music category and reading insightful posts from someone named Patrick Goodman back around 1990 or 1991. He was a huge fan of Queen and I vividly recall his devastation at the death of Freddie Mercury). Like everyone else, I jumped over to message boards which allowed for very nearly instant communication (that was also available via numerous instant messenger clients like AIM, ICQ and others, all of which were built more around one on one conversations).
As the Internet became a larger presence in our lives, it has continued to evolve. Nowadays it is more the exception than the rule that a company has a website. Magazines and newspapers (especially) have sometimes struggled to stay relevant when information can be disseminated quickly and “free”. Myspace and Facebook has ushered in an era of so-called social networking and as news organizations beef up their online components, we have seen many include the ability for the general public — really, anyone with a computer/device that connects to the Internet — to post comments on news stories, giving non-scientific and not necessarily representative but immediate feedback on stories of the day.
I have posted several times here lamenting the state of the commentary made by Joe Public on various news sites. Admittedly, these posters are a self-selecting group, so one should always take their comments with the appropriate grains of salt. But when I reflect on how the public has acted overall, I admit I start to wonder. How intelligent, rational and logical is the average person? Why do I never see evidence of this in the things they say online? 😛
All right, that’s unfair, there is obviously intelligent, rational and logical commentary out there but it amazes and depresses me how often it is drowned out by voices that demand they be heard, however irrelevant and stupid those voices might be. This long post is, I suppose, simply a further lamentation.
I read The Tyee, a website that describes itself in the masthead as “B.C.’s Home for Culture, News and Solutions”. It would be fair to describe its editorial slant as more left or center-left, which often puts it at odds with both the provincial and federal governments, not to mention the Canwest-dominated local media (in particular, the two Vancouver dailies). Yesterday they ran a piece by Geoff Meggs, a Vision Vancouver city councilor, calling for the dismantling of the Georgia viaduct, a legacy of the freeway that never was. A sidebar to another blog post goes into greater detail on how to remove and rebuild the area where the viaduct exists. It seems like a reasonable plan to me and one worthy of consideration and debate.
The comments on the story cover a range of quality but I’m going to highlight a few of the worst.
snert writes:
A silly idea.
Thought up by someone with not enough to do. Kinda like, Oh! Let’s change the corporate logo.
Well, why is it a silly idea? What is the purpose of posting such a comment? There is no insight here, nothing to be gleaned except “I don’t like it”. Well, hooray for you, snert, you’ve made your unsubstantiated opinion known. To what end?
Dr Alexander uses the common ploy of grinding his axe regardless of actual topic:
Instead of restricting access…..
to downtown Vancouver by tearing down viaducts (no thanks, I paid for them, keep them there)….
Perhaps we should restrict Gordo’s access to BC.
We would all be better off.
“I paid for them” is a rationale for keeping them? How about no, it isn’t? And then an unrelated swipe at Gordon Campbell just because. Brilliant.
To be fair, there are longer comments that address the pros and cons of the idea and I offer my thanks to those that contributed them. But it seems so often that people just post lazy, negative crap for its own sake. Am I some crazy intellectual elitist for wanting better? Hell, I wince at half of the posts I make on this site, so I’m hardly one to cast myself as a model to aspire to, but at least I try when I put it out there on a shared forum. I wish more people did.
UPDATE: Nic brought up a term that had eluded me until now that encapsulates this “cranky old guy” view of the Internet: Eternal September. Wikipedia describes it thusly:
The expression encapsulates the belief that an endless influx of new users (newbies) since that date has continuously degraded standards of discourse and behavior on Usenet and the wider Internet.
It is both comforting and disconcerting to see this idea codified in a formal way, such as it is.
I have at least one blog entry every day of the month for October, for a total of 22 entries thus far (including this one) , making October my bloggiest month ever.
I am uncertain as to whether or not this is a good thing.
In other news, I am to walk the dog today while Tim and Sue are off to Kelowna for the weekend. It looks to be a wet experience, if nothing else.
I’ve just finished reading my 13th book this year (scary!), appropriately it was Stephen King’s latest short story collection Just After Sunset. I had read “Stationary Bike” in a previous compilation (and it remains a favorite) but the rest were new to me. As always, some stories resonated more than others, a few seemed more like scenes or mood pieces than stories proper but the highlight for me was the one previously unpublished entry, a story called “N.” that delves into madness (and monsters) in a way that would fit perfectly in the Cthulhu mythos. I’m recommending the collection on the strength of that one alone, though there are several others that are nicely done. If any complaint is to be made it’s that none of the stories are particularly creepy.
A few weeks ago I was discussing phobias with a friend and realized that I have or had about a million of them. Most, I think, can be traced back to some kind of childhood trauma. Let’s have a look!
Acrophobia (fear of heights): I love rollercoasters. This actually doesn’t present much of a problem even for someone afraid of heights, though looking down while climbing the first hill tends to heighten (ho ho) the white knuckle aspect. I can possibly trace this fear back to my older half-brother who grew up with my father’s ex-wife. After a car accident, he was left partially brain-damaged and to most people would seem a little “off”. We were visiting him at the hospital, though this was long after the accident, so it may have been a hospital of the mind, not body. I was maybe 7 or 8 years old. It was a sunny afternoon in Victoria and we were either on a balcony or standing on a stair landing. In either case, we were well above the ground below. My half-brother thought it would be a hoot to pick me up and dangle me upside down over the edge. I did not agree but was not in a position to argue, so dangle away I did. I believe my hollering resulted in one or both of my parents halting this activity. I can’t say I was afraid of heights before this but I’ve never been crazy about them since.
Claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces): This could stem from one or two incidents. The first was being at a hospital in Victoria (a recurring theme, it seems — oddly, I have no phobias of hospitals). I don’t recall the specifics of why we were there, I just remember the elevator failing somewhere between floors and being stuck for a good while.
The second incident happened when a cousin and I went into the second closet of my bedroom. We were too young for hanky-panky so this was just “exploring”. Two of the bedrooms in the old house on St. Julian Street featured walk-in closets that had small closets in back, nestled in the space under the eaves. We had a flashlight so to better create a spooky cave feel, my cousin shut the main closet door. That was when the door knob fell off, landing somewhere on the bedroom floor. We could not get the door to open without it. A parent finally freed us after some stereo screaming.
Hydrophobia (fear of water): I never learned to swim properly as a kid. I could dogpaddle, sort of, but mostly I floundered and kept to the shallows. When the Moose Lodge installed a swimming pool, it was an exciting event for the town of Duncan. They had a pumper truck filling it and everything. No sane kid could ignore this spectacular new form of recreation, so I gingerly made my way down the ladder and into the shallow end. Somehow I managed to intake enough water to simulate a kind of pseudo-drowning. My dad fished me out. I don’t recall swimming in that pool again.
The follow-up to this occurred in January of this year when I attempted swimming lessons and discovered that water kind of creeps me out once it gets above my waist. I’ll go back. Someday.
Agoraphobia (fear of open spaces): This fear is best illustrated by a nervousness I’d feel if walking through a large field. I can’t think of how this came to be a fear. Maybe by that point in my childhood my mind just found it easier to fear everything rather than to pick and choose from a list. I still feel a tinge of this sometimes but it’s mostly gone now, so hooray for the list shrinking slightly.
And I should point out that a lot of these fears could be pushed aside by necessity. For example, I once lived on the 15th floor of a tower downtown. I tried using the stairs. Once. After that, the fear of closed-in spaces like the elevator got promptly ignored. I’d just “la la la” while getting whisked up to that 15th floor. Still, there’s little denying I was quite the basketcase-in-waiting as a wee one. I’m much better-adjusted now. Really!
Today I ran early due to a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon (early in this case meaning noon). Despite general rain forecasts for the week, the sky cleared up and it was sunny for nearly the entire jog. Should have left the jacket at home.
My tender right calf proved most vexing and I slowed my pace to reduce the chance of aggravating it. I was certainly successful in slowing, posting my worst times for a 35-minute run. A wiener dog puppy out in the field was chasing a ball and his barks sounded like they were filled with helium. This very cute fellow added +1 to my spirit. There was also a riding mower out cutting the grass alongside the trail, creating noise and belching diesel as I ran by it. -1 to spirit. There was also a road crew just up the hill next to the park and they were drilling with water, resulting in a highly unpleasant hissing noise. -1 again. The pleasant aroma of fresh-cut grass barely offset this. Overall, a bit of a wash.
I passed one person who was jogging so slowly I could have passed her if I’d been walking. It was some weird anti-jog. Maybe she was trying to run in place and not getting it quite right.
There was no burst of speed for the last five minutes, just quietly bearing it until the Nike lady told me to stop. When she did I hit the wrong command to end the run and it continued for another five seconds as I stood there fumbling with the iPod controls. I’m beginning to hate that sleek, sexy but difficult-to-use thing.
