crows to burnaby

And another one bites the dust. Being as it is the end of 2004, it's time for a self-indulgent look back at my life this year, for those of you I haven't kept in touch with who might be vaguely interested. There were a few moments of significance:

• Greg and I bought & moved into our own wonderful wonderful condo!
• I got competent enough playing bass to join a band; we played three gigs in the fall for 40-140 people
• Tried snowboarding for the first and last time. Broke my wrist and had my right arm in a cast for the first six weeks of spring.
• Tried paragliding for the first time. Amazingly, broke nothing.
• At the end of 2003, I started working at the university; have been here a full & fulfilling year now.
• Organized a team of colleagues to join the New Media Slam; we won an award for our entry.

Can't say I've got "resolutions" for next year (besides a little muttering about getting more exercise), but some things I'd like to do include getting more into music writing & production, and travel to a different continent.

Have a wonderful New Year's!

I'm just investigating the brand-new SmartCommons at the moment, which I found on the Many-to-Many blog. It sounds like an interesting idea, but it is still a bit nebulous. As the previous blogger says, it's not clear what we're expected to do with it. The help file says it's "a set of online tools that act as a sharing platform for real-world communities". The idea is that it's a site for communities that already exist, as opposed to the Friendster-style notion of building a network of potential friends/acquaintances that you don't actually know yet.

The navigation is completely broken in Safari but seems to be okay in Firefox. The site also seems to be having some issues at the moment - I get an ASP server error from time to time (actually, this might be related to the Safari issue, as I'm not getting any of those errors in Firefox). I've just created a "Vancouver" community so that at least I'm part of something, even if nobody else is yet... ;)

A lot of it seems to be about your stuff. I see it offers a "Collections" functionality, so you can keep lists of your stuff, whether it's your CD collection, your serial numbers of household objects, or what-have-you. You can share the collections with your friends and keep track of who's borrowed which book or movie. Right now I'm using my wiki for things like this - I've got a list there of who's borrowed what. But I also wouldn't necessarily want to give access to the whole wiki to everyone I know (for example, my Xmas shopping list was online there as well - can't let people see what they're getting !) SmartCommons lets you set different permissions for different things, which would solve that problem. It also lets you create different personas for different situations, ie. family/friends/work, which is thoughtful.

It's an interesting system. At the moment I don't feel like I'd use it much - but it's new and there's very few people in it, so time will tell. I don't feel a great need to publicize lists of my stuff, and there are other community tools available. Will it gather the critical mass it needs to catch on? Or will it fizzle out? Eh... I'm not that good at predicting these kinds of trends. If a few early adopters find a great application for it, it could do well. Let's keep an eye on it for now.

Found my way to Chris Anderson's Long Tail blog, which addresses the "long tail" of the web - all the niche sites that, individually, don't account for much traffic, but collectively offer a massive wealth of specialized information.

I was particularily interested in a post about blogging and RSS, and the point he makes that RSS "puts a premium on the thoughtful post, now matter how infrequent, and discourages floods of random miniposts designed to drive return traffic".

I felt a sense of relief as I read this. I've had this nagging guilty feeling that I should be blogging more often, because I've had it drilled into me over the years that if content gets stale, visitors go away! But I didn't want to irritate people with gratuitious posts purely for the sake of remaining "active" in between more fulfilling posts.

RSS changes things. If someone's bookmarked your site and stops by daily only to find that nothing has changed, they will eventually stop visiting. Visiting a bookmark requires an active effort by the user. But if they have subscribed to your site via RSS, your site can remain safely dormant for much longer. If you completely abandon your site, the user will unsubscribe eventually when they get around to cleaning up and sorting their various feeds. But they'll unsubscribe much faster if you post frequent minor stream-of-consciousness updates or clutter your feed with random little bits about your dog, just to try to keep the spotlight on your site.

That said, I have to mention that Dexter received a new keychain laser pointer for Xmas, and is one happy pup. Does it tell you something that my dog is a geek too?

I noticed that I've been getting a lot of traffic from people wondering whatever happened to Fiona Apple since I posted about her woes with Sony and the FreeFiona site. While you wait for her latest album to be released from captivity, you might be interested in listening to Rachel Yamagata. She has a similar smoky voice that's very soothing to the ear, and while she does write mostly about difficult relationships, she doesn't come across as a generic female singer-songwriter; she has a good sound that's her own. She doesn't have quite the same tension and edge that Fiona has - less of the fractured tortured-artist thing going on. Not bad stuff though.

This isn't related, but you should also listen to Bonobo, just because I say so.

Well, a merry Xmas/Boxing Day to all of you, and happy new year's in advance. Vancouver's having its usual green holidays with varying amounts of rain.

Just after returning home from Xmas dinner, we learned about the massive tsunami in Asia, from which as of this morning the death toll was nearly 20,000. I keep trying to mentally process this disaster, to relate to it somehow. It seems inconsiderate to have a joyous holiday season in the wake of such an enormous tragedy.

But never having been anywhere in Asia, and not yet knowing someone directly affected, it feels very distant and vague. To our primitive brains, programmed for living in small groups, we don't relate to the idea of 20,000 people any more than we do to 1000. It becomes just a number.

The US media knows this, too. If 20,000 people had died in North America, you know there'd be 24x7 coverage on every station. Think of it! September 11 caused around 2700 deaths, and more national trauma than anything in my lifetime. This is almost ten times the death toll. But somehow it still doesn't reach us, because it happened way over there.

I'm wondering if once I get back to work and start talking to people, I'll find the interconnectivity between here and there. Living on Long Island, even if we didn't know somebody who died on September 11, we all knew somebody who knew somebody. Even if you weren't affected, you realized how intertwined our lives were, in that small area.

I'm wondering how I can say this without sounding hokey, but perhaps those of us who are still in comfy homes with internet connections should take a moment to appreciate having a holiday season, in respect to those many shattered lives in some distant realm.

Since seeing Interpol last month I've been doing some thinking about on-stage banter.

My feeling on the matter is that when you're a no-name band, you're better off just shutting up and playing. Everyone groans when the soft-spoken singer-songwriter fills two minutes between each song with those "I wrote this song when I saw my cat Fluffy playing with a poor little mouse the other day, and it reminded me of man's inhumanity to man, only it was a cat instead of a man, anyway that's what this song is about" blatherings. Nobody wants to hear that if they don't know who you are - they just want you to play music and keep out of the way.

When you're famous, though, people actually start to care what you have to say for some reason. The more famous you are, the more people want to make a connection - they want you to talk to them directly, they want to hear you say something memorable. So successful bands are entitled to more than "Hello Cleveland" - the audience wants contact. And if you're a legend, you can talk the whole damn night and the crowd will hang on your every word with utter devotion. How much you can speak on stage is directly proportional to your success.

Interpol is a good band, and a very successful band. They had no trouble selling out the Commodore, and they put on a tight show. Being aloof is part of their image, but Paul Banks barely spoke a word to the crowd the whole time. They also kept the music very true to the recorded versions, which can be a good or bad thing depending on the artist. The end result was that I left feeling like I'd just watched a lengthy music video, instead of being present at a rock concert; I didn't feel like the band was "there".

Perhaps there's so much emphasis these days on putting on an intense, dynamic show that musicians are afraid that they'll lose the momentum if they pause for more than a quick "hello" to their crowd. I say to hell with that - three or four sentences over the course of three hours won't kill your show. It'll personalize the event and help you make a connection to your audience. Just avoid any mindless rambling - try to see if anyone's eyes are glazing over, and adjust accordingly.

And please leave Fluffy out of it.

Spooky! I was just about to write a blog post about how I can't really get excited about the idea of podcasting and audioblogging, and then checked out Alan Levine's cogdogblog and found him saying much the same thing.

My reasons for my lack of interest are very similar. You can't skim an audio feed for specific information. Not everyone will put much production value into it, leaving it sounding like a first-time DJ with no sense of pacing rambling on your local college radio station. But mainly it's because I'd rather read than listen to someone talk. I just don't process audio as well (which seems kind of odd to me, since I'm a serious music listener). I get distracted by things in my visual realm and try to multitask while listening, and then end up ignoring whatever speech is being piped into my ears. If Greg tries to read me a news story that has any degree of complexity, I always seem to end up reading it over his shoulder while he reads so that I can understand it better. I don't know whether it's just because I'm unwilling to concentrate my attention on the audio, or if it's just that's my learning style.

Even when the audio is well produced, I get antsy because listening to audio just seems to take up so much time. A friend tried for the longest time to get me listening to This American Life. And I have listened to it - it's excellent, consistently fascinating, very thoughtfully made, good use of the medium. Still, I just can't get myself to dedicate a chunk of time to it on a regular basis. I suppose I could listen to it on the bus... but I never feel like it. I would rather read.

Speaking of piping sounds into my ears, I can literally no longer wear the earbuds that came with my iPod. Trying to get them to stick in my ears irritated my right ear so much that it just won't fit any more (not like it did to start with). So for the moment I'm using a set of large-ish Kenwood headphones. Not very stylish (especially with the 5 or 6 feet worth of cord wrapped up into a loop and shoved in my pocket) but damn, they sound good. Perhaps Mr. Claus will put some new better earbuds under the tree next week.

Oh, and speaking of Xmas, I still haven't sent out any cards, so if you were expecting a card from me, it'll be late. Just think of it as "seasonal" rather than Xmas-related.

I seem to be going through a phase of blogging uncertainty these days. It's a bit like when you're talking before a group of people, run out of a thought, and then stand there awkwardly for a moment while everyone stares at you expectantly.

I'm suddenly not sure what I mean to blog about any more. The natural thing to do is to post about things I've seen and done lately, but I've already posted my hesitation about turning this into an online diary. I can't quite convince myself that everybody, save a few friends in other parts of the world, wants to read it.

I thought to myself, what blogs do I read the most? I usually read the ones that are all on one topic - look at my blogroll in the sidebar and you'll see what I mean. I don't think I can confine my blogging to one topic, though. I'm such a generalist, and while I may know a lot about CSS, I don't feel passionately enough about it to post about it every few days. I may love playing bass, I don't have enough new to say about it to sustain anyone's interest. I care about e-learning, but at this point I'd still just be repeating what others are saying.

Why do I blog in the first place? I enjoy writing, and I find that a little thoughtful blogging in the morning is like a mental stretch: it gets my brain going and ready for the rest of the day. Also, I love the feedback and the connectivity of it all. I've had my own websites for years, but it's always been one-way; checking my stats shows me that people occasionally visit, but rarely does anyone comment on something specific (besides a few animations that are really only funny if you're a die-hard Radiohead fan). This blog makes me feel more in touch with you readers than my site ever did, because if what I say makes you want to respond, you can do that instantly right in the context of the page. It's simple and sweet.

I guess all writing goes through phases; right now I'm feeling a bit like I haven't got that much to say, but that'll probably fade at some point and I'll get back into the spirit. I've been critically questioning everything I consider posting, and saying to myself "oh, that's been done already" or "nobody cares about THAT"... perhaps I should yank off the filters and just blather merrily away, and stop being so damn picky.

I was just reading Julie Leung's post about whether or not to keep your maiden name when you get married. This is a topic of some interest to me, especially as two good friends of ours got married lately and had to consider the options.

When I was young I assumed I would keep my name because that was what educated independent women now did. Previous generations of woman had suffered insults and raised eyebrows to make a point of being able to keep their names, etc. But when it actually came time to make the choice, I chose to take Greg's name. I liked the unity of having the same name; I liked the simplicity of it. And just because I had the choice to keep my old name didn't mean I had to exercise that choice. That's part of what "choice" means.

It did take me a while to adjust to the new name, though. I loved my old name, I love my small family that it represents, and for a while I fought with the idea that my identity had changed. For about a week I felt like I'd let myself be taken over.

But I grew quickly to realize that your name doesn't define who you are. It can certainly influence you, and influence what people expect of you, but changing your name doesn't change you as a person. It's just a label. You could even change your first name, shocking a thought as it may be, without shaking your core. (I wouldn't want to change mine, but if I had to, I could cope.) So I'm comfortable with my choice, and I would've been just as happy if Greg had chosen to take my name; I simply like being under one umbrella together.

I started to feel a little insecure again when I noticed that everyone else I knew who got married kept their old name. (And many people were surprised that I changed mine.) Not that I need to be part of the trend, but I felt like the point was being missed. I wanted people to understand why I changed my name, that it wasn't because I felt I had to, that it wasn't because Greg "owns" me. I didn't want to be perceived as domesticated and traditional.

But recently Greg spotted an article in the National Post about how many women are choosing to take their husband's name again. Neither of us actually got to read the full article (it's subscription-based), but the intro made me think aha! Other women get it as well. For me, it's not about being modern or post-modern or the Independent Woman. It's about unity and dedication. Marriage is different from being "boyfriend & girlfriend" And I like having that reflected in our name. I like having a name that shows how our lives are intertwined.

Every single gas station in Vancouver has a little sign on the ground that says gas is 3.5 cents/litre cheaper at the pump than on the actual sign.

Why? There must be some regulation that says they can't advertise it at the "actual" 3.5-cent-cheaper price, but I haven't found any explanation for it. I've found people wondering about it, and I've found a highly relevant article about gas prices going up by 3.5 cents in the Greater Vancouver area, but that doesn't explain why the gas stations don't just post their gas prices at the actual selling price.

BTW, the article also mentions that Greater Vancouver has the highest gas taxes in Canada. Well, you know what - somebody has to. Somebody also has to have the highest tuition, highest unemployment, highest banking fees... you name it, if it can be ranked by number, somebody's going to have the highest. The question is, what is it relative to? Is Greater Vancouver's gas tax related to the high cost of transportation in the area, or an effort to reduce gasoline use? Since everything else in Vancouver is expensive, should we be surprised?

Anyway, if someone could enlighten me on the 3.5 cent thing, that'd be nice.

We administer a large content management system for a fairly big chunk of campus. One of the things that's great about the system is that it provides a WYSIWYG editor for people to update and maintain their own content, so they no longer have to go to an HTML expert to maintain their own pages. We've found that people are thrilled to be enabled like this, and even the most technophobic will use the system comfortably after some brief instruction.

We made sure that we built the site to modern standards - no tables for layout, no deprecated tags, and accessibility a high priority. All content can be viewed in old browsers, even if it doesn't look as pretty. We strip out any FONT tags and offer a limited colour palette to maintain design consistency. The CMS checks that any hand-edited HTML tags are properly closed, and users can't affect anything outside the content section of each page. But we can't entirely control what our users do, apart from advising them. The WYSIWYG editor doesn't offer DIVs as an option (though it will let you insert them via HTML) and it won't stop somebody inserting a table with an ImageReady-sliced map and leaving alt text off their images.

Sadly, tables were extremely handy for layout, however incorrect a form it may have been. And they were an intuitive and easy structure. CSS is far more capable and sustainable - but the learning curve is steeper, and more significantly, there are many quirks and inconsistencies to take into account. I cannot reasonably tell a technophobic user, already leery of maintaining their own web page, that they must use DIVs instead of TABLEs to accomplish the simple task of laying three photos side by side. I cannot reasonably say to them "Oh, that's easy! Just use the Tan Hack!" when their page appears to be hopelessly mangled in Internet Explorer. I don't want to scare these people off just when they're getting ready to dip their toes into the massive ocean of the Web.

So for the time being, I must grit my teeth and accept that not every page of the site will be perfectly standards-compliant. It's a small price to pay for up-to-date content and happy, confident users.

A little more about my ProTools class. It's going well, though I still would like the pace to be a bit faster. There's one woman there who has almost no computer experience, and the TA basically has to work with her the whole way through. I feel bad for her since all the rest of us are techies, and I know at least a few of us are chomping at the bit for more.

The main realization I've had so far is that, when using other audio editing packages like Digital Performer or Garageband, I have been doing more right than I thought I was, and I know more than I thought I did. So while I don't feel like I'm making great strides forward, I've confirmed that some of the things I was doing weren't as kludgy and awkward as I thought they were - I was actually doing things right, from the start, with no real instruction.

What I think I need is to sit down individually with someone who is immersed in ProTools and other such software all the time, and just watch them at work - learn not just about the interface and the process, but also learn what makes for good production. I'd like the opportunity to pick up on the tips & techniques that you only really know after being in the industry for years. I guess what this amounts to is being an intern at a studio, only not during normal working hours since I've got quite a lovely day job I'd like to keep. Hmmm.

My band played a gig last Thursday for our acoustic guitarist's company party. I think we sounded great - we had it together and it was a fine performance, with minimal hiccups. I even got to realize one of my goals: to play on a stage rather than the corner of a room. Alright, it was about two feet off the ground in a hotel ballroom, but it was a stage, and it was fairly wide.

Unfortunately we didn't get much of a response at the time, since the people weren't really there to see a band. I didn't take it personally, of course, but most people just wandered off to talk in clusters, and not that many people watched us or danced. So my next musical goal: to play a show where people are actually there to see us as a band, rather than just being the background. This'll take longer, since cover bands don't often get to be the main focus - it'll take original music. I'll get there eventually (I hope!).

Since the election, I've noticed I'm finding it harder to handle the news. I used to actually click the occasional headline and read stories that sounded significant, and took an interest especially in anything that looked bad for Bush (ie. environment, prison scandals, economy, etc).

Now I see headlines like "Bush Praises Troops, Calls on Americans to Personalize War" and "Endangered Species Act Under Attack at Western Governors Summit" and I just sort of flinch and block it from my mind. When 59% of Americans believe that Revelations is a prediction for the near future and that one of these days they'll get swept up into the sky, there's not a lot of incentive for making sure the world is habitable for future generations. Eventually, when this fails to happen, Rapture fever will die down and if we're lucky (and optimistic) maybe someone will step up to clean up the mess that's been made. In the meantime, though, we're stuck with millions of people trashing the hotel room with no intention of paying the bill.

What am I supposed to do? Ignoring the news really isn't healthy. Vancouver has a few protests about something every week, and it never amounts to anything. Writing angry letters won't changed US policy. I voted, and that didn't help. I'm not inclined to take drastic illegal actions. How am I suppose to react?

FYI, it's a myth that ostriches bury their heads in the sand when presented with danger.

Okay, I lied... I don't really have anything to say about probiotics.

At work at the moment I'm doing some PHP programming, on an interface for a course we're developing. And I'm having a ball. For me, programming is a bit like jumping into a really cold swimming pool on a warm day. I hover around the edge, whining about how I'm not gonna like it. When I jump in, I cringe and complain for a few minutes. And then once I'm in and I've gotten used to it, I settle in and I say I never want to get out. That's the phase I'm in right now. It's gratifying to see a big change take effect. Every enhancement gives me that warm fuzzy goal-attainment feeling. It's the only thing I really want to work on right now, because I'm so into it - usually I like switching between projects, but right now I'm in one-track-mind mode.

Of course, after playing in the pool for a while, at some point my fingertips will become wrinkly and I'll start to get chilly and I'll want out. This is the point at which all the major creation is done and it's down to the bug-fixing and minor tweaking and change requests. And this is usually the only thing I remember about programming, which is why I usually say I hate it. So I'm posting this as a reminder to myself that occasionally I do really enjoy it, believe it or not.

My other news item is that the first class of my ProTools course, (via Continuing Studies) was last night. This is something I've wanted to learn for ages! Most software I want to learn I can just load up & dive into it, but audio editing packages and 3D packages do sometimes stymie me. For audio packages, even though I can generally find my way around the interface and do some odds and ends, a lot of the terminology and functionality is completely foreign to me, never having worked in a studio or familiarized myself with much audio equipment. So even while I've made it work, I've always had the nagging feeling that I might be approaching something the wrong way, or missing something essential.

The first class was mostly introductory stuff, a little description of audio, getting used to the interface, selecting and manipulating waveforms, etc. Not difficult concepts yet, but it's good to get a grounding. The instructor is quite good (Alex Boynton). He started off slowly but picked up the pace once we actually got into ProTools, which was good because I just wanted to play with everything. Of course, the trouble with doing a hands-on audio course is that while you've got your headphones on and are trying something out, you can't hear what the instructor is saying, so sometimes you miss a useful sentence here and there. Ah well.

I was also delighted to learn that it is possible to get a ProTools home system for around $500 (US) - the M-box, which comes with ProTools LE. I hadn't realized this - I thought the only ProTools systems were the massive ones that cost thousands of dollars and it would be forever out of my range. It's nice to know that it IS possible (well, after the other dozen things that take priority, but someday). In the meantime, I might have access to a ProTools HD system via work, so that would do quite nicely... !