Just today I started playing with Hunch FM, a new online music service. I like Hunch a lot. I am not a heavy participant but every time I poke around I find out about cool things, and as I write this paragraph I have heard five songs I really like, two of which are completely new to me. Also I discovered I really hate the video for MGMT’s “Kids”.
Accessing music through a service that tries to learn what I like is great but something I weirdly avoid because doing so well requires that I rate music. I have a weird sort of relationship with music, where there might be a song that I think is fucking amazing and want to hear a billion times but I also think it’s completely terrible.
I guess this is a relationship I have with media in general, as my one-time dream of owning Brendan Fraser’s complete filmography may attest. (I still aspire to have ready access to his entire catalogue but “ownership” and media are two concepts that cough don’t entirely go together anymore for me).
So when I rate music (and movies during various brief encounters with Netflix and similar services) in a service like this, what the stars actually indicate to me is the frequency with which I would like to hear the song.
I doubt I’m going to build anything with ratings any time soon, or anything that presents a chunk of content to users with any degree of computed frequency, but if I do I am strongly considering separating the two concepts explicitly so other freaks who recognize their terrible taste can be free to love something from a craft standpoint, but never want to experience it.
I had one of those nights last night that I don’t want to forget. The catalyst was picking up my new car, which I am calling the Cobalt Car because that is a more exciting colour than ‘blue’ and in part to differentiate it from the Blue Van, our other vehicle.
The car itself is fairly decent, was an okay price and is fun to drive (except for the steering wheel because of Armor All slipperiness that should fade soon) but isn’t the important thing.
We were watching Alec last night and so all of us piled into the blue van to drive to Bright, ON to trade relatively large amounts of dollars for the car. We transferred Harvey’s booster seat to the car so that he and I could drive back together and in the hope that he and Alec would fall asleep separately as they were keeping each other up.
The drive back home with the car was about as classical car commercial father/son moment as could be, and it was fantastic. Harvey rolled the window down in the warm spring evening. The sun was setting and the sky was clear and the moon was up and we were driving. Driving through country roads – straight ones mostly not windy coastal ones, that cliche we avoided by geographical necessity. Hand out the window, head near the window laughing as the wind tossed his hair, eyes searching the skies for planes and the crescent moon.
The music co-operated, my randomly loaded Shuffle playing randomly selected but happily upbeat and appropriate for the task tunes. This simple, happy scene continued for only a few minutes before the sun finished setting, we got off the country roads and onto the 7/8 (although in fairness at that point it itself is only a country highway) and headed back towards town.
The music shifted to slightly down tempo tracks, Harvey’s vision began to glaze over and not long after he was sound asleep. Despite a transfer to the van (at home, so I could switch to my father’s car to return it his house and Jen could follow along to drive me home) and the eventual move to his bed and removal of glasses and jacket he slept.
Generally I am a fan of the larger of our local newspapers, The Waterloo Region Record but today I have been super frustrated.
I read the article about the new Chamber website and was curious what the site is, but was somewhat perturbed by the lack of a URL in the article itself.
I understand that for many newspapers, their CMS doesn’t allow URLs in stories to automatically be turned into hyperlinks. Fine. That’s lame and weak technology but there’s lots of reasons that feature might not be high on their list. I can’t understand why the URL itself is not included in the story though.
The URL for the Greater Kitchener Waterloo Chamber of Commerce is http://www.greaterkwchamber.com. I was finally moved to create an account to add the url as a moderately passive aggressive comment and was not-delighted to encounter a treasure trove of obstacles.
These are not obstacles that are unique to The Record’s account creation and sign-up process by any means, and there’s a decent user interface lesson here that I myself need to be reminded of many times.
While creating an account, I kept getting the error message ‘Password must be at least 7 characters’ but the password I was entering was 15 characters. For throwaway accounts, my general password generation technique is to use a moderately difficult salt combined with an easy to remember derivative of the site’s URL.
On the scale of password security, it is somewhere in between using a password manager and using my dog’s name on every site I create an account.
I tried a few experiments to determine what the upper limit was, but realized that it was much higher than 15 when I just entered a series of numbers (“12345678901234567890” to get a 20-character password) into the field and it was accepted.
Then I tried a special character. Well, not a special character, it’s not like a unicode snowman or something like that just a non-alphanumeric character. It doesn’t matter which one, it could be a & or a ! or a # or maybe some combination of all of them. Any of them get rejected with the same ‘Password must be at least 7 characters’ message.
Bad error message, and ridiculously stupid password restriction.
Normally I would walk away at this point, but I haven’t slept well this week, I’m starting to get a bit of a cold, the crazy spring snowfall has strained my back and my John Gabriel’s Internet Dickwad Index is approaching ‘shitcock’ levels. I NEEDED to get my passive aggressively “helpful” url-sharing comment posted, so persist I did.
The rest of the process was pretty straight-forward and typical. I added my email address and it was necessary to validate that address so I refreshed my gmail account and clicked the link and validated I was.
What I wasn’t was logged in. Nor was I at the article I’d gone to the site to review. Neither of these are complicated steps. The Record just sent me a unique identifier, created while I was interacting with a modal dialog on a very specific page with the quite obvious intent of adding content to their site. And what I got was the necessity to enter in my email address and irritatingly weak password YET AGAIN and the need to dig through their navigation to find the article I wanted more than ever before to snark.
Which leads me to my final lesson: A few weeks ago there was some discussion on Twitter about the unpleasant comments on an article posted to The Record’s website. I no longer remember the article or the specific comments, but I do know why they were unpleasant.
The times I’ve wanted to comment on an article and add something positive, or even just neutral, to the discussion I’ve let myself be driven away by the irritants. There’s no way in hell I would have fought to get an account just to click “Agree” with a previous commenter.
I’ve been to The Record’s site several times over the past couple of weeks – as an aside, this is encouraging to me. It feels like either I’m more interested in local goings-on or their articles are better, either of which is a win condition – and it wasn’t until I was irritated and frustrated by something that I bothered to jump enough hoops to speak my mind.
Creating some barriers decreases random anonymous assholery. Barriers that are a result of poor development also decrease random pseudonymous positive contributions and if you have both in place what ends up getting through is irritated people being angry, not a community.
On March 8 I was in a car accident. No one was hurt, and the other guy involved was really nice and overall things went about as smoothly as they could.
The insurance company and the car rental place were both great.
The car is a write off, and my cheque comes soon and I will have to undergo the oh-so-traumatic process of purchasing a new-to-me vehicle and all the self doubt and insecurities and hatred that goes along with it. This is one of those times I wish I were more typically male and cared even the slightest about knowing anything about cars.
I’m not helped in this matter by the fact that the various reputable used dealerships I know about seem to have nothing in stock for under $5000, which is a number that itself is higher than I am able to pay right now.
Cleaning out the silver car was surprisingly tender for me. I am thankful I am not the sort who names cars because I think I would have let a couple of actual tears fall when I locked the doors for the last time. For a car that was purchased without a lot of foresight, kind of on a whim and without a lot of comparison to other options, the silver car treated me very well for just about 10 years.
(As dictated to Dad.)
It was a cold and snowy day. And a checkmark. Harvey was sleeping in his bed Jonathan just pulled on my bracelet but then I got hurt. I was sleeping my bunk beds and Mommy got the sheet for my top bunk. A monster eated me and I measured my bottom bunk.
The monster was still eating me.
The monster was still in the eating lion. He was just eating me still. I was gone. I couldn’t come back. The lion wants to eat the monster but not me.
A couple of stories.
These days, Jonathan loves the stairs. Every time someone opens the gate blocking them he stands up and starts giggling and starts walking towards the gate. If he’s allowed to go up, he giggles and chatters the entire way. If he isn’t, he flops on his butt and wails.
Just now, Harvey was upstairs. It’s fairly early in the morning so all the rooms we dark. He shouted down for some help, and Jonathan and I went upstairs. Harvey laid at the top of the stairs giggling and laughing while Jonathan giggled and chattered.
We made it to the top, and Harvey had me turn the light on in Jonathan’s room and in his room. I turned on the light in Jen’s and my room, and Harvey announced triumphantly, “Good job, Dad! You figured out my question mark!”
We finally got a bit of snow here, but not very much. Harvey was very excited to build a snowman (we were trying to get to CostCo) so we made a super small one, the bottom ball about an inch or so in diameter.
He was happy and wanted to get eyes and a nose and a mouth for it but I explained that it was much too small for that. He agreed. Then he stomped on the tiny little snowman and laughed and laughed and laughed.
In December, 1998 I was about to graduate from college. I remember claiming that I was never going to wear a tie. Shortly after Christmas I was buying shirts and a tie for my first job.
Truth is I knew I was going to sell out. I needed to work and it was a good job I and with a little bit of perspective wearing a tie wasn’t such a bad thing it was just an easy declaration to make and fashion is an easy way to announce your independence.
Not long after starting that job, flush with disposable income, I registered my second domain name: sell-out.com (the first was a .cx domain, rob.cx if I remember correctly, the original url for this blog).
I never really did anything with sell-out. At various times different ideas came to me and for a while I kept the blog with my thoughts about buying a bookstore there but ultimately it was unused. Every year though, I renewed that registration. I just couldn’t let it expire, there was just too much personal history tied up in it and I always really liked it, hyphen and all.
Until a couple of weeks ago. I was contacted by a gentleman representing a company that actually has a product for which it is a fitting domain. I let them make the first offer, and it was generous. Not life-changing generous, but definitely ‘pay back the registrar’s fees and buy a bunch of fun treats from Amazon’ generous.
Initially I wasn’t sure I was going to sell it, but with only a little bit of consideration realized: What better possible end to my relationship with that domain then to trade it for cash?
The other day the transfer completed. As I post this, it still points to GoDaddy’s default page but I’ll be sure to poke it every now and then, just to see what it may bring.
Okay, so here’s the thing. Jen and I just bought Dragon Age:Origins for the PS3. We watched like, all of Bones and all of the modern Dr. Who over the summer and I’m just completely fucking bored of World of Warcraft right now (Cataclysm on November 2 though! Woo!) we needed something to do together that requires limited brain use. Thus: Dragon Age.
Well, it’s fucking crack, of course. With Bioware’s claims that they were going back to their hardcore RPG roots I knew I was in for fucking trouble but oh what glorious trouble it is.
I haven’t played much, just a couple of hours to get through my dwarven noble (rogue) origin and a very little bit of the outside world but while doing so I’ve been only glossing through the codex entries. In part because Jen finds it boring as shit but mostly because the text is a bitch to read. Not sure if it’s our TV or what, but blech.
Jen also started a character, an elven mage. These choices will come as no surprise to anyone with any degree of knowledge regarding our historical role-playing choices. Last night she progressed through most of the origin story and this morning while Harvey was at school and Jonathan was asleep she finished it off. So she’s almost caught up to where I am, story-wise.
But while she was playing she wasn’t even looking at the Codex pages so there’s all this glorious lore that I’m missing out on (oh noes!). I had poked around the Dragon Age Wiki a very little bit earlier this week but didn’t want to dig deep due to the potential for spoilers. Today, however, I was explicitly interested in spoilers as I wanted to get filled in on how the mage origin concludes. I still have four others to try, I doubt I’ll bother doing that one on my own any time soon!
I poked around and discovered that the Origin walkthroughs (and probably the others) identify all the Codex pages that can be acquired, and of course the content of the pages is on the Wiki! Glorious, glorious nerds and our insatiable demand to populate online encyclopedias!
So now I can walk through the Dwarf Noble and the Mage Origins and read all the linked codexes as I go. That is making me unreasonably happy.
I have a few techier posts at The Miscellanean and am more likely to post there than here these days, but still not very likely to post there.
Where I work has finally released the product we’ve been working on: Lozzal. I think it’s pretty cool, it generates a bunch of suggestions for things to do that you might like. If you try it I’d love to hear what you think.
Jon is almost EIGHT FREAKING MONTHS old. That’s how long it’s been since I’ve posted, basically. He is awesome. Most of the time a great big happy baby, which is about all you can ask for.
Harvey is just over FOUR FREAKING YEARS old. He starts going to Junior Kindergarten this month. We’ve met his teacher and a few others at the school and are really excited for it. He’s been to the classroom a couple of times and seems to be looking forward to the idea of school. I think he’s really going to like it. Junior kindergarten isn’t too much different than preschool, but it is slightly more academic and structured, two things that he’ll really enjoy.
