03.24.09
Posted in Nerdy at 12:50 am by Aaron
It’s not enough that spammers have attempted to post 30,426 spam comments on this blog, they also – I just realized – set up 554 user accounts. I decided not to take my chances, so I dutifully deleted all of the user accounts except for mine.
That’s when I remembered that I had set up an account for Laura…you know, right around the time that I hit “delete” on the last batch of users.
I don’t know if anyone else uses a blog this way, but for me, at this point, this blog represents the closest thing to a comprehensive record of what we’ve done over the last few years as I have. So needless to say, I was a little upset to remember that Laura had used her account to put up some posts when we were in France with Ethan.
That’s when Google saved the day! Since Google caches just about everything, I was able to find all of the posts on Google, then re-post them to the site. A nerdy bit of time spent, but it saved one of my favourite shots on this blog (reposting the picture for good measure!) which – I think – was the exact moment in Ethan’s life when he fell in love with trains…yup, the shot of Ethan on the TGV to Lyon.
Thanks, Google!
n.b. I also love that Wordpress lets you backdate posts!
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08.27.06
Posted in Nerdy at 9:48 pm by Aaron
These videos were apparently commissioned by Microsoft UK…they are absolutely hilarious. One of my favourite lines:
You know who my hero is? Nelson Mandela. 30 years in prison, yeah? 30 years in confinement. He’s been out now for 13 years. 13 years, and he hasn’t reoffended. It shows he’s reformed. It shows that prison works.
C’mon. That’s awesome. The videos are spoof Microsoft training tapes and are done by the guy from The Office. Go. Watch.
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08.04.06
Posted in Nerdy at 11:13 am by Aaron
A very cool article in the Times today talking about something called High Dynamic Range photos, which are a clever solution to the problem of having to choose between a bright foreground and a bright background. By merging a series of photos, you can get a single picture with dazzling effects. I’m going to have to try this!
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07.05.06
Posted in Nerdy, Random at 12:18 pm by Aaron
There’s an article in the Times today about a company called Farecast which predicts what airfares are going to be and gives recommendations on whether to buy or wait…pretty nifty. It’s only in beta right now, so it’s just a proof of concept, but it looks promising.
For now, if anyone is thinking of booking some flights, I would recommend Kayak, which is an absolutely amazing flight search engine which keeps you from having to jump between ten sites to find the best fare. The flexibility in narrowing your search is amazing, and it searches places you didn’t know existed.
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04.17.06
Posted in Nerdy at 6:09 pm by Aaron
Nothing says “not enough time to fix my mess” like a template. What scared me about the traffic accident that was my first attempt at messing with Wordpress was that I was starting to get used to it.
I’m heading up to Ottawa this week, which I imagine will be the last time that I’ll leave town before Ethan is born, as Laura is getting into that stage of pregnancy where “the big day” could happen at any time. I took a great picture of Laura yesterday which I’ll put up when I get a second.
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04.10.06
Posted in Nerdy at 4:41 pm by Aaron
Okay, so this is certainly what I would call a halfway job. I admit, the site looks like crap right now, but at this point we’ll just call it a “learning experience”. As I figure out how to play with WordPress, I’d say that I’m not so much designing this site as I am hacking it. I think I’ve figured out enough, though, that I can make a second run at it and get it to come out okay…I’ve been systematically breaking bits of the code to see what happens, and here you can see the result!
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Posted in Nerdy at 10:36 am by Aaron
Today I’m going to take a crack at customizing the look of this blog, which looks like it might not be as difficult as I thought. It seems to involve a lot of css and php…neither of which I know that well, but seeing as some snarky people seem to take issue with the look of the site (I’m looking at you, Brooks), I don’t see that I have any choice [sigh].
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04.06.06
Posted in Nerdy at 9:30 am by Aaron
Okay, so maybe this is more for my reference than for anyone else’s, but there’s a pretty handy colour wheel page here that lets you play with colours and test if they’re web safe. Very handy.
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03.24.06
Posted in Movies, Nerdy at 10:07 am by Aaron
Last night Laura and I watched “What the Bleep Do We Know?”, which, I should say for those who recommended it, was well worth watching and was certainly a good conversation-starter. Very enjoyable.
But the premise? It certainly left me with a lot of questions. For those who haven’t seen the movie, the basic idea is that, in light of all the latest in quantum mechanics, we have proven that humans can mentally construct reality in any way they choose, because reality as we know it is illusory. If you look at solid matter, it is actually made up of loose clouds of molecules, and those of loose clouds of atoms and so on, ad infinitum.
The idea that the movie puts forward is that we are one with the universe, and, as the one lady (who is channeling a 35,000 year old mystic from Atlantis) concludes, we are God.
The trouble for me is that a lot of the ideas in the film are in the same neighbourhood as my own beliefs, so the bizarre tangents are a little off-putting.
First off, some of the claims in the film are completely false. They refer to the “Maharishi Effect” (meditators could lower the crime rate) which was “proven” in an uncontrolled experiment in Washington when the crime rate was miraculously lowered by 25% by the 4,000 meditators. Cursory fact checking shows that crime actually rose in Washington during that period, though the organizers claimed success. But when “facts” like this are getting thrown at you in a movie, its hard to filter them out amid all the physicists who are also saying all kinds of quantum-zaniness.
They also refer to another experiment wherein some guy claimed that water reacts to words, as proven by him taping affirming messages to glasses of water, then photographing the supposed results. Again, it seems that he forgot to mention that he froze the water.
What bothered me most, though, was the whole “nothing is certain, therefore I am the centre of the universe” leap of logic. What about the corollary? Far from being your own creator and supreme observer, what if you are nothing more than a transient cluster of atoms floating in an infinite void filled with nearly indistinguishable particles? The fact that quantum particles change when observed doesn’t signify any special significance to you as the observer; no, silly, think of it as your observation being another random act which affects the observed particles by interaction, not observation. Observation gives centrality and importance to the observer. Interaction acknowledges you for the insignificant cloud of dust that you really are.
Granted, my take on quantum theory is considerably more bleak, but I would argue, much closer to the truth. Everyone is so quick to mix and match quantum theory to justify whatever they like, giving us quantum-leprechauns and such. But I’m always suspicious of “feel-good” spiritual solutions, especially when they’re supposedly proven by science.
The truth is, when I first read about quantum mechanics, I was amazed by the parallels with Zen Buddhism. Did I jump for joy and start healing people? No. It just affirmed to me that if you look deep enough inside yourself or deep enough outside yourself you’ll find the same thing: nothing. You can paint that to be fuzzy and nice, or you can accept it for what I think it is: terrifying and beautiful.
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03.10.06
Posted in Nerdy at 12:27 am by Aaron
For reasons I needn’t go into, I’ve been reading through some old essays of mine from university. What’s most amusing about them is the common theme that seems to be between the lines in most of my papers; I’m a nutcase, and a slightly argumentative one, at that. I dug up my final paper in my anthropology in which the concluding paragraph begins with the line “Anthropology drips with irony.” Yes, I decided to criticize and try to refute the entire discipline in summation of what I learned in the course.
But I remembered that essay, as ill-advised as it may seem. What I forgot was the completely loopy essay that I just dug up in one of my fourth year classes: I argued that ergonomics were not – as you might have heard – developed to make people more comfortable, but were actually a form of exploitation.
That’s awesome. Wow. I was really into it at that point! I somehow suspect that what I was actually trying to do by my fourth year was prove that I could argue anything. Check this:
“The mechanization of society, then, has had a profound effect on the place of the human body in relation to its environment. It is insufficient, however, to merely point out that the environment in which the body exists is constructed, for this would be to ignore the ways in which the role of the body is altered by its technological surroundings. While representing the ultimate case of a mechanical black-box whose needs dictate the design of additional component technologies, the body has become a mere cog in a mechanized world. This rationalization of the body is achieved in large part through the application of ergonomic practices, which aim to blur the distinctions between man and machine.”
Later on, when really hitting my stride, I trumpet:
“As such, it must be understood that ergonomics does not represent a deliberate effort to dehumanize labour, but is instead a manifestation of socio-political values being reflected through technological systems.”
I should have been banned from my keyboard and never allowed to say “socio-political” again.
But no essay, for me, was complete without bringing Marx into it…
“To use the Marxist lexicon to define the parameters of the analysis, the focus is upon the ways in which capitalist ideology has shaped the forces of production in order to maximize output, where the ‘forces of production’ encompass the ‘mode of appropriation of nature, that is, to the labour process in which a determinate raw material is transformed into a determinate product.’”
Boo-ya. I’m a nut-job. I would quote more, but the truth is, whenever I started going off about Marx, I started speaking another language that wasn’t quite English. I think my favourite line is this: “Ergonomics is thus the methodological brainchild of capitalist efforts to extract the maximal surplus-value from labour inputs.”
That’s the scary part of the essay for me, because even as I read it now, I find myself nodding to myself and saying, “Well, yeah…I mean strictly speaking, that is true.”
But then, whether surplus-value is being extracted from you or not, it is pretty sweet when you get to sit in one of those Aeron chairs at work…
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02.27.06
Posted in Nerdy at 8:36 pm by Aaron
…a billion dollars worth of disabled music.
What a lot of the debate surrounding digital music and digital rights management (DRM) seems to ignore is that through the use of built-in limits on how people can use the music they buy, content providers are setting the boundaries on music that we used to rely on laws for. Remember those? Now, when you download a song from an online service, you are automatically signing up for an End User Licence Agreement (EULA) as well…which I’m sure you read.
Ugh. Stinky. Let’s hope this isn’t what the future of music is going to be like.
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02.15.06
Posted in Nerdy at 8:15 am by Aaron
This all seems to have gone much more smoothly than I was expecting; I thought my email might be down for a day or two, and my website unreachable for the same amount of time. Last time I switched providers (from Network Solutions) it was a hellish, drawn out process. It’s pretty nice that now all I have to work on is the mechanics of my actual site.
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02.14.06
Posted in Nerdy at 11:12 pm by Aaron
If you’ve noticed some shenanigans while trying to access my site, it’s because I’m in the midst of a pretty huge overhaul. I’ve just switched hosts, blogging programs and – well – just about everything else. I’ve been thinking about doing it for ages, but finally decided that it would be best if I just broke my site so that I’d be forced to fix it.
This blog is now on Wordpress, and I’ll be working to migrate my old posts soon. I’m going to have to do a lot of work on the look and feel…we’ll see how it goes. Again, I’ve been meaning to practice my css, and now I’ll have to, or this site will continue to look absolutely miserable.
For anyone looking for a good host, I recommend the guys I just switched to: bluehost. Pretty damn amazing what they give you for the price.
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