GLOBADOM

Somehow, I want to call the Web 2.0 era the Age of Refactoring. In many ways, I think what is going on, technologically, is that this is the era of stuff that mostly works, mostly correctly, most of the time.

I theorize that mash-up culture is a lot about maximizing the value of the present cultural resources. I guess that makes soft applications of technology, be it Google (any Google project), Wikipedia, Flickr, or whatever, attempts to mine already existing reserves of knowledge in new ways. What was that I read about digging into existing journal articles with the quest to discover new knowledge lying latent in ’em? Science and technology are full of good stories about latent discoveries (cosmic background radiation is probably the canonical one).

I am trying to say that this inward-looking jump into optimization may be a moment when we turn our computing tools on themselves in order to accelerate the growth of knowledge and understanding in the future.

Everywhere, I see people more interested in numbers and reasoning than before. Should I credit Bill James, sports books, Freakonomics, or the mysterious rise in IQ scores?

Is our children learning?

I credit video games.

I’ve liberated this from its original home in the comments on this post by Wyn. Most of the inside jokes are literary-exercise jokes. The only other useful bit of background info is that Wyn just ran her first marathon this year.

Remember that writing a novel, the marathon of literature, is all about the training.

I recommend you start off this december with just some interval sentences: quickly written, short bursts of text. As you progress through early spring next year, you will do drills that include six-word stories alternating with paragraphs at least once a week, and you’ll write a short chapter every Sunday morning.

In the final phase as you progress through late summer, you will be writing novelets, and by fall, novellas.

If you’re interested in speed, Hemingway cadences are highly recommended. Some writers earlier in the century used to use Joycean training methods, but these are now discredited as counterproductive in the more reputable literary-training journals.

Finally, by next November, you will be ready to write your first novel. Most people do a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story for their first novel, and it’s a good choice. So take Dave Eggers as your pace bunny, and go to it.

COUSINEAU – VICTOR (VIC) JOSEPH
January 5,1921 -October 21, 2006

Vic, a smiling presence in the lives of all who knew him, passed away peacefully at St. Michael’s Hospice in Burnaby.

He is survived by his son Denis (Vivian) and daughter Gisele. Grandchildren Ryan (Rebecca), John, Michael (Marjie) and great-granddaughter Olivia. Adopted grand-daughter Tammy (Jeff) Chesman, & her children, Molly & Sean. Older brother Cler (Pearl) and adoring sisters Irene Crook and Lillian Jackson, and many nieces and nephews.

Vic was predeceased by his wife Marie (1976) and son Gerry (1968) and 10 of his brothers and sisters.

Vic was born, raised, and worked in Vancouver, he spent 35 years as a postman. In his retirement he was an avid dancer at Century House and Bonsor Rec Center.

Vic lived life to the end and will be dearly missed by all who knew him.

A memorial service will be held at Burquitlam Funeral Home 625 North Road on Saturday Oct. 28th at 2:00pm.

In lieu of flowers a donation to St. Michael’s Hospice Center or Canadian Cancer Society, would be appreciated in Vic’s memory.

Dear Mr. Sacks:

You horrible, horrible man.

On October 14th, you sent me a copy of your Risk-y computer game, Lux (I say “Risk-y” because it is unabashedly inspired by Risk, but it is so expandable, networkable, re-mappable, re-skinnable, re-ruleable, and whatnot as to make cloning Risk the starting point, not the endpoint). You touted this as a “friendly” gesture having met me at Barcamp, and as a promotion of your Luxtoberfest, er, promotion.

After a quick try that night, I set it aside for a few days, and then started playing around midnight last night.

I stopped playing at 6am. Then I slept for a few hours, ran an errand, and by 10am I was installing more maps and plug-ins.

I can feel my life slipping away uncontrollably. I played Lux instead of working on actual, lucrative projects. I played Lux instead of working on cyclocross videos. I played Lux instead of bloody sleeping like a normal human being!

Dustin, if we meet again, I’ll buy you a beer for creating such a superb and well-implemented little game, but then I’m going to do that tapping-the-bottle-to-make-it-foam thing to pay you back for this lost day. Which is threatening to turn into a lost week.

So, um, thanks a lot.

Given that I haven’t managed to post anything else here for, um, forever, I thought I’d just link to this mildly amusing article on Warning Signs for Tomorrow. I believe the sign shown here accurately applies to this blog, that page, reality TV, cats wearing clothing, and maybe every blog everywhere.

On a personal note, my excuses for the light blogging and lack of new cyclocross videos (rest assured, the footage has been taken) are, in order: laziness, visiting my grandfather in the hospital (advanced carcinoid syndrome is not much fun, but he’s still in good spirits when he’s strong enough to talk. It’s a Cousineau thing), and a lucrative impersonation contract, once again adding to my long list of odd jobs.

Wired Cola consulting: no job too odd; we can be bought, and we’re cheap!

They say it’s my birthday.

For my birthday, the CBC gave me the Canucks versus the Red Wings. In useless standard def! Argh! What next, a show that consists of nothing but Rick Mercer making fun of BC?

At this point, it’s not that HDTV even looks really good, it’s just that standard def makes my eyes bleed.

Why yes, I am spoiled. Thank you for noticing.

In a few minutes, I’m going to Guu for my birthday dinner. Because it’s delicious. and because I can’t stand to watch the game in SDTV.

The answer is here. The question is “where do I find weekly ratings data for Canadian television?” The reason is this engaging debate on the CBC blog.

BBM is reasonably generous with its data, providing not only the current week, but also archives going back as far as 2003.

Being who I am, the first thing I noticed is that the CBC is a non-entity in the ratings. When I dug into a random week in March, it had four shows in the top 30: the early hockey game, curling, the late hockey game, and a Monday night primetime movie. It’s not pretty: the only thing generating a mass audience on the CBC right now seems to be sports.

I also found BBM’s radio ratings on the same site (current Vancouver ratings are on the last page of this PDF).

CBC radio, if you’re wondering, is more popular than its visual counterpart: fourth-best share in the region, though a much lower-ranked reach indicates that the typical CBC listener is loyal to their station, while non-CBC listeners studiously stay away. The FM station is pretty well-rated, too. The big dog in Vancouver radio is still CKNW, but QMFM, while having a slightly smaller share, actually has a greater reach (reflecting, I suspect, its status as the unofficial default radio station of every office in town).

So enjoy the numbers. Tell me what you find.

The EV GP of Cyclocross, right there at the West Point Grey Academy in the heart of Vancouver. I’d like to thank Stephen Cork for setting this up, and David Penner and Jeff Ain for doing a bunch of supplementary video, too. Once again, this is the Men’s A race, but there’s a pretty good chance I’ll do a follow-up video for the other categories.

I’m a little baffled: this doesn’t seem to be as high quality as I was hoping for, but so it goes. It looks fine in the original, so I’m blaming Google Video.

The race itself was fast and fun, except for the steep, brain-bendingly power-dependent parts.

Here’s Tobin’s photos. Here’s Greg’s photos. Here’s the results et cetera

Let’s do some follow-up and ruminations.

Item: the Fort Langley CX video was one of the most popular things I’ve ever put here. Glad you all liked it. There will be another one after next weekend’s Grand Prix of Cyclocross.

Item: my mother-in-law is so addicted to Brain Age that she’s going to get her own Nintendo DS.

Item: The order from LED Shoppe arrived. The batteries seem just fine. The $5 charger I ordered works, but only does 2 batteries at a time. Hm. The two bicycle LED lights I ordered are both pretty chintzy, and I can’t recommend them: both required some amount of fiddling to get working, and one sorta works, but doesn’t really work properly (it has an extra-blinky blink mode and no solid mode). Also, no smiley stamp on the envelope this time.

Item: I need to get some pictures up of the (obviously) now-complete Bianchi crossover cross bike, tentatively named “Azzuro Sporco” (1.5 beta). It worked quite capably in the CX race, though the rider did rather suck.

Item: I need to lose weight, and gain core and upper-body strength.

Item: I need to work better, and train some skills into myself.

For your delectation, the Men’s “A” race in just over 5 minutes:

This is the Fort Langley Cyclocross Classic, race #1 of the BC CX Cup, which happened September 10, 2006. I rode in the B group just before filming this, and can assure you this course was as fun as it looks, though very decidedly non-traditional. Race winner was Symmetrics’ Andrew Pinfold, in the yellow and black jersey.

The song (Re Your Brains) was provided by Jonathan Coulton, whose routinely delightful songs are made available under Creative Commons license, and I thank him for that. Go listen to his stuff.

Thanks to Masi-Adobe for putting on the race, and Aldor Acres for providing the venue (they’re also good for pumpkins and Christmas trees!), and The Lovely One for indulging my dirty cyclocrossing misadventures.

And I hope you’ll be inspired to come out to my club’s cyclocross race, happening September 24: the Team Escape Velocity Grand Prix of Cyclocross. In contrast to Fort Langley, it will be Euro-style all-grass, wide-open course. It’s gonna be epic.

You don’t have to keep reading, the rest is about creating the video. I was able to borrow a pretty nice miniDV camera for this race, as opposed to the various digicams I used last year, and it helped. I really had the song in mind before I made the video, so I laid down the music track first, and tried to track and time the edits against that. I think the result was mostly good. I knew my own race was going rather badly when I realized I was thinking about how I would assemble this video while pedaling down the fast gravel sections.

I have a very nice, very large version of this video if anyone cares for it. It would fit on one CD, but you’ll get a nice, 480p, 30fps version of the video with very clean sound. Perfect for sponsor presentations or whatnot. Let me know.