GLOBADOM

New goal: be more productive.

You know what I did this morning? A bike race. That felt so good.

Never mind that I started out by crashing my bike before I even left my house (this sets a new record) by doing a clumsy brake test. Note to self: the brakes on your non-race-bikes, relatively speaking, suck.

Never mind that I finished a minute behind the main pack, which finished not too far behind the five escapees. That was totally my choice not to contest the sprint!

But I did the race in the B group. I lasted the entire race. And I did not feel utterly at sea in the pack. It was pure, simple, fun.

Fun is good!

I felt good about the race, and I was able to race pain-free, thanks to a pair of knee braces.

This is an old paper. By the copyright, it’s approaching a decade in print. It has been widely referenced. The pretty, as-published 3MB PDF, which includes some revisions and extra graphs.

And it may be the most important thing, at least in terms of personal transformation, that you ever read.

It doesn’t tell you what to change, it tells you how to change things. It speaks to the motives and the methods for self-experimentation. It outlines general principles of figuring out your own problems, while at the same time suggesting several fascinating, specific possibilities for personal development (seeing human faces head-on, even on TV, first thing in the morning, may make you happier and more eager to do things; a less tasty diet, more or less, may make you lose weight without calorie-control efforts).

I intend to read this paper by Seth Roberts and Allen Neuringer at least once a month until I’ve really absorbed its lessons.

Item: a guy who manages content for a living writes something like this. And he pretty much has to, since to say otherwise and be even half as techno-savvy as he is (and that poor slob doesn’t even have an N93) would be to be regarded as having been bought, or retarded, or both.

Things of note:
-My digital satellite box’s DVI output will not talk to my TV’s DVI input because the TV part isn’t HDCP compliant.
-At work, we’re currently fighting through the amusing fiasco of providing a Region 2 DVD player so that a language instructor can play some foreign-language DVDs. Because of some specific college mandates, we can’t bring in anything without a CSA sticker. That means I have to either hack up something computer-wise, probably using scavenged firmware and VLC, or I have to find some deregionalized player (probably something cheap and stupid) so we can play legally-owned DVDs.
-My laptop died. Until I brought it back from the dead, I basically couldn’t sync TLO’s iPod for fear of screwing up the music library. That’s probably only half of a DRM issue.

This is just some random encounters I’ve had with some form of DRM or another. Note that in each case, the content has tried to manage me in some way that seems dubious, prevents a non-infringing use of a legal device, and mostly just makes my life stupider and more annoying.

The first thing has led me through an on-again off-again quest for an HDCP stripper. They seem to be kinda-sorta available for a couple hundred bucks sometimes. The second thing has cost a co-worker a few hours of pain and figuring, and looks to cost me some more yet. We’ll have more problem-solving labour into this trouble than the DVD playback device will likely be worth. The third thing, well, I’m mostly just pissed off that my laptop doesn’t have a screen anymore, and that I can’t easily dump music that I own to backups. Because I have a fair number of silver discs with scratches on them.

I don’t think my insight here is unique, but I do notice that what all these DRM experiences have taught me is one thing: DRM hacking is good.

I’m not sure this is the lesson that the DRMers of the world meant for me to learn. I’m pretty sure the DRM concept has rarely been thought out by implementors much beyond the “if we could make people pay for each copy, that would be more money” level, and sometimes not even that. But here I am, routinely searching out fixes in my life for stuff that would work fine except for needing workarounds to made-up problems.

I face quite enough actual, authentic, real-live technical problems in both my home and work life to not need the fake ones. But if I have to, I will work around the fake ones too. And every time I do, I get a bit of misplaced vengefulness directed towards the people who made working with technology stupider.

Was it the plan of DRM creators to induce in me hatred for creative types? Or is that just a side-effect?

The point here isn’t even that DRM makes my life especially bad. It ranks rather below Hunger in Africa or God’s Will or My Car’s Water Pump Impeller Broke in the list of things I worry about. But I cannot conceive of it for even a moment without thinking badly of DRM, and of any “protected” content.

DRM schemes are a non-trivial part of why I have little interest in HD-DVD/Blu-Ray formats right now. If you promise me that in the future, whenever the hell you feel like it, you might just make it impossible to use your stupid protected content on my retro component-inputs-only TV, I’ll take the hint and avoid buying trouble.

Was convincing people like me to not buy content the plan?

Here is a brief list of things that have broken in the last seven days or so:

• the car’s water pump
• my laptop’s hinge
• my laptop’s screen
• the robot vacuum
• my lip (4 stitches!)
• the shower cleaner (long story)
• the dishwasher
• my will to repair things

Worst of all, every one of those items (except the lip) has been a massive time sink with no resolution. I’ve thrown parts, maintenance, and time at most of these projects. The current hope is that the car will be out of the shop tomorrow, the vacuum may be under warranty, the shower cleaner may only need batteries, the stitches fell out today, I can fiddle the laptop into half-functionality, and I have no idea what will happen with the dishwasher.

South America’s favourite reality-TV show, the government of Venezuela, has granted President Hugo Chavez the power to enact laws by decree.

I don’t post about politics [or anything else -Ed.] very often here. But some bright lines deserve to be noted.

I can do no better than the prescient Mr. Cosh, who posted this just over a year ago:

I will give Chavez supporters the same advice that their Maoist fathers and Stalinist grandfathers ignored: you can save yourselves a couple of decades by being ashamed of yourselves right this minute.

[The link is in the original -RjC.]

And it’s terrible make that sort of joke about Peter Weller, Ph.D.

So let’s call him Professor Buckaroo Banzai instead.

The Lovely One, having despaired over seeing my messy cable drawer (all nerds have a cable drawer; here’s an exploded view of a typical example), was inspired to conceive of “Cableland” as the place where lost, unloved cables go.

Only a nerd would care, but the specific cable I was looking for was a mutant triple-headed A-A-A (all male) USB cable for a laptop drive enclosure. It must be in the other cable drawer. Or maybe the cupboard, or those bins, or up in the attic. Nope, I guess it’s in Cableland. (Update: it was in the new bin in the spare room.)

TLO wrote the Cableland Anthem:

Oh what a tangled web we weave
When an electronic connection we try to achieve
Yet within this labyrinthine mess
Live many a cable in acute distress

Oh, where, oh where do unwanted cables go?
What refuge have they, neglected so?

To Cableland they fly and wait
A long-desired connection they seek to make

Finally, they meet
And achieve a fate so sweet,
So longed for
Oft foretold in Cableland lore

First, let me say that I think the French Connection UK brand is beyond cheeky. I gotta wonder about why you would want to wear their logo on your body.

Of course, given that it now seems okay for even teenagers to wear “TNA” clothing and all manner of other curious slogans, I think I’ve lost this battle.

Okay, grumpy reactionary disclaimer out of the way, this history of FCUK advertising was a pretty interesting. You can interpret this multi-year tale several ways, but my favourite is to consider it the story of one company mau-mauing the UK’s perfectly reasonable advertising standards into submission on the installment plan.

But I’m like that.

The important lesson to take from The Prestige is that magicians are evil and should all be destroyed.

I liked it.

The Lovely One and I went to see this movie on Friday night (it beat out Rocky Balboa because it was slightly cheaper, and slightly closer. I also guessed correctly that the cheap theatre would make me sit through fewer ads, and I was right. There was one trailer and zero ads before the feature. Explain to me again why I go to first-run theatres?).

It’s going to be very hard to avoid spoiling the movie, but then, I will say that I figured out the major “secret” of the film about 2/3rds of the way through, and it impaired my appreciation not a bit.

I think I can say without spoiling the film that it annoyed me when Tesla was made out as some sort of Deus ex Machina magical mad scientist, but that the film totally repaid that betrayal by properly exploring the consequences of his magic box. I can also say that key elements of the story (based on a novel by Christopher Priest and published in 1995) bear interesting resemblances to the plot of the 1990 NFB animated short To Be.

I do not go too far when I suggest that everything interesting about the Tesla box was presaged (not to suggest cribbed) in the NFB short.

But I liked the film, even though it depicted, ultimately, awful people doing awful things. It was as if a proper revenge tragedy had spun out of control: what if Hamlet’s revenge was unjustifiable? What if he had only knocked Claudius down, and then their tits for tat had escalated out of hand, ultimately destroying the entire kingdom and everyone they knew? Oh right. That did happen.

When Michael Caine is playing the good guy, you know you’re in a bad place.

Everyone in the film acted their tuckuses off, but in a good way. The scenery was unchewed and pretty.

Christopher Nolan directed the whole thing, and he of Memento fame managed to use his old tricks of playing with time, space, and plot deceptions without repeating himself. It was good.

Read all about it.

My snow bike

My snow crank

My snow face

25 km round trip, the tires worked astoundingly well, it was probably an advantage to have my brakes accidentally both set to “crappy,” because they didn’t lock up the wheels.

Don’t let me tell you any differently: it was hilarious good fun, and not especially dangerous. I avoided taking any risks, and commandeered several sidewalks at a fast walking pace, mainly in order to avoid cars, as they mostly had less directional control than I did.