in case you weren't in the right place last Tuesday night...

Here's some reviews of the Toronto Echo & the Bunnymen show:

• CANOE
• EYE weekly

I tried writing my own, but I can never get past that whole dancing about architecture thing.

Bottom line: everyone who was there had their heads explode. In a good way.

how I learned to love television by never watching it

Television and I have always had an arm's-length relationship. When I was a kid, we lived in the country, and depended upon a TV aerial (it had its own tower, about two stories high) for signals. We watched a lot of TV Ontario: science shows and British sitcoms. Saturday mornings were for cartoons on Global and WUTV, and that was about it.

I knew a lot of TV-bashing people in university and after graduation, and for a time I was one of them too. Mostly I just didn't understand (still don't) how people can rush home on a schedule just to tune in to the next episode and the next dose of washing powder ads.

And yet: There are a lot of great shows on TV. There also were a lot of great shows on TV, which now can only be watched on DVD or (worst case) YouTube segments. There are lots of internet sites which rebroadcast shows, some with the copyright holder's blessing, some not.

The thing is, the TV shows whose DVDs I own now or that I've rented I enjoy as much as the shows I used to watch when I was a kid, and that never happens with the stuff I see broadcast in the 500-channel universe. There's something more contemplative, more direct about watching a show on disc than via a random button-press on a remote. Plus, you can appreciate the writing and set design better when you watch several episodes in a short space of time.

Can TV shows exist without TV stations? I think they are already starting to. Witness the popularity of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and other webcasts. In the end, it's not about whether the show is broadcast, streamed, or on a disc. It's about whether it's good or not.

UPDATE: I just got another incentive for not paying for cable or a dish. Bell Canada (whom I have a phone account with, but not any television services) just sent me an e-mail directing me to a web site called Stop the TV Tax. I'm not advocating for or against the tax — but I do note that any additional fees are an economic disincentive to pay for news and entertainment I can already get from sources I already pay for, ie: an internet connection.

if you make them want it, they will come (back)

This year's Word on the Street was the twentieth anniversary of the festival, and seemed at least as good as the previous year's had been. The vendors I asked about business all reported that business at the festival was at least normal, if not busier than usual. Once again, it was a strong sign that the reading world is not as diminished as some would have us think.

Last year was my first time at the festival, and I mostly just walked around stunned that such a wonderful thing could exist. This year, I happened to attend the festival in a quiet mood, and while I admit I made a beeline to where I found all my favourite stalls last year (they were all mostly in the same places), I cast a more critical eye on the proceedings.

I'm sure it was there last year too, but one of the things that struck me this time around was how much of the festival was dedicated to encouraging children to read. There were stage events. Balloons. Prizes. Special booths. Clowns. Even in the areas more dedicated to texts for grown-ups, there were odds and ends of things to get kids to read.

Don't get me wrong: getting kids to read is a great and wonderful thing, and not just because I have a fear of the alphabet you are reading in now becoming as obscure as Linear A in my lifetime. But I couldn't help thinking that there was a huge swath of the population being ignored.

This large, multi-faceted marketing segment comprises a wide range of ages, tastes, and incomes. There is a lot of competition for its discretionary spending dollars, but the rewards for winning them over can be very rich indeed. Sadly, most of this group is known to read just one book a year — or less.

I speak, of course, of literate adults. A lot of them can be convinced by media hype to read The Lost Symbol, or a Harry Potter book or seven, or some Stephen King, once in a while, if a film isn't convenient. They aren't against reading, not most of them. But somehow they don't.

Why not? No doubt there are several exhaustive studies on the subject, all pointing to films, video games, TV, overwork, and plummeting literacy. Those may well be factors. But I think there is another factor.

No-one has made it normal to them for a grown-up to read.

Reading for pleasure has become a kid's thing. You read as a kid because grown-ups tell you it's good for you, and because you're made to in school. Later, you read because it's part of your job. But reading something from a book that made you laugh out loud, or cry, or rush to go tell someone because you couldn't bear the only one who knew its truth: how often does that happen to the average grown-up? Sure, we may all know grown-ups who are like that, but why isn't it normal? After all, it's a normal enough reaction to stories told by other means.

I propose that programmes be started to encourage reading for pleasure amongst grown-ups. Some ideas:

• Book lovers: rant about books in terms your non-reading friends can understand. Don't compare the book to other books. Compare it to TV shows, or a movie, or your workplace, or anything else that would help show the non-reader your new favourite book can fit in their universe. Do the same in reverse: if someone admires a TV show, recommend a book of similar ilk.
  

• TV & film writers: any chance of showing main characters reading, even when it's not a "bookish" film? Just as something normal to do on a Wednesday night? John Cusack seems to be able to play characters who read in a by-the-bye way, but he also seems to be about the only one. We need more actors playing characters that read, and for the reading to be no big deal — as normal as watching them make themselves dinner.

• Marketers: how about taking some (not a lot, just some) of that money you were going to spend on getting kids to read and spending it on their role models instead? Children who grow up in homes where the adults of the family read tend to become reading adults themselves, so it's twice the bang for the buck. Just saying.

I'm not just speaking as a book lover. I'm speaking as a knitter (stop laughing and wait for it!) who has seen the craft go from the brink of obscurity to almost mainstream, all thanks to the internet, an increasing number of practitioners, and a process of "normalisation". When I was a teenager, the only other knitter I knew was the grandmother who taught me how. Now I know dozens of people, and most of them are younger than I am.

Reading can be a cool grown-up thing to do. It can be normal. We just have to make it be that way.

The Time Traveler's Wife film and sexism

Prediction: Someday people will look back on when The Time Traveler's Wife was released and comment about how much in common it had with Blade Runner.

Hope: Someday people will look back on when The Time Traveler's Wife was released and wonder how women and men ever put up with being treated like this. I don't mean in the movie; I mean the reaction to it.

Here's why:

I've read about five reviews of the film so far, and all the reviewers are more or less hung up on how preposterous it is to throw a time travel angle into a perfectly straightforward women's weepie romance story. Some have even gone so far as to claim that having Henry constantly running into Henry (and Alba running into Alba, for that matter) ruins what little believability the film has.

Funny, no-one seemed too upset about Spock the Younger and Spock the Elder meeting in Star Trek. Maybe if a black hole and spaceships are involved it's all right? It can't be Eric Bana's fault, because he's in both films, after all.

Personally, I was relieved when the film finally started. Before then, I'd been subjected to trailers for various romantic comedies, ads telling me how to send my (non-existent) children to school in an environmentally friendly way, and lots of trivia about how female stars make extravagant demands while on movie sets.

It made me wonder how the men in the audience could stand it. Yes, there were men in the audience.

The thing is, TTW is a science fiction story held together by its depiction of a marriage, not the other way around. Of the first three people I recommended the book to, two of them were men. They both liked it.

So why is TTW getting reacted to as if it's a straight "for women" romance film?

For me, this is where Blade Runner comes in. It got a similar reaction: the film noir elements didn't belong in a science fiction setting, people said. The characters lacked emotion. It was too unbelievable. It was too confusing. People couldn't understand it.

It's now a cult classic.

Until the idea dies off that the only films women will go see on their own are weepies and romantic comedies, any film that has a marriage at its core is doomed to be mis-marketed and mis-received.

In case anyone in marketing ever reads this, it may interest you to know that this 39-year-old woman of European descent who works as a full-time professional is going to see either Julie & Julia next — or else D-9. They both look pretty good.

Getting away from it all...

... or going to it?

It figures that the first weekend after I blogged about how much I love living in Toronto I wound up in cottage country. For the uninitiated, that's what Torontonians call anywhere with lots of summer/weekend homes that's anywhere up to about a half-day's drive away.

The idea was to be on retreat, relax, get away from all the stressors in our lives.

I should have known better.

What you expect from a cottage depends on where you live the rest of the time. When I was a little girl, one of my uncles had a cottage because he liked to fish. I think that's the last cottage that ever made any sense to me. We would load up the car, drive there, and go out on the lake. We would catch fish and roast marshmallows, and learn how to lash sticks together. There was a purpose, one that could only be satisfied in cottage country.

Also, we lived in the country anyhow. It made sense to go somewhere that offered different living options so as to get to do something new.

Now I live in the Beach. I'm about ten kilometres east of downtown Toronto, in an area that started off as farmland, morphed into an amusement park, and now is one of the "neighbourhoods" that are like villages within the greater city. If I want urban convenience, I walk down Queen St. and can easily find grocery shops, clothing shops, pubs, bakeries. If I want nature and tranquility, I ride my bike to Tommy Thompson park, or just walk five minutes down to the lakeshore. Wild rabbits live in the parkland by the water. Beachers get slammed for being smug a lot, but it really is a well-balanced place — if balance is what you want.

The longer I've had balance, the longer I've not wanted to do without it. When I lived away from Toronto, I resented trips to cottages because it was taking precious vacation time and keeping me away from my TO. I wasn't getting away from anything — I was just going from isolated to even more isolated.

Now I simply don't have anything to get away from. I love where I live. I'll go visit other places because I love to travel and want to see more of the world, but going to a cottage doesn't count for that. I've seen what the Ontario countryside looks like. I've lived there, and it's still only an hour away from where I am now. If I miss hills and apple orchards, I just have to take a day trip, not plan an expedition.

There remains, however, something un-Canadian, unacceptable, in disliking going to cottages. Yet for the life of me I can't figure out the appeal of driving several hours just to do what you were going to do at home anyhow. Except I didn't get to do even that well, plus I now have several loads of laundry to do before the start of an especially strenuous week at work.

All I can think about is how much I'm looking forward to next weekend. At home.

why I love TO

Last Saturday I had a terrific day, and it made me realise all over again how much I love living in Toronto.

Now, if you live in Toronto yourself, or follow Toronto news, you may be wondering what was so special about last Saturday. The municipal workers' strike is still on, after all, and ever single public garbage receptacle in the city long passed the "overflowing" designation. Last Saturday was the first Saturday after Pages Bookstore announced it was closing after thirty amazing years of business. We still haven't had a real heat wave this summer.

On a personal note: I went into the office and worked half a day on Saturday.

If it's starting to sound like I'm either a bitter cynic or a book-hating, union-loving (yet salaried) workaholic, consider this:

• I went to the library and picked up a book I had requested. The library system has twenty-three copies of this book, and all of them were borrowed when I requested it. I live in a city where people read.
  


• At the library, I found out that I can get free passes to various art galleries and museums throughout TO. The passes are good for general admission for two adults and two kids. All I needed to get one of these passes was a library card. I also found out that some Toronto Public Library branches have free wireless access to the internet. You don't even have to buy a cappuccino.
  


• I know the summer has been "cold" to a lot of people, but this is a classic Toronto summer to me. It's called "the lake effect", people — breezes, sunny skies, beautiful fluffy clouds, rain every four days or so. It's perfectly warm enough to walk around in a t-shirt, but not so warm that the city has to announce smog alerts and ask those without their own air conditioning to go to a public building that has it so they won't wind up sick or dead. The mild summer is making the city happy — it's cool enough people can sleep at night.
  


• After I finished my half-day stint at work, I went to Pages for what may be the last time (okay, that was very sad — but the good news is we had it for thirty years), then wandered over to the Eaton Centre on my way home because I needed to pick up some new socks. Along the way, I met group after group of tourists, all happily taking photos of the old and new city halls, arranging to take downtown bus tours, and asking directions from locals. The garbage strike didn't seem to be getting any of them down.


• And yeah, about the strike — I'm glad I live somewhere that people have the right to strike. Yes, the strike hasn't been entirely peaceful, but it hasn't been riots and tear gas either.

Look around, Toronto. You're as beautiful as you want to be.

1,000 words

I recently spotted the post on Inkygirl about the 1,000 words a day movement. I guess I'm feeling optimistic after my little break from the day job, because I signed up for it.

The idea is to get 1,000 words a day completed, six days a week. If you don't make your word count one day, you just don't — there aren't any makeups.

I already have a spreadsheet where I track my word counts, and I pay myself a dollar every time I make quota for the day. I'm not very good about it — the muse is more important than the accountant — but it helps. I got the idea from Carolyn See's Making a Literary Life, and it's helped make the writing normal again. (Once upon a time this was axiomatic, but some very heavy negativity has made a bit of artifice necessary.)

The only quibble I have with challenges like these is that they often don't take revisions into account. If I'm going to spend a couple of hours with a printout and a pen using all the markup symbols I learned in university, I think that should count towards work too. Often it's implied, but not talked about directly as an act of creation.

I follow See's idea that two hours of revision is equal to a thousand words. The truth is, I can knock off more than a thousand words in two hours if I know what I want to say and I'm on a comfy keyboard, but since it's revision, I think that's fair.

Today I'm only going to get to about 700 words. It's a start.

An Evening with Neil Gaiman... and, um, other people

Part 1: before

The ever-excellent Rhonda was ill, so she couldn't make it, although the equally excellent Howard did. Unfortunately, I was stupid enough to talk about this on my cell phone in front of the theatre. A few people tried to buy the spare ticket off me, and one woman was especially insistent, so I gave in. I should know better. A security guard appeared out of nowhere and said I wasn't allowed to scalp. I said I wasn't scalping, I only had the spare because my friend was sick (I should know better; some people can do these things, but I am not one of them). The guard explained that even if I did sell the ticket to the woman, she wouldn't be allowed in the theatre, because she was banned from the event. He knew her name, and that settled it for me.

I don't want to get into a lot of details about what happened next — confessing my own foolishness on the internet is one thing, but telling about someone else's is something else again. Let's just say that I get very uncomfortable when a stranger grabs my arm and starts pleading with me over something that an authority figure has put beyond my control. Howard and I had to escape into the theatre before the woman would go away.

Part 2: during

Somewhere on the internet, someone will do a much better job of telling about the "Evening with Neil Gaiman" than I ever will. Probably it will be Neil Gaiman himself. Mark Askwith did a lovely and witty job of moderating — perfect choice.

I will say that I was very glad I went.

Biggest take-away: Gaiman and Askwith both claimed that Askwith's wife always says "all men are idiots; all women are crazy." Amen.

Part 3: after

Neither Howard nor I collect autographs, so we left via a side exit a thoughtful theatre staff member opened for those who didn't want to join the very long queue in the lobby for the book-signings. We walked up Yonge Street and had a wonderful, peaceful, uninterrupted conversation.

Conclusion: sometimes fate pushes you over the edge. Sometimes it holds you back from it. And sometimes it dangles you by the neck of your shirt for a few moments before hoisting you back to safety.

Thanks for Chicago

Yeah, I haven't blogged much lately. That's because nothing much bloggable has come up as a topic, and I would rather post nothing than post blather. So, enough about that.

Last week I finally got to come up for air and go on vacation. I went to Chicago because:

• I had never been there, but knew lots of people who had either lived there or visited for extended periods of time, and they all said I should go.
• Due to the above reason, I had set part of my first novel in Chicago during the 1950s-early 1960s, and thought it might *cough* be a good idea for me to research what the place was like then, and book learning wasn't going to get me all the way there.
• Quite frankly, it was a cheap quick flight & hotel combo and I just needed to be somewhere completely new to me so I could get out of my head and reflect a bit.
  

As it turned out, I got lucky on all three points. The friends and co-workers who had told me I should go were all right, and all for totally different reasons. I learned enough about the history and the architecture that I think I can make it through that part of my novel without including any major howlers*. And yeah, I got out of my head — and noticed things that would fit with the novel that I never knew about before. Of the two novels I have written in draft mode so far, this one has been weird to write because every time I think it's not working out, I find these absolutely stunning coincidences out in the real world that have to do with things I made up for the story. Even though I'm dreading doing the second draft on this story (as opposed to my second novel, which seems to have worked out much better), fate seems to be telling me to finish the damn thing, even if I don't like it very much.

As for Chicago itself: I'm glad I stuck to near the lake. I get nervous if I'm too far away from a major body of water for too long. And as touristy as it is, I'm glad I went to the Sears Tower the morning of my first day there. It was a good orientation and the audio tour that went with my ticket helped a lot with street navigation during the rest of the trip.

My acid test of any city is that it should make you happy just to walk down a random street and see what there is to see along it, whether you've known them all your life or are seeing them for the first time. Chicago passed that, easily.

Here's the photos I took, for what they're worth (the photo of the sculpture is a link):


*The truth is, the vast majority of the story set in Chicago happens inside a house. The vast majority of the parts that don't occur inside a restaurant. So really I didn't have to research this a lot. But now that I have, I have lots of other information to draw from.

Down to Earth

Personal computing has been extra-unpredictable of late around the eyrea. First, one of my Twitter tweeple asked more than once with help recovering her blog (guess that means it was permanently missing — I haven't had the heart to ask her directly). Then another person posted several apologetic tweets saying that her blog posts weren't displaying at present, but she hoped to fix it soon. Note that these people use completely different blogging sites.

Meanwhile, I've been fighting with my internet connection off and on all weekend. I'd say it was settled now, but I'm afraid if I do it'll go down again. For a while I even thought I had a virus — two other machines and one different operating system later I had confirmed that it was my connection, not the machines I was using to attach to it.

As I was slouched over my laptop this morning, considering putting on street clothes so I could go across the road to the local Starbuck's and use their WiFi, I thought about how much of an inconvenience losing my internet connection would really be.

And then I started counting my blessings, because even though I love my gadgets, I've never fallen for the cloud.

Cloud computing, for those who find learning new jargon every week annoying (and I'm right with you, but it's part of my job) is when instead of using locally-installed applications and saving to your local machine like Vannevar Bush meant you to, you go to a web site and save everything to the servers of that web site. Everyone's favourite examples are webmail and Google Docs, but there are plenty of others, including blog sites.

Joining the cloud has lots of advantages. If you don't actually own a computer, but have access to them through cafés or other means, you can have an internet presence, even though you never know what physical machine you'll be on next. Many applications let you share your data with people you specify by e-mail address or login ID. You never need to worry about application fees or upgrades.

Unfortunately, joining the cloud has lots of disadvantages too. If the company hosting the cloud application decides that the service isn't viable, they can take down the site and leave you with no way to access your data. A nice site will notify you and give you a chance to download everything before a certain date, but probably buried somewhere in that EULA you clicked by, there's a phrase stating that they don't have to. They can pack up and take their toys — and yours — any time they like.

Weirdly, cloud computing sites often advertise that they are more reliable than saving things on your local machine because they claim to be more diligent about backing up their servers than the average home computer user is about backing up their hard drive. This ought to be true, but they have their shares of disasters too.

Once upon a time, I was a trainer to a group of customer service reps who supported a popular webmail application (never ye mind which one). Our client had all the trainers and managers on a subscription service that told us about any outages and approximately how many users they affected.

One morning we got an outage notification with an affected users count so big I had to copy and paste the number into a spreadsheet and set commas on to make sure I was reading it correctly. The entire server farm had crashed. It took several hours before it was up again, and days before everyone who could get their mail back were able to do so. Thousands of people lost the entire contents of their accounts. Months later we were still getting enquiries for help from people who just couldn't bear to think they'd lost all their mail.

Remember how "internet appliances" tanked? This is kind of the same thing all over again, except now we have Web 2.0 so the performance of the applications is at least bearable.

So what to do?

The cloud has a lot of advantages. I'm using it to publish this very blog. The difference is that I have set up my blog to e-mail me a copy of this post when I publish it. That means I'll have two copies: one here on the blog and one in my e-mail. Needless to say, I am one of those people who downloads their e-mail locally, even though all my accounts are through webmail services. That means I'll have a copy of this blog with two backups: one in my webmail and one on my local hard drive. I'll admit I don't back up as often as I should, but I do pull the external hard drive out often enough that I have a decent backup of my machines' drives. I also do mini backups (mostly of my writing stuff) on SD cards.

There are much more rigorous solutions out there, but hopefuly that gives you some ideas for your own backup plans. It's fun to be amongst the clouds, but we all have to get down to earth sooner or later.

Nerds & Computer Science jobs

Thanks to @tdoerr on Twitter, I recently read the Science Daily article, "Geeks May Be Chic, But Nerd Stereotype Still Exists, Professor Says". It describes a number of scenarios where the nerd stereotype still exists in popular culture, but then gets into some statistics about how women and minorities are either staying at a steady (low) percentage of computer science majors, or declining in some areas. Women in particular are less likely to get into IT jobs, even after earning a computer science degree.

There's no comment area on Science Daily that I could find, so I'm standing on my soapbox here. I've worked in enough IT jobs that I know I can answer this one without referring directly without breaking my current company's security policy (which, come to think of it, is very similar to the security policies of the other companies I've worked for).

First, the correlation between a computer science degree and an IT job only works for a certain portion of those jobs, and even there you can still get in if you have a long history of related experience. I have an English degree. I have worked with people who also have English degrees and are in IT, plus people with degrees in biology, political science, philosophy, education, history, music, and business. We wound up in IT because we're also geeks, and learned about computers on our own time.

If studies only look at what happens to people who take computer science, they're going to have an awful lot of "dark matter" data they'll have to erroneously assume is "management." IT never exists in a vacuum; it is always in service of a business need, whether that need is managing a factory, a hospital, or a bank. A lot of people start on the business side and then join IT because they have strong computer skills plus a very good knowledge of the industry the IT is supposed to support. It's not just about getting a software or hardware solution out — it's about getting the right solution out.

Second, I thought it was very strange that the article correlated women and minorities not getting into IT with the cultural expressions of Weird Al Yankovic and others, but didn't bother to track down any women and/or members of a visible minority who have degrees in computer science but chose not to follow that as a career path. What did they encounter when they applied for jobs? Was it an old boy's club (certainly not anywhere I've ever worked, but I have heard tell of such things)? Was it the working conditions? The hours? The career path? The fear of being outsourced mid-career?

Or was it that even people studying your job prospects think you're dumb enough to be influenced by parody rap songs?

"Good enough" technology

Quick: how many people do you know who are still running Windows XP, either at work or at home? How many are still using Office 2000?

In my case, I know a lot. A few people I know bought Office 2003 and really liked it, but most balked at the price. Besides, early adopters were "punished" because they had to save as their documents to Office 2000 format if they wanted to share them with those who had not yet upgraded.

Yet here they are, using ten-year-old software on three-year-old machines, and they're getting a lot of work done. They're not wanting for features. They're happy with how things are.

Other things are changing rapidly: cell phones/Blackberries/smart phones on the hardware side, and yet more information and tools being loaded onto the Web. But for anyone who hasn't gone Mac or Linux, things are very quiet.

It was interesting when Vista came out. Instead of being excited about it, people were saying things like, "Ugh. Will it slow down my computer again?" or "Yeah, but what's the use of it?".

Now, I'm not interested in a Microsoft slam, or even a PCs-killed-by-cloud-computing slam. I mean, cloud computing is at least ten years old too —remember "internet appliances"?

What I mean is that maybe, just maybe, people have "good enough" computing power. They can make complex spreadsheets, long and elaborately formatted documents, presentations with lots of animation and complicated transition effects. They can listen to the radio, call their mom long distance, and watch the news. They can play games, keep in touch with long distance friends, and figure out driving directions. They're content.

Maybe it's time for a period of refinement instead of scrambling off to the next innovation.

adventures in urban ornithology

The Eyrea is turning into a bit of a war zone lately, with the province of day job trying to conquer the rest, including blogging time. I'm trying to work through it (literally) and look forward to peace and harmony being restored. In the short term, it's a bit of a pity because I have two (two!) short stories on the go I'd love to get finished, plus I'm partway into editing last year's NaNoWriMo novel. I also have about four things I want to blog about. This one is the easiest: I think I spotted a baby pigeon! Normally you never see urban pigeons until they're full-grown, but I snapped this one with its grey feathers half grown in (see highlight circle in the photo below). It was about -20C the day I took the photo, so the pigeons were all on the subway grate trying to keep warm.

Book review: Knittishisms, by Rebel Knitter

I walked into Romni Wools the other day and searched their large wall of knitting books for a good ten minutes without finding what I wanted. Finally I walked up to the counter and told the clerk I was looking for a book.

Before I could go on, she prompted, "Is it about a specific technique, or is it by a certain designer?"

"Not exactly," I said. "It's about the intersection of Judaism, yoga, and knitting."

The clerk started to mumble something apologetic, so I added, "It has a knitted picture of Che Guevera on the front."

"Oh, Che!" she said. "Yeah, that should be on the right-hand side. I have to tend cash, but ask someone on the floor if you need more help."

In a nutshell, that's Knittishisms. For all the "hip" pattern books that are still coming out, for all the punk posings of various bloggers, knitting is still trying to get itself out of that evil mire known as "hobby," in the sense of something one does because one has too much leisure time and not enough imagination. People forget that at its heart, it's both a craft and a folk art, "folk" being in the sense that it belongs to everyone.

Knittishisms: the Zen of Jewish Knitting shows how knitting gets expressed by Rosanne Bernard (aka Rebel Knitter). She writes about how knitting fits in with her personal history, culture, spirituality, motherhood. She includes patterns for Righteous Lids, and charts for a Star of David, the famous Emma Goldman quote "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution," and of course that magnificently-rendered Che. There's also a pattern for a knitted engineer's ring — to be worn by knitters so they remember to make their creations well-crafted in the full sense of the term.

Along the way we get to see photos of the ever-flexible Beryl Tsang striking yoga poses with knitting materials, a good working definition of trayf yarn, and a crash course in Yiddish.

The whole conglomeration is joyous, celebratory, and infectious enough that when I showed it to some of my non-knitting friends, they got smiles out of it too.

I just wish the title was on the spine. It would have saved me twenty minutes of floundering around at Romni. I could have had time to browse the bargain bin! Maybe The Society for the Propagation of Fibre P*rnography can start an ongoing action of rearranging the copies on sale so that they face cover-out from the shelf.

Rebel Knitter has a Knittishishms blog if you want to learn how to find the book in real life.

Disclaimer: I belong to the same knitting group the author does — The Society for the Propagation of Fibre P*rnography.

where's the next leap forward?

I hosted the annual "Apollo 8 anniversary" dinner yesterday (each year my family comes up with another thing to celebrate on 25 December — last year it was Sir Isaac Newton's birthday), and, appropriately enough, my youngest brother got the From the Earth to the Moon DVD series that Tom Hanks partly directed and wrote. We watched the disc with the dramatisation of the moon landing on it over dessert.

Now, in case it's not obvious by now, everyone in my immediate family is a geek. We watched a few sitcoms on TV when I was a kid, but not nearly as much as we did documentaries. Wildlife and history were fine, but if it was about space exploration, we were all glued to the set.

I wasn't born yet when the moon shot happened, but I did grow up in a small town that looked more like the late 1960s when I was old enough to remember it in the late 1970s. And what I keep thinking lately, at the end of 2008, is: we haven't come that far.

People love to point out how computers have changed our lives since that time. Look at the technology that was used for the moon shot, though, or that Douglas Engelbart had demonstrated the year before. The technology has been refined since then, but it's still the same technology. We're still using it for the same things they did in 1968, maybe in different proportions (in the sense that computer games are no longer the privilege of MIT students working late hours when no-one wants cycles on the mainframe and they have time for a little fun, for instance), but it's still the same things.

Some things I would like to see us move forward on:

• Greener technology. We've been talking about solar, wind, and tide technology for decades — I did a project on it back in 1977 with a classmate and won a school award. Okay, we were in Grade 2 and drew a poster about how pollution is bad, but the point is, it's not news. Bobby Kennedy had cutting down on pollution as part of his platform in the presidential primaries. There are amazing opportunities here, but people continue to see it as a bad thing to go green.
• Housing. I've been thinking about this more since I bought an apartment for the first time last summer. The new place is about two-thirds the size of my last rental, and really I'm still organising it, but it's forced me to have to consider how to make a fixed space livable. Mostly I've been doing it by creating spaces that can change (watching Transformers with my brothers seems to have had a lasting effect!). Even though the layout is very thoughtful and doesn't have much "dead space," I think it could be more efficient. As much as I love my current bedroom set, I could see switching to a loft bed or a cabinet bed in the future, and reclaiming the floor space to use for active use and for more storage.
• Sustainable clothing. Throwaway fashion that demands you junk clothing because it's a season or two old is ridiculous. The vintage look is the start of the rebellion against it, and so is the utilitarian look promoted by The Gap, American Apparel, and other shops. But I want actual sustainable clothes, too. The sweater I get the most compliments on is one I made in the autumn of 2001. It's been mended three times now (both cuffs and a sleeve), and I know it's only a matter of time before it's unrepairable, but it's always worked because it's stylish, practical, and unusual enough to be a conversation piece. It's never been in fashion, so it can never go out, yet it looks good. I want more clothes like that.
• Real food. The American moon exploration effort led to the invention of a lot of things, including Tang. Tang is wonderful if you're in a space capsule, or camping, or somewhere you can't obtain or keep real orange juice. Real orange juice is wonderful when you can get it. As with clothing, we have to stop making food choices for abstract reasons (including the continuously evolving diet mythology), and start considering food because it's good. Good means high-quality, unadorned, and not specially altered just to make it more salable. Cost efficiencies are literally killing us. The locavore movement (in its non-snobby mode) is a good start here.

As near as I can figure, this is the trick we need to pull off: to embrace new technology when it will actually better our lives, and to embrace older modes when that will better our lives more than some newfangled way someone is selling us. And, of course, the wisdom to tell the difference. That seems to be the next leap forward.

solstice

It's rather late now (past midnight), but happy winter solstice to all of you who celebrate it. I had a decidedly low-key celebration this year, but I'm not entirely sad about it. It made me resolve the following for next year:

1. The "only on the internet until noon" rule was a failure. I can't be on the internet at all. It just doesn't work.
2. I am unplugging my phone just before I go to bed the night before solstice starts. That way I won't get friends who should know better calling and asking me about Christmas, including the ones with whom I have discussed my non-celebration of Christmas at length. That's like calling up your Muslim friend during Ramadan and asking if they want to have an Easter brunch with you.

I guess it wasn't meant to be this year. Next year solstice falls on a Monday, which means that I'll have to use a vacation day to celebrate, but hopefully will have better luck with finding some space.

waxing doesn't make it better

I found another one.

I'm not going to bother to link to it, because the point isn't to single someone out, but I found another author using the phrase, "allow me to wax stereotypically" just before they said something that wouldn't be allowed in a conversation in a bar. Even when it's almost closing time and all the remaining patrons are half off their gourds. The reason why it wouldn't have been allowed is because even when people are half off their gourds, they can spot a contradiction, and after this particular author said the ugly thing he did, he contradicted himself in the very next paragraph. I'm not sure if this was an attempt to reduce the sting of the first paragraph, or to make it so people couldn't object ("Ah, but I contradict myself within the next fifty words, so you can't possibly take exception!"). Yes, readers can object even to muddled arguments. I objected so much I unsubscribed from the blog feed.

If you use a phrase like that (usually the exact wording I come across is "if I may stereotype for a moment"), what you're basically doing is allowing yourself to be a jerk for a moment, and damn what the reader thinks. By acknowledging that you're stereotyping, you're hoping you can manage a "get away with it without having to apologise" card.

Now: if the stereotype is the point of the post, or if you need to set some baseline assumptions to get your argument rolling, I can see how that can be within bounds. If you write something like, "Typical of six-year-olds, I hated broccoli," and then go on to talk about how you learned to love the vegetable, I'm cool with that.

But if the stereotype disclaimer is followed by something hideous, and then dropped and never again taken up, or if it doesn't link logically to the next paragraph — at that point, all you're doing is muck-raking. It doesn't spur people to read on. It spurs people to think, "Ick, what a jerk" and navigate to another web site.

If you're going to stereotype knowingly, please make it useful.

Passchendaele

Passchendaele was the film that opened this year's Toronto International Film Festival. I just saw it for the first time last night with the ever-cinematic J-A. I'm not too interested in trying to critique it properly, but I just spent an hour and a half going over the reviews and the IMDB discussion boards, and there are a few points I feel haven't been covered yet by the chattering masses.

I deliberately waited until Passchendaele came to the Fox Theatre in the Beach. This had nothing to do with the endemic Torontonian laziness of not wanting to hike to another neighbourhood for something. The theatre opened in 1914, the same year that Canada entered the war Passchendaele is set in, and has been showing films since then. It supposedly has a stage behind the projection screen, although I've never seen it used. Passchendaele is shot like one would expect a film in 2008 to look like, but I wanted as much connection with the time period as I could get.

I got a root beer to go with my popcorn as a nod to Snoopy's WWI beverage of choice, and then J-A and I settled into the seats and admired the theatre's recent renovations. Then we waited some more. I did some sock knitting , and J-A worked on a scarf. We joked about how we were carrying on the traditions of the first women to watch films in this theatre. Then one of the staff members went to the front of the theatre and explained that the projectionist hadn't arrived yet, but the projectionist's union had been called and one was on his way. During the wait, people joked and talked. The staff members who came in to give us updates were gently heckled, but the hecklers were heckled back by other members of the audience, so no-one got irate.

The film finally started just under half an hour late. If you want a proper review, go ahead and Google some. These are just some of my impressions:

• I liked that the film pointed out that Canada was already multicultural by Edwardian times. I say this as a Canadian of Dutch/Croatian/Hungarian/German/who-knows-what-else descent who is sick to the teeth of only seeing characters of British, French, and First Nations ethnicity in dramas (I know many First Nations people have some bones to pick about how they're depicted, but they can explain that themselves far better than I'll ever be able to). In Passchendaele, a major part of the plot is driven by the conflict between being a born-and-bred Canadian and being of an ethnicity at war with the British Empire. It sounds weird, but it was refreshing to see that on the screen and up-front.
• For me, one of the most important scenes is the very brief one that takes place near the end, where someone delivers a live chicken to a platoon and tells them they'll have to kill and pluck it themselves if they want it for dinner. The soldier who is holding the chicken shrugs, breaks its neck in a single deft movement, and gives it to someone else for plucking. When another soldier teases him on his skill, he cracks a joke about how it's what he would do at home. A few minutes later we watch the same platoon killing German soldiers with guns, knives, bayonets, rocks... It's the first time I've ever seen on film, especially a Canadian film, something I remember being told in history class: one of the reasons that Canadians were such effective troops in the Great War was because they were farmers — they had learned how to kill in the barnyard and the slaughter-house, and they knew it for what it was, unadorned and unromanticised.
• I noticed a lot on the message boards on how "hokey" or "corny" the dialogue was, with some people even claiming the acting was bad. Dealing with the latter criticism first: ever seen films from this time period? They look ridiculous and melodramatic now, but at the time were praised for their naturalistic acting. Conventions change, and so do people's behaviours. At one time people really did "pull their hair out" when they were frustrated; now we just say it as a colloquialism.
  
  As for the dialogue: funny how people are criticising the dialogue using words that would have been popular at the time. Of course it's going to sound silly and old-fashioned — it's from ninety years ago! Give it another fify years and the language will be foreign-sounding enough that it won't grate. Right now it makes us uncomfortable because it's close to how we speak, but not close enough.
• A lot of discussion has been made of how too much time is spent on the "home front," and not enough on the battlefield. From what I remember of the eyewitness accounts I studied in school, trench warfare alternates between mind-numbing boredom and mind-numbing terror and chaos. Either way, showing early automobiles vie for road space alongside horse and buggies is more cinematically interesting. Besides, there's some scenes in the film where different characters talk about how the war is everywhere, not just "over there". If you're just sitting there waiting to see a scene where someone shoots someone else, you're going to miss out on that.
  
• There was also a certain amount of noise on the forums about how there's no big hero's ending at the film. I'm glad. If there had been, it would have contradicted the point that although people did incredibly heroic things and behaved with honour... they shouldn't have needed to. One point I saw being made in the film that I was glad to see was that the people who make the rules and the people who live under them are so far apart in viewpoint it's nearly impossible for them to really communicate at all. Without giving out too many spoilers: the main character gets a medal for the very event which gives him shell-shock. It turns out the persistent rumour of a certain German "atrocity" is a misinterpretation of an honourable gesture. And so on.

The Fox is a theatre you have to learn how to attend to fully enjoy. This is true for all cinemas, but as Canadian life has changed since 1914, so have our cinemas. Along with the 1914 ambiance, they have a 1914 heating system (probably upgraded at least once, but it still works like it's ninety years old, and I love it for that). It was about -10C outside, and maybe 17C inside. I knew ahead of time, and was perfectly comfy in my winter boots and handmade cardigan. Being a chronic anaemic, my fingers get cold easily, especially when I sit still for long periods of time, and I had to stuff them into the one sock I already had finished. The toe is shaped according to a design Lord Kitchener invented during the Great War, which has since become the standard in British Commonwealth nations and the US.

I'm glad I saw Passchendaele in an Edwardian theatre, on a cold day, with my sock knitting. Films are always more about what you bring to them than what they bring to you. The "here we are, now entertain us" crowd needs to be taught that level of engagement, or else "twitches" and "jolts" are all that are ever going to get through to them.

If you feel like going to the movies this weekend and live anywhere at all near Toronto, try to make it to the Fox.

Augmented Intelligence

It was 40 years ago today that Douglas Engelbart first demonstrated, in a single groundbreaking multimedia session, an awful lot of things that we take for granted in personal computer user interfaces now:

• an on-screen pointer controlled by a mouse
• a screen organised into windows
• copying and pasting between documents
• hyperlinks
• one of the first (if not the first itself) slide-style presentations

The whole thing was filmed, so we can still see it today.

In 1968.

I taught for seven years, was a corporate trainer for three, and now work as a business systems analyst, and I have to say: the quality of the tools may have got better, but the tools are still basically the same. You have sound capability on most business computers, but it's often disabled or not set up, so instead you use a conference line for sound and show the visuals over remote desktop sharing. You almost always make a slide presentation, if only to kick things off, and you use the mouse pointer to keep everyone focused and on track.

And so, every time the anniversary of the invention of the mouse (in 1965) or of this demonstration comes around, I think about what the purpose of inventing all this interactive "stuff" was: the augmentation of human intelligence so that we could work better together and, to put it one way, surpass ourselves.

Have we? And if we haven't, why not?

I don't know what research has been done on this, but I do know what I've seen in workplaces, teaching, at home, and in various capacities as a volunteer. For one thing, there is often resistance to change and radically new ways of doing things. From what I've observed (and experienced myself), it's not always simple pigheadedness. There is a tendency to throw out the baby with the bath water when it comes to new technology, where some people evangelise and other people immediately become suspicious from the hard sell. I think the world would be a better place if people assessed technology rationally rather than emotionally. It feels silly to point that out, but it's true. I have four computers at home. I also have a glass pen that requires an inkwell to dip it into to write with. Both are communication technologies better suited to some contexts than others. I think we're very fortunate that Engelbart's audience wanted to analyse and innovate based on what he showd them that day 40 years ago, rather than knee-jerkedly falling into either technolust or Luddite horror.

What about groupware technologies that let people work together better? Maybe I hang out with too many Luddites, but I have to say that it's only been in the last two years that I've found people willing to use groupware without being in a paying work situation with a manager dictating its use to them. It's as if we all finally learned how to use this openly, instead of fighting with it all the time.

The major point for me as the "mother of all demonstrations" turns 40 is that while there may be the occasional flash of invention, the truth is that these changes happen far more slowly than the hype would have us believe. It's popular to build up remarkable statistics about the rate of progress. But again, that's about technology, not the real standard of living: education, nutrition, work/life balance, happiness. In some parts of the world, these have gone up. In others (including North America, where I am), they're deemed to have gone down or stayed the same, depending on the measuring stick and who's wielding it.

Ultimately the augmentation of our collective intelligence has to be done with our humanity, not our technology. Visionaries like Engelbart can provide us with excellent tools, but it's down to us to learn how to use them and apply them to the right jobs.

the beginning!

My new year starts 31 October: Samhain. It's a good time to be quiet and introspective, which of course is perfect for writing. I love how National Novel Writing Month conveniently starts the very next day.

I made my NaNoWriMo word count with a nigh-photo finish today (6,201 words between 8:30am and 2:30pm, for a total of 50,222 words), and then headed out to learn how to make lino carvings at the ever-creative Tara's. The time on the TTC on the way there let me think about all the stuff that I've learned in the past month. A lot of it (okay, most of it) seems stupid, and in fact like things I already know, but perhaps the point is sometimes we have to learn these things over a few times before it finally sinks in. That's what works for me, anyhow.

This year, the learning included this:

• I now know that I can crank out 1,000 words of first-draft story-telling in just under half an hour. I think 24 minutes was my lowest-ever rate. I now know I can manage this whilst sitting in a Starbucks blaring Christmas music, which is incredible to me, considering how much I loathe Christmas and everything that goes with it.
• Speaking of writing at Starbucks: my biggest "duh" moment was learning that if I only need half an hour to make my basic daily word count, it's worth it to bring my laptop along on weeknights when I'm going out. There doesn't need to be a time conflict.
• A slight negative incentive can be helpful. Most of the "how to write more" advice I've heard and read all recommends the positive, like turning off your editing voice, rewarding yoruself for making your word count, and writing just to please yourself. None of that will help you if you're staring somewhere in the middle distance beyond your computer screen, wondering if you should heat up leftovers for lunch or make an omelette instead. Drwicked.com has come up with a web page that, as he puts it, "puts the prod back in productivity." It saved my NaNoWriMo, and my well save my short story output as well. Check it out if you haven't already.
• Even the world's loneliest occupation is more fun with a crowd. I met a lot of writers through Twitter the various book-lover's blogs I read, and the mutual support banished the last of the stupid self-pity that can barge in sometimes when I'm doing a marathon writing session to catch up.
• I always keep a spreadsheet with my daily word count on it. This year, because I was both sick and busy with work, there are a lot of blank (ie: zero count) days on it. But you know what? I passed the finish line anyhow. It can be done.

Last year, I was completely exhausted when I finished, and didn't want to go near writing fiction ever again. This year is different. Maybe it's because I let myself sleep when I wanted to sleep. Maybe it was the enforced breaks. But I really feel like I want to go on this time.

What a great way to start the new year.