want to speed up web access? block Facebook!

Back when I was researching the most efficient way to commit Facebook suicide, I came across an article about how Facebook can pursue you even in the non-Facebook afterlife. I made a note to try it out once my account was good and gone.

The account is officially dead, so I went ahead with the next step and blocked "www.facebook.com" in my router's firewall settings. These settings were originally designed for parents to keep children from porn sites and the like. It felt pretty strange blocking myself from a site that I never use anyhow, but I was curious as to why people were recommending it in the first place.

Adding the domain to my settings took under five minutes. It would have taken under two if I had known where in the router's settings I needed to do the data entry.

After the router restarted and I was back on the web, I headed over to my favourite on-line magazine web site to do some light reading. To my astonishment, the site loaded much faster than it normally does, so quickly I checked the status bar on my browser for an error message. Nope, nothing. So I scrolled down the home page to see if there had been a noticeable revamp of the layout or something else to explain the speed. Everything looks the same, except for what's shown in the screen shot below, and that was my doing:

I knew from the "www.facebook.com" test I did after the router reset that the block is very fast — the router is very quick to check and invoke the blocked URL settings (which is about what you'd expect, but it's nice to see it in action).

Traditionally pulling in information and displaying it from disparate URLs was known to slow down page loads, but this was the first time I'd ever really noticed it since switching from dial-up to DSL over ten years ago.

Out of curiosity I went to a couple of my favourite newspaper sites. Same thing, and for apparently the same reason.

Now, I'm not nearly enough of a propeller-head to do the measurements and attach some numbers to this, but what I thought would be a "set it and forget it" ethical stance against a site that had annoyed me turned out to have some immediate, positive benefits.

It was tempting to see what would happen if I blocked "www.google.com," but I didn't. Why? Mostly because, while I refuse to be anyone's fangirl, Google doesn't bug me nearly as much as Facebook does. But that's another blog post.

Dracula could have saved the Titanic

I finally finished something I was reading on the Kobo I posted about a couple of weeks ago (just because you're carrying around 100 books on a device the size of a greeting card doesn't make you read any faster, and I tend to read two or three books at once). I had to give up on Canterbury Tales because the formatting of the verses and the footnotes left a lot to be desired, so instead I worked my way through Dracula.

The only version of Dracula I'd ever read before was a magazine-size comic version when I was about eight. Since then I've seen two film versions (by Werner Herzog and Francis Ford Coppola — the Herzog one is my favourite). Since I was a 17-year-old in North America in 1987 I also saw The Lost Boys, but I try to forget that as much as possible.

None of these three get across something that is glaringly obvious when you read the original: the reason why the story is novel-length is that the main characters keep screwing up all the time.

At first you can forgive them. With the exception of Van Helsing (I'll get to him in a moment), all of the "good guys" are Modern People of Modern Places: four proud citizens of the Glorious British Empire and an American. They're as any gadget freaks of our own times — Mina has separation anxiety if a typewriter isn't at hand for her to use, and Seward prefers to voice-record his diary on a newfangled phonograph than write or type it out. Jonathan takes Kodaks of the house he has selected for the Count as a matter of course. These people are logical, scientific, and love to document their lives. They share their journals with each other quite freely — a good reminder to anyone who thinks that social media is a new thing.

Where they fall down is when they are faced with something that does not fit neatly into their modern lives. That, of course, is vampirism in general and Count Dracula in particular. As horrified as they are of all the blood-drinking and wolf-controlling, it seems to me they are more horrified still that those superstitious peasants they love to pity may actually be onto something.

Science, or so I have been taught in science class, is a balance between two states: confidence that one has figured out how something works, and scepticism when something has not been absolutely proven. When someone using the scientific method is presented with a phenomenon that does not fit their theory, they're supposed to be willing to alter the theory. Even when no contradicting phenomenon exists, any scientific fact is always supposed to be footnoted, "until we learn better." Sometimes the "learn better" is that we learn more subtleties of how whatever it is actually works. Sometimes we have to be willing to throw everything we thought we knew out and start over again.

In Stoker's novel, Dracula gets as far as he does and causes as much damage as he does because the characters are slow to leave their old assumptions about what is safe and good and workable behind. Only Van Helsing, who is both a learned scholar and someone who is willing to get at the kernel of truth under the superstitions, is able to figure out what the Count is and what must be done to stop him. Still even he believes, again and again with all the other "good guys," that modern convention will make them safe just because it is modern convention.

I would love to make Dracula mandatory reading in a first-year engineering or physics class, with a single assignment attached to it: list all of the places where the heroes had evidence before them they should have taken seriously, but discounted out-of-hand because it didn't fit into the tidy world they normally inhabited. That is, when faced with evidence that the theory was wrong, they assumed that their observations must needs be incorrect, not the theory.

So the Titanic sails off with not enough lifeboats because someone with the power to decide these things concludes that "virtually unsinkable" is the same as "unsinkable," rather than doing some simple math to figure out how many lifeboats they do need should the worst happen and something shows up which all their safety design precautions don't take into account. Or a patient has an appointment at a doctor's office and gets told that there's nothing to worry about, just because the patient's symptoms don't fit into the neat little diagnostic box the doctor learned in medical school. This last example has happened to me personally — it took me over a year to get a CAT scan that proved something I had described to several doctors was a fact, and not just my imagination.

A lack of scepticism and a tendency to throw out contrary evidence can kill people. Much better to learn that from a fictional tale of blood and mayhem than the real thing.

you couldn't make this stuff up

Fiction writers always have to walk a tightrope. On the one hand, they need something in their writing that will grip readers. Often this "something" is unusual, an element that lifts the story from the humdrum of the familiar. On the other hand, if the writer includes too much incredible stuff, beta readers and editors (and readers, if it makes it that far) will typically slap them down for being silly, unrealistic, or failing to suspend disbelief.

Something that frustrates me as a writer is when reality dishes up a series of events within a timeframe that no-one would believe if it were a written as part of a fictional story. I believe in giving readers a fair experience — interesting, hopefully entertaining, but fair.

So it hurts when reality shows it can give us any damn thing it feels like, far beyond what would be considered plausible in fiction.

Last Monday was a day for Torontonians to gingerly check up on each other, especially if you knew people (or were a person) who would have been out protesting. "Are you okay?" and "What did you see?" were questions that were raised often. I started keeping a running mental list of everything that happened the week leading up to the summit debacle, and then started adding all the things that were due to happen either during the following (current) week, or the following weekend. It's pretty impressive:

Already happened

• Thunderstorms — more than we're used to this time of year
• A tornado touched down in Midland. This is not actually in Toronto, but it's close enough that it's "in the area."
• We felt an earthquake. Okay, the epicentre was some ways outside of Ottawa, so we just got a little tremor, and even at the epicentre it wasn't a very big earthquake, but since it's been about ten years since we had a noticeable one, it was newsworthy.
• The G20 rounded out the week.

Going to happen in the next few days

• We're having a royal visit — and not just any royal, but the Queen herself. Interestingly, the hereditary monarch of the entire British Commonwealth needs less disruptive security than the bunch of suits who were supposedly elected by the same great unwashed who were protesting against them.
• It's Canada Day tomorrow. I wonder how the protesters who sang "O Canada" and then got rushed by police as soon as they finished singing feel about that.
• Oh, and there's tall ships and horse races and all the other "stuff" you'd expect to find in a Canadian city this time of year.

Imagine all that in a fictional story. Chapter 1 introduces the characters, the fence around the hot zone going up, the thunderstorms. Chapter 2 has the earthquake and tornado. Chapter 3 the riots happen, Chapter 4 is Canada Day, Chapter 5 establishes the Queen as an active character, then in Chapter 6 there's a bit of a lull where the tall ships show up and the horse races are run. Maybe the main characters can take in the ships and horses while something nefarious happens in the background.

How does it end? I don't know. Written out that way, it sounds like a discarded outline for Good Omens, before Pratchett & Gaiman decided to tone it down a little and stick more closely to the central Antichrist idea.

Anyone want to share some "so crazy it must be true" stories in the comments?

that's great -- it starts with an earthquake...

The politicians, the protesters, and the hooligans have been discussed better in articles like this. But, as with any man-made mess, there's more to it. Here are some snippets of the "more" part:

don't forget your bar code

Friday night I'm at a pub in Mississauga, toasting the week that was with a virgin margarita. Someone's cell phone rings, and a side conversation ensues that sounds odd enough that the rest of us keep pausing the conversation so we can try to make sense of it all.

The conversation ends and we get told, "A friend of mine can't get home because she forgot her ID."

"She's in the hot zone?"

"Yeah, her boss said it was ridiculous to work from home for the week, so they've been like the only business around that's open. She's going to call me back if she can't find her photo ID card."

later the same night

"How are you going to get home?" I'm the only one who lives past the hot zone.

"The big loop," I say. "Huronontario to the 401, 401 to DVP, DVP to Lakeshore and home."

No-one tells me I'm being ridiculous or overly cautious. They say I'm being sensible.

I see four OPP cruisers and SUVs on the way home, riding in a pack. I also see an OPP cruiser with a car that's pulled over. When I was a kid living in Erin ON, this was normal, because the OPP were the local police. But this is Toronto, and it is not normal. It's certainly not normal to see so many OPP vehicles together at once.

Closer to home, there are seven or eight vans parked on the lawn beside Lakeshore Boulevard. A proportional number of police officers — five or six per van, so say 35-45 of them — stand amongst the vans, just casually watching the traffic go by. I don't get a good look because I'm driving, but I'm struck by how the whole tableau looks like a photo from a double-page magazine spread.

word of mouth

Saturday afternoon my mother calls, and asks me in two or three different ways if I had been downtown this weekend. I answer "no" in two or three ways, and ask what's up.

"It's downtown," she says. "It's on fire."

That's not strictly true, of course. But some things are on fire that should not be, and that's what's being shown on TV.

My mum starts listing all the major intersections that are being affected by the riots, and I keep saying, "That's not in the hot zone or the main protest area... that isn't either.... that isn't either" like I've nominated myself to be some sort of truth-teller.

The conversation finishes with me reassuring her that I live 12 km away from the downtown core and so should be fine.

The next day I find out I am less than 5 km away from the nearest detention centre and that my local supermarket has been boarded up for the weekend.

don't believe

After I get off the phone with my mum, I call a friend of mine who lives downtown to see how things are on her street and find out what's going on. She says things are pretty quiet where she is (Bay & Wellesley-ish), but things "don't feel right." She's been watching the TV news too, and says what's being broadcast looks fake.

"They're too conveniently close to the CITY-TV building. The whole thing looks like a dance. Whoever they are, these guys mostly wanted to be on camera. None of them are holding signs or shouting slogans either — can't even tell if they're protesting or just smashing the place up."

choices

My youngest brother and sister-in-law live downtown, but they deliberately planned to be out of town for the G20. I call and leave a voicemail on my brother's cell phone, just so he won't be surprised when he gets home. He texts me Sunday night to say that they had checked Canadian news and Twitter feeds before they headed out.

He decides that it sounds like things have calmed down enough, and goes straight home. My sister-in-law decides to stay at a friend's place overnight and comes home in the morning.

so what?

Torontonians are used to getting their lives disrupted by out-of-towners. They come, they complain Toronto thinks it's the centre of the universe, they leave their garbage all over the place, they whine that the city is dirty, and they leave. We get that at least every weekend. In the summer, we get it all week.

We're used to protests. They happen all the time, and, surprisingly enough, they are almost always peaceful. Note that, for the most part, the G20 protests were too. Media estimates are that 25,000 people protested, but only a few hundred caused the property damage.

Torontonians are used to chaos, too. We were part of the Big Power Blackout, SARS, garbage strikes, and TTC wildcat strikes, and we took it all in stride. For the power blackout, news reports commented on how little vandalism and looting there was.

This was different. As the editorial I linked to at the start of this blog concludes:

The idea that this was an effective way to show off Toronto to foreign guests is bewilderingly stupid.

Canadian authorities created a city no citizen could recognize and no visitor could admire. Then, they allowed a pack of brutes to trash it.

I don't want, ever again, to have to reassure family members that I live far enough away from riots that I'm safe. Or tell other family members that their homes may have been damaged by rioters while they were away. Or have to check on friends and make sure they have enough groceries to last the weekend in case they have to barricade themselves in. This is Canada, dammit, and our job in the world has been to help people escape police states.

Now it looks like we're one ourselves. I, for one, will never forgive this government for what they did to my home town.

we need to talk

Today I got the Nokia N900 I ordered. I decided I wanted to get one as soon as they came out, but there were the usual ordering shortages, early-adopter angst, and all the rest. Besides, watching other early adopters has convinced me that the best thing to do is read all the reviews and then wait a few months.

The Eyrea normally has a strict policy of not upgrading gadgets unless and until there is a damn good reason. "A newer, shinier one got released" is not a damn good reason. The N900's predecessor, the still-working N800, eliminated the MP3 player from the "stuff I cart around in my purse" list, plus gave me a simple word processor for when inspiration struck and I was standing up on a TTC bus. Turns out it's handy for other things I find of value, like keeping a calendar, making a usable calculator handy, and surfing the web at Starbucks. Plus, erm, Mahjongg and Tetris. Games don't seem important until you realise they're the only thing between you and the overwhelming urge to throttle the annoying person three seats away from you on the subway.

The N900 does all the things the N800 did (the only loss seems to be handwriting recognition, which I probably won't miss in the long run), plus it has GPS and a built-in phone. So now I can quit carrying around a phone, too. It also has a camera with a flash and Zeiss lens. Maybe I can quit using my little digital camera too.

A phone. That means I can ditch my old cell phone and just use the N900 as a pocket wireless gadget, a simple word processor, a calendar, and all that other stuff.

But before all those gadgets can be shed, the ugly stuff has to happen. The data transfers.

Sure, the N900 has a USB cable connection, plus Bluetooth, plus WLAN, plus of course the phone connection, plus a microSD slot. Sounds pretty connected, right? Not quite.

The USB only shows the microSD card.

The microSD slot on the device is internal, right beside that nice Zeiss lens on the phone.

The Bluetooth.... works like Bluetooth. All the usual "sure this device is wide open but I can't see it la la la", or "I can see it, but I'm not going to talk to it" inanity that besets Bluetooth. Or else the Nokia is willing to talk, but the other device won't, even thought it's wide open and can recognise the Nokia is trying to talk to it.

I'm not picking on the N900 here. I'm not even surprised. This is what often happens when older gadgets get folded into a single gadget, or even when you just do a straight one-to-one upgrade.

The good news is they're getting better all the time. The bad news is they weren't better before.

At any rate, I'm sure I will get everything figured out eventually. When I do, I'll post about the solutions here, rather than the first-night-of-acquisition problems.

Update: Aha! I gave up for the night, and powered down the device, but left it charging on the USB from my computer. The laptop detected both the microSD card and the main storage! This would probably be highly boring if I just read the manual cover to cover first instead of just browsing the index. It would also be less fun.

So if I can get it on my laptop, I can get it on the N900. Okay.

Kobo review -- includes instant DIY case info!

The first time I did any research on ebook readers was around 1994-95. E-ink was already being talked about, as was desktop synchronisation. Since the Web only started in 1995, people were talking about downloading a lot more than they were doing it.

I never got to actually handle any of the ebook readers I checked out back then. The first reader I've had a chance to take for a real test run was the Kobo I won at last Friday's Book Summit. The main place they seem to be sold in Canada is Chapters/Indigo.

The Kobo got its initial check-out over some post-Summit libations on a patio by the lake. The company that makes the Kobo is very smart about getting on a new customer's good side right away. The reader comes out of the box with enough of a battery charge for an initial play session, and 100 books are pre-loaded so you can start reading right away. There is only one page of settings to adjust, and then you're ready to read.

I already read ebooks a lot — I put free (and legal!) downloads from Craphound and elsewhere on my Nokia tablet, mostly PDFs. So I'm used to reading novels on a colour screen about the size of an slightly-larger-than-average smartphone. Given that, these are the things that jumped out at me about the Kobo:

Positives

• I managed to choose the right date & time settings, adjust the reading font, flip through the catalogue of loaded books, choose a book, and start reading without ever looking at the manual. Having said that, taking a careful look at all the edges before you start playing with it in earnest is a good idea. Some of the buttons are so discreet that it isn't obvious where they are. Once you know where they are, they're easy to use and remember, but it's more pleasant to find them before you want to use them.
• The device is light, light enough that you can comfortably hold it in one hand and read with it while waiting at a TTC stop for a long time — which is exactly what I did with it after I went to the Small Press Fair last Saturday. It's also more than light enough to read comfortably lying down.
• It is also completely easy to read in bright sunlight. That TTC stop I just mentioned didn't have a shelter, and it was about four o'clock in the afternoon on a very bright day. No problems at all.
• I didn't time it, but the battery seemed to charge very quickly. Although I've read about people having problems with battery life, my unit seems to be fine. Then again, I'm used to having to recharge my Nokia tablet every day because I use it so much, so I'm easy to please in that regard.

Negatives

• I can read the Kobo fine under natural light and fluorescent tubing (ironic, since the latter gives me eyestrain headaches), but it seems too dim when I have lamps with energy-saving lightbulbs on at home. I knit, read on paper, and bead under the same lamps, so I know that normally they provide enough light. The Kobo seems to do better under the halogen reading lamp I have by my bed.
• The navigation rosette (they call it a D-pad) doesn't always interpret a "next-page" click correctly. If my thumb really loses the mark, I can wind up in a menu or at the home page without meaning to, and have to wait for the book to load again to continue reading. So far it hasn't happened often, but if I did it a lot it would be annoying.
• The desktop software, which is an essential install on your computer if you want to buy books for the Kobo, does not have an official Linux version. That means I can't buy new books for the device, because my home computer and my Nokia tablet/phone all run Linux.

About that last negative point: Kobo does have an unofficial Linux distro of its software. Unfortunately for me, it's compiled for 32-bit processors, and my laptop has a 64-bit processor. However, I want to take a moment here to thank them for thinking of Linux users. Just because we decided not to give money to Microsoft or Apple doesn't mean we won't cheerfully buy things from other companies!

Because I can't buy new books for it at the present time, I decided to give my won Kobo to my mum. She runs Windows, so she'll be able to install the required software just fine, and she's been coveting a Kobo (and specifically a Kobo) for a while now.

"You're going to need a case for it," I said when we talked about it over the phone. "I've been reading the reviews on the Chapters web site, and everyone says that protecting it from any accidental drops is very important."

"Does it feel fragile when you use it?" she said.

"Not for reading with it," I said. "But when I brought it along on the TTC, I was really glad my backpack had a pocket almost exactly the same size. I could see it getting smashed or cracked if you're rough with it. Probably true for all of these things."

"I'll have to watch out for that," she said. "Well, stick it in an oven mitt in the meantime until you give it to me. I'll have to figure out whether I'm going to buy one of those Roots cases or just sew my own."

I've talked about it on my other blog, but let it be known here as well that I don't come by this DIY stuff all by myself. A lot of it is inherited. Mum's completely right — the Kobo fits perfectly into a standard-size oven mitt, and gains a little eccentric je ne sais quoi that appeals to me, like when women use tea kettles or other found items as purses:

If I tie a length of grosgrain ribbon or seam tape to one side of the mitt and a button to the other side, I'll have a strap to keep the Kobo from slipping out if the oven mitt gets turned cuff-side-down, at the cost of less than 15 minutes of work! (Oven mitt: $3.99 for a matching pair of two at Canadian Tire.)

how's your reading health?

As I mentioned last post, one of the sessions that I went to at Book Summit was "Reading in the Digital Age." Somehow I had the impression that it would be about writing for digital instead of paper media and how that shifted story structures. It turned out I was wrong, but that was okay, because the presentation encompassed that and a lot more.

The presenter was Raymond A. Mar, who works at York University. He also contributes to the blog On Fiction, which I immediately added to my Google Reader list as soon as the session was completed.

Mar and his colleagues have been comparing the effects of reading fiction on the brain, comparing it to the effects of what he termed expository writing. This sounds similar to what I was taught at teacher's college to call "transaction writing" — non-fiction works like essays.

It turns out that reading fiction has measurable, beneficial effects. People who read fiction are better are social tasks, and better at recognising emotions. The research also shows that watching films has the same effect, but not watching television (there are a lot of theories, but they haven't figured out why yet).

I'm not going to try and repeat the entire presentation — you had to be there, and besides, I'm not a professional in neuropsychology, so I'm bound to get some things wrong.

I am, however, a recent reader of CP Snow's Two Cultures. That book recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, which is how I got to here about it. CP Snow was either a novelist who worked in science, or a scientist who wrote fiction, depending on how you want to look at it. He noticed that he was just about the only person he knew who had an interest in both fields, and he was appalled both by his science friends' lack of respect for the power of fiction, and his artist friends' lack of knowledge of basic scientific facts. He presented the "two cultures" idea originally at a lecture he gave at Cambridge University, then expanded it to book form for publication.

The interaction of science and art is much different from how it was fifty years ago, and the version of Two Cultures that I bought and read points out that most of Snow's examples were actually from when he started his career in the 1930s. Nevertheless, I thought it was interesting (and, okay, dismaying) that the newspaper articles I read asked people working in the arts science questions like "why is the sky blue" and "what is the Second Law of Thermodynamics," but it seemed as if no-one was asking any scientists what novels they'd read recently.

I was encouraged to have what sometimes gets called a "well-rounded" education. I kept taking math and science subjects long after it became clear I didn't have the talent to pursue a career in them (except for chemistry. For some bizarre reason I always found chemistry easy.). Since then I've become the woman with the English Lit. degree who likes to read about science. I really did finish A Brief History of Time (which has a very beautifully-written ending, by the way), and wish they would just hand that book to high school students who prefer arts subjects instead of forcing them to take bewildering physics classes. They'd learn more. I did — the first three chapters more or less cover my Grade 11 physics class curriculum.

Bottom line: people need to engage in both the arts and sciences to make sense of the world and each other.

awfully wonderful day

Today I went to Book Summit 2010. The very first thing I learned there is that the adjective in the name of the conference is misleading. Sure, books are a very big part of the overall mix, but there was also a lot of discussion about printing, drawing an audience in the mass- and web-based media, the neuropsychological act of reading and how it affects the reader's social skills, and.... lots of other things that I would blog about except that, four hours after it ended, my head is still exploding, albeit in a very positive manner.

In a way, it was the perfect fun day for bookworms. First, we got to learn about e-readers from a technological/gadget point of view. Then we got serenaded with parodic songs about copyright. If that doesn't sound funny to you, you can't have been there.

Then we all dashed off to the two information sessions we had chosen for the morning (mine were "Books and the Media" and "Reading in the Digital Age"). After a yummy, healthy lunch, we went to our selected afternoon sessions (mine was "The 21st Century Writer"). The day wrapped up with a panel discussion, and the giving away of the door prize. It was a Kobo Reader, which I (ulp!) won. I never win door prizes, so that part was a bit confusing.

My inner bookworm child feels like she just went to the best party ever. There was even an afternoon ice cream break. Nothing like wandering into a panel discussion on the future of publishing while your inner child is busy exclaiming, "We got ice cream and now we're going to talk about books some more! Wow!"

I started to read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales with the Kobo on the way home — since the tales pre-date Gutenberg's press and are being included free on many e-readers it seemed like the right place to start.

There was at least one profound idea to absorb every quarter-hour or so, all throughout the day, and you may have noticed while reading this that I've been trying to avoid getting into them. I'm sure many of them will be fodder for at least one blog post in the future, as will a review of that Kobo reader.

For now I'm still trying to absorb it all. The most clear take-away so far is that whatever form the things we call "books" take in the near or far future, there will always be stories to tell, and we have to remember that's the important part. It was as good a root cause analysis as I've heard lately on any topic.

Many thanks to the organisers, presenters, and other attendees. I am so grateful I got to be there with you and learn so much.

does TV exist anymore?

I remember when my parents bought our first colour TV set. It was in 1980. Somehow my father convinced the delivery people to come out to a rural address during the Christmas-New Year's week frenzy so that we could have it in time to watch the Rose Bowl Parade.

Colour TV, of course, had been around since the 1960s, but my parents refused to buy a colour set for the first twenty years because, as my dad put it, "the technology wasn't there yet." We didn't get the see the NBC peacock unfurl in colour, but we didn't get to see sitcom actors with unnaturally orange skin either. We waited until the technology was acceptable, and then we bought into it.

The only significant difference between the new TV and the old one was the colour display. Everything else — the channels we could get, the time the shows were on — stayed the same.

Recently I got my first flat-screen TV. The old CRT-style set I had was a hand-me-down from my brother's girlfriend's grandmother (in the Eyrea, we're all about reuse before recycle — the set is now in its fourth home at an aunt's). It became very clear, however, that with this box — can we still call them "boxes" when they're nowhere near cube-shaped anymore? — didn't just involve a change in display technology.

Since I am old enough to remember 1980, it should come as no surprise that I am also old enough to remember the consternation of those who wanted to get into video games but were facing having to buy a TV set at the same time as a Pong console, because their set lacked the necessary plugs (or even the bit where you connected the forked wires to the screws) to connect the console to it. The new set has two HDMI jacks, two sets of RCA composite/component jacks, an SVGA jack to connect a PC with, and I forget what else.

Which means, to me, that it's not really a TV set anymore, even though according to the setup menu there is an aerial buried in the thing somewhere.

It's a display monitor. Right now I have four inputs and one output (sound to my stereo) attached to it, and I haven't nearly used up all the jacks (ports?) yet. Of course, The Eyrea has always been a cable- and satellite-free space, so no actual television broadcasts ever come across any transmission medium. The TV part is entirely disabled, and there's less than ever to mark that it's not there.

I know millions of people still have cable or satellite subscriptions, still think about how many channels they have access to, still gossip about reality shows. That seems to be the part that makes the mainstream news (also available on the same TV channels, or their newspaper subsidiaries), most of the time. But I know I'm not the only one who has decided to do without that particular media delivery system, and has instead gone for the local-network-with-single-display-and-no-streaming setup.

Anyone with a somewhat up-to-date system can do the same thing: just kill the broadcast downlink. Use the internet instead for when you want new data, like the latest headlines, weather, gossip.

I am very curious to see what will happen if and when a critical mass of people decide to do that. After all, the technology is there now.

the iPad anti-review

I haven't seen an iPad except in review videos. I haven't touched one, tried one out, or gotten within ten feet of one (unless I was sitting next to someone one the subway who had it in their knapsack and I didn't know).

Because I like to read about technology and because I am a geek, I've been hearing a lot about them, including full-on debates about their merits and drawbacks well before anyone outside of the Apple development group even knew what the thing was going to look like.

And I have to tell you: I'm confused.

So this... thing is like a lightweight tablet computer. Okay, other companies have had those out for a while, except those companies include a keyboard.

But, so I'm told, it's not about the feature set. It's about what you can do with it.

The early adopters have all been blogging about how the iPad can be used to watch movies, listen to music, surf the web, read books. The ads I've seen are big on that last one, although the bloggers I read seem to be doing more movie-watching. Actually, most of the iPad-owning bloggers I read just seem to be chanting "Shiny! Shiny! SHINY!" at the moment, kind of like in that issue of The Tick where the bad guy hypnotises The Tick by placing that chrome apple in front of him and.... hey. Chrome. Apple. Hypnosis. I never picked up on that before.

But I'm still confused.

If I want to watch movies, I watch them on my TV set. My TV set can play all the file formats the iPad can (and more) thanks to the media box I have plugged into it. If I'm travelling I watch movies on my Nokia tablet. Yeah, the screen is smaller than the iPad's, but it's dead sharp and the gadget weighs less than half of what the iPad does. If I'm on a long trip, I might have my laptop with me, and that has a bigger screen than the iPad, although since I own a biggish laptop yes, it does weigh more.

If I want to listen to music, I can use that media box again if I'm in my living room, or use my Nokia tablet if I'm not. If I'm on the go, I don't want to listen to music on something that is too big and heavy to hold comfortably in one hand for long, sorry. Ideally I want something that tucks into a pocket or small purse.

If I want to surf the net... you get the idea. I just don't see what this thing is for, besides fleecing consumers.

Maybe if someone owns a netbook and they want to replace it with something a bit flashier... I could see a market existing there. Netbooks are often sort of alternative computers, backed up by the real thing. The iPad matches them (kind of) in weight and form factor.

Otherwise, I can't really see why it exists.

top 5 pens

My favourite day-to-day writing instrument has got to be the keyboard on my Dell laptop. That statement is misleading, though, as it hides the significant pen fetish I've developed since about the time they let us stop using pencils in elementary school. I've had a lifetime of bad handwriting coupled with a constant desire to be writing, and that has led to some very strong preferences regarding pens. I've certainly tried out enough, hoping to find the magic writing stick that will make my scribble legible to other people (and me!).

#5: V Pen by Pilot

I wrote with a Skrip fountain pen for most of university. For once this wasn't just being pretentious, but because my handwriting improves a tiny little bit when I use a heavier, non-ballpoint pen. I think it's because it forces me to slow down. The V Pen by Pilot is lightweight (bad), but it's also the only disposable fountain-style pen I've ever been able to find. It's also extra-fun to lend to people, because they see and feel the plastic case and then are confronted with the fountain pen nib when they write with it. I really do like the stroke of a nib across the paper as opposed to the run of a ballpoint. It just feels more "right."

#4: found Cross pen

I found this smaller-than-normal Cross pen on a Mississauga Transit bus seat, way back at the turn of the century. For a lightweight, narrow, ballpoint pen (which is three strikes against with me) it writes remarkably well. I alternate between trying to keep it nice and saving it and trying to use up the ink so I can replace the bright blue with my preferred black.

#3: Pierre Belvédère

The ever-thoughtful J-A got me this pen as a birthday present this year. It's a ballpoint, but it's a wide-bodied, heavy ballpoint. So far I've used it to write out a short-short story inside a birthday card (seemed appropriate), and the heft and balance make it very nice to write with. When I finally get around to trying to re-teach myself handwriting, this is definitely the pen I'm going to practise with.

#2: wooden commemorative

It's not unusual for teachers to receive commemorative pens or other academic tools as retirement gifts. This pen, and all the other pens that go with it, are unusual because they were given to teachers when they got their first full-time contract. It was presented at the adult education centre I spent the first four years of my career at. It was, in a lot of ways, a great place to work — except that the Harris government had just made a lot of funding cuts to education, which meant that even basic items like photocopy paper were in short supply (our principal had to beg boxes of paper off other schools the first semester we were open under the new rules), and all the teachers were on short-term, dead-end casual contracts. If we wanted to have a teaching job with a career path (plus things like health benefits and merit increases), we had to get a full-time contract at a school for teenagers. Leaving was always bittersweet — not because any of us particularly hated the idea of teaching teenagers, but because we had to leave a perfectly good job arbitrarily just because some politician wanted to score points.

Each pen has a real wood barrel with the name of the "graduate" on it (that's what we called it when someone went full-time), and has a carved solid-wood case. The cover of the case has the school's logo and motto: an open book next to the words "In pursuit of lifelong learning."

#1: a practical glass pen

I've had this pen for almost twenty years now. It's made completely out of glass, and is based on designs that were popular in the 18th century — sort of after quills but before steel nibs. You dip the nib in the ink, and the spirals of the nib "catch" enough ink to write comfortably for about five lines of text. Then you dip again, and continue. The pen itself only cost about twenty dollars, and the bottles of ink are available at any decent art supply shop.

I've written a lot with this pen, including some lengthy letters. It is light and narrow, but the ink delivery method makes me write like no other pen does. The feel of the inflexible glass sliding along the paper on a thin layer of ink is a sensation like I've got from no other pen, even my fountain pens.

I wish I could cite where I got the glass pen from, but the shop went out of business shortly afterwards. There's no maker's mark on it or the box it came in (long gone anyhow). I've seen other glass pens, but they're almost always just for show, rather than actually writing with, and often have lovely, colourful, fantastically-shaped barrels that would not be comfortable to write with for long.

What are your favourite writing instruments? What makes you want to write with them?

if you're reading this, you may already be a hippy

To those who read both my blogs (hi Carla!): this one is getting cross-posted because it overlaps the topic scope for both of them.

The meanings of words shift all the time. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be annoying if you enjoyed using a word in its previous sense and now can’t. I know of one grandmother who got pretty upset when her grandson’s parents told her she could not teach her grandson to call a cat by saying, “Here, pussy pussy.” You understand.

Things float the other way, too. Things that had one label stamped on them can have an entirely different one stamped on them once the previous one fades. This can be good, bad, or indifferent, but it can be very annoying if the new label doesn’t quite describe the original thing as well as the old label did. Perceptions change, practices change, and eventually the thing itself is in danger of changing.

One word that illustrates this is hippy.

Hippy comes from “hip,” as in “with it.” It grew to encompass a lot of things — do some Google searches if no ready stereotypes come to mind. It also grew to encompass a lot of things that pre-date its inception as a word.

There’s a nice point in a Philip K. Dick short story (whose title I am too lazy to look up) where one character assumes another is a hippy because he has a beard. The third character who has introduced them later explains that the “hippy” is actually a conservative — he has a beard because he has a nasty case of barber’s rash.

Hippy-ism (hippiness?) spread over all sorts of things that became associated with it, whether they were exclusively for hippies or not. Things like pacifism, or home schooling, or growing your own food, or doing things by hand. People forget that there were conscientious objectors in both world wars, that community schools are a relatively new innovation, that the working classes/peasants always grew their own food whether they were “farmers” or not, that doing things by hand was once a sign of thrift and quality products rather than a sign of “dropping out.”

When people ask about my parents and/or my childhood, they often comment that my family must be hippies. We had two big vegetable patches and a small orchard, and lived in a house my dad and his brother built. My mum sewed a lot of the clothes I wore. My brothers and I had wooden toys our grandfather made us. And yeah, politically we often (but not always) wind up on the pacifists’ side.

A quick glance at some family photos, plus some extra contextual information, shows how wrong that perception is. My mum worked at an office and was (still is) a twinset-with-pearls type. My dad was a fan of Elvis and the Rat Pack. Besides, long hair can get in the way when you work in construction. The garden? The sewing? The wooden toys? Both my parents were avid gardeners who didn’t have a lot of money when I was a kid — growing veggies was fun and practical. Same thing with my mum and her sewing. And of course my grandfather made us wooden toys — he was professionally trained as a finishing carpenter and worked as one almost his entire career. The pacifism isn’t exactly unusual in people who grew up in countries that have been occupied during wartime, and both sides of my family experienced that.

Over here in North America, safe insulated attacked-twice-in-100-years-but-not-invaded North America, all those things, those activities, add up to being a hippy, at least for those who don’t know any better. An entire ethic of thrift, practicality, and simple do-it-yourself-ness has been buried under a catchword.

It goes further than that. Are you a woman who doesn’t remove her leg hair, pit hair, or (ahem) hair in other places? Get ready to be called a granola-cruncher, even if (like the character in the PK Dick story with the barber’s rash) it’s because you have sensitive skin. Actually, with the hysteria aimed at those with pubic hair these days, it might be something worse than “granola-cruncher” if you happen to be wearing a bathing suit at the time.

What if you make an effort to eat less processed food, or if you like making basics for yourself like bread, jam, or soup stock?

What if you prefer to make your own music (or listen to your friends make some) instead of buying whatever is at the top of the list on iTunes this week?

It seems to me that it doesn’t take much these days to be a nonconformist. The weird thing is that there are an awful lot of people being nonconformist in these things, or myriad other things.
So are we all hippies now? Or is it time to do a collective semantic readjustment and admit that the label is not only inadequate and misleading, but also passé?

writing goals vs. writing normally

I still have it in the sidebar: the 1,000 words a day tag that Debbie Ridpath Ohi over at Inkygirl made. I also have a spreadsheet showing that it doesn't actually work that way in The Eyrea. By now the data is pretty conclusive.

Don't get me wrong — I am writing. Progress is never what I want it to be, because what I want it to be is a full-time job, and that's not happening in the forseeable future. But there's also a perception factor that bothers me. It's taken a long time to come up to the surface, but here it is.

I went through a long period of time where writing was normal in my head, but I was literally afraid to write anything down because it would be deliberately interrupted ("you're doing that and there's dirty dishes in the sink. Shows how much you care about our health"), or read when it was barely beyond note-taking ("what do you mean 'first draft'? fiction is meant to be shared, and you left the notebook on top of your desk"), or diminished (the word I hate more than any other in the English language is "hobby." There's a reason for that.).

It doesn't actually matter if I make 1,000 words a day or not. I have to write something, because if I don't I'm not going to move ahead with the story (and, worse, wind up being that most despicable of beings, the poser). But what matters, what really, really matters, is whether or not writing is normal. It's a symptoms-versus-disease thing.

If writing isn't normal, it will take a larger-than-should-be-necessary amount of willpower to sit down and write. The writing will be more exhausting, more frustrating, and more of a chore than it needs to be. Writing is always work, but if what it takes to make it worthwhile is another entry on a spreadsheet, there's problems.

If writing isn't normal, all the stories will be stillborns. They will suck and while a certain amount of editing will prettify the ones that came closest to term so that they can at least be presented for critique, they will never get to be grown-ups loved by strangers to the parent. They will always be potentials buried in shoeboxes, long before they had a chance to bloom and make their own way in the world.

But:

If writing is normal, then 1,000 words isn't a marathon, but a pacing marker so that the writer doesn't blow their wad too soon.

If writing is normal, then the text's growth rate is regular and steady.

If writing is normal, then you don't need a badge on your blog to make it that way.

When I started this post, I wasn't planning on taking down the badge (I may still check in to Ohi's roll calls from time to time). I think it will be gone by the time this post gets published, though.

The Eyrea, both this visible blog-space and the private virtual and physical spaces behind it, is a place where writing is normal. Anything that contrives past that will wind up being a hindrance, not a help.

resistance culture

Perfect timing. 31 May, the day designated for the "Facebook suicide" I decided to take part in, happened to be the same day as the latest instalment of West End Stories. I got to have my resistance culture and enjoy it too!

The wonder of West End Stories is that it is a routine of novelty. Every month, without fail, this is what happens:

• The café opens up. People start to arrive and order refreshments/meals from Erin, who takes care of the food & drink side of things.
• Howard, the ever-excellent host who presides over the chaos, appears. He puts tea lights on all the tables for the proper atmosphere, greets everyone who's there, and stands out on the sidewalk looking for all the world, as the ever-perceptive Rhonda put it, "like an expectant father."
• A little after 7PM, Howard manages to herd all the cats (audience) and gets us to be quiet long enough to welcome us to another night of West End Stories. He quickly goes over the rules (anyone can tell, everyone else will listen), then tells us the story he always starts with. I won't spoil it for newcomers by telling it here — you'll have to come and listen for yourselves.
• The first teller goes up and tells their story. Then the next, and the next, until a little after 8PM. A ten-minute break ensues where people go to the washroom, get more refreshments, and chat.
• The second half proceeds with more story-telling until nine-ish. We all try to clear out quickly so Erin can finish cleaning up and get home at a decent time.

It's what happens in the two sessions that is so amazing. No two instalments are alike, yet you're nigh-guaranteed to have an entertaining night out if you attend. This last time we sang together, listened to a guitar player, learned about a web site where you can leave love letters to your favourite urban streets, heard a Sufi story, and more. Lots more.

Every time it all, miraculously, hangs together. No-one knows who will tell what, no-one knows what order the tellers will go up and tell in, but somehow it always works out. It's the opposite of rehearsed, yet it feels put-together. Casual, laid-back, but put-together.

I give the credit to Howard. He sets the structure every time, creating this "safe place" where first-time tellers can and do regularly go up and tell stories in public that they may not have even remembered until the evening got underway. Howard is a wonderful story-teller himself, so he can easily fill in when people get shy and won't volunteer, plus he gets help from experienced, superb story-tellers like Pat, Norm, Harry, and Ariel (who has to be heard to be truly appreciated).

It's hard to explain to people who have never experienced anything like it how accomplished it all is while you're there. We've been so conditioned to leave sharing stories to the professionals that we forget that people used to spend evenings this way all the time.

Come see. Come hear. And if you live too far away and won't be visiting soon, try creating your own.

i think i understand now

Warning: contains the word Facebook.

One of the biggest banes of a commuter in Toronto are "jumpers." Those are people who commit suicide by leaping from subway platforms, or off bridges, or just about any other way they can get in the way of a lot of people who just wanted to go to work and get their job done. It's a particularly selfish, dramatic way to off oneself, and it keeps happening because Toronto is sufficiently crowded that it's also very effective. There's been a few cases of successful (physical) intervention, and several more cases where the jumper wasn't successful. Yes, there are worse things than suicide — there's the agony and humiliation of being pulled off train rails while the innocent people whose day you were about to ruin watch you carried away with your self-inflicted injuries.

Public physical suicide is one thing, but the virtual kind can be overly dramatic too. As I posted last, I'm all for people deleting their Facebook accounts en masse to protest the way that the company has mucked with its users. I've said it before but I'll say it again: just because you sign up for a free service doesn't mean you signed up to have your trust abused. That's why this morning I said, "good-bye, cruel social network", and my Facebook "identity" ceased to be.

I don't know if that means that what's left of my account will wind up on the consecrated server or the unconsecrated server, but I do know that the "suicide" is a massive relief. Ironically, once I made my decision, I wound up spending more time on Facebook these last few days than I had over the last six months. And you know? There's a lot that still irritates the hell out of me.

I will not miss having to explain to my friends who are allowed, even encouraged, to use Facebook at work that I cannot reply to them during workdays via Facebook, because it is banned at the office and my company is very strict about personal internet use.

I will not miss finding notification e-mails in my inbox about messages from people I don't know contacting me via Facebook. They leave me scrambling through my privacy settings, wondering how on earth I wound up on their contact list when I have all my settings cranked to the max as "friends only," or even "no-one." I just got another one today. Turns out in this particular case a real-life friend of mine invited me to an event via Facebook, although she's not the host. The host, in turn, sent out a mass message to all invitees, whether they had RSVPed or not (I hadn't).

I will not miss people asking to be my "friend" when I have never met them in person.

I will not miss people claiming they know my Facebook page, yet they haven't noticed that it's been empty of all the content I could delete for months.

On the other hand, I am very much looking forward to saying, "Facebook? You're still on that?"

Jumpers typically have a poor idea of what they're leaving behind. They can never have any idea of what they're really going towards.

In the virtual world, things are different. My Facebook identity has been brain dead and on life support for over two years, even if no-one else noticed much. Today I pulled the plug.

I know exactly what comes next, because I've been living it for over two years now. And it's great.

PS: Check out the screen shot (also at the top of this post). Apparently no account gets a quick and painless death on Facebook if the user initiates it. At least by leaving at the end of the month it'll be easy to count the days and then check if it's really gone. I am going to wait more than 14 days, though, just in case the way their servers count it is different from how time passes in real life.

pay no attention to the man behind the web site

Warning: contains a word not usually used in this blog. The word in question is Facebook.

The dust seems to have settled now. Again.

If anyone out there besides me has been reading this blog from the beginning, then you know that the main motivation for starting it was my complete and utter dislike for Facebook. I joined it sometime in the summer of 2007, back when it was supposed to be a way to keep in touch with friends and family (in case you missed the memo, it's not anymore). During the course of my never-ending search to find a decent writing critique group, I'd stumbled across a group of Facebook fans, who were so enthusiastic about it I thought I should at least give the thing a try. Besides, there were some people from high school I always wish I hadn't lost touch with.

I've ranted about what I dislike about the site before, so I won't go through it here again. Suffice to say that the user interface drove me crazy long before the constantly-changing privacy settings did. Truth be told, most of the time I was actively on Facebook I had my account pretty much wide open, because right from the account creation process the site didn't pass the sniff test when it came to being able to trust it.

Every time Facebook goes and changes something, a certain percentage of people get up in arms about privacy. Facebook seems to ignore them for a while, and then, when the media attention reaches a certain pitch, they apologise and make some overture to show that they're "listening."

The last bit was about changing some default privacy settings again. As usual, the changes had to be opted out of, rather than opted in, and so everyone who didn't like the new defaults had to go to their privacy settings and update them.

Here's the part people seem to be missing: If you have to go in and close something off or opt out, it's already too late. You've already been exposed. Your privacy, what's left of it, has already been compromised. The spammers and scrapers and marketeers have already cleaned you out.

So, it's not about privacy. What's it about then?

For one thing, check out this interactive graphic. Yeah, I know it shows how the privacy elements have shifted over the years, and I just said this wasn't about privacy. But check it out anyhow. See how things keep changing, year after year?

Now take a look at this web page that shows how Facebook's mission statements have changed over the years. A mission statement is something most companies rewrite every five years or so. Facebook has been around for less than ten years, but look at how much the mission statement has changed.

Imagine a bank doing this. At first, your funds are safe in your saving account. Then, your funds have been transferred to a mutual fund without your prior knowledge or consent, and it's only after several thousand likewise enraged depositors demand control of their money back that the bank reluctantly agrees to redeposit funds back in savings accounts. "We listen to our customers," they sigh, "but they're missing out on such a great opportunity to earn more with their money. We weren't trying to do anything wrong."

Of course they were doing something wrong. They just broke several laws. They did something with your money that you never told them it was OK to do, and if you have any sense at all you would immediately clean out and shut down all your business with them and go elsewhere. Yes, technically another bank could pull the same thing on you, but the world runs on banks, and it's a rare person who has the means to do without them.

Facebook does the same thing with the data we provide them. (We think of it as sharing data with our friends and family. Really we're giving data to Facebook and they're letting our friends and family see it.) They've changed the on-line yearbook that early adopters signed up for to something that is supposedly like Twitter, yet continues to be much more cumbersome.

And, unlike Twitter, where you can back up your tweets (although it's awkward), there's no good way in Facebook to get your data back. There's not even a good way to delete it. The first time I made an effort to clean out my account, just over two years ago, it took me days of pecking away at different aspects of the UI and ditching all the data I had entered. Yeah, I know it's still lurking on a Facebook server somewhere, but again, that wasn't the point. The point is that Facebook breaks user interface standards (again) by making it only easy to add information, like a bank that lets you deposit your money into a savings account but never make any withdrawals or transfers, even though you supposedly can. No wonder leaving Facebook has been compared to leaving a cult. Of course, if Facebook deems it reasonable, they'll delete stuff from your account themselves, again without your knowledge or consent.

Mark Zuckerberg claimed recently that Facebook does not sell users' personal information with any other parties. They don't need to. They just network with their "partners" (again, something else users have to opt out of in a way designed to make it difficult to do so) so the "partners" can connect the dots themselves, with your (forced) consent. This is like the crooked body repair shop that slips in a form authorising repairs your car doesn't need into a sheaf of forms authorising repairs your car does need, and then, when you complain about the extra work and higher cost, claiming that you agreed to it, so you have no recourse.

For the last two years, I've had an empty Facebook account strictly so that people who manage their event invitations from there could include me on their lists. Lately, that's been happening less and less (often people will use an invitation and and e-mail), so I think it's time to delete my account. I'm going to do it on 31 May, which has been chosen by a lot of people as Leave Facebook Day. Oddly, it's been called "Facebook suicide" a lot. I think of it more as "Facebook freedom".

The ever-wise Howard has spoken eloquently at West End Stories about "resistance culture" — of cutting the established circuit of "us providers/you consumers" and engaging in opportunities to blur that dichotomy. Time to take it on-line.

is self-reflexive narcissistic?

Per my usual policy, I e-mailed the ever-cool Cheshin to tell her she had been blog-mentioned. I don't have a perfect record for it, but I figure it's just courtesy to tell the people you mention on-line that you name-dropped them. The only exceptions I make are for a) people whose blogs or sites I can just link to; b) people who are sufficiently famous they sort of expect to be mentioned without knowing about it; and c) dead people, for what I hope are obvious reasons.

Cheshin wrote back to thank me for telling her about the post. "I keep forgetting you have a blog," she said, and that sparked off a mini-discussion we had about keeping blogs. Because truthfully, either my friends forget I have a blog, or else they tagged me on Google Reader so some software could remember for them. And no, I don't mean that in a whiny way. You don't do this stuff expecting to actually get a readership.

Bloggers take a lot of piss, both on- and off-line. Apparently no-one in this world is interesting unless they are either already famous or can blog about what they do for a living. The world's foremost amateur enthusiast about Topic X has a steep cliff of credibility to climb before they can be considered a worthwhile source of information, no matter how many citations they include. Basically, no-one cares about your opinion so long as you give it away for free and don't run it by a professional editor.

Sturgeon's second law applies to blogs just as well as it applies to everything else, to be sure. It does not, however, apply to blogs more than anything else. Humanity has gone through previous phases where large percentages of the literate population got on their hobbyhorses and rode towards whatever battle they beheld in their minds' eyes. It's happening again.

There's nothing especially wrong about it, but each individual has to manage their own blog-reading and -writing load. For someone who posts about three times a week (or tries to), maintains not one but two blogs, and has subscriptions to dozens of blogs by other people around the world, I try not to take the whole thing too seriously. You have to treat it like Twitter, or TV shows — if you miss it, you miss it. There are some amazing blog posts out there, and some consistently amazing blogs, but there are many paths to whatever intellectual enlightenment you can get from them.

meals & the modern office

My birthday happened recently, and the ever-cool Cheshin mailed me a box of prezzie stuff. I could do a whole blog series on all the things that were wrapped up inside — Cheshin is ever-cool in gift selection as well as a whole host of other things. But that would be too much like those people who show off their shopping sprees on YouTube, so I'm going to focus on the lunch bag she got me.

I had an Elle lunch bag a while ago, and while I loved the idea of schlepping my food to work in something that wasn't a leftover plastic bag, I had a hard time fitting everything in that I wanted to bring. The thing is, calling these things "lunch bags" is a little like calling the laptop I'm typing on now a "word processor" — sure, it can do that, and its ancestors did that too (some of them), but it does a whole lot of other things besides. It's just not a good description anymore.

Here's all the things I fit into my new cool lunch bag this morning:

back row: bowl for breakfast, bowl for lunch entree, salad dressing cup, tea cup

front row: apple, hunk of extra-old cheddar, utensils, two slices of malt loaf

I'm not just toting lunch. I'm toting breakfast (mostly yogourt parfaits this week), lunch (risotto with fiddleheads and grilled chicken), dessert (malt loaf), and a late afternoon snack (the apple and cheese). Usually the apple and cheese winds up being the last thing I eat for the day, in case that sounds like a lot of food to you.

So basically I'm fitting three meals into one "lunch" bag. Breakfast is eaten at work because I hate eating in transit, and it's not nice for whoever winds up sitting beside you on the subway. Lunch is the one meal everyone who works days expects to eat at work, so hopefully it's self-explanatory. I'm one of those people who gets suddenly and extremely hungry around 3-4pm, hence the apple and cheese.

Those little lunch bags that are meant to hold a tiny salad, half a sandwich, and a small cup of no-added-sugar fruit cocktail aren't going to cut it, though. Besides, I don't know anyone who can live off that for a 8-10 hour workday who doesn't have, ah, "food issues." That might be all they bring with them, but you can bet they're making at least one trip to Starbucks during the day.

At last lunch bag manufacturers are catching on:

All the food, the containers, the utensils, and the cup packs into this bag (I even stuck them in there for the photo for truth in blogging). I have room for more if I needed it. Yesterday I brought soba noodles with shrimp in peanut sauce, and had a container of peanuts packed as an extra. I still had room for more stuff.

The bag fits regular-size chopsticks easily, which is also a nice plus.

Cooking for yourself and toting the results instead of running out for food makes sense on a lot of different levels. I've been pretty strict about bringing lunch in five days a week for a few months now, and already I'm noticing my tastes starting to change. Not that the doughnut shop across the road doesn't make nice sandwiches, but home-made is better, and probably healthier.

Office workers tend to eat two if not three meals during today's working hours. Much has been made of how unhealthy "deskfest" can be, but lots of people only have time to eat at their desks or not at all. It's probably better on all counts if fewer of these are take-aways.

the elephant in the room of bags

I got my first reusable shopping bags back around 1990. Back then, I mostly used them for putting the plastic shopping bags into on the way back from the supermarket. I lived on-campus in a single-student apartment building, and the nearest place to get groceries required a long bus ride and a long walk to schlep everything back home. Plastic bags often wouldn't survive the trip.

The net bag on the top left is the same design as those early bags, although I probably bought it a few years later because it isn't ripped up. Below it is one of my earliest logo bags. Its original purpose was to hold all the paper I got at the conference advertised on it. In the bottom right is a 90s-style DIY bag I crocheted out of dishcloth cotton, and above that is one of my first retail logo bags. Incidentally, the LCBO bag is equally divided into four pockets on the inside, the better to carry your wine bottles and liquor (although it's awfully heavy if you actually fill all the pockets with bottles of booze).

Sometime in the early noughties, reusable shopping bag manufacturers stopped caring so much about using ecologically-friendly materials like unbleached cotton and starting using stuff that probably originated in an oil refinery somewhere. It's very strong, and since the whole idea is to keep the bags out of the landfills, I suppose I can live with it to some extent. The plastic reusables do seem to be somewhat stronger than the cotton ones, although I suspect the biggest motivator is that they let manufacturers create better advertising for the shops the bags come from.

It's hard to tell from the photo, but this Sainsbury's bag is enormous — I've managed to fit my entire week's worth of groceries into it a few times. It also has a velcro tab at the top of the bag, between the handles, which is convenient.

My favourite bags, though, are the pocket bags. These are made from petroleum-based products, too, but they fold up into a very small package and can easily be shoved into a purse or coat pocket until they're needed. They can have logos, too — the "t-bag" one at the top left comes from a tea shop.

The top two bags have their pockets attached to the bag, which makes them very quick to unfold and to put away. As a bonus, you always know where the pocket is. The two orange bags at the bottom have separate pockets (the dark orange one on the right has a loop to hook the pocket onto, at least). They're still extremely useful. I can fit all of these bags, my wallet, my keys, and my cell phone into a small purse and head off to the market as unencumbered as I was back when plastic bags were the norm.

Back when I first started using those plain-cotton net bags at the top of this post, using reusables meant that you were a radical, tree-hugging, granola-munching eco-freak. I had to fight with checkout cashiers to not give me a shopping bag most places I went. No-one knew how to handle them unless the shop had made being environmentally-friendly part of their marketing and shopping experience and given their staff training on reusable-bag etiquette.

Now, in Toronto at least, plastic bags must be sold at 5 cents apiece, and people are learning to bring their own bags. The reusables have become a fashion accessory, and come in lots of designs and colours. People swap tips on which ones are the most cool-looking/comfortable to carry/strongest.

There's just one little catch, though. Reusable bags are... reusable, and must needs be made to be durable. Except for a few that have been overloaded, or that I lost, or that I dragged across Queen St. whilst trying to catch the streetcar, I still own every single bag I've owned for the last twenty years.

That's a lot of bags. They come in very handy when I move house, but otherwise I only ever really use the pocket bags for shopping. The rest are used in an futile attempt to organise my knitting by project, but even then there are over a dozen spare bags stuffed into my front hall closet.

Most of these were given to me, rather than bought. Shops give them away as promos, or relatives give them to me because they know I don't use plastic bags.

Maybe there are still a lot of people who don't have their full quota of reusable bags yet, but at some point the consumer market is going to be saturated, with only people making a home for the first time and those who finally need replacements creating a demand for bags.

Will the reduced demand for shopping bags teach us to reduce, period? Will the superior quality of reusable over throwaway plastic finally teach North Americans that quality is more important than quantity? What do you think?

cute AND useful

The ever-together Suzanne got Jake and I these mini-USB keys during her recent trip to Hong Kong. I've been coveting the one she got herself on her last trip.

The little silver thing at the bottom of the blister pack is to attach the key to your phone. There's a lobster claw clasp to latch the key itself onto, so you can remove it easily when you want to use the key.

It holds 16GB, and as an added bonus, it's cute. It has a little panorama of Parisian landmarks on it, which is ironic in a cute way, given that the company that made it is based in New York and we've only ever been able to find them in Hong Kong (although I suppose if I checked out the College St. computer strip here in TO I might find some).

The cuteness connects to something that I was talking about with my work friends tonight over drinks: manufacturers and the technology media have been slow to notice that women are into computers too. Okay, laptops come in colours now, and the EeePC was marketed directly to women and children, but there's still a lot of "tech is for guys" noise out there. C'mon people, I can't be the only person who remembers who Grace Hopper is. Tech is for everyone.