if this is not an exercise, could it be a....

I'm still thinking about the act of reading, maybe because I spontaneously wrote a first draft to an illustrated children's book this week. I put all the snippets of text that are now waiting for illustrations into a numbered list for ease of reference ("the last sentence in #9 should be the first sentence in #10, don't you think?"), then ran the whole thing through a reading comprehension test to make sure I was writing for the right grade level.

It turned out I was writing at the right grade level, and it's all well and good, except... I'm not sure how all these numbers got in the way of reading.

Throughout my life I have been accused of both reading too quickly and reading too slowly, of skimming too much and of reading in too much detail. I know people who will not take a book seriously simply because it has a very low page count — or a very high one. When I tell acquaintances that I write (or knit, or bake, or sew) they always want to know what I call "baseball information": how many words do I write a day? how long does it take me to knit a pair of socks? how do I find the time to bake my own bread?

I call it "baseball information" because that sport is famous for being more statistically analysed than most others. It's also a reminder that writing, knitting, baking, sewing, and many other tasks are not baseball — they do not break down easily into statistics, and even if they did, the statistics won't tell the questioner what they want to know.

It doesn't matter how many words I write in a day. It matters whether the words, once written, are any damn good. It also matter if they are not good, but can be salvaged by editing. I find it fascinating that far more people want to know how many words I write a day than want to know how much time I spend editing them.

I have been knitting socks for almost twenty of my thirty years of knitting, and I still have no idea how long they take to make.

Since I stopped watching things as they baked in the oven when I was five, baking takes hardly any time at all.  In the case of bread, the human spends much less time working on the bread than the yeast do.

Even if I bothered to do a statistical analysis of these tasks, the numbers would not tell you: how good my writing is, why hand-made socks will always be better than mass-produced ones, how much fun it is to make bread. Numbers are certainly important —  they tell you how much yarn you need for a pair of socks and how long to bake the bread, for starters  — but they are not the whole story and were never meant to be.

Never mind how long the damn book is. It's good. The number of pages was important to the editor, the publisher, the book designer, the printer. Their only benefit to an end-user is if that end-user is a consumer, not a reader. There is a difference.

sanctuary vs. sanctimonious

The Eyrea closed its borders for a while. A certain list of things happened at once: I got sick, every blog topic on my list seemed ridiculous, and I got very frustrated with how much time I was spending on the blog versus how much time I was spending on writing my novel. That Toronto was also heading into the height of harvest season (the physical Eyrea is a heavy supporter of local farmers) contributed to the break as well.

The hiatus was actually very productive. I revamped my novel plans, figured out a new blog schedule, and did a lot of reading. I also spent a lot of time thinking about the act of reading, and the fallout that happens when that act doesn't get thought through properly.

For instance:

I was one of those kids who learned how to read nigh-instantly, not gradually. There are plenty of people like that — any given university English class has tons of people who did the same — but I know from teacher's college that we're not usually accounted for when elementary school curricula are planned.

When I was about eleven I borrowed The Hunchback of Notre Dame from the school library. The librarian praised me for starting on the classics at an early age. My teacher praised me. My parents praised me.

This is how I learned two important things. One: not nearly as many people who think they know the Hunchback story have actually read the book. Two: if a book with sex, violence, and cruelty in it is old enough, the age for which it is appropriate lowers.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame isn't exactly Flowers in the Attic, or even Lady Chatterly's Lover, but it does have:

• a man attempting to seduce a woman and getting as far as taking her blouse off


• a woman bound to the back of a cart wearing nothing but a slip, trying to keep it from falling down by holding on to the top edge with her teeth as she is paraded through the streets of Paris


• a crazy old woman kept in a cage... just because she's a crazy old woman

There's more where those examples came from, but the point of this blog post isn't to ban Hunchback from elementary schools. Even as I was reading it I was thinking, "I'm too young for this stuff." But I read it anyhow, and as near as I can tell there were no permanent scars as a result. Sure, I lost faith in the wisdom of grown-ups, but that was about due to happen anyhow.

My point, if anything, is to offer a public service announcement to remind grown-ups that children do not grow up in a happy never-never land, and that, try as they might, adults are pretty bad at deciding what is and isn't "appropriate" for a given book-reading kid. There's a difference between protecting kids and isolating them, after all.

Also: The Hunchback of Notre Dame is an excellent read for anyone who likes Gothic horror, and would make a nice back-to-back with Frankenstein. Read it if you're old enough to get away with being seen carrying it.

an open letter

Dear Mr. Hartling of Rogers Consumer Marketing:

I recently received a letter from Rogers, signed by you. In it, you promised me my choice of one of three options to receive television transmissions from Rogers instead of from Bell.

Let's get one thing perfectly clear right off the top: I'm aware that this is a form letter, that my name isn't "Resident", that the letter certainly wasn't personal. It's 2010 already. You have to give me some benefit of the doubt.

You said you missed me, and wanted me to come back. You said I used to be your customer.

There's marketing, sir, and then there's laziness.

Instead, I got a mass mailer that said you missed me. Yet you, or more precisely, your database, had never known me. Which I guess is how I wound up being called "Resident". So how can you miss me?

This is about the point where you might be thinking, "It's only an ad. Don't be so goddamned serious about it."

Yes, it's only an ad. But it's an ad that was a failure right from the pitch line.

Isn't the whole point of ads to make us feel like these mass-produced products and services, this remarkably narrow set of choices, are tailored just for the individual being pitched at?

one followed by 100 zeros

I started using Google search shortly after its launch in 1998. At the time, Alta Vista sometimes found what you wanted (and sometimes didn't), Yahoo still indexed sites by hand (and censored, so we were told), and the rest... I don't even remember, because quite frankly they sucked. I was teaching basic HTML classes to high school students, and one assignment was for them to compare search engines. People tended to use two or three and switch between them, depending on what they were looking for.

And then word went around about this search engine that was named after a number, and the number was named after the first couple of syllables that came out of a kid's mouth when his mathematician uncle asked him for a name. Any search engine with a moniker that massively nerdy was worth checking out.

What: the Google search engine.
When: since it was in beta, so 1998-ish.
Who: at first me, whoever told me about it, and whoever I told. It seems funny now, but I do remember being an enthusiastic word-of-mouth evangelist of it.
Where: on dial-up. Google's famously minimal search page was well-appreciated for that alone. I also liked how they repeated the letter "o" above all of the page numbers between 2 and n-2.
Why: It loaded quickly. It responded quickly. And, astonishing for 1998 but still appreciate now, you could actually find what you were looking for. Besides, the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button still makes me smile, even though I never use it.
How: lots of different ways, depending on what you want to know. It translates! It converts! It calculates! It maps! And so on.

Bonus: It's become so entrenched, so easy to use ('til the next thing comes along, but in my humble opinion that hasn't happened yet, bada boom bada Bing), that there's even "duh" parody sites.

genius

I picked up a copy of You and the Pirates at the Small Press Book Fair this summer. I'm about 150 pages in and loving it, so it will probably show up in a later blog post, but for now, take a look at the book cover I bought from The Workhorsery (the publisher) at the same time:

It's cloth, it's sewn, and it has the publisher's logo silkscreened on the front. So even if you don't happen to be reading You and the Pirates or another Workhorsery publication at the time, you can still flash their logo. The cover fits a lot of the books I own, so I expect I'll be doing that a lot.

When you're not reading your book, the cover is held in place with a button and an attached piece of yarn. This keeps people who read on the subway until the last second (like me) from dog-earing their book when they jam it into their bag and run out the doors.

Here's my alarm clock propping up the book to show the built-in bookmark (and a bit of the lining fabric too).

I wish I'd bought another in the other colour they had on hand.

plastic degradable cognitive dissonance

In case it hasn't been desperately obvious, here in The Eyrea we like to be environmentally-friendly  without being uptight about it. The most joy, it seems, comes from being practical and keeping things simple — being thrifty saves way more trees than any complex substitution scheme of one overconsumption for another.

One simple way to check on the environmental friendliness of something is to keep in mind the four Rs:

1. Reduce
2. Reuse
3. Recycle
4. Rubbish

For anyone who missed the public service announcements, those are in order of preference. It's best, garbage-wise, if you use less stuff. If you have to use stuff, try to use it more than once. If you must toss it, try to make sure the stuff you have to toss can go in the recycle bin. Tossing it in the garbage is an action of last resort.

The problem is, once the last resort is taken, a lot of things sit in the landfill and just stay the way they were pretty much when they were first tossed. Plastic bags especially seem good at preventing things from doing what we'd like them to do: rot. People who study these things have all sorts of stories about opening garbage bags dumped in landfills in the 1970s, and the grass clippings inside are still green. That's because the plastic has prevented the grass clippings and other organic materials from getting at the natural forces that let it rot. Things like sunlight, damp, and bugs can't do their work with the plastic in the way.

So some bright spark came up with a plastic bag that biodegrades. That means it will rot, eventually, on its own. Sounds great, right? The grass clippings or whatever will be free to rot, and the plastic bag will break down into its component parts. With any luck, those component parts won't even be toxic.

Look at that four Rs list again.

The problem with biodegradable plastic bags is that they're too stupid to know if they're in a landfill or not before they start biodegrading. "Reuse" is a whole two steps above "Rubbish" — that's a long way on a four-item list. Hell, I've got Eaton's shopping bags from when they still had the skinny-lettered logo, before they switched to the boldfaced one just a few years before they went under. Those bags are over fifteen years old.

A biodegradable bag starts to biodegrade in a matter of months. Here's how I found out:

Before it started breaking up into little crumbs of brittle white plastic, this was the bag I used to bring my pashmina shawl to work in the wintertime. It was packed flat with the layers of clothing you see with it for the summer. When I first found the bag with the chewed-looking holes in it and damage scattered all about, I thought it was mouse damage. I've lived in three places that had mice, and believe me, it took a long time for me to come down from the ceiling and discover that it was another type of laboratory inhabitant entirely who had caused this.

I picked up all the big pieces that I could and threw them in the — yeah — garbage, but a lot of the smaller bits were too little to pick up easily. Every time I touched one, it would break into smaller crumbs.

Vacuuming helps a bit, but the machines have a hard time picking up the bits.

See all the crumbs stuck to the underside of the vacuum? Just because it's biodegradable doesn't mean it's not still plastic. Think of the susceptibility to static charges and the overall clinginess of a typical plastic bag. Now imagine several hundred plastic bags that are all about the size of a thimble, and which break apart if you or a vacuum cleaner touches them. Right.

I've managed to track white plastic crumbs throughout my entire apartment, and so far I'm only grateful that I don't have any pets at the moment. The only cleaning solution I can think of is to buy a lint roller that uses those sticky paper things (yeah, I know, more landfill) and roll it across any parts of my floor that have plastic crumbs.

If anyone's already dealt with this and has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Gmail

After the actual Google search engine, Gmail was probably the first Google app I started using. I'd had it to the teeth with my Bell Sympatico internet connection, and was shopping around for a new ISP. That meant my sympatico.ca e-mail account would be going away. I didn't really want to use Hotmail because I used to train people on how to do tech support for it (along with sausage and journalism, the workings widely-deployed web apps should not be seen by the weak-stomached).

At the time, too, maximum attachment sizes and maximum mailbox sizes were pretty punitive for web-based e-mail. Besides that, some web mail clients were trying to police their users by not allowing files with certain extensions through. Since I'd been using PKZip since DOS was the norm on PCs and tended to write some of those "forbidden" files myself (like .JS files), I was pretty annoyed at just about everyone offering web e-mail.

I begged an invitation to Gmail off the person that told me about sometime in the summer of 2004 (my absolute earliest e-mails are long gone, and not terribly missed). What made me sign up was:

• their maximum on-line mailbox size was (and still is) bigger than most other web-based e-mail clients
• they had keyboard shortcuts way before anyone else
• you can use the Google search tool to hack through your inbox and find messages
• even though the infamous "keyword targeted ads" are there, the interface is much less flashy and therefore tends to load more quickly than the competition's
• the ads themselves are not entirely bad — I usually get ones for Wired.com, which I read anyhow.

I don't know if the numbers would back me up on this, but I suspect Gmail is also Google's most popular tool (after the search engine). It seems like a lot of people have accounts, even if they're not primary accounts. That's easy to manage, because Google lets you grab mail from other accounts and will even label it for you. You can even reply back using Gmail, but say it's from the other account. I manage three accounts from one Gmail address, and it works great.

Gmail was also the first web mail app (that I know of) that encouraged you not to file away things in folders. Instead, you just kept everything in your inbox and then searched through it when you needed something. When Gmail came on the scene, this was weird, and outright frowned upon at the offices I worked at. Now it's the norm, and other e-mail apps have had to improve their search capabilities to keep up.

Gmail's account capacity is now somewhere in the neighbourhood of 7.5 GB (they keep increasing the inbox size gradually), they've recently added a task list feature, and the contacts list has improved a lot from the early days. They also have integrated chat now. This is different from the ill-fated Buzz, which seems to have been some sort of Twitter competitor and that no-one I know ever took too seriously. They don't seem to have a lot of downtime, and, although I noticed that my on-line inbox only goes back to 2005 now, they don't seem to lose accounts a lot. From what I have heard, when they do, it's game over, but that's just another reason why you shouldn't trust cloud computing and should always have a backup mailbox.

Like anything else that's free, if you think you could use it, you should check it out.

lammas

The beginning of August was marked by the celebration of Lammas, at least amongst those of us who celebrate it. Lammas, or Lughnasadh, celebrates the first harvest of the summer. It's considered a fire festival because of the time of the year it's held, but thanks to the intense, humid weather, most people I know who observe it try to generate as little heat as possible.

Lammas is the corn festival. People who celebrate it make meals where grains dominate the menu, and little to no meat/protein is eaten. The idea is to celebrate the foods that are harvested at this time, so that means corn, wheat, rice, potatos, barley.

This year, that got me thinking.

Grain is some of the easiest food in the world to store and keep. Mass grain storage gave humans an excuse to form the first cities. It works well both as a sweet and a savoury, and is the considered the staple food in one form or another around the world.

If you need to eat in transit and you're in a hurry, what do you pick up? The easiest things to get are all grain-based: pastries, muffins, sandwiches. Portable food means grains.

Most places take advantage of grain's long shelf life, and offer prepackaged stuff that may have been made days before it got to the shop, waiting for you to squint at it and try to figure out which cellophane-wrapped bundle is the lesser evil.

It's not just monotonous. It sucks. And you deserve better.

We haven't had rationing on this continent for over sixty years. We need to stop acting like it's okay if that's all we can get.

this blogging century

Ironically, I had another post about numbers all lined up for today, but when I hit the Blogger dashboard to start writing, I noticed that this is post #100.

It took two and a half years to get here. A lot of bloggers hit post #100 after a hundred days of blogging, but right from the start that was never going to be me, and I had planned it that way.

The whole point of The Eyrea was that it was to be an anti-Facebook. No-one (especially not me) was going to get reminded that they hadn't talked to this or that person in a while. No-one would be compelled to log in every freaking day just to stay caught up... with what exactly? No-one will ever be tempted to play Farmville or whatever the hell the game of the week is. For a while I had a link to the non-Facebook version of Scrabulous, but I took it down and I'm not even sure it exists anymore.

The one thing on Facebook I entered data into on a regular basis was my status update, so I signed up for Twitter. My Twitter feed hit 1,000 posts several days ago. I thought about having a little fanfare for it, but That's Not What Twitter's About.

I guess I feel more compelled to point out the hundredth blog post because, with only a few exceptions, I actually try to find topics I can thrash out in writing. My DIY blog has at least one photo on most entries; this blog rarely has even that (although I agree more visuals would spruce the place up a bit).

This is the part in a typical "milestone" article where the author muses about what they've learned. I'm not going to do that, because I always find that part narcissistic, and I already use the first-person pronoun too much around here. But if people want to comment on something that they've learned since March 2008, whether in the blogosphere or anywhere else, that would be very, very cool.

Cheers. And thanks for reading.

a google of reasons

I've said here before that I try to be nobody's fangirl. That's including software and web sites. That's especially including software and web sites. They're like bad boyfriends — as soon as you decide they're perfect, you discover this nasty side to them that's a complete turn-off.

I do, however, use an awful lot of Google's on-line tools. I even switched to Chrome as my default web browser, away from Firefox. Here's a list of all the tools I use. Some of them I use every day, some only a few times a year, but they're all in regular rotation:

• Gmail
• Search
• iGoogle
• Chrome
• Reader
• Chat
• Docs
• Picasa
• YouTube
• Blogger (duh)
• Wave
• Sites
• Translate
• Analytics
• Calendar

That's fifteen things, and all of them except for one involve cloud computing, which I am on the record as being sceptical of. I had no idea that I'd joined the Google universe that completely. I like to think I check things out and choose the best tool for the job, not just the one that Google makes.

But you know? By and large these tools are the best ones I've found out there. My usual criteria list is:

• Can be used on Windows, Ubuntu Linux, Mac OS, or Maemo ('cos I use all of these)
• Has the feature set I want
• Is preferably free, or at least has a usable free version
• Is stable "enough" (Note: I don't believe any software is completely stable)
• Is easy enough to use that I can recommend it to someone without spending the rest of my life helping them with it
• Does not require users to buy into the entire universe just because they want to check out one thing (I'm looking at you, Facebook!)

At first I had an idea that I could review all the Google tools I use as one of my blog series, like I did with document processing or basic Linux applications. But fifteen... that's over five weeks, and those tool/application posts take more time to put together than the average post.

So I'm going to start posting a Google tool entry every Friday instead. Let me know what you think.

Gadget reduction

Anyone who isn't a blatant Luddite these days risks getting the epithet "gadget freak" (okay, "gadget whore", but I have some problems with that term) thrown at them. It doesn't take much — just have some idea how most of the features on your cell phone work and you're on your way.

Personally, I don't understand why people spend hundreds of dollars on something and then barely learn how to use it. For one thing, the more you know about a single, well-chosen gadget, the fewer gadgets you need.

The need for a separate cell phone and MP3 player disappeared a while ago. To those about to complain that MP3 software on phones suck — not if you get the right phone they don't. So there's one gadget gone.

Not everyone wants or needs a pocket-sized computer, but I do. I used to carry around a paper notebook, but my handwriting is sufficiently awful (and has been since I was a little kid, thank you very much) that typing is by far the best way to go.

And if you're going to carry around a pocket-sized computer — a Nokia N900 in my case — it makes sense that it should have a SIM card slot and a phone application, yes?

So now I have a single gadget that plays MP3s, lets me do things like write this blog post on it, and acts as a cell phone. And it fits in the little book bag I just made, not to mention a coat pocket.

More gadget consolidation can be had, though. Cameras need to be considered. Nothing can replace a good SLR, of course, but for quick snapshots... Again, a lot of phones have awful cameras (and they wonder why people don't video call more!), but there are decent snapshot cameras built into some phones. My Nokia gadget has a Zeiss lens, flash, and takes remarkably nice snapshots. They're much better than my old snapshot camera's, anyhow. I even found a free app to downlod to make them look like film photographs.

Okay, so now I have no separate MP3 player, cell phone, PDA/netbook, or digital snapshot camera. Last night, when I was browsing through the list of free apps available for the N900, I found a utility that lets me emulate remote controls. If I could put all those away, I could clear up my coffee table space and save on batteries. That would be... five more gadgets out of my life.

Eight gadgets in one. Only one set of batteries to recharge/replace, one item to remember to bring along, one potential little solid-state box for the garbage bin when its time finally comes.

It would make being a geek downright virtuous if I had been able to skip right to having the N900 in the first place.

is this the start of the breakdown?

I finally got around to watching the film Memento this past weekend. Don't worry — I'm not going to review a ten-year-old film. I just want to reflect on why it took me ten years to see it, because there are some purposeful reasons.

People have been recommending Memento to me a lot since it got released. The reason why is because for a while I had a difficulties with short-term memory. It wasn't because someone had given me brain damage by smacking my head into a mirror, though — it was because for pretty much all of the 1990s I never got enough sleep. I'm not going to get into why here, because it's not the sort of thing I'm going to blab about in public. Suffice to say I made do with 3-6 hours a night for just about ten years. I'd have a catchup day where I could sleep in maybe 3 times a year. That was it. The rest of the time I was stumbling along. It got to the point that I had been tired for so long and impaired by the lack of sleep for so long that I couldn't figure out why I was so tired all the time.

I am constantly shocked by how poorly people understand the importance of sleep, and how willing people are to attribute the effects to other things. I was told (at age 24) that the cognitive impairment, memory loss, chills, and lowered immune system were from "getting older." I was told that the irrational cravings for sugar and rapid weight gain were because of my own "lack of willpower". I now know that all of this stuff was related to the sleep deprivation. Don't believe me? Google it, or at least start with this Harvard Magazine article. Thankfully, I got control of my sleeping schedule back around when Memento was released and can now sleep as much as I need to in order to be healthy. That this blog even exists is proof of that — back in the 90s, posting three times a week like this would have been impossible.

The thing is, there are lots of people who live like I used to. They get just enough sleep to stave off collapse, and the rest of the time they're running around, trying to get done an impossible list of tasks. Often they've been burdened with too much to do from too many places. I used to work with someone who was taking care of a sick parent, doing all the household chores, taking care of her kids, and working full-time for a while. Things finally came to a head when she got seriously ill herself.

It's easy to say that those who wind up in situations where they're exhausted and overwhelmed need to learn better delegation and time management skills. It's harder to understand what it's like for the exhausted, sleep-deprived person. Things that are supposed to be short-term turn into long-term, and there's no time or energy for the long-term. Their problem-solving skills have been stolen from them by lack of sleep. Often the demands are coming from several different areas, so it's difficult to determine who to say "no" to. Friends and family are slow or unwilling to see the extent of the damage being done, and can't figure out why the person is "different."

Culturally, there is still far too much bragging going on about how little sleep this or that A-type personality needs to keep going. It's almost always an exaggeration, and it's not apples-to-apples as a comparison because it doesn't take into account how much work — efficient work — is getting done during waking hours.

The Harvard Magazine article I linked to says that all North Americans are part of a mass sleep deprivation experiment. More of us need to figure out how to be in the control group. Unless you've lived it and recovered from it, it's very hard to grasp how frightening it really is.

and I thought "dog bites man" was funny

Today during a coffee break I walked by a TV set that was showing one of those 24 hour news stations. I spotted a headline that said something like, "Controversy after dog receives communion at downtown Toronto church."

As a Catholic school survivor, this struck me as really, really funny. By the time I made it back to my desk, I had the whole scene in my head:

Doddery, nearly-blind old priest shakily holds up a wafer during a hot summer's Mass. What little breathable air that is left in the church is being gasped at by the parishioners as they wait in line for communion. The St. John's ambulance staff outside get ready for that Sunday's heat stroke victims.

A dog has trotted into the church through doors left open in the hopes of admitting a thus-far absent breeze. He butts in line in front of a twelve-year-old boy too shocked to see a dog in a church to do anything, and before anyone thinks to speak out stands on his hind legs in begging position, triggered by the sight of the wafer raised just the way his master lifts a Milk-Bone into the air at treat time.

Priest: The body of Christ.

Dog: Woof.

The priest places the wafer on the dog's tongue and gets ready to present communion to the next person. It strikes him that the elderly man he just served had an awfully hairy face, but it takes all sorts to make a world. He decides it's nice to know some people still receive communion hands-free, the old way.

As it turns out, this is one time that the truth is less funny than the fiction. It wasn't a Catholic church at all, but an Anglican one. This makes it less funny. First of all, a lot of Anglican churches have a day where they bless their parishioners' pets once a year, so a dog in an Anglican church is less funny. Second, Eddie Izzard already covered most of the relevant topics about how the Church of England is funny in his "Cake or Death" monologue:

Although, if he'd had a dog get some cake, that would have been even funnier....

reassuring... i think

In my own personal top ten of "things I wish people would stop asking me," there is an entry for "which famous author do you write the most like?". I hate this question because I honestly have no clue, but I know when it comes time to query the current novel-in-progress I'm going to need a good answer. The ever-reading J-A says my short stories remind her of Ray Bradbury a lot. That's extremely flattering, but since I still can't see it myself, it doesn't help me much when it's query-writing time.

That's why I was very interested when @tdoerr had a link to a Toronto Star article about I Write Like, a web site that compares text you paste into a text box to sample works by fifty different published authors. That's a small sample, but with better data it could actually become useful. After all, there's always a difference between who you wish you wrote like and who you do write like.

I ran my blog entry about my theory of Facebook's real agenda through I Write Like, and it told me:

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Given what Doctorow himself writes about Facebook, that's not really surprising. But he's one of my favourite authors, especially for non-fiction, so hey, I'll take it!

Even I can tell most of my fiction isn't like Doctorow's though, so I ran my current favourite short story (a ghost story set during the Spanish flu pandemic) through the I Write Like analyser, and got:

I write like
J. K. Rowling

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I love Rowling's character development and how she handles mystery plots. Neither of these are evident in my little 2,000-word short story, but I'd much rather have a comparison script decide I write like her than James Joyce (another option on this site).

Which leads me to conclude: if I ever get down on my writing, I can just run a page or two through the analyser. Sure, it's all BS and about as accurate as, well, one of those silly Facebook quizzes, but its response and another cup of tea might be all it takes to get going again.

found

Where: the Bar Italia upstairs ladies' washroom, the top left corner of the mirror over the sink.

When: at the most recent Descant launch.

What: Besides a sticker with the panel of a comic on it, beats me. A graphic novel version of The Fly, maybe?

Who: Given that Bar Italia has espresso cups with comics on them, it might have been the restaurant's idea. Or not.

Why: I don't normally take photos in washrooms (although that does sound like a coffee table book waiting to happen), but this caught my fancy. You don't see a lot of comic book art in ladies' washrooms, more's the pity.

another season, another Descant launch

Some people get hooked on sitcoms; I get hooked on literary magazines. I love short fiction, so I hit the bottom shelf of the magazine section pretty regularly. I also have three subscriptions to different magazines.

One of these is Descant, and as I write this paragraph I'm sitting in the upstairs lounge of Bar Italia on College Street, waiting for the launch of the latest issue to start.

I don't know if they've done this for the entire forty-year history of the magazine, but for as long as I've been following them, every launch has been in a different venue — always one appropriate to the theme of the issue. Last issue's theme was "dance," and the venue provided space both for some live performances and videos. It's always something different, yet it's always exactly right.

The launch is over, another lovely night out, and I try to tap out more of this blog into my phone.

This issue's theme is "summer and smoke." The readings included tales of travelling through Viet Nam, rules for conduct created by a used bookshop owner, funeral barbecues, poetry about going postal. The first two readings were hilarious (I'm making up my used-book list now), the last two thoughtful and imagistic.

And, as usual, I think it all just makes me love the written word a little bit more.

Kobo coda

Last Saturday I gave my mum the Kobo I won at Book Summit 2010. It was an interesting study of both usability and the inaccuracy of stereotypes.

My mum is pretty computer literate. She knows how to build web sites, use Photoshop, and create multimedia presentations. She's an MS-Excel power user, and is comfortable talking about hardware specs on laptops.

So it gave me pause when I was the one who wound up installing the Kobo synch software on her machine.

Explaining how to use the Kobo itself to her was easy, even with my toddler niece sitting on Mum's lap and trying to help push the buttons (the gadget-fascination continues to the next generation). My mum's only comment was, "That's all there is to it?" We decided to move to the next step of loading the synch software on her laptop.

We went to the Kobo web site. We found a very aesthetically pleasing, clearly-written page that extolled the virtues of the software, but noted nothing about where to get the software from.

"Where do you buy books for this thing, anyhow?" Mum said, so we took a break and bought a copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Buying the book from Chapters/Kobo was easy, but once it was bought we couldn't figure out how to download the ebook file.

At this point we were both getting confused and worried. Sure, checking the Kobo's on-device manual probably would have helped, but, as my mum pointed out, you can't power on the Kobo while it is attached to a computer, and we didn't really want to undock it until we had no other options to check.

My mum gave me the computer to fiddle with, and I checked the Kobo folders Windows could detect over the USB link. Sure enough, the required software was on the device all along. It wasn't in a very obviously labeled folder (I was hoping for something called INSTALL), but it was there.

The installation app itself was a joy to behold. It started with a device operating system upgrade, then installed the synch software on the laptop. All along the way, the instructions were provided in wonderfully clear text plus easy-to-follow diagrams. Everything worked like a charm. Sure, I've been updating firmware on various devices almost as long as firmware has existed, but I have to say I appreciated this process like no other. The instructions make it easy for any newbie or casual computer user to follow the steps, yet at the same time treat the user with respect. If all technical writing was this good the world would be a far better place.

Best of all, when the synch software itself finally launched, it immediately discovered that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had already been purchased and promptly added it to my mum's library of Kobo books. I clicked the "synch" button on the software, and the ebook was added to the Kobo device.

My mum's been reading the book on the Kobo ever since, and she loves it (mostly the device, but also the novel). Her only concern so far is how to share the device with my stepfather. He reads mostly nonfiction, and she reads mostly fiction, so probably they won't want to read the same book at the same time, but arranging reading time on the device itself could prove to be difficult.

I think I know what he's getting for Christmas already.

Coda to the coda: For any readers who are bursting to say, "Why didn't you just follow the damn instructions? It says the software is on the device!", here are a couple of points to ponder.

Yes, the Desktop page does state, right near the top, "The Kobo Desktop Application comes preloaded on every Kobo eReader." It doesn't say which folder it's in, though, and it doesn't have any technical how-to information (or a link to the same). That was the sort of text my mum and I were scanning for when we went to that page. People who are reading in a hurry for how to install something are going to skip right past that sentence, which is what we did. If you want to call us idiots and not typical users for doing that, that's cool — it won't be the first time and I'm sure it won't be the last.

Again, once the user finds the software to install, the experience is absolutely superb.

do the math

It's bloody difficult being pro-transit in Toronto. Twenty (erm, getting on thirty) years ago we had the best public transit system in North America. Then, due to a number of factors — including a provincial government that was elected twice on a platform that included gutting the provincial capital — it's gotten worse and worse. "Why should Toronto have that when we don't?" was the question, and the answer was "They shouldn't." Never mind that over ten per cent of the entire country's population lives here, creating an urban area very different even from Canada's other major urban centres.

Still, it's my home town, and I like my home town to be as car-free as possible. I do own one of these money-pits, simply because the lack of urban planning forces one to, but the fewer places I have to walk, bike, or take public transit, the happier I am.

It's the places that are difficult to get to by public transit that make it impossible to always do that.

The Golden Horseshoe — the span of Lake Ontario shoreline reaching from Hamilton to Scarborough — has several different transit systems, which technically all link together. You have to pay again at each changeover, and just getting to a changeover point may necessitate several transfers, depending on where you live. What people who usually drive everywhere don't understand is that every changeover, and even every internal transfer, causes another delay. Besides having to add in waiting for the next bus/train/whatever as travelling time, the public transit-taker has to re-settle themselves into the new vehicle each time.

Travelers also have to make sure, in order to minimise transfer times, that they have all their passes/tokens/tickets lined up and ready to go. Unlike in Europe and some cities in North America, the Golden Horseshoe transit systems still mostly achieve this by having people queue to talk to someone at a booth. The only fully automated points-of-purchase often have queues as long as the ones at the booths, simply because there aren't enough of them.

Last spring I mentioned taking a combination of tram and train from my Amsterdam hotel to Schiphol Airport on a Good Friday. I covered 30 kilometres in 45 minutes for about five bucks, give or take some leeway on the currency exchange, and taking into account that the cost of living is slightly higher there. I had to transfer twice: my total was one tram ride to a changeover point (Amsterdam Centraal), buy a train ticket from an automated kiosk with no queue time, and then get on a train after a few minutes of wandering platforms before I found the right one.

To do the same trip here costs about the same, but it takes 90 minutes on a good day. Do I need to mention the vehicles aren't as clean and the whole thing feels more like an endurance test than a commute?

Here are some sample per-week (five working days) cost breakdowns to travel 35 km using two systems in the Greater Toronto Area using public transit. The example trip is from Toronto to Mississauga. If you want to get an idea of how much it costs someone using public transit to cover 35 km, just add any two of the items in the list together:

• $46 a week for the GO
• $25 a week for Missy Transit
• $30 a week with a Metropass ($121 a month divided by 4 to get a weekly average)

If you think the two-system comparison is not a good example, remember how many people commute between Mississauga/Brampton or vice versa and Toronto every day. Or Richmond Hill. Or Markham. A lot of them wind up taking two transit systems just to get to where they're going.

Every.

Freaking.

Day.

It's not unusual for the price of employment being to spend most of the rest of one's waking hours on buses.

In comparison, it only costs $30 a week in gasoline to drive the same distance using a medium-sized car. Yes, that's $30 a week, period. Sure, there are maintenance and other ownership fees, but if you own a car anyhow... why would you take public transit?

It's not for the cost savings, that's for sure. It has to be because you believe in it.

five-dimensional polyhedron, maybe?

Once upon a time, back when radio stations would play "MacArthur Park" because it was actually on the charts, there were three malls that could be traveled to easily from Erin, Ontario. Mall shopping was one of those things that needed to be done when the local Zellers in Georgetown didn't quite have what you wanted.

The closest one was Shopper's World in Brampton. Back then it was a single long corridor with major shops at either end, plus one short corridor marked with a geometric wall mural. We went there for clothes, to pick up cold cuts and rye bread at the German delicatessen, and so my parents could get their drivers' licences renewed, back when the entire driving population of Ontario had to get that done during the same time period, instead of by birthdays.

The second closest mall was Bramalea City Centre. This was a dark rabbit warren, two floors of walkways lit by the illuminated shop signs. We would deliberately stand in front of Japan Camera to read something on a piece of paper because they had the brightest sign. The ceiling was covered in huge, tinfoil-coated tubes held in place by yellow rope. My parents said that this was to reflect the light. It didn't work very well. It was more like someone couldn't decide whether to build a market or a disco until they were almost finished.

The third mall was hollow in the middle, and it was our (the kids, that is) favourite, because there was a playground in the outdoor centre area. This mall had two levels and burnt orange tile flooring like City Centre, plus lots of backless stairs that I was afraid of, because I was always afraid I would fall down the backless part of backless stairs. Somewhere in its bowels was a lower level with a cinema. We once waited over an hour to see the first Superman movie before my mum gave us many admonitions not to talk to any strangers, walked to the front of the queue, and came back to tell us we were going home because the next two shows were already sold out. There was also a very dark food court (again, only lit by the signs from the food vendor stalls) with white chairs that had curlicues on the back. It was always very busy whenever we went.

We would almost always exit the mall by the Woolco. This discount department store had two levels, and you could take your shopping buggy between levels because instead of escalators they had movators on ramps, and special wheels on the shopping buggies that locked when they were on a slope. We often got some broken chocolate bars from the little candy booth on the second floor before heading for the parking lot.

This third mall was possibly even bigger than City Centre, and I had got lost in the smaller Shopper's World when I was three, but my mum pointed out that you couldn't get lost in the third mall because it was a giant two level square. That's why they called it Square One.

If you live in the Greater Toronto area, you probably know what has happened to Square One and the City of Mississauga that surrounds it. First they filled in that outdoor playground area, so the mall was less a square and more a sort of windowpane shape. Then they put in additions, and more additions, and "big box" outbuildings that are still being built and added as I write this. The City of Mississauga has mushroomed into one of the worst cases of suburban sprawl ever seen on the continent, and Square One reflects that. Instead of being the mall you could never get lost in, it now has street-style signage along its many corridors so you can pick your way through and, with some luck, find everything you went there for.

The Woolco is now a Wal-Mart. The old cinema has been replaced by two new ones. Except for The Bay, Sears, and maybe Zellers, I don't know of any shops that have been there from when it opened.

Square One is an odd place. Some of the department stores have hardware departments, but there is not a single dedicated hardware store amongst all those shops, nor a lot of other shops and services you would expect to see in a central shopping zone. Even though the complex is surrounded by high-rise condominium towers, the nearest supermarket is just over three kilometres away. I believe there's at least one pharmacy in it, but as I write this post I can't think of where it is.

What it does have are tons of clothing shops, costume jewelry/trinket shops, music/movie/video game shops. There are also lots of places to get cheap fast food, including what I believe is a reinvented version of that dark food court we used to go to. None of the stalls have the same vendors, and the layout is completely different, but I think it's still the place.

The reason why I think it's the same place, even though it now has a skylight just beyond it and bright artificial lighting within, is that I still sometimes automatically take a shortcut to it. I can't describe where it is, because I always seem to find it by feel, but if you duck past some utility doors, go past the public washrooms (rather hidden now), and go down a flight of stairs past where some of the fast-food joints cache their extra inventory of burger buns, you'll wind up right beside the Dairy Queen.

The floor tiles in that little corridor are still burnt orange. It has to have been there all along.

the World Wide Wrong number

Wrong numbers used to be pretty straightforward. The caller would ask for someone who didn't live in your home, you'd explain using a standard polite phrase, and they would apologise and hang up. Easy. There were some loopholes, as immortalised in certain Hitchcock films, but they weren't common. If you lived in a small town, it wasn't unusual to know the person who had called you by accident anyhow.

Cheap long distance started to change that. There's less reason to check a number carefully if the financial penalty for screwing up is reduced, but there's more reason to dial a number incorrectly if you can't look it up in a phone book. (This applied to the era before the WWW, of course.) So we all started getting wrong numbers from people who lived the next town or two over.

The proliferation of non-phone devices changed things a bit more. If you've ever been forced to take your phone off the hook in the middle of the night, just because some aspiring fax spammer fat-fingered your home number into their overnight transmission list and set the retries to the maximum, you know what I mean.

Then "phone plan options" appeared, and something new started to happen: the reverse wrong number. You'd call someone, realise you had the wrong number, apologise, and hang up. Unluckily for you, you'd just accidentally called someone with both an unlisted number and caller ID. They'd call you back, and the conversation would go something like this, at least if you deal with such situations the way I do.

Me: Hello?
Them: Why did you just call me?
Me: Um, other way around — you just called me.

(This is the part where they get whiny/panicky/irate.)

Them: Nooooooo, you just called me! And I have an unlisted number!
Me: Hm. I did just try to call a friend of mine, but I dialled a wrong number.
Them: But my number's unlisted!
Me: Doesn't mean people can't dial it by accident. After all, my number's unlisted and you called me.
Them: But that's because I have call display.
Me: Yeah, but now you've invaded my privacy by recording my unlisted number and calling it. I could report you for harrassment. What did you say your name was again?

[Click]

Just about when the paranoid people finally figured out what their optional services really did, all those new (no longer that new) area codes were added. Toronto finally had a succinct way to identify conservative suburbia — the "905" — and having a 416 number became a status symbol in some circles. Plus, calling a wrong number became a lot more easy and common than it used to be.

I got some experience with just how easy and common it was when some guy named Kevin got a cell number the same as mine, but with a different area code. It was right at the beginning of a long weekend, and I got lots of late-night calls from drunken young men, giggly (and also drunken) young women, and irate older people who wanted to know who I was and why I was answering Kevin's phone. After two nights of interrupted sleep, I got a call from the Humber OPP asking for Kevin. The police were the only ones I called back — to confirm that they had the wrong number. I never found out who Kevin was, but I hope he learned how to party without getting on the radar of the provincial police.

That brings this narrative up to the present day. Phone services on the interweb have proliferated. There are plenty of phone number searches, and now there are VoIP services like Skype. In the same way that you don't need a TV set anymore to watch TV, thanks to computers, you no longer need an actual phone number to make a phone call. As my mother now puts it when I call her long-distance over Skype, "the call display said 'unknown caller' so I figured it must be you."

And it's that flexibility, that global reach available to anyone who has access to an internet café and a cheap long-distance card, that is making wrong numbers get really, really weird.

In the past year I had a call from people who said they were in Constantinople and who claimed to be friends with my nephew. I don't have a nephew and they did have a wrong number, but it was a long, convoluted discussion before I felt I could hang up politely. (I don't like to just hang up. People hit redial, and now they're annoyed at you for being rude.)

I've also had a call from someone who thought I was their long-lost half-sister (this one wasn't so much a wrong number as a wrong relation), and a lot of calls from people who get very confused when someone with a Canuck accent answers the phone. This last group is almost always very polite and apologetic — I hope they reach their intended party.

One last note: drunk dialing has been around as long as there have been phones. My maternal grandparents were painfully aware of it — their phone number was one digit off from the local taxi company, so they got plenty of calls at closing time with people saying things like, "Yeah, pick me up at the Rose & Crown[click]". It's just that now there are more phones around (and, arguably, more recreational chemicals), so drunk dialing is reaching new heights/depths just like all the other wrong number dialing we do.

My new Nokia N900 still doesn't have a SIM card in it (my old phone still works, so I'm being lazy about dealing with that), so it can't receive or send phone calls except via Wifi and some VoIP service like Skype.

Last Saturday night found me watching one of those lovely, chick-flick Jane Eyre film adaptations. It was right about the part where the hero and heroine finally have their one kiss of the entire movie when all of a sudden my phone started ringing and buzzing.... as if I was getting a call or something.

So I picked it up and checked (I figured I'd accidentally set an alarm for the wrong time)... and it was a Skype call. From France. Since I don't know anyone in France who would call me at midnight Toronto time, I just hung up. But this caller was redialling so fast it was as if I had never touched the End Call button. Finally I just turned off the Wifi.

I got two chat messages from my French caller. One was in the French version of texting shorthand, and I have no idea what it said because I don't know the standard abbreviations for French text messages. The other was in regular, if ungrammatical, French, and I could read that. It said "repend moi" (answer me).

Pro tip: if you're going to drunk dial, be polite. You never know when you're going to call a semi-bilingual former teacher in Canada by mistake.

If you have any favourite wrong number stories, please add them to the comments!