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In fact, I’m thinking of abandoning the whole artificial construct of the large commercial Social Networks entirely, and I have a number of reasons that have been brewing at the back of my mind for a while.

First off, I was a late adopter to the Social Networking scene in general, and was never really convinced of it’s usefulness. I completely missed the MySpace and Friendster era of social networking, and don’t feel any pangs of regret over that.  I had trouble with the whole concept of joining such an artificial construct in order to make it easy for distant acquaintances to keep in touch with me.  I have a very small circle of friends and family that I keep in touch with, and this is by choice.  It is a limited group due to the fact that I don’t keep in touch with people I’m only tangentially interested in dealing with.  Life’s too short.  I would rather spend my limited socializing time with people who’s company I genuinely enjoy.

Secondly, and no less importantly, I have never been particularly comfortable with such blatant profiteering by others of my friendship circles.  Facebook, MySpace, G+, LinkedIn, essentially all of the “free” social networks make their dime by selling marketing information and access based on how you intersect and interact with others on their network.   This is really not much different than how marketing and sales works in the real world, but the social networks make the data-mining trivially easy.  I expect marketing companies to analyze individual behaviour and relationships to effectively target their wares.   But my general sense of orneryness makes me want to make them at least work for it.

Further, I wonder about the time commitment it takes on my part to make effective use of the platforms.  I won’t deny that they have some use, but to really get something out of it, you have to put something in.  And the time involved with putting something in is striking me as more valuably spent on other activities.  The Return on Investment I get from my activity in social networks is fairly negligible.

Overall, I just don’t “get it” never did, couldn’t be bothered to waste the time to figure it out, and am somewhat creeped out by the whole thing on a subconscious level.  So why the heck should I continue to spend time on it?

So, do I actually believe I can drop the habit?  I honestly don’t know.  If I’m being honest with myself, it will probably be difficult to wean myself of Facebook and G+.  In spite of never really being comfortable with, or fully embracing, either the concept or the platform, I’ve found myself spending an increasing amount of time on them over the past year or so.  It has become somewhat of a reflex to “check my news feed” on FB and G+ several times a day.  I’m almost interested in trying to abandon it just to see if I can, if I have the will-power to do it.

Do I plan on any alternatives to Social Networks?  Maybe, partly, kinda sorta, in a nebulous sort of way.  Maybe spend some more time blogging.  Maybe build out a limited access BBS or some such and take a stab at creating a small community of like-mindeds that I actually find it appropriate to keep in touch with in an online kinda way.  Most people, I’ll just call, visit, or email directly.  That strikes as being a far more effective and genuine means of maintaining a genuine social network.

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I colour shifted this fractal a bit.  It reminds me of a slightly distorted Yin without the accompanying Yang.  (Or is it Yang without the Yin?)

I was flipping through my feeds, and came across an interesting bit of a rant against Facebook and they’re poor security implementation on a security research blog.  I found it funny, in a technical geek philosomifizing kind of way.  I’m guessing that most of you who click on that link might not get the joke. (Hint – The joke is about a security researcher who actually uses Facebook, then complains about the security – talk about shooting fish in a barrel).  Sure, I use Facebook, but I use it with the assumption that the whole platform is fundamentally insecure.  That’s sort of a given.

But it ties in with with something I read earlier in the day about Cussing in Code Comments.  The article itself was about which programming language tends to have the most swears embedded in the comments, but it pointed to one specific code comment that I’m sure has ended up, in one form or another, in thousands of pieces of software over the years:  “Fuck it.  Let’s Release.”

It speaks to an industry wide problem.  Sooner or later, you run out of time to fix things, and you have to suck it up and release something that may not be perfect, but it works.  Kinda sorta.

If you’re not in the industry, or are a “certain type” of manager in the industry, you might look at that kind of attitude with disdain – can’t people take pride in their work anymore?  But if you’ve ever spent time generating code, even if its a simple BASH script or BATCH file, I can almost guarantee that you’ve said something similar to yourself, even if you haven’t actually embedded the comment into the code.

Essentially, it comes down to 2 key issues.

First: This stuff is complicated.  No, really, software is way more complicated than you realize.  This “simple” little blog is a prime example of how complicated software has become.  This site uses WordPress as its prime engine, with some add-ons and minor modifications I’ve done myself.  All told, the code accounts for over 2,000 separate files that interact with each other, some larger than others.  At a guess, I would put the word count in the code to somewhere similar to twice that of The Lord of the Rings.  It represents the accumulated efforts of several hundred people.  And for all that code to work, it has to interact in complex ways with a Web Sever and Database software.  And then for you to see it, the generated output has to be interpreted by your web browser – one of dozens of differnt browsers running on a number of different platforms, and each browser and platform combination will look at the output in slightly different ways.  The fact that it works at all is somewhat amazing.  Even there, I actually used certain “edit hacks” when I’m composing a new post, just to make sure things line up reasonably well in all those different browsers.

And in modern code terms, this is genuinely a fairly simple application.

Second: This is a deadline driven, “publish or perish” industry.  With an infinite amount of time, and an infinite amount of resources, it might just be possible to write the “perfect” software.  But that just isn’t the world we live in.  This is an intensely competitive industry, and the advantage goes to the first person/company to release a product for a given sector.  Sure, things can get disrupted by an outstanding newcomer who comes up with an innovative way of doing the same old thing, but that’s the exception to the rule.  Look at Microsoft Office.  I will concede that MS Office is a pretty amazing package, it does a lot of different things very well, and in a way that’s intuitive for most people.  At the same time, it’s bloated, full of bugs, and far more expensive than it needs to be.  It maintains market share not because there aren’t excellent alternatives, but because it already HAS market share.  MS Office is the de facto standard in offices around the world.  Whatever the problems and costs associated with the software, businesses use it because they know that they are less likely to have to train their staff how to use it, and that the documents they generate with it are virtually guaranteed to be readable by the widest possible audience.

That doesn’t mean that Microsoft hasn’t kept innovating the product, evolving it and squashing bugs – they have to or someone else will come up with something with significant enough improvements that it will warrant businesses to change what they use.  It isn’t like others aren’t trying to take the market away from them.

This puts enormous pressure on software companies to publish quickly.  The modern motto is “Release Early, Release Often” – a philosophy that came out of the open source movement, and has since permeated the industry.  The roots of this type of engineering go back even further, at least to the 50′s, but it really grabbed hold of the software industry in the late 90s onward.

The end result is that developers, and to an extent IT administrators in general, are under some intense deadline pressure.   And the economics of it mean that you can only have so many people working on a given problem.  Limited resources, limited time.  Make Rocket Go NOW!

So mistakes happen.  There isn’t enough time to test all the possible scenarios.  Everyone will do what they can, test what they can.  Eventually, though, there just won’t be enough time to make it perfect.  So coders will continue to swear, and sooner or later, everyone ends up saying “Fuck it, let’s release.”

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Another XaoS rendered fractal.  Reminds me of a Mardi Gras face mask.

A colleague from the U.S. was up for some meetings this week, and brought me a mighty fine pound of coffee from a boutique roaster in San Francisco.  It’s kinda an inside joke about the fact that I work really weird hours, and I’m pretty much never seen without a mug of coffee in hand.  Also, I have been known to go off about the lousy state of coffee culture in North America from time to time.

You see, your average coffee snob is actually an FP who thinks that the muddy, burnt, pig-slop they serve at Starbucks is actually good coffee.  Let me explain to you why that just isn’t the case.

First off, and perhaps most importantly, Starbucks burns their beans.  What most peasant paletted goons don’t realize is that there’s a VAST difference between “dark roast” and “charcoal.”  Starbucks, as a corporation, is well aware of this, and burns their beans for two very good business reasons:

1. The masses are asses, and associate the heavy, strong taste of an over roasted bean with “strong” coffee – they think it has more of a kick, that it will contain more caffeine, and give them a bigger energy boost (they’re wrong, and we’ll talk about that in a minute).
2. It’s cheaper to burn the bean than it is to roast it properly, which is big $$ when you’re doing things on the industrial scale that Starbucks is.  You see, Starbucks roasts its beans at a high heat, but for a shorter period of time, than a properly roasted bean.  This allows a much larger throughput, and results in a big savings.  It also results in a crappy bean.

So, let’s get one thing straight right off the bat.  Dark coffee may taste stronger, but it’s actually much less potent.  And the reasons come down to some fairly basic chemistry.  Caffeine is a relatively volatile molecule, and if you subject it to too high a heat, it reacts, disassociates, and produces some crappy side chemicals.  A classically trained Barista will be able to tell you that as a rule, the darker, stronger tasting the coffee, the less potent it actually is.   Quite simply, by darkening the roast (whether you do it properly by low temperature roasting for a long period of time, or the wrong way like Starbucks and charring it in a blast furnace), you burn off the caffeine and reduce the overall potency.

That’s not to say all dark roasts are bad.  A good dark roast, done properly, can be quite tasty.  It just isn’t going to have the same kick.

The second side effect of an improper roast is a bit more complex, but has a nastier side effect than just the taste.  It actually makes the coffee a lot harder on your digestive tract.  Chemistry is a complex thing, as any good cook will tell you.  Slight variations in heat can produce markedly different effects – sticking a soufflé in the oven at double the heat won’t just reduce the cooking time, it will destroy the soufflé.

With coffee beans, the roasting process triggers off several important chemical reactions.  Among the most important, is that it reduces the acidity of the bean.  Green coffee beans are quite acidic, and would give you one heckuva stomachache if you tried to eat them raw.  To break down the acidity, you need to roast them for a fairly long period of time.  Ever get the infamous “gut rot” from drinking too much coffee?  Well, odds are, you got it as a result of poorly roasted beans.  Roasting them at a high temperature for too short a period of time does NOT break down the acidity.  You need to roast them for a fairly extended period in order to do this.  Also, when you roast at too high a temperature, it “burns” the coffee which releases a whole raft of other nasty chemicals.

Over roasting has one positive effect for the big chains.  It produces a much more consistent flavour.  It’s going to taste like the same burnt crap no matter what the original bean.  Lighter roasts maintain the original signature of the beans you roast.  Burnt beans taste like burnt beans.  (source)  For an outfit like Starbucks, that’s great.  They can buy the cheapest crap available, burn the hell out of it, and it all comes out tasting the same.  And let me assure you, this is exactly what they do (in spite of all the touchy feely marketing pamphlets they have in the store).  They almost have no choice – given the vast quantities they purchase, they can’t expect a lot of fine grained quality control.

In the end, I’m not asking for people to give up on coffee snobbery.  All I’m asking is that you practice intelligent coffee snobbery.  Yah, that’s probably asking too much.

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I know a few people who are so scared of pretty much everything, that it takes an intense act of fortitude to even leave the house. They worry about muggings, terrorism, the weather, disease (which often, weirdly and irrationally, goes hand in hand with fear of vaccinations), children getting hung up in drop rail cribs, “sudden acceleration syndrome” in their cars, meteor strikes… You name it, and they’re afraid of it.

And it’s just so pointless, not to mention out of step with what’s actually going on in the world, that I’m not sure whether to pity them, laugh at their ignorance, or rage against those who have a vested interest in perpetuating it.

I can’t possibly list all the things people fear, and some of them pretty much warrant their own posts (fear of G.M. foods, fear of Nuke Power, I’m eyeballing you, you groundless, media stoked, irrational paranoias), but I think maybe I can tackle a couple of them.  Hey, maybe one person out there will actually pay attention and fall under a sudden grip of rationalism.  Don’t laugh! It could happen!

We’ll start with one of my favourites, the fear of terrorism.

And right there, my mind almost froze contemplating the irrationality of it.  Do you have any idea how vanishingly small the odds are of being caught in act of terrorism? Or that terrorism peaked globally in the late 80s – early 90s, and in spite of rising, ever so slightly since 9-11 (source), are roughly half now what they were at 88-91 peak? Here’s some fun numbers:

• Lifetime risk of being killed in a car accident, 1 in 83.
• Lifetime odds of being killed crossing the street (for crying out loud), 1 in 625
• Lifetime odds of drowning, 1 in 1100
• If the global Jihad suddenly got it’s act together and was able to pull off a 9-11 scale attack at least once a year (on top of the normal background noise of terrorism that mostly happens in the Middle East), 1 in 1300
• (source)

That’s right, even given a worst case scenario of terrorism, you’re more than twice as likely to be killed crossing the street as you are to be killed by a terrorist, and fifteen times as likely to die in a car accident.  Don’t believe me?  How many people have you known who have been killed in a car wreck?  How many people have you known who’ve been killed by a terrorist?  For most people outside of New York, the answer to the first question will probably be at least one or two.  To the other question, none.

So here’s a thought: Ditch the full body scanners at the airport, and instead stop yakking on your cel phone while you’re walking/driving around downtown.

Next up: Fear of crime.  I don’t have any good statistics for my country, so let’s take our most beloved wretched hive of scum and villainy (the United States) as a good baseline. In the past twenty years, violent crime in the US has dropped by half, property crime is down by 40%,  but our perception of crime is at an all time high (source).  How the heck could that be?

A big part of it is the 24 hour news cycle.  There’s an old adage in journalism: “If it bleeds, it leads.”  Violence, and violent crimes, are good for ratings.  So the news networks go out of their way to seek out crime stories, splash them on the screen, and milk the crap out of it until the ratings start to slide, then go find something else.  And this plays against our very basic instincts to be afraid of that movement in the shadows.

Also, “getting tough on crime” and a good “war on terrorism”, are really good platforms for getting politicians elected.  Much more effective than the “Elect me, because things are pretty good right now, so I don’t plan on doing anything” election campaign.

And I could go into all the other fears you might have, but really, it would just be an exercise in throwing statistics at the wall.  Really, the only statistic that matters is that, on average, you will live longer now than at any point in recorded history.

So you might as well get out there and enjoy it, because you’re going to be around a lot longer than you might think.

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Kinda neat one…  Not often you end up rendering a fractal that ends up being all straight lines.  At least, not with the software/methods I use.

So, it’s Saturday night, and here I sit locked down in front of the keyboard…  Again.  Like so many Saturday nightsw before me, and so many after.  I’m really just taking a brief sanity break, and then will be back at it until the wee hours.

I was hard at it until about 9am this morning…  Slept a bit, spent some time with the family, then it was time to work again.  This is an unusually busy weekend for me – a whole raft of problems conspired to make me very busy with problems that, because of the SLA (Service Level Agreement)
we have with our customers, need to get solved so I can hand off 150 imaged, live on the web, servers by noon on Sunday.

I could complain…  Actually, I do complain about it.  But really it’s an industry wide problem.  Once you pass a certain level, there’s a long stretch in your career where your hours are pretty much 24/7.  That doesn’t mean I work all day everyday.  It just means I’m on the hook should something go wrong.  The issue is that there’s a whole lot of systems that I can troubleshoot quicker and easier than most other people in my company.

That doesn’t mean I’m smarter, or even more knowledgeable than they are.  It just means there’s a big piece of our infrastructure that I’m more familiar with.  Other parts, there are other guys who are more familiar with it, and they’re on the hook for the same kind of hours as I am.

Ideally there should be “knowledge redundancy” across the board.  And to a certain extent there is.  If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, our company will survive just fine.  Someone else will shift priorities, start working on the same chunk of our infrastructure, and working from a good general base of familiarity with IT in general and how our company manages systems in specific, over time will gain the same level of intimate knowledge of the bit of infrastructure that’s currently “my problem”.

The problem is really twofold.

1.  Budgetary/traditional staffing standards.  Companies have gotten use to having a key “Unix guy” or “Windows server guy” or “Storage appliance guy” or whatever…  A key individual who gets to know a specific set of systems.  Having a lead tech for a given area makes sense, because we don’t come cheap.  Usually, this person will have 1 or more people working under them (right now I’m blessed to have two PFY‘s), but there is usually a steep knowledge gap between the two.  With the day to day pressures of business, the PFY’s usually end up doing the grunt/chore work that’s not time sensitive, and the BOFH will end up perpetually on call to deal with the bigger, more time sensitive problems.

Here’s the funny thing, there’s actually a deeper hierarchy to this.  While I may be the BOFH to two PFY’s, I’m also the PFY to a completely different BOFH.  Which is fairly standard in really large IT infrastructures.  At some point, you might pull out of that loop and move into management or architecture design, but a lot of people spend their entire IT careers in the PFY/BOFH hierarchy loop.  Probably most people.  And if that’s the case, then you’re almost never not on call, and the hours suck.

2. Personality.  It takes a certain type of obsessive compulsive person to become any good in virtually any part of IT, and when I’m being honest with myself, I take a bit of perverse pride in the ridiculous hours I’ll put in to solve niggling little problems that most people could care less about.  And that just adds to the hours.

Which brings us to the title of the post.  Sure, I make reasonably good money.  Heck, I’d cleared my mortgage when I was 35.  But there’s a price to be paid for that.  And that price is time.  I let myself dig too deeply into things, put in foolishly long hours, and it takes a toll.  Emotionally, physically, and on my family life.

And I find myself thinking about this more and more as my daughter grows.  Do we really want to raise her to be a nerdling techie?  I dunno.  I suspect she might be happier doing something else.

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Nothing screams “80′s !!!” quite like Pastel Pink.  To be honest, I was wondering if I’d ever come up with a way to sneak this fractal into a post, but inspiration struck a few minutes ago, and it’s the perfect fit for this post.

It would be a bit of an understatement to say that I have a passion for movies.  Outside of my wife and daughter, my three major passions in life are:

1. Novels
2. Movies
3. Computers

I’ve read well over a thousand novels in my life, and have probably watched twice as many movies.  You might think that’s impossible, but there was a long span where I’d read 3 or 4 novels a week.  And because I work from home, I often have a movie running on one of my screens as I work, and it’s not uncommon for me to watch a couple or three movies in a day.  It adds up over the years.

Now, you’d pretty much have to have been living under a rock, or on the far side of the Moon for the past few years not to have heard at least the odd tidbit of news about the MPAA and it’s various other affiliate organizations in countries outside the US, being on a crusade against copyright infringement and piracy.  The biggest problem, in their eyes, is the rampant use of digital piracy through P2P networks and BitTorrent.

But, here’s the deal – the MPAA and the major studios are completely failing to learn the lesson that the record labels failed to learn ten years ago with the rise of Napster and the early P2P networks.

Specifically:  People want their media digitally, they want it without DRM, and they want it on demand.

The studios are arguing that there is no effective business model that will provide for this in a way that keeps their “High Quality” products in production.

Oh?  Really?  Once the record industry fully embraced digital distribution, digital sales have grown to a point where they nearly offset the loss in physical media sales.  And here’s the thing:  Digital media distribution is several orders of magnitude cheaper in delivery costs, so in the end, the studios aren’t out as much as they complain about, if at all.  And hey, it’s a lot nicer on the environment.

So how does this all relate to 80s pastel?

What set me off tonight, was my ongoing quest to get a DVD of a really bad movie from the 80s.  It’s a turkey of a film, that for most people would be barely watchable.  But for reasons we won’t go into, it’s near and dear to my heart.  The thing is, not only is it not available for digital download through iTunes or some other digital distributor, it has never been released on DVD.

“So what?” you might say.  Some obscure film doesn’t get released on DVD, big deal!  Well, the thing of it is, this movie has a bit of a cult following.  So much so, that there are enough other people out there looking for a decent copy, that a lone fan has gone to the trouble of hand crafting his own DVD release based on a LaserDisc copy.  He even went to the trouble of creating a cover for it that rivals the cover art of most B Movie DVD covers I’ve seen, and then releasing the work onto UseNet.  From there, it has been granted eternal life on various P2P BitTorrent trackers.  And he wasn’t even the first to go to the trouble.

Currently, the rights to the movie distribution are owned by Columbia Tristar, which in turn is owned by Sony Pictures.  Given that such a bad film has a weird, devoted following, don’t you think it might be worth their while to devote a day or two (tops) of one of their Tech’s time to digitizing the movie properly and releasing it for sale on iTunes or somewhere else?

If you answered “Yes” to that last question then you have more clue than the average studio exec.  The truth is, there are thousands upon thousands of movies sitting in vaults, that have never been released on DVD, let alone purely digitally.  For a lot of these movies, I can see why it wouldn’t be economically viable to make a DVD and engage in all the costs of distributing the physical media.

But to digitize it, and make it available for download for a buck or two, the distribution costs are virtually non-existent.  You don’t have to have a big marketing campaign or anything.  Trust me, movie geeks will spread the word for you.  Just put it in some online store and add it to the catalogue, post a note on your corporate blog, and then cash the monthly residual cheques.

As a businessman, if you can’t figure out how to monetize that, then you’re as stale and dated as Crockett and Tubbs.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve made my choices and I’m sticking with it.  Day to day, I work in Linux and that isn’t going to change.  But there’s a good reason why Linux is a “Fringe” OS on the desktop, and why it will remain that way for the foreseeable future.

Mostly, it comes down to making simple things hard, and for no good reason.  Quite often, in the Linux community, simple things are made hard for purely political reasons.  Little pissing matches in the open source community with the end result that things that the average “Joe User” just needs to work, will work, but only once you make the poor schmuck jump through too many hoops.

The current example that’s annoying the heck out of me is the ongoing pissing match between the FOSS community in general and Oracle/Sun over Java.

Here’s the deal:  Java used to work brilliantly and seamlessly on the average Linux distro.  it wasn’t something you had to think about installing.  By and large, JRE was just THERE, and it worked, and you didn’t have to think about it.

But along comes Larry Ellison and Oracle, buying up Sun and the rights to the Java platform along with it.  Without getting too much into the details, Ellison is a world class wank and has gone out of his way to piss off the open source community.

The end result is that JRE no longer ships pre-installed on pretty much any Desktop Linux.  It’s not a technical decision.  It’s a political/business decision on the part of the distro makers.  And it’s a really dumb one.

Look, guys, Ellison may be an asshat, and what he’s doing to the open source projects that came part and parcel with the Sun purchase is greedy, self serving in a very shortsighted way, and in some ways nonsensical. But the fact of the matter is a huge chunk of the Web relies on the JRE plugin framework.  That didn’t change with the change of ownership of Sun.  JRE is out there, it’s widely adopted, and people just expect it to work.

The hoops to jump through to get it working on, say, an Ubuntu install aren’t that extreme – if you’re a nerd and mucking about on the command line is something you’re used to.  But if any “Joe User” is out there, I ask you:  Is opening up a terminal window and typing the following something you’re likely to know how to do – is it even something you’re likely to know how to google for?

sudo add-apt-repository “deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner”

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts

My guess is no, it’s not something you would know how to do.  And you shouldn’t have to know.  Java is a part of the web.  Moreover, it’s a part of a lot of corporate infrastructures – thousands of companies have custom Java applets that their users work with on a daily basis, usually without even realizing it.

Taking something simple and making it hard is not how you gain converts.  It’s how you piss people off.  And not just “Joe Users” – you piss off IT people who have to face the wrath of the “Joe Users” who complain about simple things being broken.

So, Mr. Shuttleworth, get over yourself.  Linux distro makers in general: get over yourselves.  This isn’t a holy war.  This isn’t about idealism, values, open standards, or all the other crap that seems to get wrapped up part and parcel in the FOSS community.

It’s about making simple things simple, so that the poor guy at the far end of the keyboard, who mostly just wants things to work so he can get on with his day, can do just that.  They don’t want to know how it works.  They don’t want to know about the politics behind the community.  They have just one, count ‘em one, vested interest in their computer:

They want to turn it on and have things work.

If I buy something, I own it.  It is mine.  That is the nature of property law.  If I want to pry it apart with pliers, that’s my right.  If I want to hook it up to a Tesla coil to see it glow, that is my right.  If I want to take a piece of media that I bought and have the receipt for, and crack some silly encryption scheme that prevents me from enjoying it on the device of my choice, that is my right.

That is not piracy.  That is making personal use of something I bought and paid for in a way that suits me.

By legalizing “Format Shifting” but making the practice of cracking a digital lock punishable by a fine of up to $5,000, you effectively countermand the legality format shifting.  What most consumers don’t realize is that virtually all modern media contains some form of encryption or digital lock to prevent copying.  This goes back to the 80′s Macrovision standard on commercial VHS and BetaMax tapes (which is way before most people realize digital locks started).

If I buy a hard copy CD/DVD of software, and want to back up an image of the CD/DVD in case the medium is damaged and I need to re-install it, there will be DRM I have to circumvent in order to perform that backup.

Also, the definition of “encryption” and “digital lock” is woefully gray.  In simple terms, encryption is merely an algorithm that must be decoded in order to view the contents of a “message” – be that message a coded letter or the movie on a Blue Ray disc.  Mathematically, and thereby legally, compression formats are no different than what most people think when they think of “encryption”.  To decompress and view the media, you must use an algorithm in order to “decode” the media.

All modern digital audio/video uses some form of compression.  To “format shift” such media from one device to another, it is often (actually, almost always) necessary to change the compression format.  Technically, this is breaking an encryption scheme.

So, if you want to “back up” a commercial CD (which typically uses the AAC compression format) to your digital media player (which typically prefers MP3 format), you would need to “crack” the AAC compression in order to “recode” the media to MP3.

Even better, if you want to download video that you yourself have taken using an HD cam-corder, and edit it with anything other than the editing software provided by the cam-corder manufacturer, you will inevitably need to recode the media to a different format, thereby “breaking” the encryption of a commercial device.

This legislation also goes against the intent of previous legislation to encourage consumer choice in the telecom market.  The CRTC, backed by legislation, has made telephone numbers portable for both land lines and cel phones, so that you can change carriers without losing your phone number.  However, with this legislation, what you will lose is the right to keep your equipment. Virtually all cel phones on the market today come with a “Carrier Lock” – a tiny piece of digital code which will only allow that cel phone to work with a single carrier.  The wording of the legislation is such that if you were to circumvent this lock, so you can use a device you paid for on the carrier of your choice, you would be in direct violation of the law, and subject to a fine of up to $5,000.

You are putting all the rights in the hands of the distributors, and taking them all away from the consumer.  You put some pleasant window dressing on your bill, but there are people out here, amongst the unwashed masses you so obviously care little about, that can see through the window dressing to the traps you have placed behind it.

And we will talk.  We will take the time to patiently explain the issues to our friends and families.  We will post messages on the Internet.

We will spread the word and work hard to see this bill crushed.  And some of us will work hard to see your government collapse – the sooner the better, although some of us are patient enough to wait for the next election.  Because some of us have long memories.

Right now, I have both an iPhone (personal) and a BlackBerry (business – paid for by my company).  I have them set up to manage email and my appointment calendar.  I even have RDP and VNC installed on my iPhone, so I can remote manage several computers from anywhere I can get a cel signal.

I have big data packages for both, and they get used.

And I  hate both of them with a rare passion.

They’re like electronic leashes.  Everywhere I go, I emit a steady dribble of beeps, bloops, and musical ringtones – (my iPhone in particular, I have a number of custom, “unique to me because I made them” ringtones, so I can determine what kind of call is coming in, or who is calling without having to even look at the caller ID).  Again, the level of customization and personalization I’ve commited to the devices might fool you into thinking I’m enamoured with the devices.

But let me stress again how far that is from the truth.

I customize them because I have no choice but to deal with them.  I go to lengths to make them less annoying.  Mostly, it fails.  I mean, it works to the extent that a snippet of late 70′s, early 80′s garage punk is a way better way of being notified of an incoming call than some chirping blip-bleep.  But it doesn’t make dread the call itself much less.

Half of my calendar year (excluding holidays) is spent “on call” – I can be no more than 15 minutes away from an internet connection (and thank god for mobile 3g sticks…  Does that count as a phone too?).  when the phone rings, there’s a good chance that something has gone wrong.  It’s going to be complicated.  It’s going to eat my time.  And it’s come at an inconvenient hour. Say, dinner time, or when a sane person should be comfortably in bed.

I also have to monitor pages and emails that are automatically generated by a mass of servers when they auto-detect something out of norm.  Given that we’re talking about hundreds of servers, it’s pretty much a given that the automated stream of error spam is pretty constant.  And even these are segregated by priority.  Some are more informational “Hey, Mr. On-Call man, I got a little busy at 8pm.  Try and figure out why when you get a chance.”  These come as emails.  A low tone bloop on my phone that I can (and usually do) sleep through.  Some are more urgent, of the “Hey, Server X isn’t responding to pings, and it’s IMPORTANT!!!” These come in as pages, and the noise is…  Well, let’s just say I’m not likely to sleep through it.

And it goes beyond that.  Because email is so important to the modern workflow, the fact that I can respond to it from anywhere, to a certain degree means the expectation is to actually do that.  I’m one of those guys you see who parks his car, steps out, and whips out his smart phone to read and respond to emails while he finishes walking the last couple of blocks into the office.  Distractedly missing his floor on the elevator (or absentmindedly walking off on the wrong floor), face buried in a BlackBerry.

From my side of that picture, it kinda sucks.  “Always on” is, well, draining.

When I have time off, I tend to turn my phones off.  Completely.  For days at a time if I can.  And then my mom ends up getting annoyed that I don’t return her calls (sorry mom, it’s not you – it’s the phone).

I dunno, I guess I just needed to get that off my chest.

And, well, the dang phone’s incessant reminders and nagging me with problems is the reason I missed the last two days’ worth of posts.

As a teenager, it became a time for late night horror film sleepovers.  Later, it was costume parties, and then as a young adult, all night costumed dance-a-thons at the “in” club of the moment.

But when it gets right down to it, for me Halloween is, and always will be, about those younger kids and that gleeful, chaotic, sugar buzzed night.

This year, the weather was pleasant, and the trick or treaters were out in force.  I stayed home and handed out candy to what was a record for us in this house (where we’ve lived for the past 7 Halloweens).

My wife bundled up our 10 month old and took her up and down the street, because you only get one first Halloween.  And even though our toddler likely won’t remember it, that’s no reason for her to miss it.

And she brought back some news that really surprised me.  Nearly 3/4′s of the houses in our neighbourhood were dark.  The residents either out, or pretending they were out. No decorations.  No carved jack-o-lanterns.  No spirit of the day.

For some reason, that just made me sad.  Obviously, the families with children were still participating.  Like I said, the kids were out in force.  But what about everyone else?

It’s about community spirit.  It’s about doing something for the next generation, so they’ll have fond memories when they grow up.

Come on people, quit being such spoil sports and grinches.  Set aside the origin of the holiday.  It’s not about witchcraft and superstition anymore.  It’s about sharing a fun night with friends and children.  It’s about showing those children that people are basically good and generous, even if you don’t know them.