stratosfyr

Semantics

2007-12-11T01:14:00.000-05:00

Is anyone else tired of being called a consumer?

I'm really very sick of it. Corporations don't have any respect for people, and I can't do much about that, but I'm all for changing the language.

Call me a customer. Call me a patron. But unless I'm buying food, don't call me a consumer!

***

While I'm on the subject, planned obsolescence just drives me crazy. I also learned myself a new term today: perceived obsolescence. I'm looking at my 4-year-old cell phone and thinking, Geez, I wish it had a camera. I'm looking at my 3-year-old MP3 player and thinking, I wish it played videos and wasn't so scratched up.

Why? They both work fine. I have a digital camera. I have a laptop I can watch videos on. What is the problem?

The new things are just so darned shiny.

Or am I just bitter because I'm broke? Who can say..?

Sick world

2007-04-18T22:40:00.001-04:00

"We live in a sick world.

We all know that.

Please cancel the next shocking reminder."

- Kelly Egan, Ottawa Citizen, April 18, 2007

Caught my eye in today's paper. My condolences to the people at Virginia Tech.

More programming

2006-11-20T00:23:00.000-05:00

I gave up on C++ cos it's harder than I remember.

Staring at sample code for Visual Basic was giving me a headache, so I read the tutorials and made myself a web browser; that is apparently the Hello World! of the 21st century. We've come a loooong way since SCREEN 9 and PSET.

I've also concluded that I don't care enough to make a Heroes screensaver, but I might resurrect an idea I had a couple of months ago for a lightweight TabletPC animation sketch program..? Something along the lines of a pad of Post-It notes and a ballpoint pen.

Well, I'll probably lose interest first, but I was surprised when I couldn't find any decent free programs for that purpose. Everything I could find was way too feature-heavy, slow, and complicated. Forget features--I want tiny, free programs that do one thing.

But that's just me.

Programming? Eh...

2006-11-18T21:28:00.000-05:00

For some reason I thought it might be fun to download the Free versions of MS Visual Studio C++ and VBasic and also the DirectX SDK. Why? I don't know. I always get it into my head that programming is fun because I remember writing little programs in QBASIC a million years ago for drawing bouncing balls and stuff.

It's not actually all that fun. Especially when you've totally forgotten how to do it. I haven't written an actual program that, y'know, worked since high school.

Anyway, for some reason I decided I really wanted to make a screen saver that looked like the scrolling DNA on Heroes.

AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-GATT-ACAG-ATTA-CAGA-TTAC-AGAT-TACA-

Something like that. I have no idea why I want one so badly. (The worst thing is that it's easy as heck to do--at least badly--in HTML but I have no idea how to do it in C++.)

Anyway, the installations went pretty smoothly, and the software seems to have improved a bit since I last used it. The DirectX SDK took, I don't know, a month and a half to insall though. You have to download a 400MB+ installation file, which decompresses, then it has to unzip to a temp directory (over 1GB), then it installs. The last step alone took about half an hour.

Well, I don't know if I'll ever manage to make the .scr, but I'll give it a shot.

These are a couple of my favourite free screensavers:
The Amazing Spider-Man 3D - sadly my laptop doesn't seem to have the power for this one, but my much older desktop does.
Matrix Code Emulator - closest of all the Matrix screensavers I've seen to the look of the falling code in the original film. Which of course is the only real Matrix movie.

LATE

2006-11-17T01:33:00.000-05:00

School & studying is killing me dead.

Please enjoy this token of my stress.

Election time!

2006-11-13T21:25:00.000-05:00

Municipal elections were today.

I know it's not as big a deal as the midterm elections in the States, but anyway. Larry O'Brien is now the mayor of the City of Ottawa... and I'm not really sure how. Alex Munter was apparently leading in polls by a decent margin until last week. Something must have happened while I wasn't looking.

You win some, you lose some. Mr. O'Brien apparently promised to freeze taxes, but didn't say how. He's against burying power lines in one of the city's major pedestrian shopping areas, even though the streets aren't due to be torn up again for another 50 years and it's never going to be cheaper or easier. He's against a pesticide ban, because he apparently doesn't believe there's evidence of health-damaging effects of pesticides. Uh, what?

Oh yeah, and I think he's going to scrap the Light Rail plan, or change it. No opinion on that.

Clive Doucet has been re-elected as councillor, though.

OK, I cast my ballot and--satisfied that I have done my democratic duty, for all the good it did--I'm going back to writing papers now.

Link of the day:
Family planning doctor 'told patient she needed exorcism'

2006-11-10T01:06:00.000-05:00

Spent another hour or so on this drawing. Still not done, but what the heck.

Couple of term papers due in a few days. Nothing important happened today.

(Knock on wood.)

Buildings and a ninja

2006-11-05T23:58:00.000-05:00

Working on a couple of things right now, artwise. One is the comic that I've been working on the past few years, on and off, and never seem to get anywhere with. And my (least) favourite part, the establishing shot. I hate drawing perspective. Hate it. It takes me forever, I always screw it up somehow, and I hate it. Well, I was hoping to finish one freaking panel tonight, but no luck. At least it doesn't seem too warped.

A friend asked me to draw her a cartoony ninja with a sword that she could put on a t-shirt for her sister's neighbour's cat's breeder's cousin's fiancé... or something like that. This is a rough sketch, just for the pose. The lines need some work, obviously.

And by "need some work" I mean "need to be completely redrawn." It's too bad it needs to have a sword. When I think "ninja," I think "gardening tools."

Now, on a completely unrelated note, follow the link and wish for one of your own.

Second Life

2006-11-04T22:48:00.000-05:00

I spent some time playing around with Second Life today. It's kind of interesting. You sign up, download the program, log on, make yourself an avatar...

And then wander around looking for something to do, basically. SL is a huge, three-dimensional interactive world and there's no one in it. If you do happen to run into someone, chances are they're a newbie who's trying to figure out how to walk and make their avatar look pretty, or an experienced user who knows what's what and doesn't want to talk to newbies.

Also, you need money. I met a nice user who gave me L$5 to buy some cool hair. Other than that I haven't got a cent to my virtual name. You can get some Linden Dollars by buying a membership but if you want to play free, you're pretty much stuck broke. I was thinking of making poppies and selling them, but I decided to explore instead.

And take a nap.

That's where I left my avatar last night. When I logged back on in the morning, the couch was gone. I guess there is someone around.

There seem to be two objects to SL. One is to interact with people. If you can find them. SL apparently has over a million members, but it seems to have an astonishingly low population density. I spent several hours walking through buildings and "malls" with no one in them. I found a casino with people in it, but no one seemed to want to talk to anyone else. I'm guessing a lot of those members are people who signed up and gave it a shot once, and never logged in again.

The second is to make SL content and sell it for L$. With your money, you can buy stuff. This can be clothing, hair, furniture, scripts, poses, gestures, and so on. I can't figure out how to make anything but clumps of primitives, but some people have made rather elaborate stuff like designer furniture--and telescopes.

That's where I left my avie the third time I logged off. And then my desktop was this, so I got to see space! Yay! Not that that had anything to do with SL. Oh well, it's pretend. (Apparently the little dot on the left between the main rings and first minor ring is Earth. We are so tiny.)

So, basically, I don't have any use for SL. It's kind of fun to play around with, but only really about as fun as, say, The Sims once you're already bored with it, and a really inactive chat room where you don't know anyone. The best part is seeing what other people have created in there--virtually all the content was made by user craftspersons. It's an interesting experiment in a virtual economy, but ultimately it seems a little pointless.

Yeah, I'll probably still be poking around for a few more days...

IE7, news, and RSS

2006-11-01T23:35:00.000-05:00

Well, I've been using the Beta version of Internet Explorer 7 on my old computer for the past few months. The release version is finally out, and I have to say it's pretty sweet. There are still some glitches, unfortunately... the search box doesn't seem to remember what site I want to be the default search engine, and it filled up my memory to the point where I had to reboot earlier today. Probably the biggest problem, though, is that you can't move the toolbars around much. I think that might be a feature though--stopping you from hiding the address bar might help prevent phishing. Maybe. I don't know if I'd give people that much credit.

For the most part, though, the new features are well worth the upgrade. Zooming in and out, integrated RSS reader, etc. I'm falling in love with RSS. It's nice to get all my news in one place, and I never remember to check all the webpages I'm interested in. And of course, anyone who's used Firefox knows how great tabs are.

Yeah, so, a few glitches left, but overall a big improvement over version 6.

Now, I tried to post this using the Google toolbar and the "Send to Blogger" button but it's not working for me.
I've been saying this for the past 3 years.

But I didn't write a book about it, see, and that seems to be key. The gist: morality is an evolutionary byproduct of social behaviour, and certain moral judgements are inate.

I've been told that atheists (I'm not an atheist, by the way, but I'm also not religious) were incapable of acting morally because they didn't believe in heaven and hell. (And I'm not talking about "not-praising-God-is-faithless," I'm talking "well-then-obviously-they-murder-small-children-and-eat-kittens.") To which I say: you must live under a rock. Or think that the world sucks big time, which I don't personally subscribe to. I didn't say it when I was told it, which is too bad. L’esprit d’escalier, eh?

Actually no, it's not really witty enough for that.

The world is cool again

2006-10-27T23:48:00.000-04:00

...And I don't just mean because it's almost winter. Yeah, it's supposed to snow in the next couple of days. Lovely. Luckily, it's also supposed to be 9°C for Halloween, so that will be nice for the kids. We get about 200 at the door each year in our neighbourhood, so I picked up a generous supply of candy today. I adore Tootsie rolls and bought a big bag (who cares what the kids think of them--at least I didn't get any of those orange-and-black toffee things or peanuts), but had to pass on my beloved Rockets because they pretty much make me hypoglycemic to look at them.

Caught up on Heroes after some friends recommended it. I'm officially a fan--and this is the first show I've gotten into since Buffy (pleasedontjudgemetooharshly) and Farscape went off the air. I know Lost and House and such are awesome, but I just can't seem to care. Reality TV of course holds no interest at all, and never did. Even Mike Holmes is starting to lose appeal. Don't get me started on the procedurals.

Actually, do.

Since I hate television these days, I don't make a point to watch them. But my mom does, and since I can't pay rent for elsewhere I'll catch a bit every now and then. She noticed this way before I did, and possibly before anyone else, too.

I did some searches, and a lot of people seem to have noticed the disproportionate number of female victims on CSI (and whatever the other shows are, I totally forget). A few people have also pointed out that their murders are often... well... sexy, for lack of a better word.

Has anyone noticed how many of the killers themselves are women? I was pretty skeptical when this was first pointed out to me. I mean, yeah, there's probably going to be a skew for the sake of drama. In a murder mystery, you want the killer to be the person the audience least expects. Only 10% of murders in reality are committed by women. Women are (generally) less aggressive and less tough. So, intuitively, the woman is less likely to be the killer. It's a more dramatic reveal if you don't expect it, right?

And that's how it goes. There's a victim (usually a woman, but never mind that for now), and a man is immediately identified as a suspect. Then, after much investigation, the CSI crew determine that in fact it was a woman who did it all along--or forced, coerced, hired, or tricked the guy into doing it.

Now, I figured this happened maybe half the time. That's more than in reality, but, you know, you don't want to make it look like you're picking on the guys, even though, "[in] the Western world, nearly 90% of all murders are committed by males, with males also being the victims of 74.6% of murders."

So we'll bend the stats a bit for the sake of drama. Sure. If I can get over one of the characters in Heroes citing the ten percent myth as fact, then lauding cockroaches for surviving without food for months (humans can do so for between a month and two, and some of the hardier cockroaches last about 3. Bears last about six, on purpose), surviving without heads like it's something special (basically their brains, or nerve bundles or whatever, are farther back, so they don't need heads for much beyond eating and seeing--so losing a head for a cockroach is more like losing a face for a human. They die eventually of dehydration). And then apparently the whole basis of the show is some wild misinterpretation of evolution (you only have to be good enough to get your kids to adulthood--that's it!) when they should just say "aliens did it" (to be fair, they probably will someday). If I can get over THAT then I can get over skewed statistics.

Except it happens all the time. I haven't seen one episode where it wasn't a woman killer, or at least conspirator. The other day, there were 3 of these shows--two female killers, one male, and it turned out that he did it because his mom talked him into it. Awesome. (Mom calls it WAK -- Women As Killers. I call these diabolical murderesses the LLFs--the Least Likely Females. Looking for the LLF is the best way to guess who the killer is in the first 10 minutes.)

I can't prove anything based on what's essentially anecdotal evidence from a second-hand source who's actually started looking for this. I'll have to do some science or something, which is to say rent the DVDs and note who killed, who got killed, and why. Then statisticify it into comprehensibility. But the thing is, I don't really want to, because they're all such godawful formulaic shows. They suck. I mean, even if it weren't for this, they still suck.

Don't let my criticism of the sucky science on Heroes put you off. That, and the silly opening text ("volume one" of a TV show? I mean, wha?), were all in the first 10 minutes, and after that it was super cool.

So I was driving around and I saw a McDonald's, and the sign says, "LARGE SIZE IT." Wish I'd had my camera. They're trying so hard it's actually cute. Try the french fries with sweet & sour sauce. I don't even bother with the burgers unless I'm starving or in a foreign land (like, New Brunswick or something), but I love the fries.

So while I was typing all this, mom called me in to see one of the CSI-esque shows. I think the Miami one. Mother killed daughter, apparently. Surprised?

Chins & links

2006-10-24T02:35:00.000-04:00

Quick sketch before bed as I try to master chins and lips.

Next, gotta find some decent reference for shirt collars.

Score one for the nocebo effect.

It'd be nice if they could fix it.

Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, A Poem by Anna Lætitia Barbauld

Drugs are bad for you

2006-10-22T01:05:00.000-04:00

Nothing much to report. Just wrote a midterm on drug addiction. And I've been saying this to my friends for a few weeks now, but just don't use cocaine or amphetamines! Seriously, they'll screw you up. They kill the brain cells that let you be happy -- brain cells don't grow back by the way. They cause paranoia and psychosis. They kill your motivation. They cause symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

You get something like 20 minutes of wicked fun followed by hours of misery. And that's if it doesn't totally screw up your life. Or kill you.

If you want a thrill, go bungee jumping or something.

Apparently there are some drugs that don't screw you up so bad. But I'm just going to stick with stupid amounts of sugar, because I am a chicken.

Oh yeah, fun fact about drugs. I was reading my textbook, and I found out that, like cocaine and amphetamines, methylphenidate also works by raising dopamine levels. Methylphenidate is better known as Ritalin®. I took it for about a year when I was in high school.

In the United States, methylphenidate is classified as a Schedule II controlled substance, the designation used for substances that have a recognized medical value but which have a high potential for abuse because of their addictive potential. -Wikipedia

Damn it!!! I don't want that crap! I won't say I was addicted or that it screwed me up permanently, though I did have some symptoms when coming off the stuff, mostly dizziness and confusion that took a few days to clear. If I had the education then that I have now, I probably would never have taken it. But then, did I ever really need it? I don't know. As far as I can tell, I was just as unfocused before, during, and after.

All this studying has made me incredibly wary of any drug that affects the brain.

OK, so here are some drawings that I put on my old blog. Just completing the move. Hopefully something new soon but, you know, I was studying the ventral tegmentum and the nucleus accumbens and other big words. I want to go back to thinking about comics and stuff... -.-

Everything sucks because of comedy

2006-10-20T00:39:00.000-04:00

I'm getting kind of upset with the world.

Specifically about politics. U.S. politics, Canadian politics, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so on. All the death, all the money being spent and made. The environment, the ozone layer, global warming, the Clean Air Act, Kyoto. Peak oil. Militarization. North Korea's nuclear test. The rhetoric and, worse, recriminations between Right and Left. Hypocrisy. Lies. Hate, racism, religion. Patriarchy, patronization, repression of knowledge, repression of technology, over-regulation. Poverty, drug abuse, mistreatment of prisoners. Favouring political posturing over hard science, and vote-mongering and leaving the hard problems for later administrations over changing the world for the better right now.

This all started because someone said, "The Colbert Report is really funny, you should watch it," so I did, and then some Daily Show, then some Rick Mercer Report... and it was all really funny, but just serious enough to make me angry. And then I watched the Fifth Estate's "Sticks and Stones" episode again, which chronicled a bit of a tiff between the CBC and Fox News.

And now it feels like I'm watching a train wreck and I can't look away. I don't want to write about my feelings on these issues here. At least not right now. I'm Canadian, more-or-less left-of-center (depending on the issue), and you can probably guess what I mean by that. I feel horribly uninformed about politics, though I don't know exactly where I fall on the spectrum of politics knowledge. In the past I just didn't care, though these days it's hard to avoid.

A little while ago I asked my mom if the world was always so horrible and scary. This is a rediculous thing for an educated 25-year-old to ask her mommy, but anyhow. She said yes, but the journalism was a little less extreme.

It's weirdly reassuring that the world was always horrible.

I'm way too nice for this. Why can't we all just get along? Because they're wrong, darn it. Whoever they are.

And they think I'm wrong for thinking so.

Too nice for this.

Magicky sketch

2006-10-15T00:28:00.001-04:00

Sketch2006-10-15AC
Originally uploaded by stratosfyr.

I basically said to myself, you know what this picture needs? Kirby dots!

Anyway, it represents thoughts becoming words and the deconstruction and reconstruction of reality through will and magic. Tada!

It was going to be something completely different and way, way more mundane.

Homework 2006/10/14

2006-10-14T18:16:00.000-04:00

Homework for this week.

For Oct. 17
Read
Wordsworth, “Michael,” “Resolution and Independence,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality. . .”
Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp,” “Frost at Midnight”
Michael: A Pastoral Poem
"Response #2: Some critics have suggested that the poet-speaker of "Michael" endeavours to honour the covenant with Michael that Luke broke after going to the city. How does the poet-speaker do this? "

For Oct. 18:
Read
The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekov
Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello
A Primer of Drug Action chapters 15, 8.

For Oct. 20:
Read
Health Psychology chapters 6, 7.

For Oct. 21:
Read A Primer of Drug Action chapters 1,2,3 and 7.

...Looks like fun.

Mandatory first post where I complain

2006-10-14T17:13:00.000-04:00

Well alright. I wanted to put a blog here, and I don't know if it'll be worthwhile, but I wasn't all that happy with my livejournal blog. So I figured, hey, maybe blogger or blogspot or google or whatever has a better handle on it? Possible!

So that set me searching for a clever name for my brand new shiny slightly redundant blog. Good lord. Every name is taken! I tried... let's see... I tried my first name. Taken, but no big surprise there. I tried my initials. Taken by someone who didn't even make a single post. I tried my haughty Latin username. Someone claimed that back in August, made one post, and split. I tried my old username. Someone actually used that for a couple of months back in 2003. I tried an acronym which as far as I know is meaningless to everyone but me--because it's 5 letters long and I made it up. Taken! Someone named "jossseph" claimed it back in September.

So after a while I just started typing in random words and strings of letters. They're all taken. Every one. Now, OK. I know I'm a little late to the blog game. But seriously. I don't think I'd be so annoyed with this if any of these were actually used. They're not. People register them, decide they don't have anything to say, and take off. And five or six years later, the names are still taken.

The media lately has made a big deal about how many blogs are out there. What I really want to know is how many are just sitting there unused for years? If I had any influence over the situation, I'd say blogs with few or no posts should be deleted after a couple of years. Because if "iks," "drl," and "wef" are taken, there's something wrong with the system.

So anyway, I just used stratosfyr, the name I used on lj. I kinda hate it, but at least it's unique.

Rock. With that taken care of, mission statement time. Probably I'll be posting drawings here and maybe photographs of funny things around town, if I remember to carry my camera. Occasional rants. Maybe some comics. That should do.