senatorhung's pad
ramblings of an information troubleshooter
ramblings of an information troubleshooter
fuel lines make the world go 'round
Sunday, 31JUL2005:biked out to the causeway to see if i could spot any seals out in the bay, but it was low tide. i parked myself to read a few pages out at the end of the causeway, but the rising water crept up on me and i didn't notice until it had soaked the bottom of my tote.
i moved on up the ridge and found a small nook sheltered from the wind to continue my reading of linda mcquaig's 'it's the crude, dude'. after biking back to town, i rewarded my exertions with a slice of strawberry-rhubarb pie from fantasy palace. yummy.
in the evening, i hit the astro again to catch 'stealth'. compared to 'the island', this was a huge improvement. there was a moral dilemma that was clearly outlined in terms of the different capabilities of humans vs. artificial intelligence. the villain was merely an honourable warrior who just pushes things a bit too far too quickly. these serious elements were just as integral as the outstanding dogfighting scenes and with music by 'bt', the beats were just fine.
coming back downhill, i ran across the tail end of a bbq at nikki's and stopped in there for a bit. the conversations went from top movies of various categories (bruce lee, scary, early 80's, late 80's, ww2, etc.) to favourite simpsons episodes. however, when talk turned to daycare operations, i decided to excuse myself and call it an evening.
way to end another long weekend
Monday, 01AUG2005:slept in until the afternoon and then got up to rip some tracks from cd's to mp3 format. now, most people seem to just rip every track from a cd and filter out the crap later, but i'm a tad more protective of my ears.
i'll edit for stuff that i don't want (e.g. dead air, intros for subsequent trax), combine pieces of the same track that have been split over multiple trax, boost volumes for sections of a song and even re-balance the eq on a track that sounds muddy or, for vinyl, too clicky. needless to say, i have a substantial ripping backlog.
called over to the atii gym to make sure they were open regular hours given today's civic holiday. found out that they were, so i wandered over. however, my timing was still off, as since it wasn't 5:30 yet, they hadn't opened for the day. so, i hung out behind the building, watching some sled dogs stretch out their lines and digging little nooks for themselves to soak in the sun.
a friend invited me over to sample a tasty salmon supper and then we hiked out to visit the sled dogs again.
just as we returned home, the sun peeked out from the clouds.
wanted: problem solvers
Tuesday, 02AUG2005:in the morning, i dropped off a completed application to be a member at large on the city's solid waste management committee. we'll see if i meet their stringent qualifications, but seeing as they don't have either a director of engineering or of public works (the two directors that this committee is supposed to advise), i don't think there's any rush.
we had been having a 'joint' celebration of staff birthdays each month to minimize the amount of cake buying, but seeing as i was the only july kid, i would have been happy to slide in with the august crowd. however, since today was also morgan's last day, charlene baked a couple of cakes to mark both occasions. we all bugged morgan about how much he would miss working in our lively office.
- link of the day: jared diamond
of 'guns, germs and steel' fame is
interviewed
about his new book 'collapse'. he
pulls away some of the veil about
the mystery of what happened on
easter island, but i'm still planning
on visiting someday.
Around the year 1670, they chopped down the last tree on the island. Without forests to protect the soil, they ran into problems of soil erosion. Once they couldn't construct canoes to go fishing, the only large animal left on Easter Island as a source of meat was each other. Easter Island society collapsed in an epidemic of cannibalism. The worst insult that an Easter Islander could say in those days: the flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth. Easter Island society collapsed ultimately due to deforestation.
anyway, he lists 5 factors that he considered important in evaluating a societal collapse:- human environmental impacts
- climate change
- enemies
- friends
- type of response to problems
It's a very interesting question, why a society doesn't even notice or doesn't successfully respond to problems that look obvious. You would think, not a good idea to chop down all the trees and cause soil erosion. They needed timber and pastures, how could they be so dumb? But let's just suppose that 50 years from now there's still a complex society left on earth. What do you think they're going to say when they look back on the United States in 2005, with its well-known energy problems, continuing to waste energy? Not dealing with its population problems or its water problems, how obvious. Soil problems, how obvious. Climate change problems, how utterly obvious. The Norse were unwilling to learn from the Inuit who preceded and outlasted them. That's right, the Inuit are still alive today. It's like a controlled laboratory experiment. The red test tube and the blue test tube: the Inuit and the Greenland Norse. The Inuit hunt whales and seals. The Greenland Norse grow sheep and goats and cows, but refuse to hunt whales and seals. It seems obvious if you're short of food during the winter, it's a good idea to hunt whales and seals. How could the Norse be so stupid? Well, the Greenland Norse were medieval Christians. They despised the pagan Inuit. Modern Americans have also been known to despise other people. The Greenland Norse refused to learn from the Inuit and they all ended up dead as a result.
how can we work together ?
Wednesday, 03AUG2005:just some annotated links today ...
- david kilpatrick discusses the
growing
contribution
economy that he believes is not
adequately tracked by conventional
economics. He posits that:
... the value that can now be produced through collaboration is vastly greater than in the conventional top-down process.
- the online journal first monday
published an article about
professional
participatory journalism that outlines
how this idea of a collaboration economy
impacts on the domains of journalism and
advertising. the author believes that
these media professionals would be better
off shucking the idea of an 'audience' for
their work and buy in to the idea that
they are communicating with fellow
'citizens'. the danger is that
'egocasters' (such as my fellow bloggers)
will supplant traditional media outlets
based on increasing relevance to other
people who are as much creators of media
as consumers.
Instead of relying on journalism, advertising and other professional storytellers to make sense of our world, we seem to become quite comfortable in telling and distributing our own versions of those stories. ... It then seems the astounding rise of the mass media throughout the twentieth century owes much of its success to filling a temporary void between the demise of our trust in (as well as reliance on and allegiance to) social institutions - like the state, the church or mosque, the school, our families or our parents - and the emergence of a perhaps over-zealous faith in ourselves. As Shirky (2000) aruges, "[i]n retrospect, mass media's position in the twentieth century was an anomaly and not an inevitability."
- in '
why
unions are like typewriters', frank
joyce discusses why unions have lost
some of their influence since their
heydeys from the 1930's to the 1970's.
i don't necessarily agree with some of
his proposed solutions, but one of his
statements about why unions have become
somewhat discredited struck a chord for
me:
... the unions that are out there flunk a simple cost-benefit test. ... Unions remain wedded to an exclusively employer-based model in a time when there is hardly a single worker under 30 who expects to have the same employer five years from now, let alone when they retire. They cling to a 'zero-sum' world view that 'sells' the value of the union as directly proportional to the oppressiveness of the employer. Consequently, if employers aren't perceived as abusive, unions have defined themselves as having little to offer.
community icons
Friday, 05AUG2005:fiona had asked me if i would be willing to introduce our guest speaker at this month's nunavut press club meeting and i was glad to oblige. here's what i had to say:
Good evening. Bryan Pearson has been a community icon since his arrival in Frobisher Bay in 1956. HE took over the 'Fox Theatre' from the U.S. military and in 1957, he branched out to found the general store Arctic Ventures. In 1965, he was first elected as mayor and he served in that capacity several times on and off for a total of 18 years. In 1970, he was elected as the Territorial Councillor for the South Baffin region, representing constituents from the Belcher Islands to the North Pole. As a Councillor, he was a strong advocate for the use of aboriginal languages and was instrumental in the formation of the interpreter corps now working in the Legislative Assembly. He also helped to found the Territorial Housing Corporation and was re-elected as Councillor for the subsequent term. After selling Arctic Ventures in 1985, he had so much free time on his hands that he decided to run as a candidate in the 1988 federal election in the riding of Nunatsiaq. He returned to the theatre business in 1996, opening the Astro Theatre down the hall where I worked with him in March to present Iqaluit's third viewing of the Banff Mountain Film Festival. Besides first-run movies, his venue has also hosted classical music groups. He has travelled widely and is also famous for penning Letters to the Editor. I hope you would all join me in welcoming our guest speaker this evening, the irascibly outspoken, Mr. Bryan Pearson.his talk was very well-received and he was peppered with questions until he had to run off to welcome the audiences for the late shows at the astro.
sara invited us over to her place for drinks afterwards, as a prelude to the legion. her brother rob was in town visiting from saskatchewan and then chris showed up with his sister liz, visiting from ottawa. olivia had just flown back in to town the nite before and she gave us the lowdown on how she fared during her weeks-long geology field trip.
unlike last weekend, with olivia and sara back, we had enough members to sign in everyone in our group. i hit the pool tables right away and managed to hold my own for the night, getting the last word against each of my opponents by losing at first and then taking the table from them: moe 1-1, epeebee 1-1, and patrick 3-1.
when worthy opponents quit presenting themselves, i went over to dance for a couple of songs until the lights came on. stood around outside in the spitting rain, devouring a hot dog from jeff's cart across the street and chitchatting for a bit before heading home.
- link of the day: who needs anthrax when you can use kittens to freak people out instead ?
movies and more movies
Saturday, 06AUG2005:today's show went smashingly well and i it didn't take me long to edit my copy at home into a final re-usable version. today's show featured selections from movies, inspired by my pivotal splices mix with tracks taken from official soundtracks as well as ones ripped directly from dvds.
aur.oral exposures setlist for 06aug2005:
- Your Song - Ewan McGregor and Alessandro
Safina
[Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge] - Well Tempered Clavier Fugue G minor
(J.S. Bach) - The Eccentric Opera
[Hiroko Tokita's Nazca] (a japanese anime) - Yumeji's Theme - Shigeru Umebayashi
[Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love] - Ice Dance - Danny Elfman
[Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands] - molly - Michael Nyman
[Michael Winterbottom's Wonderland] - I Want to Be a Librarian - Parker Posey and cast
[Daisy Von Scherler Mayer's Party Girl] - Party Girl (Turn Me Loose) - Ultra Naté
[ditto] - Sway - Anita Kelsey
[Alex Proyas' Dark City] - Roads - Portishead
[Rachel Talalay's Tank Girl] - One More Kiss, Dear - Don Percival and Vangelis
[Ridley Scott's Blade Runner] - Who Will Take My Dreams Away ? - Marianne Faithfull
[Patrice Leconte's La fille sur le pont] (a.k.a. The Girl on the Bridge) - A Moment for Gandalf - Howard Shore featuring
Edward Ross
[Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring] - Milk Tanks Drained - audio extract
[Stephanie Black's Life + Debt] - Life and Debt - Mutabaruka
[ditto] - 2 Pi R - Clint Mansell
[Darren Aronofsky's Pi] - Voodoo People - Prodigy
[Iain Softley's Hackers] - Spybreak ! (short one) - Propellerheads
[Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix] - The Stripper - Joe Loss and His Orchestra
[Peter Cattaneo's The Full Monty]
instrumentals:
lounge-y:
dvd extracts:
techno:
got home to have some supper and then stayed up til 5 in the morning watching 'the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind' twice, the second time with the audio commentary by screenwriter charlie kauffman and director michel gondry. the film held up to repeated viewings and it was neat to pick up on little details.
my favourite scene is when joel and clem are sitting at the site of their first meeting. clem asks what they can do with the time that they have left, now that they've run out of options, and joel responds, 'we just enjoy it'.
- link of the day: a salon.com
interview with rebecca solni,
the author of
A
Field Guide to Getting Lost.
I had been writing in these distinct voices, the sort of personal, essayistic voice, the voice of criticism, the voice of environmental journalism. And the test site was such a complex subject that I realized I needed all of them, that it was just an artifice, and an unhelpful artifice at that, to keep them separate. One of the models for me ever since has been conversation. I have these wonderful conversations with friends where we'll stop and say, 'wait, how did we end up talking about this ?' I think everybody has them; it's how we experience life. We're always doing this sort of associational jazz riffing, in thoughts and conversations. The rules in writing are usually that you have to be more linear, but, you know, why ?
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