Cicleworks

The Washington State Department of Transportation, not exactly known for being hip, has a Flickr page full of awesome road construction and snow removal porn. I don’t know who thought up this idea and what their motivations were, but it’s pretty rad and very interesting. It really alters my perception of their work in a good way, and although I doubt they intended that, I hope they keep it up!

We spent only a short time in Sibiu on our trip to Romania last June, because with the Sibiu International Film Festival in full swing it was nearly impossible to get a hotel…and the one we got was overpriced and too far from town. But the town has a very long history, some very interesting Saxon architecture and has been very, very well restored for it’s year as a “European Capital of Culture”. So despite being pretty crowded, it was a very pleasant place to spend a few days. We had some pretty interesting encounters there too, including an amusing haggling session with some gypsy women and a completely fruitless search for laundry facilities. And of course some free movies in the square too! My small handful of pics are here, but I recently found the interesting blog of a Peace Corp volunteer in Lugoj who was in Sibiu recently and took some really great pics that really show how interesting and photogenic the city is.

Humorous quickie from Midnight Poutine:

“The Canada-U.S. income gap is narrowing, reported Statistics Canada today. Canadian per capita income grew by 15.5 percent between 2000 and 2006, nearly two-thirds faster than the United States’ 9.1 percent. The growth is largely attributed to a boom in resources. (And the fact that we rule.)”

You might have heard that there’s a bit of debate going on here in Quebec on the “reasonable accommodation” of immigrants. It’s interesting to watch as a potential immigrant myself. I’m not really that exotic, of course…Quebecers are used to Americans and the two cultures are deeply intertwined historically, especially the states of New England where it’s incredibly common to run in to people and towns with French names. So, having gone to school in New England, I have some sense of what’s up with Quebec. But of course, I speak and understand only rudimentary French and I didn’t grow up with much of the same cultural context during my youth as my Quebecer colleagues, so much of the subtext of this discussion is lost on me. That said, as we approach the opening of the Bouchard-Taylor hearings here in Montréal, I just want to take a second to say how universally awesome the experience of Montréal is for a non-francophone “immigrant” of sorts. I have never in my life lived in a city with better racial and religious harmony. Although my French is incredibly poor, only once has anyone lost patience with me for falling back to English. So I feel quite welcome here, language included, and universally impressed with the depth of compassion Montréalers feel on the whole for each other and those outside of Montréal as well. It’s a wonderful city.

Call me old-fashioned, but I gave RSS readers a try some years ago and gave up on them. It seemed to me like the RSS reader just added a bland step between me and the aesthetic experience of actually dropping by someone’s “space” on the internets to get a piece of their mind. In the end, I picked a handful of great blogs and made a point of dropping by regularly to check out what was new. In the meantime, I began using the iGoogle homepage for my aggregated news (I don’t get much aesthetic pleasure from dropping by the IHT website…I just want the info, and quick). So, my daily surfing experience was check some email, scan the headlines on iGoogle, and then pop by a few blogs. This was my pattern for years but there was a definite limitation on the number of blogs I could regularly consume this way, especially if someone went through a posting dry spell.

But iGoogle added tabs, and became more and more useful over the years…and then other friends pointed me to Google Reader and I gave RSS another try, embedded as Google Reader modules on a tab of my iGoogle page. It’s definitely better than the old RSS readers of yore…the ability to preview an entry and then just open it in a new tab if I’m interested makes it vastly easier to use. But RSS feeds themselves are widely variant in the amount of content available. Some feeds contain everything, including images. Others leave off the images. And still others only give teasers. None of them, however, preserve the aesthetic experience of that blogger’s space so I still find myself visiting sites by hand, albeit a bit less so. At least now I know when a blog has been updated as a part of my daily “net breakfast”.

Another interesting thing is that I realize that many folks use these readers and probably direct blog traffic is getting rarer. I wonder if other RSS users also feel a bit of loss from the lack of the individual aesthetic. I hope that at some point it’s a bit easier to customize the RSS experience for the end user because while words are fantastic, there’s a lot more to the experience than “just” prose.

Ah yes, the obligatory first snow post! A paltry couple of wet inches today, but there’s supposed to be a good bit more on the way. Once again, I had my snow tires put on within 24 hours of the first snow…

I haven’t been blogging much…no, not because I’m still tagging MP3 files, but probably because work has been busy and I’ve been quite tired lately. I thought about participating in NaBloPoMo, but didn’t have the energy. The short days during this time of year really does it to me. Nonetheless some progress is being made on a few fronts and perhaps I’ll have more interesting stuff to share soon. And hey, it’ll snow any day now and that always brightens things up!

I’ve been waiting to write a post like this for awhile! Today, the Canadian dollar hits $1.07. That’s absolutely astronomical compared to only a few years ago…Canadians born 40 years ago barely remember a similarly valued loonie. For the most part, for Canadian consumers, this should be a blessing. Most luxury items arrive here from the states and so, under normal arguments, Canadians should be buying these items at a pretty significantly reduced rate! But it hasn’t panned out. The Finance Minister recently went on air with a Harry Potter book to (pathetically) illustrate the price issues and “demand” retailers reduce prices. Why the differential? Because everything is technically shipped via the US and the middlemen have to make their cut, you know? So despite the parity++ exchange rate, there’s a “fee”. This place, as an entire country, has an economy the size of California…it just doesn’t have the clout to get straight shipping. But…certain items are both produced locally, priced *very relatively* in US dollars. Most notably, these things include grain and oil. Of all things, prices should remain stable against an absolutely useless US dollar. For oil, as I’ve seen it from a consumer perspective, it’s been true. I’ve paid roughly $0.97 CAD/liter for unleaded gas since I moved here in ~fall of 2005.

But today I had the most interesting experience. Fairmount bagels and St. Viateur bagels are sort of like the local version what of Krispy Kreme was for me in the deep (US) south. This is where you stumble in to at 3 am and they still have hot, fresh baked goods to sop up some of the damage done the evening prior. I, ahem, walked gracefully in to Fairmont bagel this evening after a good time at Dieu du Ciel, and discovered that the sign had been revised from $1.80 to $2.00 for a (delicious) pretzel. Now, OMFG, $0.20 is not asking a lot, even given my deep love and large-scale consumption of pretzels, but still, it creates apparent shockwaves. Now, I hadn’t been to either Fairmont or St. Viateur in, oh, 2 or 3 days, but somehow by the time I had discovered this incredible change the CBC had already picked it up!

Damn…that is some seriously up to date reporting! So much for blogger “realtime”ness.

A new version of Ubuntu means it’s time for a little housecleaning on my desktop and server. This time, the biggest task was ensuring my mp3 collection is backed up correctly and more importantly, of course, that the %@#*& ID3 tags are correct. I’ve never really settled on the right way to tag classical mp3s. ID3 is just too primitive and anyway, most mp3 streamers and players don’t support anything beyond v1. I did find this style guide on the MusicBrainz wiki, though, which seems to work alright, or at least it allows my scrobbling to work with Last.fm.

Windows guests running in VMWare workstation on my Kubuntu linux host machine have always had a fast clock. Ordinarily this doesn’t impact me much but I finally got annoyed with it enough to find a fix…you have to add a few lines to your /etc/vmware/config to specify the clock rate of your CPU. Full details here.

It was pretty clearly a possibility at some point in the future, I just didn’t think it would happen this quickly…the Canadian dollar reached parity to the US dollar for the first time since 1976.

I’ve been using linux as my exclusive platform now for several years. I’m pretty decent at administering my box but I’ve only rarely had hardware that just worked, as advertised, out of the box. We’re heading into paper and article season here, so I bought a Brother HL-2070N network printer…Brother has drivers and instructions for linux on their site. As it turns out, the instructions were perfect! It…just…works!

Hardware support is where linux lacks the most, but this is of course mostly due to a lack of vendor support, not an issue with linux itself. In this case, Brother actually has drivers. So kudos to them…

I don’t blog much about work…and this isn’t going to become one of those blogs but just my usual observations. I’ve always worked for small companies or on my own as a contractor. I prefer this approach because I tend to feel like fewer obstacles are in the way of producing high-quality software…meetings are often fewer and more meaningful and there is less cross-organizational politics to impact your decisions. If everyone’s your customer you tend to treat everyone pretty well and actually listen to what they need, too. But recently the small-ish company I work for was purchased by a much larger organization…literally 1000x the size. Naturally, this has involved absolutely tremendous changes in our work style and environment. But thus far, one thing has become extremely obvious…they waste absolute gads of money on the stupidest things.

Right when we were acquired, they replaced our aging copier with a brand new one. And then, today and not three months later, they replace it again for an “approved” company-built model. Shipping, installing and disrupting our workflow with this new beast had to be tremendously expensive…just to replace an already brand new copier? And what sucks even more is I prefer the old one…

Likewise, I am severely restricted from using external libraries in my development, regardless if they are best of breed and freely licensed, if they don’t align with the company’s strategic goals. Unfortunately, their internal libraries are substandard…and so the code I produce that relies on them will be substandard too. Viral substandardization… It’s an example of the weird cross-organizational politics of such a massive beast…we suffer because of another team’s incompetence in an entirely different domain.

And then, for open libraries with amiable licenses, I still have to go through a very lengthy documentation and approval process. Say I want to use the jArgs Java command-line library to cut a few hours of my time off of a simple project. The process to get this approved takes more time than coding a command-line args processor myself!

I won’t even get in to the 50% of my time spent on ridiculously long-winded and borderline insulting HR tasks…maybe that’s just the first 6 months. How do these companies even stay afloat?

Sort of amusing timing after my link to Dumneazu’s fly-infused ţuica post, but I found an interesting albeit short article in the BBC on the tension Transylvanian farmers are feeling as EU policies and money begin to come their way.

After learning to brew my own beer and cider, I’ve come to recognize just how important local micro and macro biodiversity is on the product being produced, whether it’s beer, wine, cheese, or even just local fruits and vegetables, and I’ve come to really appreciate the beauty of what I used to consider imperfection. The incredible lambics produced in Belgium are a prime example…producing their unique flavors requires traditional, unsanitary practices to cultivate just the right balance of bacteria and yeast (and flies). And although EU membership will do so much for Romanians, it’s exactly this type of odd tension that could possibly destroy what remains of the very old practices there and the unique products that are mostly unknown to those enforcing these regulations. The EU gave lambic producers a free pass because of their reputation (and likely because of their proximity to Brussels…how could they not respond to save what they were likely drinking!), but I really worry that Transylvanian farmers will be looked down upon as requiring Europeanization and their traditions will be lost.

Stuff like this gives me nightmares of a world made up of Kraft singles and Coors light.

Maramureş is a legendarily old-fashioned northern piece of Romania…no place in our entire trip was as ardently old-school. I was poking around for Romanian recipes and I found this great post on Dumneazu which included the impact that a lack of weddings has on fiddle music, the role of fruit flies in the making of ţuică, AND mămăligă! Great stuff.

Keep up the good work, geniuses!

Update: A better, closer view.

So maybe you’ve heard about some issues the US is having with “subprime” mortgages. If you’re looking for a quick and easy explanation of how we got there and why it impacted the US financial markets so heavily, take a look at this great article in the International Herald Tribune. Especially the part that says “So good was the system at spreading risks…”.

If you’re curious why it impacted the world markets so heavily, check out this article, also in the IHT.

Today, the 25th, is my birthday. I’m 31. Not old. Not young. It’s not at all an unpleasant place to be, my situation at 31. Things are pretty good. But I’ve been a bit more reflective than usual this time.

I moved to Montréal a bit more than a year ago, and I’ve missed a few of my goals. My French still sucks, I’m not particularly psyched with my professional and intellectual progress, and I’ve been very lazy about exercise. Looking back across the last year though, I have accomplished a few things I had focused on for many years, like traveling a bit more and paying off my debts. Maybe it’s the bad weather today putting me in a ill mood. Maybe it’s work-related annoyances. Maybe it’s the difficulty of being “me” in my current situation. Anyway, I have a lot to do this fall.

I’m parodizing Alex with the post title, but in all seriousness I had a chance to drop by a brand new coffee shop around the corner at Parc and Fairmount, Caffè in Gamba…this addition dramatically increases the espresso density in the neighborhood, almost eclipsing Seattle levels! I can’t walk a block from home in any direction without finding decent espresso. Now I just need to find a way to work from home every day…

Gamba has a nice twist, offering more than one variety up at a time and rotating what they have among quite a few interesting roasters, including the previously locally unavailable Intelligentsia. They even had Caffe d’Arte, a roaster from the old stomping ground (it would have really killed me if he had had Vivace, if only for the nostalgia). Anyway, time to break in the Saeco Classico I picked up awhile back!

My favorite fermented beverage is cider…but I’ve usually only made it in the fall when fresh, unpasteurized cider is readily available cheaply. But I found Huck brand unpasteurized organic cider at my local store for ~$5/gallon and decided to give it a try. After all, the dep sells cider for nearly $22/gallon, and good beer at $11/gallon, so I figured I’m doing pretty well! I outlined the basic process in my intro to brewing post, but I put pics up on flickr showing the process visually.

Update: in case you were wondering, beer typically costs around ~$1-2/gallon to make.