RelevantCuriosity

EV3, Starbucks, and Consumerism

2011-02-24T22:57:00.005-05:00

There’s been a fair amount of consternation in the Waterloo parts recently over the plans for the new Environment building (EV3) to contain a Starbucks. This decision was reportedly made by the university honchos and/or food services management, and not by the Faculty of Environment – but the idea of a Starbucks in an Environment building has been controversial because of a lack of consultation with the student body, the harm it will likely cause to the student-run coffee shop in EV1, and the faculty’s commitment to ideals such as Fair Trade.

Recently, the Environment Student Society sent out a survey asking for students’ opinions on the matter, which they’ll use in their discussions with the Faculty and with Starbucks reps. My response took a different tack from the others listed above, though an equally important tack, if not more so.

(For the curious, I think I was channelling my inner James Howard Kunstler when I wrote this, with perhaps a dash of Jack Cafferty thrown in.)

What faculty are you in at the University of Waterloo? Environment
How do you feel about having a Starbucks franchise in EV3? I don’t support it
Please state specific factors that led to your decision in question #2.

The way I see it, Starbucks is a powerful symbol of the excesses of our consumer culture. Whereas, say, Tim Hortons (or Country Style, etc.) takes pride in its everyman image, Starbucks seems to take pride in having a hip, stylish image -- turning a cup of coffee into a status symbol. Of course, both images are just marketing ploys, which makes the suggestion of a cooler-than-thou cup of coffee all the more ludicrous. With their relentlessly trendy image, their irresponsibly high pricing that gives the illusion of a "boutique" product, and their sheer ubiquitousness, Starbucks contributes to Western society's faux ideals of owning the smartphone, camera, and HDTV du jour; living in a McMansion with a three-car garage; driving the coolest cars; and wearing the latest fashions.

When was the last time you heard of a movie star drinking Country Style or Dunkin' Donuts? I'm not saying that all movie stars drink Starbucks, but this is more easily imaginable since it's the image Starbucks creates, the delusion they want the public to buy into and adopt for themselves. If you're a middle-class Canadian envying a piece of the high-class lifestyle, Starbucks is right there on your doorstep; it's more accessible than Gucci. This sort of marketing and media-induced peer pressure plays a huge role in turning citizens into consumers, never content with what they have and seeking more than they *need* -- which, in turn, causes resource exhaustion; urban sprawl; overworked and overstressed families; the inequitable distribution of resources; an ever-growing hunger for energy, whatever the source; and all sorts of other stuff that the Faculty of Environment seeks to reduce. It seems ironic, therefore, that the faculty would willingly share its space with an organization that contributes to these very problems.
If you don’t support the Starbucks franchise in EV3, what food outlet would you suggest instead?

That's the thing; I'm not sure I could recommend any particular brand, for the reasons stated above. I'd be most likely to recommend Tim Hortons, but there are enough of those on campus already. This being the case, I'd like to see some sort of independent coffee shop in EV3 -- not one of those hipster-calibre indie coffee shops, but one that is what it is, doesn't try to be anything but wholesome and genuine, and serves environmentally and socially sustainable products on principle and not because the faculty is forcing it to. In particular, I think it would be great if the ESS Coffee Shop could expand into this space, giving the faculty a proper C&D. It's got a pretty good menu already, but its current ordering area is cramped to the point of being uninviting. Nonetheless, if an established brand sets up shop in EV3, the ESS Coffee Shop will likely need more than a renovation in order to stay competitive.

A brief history of the past few months, Part I

2010-06-12T15:18:00.019-04:00

This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now. When I learned about my brain tumour, a friend from church suggested that I write about my experiences. That didn’t happen, but I still think it’s worth chronicling, if only to have a record of it for myself.

Since I wasn’t really keeping track of this stuff as it happened, what follows is, as Margaret Atwood’s heroine Offred would say, a “reconstruction”. I’ll try not to recount every detail of every doctor’s appointment I’ve had, but even so, my condensed version will require a lot of text, so I’ll spare you the eye strain and do this in chunks. Think of it as episodes in a serial medical drama.

PROLOGUE:

2007:
- I’m talking with friends in the TDCH Commons at lunch, and I realize that it’s hard for me to hear them. I cup my right ear in their direction, and it seems to help.
- I realize that I’m having a hard time hearing the people who sit to my left on the schoolbus.
- It’s the TDCH talent show, and I’m working as a stagehand, helping the acts with their microphones as they go on and off the stage. The people working at the sound booth gave me a headset so I could hear their instructions. Except that it was one of those headsets that only has one ear, and it was made for the left ear. By this time, I had a slight suspicion that my left ear was a bit weaker than my right ear ("Just like being left-eye- or right-eye-dominant," I told myself at the time). And sure enough, I could barely understand their instructions, leading to some embarrassing misunderstandings (really embarrassing given that one of the guys on sound – a friend of one of the teachers – was a Juno-nominated producer).
2008:
- I noticed that I was having problems swallowing dry foods like bagels. The stuff seemed to get stuck in the upper part of my throat until I washed it down with water. I had a barium swallow at a nearby hospital, but the images didn’t show anything suspicious.
- One day, I talked with my grandmother on the phone, and, trying to multitask, I held the phone against my left ear. I could barely make out the words she was saying. I spent the rest of the afternoon lying on the couch – I suppose I was stressed out by it at the time.
2009:
- On the way to a band practice with Dad one morning, I mentioned how I definitely thought my hearing was getting worse; my estimate was that I had lost 15-20% of the hearing in my left ear, and gained a strange hiss in its place. I had a hearing test at the doctor’s office – the most basic hearing test you can imagine. It showed no hearing loss.
- I was still having problems swallowing, so I was referred to an ENT (ear/nose/throat) specialist in Sarnia. While I was there, I mentioned about my hearing loss, and I had a more sophisticated hearing test there. My estimate of 15-20% turned out to be pretty accurate – but the hearing loss was mainly in the lowest and highest frequencies. Based on this characteristic and the hissing, the ENT specialist suspected that my auditory nerve was damaged, and he sent me for a CT scan at the local hospital.
- The CT scan didn’t show anything suspicious. So, since it was nerve damage and not eardrum damage, it was the sort of thing no hearing aid could fix – make the sound as loud as you want, and it still won't make it to the brain. I was just going to have to live with the nerve damage and hope it didn’t get worse. I imagined myself walking from class to class at Waterloo that fall, messenger bag slung over my shoulders, trying to be a hip university student, and still having this annoying hiss in my ear.
- During the early part of the summer, I went for acupuncture to try and fix my hearing. Didn’t work.
- Oddly enough, once I stopped the acupuncture, my hearing got worse. To the point where I told my classmates at Waterloo that I was basically deaf in my left ear, so if you’re going to walk beside me, walk on my right side if you want me to hear you.
- My hearing loss didn’t go unmentioned when I would phone my parents from Waterloo. Shortly before Christmas, Mom called the ENT specialist to get me in for another hearing test while I would be home for Christmas. Being the only ENT clinic in Sarnia, they were booked solid, but they said they could squeeze me in when I would be at home for Reading Week.

NEXT TIME…“SWEET! I had forgotten about that!”

Thinking outside the shoebox

2009-11-25T23:58:00.026-05:00

My first experiences with Operation Christmas Child came in my early years of elementary school. One of the families who attended the school was heavily involved in the program, and would fly their Cessna down to Latin America to deliver some of Canada's shoeboxes. When they got back, they would share their experiences with us. So from an early age, I was aware of the program and the joy these children felt as they received what was most likely their first Christmas present ever.

Since those years, Operation Christmas Child became something of an annual ritual for our family. We made up these shoeboxes for school, for church, for Scouts, and so on. One year, my church's youth group even volunteered at Operation Christmas Child's Canadian warehouse in Kitchener.

For those of you who don't know, my Dad is a minister in the Presbyterian Church of Canada. A couple years ago, he got to meet another minister who at the time was representing the national Church body.

Now, whereas the family from my elementary school travelled to the disadvantaged communities to deliver the shoeboxes, this minister had visited after the shoeboxes were delivered. What she saw was how the children were worse off than before they had received the shoeboxes.

Here's the problem. We give them candy and toothpaste. But what do they do when these run out? What happens when the yoyo breaks or the matchbox car gets lost? This stuff is basic enough for us that we can replace it fairly easily -- all it takes is a walk to the convenience store. For these children, it's not as simple, and even if the stuff was readily available to them, there's no guarantee that they'd be able to afford it.

After the stuff runs out, they're left wanting more of what they can't have. They're left wanting more of stuff that, until recently, they might not have even known they wanted.

What does this mean? With Operation Christmas Child, what we often end up doing is just introducing these children to Western society's self-enforcing cycle of "wants" and "stuff". Maybe you could say that this is the way we help these children in an otherwise-hostile environment. But we're not giving them any lasting assistance by giving them a towel and soap or a pack of pencils.

Think about it this way. Let's say that a church makes 100 shoeboxes. If you fill them with the standard array of stuff from a dollar-store, that would work out to something like $15 per box on average. So a single church might spend $1500 on shoeboxes. What else could you do with $1500? Let's take a look at, as an example, the World Vision Gift Catalogue. $1500 could buy:

250 fruit trees, to provide strength and nourishment to families
15 goats -- They can be used for protein and milk and can grow into a herd, and their offspring can be sold at market. A gift that keeps on giving!
15 microcredit loans, to help 15 entrepreneurs start their own businesses
Agricultural assistance for 126 families
12 latrines, to improve communities’ sanitation

The list goes on. What do these things have in common? They all provide lasting, sustainable ways to assist disadvantaged peoples. These sorts of gifts give people a “leg up” – to improve their health, and ultimately, to give them opportunities to lift themselves out of poverty.

I would argue that sending shoeboxes full of dollar-store commodities won’t accomplish this. It makes the children feel “good” for a while, but then what?

Operation Christmas Child is, at least for the purpose of this discussion, an institution. It’s backed by Samaritan’s Purse, a charity run by Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham. I’m convinced that they have the best of intentions, and as a Christian, I’m honestly thrilled to see how their project has grown -- and they now have a gift catalogue similar to the World Vision one I linked to. The problem is with Operation Christmas Child in particular: since it has now reached the point where we participate without really giving it a second thought.

What I’m suggesting is that we give it this second thought. Let’s take a look at what kind of assistance these people need, and figure out the best way to help them. This will require us to think about not only the differences between our economies, but also the differences between the goals of our different societies.

Solving problems such as these will require us to think “outside the box”.

So this Christmas, I propose that we start by thinking “outside the shoebox”.

With thanks to Nathaniel for his proofreading and the invaluable assistance of an INDEV-er. I highly recommend checking out his Daring Souls campaign.

"Thinking outside the shoebox" by Jonathan Van Dusen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

"The Right Man For the Job": A Short Story

2009-06-06T22:25:00.026-04:00

In Grade 11 English class, we were shown this photo, without being told who the subject of the photo was. We had to imagine who he might have been, and write about him, relating his story to our interests in some way. This is who I made him.

It's certainly the best piece of fiction I've ever written, though of course that's not saying much since I tend to stick to non-fiction. Here it is, with a couple minor word changes:

THE RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB
By Jonathan Van Dusen

EDINBURGH, 1894.

Click, tap, clack, thwump. Click, tap, clack, thwump. Click, tap, clack, thwump.

It was a sound that grew monotonous, but Reynolds knew that the process took patience. He watched the gears turn, the steel output rods dancing up and down to the mechanical beat, and the stack of punch cards that the analytical engine swallowed one by one. He crinkled his nose as he watched the translucent puffs of steam fly out the window into the Victorian winter.

It had been two weeks since his consultation with the local Science Council. His analytical engine was the sort of phenomenon they had only heard about in their yearly conferences in London, when Charles Babbage had introduced his machine, and Ada Lovelace her visions for this invention. But Babbage had been dead for decades now, and his visions for these mechanical mathematical machines had never been truly realized.

This is where Ronald Reynolds came in. He had spent thirty years of his life teaching logic and mathematics, which led to an interest in these analytical engines. His machine was but his hobby, something that he worked on simultaneously with the garden behind his city house. He saw logic as another aspect of the beauty he experienced in this garden, and it was this rustic nature that him from shaving a beard that was turning increasingly grey, and kept him in the sort of unpretentious clothes one would not expect from someone in the Edinburgh city centre.

The Council had said they would send a carriage to transport him to their weekly lunchtime meeting. Noticing on his pocket watch that the time was growing nearer for his departure, Reynolds placed a piece of plywood in the machine’s gears to lock them, and left the house. The carriage arrived at exactly the specified time, and took him to the building the Council had been renting. He was escorted upstairs to their spacious boardroom, where twelve men, seated at a long oak table, were regarding him with a mix of curiosity and excitement.

“Good day, Mr. Reynolds,” came the greeting from a smiling, portly man at the head of the table. It was Higgins, their leader, who had taken an interest in Reynolds' work due to an acquaintance with Babbage himself. He motioned for Reynolds to sit across from him, at the other end.

“We have reviewed your application for a grant. We recognise the usefulness of your discoveries, the potential uses by the military. To this end” – Reynolds shifted nervously in his chair as Higgins began to smile – “we are prepared to invest £5000 in this project.”

Reynolds grinned. “My deepest thanks, gentlemen! I am convinced that this will be of benefit to us all.”

“As are we,” nodded Higgins, who then took a sip of his tea. “However, our grant comes with a condition. Mr. Burton?” He pointed to another seated man.

The young man named Burton stood and nodded towards Reynolds, smiling.

Higgins continued. “Mr. Burton’s current field of study is that of electricity. We assume you are familiar with, for instance, the current studies of Edison and Bell?”

Reynolds gave a small sigh and nodded. He was familiar with the field and found it intriguing, but he had always wondered if such applications would ever truly enter the mainstream. After all, no households owned telegraphs, did they?

“Our friend Mr. Burton is experimenting which such things, and is spending a particular amount of time on the concept for an electric version of your math machine.”

Reynolds raised his eyebrows as Burton, still standing, cleared his throat.

“My training lies in electricity, Mr. Reynolds, and yours in mathematics. We have seen many advances in electricity lately, and we have come to the decision that much of the coming century will involve further advances, possibly to the demise of the mechanical trades within the next few decades. But with electricity, the possibilities are endless. Imagine your logic, contained inside a box the size of a loaf of bread!”

Higgins regained control. “As such, we will give you the grant on the condition that you use your logic skills and experience to aid Mr. Burton with his research; a fusion of sorts between the two areas of study.”

Reynolds leaned back in the padded chair and took a slow drink of tea. It was an avenue he had never considered and didn’t know how to respond to. He would have been perfectly content, oh yes, to use a grant on his beloved apparatus, and then present it to interested clients. He frowned slightly, all eyes on him, as he wondered if it was possible to teach an old scholar new tricks.

He sat up slowly. “It if is possible, gentlemen, would you grant me some more time to consider this proposal?”

Higgins took a look around the table, his face showing both disappointment and irritation. “Very well. You have until our meeting next week to reach a decision.”

Reynolds stood up, put on his coat, and said thank-you. He used the carriage ride home as a chance to gather his thoughts. As they approached the house, however, he could identify the bitter smells of a steam engine, but a smell far stronger than he was accustomed to. Minutes passed, and he noticed the wafts of not just steam, but smoke rising from a corner of his house.

He realised his mistake at once: prior to leaving, he had locked the machine’s gears in place, but had never turned off the steam engine. The machine had overheated, and he entered the workshop to find a warped rack of steel, with gears fused together, and ashes for punch cards.

The fabled analytical machine, the object of Reynolds’ devotion, was no longer.

But its successor was needed, and as Ronald Reynolds sorted through his surviving notes on the fundamentals of logic, he realized that he was still the man for the job.

The Right Man For the Job by Jonathan Van Dusen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Run XP programs within Windows 7!

2009-04-24T18:01:00.015-04:00

Did I just say that Paul Thurrott was getting on my nerves?

I take it back.

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/04/24/secret-no-more-revealing-virtual-windows-xp-for-windows-7.aspx

I just wish it weren't limited to the higher-end versions. But on the other hand, how many home users are willing to set up a Virtual PC in order to prevent old programs from crashing? Either way, this is seriously awesome.

Why I don't use Twitter...

2009-04-24T16:35:00.004-04:00

I've started reading ZDNet (partly because Paul Thurrott has been getting on my nerves lately). Found this article today: this basically sums up why I've never actually joined Twitter, and I'm glad I'm not alone in feeling this way.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/igeneration/?p=1540

OK, so what is sustainability, really?

2009-04-22T16:25:00.010-04:00

In honour of Earth Day.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=top-10-myths-about-sustainability

Points #4, #7, and #8 are particularly awesome.

I'm a firm believer in the theory of global warming through CO₂, but I'm not really the apologist I once was. Thing is, as one scientist interviewed in The 11th Hour put it, global warming is not the entire problem. Global warming is a symptom of our inability to live sustainably.

What's more, even if you don't believe that we're warming our planet, sustainability is still a valid topic. Example: whether or not you believe that your Hummer causes harmful emissions, you probably won't be driving it as much when gas is scarce and expensive.

David Suzuki illustrates this well:

While filming a special program on forestry for The Nature of Things in the 1990s, we arranged to interview loggers working in a cut block near Ucluelet on Vancouver Island. When we arrived and set up the camera, the loggers came out of the forest and began to cuss me out as an environmentalist who was threatening their jobs.
The confrontation made for good television, but I was frustrated at our inability to find common ground. Finally I told them, "I worked as a carpenter for eight years, and to this day, I love working with wood. No environmentalist I know is against logging. We just want to be sure that your children and grandchildren will be able to log forests as rich as the ones you’re working in now."
Immediately, one of the men replied that he’d never let his kids to go into logging. "There won’t be any trees left!" he said. And there it was. Those men knew that they were cutting the trees down in a way that ensured there would be no harvestable timber for future generations of loggers, but they saw the trees as the way to put food on the table day after day and make the house and car payments at the end of the month.

Here's the paradox: yes, learning to live sustainably will solve the problem of emissions. But when solving global warming means capturing coal emissions and pumping them underground, or putting loads of mirrors into the sky, we still won't be solving the root problem of sustainability.

I think they’re trying too hard.

2009-04-19T18:44:00.004-04:00

Evidently the recession is making SanDisk resort to guerrilla warfare:

Advertising usually tries to convince the consumer that money buys happiness. That’s the nature of the beast, but this ad was just so damned transparent that I couldn’t leave it alone.

To add insult to injury, their website doesn’t display correctly in IE8 either. Seriously, SanDisk, if you expect us to buy your products online, then make sure that your website doesn’t suck in the first place. Even the most ludicrous of ads are best delivered in a user-friendly way.

I haven’t been blogging too much lately, at least not as much as I had been hoping, but suffice it to say that there’s a lot going on. Lots of projects, and family stuff. Hopefully once things calm down a bit I can really sit down and give this blog some more attention.

Consumerism Conscience

2009-03-23T19:14:00.010-04:00

This is a speech I wrote and presented as a Grade 12 English assignment, and the topic is something about which I am quite passionate. (If you’ve really been paying attention, you might recognize Sterling’s quote from my “Favorite Quotes” on Facebook.) Bear in mind that it was written as a speech – by which I mean that I would have written it differently were it an essay, commentary, or blog post.

The man worked at a Wal-Mart on Long Island. His death occurred on Friday, November 28^th, 2008, a day when most of the nation was looking the other way. You see, the day was 2008’s “Black Friday”, the first day of the December shopping season. So how did the worker die? He didn’t die in a car accident in the New York traffic. He was not mugged on the street on his way to work. On the contrary, he died at work around 6:00 A.M., after being trampled by a crowd of avid shoppers.

With this in mind, I must say that I am not here today to tell you to live like cavemen. I am not here today to claim that Wal-Mart is evil. However, I am here today to give you a chance to reflect on a societal habit that our age group often overlooks. Because the more I look at our society, the more I grow convinced that our biggest threat is one for which we are all responsible: our consumer culture.

In truth, consumerism has dominated humanity for most of its civilized existence. A civilization’s economy helped it expand, trade led to cultures and empires discovering each other, and trade routes eventually led to the global village we have today. But the irony is that this global village is now being damaged by the consumerism that helped create it, and the effects are worse than ever.

We see this when basic commodities are made in foreign countries, made by the hands of women and children paid little for their efforts. This is not just. And we see this when, in the middle of a cold Canadian winter, supermarket produce departments are filled with foods that have been shipped from warm tropical climates half a world away, just to get to our dinner table. This is not sustainable.

We also see this when our global village is linked by a media that serves only to advertise. We complain about advertisements when they interrupt television programs or websites, but do we ever try to reject the mentality that gives us these ads? Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, we are being told to buy items we don’t really need. We are being told that buying these items will increase our self-worth and outward image. We are being told all this through whatever forms of media we choose, but unlike in previous generations, our modern media is so deep and so far-reaching that it we often turn it into our own personal universe, a cocoon made from the messages we like best.

I would like to close by going back to the Black Friday movement. A group called Adbusters has created a counter-movement, called “Buy Nothing Day”. This day intentionally falls on Black Friday, every year. A peer of mine commented, upon hearing of the idea, that buying nothing that day would be a “stupid” idea, because of the day’s lower prices. But ultimately, neither Black Friday nor Buy Nothing Day is about prices. If we are to try and weaken the pull and temptation of consumerism, what better time is there to do it than on consumerism’s strongest and most tempting day? So I encourage you to not only participate in Buy Nothing Day this coming year, but also to be conscious for the rest of the year of the things you buy, want and need. Science fiction author Bruce Sterling recently said it best:

It’s not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY [sic] like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.

Dross. Anything that is trivial, that has no worth.

Dross. Waste, impurities, scum.

What in your life enhances your existence? And what in your life is merely dross? My challenge to you is to reflect on this. But don’t just stop there: do what you can to remove this dross from your life.

Bibliography (Works Cited)

“dross.” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2009. Merriam-Webster Online. 12 February 2009 <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dross>.

“dross.” Wiktionary. 26 Oct. 2008. Wikimedia Foundation. 12 Feb. 2009 <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dross>.

Long, Colleen. “Wal-Mart worker dies in Black Friday trampling.” Sympatico/MSN Finance. 28 Nov. 2008. Associated Press. 12 Feb. 2009 <http://finance.sympatico.msn.ca/investing/insight/article.aspx?cp-documentid=14539064>.

Sterling, Bruce. “The Last Viridian Note.” Viridian. 19 Nov. 2008. 12 Feb. 2009 <http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/451-500/the_last_viridian_note.html>.

Developing a Conscience for Canada's Consumerism Culture by Jonathan Van Dusen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Note to Facebook: “Don’t let the whiners get you down, but…”

2009-03-14T13:33:00.002-04:00

My feedback to Facebook, word-for-word:

I don't mind the new home page, but I am still respectfully concerned about a few things.

1. The new style for Wall posts -- they now look far too much like status messages. Were a person to change their status and then write on their own wall, the two events would look almost exactly the same.

2. "Recent Activities" seem to be arranged illogically, grouping them between Wall posts. It made more sense when everything was arranged chronologically, and when each Activity had its own date and time by default.

3. The new advertisement sidebar makes the pages too wide for a 1024x768 monitor. I could be wrong, but this is still the dominant monitor resolution.

I don’t really like this week’s redesign that much, but (a) it won’t cause me to stop using Facebook in protest, (b) it’s not even worth whining over, and (c) it’s not as major as the last upgrade, the “New Facebook” we received over the summer. As I said in a status message, technology evolves. (Would you like it if your new iPod classic didn’t support photos or videos?)

That said, I do think this Facebook is too much like Twitter, and unlike the New Facebook, I actually dislike it overall. Here’s the thing, though. With the New Facebook, we had a lengthy chance to test it before it was released. With this one, you really had to be paying attention to know it was going to happen (Facebook announced it on their blog weeks ago), and only then would you even have the chance to provide feedback. (I suppose this could be compared to the development cycles of Windows Vista and Windows 7, respectively!)

When the New Facebook was in beta, I sent Facebook feedback then too, suggesting that profiles should have ways to filter Wall posts from actions, and reminding them that each profile should have a link to your Wall-to-Wall with the person, instead of only showing this link on Wall posts themselves. Both of these features were eventually implemented, or in the case of the Wall-to-Wall link, re-implemented. Hopefully Facebook will take feedback as seriously this time around.

P.S. – Yes, I am blogging again! I seem to have more time for it nowadays. Hopefully my next blog post won’t take seven months. Probably closer to seven days this time around.

Well...

2008-08-25T21:45:00.007-04:00

Those promised blog posts didn't really happen.

Stupid hard drive failure.

Not to make excuses, but our laptop's hard drive crashed about a week ago. For the curious, I usually spend the first week of a vacation to "exhale" whatever stresses I might have accumulated, and then use the second to "get to work", whatever that means given the circumstances. Sometimes it's doing homework. Sometimes, as here, it's stuff that I assign myself.

So with a defunct laptop, and, counting a trip to the library, only one chance at Internet until today (we're back in Sarnia now), I couldn't write the blog entries, or accomplish the other computer-based goals I had set for myself for the trip (i.e., mixing some audio, cleaning out my Inbox, etc). And it's unlikely these will get accomplished during the next week too, for what I hope are obvious reasons.

Not like anyone was eagerly waiting for the blog entries anyway. Or that anyone will even read this sentence. Ah well.

P.S. If anyone's curious, the computer that crashed was five years old, ran XP, had a mere 128 MB of RAM, and -- worse yet, perhaps -- 16 gigs of total hard drive space. If anyone can commandeer such a system in 2008, it'd be a nerd like me, but sometimes things fall apart on even the most cautious users. You have been warned. That said, I made a backup before we left, so it's not as bad as it could have been.

P.P.S. Re: the last sentence before the post-script: some comments here would be nice! I suspect that there's at least a couple people reading this. So, in the hopefully-immortal words of Chris Martin, "If you love me, won't you let me know?" I have little free time as it is, and I'm not going to waste it on a thoughtful, insightful blog series if no one's going to read it.

Stay tuned! (aka "My Blog: Seven Months Later")

2008-08-08T23:34:00.004-04:00

So my last blog post was in January, and this fact isn't as hard to believe as you might think. A second semester that was absolutely killer in terms of homework (picture this: American History + ISU, Physics, English, and Law), a more-than-melancholy trip to Pennsylvania immediately after my Law exam, and a busy couple weeks here in Brights Grove [sic], meant that this blog shrank to far less than what I had imagined for it.

Next week, though, I'll be heading back to Pennsylvania for what should be a slightly more normal visit. During this time, I hope to not only finish off some of my summer goals, but to write a series of long-overdue blog posts, on topics including my recent experiences and mindset, the presidential race, Windows Vista, ABBA/Chess/MAMMA MIA!, the New Facebook, and beyond.

So don't touch that dial! Before you know it, this pathetic little blog that no one reads will turn into a slightly less pathetic blog that a few more people read.

-JVD

The Glass Menagerie

2008-01-18T22:55:00.001-05:00

Let this be a lesson to the lot of you...we stay in hotels frighteningly often (at least once every other month), so I myself have just learned a valuable lesson. (And from FOX News, no less -- who knew?)

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Hotel Drinking Glasses Expose

The environmentalist in me takes great issue with this, actually, because it sort of forces you to use the disposable cups. On the other hand, my Nestea addiction travels with me, and that stuff comes in recyclable tin cans. Of course, no hotel that I've ever been to has had a recycling bin in the room....

P.S. OK, so I've sort of neglected this blog, and for that I apologise. Writing more frequent posts is indeed one of my New Years' Resolutions; however, I might have to keep neglecting it until exams are over.

Should media make killers 'famous'?

2007-12-20T19:05:00.004-05:00

"Just think tho," wrote the 19-year-old Omaha shooter in his suicide note. "I'm gonna be (expletive) famous." And he was, at least for a while.

This is something I was wondering about, after seeing all the media buzz that accompanied the recent mall shooting in Omaha: the killer had wished that, through his rampage, he would become famous, and guess what? Thanks to all the media coverage, he did indeed become famous.

This excellent article discusses what CNN, CityTV, and FOX News would fear to imagine: where news doesn't have to be sensationalised or personalised: but sensical and sensitive.

The whole concept can be best summed up by its quote from columnist Michael Mayo, who refused to mention the killer's name:

"I want to deny him what he wanted, the way he denied life to eight innocent victims."

I guess I can't be trusted...

2007-11-23T17:32:00.004-05:00

...to not buy anything. Thing is, today is Buy Nothing Day. In a gesture of good will and non-conformance -- because, (a), I'm a non-conformist, and (b), it's Black Friday and 25,000 children die every day of poverty -- I signed up for the associated Facebook event, having been invited by a friend (good thing you know who you are, because unfortunately I don't).

Easy enough, I thought. I never buy much anyway. Chances are -- Black Monday be damned -- I won't buy anything on Buy Nothing Day.

But today, during music council, our "Music Minion" t-shirts were distributed -- for $5 each.

So I bought something. On Buy Nothing Day. When I had already said that I wasn't going to buy anything.

Shame on me. On the other hand, at least there's 365 other opportunities within the next year to defy consumerism.

</sarcasm>

...

But shouldn't we be doing that everyday? I mean, you look at things like this and it should be obvious why the terrorists hate us, in a continent where more money is spent on pets than is donated to charity. When will we learn?

...

P.S. In case your head isn't reeling yet, yes, 25,000 children do die of extreme poverty each day. Think about that for a second, before you ask for that PS3 or iPod touch for Christmas.

"Riot Gear!" - Max Mobley's column for Crawdaddy!

2007-11-07T19:11:00.002-05:00

Crawdaddy! bills itself as the premier magazine for rock music criticism. Makes sense, given that Rolling Stone is more preoccupied with taking photos of a womanizing Kid Rock than it is with talking about, say, the political ramifications (or, sadly, the lack thereof) of Neil Young's Living With War record.

What's more, Rolling Stone essentially sleeps with the enemy, where "the enemy" translates roughly to "the recording industry". Crawdaddy! does nothing of the sort, and leading the pack is the brilliant Max Mobley and his biweekly column called "Riot Gear!". You might have seen on Facebook that I posted a link to one of his articles, this one (profanity warning!) on the drawbacks to MP3s and even CDs in comparison to analogue media like vinyl, and called "There Once Was A Note":

So then you take this cold and perfect [digital recording], and you strip away things that were there in the performance and the production so you can make it smaller—because if you make it smaller you can carry more of them with you. [...] It’s the sonic equivalent to pizza rolls. It tastes a bit like a real pie and has some of the same ingredients, but nobody’s fooled—unless pizza rolls are all you know, ya poor bastard. And so I pity the mp3 generation every bit as much as I envy them. Working in music production and pro audio, I will probably grow angry with them, too. Because what am I going to do with this expensive gear designed to provide subtle nuances that first will be captured coldly, then stripped out entirely so the listener can hear the tune on a bus?

Good stuff. But there's too much else here to leave unmentioned, like his post from Oct. 24th about the struggle of buying CDs under the noses of the record company "weasels":

I stopped downloading when my favorite sites went away or started charging actual money. And downloading never stopped me from buying CDs. In fact, I bought more because I got to test drive the band. I certainly can’t leave the decision of who to buy up to the weasels. They like crap! [...] But like my contemporaries, and many consumers, I dig the packaging. I want to hold the disc and read the booklet, check out the album, not just a file of a single. I still believe an album has a beginning, middle, and an end.

And an article about the history of making music more portable, and the sacrifices necessary:

Cassettes also gave birth to the mix tape. Take your favorite vinyl, your brand new cassette deck, a blank tape, a sixer of beer, and a broken heart, and you could create an epic sonic drama that defined who you were and why your ex-girlfriend should come back. In the ‘70s, mix tapes probably saved more relationships than Dr. Joyce Brothers, Pauline Reage, and Phil Donahue combined. Now it’s as though the music market is one big mix tape. Hello MP3, goodbye album. Hello quantization errors, goodbye rumble, wow and flutter. Hello digital, goodbye vinyl, goodbye tape, goodbye rock star. At least vinyl lives on as a bastardized musical instrument, which I find very rock ‘n’ roll since rock music is art’s most infamous bastard child.

Anyways. All his stuff rocks. If you, like me, won't settle for the current state of music -- where the artistic experience equates all too often to listening to an iTunes track at 128Mbps, without any sense of individuality -- then you should check out his stuff. The music industry is in turmoil, and neither side seems to be pursuing an environment that allows creativity to flourish. Thus, the music industry needs more people like Max Mobley.

Harry Potter: the best fantasy books that never were

2007-11-06T18:04:00.001-05:00

This is something that I've always believed, and Ken Jennings (of Jeopardy! fame) seems to agree, though in an incredibly articulate way: the Harry Potter books, despite what booksellers and naysayers might have you believe, are not fantasy books at all, just glorified detective novels. Remove the "hocus-pocus"-esque elements of Harry Potter, and what you're really left with is Where in the Wizarding World is Lord Voldemort?, where, as Ken will tell you, Harry, Ron, and Hermione are the new Mystery Inc., using thestrals instead of a VW van to roam around solving mysteries.

Anywho. If you've never read the Harry Potter books, this should give you more reason to do so -- there's too much good stuff there than should be ignored. I also think the series is slightly prophetic, but I'll touch on that in another post. In the meantime, check out the mad literary discernments of Ken Jennings:

http://ken-jennings.com/blog/?p=526

FreeRice.com

2007-11-06T17:53:00.001-05:00

This is neat! Increase your vocabulary and fight world hunger at the same time!

Yes, you read that right. I'll say no more; check it out for yourself:

http://www.freerice.com/

Be David Suzuki For Hallowe'en!

2007-10-31T16:27:00.001-04:00

Anyone need a last-minute Hallowe'en costume?

Avaaz.org

2007-10-31T16:17:00.001-04:00

In many languages, "avaaz" means "voice". Avaaz.org is about your voice being heard -- through online petitions and letter campaigns -- along with a million other voices from every nation in the world.

Right now, they're running campaigns on Burma, and the US government's climate change policies. And remember, this is only effective if you spread the word about it too.

http://www.avaaz.org/

A new experience...

2007-10-28T21:14:00.002-04:00

So, I'm on Blogger now. It's mainly because I'm growing increasingly lazier with my website, and, realising that my previous hand-made blog lacked comments, I'm using this instead of coming up with code for a comment engine. Eventually, this page will be integrated into the new version of my website, but I wanted to get a head start since I haven't been blogging in awhile.

More to come soon. Stay tuned.

-Jonathan