YouTube Wednesday

First:

We’ve all seen the pictures, and we probably all understand on some level exactly how hard this was to accomplish, but check this: real time, showing altitude and airspeed, with the various radio calls (be sure to put it on HD mode and blow it up so you can read the CVR transcript), along with the attitude and position of the plane during the whole flight. Six minutes is a lot less time. My admiration for that flight crew continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

Second is this. It is a collection of movies of dogs welcoming their owners home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Anybody who owns a dog will probably get a little weepy.

Service notice

I have migrated all of the Flickr content off of that service and on to SmugMug. I think this is going to make us all much happier. (Summary: SmugMug is a photo hosting site with some collaboration and Web 2.0 services grafted on to it. Flickr is a Web 2.0 site with some photo hosting grafted on to it. This isn’t really a fair comparison, but it’ll have to do until I have a chance to quantify what, exactly, it is that I like so much about SmugMug.)

Thought for the day

The complaints of the major broadcasting and media companies regarding the long-term viability of local television would be a lot more believable — and easier to support — if CanWest Global hadn’t just recently tried to kill off a local TV station (which now has its own logo on the campaign page).

I am agnostic on this issue, since I can find plenty of people to dislike on the other side. It would be easy to say that, given the CRTC’s historical position on fee-for-carriage (oppose) that if you’re satisfied with the status quo you might find yourself on the same side as the cable companies — but then you look at what you pay for cable service, and how much you’re getting in return, and realize that maybe you’re just going to stop paying attention altogether.

This might be the first time I’ve seen people get this worked up over a proposed CRTC decision since the blank media levy was introduced in 1997…

Thanksgiving Quick Hits

Whatever you do, don’t panic: The drama of a call to the emergency services. Transcripts and audio recordings of calls to 999 in the United Kingdom. Interesting for lay readers because most people never actually hear what these sound like; interesting for my colleagues because the PDI is basically the same and, modulo the accents, the calls themselves are basically the same, too.
Principles of the American cargo cult: “I wrote these principles after reflecting on the content of contemporary newspapers and broadcast media and why that content disquieted me. I saw that I was not disturbed so much by what was written or said as I was by what is not. The tacit assumptions underlying most popular content reflect a worldview that is orthogonal to reality in many ways. By reflecting this skewed weltanschauung, the media reinforces and propagates it. I call this worldview the American Cargo Cult, after the real New Guinea cargo cults that arose after the second world war. There are four main points, each of which has several elaborating assumptions. I really do think that most Americans believe these things at a deep level, and that these misbeliefs constantly underlie bad arguments in public debate.”
LaCie imaKey USB flash drive: WANT.
The Toaster Project: “I’m Thomas Thwaites and I’m trying to build a toaster, from scratch – beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99. A toaster.” Take that, localvores!
Shawn Colvin: Born to be telling her story. Strikingly interesting interview with one of my favorite artists about one of my very favorite albums.
Because it’s on TV tonight, and because this is one of my favorite pieces of fan-created SF tie-ins: The Endor Holocaust. Knowing this totally changes the way you watch Return of the Jedi. See also these guys for more ways to kill beloved childhood popular culture memories.

City of blinding lights

Back from Tokyo yesterday afternoon, after a whirlwind 4 day stay in Japan. Why? Because it was days off, that’s why. It was a fantastic trip overall, reminding me of how much I love Japan — but I do think, in all honesty, that four days is about all I can take of Tokyo. I remember last time I was there I felt this mixed sense of relief at leaving; Tokyo, for all of its charms and its advantages as a city, remains the biggest city on the planet with almost as many people in it as live in my entire country, and so it’s probably not surprising that (a) you are almost always swimming against a current of people moving in the opposite direction and (b) the only time you can really feel alone is at 4:00 when you’re up with jet lag.

A more complete description of the trip — sumo, sushi breakfast, Jodo Shinshu services entirely in Japanese — will come later. Meanwhile, this is a placeholder and pointer to the quick and dirty Flickr photo set I’ve thrown up with my favorite pictures from the trip.

Also:

This was the craziest sumo matchup I’ve seen in a long time.

For old time's sake

I unsubscribed from a bunch of mailing lists I don’t read anymore in an attempt to cut down on the amount of e-mail I need to deal with on a day-to-day basis. One of them was still managed not by mailman (the evilness of which is self-evident even to casual observers), not by Majordomo (“most recent version is dated January 2000”), but by LISTSERV. Which is something, in this day and age; you don’t see that very often.

LISTSERV has a whole host of weird behaviors that, even back in the day, seemed oddly quaint; now, they’re just bizarre. (It always felt to me like it was written by and for people who thought JCL and its ilk were the pinnacle of human-computer interaction. For all I know, this may actually be true — but whatever.) I had, however, forgotten about this little gem, tacked on to the end of my “SIGNOFF” request:

Summary of resource utilization
-------------------------------
 CPU time:        0.010 sec                Device I/O:        0
 Overhead CPU:    0.004 sec                Paging I/O:        0
 CPU model:         8-CPU 1.6GHz Xeon (1M)

It warms my heart to think that somewhere on the Internet, someone still cares about overhead and process accounting for e-mail.

This oughta be fun

My Blackberry went for a bit of a swim — well, more like a wading session — early this morning when I tried to answer it but knocked it into a glass of water. It worked fine when I talked on it (“I’m sorry, you sound all garbled and confused!” “That’s because I’ve been asleep for two hours!”), but the keyboard is, as would be typical with any electronic device like this, kind of… non-compliant. So it is now sitting on my balcony, in the sunshine, in a plastic bag full of rice, my stash of dessicant packs apparently having been lost in the recent move.

We’ll see how this works. We’re scheduled to go away for the weekend, and leaving my phone at home unplugged in a bag of rice might be a therapeutic thing for me; I’m not sure. Unplugging is a strange thing when I do it during travel; it’s doubly strange when you’re nominally at home.

The Jerry Maguire moment

The low-rent version, anyway.

I’m wrestling with a bunch of ideas right now. They seem incredibly important; they possess a kind of urgency to them, like I want to vomit them out onto someone’s shoes. That won’t work, though — obviously if I’m going to convince anyone, it wouldn’t do to have to give them a towel to clean up after me. Unfortunately, these ideas are only half-formed. So I’m trying to bring some semblance of order to my thoughts on the issue of organizational health and development. I’m not naming names, though anyone who knows me knows perfectly well what I’m talking about.

Skip this unless you want to hear my incomplete hack theories that would probably get me laughed out of any third-rate B-school. I’m serious. Buzz off.

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Motivational speech

I wanted to break this point out from the last post, because it doesn’t really have anything to do with my own personal history. Well, it sort of does, in the sense that my mother worked for the CPR for a lot of years and I grew up as a railway kid, and the railway looms large in the minds of a lot of people on the prairies. So I feel a kind of ownership of the CPR, and its various assets, including those that have been divested — Fairmont, I’m looking at you and your hotel properties — but this isn’t about that odd sensation.

The Glenbow Museum is currently hosting an exhibition called “Vistas: Artists on the Canadian Pacific Railway.” I’ll let them describe it, since they’re better at this sort of thing than I am:

In 1871, with a vision of a new nation spanning the continent, Sir John A. Macdonald promised a railway link to the Pacific Ocean if British Columbia joined Confederation.

Glenbow’s Vistas: Artists on the Canadian Pacific Railway features works by 20 artists who travelled west, courtesy of the CPR and William Van Horne. These remarkable artists captured images of the prairie and the mountains, incorporating them into Canada’s emerging national identity.

It is a spectacularly good exhibit. The CPR encouraged and paid for artists to travel with them as the railway was being built, and although a lot of it is quintessentially Canadian frontier stuff, it’s really really well done Canadian frontier stuff. We forget how important rail links were in bringing this country together, and this is the visual story of an age that we’ll probably never see again in our lifetimes.

I was particularly taken with the work of William McFarlane Notman, who was one of the only photographers who showed up in the entire exhibit. The quality is breathtaking. The fact that he was working with 30×40 view cameras probably didn’t hurt matters much. (The above link goes to his collected works, not the work in the exhibit.)

Here's where the story ends

We need big change to provoke consideration in our lives. My grandmother, my mom’s mom, died 5 July, and the other week I was in Calgary for the funeral, to deliver the eulogy and, though I didn’t know it, take some kind of stock of my life.

The whole thing had a very strange Grosse Point Blank-ish feel to it. I arrived on the coast, more or less fully formed, and that was that; the majority of my friends went years before they ever met anyone else from my family, and my day-to-day life is made up more or less entirely of people that I have chosen; no one is in it simply because they “need” to be, or because they “should” be. Coupland once said that families were God’s way of making you hang out with people you hated, but felt guilty about hating; this is a good approximation of how I feel about them in general, and it would seem that I managed my life so as to minimize the guilt.

I’d been back to Calgary before, of course. But this was the first time things felt manifestly different. I was acutely aware, for the first time, that I don’t live there anymore – “well, doy,” you say, “of course you don’t live there.” That’s not what I mean. I mean that it’s very clearly not my city anymore. It’s not my parents’ house anymore, either – sure, they still live there and stuff, but the landscaping has been redone, the windows have changed, and I spent three nights sleeping on a couch in the same room where S. first told me she loved me. And all around this house were things that I knew, fragments of my childhood, and it was all I could do to remind myself that these were a part of my past – because they didn’t feel like they were a part of it. It’s not a past I conceptually think of on a day-to-day basis.