Dave Kellam

Queen’s has given me another piece of paper today, this one entitles me to one (1) Bachelor of Education. It also entitles me to expound at great lengths on various subjects and pretend that I actually know what I’m talking about. Here’s the photo-set on flickr.

Overall, the education ceremony felt smaller and lighter than the science/computing ceremony last year. That said, I prefered the speakers last year. Karen Hitchcock’s speech was pretty dry and uninspiring; there was nothing that directly applied to our faculty and it was likely the same one she was going to read to the engineers later in the day. As far as the honourary doctorate goes, I still give top honours to Maria Klawe last year, her talk would have been more relevant to the crop of educators than someone prattling on about how little respect the art of dance gets in Canada.

I’m not likely to go into teaching right away, but I will probably be working in the education field. Currently, I’m working with one of my former professors to develop an online resource-centre/community for computer science teachers. It’s developing nicely and we should have a functional prototype fairly soon. Beyond that, I’ve been reading, working on various projects and trying to decompress.

Here are the current all time record box-office opening weekends (the Star Wars III numbers are an estimate, but not far off).

Is it surprising that Star Wars had a great opening weekend? No, not at all considering it’s supposedly going to be the last one ever made (it probably helps that the movie is good this time around too). What surprises me is that percentage of total number– it’s at 68.5%. Nothing else in that list comes anywhere close. Everyone was watching Star Wars, talk about a cultural event.

It appears this month’s meme craze is passing a musical baton, Brandon sent it my way. So, here we go:

Total music files residing on my computer: 3397 songs totalling 16.66GB (Some weird trend going on with the sixes).

Last CD I bought: It’s been a little while, but I think it was two Ted Leo albums — Shake the Sheets and Hearts of Oak.

Song playing right now: “Staring at the Sun” by TV on the Radio

Five songs I listen to a lot / mean alot to me:

* “When I Come Around” by Green Day
* “Da Mystery of Chessboxin” by Wu-Tang Clan
* “Blimps Go 90” by Guided by Voices
* “No One Like You” by Scorpions
* “How Many Cans?” by Soul Coughing

Four or Five People I’m Passing The Buck Baton To: Tavis, Riz , Marc, Richard, Freeman.

That’s it, to those who’ve been tagged, enjoy. If you’re interested in my current listening habits, try my audioscrobbler stats.

The essay Piracy is good? explores the Battlestar Galactica phenomenon and makes a case that it has essentially destroyed the broadcast television model. The television series has been incredibly popular and has been the SciFi network’s most successful show. That’s not really cause for concern, it’s a pretty good show, the issue is how it became popular.

All 13 episodes aired on SkyOne, the BBC affiliate that partnered with SciFi to produced the show, back in October last year. Within hours, each episode made it onto the internet and into the hands of eager fans around the world, mostly through Bittorrent distribution channels. This generated a word-0f-mouth buzz that induced a lot of people to watch the US premier in January and tune-in to subsequent episodes. So, it’s an interesting new way to test out the market for a television show but it’s not really the most effective way to generate revenue for your station (who wants to download a show with commercials?).

Towards the end of the article, Mark points out that all of the ripped episodes from SkyOne had the broadcaster’s logo overlaid on the screen at all times, fairly common practice these days. That screen realestate can be ignored for the most part, but it is a constant reminder about whatever’s there. It could provide an effective means of advertising in the future, a sort of picture-in-picture thing.

Persistent advertising is nothing new, they’ve been doing it in soccer for years (unlike hockey and baskeyball, they don’t stop the clock and provide commercial time). It’s not the worst thing in the world and short of pirates blurring or blanking out the ad, you can’t really remove it from the content. In my mind it’s a step above product placement shills.

I’ve seen Battlestar Galactica, it’s damn good. Which model did I use for watching the show? The SkyOne rips of course ( I live in Canada and don’t get SciFi, so they were the next best thing). That said, the audio was pretty hollow and I can’t wait a better copy. I’d recommend the show to anyone who likes scifi, I’ll be buying it when it hits dvd. The first season is currently airing in the US. If you find yourself in my situation and already watched all the episodes, check out the production blog for some clues to where they’re headed.

Update: Part two of the article is available

So, Getting Things Done appears to be all the rage these days. One of the organizational elements being pimped by the cult is the hipster pda. I haven’t read GTD or totally applied the system, but I’ve found it to be an effective organizer/notetaker/todolist. It also seems to be a good cat toy.

That’s right, a bunch of 3×5 index cards held together with an art-clip can provide hours of fun for the feline kind. Alanah’s cat, was on one of her nightly psychotic benders and got ahold of one of the hipster pdas I had kicking around. She proceed to spend at least 10 minutes wrestling with it (not bad considering her normal attention span is closer to 10 seconds). We had the presence of mind to grab a camera and encourage her behaviour. Here’s a photoset.

Update: Another photo of a cat with a hipster pda in its clutches. Hmm, I’m starting to wonder.

The upgrade to WordPress 1.5.1 was pretty smooth, but I think that my pingbacks might be borked (no one will notice or care, but it’s like personal ego stroking). Other people seem to be having similar problems (bug report).

As far as I know, there are no obvious problems, other than ones that have been around for a long time. There might be some problems with the feeds, but I’m running them all through feedburner now, so hopefully it won’t matter. I think the site will work better in older browsers now (in a lot of them, it was wanting to download a php file).

Update: I don’t think the pings have been working since Dreamhost disallowed fopen.

Update 2: They weren’t working but might be now. The problem may lie with other people’s installations, just realized my test site was still using 1.5 (which is broken).

Alanah and I picked up a copy of Lego Star Wars last night. It’s a lot of fun (in a big dopey shattering-Lego-pieces kind of way) and totally geared towards young children playing with their nerdy Star Wars parents. Tandem gameplay is setup well, with the ability for a second character to drop in and out.

If you’re looking for super complicated, insane, graphically eye-popping whatever, you can probably find something better. If you’ve been playing various arcade and console emulators and like mindless repetitive gameplay, I highly recommend it.

More reviews.

Hi, welcome to eightface.com (or not if you’re a feed junkie), I’ve been doing this for awhile now. About half a decade, that’s a long time in dog years. If you’re pissy and want to get technical (ie. whois LOLZ!!1!), eightface.com has only existed since August 16, 2000, but the weblog has been going strong since May 9th, 2000.

Around that time I discovered Blogger and thought it was man’s greatest creation since the waffle iron. Until that point I had been updating various versions of my sites through the wonderful ftp process. In hindsight, I could have used a shell account, but they were only available on more expensive hosting plans back in the day.

FTP is great, but was hard to update from someone else’s machine because no one usually had a client installed. Blogger meant I had a nice easy-to-use web interface that I could login to from anywhere. Somewhere along the lines, there was a period of instability for Pyra and Blogger, so I felt the need to host the database in my server space, with my own content management system. I started using Movable Type in March 2002. And continued to use it for a number of years, before switching to WordPress in January of this year.

If you’re still with me, we can even dig through the archives: May 2005, May 2004, May 2003, May 2002, May 2001, May 2000.

It’s been awhile. I started it at the end of high-school, I’m now about to graduate from university for the second time. It’s a different world, both on the web and off. No one had link blogs, every weblog used to be a bunch of quick one-off links and a paragraph or so describing what was going on. But posts started getting longer as people started becoming more comfortable and perhaps more eloquent. We never used to have a title field for posts. Back then, Bush and Iraq were so 10 years ago. This post is now almost over and I may attempt to wait another 5 years before writing such lengthy and self-indulgent filth.

That’s about it. Except for the incredibly self-indulgent part — the pimping of some recent additions to the weblog:

• Turning my degree into a paper airplane
• iPod Possum
• Dissecting Queen’s Alumni Spam pt I
• Dissecting Queen’s Alumni Spam pt II
• Links, Template Land and Personal Design
• Making an infrared webcam
• Buy my stupid t-shirt!

Now it’s over.

As Gregory pointed out, there’s not really an easy way to figure out your Flickr user id number. The only thing you can really do is take a look at the source of your photostream and pick the id out of the RSS feed address.

To remedy the situation I threw together Flickr idGetter, a little page that finds the user id for you. It essentially does the same thing you would, grabs the page, looks at the source and finds your id.

And you wonder why everyone gets so many parking tickets around here. I guess it’s how the city makes money.

Finally got around to seeing Sin City a couple of days ago after a number of aborted attempts. It seemed like time conspired against any attempts to actually get out to a movie theatre. I won’t make this long because there are tons of other reviews you could read at this point. I’ll say that stylistically it’s pretty amazing and definitely worth checking out in the theatre before it goes away. It’s also worth it to see Elijah Wood in an incredibly creepy post-Hobbit role.

My only complaint would be that the dialogue was a tad on the stilted side, then again, it reflected the comic book style. If I had to complain about something else, I’d say that it took me awhile to figure out what the hell was going on in the film.

Time for another installment of ripping apart email from my favourite university, in partial service to those not fortunate enough to be part of the alumni listserv. In case you missed the first installment, it was taking a look at Karen Hitchcock’s plea for support Bob Rae’s super report.

This time around, Hitchcock’s name isn’t directly attached, so the blame cannot be placed on her shoulders alone. That said, it doesn’t do anything to improve the perceptions of a ‘country club’ attitude at the university. Here’s is the latest email in it’s entirety:

Dear Mr Kellam,

Spoil yourself with unforgettable golf. Through Queen’s University’s newest affinity partner, International Club Network, you have the opportunity to experience incredible benefits and savings at over 100 exceptional golf courses across Canada and the US. For a special Queen’s alumni price of only $99 per year (regularly $275), you receive one complimentary round of golf, 20% unrestricted savings on green fees and carts and much more at courses like Taboo, Angus Glen, The Marshes, Le Geant, Westwood Plateau and Wolf Creek!

You also have the chance to win a brand new set of Ben Hogan golf clubs and bag, one of 5 golf memberships or one of 10 dozen golf balls.

Click here for more information and to enter the “Tee Off & Win” contest.

I’m not going to bother with a rigorous dissection of this one, I’ll leave it as an exercise for the clever reader.