Dave Kellam

Last week was reading week, I was in Kingston for most of it pretending to read. I managed to get a chunk of reading and work done, but didn’t feel like I accomplished much. I was planning on getting more programming done on my 499 project than I did, but it’s not the end of the world. I managed to get a pretty good feel for the game-logic. I needed some relaxation time, these next couple of weeks are probably going to be on the hellish side.

I went down to Missassauga towards the end of the week and stayed with Alanah for a couple of days. Did a detour down to Burlington and visited with most of my relatives, who I hadn’t seen in two or three years. I picked up a couple of cheap cds while I was down there, including: The Darkness – Permission to Land, The Darkness – Christmas Time (Don’t let the Bells End), Mars Volta – De-Loused in the Comatorium and Nas – Illmatic. I can also recommend the movie Formula 51 if you want a really oddball mix of comedy, including Samuel L. Jackson wearing a kilt for no reason. I also saw Underworld, which is a shite Matrix rip-off with some vampires and werewolves.

On the newspaper side of things, it was a fun night last night. We took over the journal house to do a parody issue, which should go over well tomorrow. I ended up getting home around 7 in the morning, there was just a bunch of a nitpicky stuff that held us up. That said, it looks a lit more convincing than other years (yea official templates).

I’m impressed that this sentence was published:

This suggests that without human evolutionary pressure, the singing dog lost its ability to read human minds.

That’s how the article ends. That’s all reporters do to spin stories though, take a quote out of context and run with it.

Here’s an article on the the design and implementation of the TiVo remote control. I find it amusing because this was essentially the project I had to do for my human-computer interaction class last year. We were essentially told to redesign television — to come up with some sort of system, be it redesign remote, settop box, whatever.

My group came up with a remote that had a little screen on it, kind of like a pda, that could receive data about whatever channel you were on or channel that you’d like to be on. It was essentially taking one of the preview type channels and putting it onto the remote, so you could continue watching your show and browse at the same time. The biggest problem would have been cost. The other thing that we came up with was a page button, something all remotes should have, so you can page your remote when you lose it.

I was about to click away from this relatively boring article about the US debt being over $7 trillion dollars when I notice the ad on the page. The ad is for some sort of credit card/debt reduction thing. It’s too bad there wasn’t an option in the selection box that said “sluggish economy, security and defense.” I guess it’s irony or comedy or whatever you want to call it. Regardless, it amused me. Oh, the US debt is also at $7 trillion, that’s a lot of money. Now, it’s all imaginary money, but it’s still a lot.

I’ve been sifting through some of my older stuff lately and trying to get more things onto the site. I remembered the design community we had at suffocate.org. The site died, but we had a semi-active mailing list for awhile. Cedric Dewulf paid for the hosting and stopped doing so at some point a year or two ago. I hadn’t backed up the third version of conform (old backups: v1, v2). Whoever owned the domain (i think it was nick) also let it go. It was a lot of fun. I’ve been planning on getting conform back up for awhile (I almost did last summer), but never got around to it. That’s on tap for the near future, although there’s a fair bit of school work left to do. If anyone knows how to get in touch with Cedric let me know, or any of the crew. It would be nice to know what people are up to now.

Some notes: an old article I just found about suffocate, old shift.jp issue, conform was coolstop site of the day in august 2000, suffocate in march i think.

Had a good day yesterday; ventured downtown and spent plenty of time browsing the bookshelves at indigo and the liquor shelves at the liquor store. I stopped by Dave’s place and bounced around some ideas about creating a media/recording company. My purchases from the bookstore included a cheap copy of The Hacker Ethic (hardcover with cool minimalist binding), a copy of Frank magazine, and some things for Alanah. The liquor store presented me with a couple bottles of wine, both from the Rhone Valley in France. I did a short exchange there when I was younger and liked the wine from around there.

After that was food shopping and cooking. Alanah came over, we had some wine and cheeses, then we cooked up a couple of steaks, some crazy potatoes and onions (with lemon, butter and brown sugar), a tomato and mozzarella salad type thing and some garlic bread. Ate with candles burning, sat around drinking wine and talking. She gave me a copy of Pattern Recognition, Talkie Walkie, some chocolate covered coffee beans and some Glenfiddich. All in all, a great night.

I’ve been doing some updates to the writing section as well. A good chunk of the things I’ve written for the paper this year are online (and by that I mean the eds).

Atom is a new specification standard for regularly published content. Ranchero has a beta version of NetNewsWire available that supports the feeds. I also put an atom feed up, there already was an rss 1.0 feed.

I remember hearing about this book on weblogs when it came out, but forgot about it. Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing) relicensed the book and is offering copies for free. I just started reading a copy on the palm.

My Zire has meant more reading for me this year. I’ve been through the five books in the hitcherhiker’s trilogy by Douglas Adams and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It’s mainly because I tend to have the palm around with me a lot; whenever I goto meetings or have my schoolbag with me. If I have to wait for something and get bored, I can pick up a book easily. Also, professor’s don’t mind you tapping away on a palm, they don’t seem to like people flipping through novels though.

Update: Doctorow’s second book is also available for download online.

I’ve done a bunch of a backend work and integrated the sidebar/quicklinks into the main block of posts rather than on the sidebar. It’s only on the main page, the archives will stay as they are, although I’ll make quicklink archives available. I spent some time over the last month or two overhauling how the quicklinks they were entered into moveable type, meaning I went through post by post to change them to a nicer format.

It involved a bit of work and a couple of mt plugins, but the integration wasn’t that hard. Here’s a good tutorial on how to do it, although it won’t give the setup I have. I did some tweaking and put the links at the bottom of the day’s posts rather than the top.

Omar has achieved victory. Global domination will commence shortly.

I took this BBC psych test (via tavis) where you’re supposed to identify whether smiles are genuine or not. I concur with his hypothesis that british people are ugly. I ended up scoring a 19/20, whoo.

I was playing around with photoshop this afternoon and made this graphic (small), it’s nice and colourful. It’s basically just laying a bunch of gradients on top of each with some layer effects.