Sparticus

I'm getting really tired of privacy issues on the internet. Being in a position where I may one day be working with minors I hear a great deal of conflicting instructions, but the one I am going to talk about is the issue of being somebody.

We talk a lot in the Education Department about being a person, being relatable, being careful, being conservative, being experimental, being professional, being ourselves, and so on. So, where does that put me? Am I supposed to be careful of every little thing that I post on the internet? I haven't got any posts of illegal drug use, pornography, hate crimes (at least I don't think my "People I Hate" segments are considered hate crimes) or illegal activity (someone took down the picture of us walking left out of a parking lot that had a Right Turn Only sign), so what's the big deal? Sure, I drink and I swear and I make the occasional wild accusation, but the people that don't do that kind of stuff are the people who hide the fact that they do. So, should I join the conservatives and the cowards and try and erase my existence on the internet? I have two problems with that.
1) I'm not that good at the internet. It'd be like trying to clean up an oil spill with my bare hands.
2) Fuck that!
Why should I spend the time and effort to make myself digitally invisible? Why should the only information be an e-portfolio? Should I make all of my friends and colleagues sign confidentiality agreements before I act like myself? If we're going to let our potential employers dictate how we act, then we let them dictate who we are. And if we all tried to present ourselves as hard working, innovative, creative, involved cardboard cutouts, then future employers will just have to dig deeper to find out who you really are.

Many of you may already know my opinions on public and even private surveillance, but for those of you who don't, here's the truth: we all do things we wouldn't want other people to see. We all do things that we think separate us from everyone else. But, when everyone is doing something wrong, who's to say that it is wrong? If we were all seen as ourselves, then all the 'unacceptable' things that we do would be entirely normal.

So wouldn't it be great if we all let ourselves be who we are? What are our future employers going to do? Not hire anyone? The problem is, "I am Sparticus" doesn't work in this case when some people don't participate. Those people are fake. But maybe that's what you have to do to play the game.

A limited access to the internet

I would blog more if I could blog from anywhere. It seems like 140 characters is too short for a complex thought, but sometimes I have complex thoughts while I'm at work (sometimes). I think it feels weird to write a blog post on a piece of paper and then transcribe it to the internet later. It kind of loses the point of what most blogs are about: venting on the internet.

I don't think I'm alone on this, but I feel like the future isn't coming fast enough. There hasn't been a scientific development where our generation has been able to say "no fucking way!" Maybe we're spoilt, and when something comes up like a touch screen handheld media player that can access an entire world of information from satellites we only think "hey, neat" or "if I don't have that I will be unpopular." Sometimes, I'll admit, we can really sit down and be wowed by the world we live in, but for the most part, where the fuck is my reliable voice-to-text app that will let me remotely update my blog from my lunchtime musings? Or a printer that can withstand more than the movement of it's own printer head without breaking, for that matter.

Geothermal Power

It occurred to me in the cold heights of my bathroom (where someone saw fit to leave the window open throughout a snowstorm) that geothermal power is a really, really, really, dumb idea.

"B-but it doesn't create any pollutants! It's natural! It's eco-friendly, man," one might retort.

Those are all good points. Except the last one. The last one is as short sighted as many eco-geeks are. I will now guide you through the reasoning why making ventures in geothermal power is a bad fucking idea.

1. The Earth was created well over 4 billion years ago. (Argue. I dare you.)
2. When the Earth was created, it was very rather warm.
3. The Earth today is rather cool in comparison, however the centre is still molten hot.
4. The molten hot centre is made of iron which, while moving, creates a magnetic field.
5. This magnetic field shields the Earth from many of the Sun's rays that are harmful to living things both directly and indirectly.
6. Recall the previous data: Earth was hot, but cooled. The centre of the Earth is hot. If we extrapolate this data we can predict that the centre of the Earth will cool.
7. Recall point 4. If the centre of the Earth cools, it stops being molten. If it stops being molten, it stops moving. If it stops moving, it stops creating a magnetic field.
8. Recall point 5. If there is no protective magnetic field around the Earth, then the harmful rays from the Sun will reach the surface.
9. This is the most important point. You and the majority of the living things you want to be eco-friendly towards live on the surface of the Earth.

So tell me, why exactly do we think it's a good idea to punch holes into the surface of the Earth and vent out all the heat? Because it's such a huge source of energy that we'll never use it all? Yeah, you said that about fossil fuels.

Big Brother Needs To Get To Work

I'm sick of this shit, guys. People can trace my IP, copy my debit card, and find my name, address, and phone number all without any trouble. The police have me on record for my heinous exiting my old high school after lunch break. The system has a credit history on me a mile long (that's the system, not just the bank). I have folders in different medical facilities that contain my medical history and information. But despite all this, Alberta Education doesn't have my grades.

I've got an Alberta Education number! I've taken my tests and I was assured that they were taken to our provincial capital for review. I attended a university inside the province. On top of that, I sent all of my information to Mount Royal the first time I applied! So here is my question:
Why is it so goddamn hard for post-secondary institutions to just look up all my information their goddamn selves?

My argument can be broken down into three simple arguments:

1. My information exists somewhere. Just link it all to my Alberta Education number. I can get all my transcripts sent anywhere I want from that anyway (it just costs me money)
2. Everyone else has me on file in some way. Safeway keeps track of how many bags of corn chips I eat per week, and the government can't keep track of sum of my educational achievement expressed simply as single page of grades?
3. a) How can an accredited institution such as MRU or UofC not be trusted with access to view my grades, and b) even if they can't be trusted, what malicious acts could they commit with knowing numbers of things that I did once? What? Are they going to feloniously report my aptitude?
4. (Bonus argument) They don't even accept a transcript that I give them! They need to get the information directly from my previous post-secondary institution- correction: They need to get me to get them the information directly from my previous post-secondary institution.

In conclusion, I'm sick of educational institutions that clearly recognize each other who refuse to communicate with each other independently. It's as if they make all the hoop jumping mandatory to prove that you're devoted to going to school. As if the application fees aren't enough to prove we're serious, we've also done post-secondary before and aren't shitheads fresh out of high school, but we're still harassed the most.

Thanks for making my continued education easier, Alberta. I'll be sure to try to find work in BC.

Eraser

There are three points about this film that I would like to address.

1. "That place is like a fortress."
I never realized how much of a movie staple that is until tonight. But what's interesting is why we find it interesting. Is breaking into places we shouldn't be allowed a fantasy that we enjoy vicariously through the cinema? Maybe it's the repressed anger we feel about sticking it to our former employers, because, isn't that always the case?

2. The Railgun
Obvious physics problems aside, I don't understand why Arnie didn't use the guns the way they were meant to. They have x-ray scopes (despite x-rays not working like that) and could shoot through almost anything at nearly the speed of light. Arnie downs to guys in a warehouse and, rather than staying inside the warehouse where normal bullets couldn't hit him and shooting all the bad guys with the assisted heart-seeking x-ray scope, he walks out and shoots everybody with two railguns. He would have killed just as many, if not more, people if he had been using normal machine guns; probably would have done less damage to cousin Tony's docks, too.

3. Train Operators
They are people! I think movies really tend to forget this. For those of you who haven't seen Eraser, SPOILER ALERT, the bad guys die in the end. Arnie locks them in their limo and it gets hit by a train. Wonderful. But does anyone think about the guy who operates the train? No. Nobody does. This poor fellow is just driving a train through town assuming that when the gates come down on the road the path will be clear. But today the path wasn't clear. Today there was a limo on it. The engineer blows the horn and puts on full brakes, but it's too late. The point of no return has been crossed. The train obliterates the limo and although there will always be thoughts of "that was awesome," surely the engineer must be hoping that no one is inside.

"They had to catch a train," Arnie quips before he vacates the scene.

The train finally grinds to a halt. The engineer has already reported the incident. A dozen emergency vehicles drive down the gravel lined railway, hundreds of metres from the initial collision. They manoeuvrer slowly around the wreckage keeping a close eye out for bodies.

The engineer is questioned; detained even. The bombardment of questions fail to penetrate the guilt-wrought conscience of the engineer; only causing noise and distortion, like rain in an ocean.

"I could have stopped sooner. They might have made it..."

The death of three men lies solely on the conscience of the train engineer. An honest life forever stained, a soul tortured.Four men's lives were lost on that day.

The Ironing

I recently wrote a blog post about stealing and being a bad person.

The night that I wrote that I had a thousand dollars stolen from my bank account.

Dear Playstation

I'm sorry that I was so prejudicial towards you in the past. We haven't always gotten along and I know that is mostly my fault. The truth of the matter is you are the most awesome thing in the entire world and I've had more fun with you than I have on just about any other game system.

Your sleek new design, albeit inconvenient, demands well deserved attention. You don't stand upright and you negate the ability to pile anything on top of you; you have forced me to rearrange my desk and use a large portion of it simply to have you, but you are worth it.

PS3, you do not look better than my 360. You don't have the classics of the Wii. You will not play the PS2 games of many years' past. Your controller design is unchanged from an imperfect design. Why do I love you, you ask?

Free downloadable demos.

I was never the kind of guy who downloaded demos for my PC, but this is because my PC is used for so many other things. It has videos and word processors and design programs and entire games loaded on to it that never look as good as they could and play rather choppily. For a machine that cost two grand, my computer started to suck awfully fast.

But you, Playstation, are, by definition, designed for playing. And so I play. Some of your demos are not fun at all (Condemned 2, although scary, was hard to control and all too easy to get killed by something you couldn't see. Maybe your demo shouldn't be the level where your character is drunk. Maybe I just think 1st person shooters are lame). Some of your demos are so fun that I want to buy them when I otherwise would not (X-Men Origins was beyond fun, Wet was surprisingly entertaining, Conan is a $14.99 discount buy). This last point is the most brilliant marketing strategy ever, especially for a more consumer conscious culture.

I don't want to take a $70 risk on a game that I don't know that I will like. If I were to buy Conan at its opening price, I would be disappointed and be less likely to buy a new game before I let it become preowned and dropped in a discount bin, or if it was a good game, wrapped in a "classics" package 3 years later. I would not buy X-Men, but now probably will. I would not even consider Wet, though now I will shop around for it. And I wouldn't have bought these demos if they hadn't been free, either.

This is why I love you, Playstation. I love you in the worst way. You make me want to spend money on things you've shown me I will enjoy, and I thank you for it. I see the marketing plan and I don't fall victim to it, I support it.



Thank you to those of you who made me buy one.

Mankind: A Million Years of Luck and Survival by Fisher Price

So, my younger brother is having a baby. We've been doing renovations and decking out the house with stuff and places for the baby. While I was at the grocery store my mom pointed out how gigantic the baby stuff section is. It covers 80% of the wall, two aisles thick.

My first thought here was, "how the fuck did mankind ever survive without all this crap?" What did we do before $30 baby pillows and $40 baby outfits and $60 baby toys and $300 baby boxes?

$300?! For a baby box?

For those of you who are unfamiliar with what I'm talking about, break it down a minute.

It's a box. A box that you put your baby in. You slept in one, I slept in one. I think they call them cribs, but I'm pretty sure that's what gangstas call houses. And they seem to cost just as much. It's like a scale version of a house with equally scaled cost, only you don't get a yard or bathrooms or outlets because your baby isn't an equally scaled version of a person.

My point is that for $300 I'm going to make my own fucking baby crate! I don't remember the one I grew up in and neither do you. And if you do, you certainly didn't care that it was $300.

I think a lot of people scoff at the cheapness of that plan, as if it were unthinkable that someone would put a baby in a non-professionally handcrafted wooden cage. Perhaps the precision engineering yields to the child superior growth and mental ability. Perhaps its finely tuned aesthetic design that has been passed down for generations soothes the child into a more restful state. Perhaps they imbue the very materials with ancient magicks in the factory which can never be replicated. Or perhaps it's just an overpriced box that you keep your kid in until you have to throw it out because your kid needs a bed in a few years.

Hats

I wanted to get a picture for you, but I took a picture of the girl by the ghost stairs instead. Then the guys actually accused me of taking a picture of them. Them, whom this post is about, were sterling examples of how and how not to wear a hat.

The man closest to me chose to wear the hat on his head in the traditional manner. The man to his right chose to wear the hat 4 inches above his head in what may be an 'I don't care what you think' fashion which, in my opinion, conveys strong the message of 'I'm a twat.'

Once I figure out how to send myself pictures (and if it is covered in my contract*) I will upload the ghost stairs picture.


*When attempting to send picture my phone asks me to register. The message is as follows:

If your account is unused for 30 days, Bell Mobility may delete images stored using this service. By sending this message you agree to the

• Accept
• Decline

Agree to the.... agree to the.... Maybe I'll hold off on sending pictures.

I can't believe NBC told me this

Okay, the jist of this one is the folks down at Berkeley have made a data storage system that can hold 250 DVDs worth of information on a quarter sized device.

I'm going to make this short, because no one likes to read a lot: go Future 2!

I hate when technological advancement is "we made it 6% better!"

A Not-So Quickie

What happened to dials? My folks just bought a new stove and I feel like a 90 year old man. I swore at this machine for a half an hour.

My kitchen has a window. From this window comes sunlight. Sunlight starts in the morning. In the morning, I like to eat scrambled eggs. Scrambled eggs are best cooked on the stove. The stove is in my kitchen. For decades, this circle has gone uninterrupted. Then LG had the brilliant idea of adding a digital interface for hip young couples.

Now, LG doesn't want you to see it in this tiny picture, but it was the biggest I could find (good advertising. It's the goddamn future. I want to inspect this product from the picture, not get an idea that, yes, it is a stove that is white...ish). Okay, so the 5 black squares on the left are LED numbers that give you a digital reading of 0.0 to Hi. To select "Hi", you hit the ON/OFF button and the up arrow beside it. To ensure you are on the "Hi" setting, cup your hand over the LED screen and lean over the hot element to make the LED visible in the light. To select a level of 2.5, an appropriate egg temperature, I think, hit the ON/OFF button, then the up arrow, then the down arrow about 15 times until you think the LED reads 2.5. Remember to cover the LED with your hand to read it.

I think that you could turn it on and hit down to start at what I assume would be "Lo," but I'd still have to hit up ten times to get to 5.

How is this easy?! There was a time when you could simply turn a dial to half and it would be at half. I don't think anyone was confused by it, or broke it, or did not trust the accuracy of the dial.

In short, fuck you LG, for trying to make a futuristic stove. Don't fuck up what ain't broke.


Now for the lesson. There are some things that buttons are better for and some things that dials are better for.

For example: a car that has an ignition button is pretty cool. Yes, by turning your key in different directions or to different degrees, you can perform different actions. These actions are not common and I have seen their functions replaced. My mom's new van, for example. If you want to listen to the rest of a song on the radio, but don't want to keep the car running, you simply turn off the car. The radio remains playing until you open the door to get out. Thus, you always get to listen to the rest of the song, and it always turns off when you leave.

A stove, however, has a large range of temperatures that it can be set to and precision isn't crucial. The difference between 190 degrees and 195 degrees is minimal (celcius. I think it's time to get with it. [That's not a bad book title]). So why do I have to digitally input that temperature? In case I can't find 190 on a dial? Should I really be operating the stove if I can't find 190 on a dial? And if I think the heat needs to go up, I don't want to cancel, reset, input a new temperature, hit Go and collect $200. I want to turn a fucking dial.


Jerry's Final Thoughts.
We're so often frusterated with technology. We have 7 remotes with hundreds of buttons that we've never used. VCRs lived and died without ever being set to the correct time. Buttons take control away from people. Buttons are the cause for so much confusion and misuse. Back in the day, dials were a direct relationship between command and function. Turn this dial, the music gets louder. Turn that dial, the stove gets hotter. Dials put people in charge. Dials are sometimes as satisfying as a really good toggle switch. Bring back the dial.