Another map of downtown Montreal

Below: I've done yet another map of downtown Montreal. This one details parking lots (dark grey) and the newly defined high parking lot taxation zone (light grey). Visible trend: parking lots in areas with higher property values are discouraged through the use of higher taxes. This goes hand in hand with the current master plan, which aims to densify the central business district.

Colour for everything, especially wool

The post below is cross-posted on my Open Colour Standard process blog, but I thought it would be worth a look here, too.

There absolutely needs to be an open standard for print colour. I'm behind that and I'm working on it. But I'm increasingly of the opinion that there's more to it than print and screen. There's a world of physical things that depend on some sort of colour specification, whether loosely defined and changeable or rigid and consistent. On that first count, the loose and changeable, I've gotten to thinking about yarn and other animal proteins like silk and even human hair.

Anyone who knits knows well the pain of not buying quite enough yarn to finish a project, going back to the store, and finding that the yarn you've been working with, while still called by the same name, is a slightly different colour than before. Eventually, you learn to buy more yarn than you think you'll need, just for the sake of consistency. That's the problem with dye lots. Every batch of yarn, while using the same dye and same general process, comes out slightly different.

I'm not proposing to necessarily solve the dye lot problem. I have a hunch that a large part of it comes down to white and the inconsistency of the base colour of wool. But it has gotten me thinking. Wool is an interesting test case. It's easy enough to deal with, it has good possibilities for home brew colour experimentation and, most importantly, there's the dye. Wool, being an animal protein, can be coloured with acid dye. Or, to you and me, food colouring.

The food colouring angle is a good one. One of the biggest challenges of thinking about a spot colour system is sorting out the physical colour. It's been a hurdle in my exploration of colour for print. How, the thought goes, do you decide what the gamut of inks going into the spot colours will be? Are those colours consistent across ink manufacturers? And so on. This is the appeal of acid dye. In North America, at least, there's a handy gamut all ready to go. It's the set of dyes prefaced with the letters FD&C (food, drug and cosmetic) or D&C (drug and cosmetic). That's a limited gamut of dyes already carefully regulated by a government body. It takes away the gamut decision and just leaves questions of application and method guidelines/best practices, as well as the development of physical colours from those dyes and the translation of those colours into digital.

In short, expect some proof-of-concept wool and hair dye experiments from me in the near future.

Truth in design, Truth in production

There's a design principle that I've often taken for granted. Distilled down to one word, it's Truth, with a capital T. But what is Truth in design? How does it apply? What, in short, does it mean?

There are two examples I like to use when explaining Truth in design. They both have to do with materiality. Here goes. Say you're designing a poster. You want it to look a little old school, a little messy, but still a little official. In short, you want your typography to have the look of an old-timey typewriter font. An easy reaction, when pressed for time, is to grab a typewriter font. I'm not talking about Courier, but instead about something that tries to mimic the little errors and ink blots of a worn out typewriter. But that font isn't very true. Use it and you'll find that all the letters look the same, each instance of a letter exactly like its siblings. It's not organic. It lacks soul. Not only that, but it's obvious that it wasn't done with a real typewriter. Then there's the truthful way. You dig out the old typewriter and honest to goodness type out the text you want. Scan it, clean it, integrate it into the poster. Each letter is a little different and the whole thing comes by its blotches honestly. In short, it's true. It's meant to look like the product of a typewriter and it does because it is.

Truth, however, is also utilitarian. That's where my other example, the one with the corkboard, comes in. Say, for the sake of argument, that you want the look of pictures or notices pinned to a corkboard. Sure, you can open up your graphics program and plunk a stock texture of cork in. You can drag whatever you want onto it, even simulate the shadows cast by the tacks. But why would you? In real life, light casts shadows for you. If you actually print the photos (or notices, or whatever) and pin them to a real cork board, it looks right, automatically. Why add shadows when light can do it for you? If you try to do it digitally, you'll miss something, or agonize for far too long in order to not miss anything. Do it in reality and the details are taken care of. Nature does half the work for you.

In essence, Truth is about materiality and reality. It's about doing it properly, with the right materials. In an idealistic sense, it's about knowing that you've got something right, that it is how it should be and isn't just an imitation. In a practical sense, it's about covering your bases, not by thinking out every eventuality, but by letting reality do the work. It may not always be convenient, but it will always be right.

Sitting alone

Every time I'm in a public space equipped with tables, I think about the inefficiency. More often than not, tables for two or four are taken up by solitary people. Every table in a given food court or coffee shop can be occupied, with none fully or even half occupied.

Sure, there are existing solutions. There's the raised bar with stools. But the bar has its own issues. For one, it turns the diner or drinker into a spectacle, raised and placed on the periphery. It also falls prey to what I like to think of as the subway problem: if there are three seats next to each other on the subway, the middle one is invariably the last to fill. Strangers just don't want to sit next to each other. The same goes for bars in eating areas. Half the seats go unfilled because solitary diners are loathe to make contact with each other.

Today, I've got two solutions to attach to this problem. The first is the half table. I'm talking about tables that are half the usual width, maybe two feet. Line them up in rows, like a classroom, with one chair each. You'll get rows of solitary eaters, staring at each others' backs, taking up less space and (hopefully) leaving quad tables for larger groups.

My second solution addresses the sitting together issue. Even if there are four seats, even if there are no vacant tables, people are unwilling to plunk themselves down at the table of a stranger. But that can be fixed. Imagine a large, square table with the usual four chairs. The difference is that this table is divided on its diagonals by thin walls a few feet high. This divides the table into four separate, triangular eating areas. Think of it as cubicles for eating.

Of course, all of this does nothing to address the underlying issue of isolation. Maybe it's a problem that people don't want to be together, want to pretend no one else is watching them eat. Even so, I think that problem is too big to be solved in a half hour food court lunch break.

I hope I don't see anyone I know

I've been thinking about it and have come to the conclusion that the phrase "I hope I don't see anyone I know" is profoundly flawed. We think or utter this phrase out of worry, because we hope that by not seeing anyone we know, we can avoid embarrassment. (I know there may be other reasons, but this post deals with the embarrassment factor.)

My conclusion is that there's no reason to be embarrassed. Why? If you're doing something which causes you to hope no one you know is there to see you doing it, you must perceive the activity to be embarrassing, wrong, or somehow out of character. (What spurred me to think about this was a trip to the mall. Very out of character.)

But here's the good part. There are two likely outcomes. If you do see someone you know, and if they also perceive the action/location to be embarrassing, then they, too are guilty. The two of you have equal leverage. You both know something embarrassing about the other. You both keep the secret for your own sake.

The other scenario is more pleasant. It's quite possible (like in my mall experience) that the person you know will take the location/activity to be completely normal. S/he enjoys visiting/doing it, which means that it should seem completely normal that you do, too. Your stock rises in the eyes of your observer. S/he perceives you to be more a member of her/his tribe than before the encounter. Win.

In short, it's a flawed sentence, provided that it's uttered out of fear of embarrassment. Whether through mutual squeamishness or increased affect, you avoid negative judgement. As I said before, win.

Mall brands for hipsters

I had a bit of a revelation this morning. As we know, purist hipsters, by nature, eschew anything particularly popular or common. They favour, instead, the obscure and unique. This is why they can be spotted at craft fairs and seconds hand stores. This means that hipsters must take precautions to avoid mall brand clothing, clothing from popular, mainstream retailers.

But what if a hipster, for some reason, finds him/herself desiring, for whatever reason, a mall brand garment? Purchasing something common and popular goes against the grain. In order to maintain status, the purchase must be hidden or downplayed. But there is a solution.

Most manufacturers maintain outlet stores. These outlet stores are stocked with leftovers, unsuccessful garments, items from previous seasons and the holy grail: samples. Samples fit the hipster bill beautifully. They're generally one of a kind, or at least incredibly uncommon. They have entertaining idiosyncrasies. They epitomize process and experimentation. Most importantly, they cannot be found in malls. Thus, a hipster with the desire to purchase mall brand clothes may safely wear samples, secure in the knowledge that the garment is not only unique, but also has a story (however short) to go with it.

Commercial Web Services as Courseware

Setting up an account with any web service provider means a lot. It means agreeing to terms of service, buying into their framework, playing their game. These services are not provided for free for the benefit of humankind. They serve ads and gain revenue. Some of them sell personal information to third parties. At the very least, when you sign up for a free web service, you enter into a legal agreement with another entity and also into a business relationship, wherein you allow them to sell your attention to others. While most people don't view it as a choice, it is. And it is an individual choice. It should be made, in an informed way, by an individual, without coercion.

Educational institutions decide what their students will learn and which tools they'll use in order to learn. Traditionally, this has meant deciding which textbooks and articles will be read. As any educator bombarded with textbook samples knows, this is not a strictly academic decision, but one with profound financial implications for many different stakeholders. It is in the power of the educator to decide which textbook all her students will have to purchase.

Increasingly, the tools of education are more than just textbooks. The new tools include courseware and software. Academic institutions decide whether to tie their students to Blackboard, Moodle or any other courseware system. What's more, those institutions decide how zealous they will be about the enforcement of their courseware standards. Will they allow one faculty/department/professor to diverge from the norm?

The issue, of course, goes far deeper than courseware. And this is where we come back to the initial discussion of free web services. Educators in less zealous institutions may choose to abandon standard courseware in favour of a third party solution, often a service already favoured by students. A professor may, for example, choose to conduct course discussions in a Facebook group devoted to the class. This decision presents problems. Sure, most students are probably already Facebook users. But it can't be taken for granted that they all are. And what of those who don't already use the service? In order to engage with the class, these students are forced to enter into a legal and (effectively) financial agreement with a third party service provider. And if they don't, they lose out. That dynamic smacks of coercion.

I don't mean to be negative. I am, in fact, all for the idea of using accessible, available, ostensibly free tools with which students are already comfortable. But it bears thinking about. In an attempt to make learning accessible and integrative, an important element of choice may be lost.

Video games as accomplishment substitute

I have a hypothesis and an idea. Bear with me through a series of statements and questions.
The payoff of a task is in the hit of accomplishment gained from a job (well) done.
Video games (everything from freecell to The Sims) give artificial tasks that provide (largely)meaningless feelings of accomplishment.
Time and energy that could be used to accomplish tangible things in the real world are instead used to accomplish the goals set out as artificial tasks in video games.
The drive to accomplish is transferred from reality to video game.
Video games are a more convenient accomplishment engine because they give a series of small, easy to accomplish goals.
How do we use video games as substrates for real accomplishment?
Can the structure of small, easy goals be applied to real things that need to be done?
In short, can we use video games as engines to accomplish real life tasks?

Teachable creativity components

I posted last month about methods for teaching creativity (http://adaptstudio.ca/blog/2009/07/teaching-creativity.html). I now have some more developed ideas on the subject. Here's my shortlist of teachable skills that I think are essential components of creativity.

• critical thinking
  
• observation
  
• brainstorming and idea generation
  
• open mindedness/lowering of mental filters
  
• perseverance
• sorting and association of concepts/ideas
  
• curiosity
  
• non-standard problem solving OR solving the same task in a different way
• extrapolation
• creating within constraints
  

Teaching creativity

Creativity is so often seen as an innate and unteachable skill. You either have it or you don't. The hydro reader once walked into my house and decided I must be an artist, seeing the flow charts on the walls and paint splattered door mat. I said anyone could do it. He begged to differ. So, creativity is rarefied. If there's one thing I'm convinced of, though, it's that creativity can indeed be taught. But how?

How do you teach creativity? There aren't specific hard skills that go along with it. It's largely about process and mindset. Teaching someone to draw doesn't give them creativity, simply a set of skills that help creativity be actualized. What, then, do we put in the creativity toolkit? Which mental processes go into creativity?

Home is where the power outlet is

I just came back from an incredibly short trip. In fact, I think I spent more time travelling than at my destination. While travelling, something occurred to me. My packing priorities don't run along traditional lines. I didn't pack any clothing or toiletries. Instead, I packed adapters and chargers. After a little thought, that packing decision makes sense. Toiletries don't need to be packed. They're available everywhere and are extremely standard. Clothing isn't necessary either, other than the bare minimum. But adapters and chargers aren't so simple. They're neither standard nor optional. Laptops eat power and uncharged MP3 players are a death sentence in crowded transport. I'd rather sleep in my clothes than go without data and connectivity. Toothpaste is ubiquitous, but specific cellphone chargers aren't. This is why I've determined that home is anywhere I can plug in my laptop.

A troubled bridge over water

Here's a problem for which I don't yet have a solution. There's a wonderful canal in Montreal called the Lachine. About 20 years ago, Parks Canada took over its management, cleaned it up, built footbridges over it and built a park and bike path next to it. It has one particularly problematic footbridge. It's at the end of Atwater Ave., near Atwater Market. It's a very narrow bridge with little signs on each end telling cyclists to dismount before crossing. Of course, given its proximity to the market and several other attractions, it gets a lot of traffic. The traffic is mixed. There are pedestrians of all ages, cyclists and even tourists on the little electric scooters that can be rented at some of the shops along the canal.

What's the problem? The bridge is wide enough to accomodate two directions of pedestrian traffic. Even so, it gets cramped. The majority of cyclists, who are progressing at speed along the bike path, apparently want to get across the bridge and onto the next path as quickly as possible. All of this means that very few cyclists obey the sign and dismount. The cyclists speeding across the bridge pose a threat to pedestrians. Even worse, the renters of electric scooters don't dismount either. Their vehicles are heavier, faster and take up more space than those of the cyclists. So, because very few people obey the sign, the bridge becomes congested and dangerous.

I've thought up a few solutions to this, but none of them are sustainable. There's the citizen action approach. I could start personally mentioning to cyclists, whenever I happen to be crossing the bridge, that there is a sign telling them to dismount. But that doesn't work because I don't cross that bridge nearly enough to make a tangible difference. Then, there are institutional approaches. They could get bigger signs, although I really don't think that would work. They could install speed bumps, but that might not properly discourage all cyclists, might cause injury to some, and would inconvenience everyone.

Basically, I'm stumped. I can isolate the problem and even explain why it is actually a problem (and not just me being grumpy) but I can't figure out a good, sensible solution.

Discomfort by proxy: introverts and social networking

I quit Facebook a couple weeks ago because I was sick and tired of the obligation it represented. It makes me wonder: can introverts become uncomfortable by proxy? Is it possible that online social networking could pose the same problems for the shy that overcrowding and over-stimulation in physical space do?

Here's the rationale: As a more introverted than extroverted person, I tend to draw my energy from being alone or with one other person, at most. I find that the energy I build up being alone gets drained when I have to deal with large amounts of social demands. A concrete example would be banking up energy by spending a day alone and then using it up by being social at a party in the evening.

Why should this work by proxy, then? When using services like Facebook, I'm physically alone. But that doesn't seem to detract from the social nature of it. In fact, it may be worse. The structure of Facebook in particular requires constant decision making. And those decisions always have social repercussions. I get a friend request from someone I don't know particularly well but went to school with: do I accept or reject? A group invitation for something I don't care about, but the group was formed by one of my friends: join or not? For people who find that making social decisions is a taxing activity, this can be overwhelming. It doesn't have any of the comfortable downtime that comes with more old fashioned modes of socializing. Instead, it's just a constant stream of demands and obligations.

So, can introverts become uncomfortable by proxy? I say yes, and to an even greater degree than in physical interactions.

Print has problems

I'm catching up on my reading, going through a textbook about advertising and promotion, reading the bit about social networking sites as promotional tools. As is so often the case with textbooks, the information is out of date. Here's the problem: the book was published in 2008. Important news for textbook publishers: It's impossible to write about the internet in print. By the time the books gets to print and into the hands of readers, what was good, current information is out of date and outmoded. Print isn't fast enough.

What's the solution to this problem, then? A couple things. Thing one, I'd like to see my purchase of the textbook give me access to a pdf of the book as well. (A good example of a publisher doing this is The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Ubuntu Kung Fu, for example, offers a pdf option, as well as couple other neat things that I'm about to talk about.) Offering a pdf version means giving readers something searchable and easier to navigate than a physical book. That's important when the book in question isn't a novel. Thing two, I want to see online errata and updates. I know it's impossible to expect publishers and authors to constantly revise their books, but I'd really like a little community and challenge to build up around textbooks (for an example, look again at Ubuntu Kung Fu). Give me an errata section that users can contribute to, give me updates on the subject matter, give me a discussion board. In short, give me an online portal for the textbook. Make it relevant and timely. For marketing especially, things don't lie still. Timely subjects need timely textbooks, not a new version every couple years.

The building blocks of life

Not DNA or anything else anyone ever calls one of the "building blocks of life." I'm talking about real, literal building blocks, the wooden ones that children use to make towers and forts and cities. Except that I'm talking about them in a figurative sense.

This morning, I've determined that life is a lot like a block tower. Here's how the theory goes: We are a building species. We build in both literal and figurative senses. We spend time building habitats, social networks, routines and reputations for ourselves. We are builders. But we're not building with concrete and rebar. We're building with (you guessed it!) blocks. Block towers can be sturdy or not, inventive or not. They can be anything imaginable. There are block towers that fall over if there's a breeze or someone shakes the table. No block tower can stand up to a determined kicking.

So, we spend our lives building block towers. In fact, our lives are block towers. Sometimes, if we really like the tower we've built, we spend ages admiring it. It's such a great block tower that we can't imagine any other. But then, if we're being pessimistic, the fear can set in. What if someone comes along and kicks the block tower down? If we add another few blocks, mightn't it ruin this beautiful tower? Best to leave it as is and hope nothing bad happens. To me, this is a problem. We're builders. Why should anyone spend a life trying to protect their existing block tower?

What's the best way to keep our block towers from getting kicked over? Tear them down before someone else does. We may think that we already have the best possible block tower, but maybe it can be better, or at least different. We need to learn to tear down our own towers. When we're not busy trying to protect the towers we've built, there's way more energy available to imagine and build better towers.

Different kinds of story arcs

Books are different from TV. We know this. The difference I'm thinking of today is in the way their story arcs work. In books (the ones that aren't part of a series, I mean), there's a little bit of a problem. Maybe not everyone has this problem, but I do. I constantly find myself wanting to hurry up and finish the book, just so that I can see how the story ends. But when I finish it, I realize that it's all over. There is no more. Not only is the story over, but the characters and setting are all gone, too. And then I get sad.

This is an area where TV wins. Or where TV series win, at least. The joy of a good TV series is that the viewer gets a satisfying story arc every week, but with the added bonus of not losing everything else at the end of a given story. The characters and setting stick around for another arc next week, with the added bonus of a little more backstory than before.

This quality can make TV, as well as series novels, very attractive. It makes for strong relationships between viewers and characters (I say between, but it's quite one sided) while providing lots of satisfying conclusions to stories.

Brain Training

People are just so darn interested in training their brains these days. We come up with all sorts of clever, synthetic ways to keep our brains in shape. We play brain training video games and live in houses that are meant to break the occupant out of normal behaviour. I think we do all that because we've stopped opening ourselves to the organic challenges that we should be encountering. Our lives are so boring and predictable that we feel the need to find ourselves fake challenges.

Being profound isn't easy

When very few people knew how to read or write, it must have been much easier to write profound things. Today, with the huge mass of voices, all demanding to be heard and all distributed worldwide via the internet, it's far harder to write things that people will actually pay attention to and remember. We have such a huge volume of information, now. It makes it nearly impossible to actually process and give consideration to everything. And if I blog that sentiment? It's just another bunch of words in our huge wash of constant data.

Subway Ceilings

I avoid looking people in the eye on the subway. In turn, they avoid looking me in the eye. When the subway is packed, there's nowhere to look but at the floor or ceiling. The problem is that I can only stare at the ceiling for so long before I get bored. I never think to bring a book and don't really like the tabloid newspapers they hand out at rush hour.

Solution: Commission art for subway car ceilings. Give commuters something interesting to stare at. Print a magic eye or Where's Waldo sort of graphic up there. Art, puzzles, poetry, whatever. Just no ads. I don't think that subway riders should be abused that way.

Correlation is not causality in Doctor Who

A thought for anyone who enjoys Doctor Who and false logic:

The mother of every companion in new season Doctor Who thinks that the presence of the Doctor means trouble. They believe that the Doctor brings trouble with him. In fact, as the audience and companions know, the Doctor constantly saves others from the trouble that is already planned. While trouble and the Doctor are positively correlated, the concerned mothers are wrong in believing that there is causality.

On sensible careers

People try to be too damn reasonable and realistic about the future. I think those are silly and impossible things to be. Everything always changes. How can we expect to be reasonable about the unknown? I don't care if the world will always need engineers and lawyers and accountants. I don't want to be something the world will always needs. Where's the fun in that? I'd much rather be something new.

Unbranded grocery stores

Assumptions: Food is a necessity. Without food, human beings can't live. Most people do not have easy access to farmer's markets or community shared agriculture schemes. Most North Americans shop in supermarkets.

Observations: It's impossible to look anywhere in a grocery store without seeing invasive brand messages. Okay, that last sentence was a tiny exaggeration. The ceiling is almost always free of brand messages and in most cases, so is the floor. The remainder, on the other hand, is generally quite thoroughly visually cluttered.

Solution: There needs to be a completely unbranded grocery store. I don't mean that there needs to be a store that sells only their own brand of food. I mean packaged goods in the unbranded store need to be blank except for the name of the food, the country of provenance, the nutritional information and the ingredients.

Think: Many of the necessary foods can already be found brand-free. Vegetables and fruits, more often than not, aren't branded (although there seems to be a trend towards branding them). Some stores have bulk sections which allow for the purchase of ingredients like flour that aren't branded.

Implementation: The unbranded grocery store needs to take advantage of the existing private label infrastructure. In the same way that Loblaw has food sold under its own name, the unbranded grocery store can implement a private label brand. The only difference is that this brand isn't a brand. It is instead the complete absence of a brand. Of course, it also makes a kind of good business sense to stock a store entirely with private label products. Margins are higher on private label than on national brands and prices can be lower.

Of course, the store would be a promotional disaster. Many consumers take comfort in familiar brands. A store that offered a reprieve from visual noise might not be widely welcomed, even if the prices were lower. But, just at this moment, having grown tired of too much visual clutter in supermarkets, I'd jump at the chance to shop at an unbranded grocery store.

Proper nouns on the Internet

While doing a little writing about traffic shaping and such things, it occurred to me that I don't know whether the name "Net Neutrality" actually qualifies as a proper noun. Many people treat it like a proper noun, capitalizing the first letter of each word, but there are also loads of people who don't. This inconsistency leaves me wondering whether it really should be a proper noun and some people are just being lax, or whether some people are just being overzealous with their capitalization. I've been hunting around to find out what exactly makes something a proper noun in English. According to the Wikipedia, a proper noun represents a unique entity. It then goes on to give examples like cities, the names of people, and specific physical things (like Bill of Rights, which may embody concepts, but has a physical manifestation all the same). But all of the things (not people, not cities, but things) mentioned are tangible. So, can movements and concepts be proper nouns? Net Neutrality isn't tangible. Is it allowed to be a proper noun? I'm thinking yes, given the capitalization of political ideologies and systems of thought. If Marxism and Liberal and Atheist can be proper nouns, surely so can Net Neutrality. I think, then, that I've answered my own question. Is Net Neutrality a proper noun? Yes.

A manifesto for ginger coons

[Having discussed the idea of mission statements for people, I set about figuring out what I need to remember when times get confusing. The result is the following point form manifesto. I'm posting it because I think several of the points are useful, not just for me, but for anyone else of a similar age and inclination.]

• I will do things that interest me, come hell or high water
• I understand that interesting things are sometimes accompanied by boring things. I will find joy in the boring things because they help with the progress of the interesting ones.
• I must understand that degrees are only pieces of paper and that they may not make me happy or help me along with the things I want to do.
• I will remember that there are twenty million (give or take) different ways to do the same thing.
• I must remember to do things because they make me happy, not because I think I'm supposed to do them.
• I will avoid sulking and stewing and hiding under the covers when I am unhappy. Instead, I will endeavour to take positive action.
• I will not compare myself to other people. Everyone is different. That's the whole point. There's no reason to try to be the same as anyone else.
• I will not seek easy answers from outside sources. They don't exist.
• I must remember that most people do not achieve greatness before the age of twenty or even in their twenties. The people who do so are anomalies. I am not running behind schedule.
• I measure my own success. People who try to measure my success for me are wasting their time and neglecting themselves.
• The same goes for me: I have no right or time to measure the success of others. In short: I mustn't be judgemental.
• I don't have to choose. I can do everything. I just can't do it all at once. I must learn to prioritize.
• I will learn to excuse myself. I don't need to be right all the time. Changing my mind isn't the end of the world.
• Grey areas are okay. Sometimes, "maybe" is a better answer than "yes" or "no."

On Agency

Agency is a double edged sword: I have the power to decide for myself. The only catch is that I have to decide for myself.

Mission Statements for people

I've written before about annual reports for people. Annual reports are all well and good for talking about what people have accomplished. But I think there needs to be something more. Most businesses have a mission statement, or a vision statement, or something of the like. It occurs to me that mission statements could be even more vital for people. I find that I sometimes get caught up in the drudgery of every day life and work. If things go badly, I can wind up in a funk. And then it generally takes some kind of great big revelation to get back out of the funk. This is where the mission statement comes in. I think it would be awfully handy for people to have something that enumerates what and who they want to be. It just needs to be some kind of document that makes you say "I remember, now. That's who I am."

I think this already exists in an indirect way. People have books or music or other cues that make them happy and remind them about themselves. I just think that having a mission statement would make the whole process of remembering and realizing a little less chancy.

Landscaped metro stations

I've been researching house plants and humidity. It would seem that one needs the other, but also that the first does a rather nice job of regulating the second. This has gotten me thinking. Plants like humidity. Some metro stations in Montreal are so humid that they literally have stalactites extending from their ceilings. What's the clever, humidity regulating, life enriching solution to this problem? Obviously, the STM needs to turn metro stations into giant, beautiful terrariums. Plants would make the metro stations more comfortable for passengers. And they'd be significantly less drippy, too. The only major retrofit involved would be switching the florescent lights for something a little more grow light-y. Landscaped metro stations? Oh yes.

Grocery Lists Quarterly

A set of assumptions and an idea:

1. Copyright is automatic. Authors do not need to register their work, they simply need to publish in order to be protected by copyright.
2. Publication can mean all sorts of things, not just books (in the case of print work).
3. Grocery lists are original creative works. They are a product of the imagination given literary form. In form and content, they aren't very different from some types of poetry.
4. Writing down a grocery list constitutes publication.

All of the above has been making me think for a while that I should be making sure to release my grocery lists into the public domain. But then, the question is, what's the point? Other than whimsy, is there a good reason to release something as ephemeral as a grocery list into the public domain? If there's only one copy, and that copy will be thrown out after use, is there a point in releasing grocery lists? So, I've come up with the following idea:

Grocery Lists Quarterly will be a zine devoted to grocery lists. It will be packed full of scans of real grocery lists. Grocery Lists Quarterly will provide intriguing snapshots of life, the tiny stories told by grocery lists. If you feel moved to contribute your lists, do send to groceries@adaptstudio.ca

The Internet is a Copying Machine

Below is my little lay-introduction to the Internet as the ultimate copy machine. It's altogether too easy to forget that this is an instrument built for copying.

Computers are copying machines. They do the job of duplicating even better than photocopiers. The Internet is the hyperactive child of computation in most respects, but especially when it comes to copying. Everything you so much as look at when browsing the Web (No, I'm not using “Internet” and “Web” interchangeably. Right now, I mean WWW.) gets copied onto your own personal hard drive. Let's say that again, shall we: Everything. That's the automatic aspect of copying on the Internet, as practised by our good friends Firefox and Opera (or their mean brother, IE).

Copying on the Internet isn't just automatic. There's also a social aspect to the copying. When you take digitized media, which is what populates the Internet, and put it in the same place as people, copying will inevitably happen. Say I put a photo on my website. You take a look a look at my website (That's what I want you to do, after all. Why else would I put it on a public website if I didn't want you to look at it?). First, your browser, which doesn't have much taste or discrimination, grabs everything my website has to offer and makes a little copy for itself. Then, quite independently, you decide that you like the photo. You like it so much that you download it. Maybe you use it as a background, or even print it out and hang it on your wall. It's perfectly natural. I make my photo available, you see and like. All you have to do to get your own copy is click your right mouse button (or CTRL click, if you happen to be a Mac person). It doesn't feel like work, and I still have my copy of the photo. In fact, my copy and your copy are exactly the same. And the copy that every browser makes for itself when someone looks at my website is exactly the same as our copies. (It doesn't feel like stealing, since you haven't taken anything from me. In fact, it isn't even copyright infringement, since you've only used it for personal study and can claim Fair Dealing. But you don't know that. You just liked the photo and wanted to look at it without coming back to my website every day.) In such a way, the Internet can be seen as a giant (mostly apolitical and amoral) copying machine.

Bank Machines in a cashless world

I think that a cashless world is far more likely to happen than a paperless office. What, then, happens to all the poor bank machines when we finally give cash the boot? They'll be sad, obsolete, unemployed, junked. We'll have a glut of clever computers in great big boxes.

Then again, who am I to say that we'll ever have a cashless world? We've been promised that world for years, and it keeps not happening. Who wants to buy a pack of gum on debit? It's a clunky and inefficient thing to do. Loads of cash replacement schemes have failed over the years, and so many people argue that cash is a better way of regulating spending. But, in the event that it does ever happen, I can't help but wonder what will become of the thousands upon thousands of unemployed bank machines.

An Easier Website

I was in a design meeting at work today. The complaint: Clients ask for "cleaner" or "more professional" websites. So, the boss muses out loud that we can't just adjust and make a website sixty percent cleaner. It struck me at that point that there should be a way.

Solution: Take a representative sample of people. Give them a word (professional, clean, edgy, etc.). Give them a pile of design elements (colours, layout pieces, whole layouts, typography, all that good stuff). Get them to rate each element on how much it matches their perception of the given word. Look for patterns in the responses. Sort by demographics, psychographics, industries. Take the data. make a website generator with a very simple interface: a white screen with a number of slider bars, where each bar represents a scale of zero to one hundred for a given trait (edgy, contemporary, clean, professional...). Any person who wants a website need only key in a little pertinent information about themself, and then move the sliders to get what they want. Press the button. Don't like the output? Move the sliders some more.

So, I'm sensing another thesis. Doctorate, maybe? The research should be fun and doable. It's just the actual programming that I'm a little scared of. But it could make a good collaboration with a computer science person.

If it actually worked, I'd put myself out of the web design business. On the upside, I'd secure my place in other circles.

Super heroes must be exhausted

Having just lived the equivalent of two lives for the last month and a half, I'm left with one burning question: How do super heroes do it? It's hard enough trying to live two normal lives (for example: a full time job and another business on the side), how can anyone possibly be expected to live one normal life and one crime fighting super life?

Other people might argue the plausibility of different elements of super hero stories. Let me be the one to find it implausible that super heroes don't routinely fall over from exhaustion.

The Craigslist System of Need Organization

I've gotten into the habit of hunting for things on Craigslist. First I was looking for a job, then I was looking for an apartment. I found both. Short of looking for a relationship, I'm running short of things to look for on Craigslist. It does occur to me, however, that Craigslist (or indeed, any classified ad directory) presents an interesting system for organizing life. There's housing, jobs, personals, for sale, services, discussion, and community. Those categories encompass what people tend to want out of life. We need jobs in order to get money to live. We need places in which to live. We need people to share our lives with. We need things to fill our spaces. We need activity. Craigslist basically handles all of the necessities of being human.

I'm thinking, then, that we should use craigslist as a complement to more sober systems like Maslow's heirarchy of needs. I'm not saying that we need to throw Maslow out, as there doesn't seem to be a heirarchy evident in Craigslist, but I do think that classified ads provide a very good measure of what it means to be human at this point in time.

Some grown ups dream about credit cards

When I was younger than I am now, ten years ago, for example, when I was half the age I am now, I had more dreams. Everything in my life was going to be a big deal. I anticipated huge accomplishment, but I never seemed dissatisfied with what I had. I would invent perfectly spherical flying cars with nubbly little wings sticking out the sides and jets powering the whole works. Aerodynamics be damned, I thought that a spherical air car would be the most profoundly cool thing ever. I was an inventor and a fashion designer in my own mind. I discovered that Barbie dolls were insanely difficult to tailor for. I dreamed up a load of things that would hit the market years later. I was irate, just a few weeks ago when I saw a vending machine in a rest stop washroom selling toothbrushes with built in reservoirs for toothpaste. I've been told that when I was little, I'd speak French in my sleep. I barely even speak it awake anymore. My nightmares used to transport me to other dimensions, filled with human eating aliens. I'd save the world of a night. Now, even my good dreams involve things like credit cards and modems. In short, I'm worried that I've lost something. I've lost my capacity to have very big dreams. I've learned to be a little too realistic. I've lost my magical, optimistic dream world and replaced it with a life overly constrained by reality.

Distant families and close TV

I re-watched the season finale of Torchwood today. I actually cried a little when two of the characters died. It strikes me as odd that I should cry for fictional characters. It seems especially odd when I stack it up next to my inability to cry when one of my uncles died. It's been nearly a year and I haven't cried for him yet, but I can cry over fictional characters. Rationally, that seems very strange.

Here's the problem: emotions aren't rational. I barely knew my uncle. He lived on the other side of the country and I only ever met him and handful of times. The Torchwood characters, on the other hand, were a fixture in my life for two years. Over the course of two seasons and twenty six episodes, I learned about their hopes, dreams, histories and problems. They were presented like real human beings. It doesn't matter that their lives revolved around fighting aliens. It's the human element that makes science fiction feasible. Personalities that we can believe in and identify with allow us to suspend our disbelief in other areas. In short, the characters in Torchwood became less abstract to me than a real member of my family.

I can't decide whether this is problematic or not. My knee jerk reaction is to be a little aghast that I have more emotion towards fiction than reality. But then, maybe the problem is that in the standard North American WASP family, there just isn't much emotion going around. Maybe it's life that's the problem. Maybe it's a good thing that TV is training me to feel more.

Adult deterrent retail

I was dragged into a Garage a while back. In case you don't know what it is, Garage is a clothing store aimed at tween, teen, and early twenties women. I think it's only in Canada, and, if I remember correctly, it used to be kind of retro gas station themed. Now, though, it seems that the powers that be at garage have taken a clue from Hollister. To put it bluntly, it looks like a beach house. It's all tiki and dim lighting, and you have to actually make an effort to go inside. Never mind having a store wide open to the mall hallway. To get into Garage, you need to actually go through a little doorway/atrium thing.

It's loud inside, too. I'm not old (heck, I'm in their target demographic!), but the place managed to give me a headache. To work there, you'd have to be the kind of kid who likes clubbing, or who can at least tolerate ridiculous amounts of noise pollution for an extended period of time.

Garage has, as far as I can tell, turned its stores into fantastic parent repellant. If we're to believe the common perception, loud, dim, and difficult to navigate are turnoffs for a lot of people over a certain age. Does this mean that perents are handing their daughters the credit cards and letting them go at it? Or are contemporary parents into this sort of thing? Or maybe I'm from an alternate universe and no child, ever, would let a parent take her shopping. I could do with some insight on this one.

More on video stores

First of all, I need to point out that Movieland is the only name for a video store. It's like calling a bowling alley Bowlerama. It's just the natural order of things.

So, I was in Movieland the other day (seriously) and I decided to carry out a little preliminary research for my video store study. I had a little chat with the guy at the counter. I asked if he'd ever had anyone in, renting movies and crying. His answer was encouraging. It turns out that there are criers. I am now unreasonably happy on two counts: people who cry in video stores do exist; people who work in video stores are suitably observant and would probably make excellent interview subjects.

The other cool thing I've noticed, in conducting my literature review, is that it's next to impossible to actually do a literature review for this project. I've found one study relating to the impact of mood on movie rental choice. That's as close as I can find to information relating to my topic. That's both good and bad. The good is that I won't be studying the same tired old thing. The bad is that secondary sources will be hard to find. Still, it's darn exciting stuff.

Twenty million different ways to get the same information

I've noticed something new and exciting. The thing itself isn't terribly new and exciting, but it's exciting that I've noticed it. I've noticed, as the title of this post says, that there are loads of different ways for me to get the same information. I'll give you an example.

Say I want to see what's new on BoingBoing. I could just plug the URL into Firefox and go have a look at the page itself. I do that a few times every day. Another option is to grab a glance at my iGoogle homepage, which has a widget for the BoingBoing RSS feed. Or, and this is increasingly becoming the case for me, I could look in my Twitter feeds and find out what the very latest post is, if there's been anything recently. But wait! There's more. Say I want to watch BBtv. Go to the webpage and look for it? Why bother when Miro downloads it automatically?

One blog, with one set of information, and I look at it in about four different ways. I do something quite similar with the CBC. I'm wondering whether this tendency is a) convenient; b) the wave of the future; c) an obsessive behaviour; d) a quick route to information overload.

Crying in video stores

Another thing I want to study:

Lots of people watch movies when they feel sad. Where do those people get movies from? Pre-internet, unless they wanted to watch something they already owned, they'd need to go to the video store. That means sad people in video stores. Even if they aren't crying, it should be possible to see who is more upset than the average.

Questions, then: In the past, how often would an average video store get a crier? A sad non-crier? Has the frequency of sad video store customers changed? Has it gone up? Down? If down, where have the sad video watchers gone? Or are people finding different coping mechanisms?

Problems: I don't know how I could possibly dig up information on incidences of video store criers and sad non-criers in the past. I can't imagine that anyone has kept records on that sort of thing. Perhaps it's time for a literature review.

Craigslist personals dynamics

I keep thinking up things that I want to study. Most recently, I've been thinking about what makes people reply to personal ads on Craigslist. Do people ever post ads that get no replies at all? What are the factors in a popular ad?

There are variables: Who the target audience is in terms of gender, sexual preference, age, location, all that good stuff; how the ad is written; whether or not the title of the ad is engaging... I could go on, because I think there are loads of factors in the popularity of ads. It's a fun exercise in personal marketing, and I somehow don't think there's a substantial body of literature on it yet.

Late night grocery stores

There's a late night grocery store on my way home. I hardly ever use it, but I appreciate that it exists. In that sense, for me at least, it's similar to a falafel restaurant. Tonight, however, I got the chance to use it. Wandering home from a late movie, I got a jones for orange juice. But where can I possibly get orange juice at one o'clock in the morning? Quite simply, I can get the orange juice about one block away from home, on my path from movie to bed.

Most of the time, the late night grocery store is a service I don't feel the need to use. Even though I seldom use it, it's something I like to have around, just in case I find myself needing it.

On logos

At the moment, typography-heavy logos are popular. Many logos are solely typographical. That's fine. Some of the most famous and long-lasting logos are just logotype. Take IBM and ABC. Both are just treatments of letters. Both are well known in design circles. Both are instantly recognizable. There are loads of other examples of type-based logos. But I'd rather talk about a different kind of logo right now. That different kind of logo doesn't even need typography. A good example of this sort of logo is the NBC peacock. It communicates well and is well known. It works and is recognizable without the initials.

All is not well in logoland, though. At this point in time, many logos are quite similar to each other. They use basic fonts and are distinguished by the configuration and colour of words, as well as by small additional elements (example: the fast forward symbol on the Futureshop logo, the slant of the Zellers logo). Some logos are boxed, some have a coloured ground. Many logos don't say much about the company. This, in my opinion, is the result of the (sometimes) bland rules of good design being implemented in uninspired ways by bored (or boring) designers.

All of this, of course, does nothing to help me rationalize the logo I'm currently working on.

At least two people

I was looking at a piece of design the other day that I just didn't get. It was a handbag with a graphic on it. It didn't speak to me. However, looking at that bag, something occurred to me: in order for a design to appear in the wild (that is to say, on a bus, in a food court, on a coffee table, whatever, as long as someone has bought it), at least two people need to understand it and believe that it is a good idea. The designer needs to think that it might be a good idea, that someone else might want it. Someone else (a consumer, for example) needs to agree with the designer and buy that design. I know that most of the time, far more than two people will believe that the idea has potential. I like this, though, as a rule. For a design to appear in the wild, at least two people need to understand and like it.

Painters in the park, but never graphic designers

It seems that people like watching painters paint in parks. It stands to reason, since people often hold such events, that painters don't much mind painting in parks. They may even like it. Okay, so painters like painting in parks and people like watching them. This leads to all sorts of painting-in-parks events. Why not graphic-design-in-parks events, then? They're both visual things. They both turn out very visual, mostly flat things.

Today, I found out why there are no graphic-design-in-parks events. I took my laptop for a trip to the park today. The weather was nice and I wanted to sit under a tree. Big mistake. I now know why computer geeks like living in dark dungeons. The noonday sun turned my screen into a mirror. While it's great to see that I don't have any food stuck in my teeth, a reflective screen isn't exactly fantastic for doing picky work with colours and curves. I don't think we'll be seeing groups of designers mocking up newsletters or logos in parks any time soon.

Ozone depletion: a hairdressing plot

Here's an entertaining one: the unseasonably hot weather is causing side effects. My skin is becoming sunburned, my feet are getting warm, most irritatingly, my hair is getting sun bleached. That last one is an issue. My blue is turning suspiciously blonde under the profoundly bright mid-April sun.

This got me to thinking. I'm figuring that ozone depletion could be a clever plot dreamt up by an international consortium of hairdressers. Consider: CFCs, in the past, were a major cause of ozone depletion. Where do CFCs come from? Aerosol cans. A product contained in aerosol cans? Hair spray. Who uses hair spray? Hairdressers. And how do hairdressers benefit from ozone depletion? Dye jobs fade in the summer, resulting in more trips to the hairdresser for touch ups. Aha!

An open letter to Facebook

Dear Facebook,

You have access to huge amounts of information about me. You know what city I grew up in, what activities I take part in, what parties I go to. You know what I study and when I'll graduate. You know what interests me and what causes I care about. You know how old I am, what my gender is, even my sexual preference and relationship status. You know where I live and who my friends are.

Why, if you have so very much information about me, do you insist on serving me ads that aren't relevant? You attempt to sell me foolproof scrapbooking supplies, on the assumption that I don't know thing one about design. You'd better tell the design school I've been attending for the past three years that you don't have confidence in their teaching. You'd show gay men ads for dating sites where they can meet great girls, wouldn't you?

Facebook, you have all the power and information in your hands. You have the technology. It's not a new idea. Why can't you serve relevant ads? You know what kind of music I listen to. Can't you give me pertinent ads from HMV or iTunes? You know what sports I like, and yet you refuse to advertise frisbees.

I cannot understand, no matter how hard I try, why a website that collects so much personal information is so bad at personalizing advertisements.

Absentee parents in picture books

In discussing the classic picture book Are You My Mother? today, an important question was raised. Namely: Why is the bird not concerned about who his father is? The baby bird moves heaven and earth to find his mother, but is completely unconcerned by the absence of his father. Could this book be an early example of positive depictions of single parenting? Is the bird unconcerned because he sees his father solely as an earner and would rather seek nurturing from his mother? Who, the bird should be asking, brought in the worms while mother was warming the eggs? Constantly, the little bird asks, "Are you my mother?" Why does a book written long before the mainstreaming of single parenthood present a baby bird with no father in sight, and no concern for his absence?

NOTE: Don't take the above seriously. If it were meant to be serious, there would be footnotes.

The life ruiners

There are people who ruin your life by being terrible. They make everything collapse around your ears through malice or other negativities. Then there's the other kind of life ruiner. These people don't want to ruin your life at all. Sometimes, though, it feels like they have. They ruin your life through goodness. They ruin your life by being wonderful. Most of the time, you don't feel ruined. You feel better for having known them at all. It's only when you realize that no one else is as wonderful. That's when you see the good, the wonderful and the true as life ruiners.

Test all the children

When I was in school, every math teacher I ever had got treated to the frustration of trying to make me show my work. I never knew how I got to the answers, I just did. There was no process to grade on the test, no way to see if I was doing it the right way. Not showing my work was, of course, a Bad Habit. Now that I look back at it, I think that life might have been a little less frustrating for my teachers if they'd had a little background on the way I work and what sort of personality I have. Being an INFJ, I have the habit of intuiting, of not knowing why, but just knowing. That was my problem in math.

My thought, then, is that instead of waiting years for university career counsellors to do the testing, people should be tested on day one. I suppose that means having five year olds doing personality tests, although I'm sure there's a more humane way to do it. Every teacher knows that different people learn differently. Why don't they act on that? If we could sort out how children could best succeed, and if they could be taught in an appropriate way, school might become a lot less frustrating for everyone involved.

Extremely delayed negative post purchase perceptions

Today, for the first time in six years, I looked in the mirror and thought "maybe the stud should be a bit farther forward." It never even occurred to me until today that the stud in my nose should be anywhere other than where it is. Negative or positive post purchase perception is meant to happen rather more promptly after a purchase than this. Six years is a bit of a stretch. The strange thing is that even though I was the one who decided exactly where the hole would be, I did not, until today, ever think that I could or should have made a different decision. I suppose that speaks to a generally positive post purchase attitude. After all, many products don't even make it six years.

ginger to English dictionary

I find that I have a kind of obfuscated, often overly whimsical way of writing. I also make up words when I feel the need. All of this contributes to a use of language that I'm not entirely comfortable classing as English. I ran into that problem today. I was writing an email and noticed that although it sounded nice and had good use of rhetoric, it might not be a practical email. Email, being a perfect medium for quick and concise communication, might not be the place to be excessively narrative. That meant that after writing it, I had to figure out how to translate my own writing into proper English. It left me thinking that I need to a) write a ginger to English dictionary and b) make one of those awesome little translation tools for ginger to English conversion. I now know what my summer project will be: I need to start listening to what I say, sort out how my use of English differs from the norm, make a dictionary based on those results, and then figure out how those translating widgets work. Should be a good time.

Carpets in kitchens

We don't carpet our kitchens. I don't see a good reason for that. Think: What makes a kitchen inherently bad for carpeting? Food preparation takes place in kitchens. It could cause a mess if bits and scraps were to fall onto the rug. Fine, but how many people are actually very messy cooks? Scraps can cause a mess on the way from counter to garbage bin. Fine, but why not just install an opening for the garbage bin in the counter and sweep everything in? Kitchens are high traffic areas. But they're no more high traffic than the rest of the house. I don't see a reason why kitchens shouldn't be carpeted. After all, dining rooms in restaurants are carpeted, and they see far more falling food scraps and foot traffic (with shoes!) than an average kitchen. Yes, restaurants with carpets tend to get vacuumed every night. But as I said before, they get much more traffic than the average home kitchen. I think that carpets in kitchens could be highly feasible. I advocate the use of the kitchen as a secondary living room. Kitchens are, after all, warm and central. They play an important role in life. More carpets, more arm chairs, less utility. Most people don't use the utility anyway.

Fraction People

I'm wondering if this is a uniquely North American thing: we seem to define ourselves as fractions. I can say that I'm one eight Swedish or five sevenths Irish or whatever. Most people I know do it. If you ask, they'll be able to give you their fractions. North America seems like a perfect place to be fractional. We're a land of colonists. No one is one hundred percent anything. What I'm wondering, then, is if anyone else does that, or whether it's just us.

Online ads get more obnoxious and depressing every day.

Facebook just asked me if I wanted to not be lonely anymore. That is to say, more specifically, that an ad on facebook asked me if I wanted to not be lonely. Funny thing, I didn't even know I was lonely. Facebook clearly thinks I am, though. Lots of websites also think that I might like to know who my soul mate is. These ads clearly think that I'm not happy as I am. Maybe they think that only frustrated, angry, lonely, desperate people view social networking and news sites. And all of that is without even bringing my SPAM into the equation.

My SPAM thinks that I might like a status symbol watch. Or that I might like to look at wild girls. Or that I'm having troubles with an appendage I don't even have. It's offering me designer shoes for cheap, too.

If I were to judge our social climate by the quality of advertising I see, I'd get the idea that most people are pretty unhappy. I'd get the idea that people are lonely, that they suffer from un-fulfilling relationships and bad sex. And that they don't own enough expensive looking watches. I might think that social problems magically disappear when certain pills and supplements are taken, or at least that people want to think so.

I find that things look fairly bleak, when you judge by the ads.

Conventional media as curator

I'm going to draw a parallel. If I want to see art, there are two things I can do. I could go online and do a search for "art." I'd get over a billion hits (check it yourself if you want to make sure). I'd get to sift through a whole world of art, opinions about art, art history... (Suspend your comments for a moment, if you will, about the non-originalness of the art online. I know that I won't get to see the real painting. But that's not the point of my argument. Forget about it.) My other option would be to go to an art gallery. Doing that would give me access to a limited amount of art, filtered through the perception of a third party. For it to show up in an art gallery, someone has to curate it. I get to look at what they think is interesting.

I think that it would be good for conventional media to operate that way. Let's have an example: Before the internet, it was alright to show one TV show in one country and a different one somewhere else. That's still how it happens, but I'm not sure it's okay any more. If a TV show airs in the UK but not in Canada, and I want to watch it but have no legal way to do so, what am I supposed to do? Am I meant to just not watch it at all? Or do I wait for the DVD to come out and then break the encryption? Or subscribe to digital cable for one show? That's no fun at all. It means that as much as I may want to watch something, there's no sensible, legal way to do it. Why don't they show me what I want to watch on TV? The standard channels only have so much space in their schedules. They have to make decisions about what they think will be successful. They don't have the resources to cater just to me. And yes, I know I could just get BBC Americas or something, but it comes with a large cable package. In order to get one show that I want, I'd have to sign on for a whole lot more. Not very sensible if I don't actually want to spend my free time in front of the TV. So, there's no easy way for conventional media to get my viewership without alienating another large chunk of the viewing public. There simply isn't enough time in the day to accommodate me.

There is, however, another medium that can target individuals quite well. Guess what it is. Did you say The Internet? You're quite right. The internet has all the space necessary to show everyone just what they want to see. That's pretty great. But there are some problems. For one thing, with enough space to make everyone happy, it's sometimes hard to find what you want. Take the art analogy above. A billion hits for the word "art." I'd have to narrow my search down quite a bit to find something that I actually wanted to look at. But that's another problem. Going to the art gallery, or watching TV, or listening to the radio gives me the opportunity to find new things. I might not have known that I'd like it, but when someone else presents it to me, wow! It's a whole new world.

We've established the strengths of conventional media and new media. Conventional media is good at filtering things, at presenting new things to viewers, at curating. The internet, on the other hand, is far better at distribution. You can actually fit all those individual tastes onto the internet. I think that the answer, then, is to make the two work together. Conventional media should become an arbiter of taste, a more curatorial venture, and should leave distribution to new media. Both media could play to their own strengths instead of the constant fear and competition that the current model provokes. Wouldn't that be nice?

It isn't charity if you demand something in return

The grocery store I give some of my business to is doing a charity thing right now. They hit their customers up for money at the checkout, the money goes to disadvantaged kids or some such. Fine. I have no problem with that. The problem is that after you give them the money (the amount in this case is $2), they hand you a little slip of paper on which you're meant to write your name. Later on, they put all of the little papers up on the wall near the checkouts, so that everyone can see just how generous they've all been. That's the part I have trouble with. I have trouble with the idea that people demand recognition for their acts of charity. It's like the Livestrong bracelets that were so popular a couple of years ago. It's not enough to just give money for cancer research. People need others to know and acknowledge that they've given money. "Look at me! I'm terribly thoughtful, nice, and charitable." We're not giving for the sake of others. We're not giving to feel like we've done something good. We're giving so that other people will know how wonderful we are. That's my problem.

The chicken or the egg

I'm sitting around, reading a book on my computer. It's a .pdf that I'm looking at in KGhostView. I've got the whole page, that's two pages of book on one page of the .pdf, displayed on my screen. That means no scrolling, except to go to the next page. And that's what's got me thinking.

There's no button clicking. Every time I want to hit the next page, I just move my middle finger a little on my scroll wheel. Just a little, though. It's a tiny fraction of an inch, just dragging the little bit of mouse wheel that comes into contact with the very tip of the pad of my finger. Just one drag. I don't need to go back and drag again, I don't need to extend my finger to the end of the wheel and drag the whole thing. It's perfect, it's lovely, it works with minimal effort. And like most things that work well, I didn't notice it when I was doing it right. I only noticed what I was doing when I accidentally scrolled too much and skipped ahead two pages instead of one. It's like the computer/mouse/program/mouse driver is teaching me to be subtle.

That's where the question comes in. I'm trying to decide whether the way my computer asks me to do things makes me more subtle, or whether humans just are subtle and computers are designed to work with that. I can't decide whether it's teaching me, or we've taught it. For me, because I lack the insight that would give me the real answer that I'm sure exists, it's like the chicken and the egg. Is the computer subtle and teaches us to be, or are we subtle and teach computers to be? I know that I possess the ability to be subtle. I know that the computer does, too. I just don't know who's driving that subtlety.

Not book reports, website reports

In grade school, I had to write book reports. They usually talked about the plot, the characters, and other basic things. Because it was grade school, I didn't go into much detail. I didn't analyse much or explore deeper issues of imagery and what lies beneath the basic plot. I was writing a reading response today, but it was a little different from the usual. Instead of an article, I was meant to be responding to some websites. As I wrote, it started looking suspiciously like one of those book reports from grade school. So, I'm wondering if, in the future, children in grade school will write website reports. They could discuss what the website is meant to do, the basic layout and structure, what kind of interaction it allows (if any), that kind of thing. Here's to a new artform, then. Or, if not an artform, a new kind of busywork for teachers to assign to small children. At least it promotes media literacy.

Capitalism for butterflies

I have this habit of starting little micro-businesses for individual occasions and situations. I take different things that I'm good at, different trends that I see happening, and different environmental stimuli (impending small press fairs, craft festivals, that sort of thing) and build a business to meet the need. In short, I do something that interests me now, for a limited period of time, and hope to benefit others. I then move on before the concept goes stale. I think there are other examples of this in existence, but I may take it to an extreme.

I'm calling my habit Capitalism for Butterflies, because it does a lot of the same things that butterflies do. Think: Butterflies live short lives, being pretty, flitting from place to place, pollinating. That's what an ideal Capitalism for Butterflies business does.
It exists for a short period of time, based around one good idea that is often trend based. It isn't meant to have staying power. If it works well, it pollinates. It makes the people who encounter it happy, it builds personal brand equity for the people involved, and the whole thing ends before it gets old.

A recent example of Capitalism for Butterflies: no poetry press. I started no poetry press specifically for Expozine. I got it into my head that I would show at Expozine 2007. Roughly two weeks before Expozine took place, I made a website, dreamed up a few zines, did the covers for those zines, put those on the site, and then registered myself for Expozine under the no poetry press banner. By the time Expozine rolled around, I had a catalogue of around ten zines/small books and I was ready to go. People showed up at my table, some of them actually looking for me because they'd seen covers that had interested them on the no poetry press site. I sold a lot and loads of people went home happy with copies of Flow Chart Comics, The Adorable Seven Deadly Sins and Love Poems for Undeserving People. no poetry press hasn't been active since. The website still exists, I still have copies of zines that didn't sell as well, and no poetry press might just register for Expozine 2008.

The bottom line, though, is that a Capitalism for Butterflies business doesn't need to exist all the time or for long. Good Capitalism for Butterflies businesses are low commitment, low investment and extremely compelling. They don't need to last forever. It's like having loads of different product lines under the umbrella of one company. The parent company in this case is just an individual. Every Capitalism for Butterflies project I start gets the ginger coons brand a little more equity. No loss, lots of gain and never any stasis.

Capitalism for Butterflies is a profoundly fluid business model. And that's a very good way to be.

Books are more democratic than television

I just watched an episode of jPod. As the credits rolled, I thought to myself "I really need to get out and buy that book." Immediately after thinking that, though, I realized that reading the book would ruin the show, because I'd know how it ends. But then, my reasoning went, Douglas Coupland is such a fantastic writer. There's probably way more in the text of jPod than there is in the show. After all, I love Douglas Coupland books for their tiny details. And tiny details don't show up very well in TV and movies. If they make it at all, they take a backseat to larger points of plot or mise en scene.

That's what makes books so much more democratic. When reading a book, everything is equal. Everything is just another set of words on a page. Tiny details get the same love that large events get. They have to, because everything comes in sequential order. Things that could happen simultaneously on a screen are forced to go one by one in books. And that's fantastic. It means that the tiny details work. It means that I really get to think about what the room looks like, if that's something that matters. Instead of simply seeing, the sequential nature of books forces me to process, to acknowledge, and to understand.

Jam Jars

I have issues with jam jars. The standard practise is to get jam out of jars through the use of butter knives, or in some cases, a spoon. The jam jar is made of glass. The knife or spoon is made of metal. Jam jars come in all shapes and sizes, so do knives and spoons. All of this means that it proves very difficult to get the last of the jam out of the jar. It just doesn't work. I wind up getting frustrated and wasting valuable jam when I rinse the jar. A spatula would probably work quite well, since flexibility and malleability are of importance in this situation. The problem is, though, that I do not own a spatula small enough to fit into the jam jar. I know that they exist, but I don't own one. I can't see the use, other than for getting the last jam out of the jar. It seems a little wasteful to own a tool whose only use is to get the last jam out of the jar. Although who knows, that may be less wasteful than having to constantly waste jam.

The Language isn't built for it

Science fiction writers (I'm thinking Douglas Adams and Spider Robinson in particular) always say that our languages (particularly English) aren't built to deal with time travel. Fine. But at this point in time, we don't have that problem. We still travel at a rate of one second per second into the future. But there are other things that English has trouble with that we have gotten around to.

I'm thinking, in particular, of transgendered people. If I'm thinking about someone I haven't seen since high school, who was a girl then, but isn't now, what pronouns do I use. I know that if I saw him on the street, in the present, I'd call him by his new name and have no trouble thinking of him as male. But am I meant to change my memories? Can I treat his memory as something separate from his present? Can he have two different sets of pronouns that apply, one for the past and one for the present?

I think I may have lied in the first paragraph. This is a question of time travel. The time travel in question is my travel to my own past experience through memory. In this case, though, the past tense works just fine. It's the pronouns that are broken.

When word processors are the old fashioned way

I tried to load my blogger dashboard, in order to write the previous two posts. No response, just the generic message from my modem, saying that it wasn't going to happen. Check the modem: no lights out. Check another site, internet working properly. “So,” I though to myself, “blogger must be down. I guess I'll have to write these the old fashioned way and upload later.” The strange thing, though, is that by “the old fashioned way,” I meant in a word processor. Which is to say, a word processor that is actually installed on my physical-right-here-in-front-of-me computer. When did that become the old fashioned way? I'm a little concerned that I might soon be an anachronism. More and more, our productivity apps are moving to the internet (just look at google docs). More and more, the app that people use most is their browser. Will I be hopelessly old fashioned with my word processor and my graphics clients and my email client? The smart money, I think, is on the answer to that question being “yes.”

Mixed feelings about falafel

Ever since I first set foot in Montreal, even before I moved here, I've had a love-hate relationship with falafel places. I don't really like falafel pita that much, and whenever I get a plate instead of a pita, there are always a load of things that I just don't want to eat. (Actually, I think that might be a corollary of Murphy's Law: No matter what you order on the falafel plate, there's always something unappetizing.) Even though I don't actually like falafel that much, and even though I never feel good after eating it, I have a strange sense of security knowing that I can always get one if I want to. I think that's a little odd. I have some kind of strange dependency on falafel places, even if I hardly ever patronize them. Maybe it's like having a fire station nearby. Even if I don't plan on setting fire to my house, I feel more comfortable knowing that there are pumper trucks and fire fighters a few blocks away. Falafel as emergency service?

Am I allowed to resent couples?

I remember reading, in one of the books about romance novels that I've been going through for my Legally Blonde/romance novel analysis paper, a passage from an old-ish romance novel. Some supposedly wiser, and certainly older, woman was advising the young heroine. She was talking about how women in love are happier to see other couples. I believe the term she used was “more generous.” She was essentially saying that women are more complete, more selfless, and more understanding of others as long as they're in (reciprocal) love. And in this case, it's worth pointing out that love denotes coupledom. I caught myself wondering about that idea today.

I was on my way home from the store, the weather was fantastic (for February in Montreal, at least) and I felt great. I turned onto a side street and was immediately confronted by the sight of a couple kissing as they walked. My instinct was to resent, if not them, then at least their public display of affection. My second reaction was to wonder why I was resenting them and their display. Am I allowed to be displeased by people who kiss in public? Am I merely resenting them because they are displaying their status as a unit? Does the wisdom from the romance novel apply? Would I stop resenting their display if I were part of a unit?

In short, is it valid to resent public displays of affection?

A theory about cul-de-sacs

I know this new theory isn't even remotely true, but I'd like to posit that cul-de-sacs exist for the benefit of people in aeroplanes.

Cul-de-sacs look fantastic from the air. They add lovely twists and turns to a city. They are, however, significantly less good for people on the ground. They take up loads of space, they're quite confusing, and they cause getting places to be more time consuming.

This leads me to believe that cul-de-sacs exist to be looked at from the God's eye view, which is to say, the aerial view. Pre machine assisted flight, the only people/things/animals/fictional characters who got to look at things from above were birds and God(s). These days, sixty dollars gets you from point A to point B in an hour, with the added advantage of a killer aerial view for the duration. The result is that everyone can have the view from on high.

We're all gods now.

The garden as a metaphor for the city

Flying into Toronto the other day, I got a chance to look down at the buildings surrounding the airport. It struck me how many houses there were, and how few taller buildings. I then started thinking that cities could be viewed like gardens. Houses and other low-lying structures are ground cover. Basic tract houses remind me of grass. They look very homogeneous from the air. Taller buildings are plants. They stand out above the ground cover, but with the way architecture has been unremarkable in the past century, very few of these plants can be called flowers. We seem, also, to be missing shrubs. I don't think we have the buildings yet that could be likened to shrubs.

So, how can we make our cities into better gardens? More flowers. That means more variety, more colour, and taking more chances with architecture. Some different varieties of ground cover might be nice, too. And shrubs: I'd like to figure out what architectural shrubs could be.

Settling and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

We watched The Umbrellas of Cherbourg last night in my film studies class. It may be a musical (entirely sung, no dialogue), and it may have killer sets and costumes that verge on the hilarious, but it's still incredibly sad. At least, I thought it was sad. What makes it sad (spoiler alert!) is that there are two characters, who epitomize young love, who end up, through circumstance, being separated and settling for other people.

The two main characters have the wild, irrational, crazy love that we prize so highly. During a period of separation, for social and economic reasons, they both end up settling for security instead of passion. Fine. They both end up fairly happy, in lives that they find comfortable, with reasonable partners who care about them. However, they have regrets. There are a million things I could take issue with in this premise. I could argue that crazy, irrational love is a relatively recent construct, and that mercenary marriages have long been seen as normal. But that's not what's bothering me, this time around.

What bothers me is the reaction of the other people watching the film. The main complaint was that all of the grand, swooping music and over the top set design didn't match the fairly pedestrian plot. Over and over, people complained that there wasn't enough excitement and conflict in the plot. The other viewers found it problematic that the characters had small issues, but managed to move on with their lives. I'm a little shocked by that viewpoint. I'm worried that we've been so conditioned by Hollywood to expect big things that we can accept reality.

In real life, people live with what they have. People make choices based on their immediate situation and their future happiness. People like comfort and certainty. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg presents a story in which characters react in realistic ways. In movies, people hardly ever settle. In real life, it happens all the time. Based on the reactions of the others in my film studies class, I get the impression that people want grand romance in their movies. They want the hope that unrealistic things can happen. That worries me, just a little bit.

On being ordinary and the economy

Digging deeper into the existing research on romance novels and gender, I've discovered an interesting tendency. I find it interesting, although it shouldn't surprise me. I'm finding more and more evidence that most people just want to have an ordinary life. There seems to be an overwhelming desire to have a comfortable life and just pass the time. I shouldn't be surprised because that's essentially what gets classified as the American Dream: the house, the husband, the car, the kids.

I'm surprised, of course, because I lack the fundamental ability to get out of my own head. My (heavily flawed) reasoning is that if I aspire to be extraordinary and to make an impact on the world, then most people should aspire to be extraordinary and to make an impact on the world. Wrong. If I actually take a moment to think about it, it's easy to see that I've made a seriously bad assumption.

Where does the economy come into it, you may rightly ask. The glib answer would be: where doesn't the economy come into it? But that's not very productive. It is in the interest of industry to have customers who want to buy things. A shiny new car every few years? That's fantastic news for the economy. Taking the metro or walking? Not so much. Cosmetics? Exfoliants? Cleansing pads? New clothes every season? Super! All of these things are sold to us as ways to fit in, to be normal, to live the life. That's not by chance, either.

Being extraordinary? If extraordinary means, etymologically, to be "out of order" (see for yourself), that's not so conducive to meeting societal norms. Want to save the environment? Not good economic sense. Want to re-examine gender roles? Downright dangerous. Not meeting norms? Not good for the economy.

Nothing is perfect, but many things are good enough.

I keep a whiteboard in my front hallway. I often get tiny stubs of ideas, little soundbites, that need to be documented before I forget them. Those stubs often end up on scraps of paper, random pages of my sketch book, and generally in difficult to find places. The purpose of the whiteboard is to aggregate the stubs so that I can actually find them when I'm ready to turn those little ideas into bigger projects. Yesterday, on the whiteboard, I wrote the words "Nothing is perfect, but many things are good enough." I like that statement. It sounds pithy. It shows good use of rhetoric. I'm troubled by it, though. It bothers me, as an inveterate perfectionist, to be embracing the "good enough." Should we reconcile ourselves to a world of "good enough?" After all, the quest for perfection leads to so much heartache. At the same time, we need to be able to dream. I'm wondering if the realism of my "good enough" statement is productive or not. Is it actually good to be able to settle? Is it worse to aim for perfection and fail often than to aim for good but never get the lift provided by actually attaining perfection? Is "good enough" good enough?

TV on the internet v. TV on TV

I sat down in front of my TV last night to -amazingly enough- watch some TV. Most of the time, I use the TV for watching movies or playing games. I get most of my TV from the internet. The CBC normally gets my viewership by posting episodes on their website. This, I think, works better for everyone. What's so good about it? The CBC gets a more precise impression of where their viewers are coming from. When I pluck waves out of the air with an antenna, the CBC has no idea that I'm watching. On the other hand, when I click through to the jPod website, for example, it is quite clear that I'm watching. There's a useful corollary to that, too. CBC can more precisely tell their advertisers how many people are viewing, and who those people are. That's quite good. Clearly, the CBC benefits from me watching TV on the internet. What, then, do I gain? I gain flexibility and self determination. I gain the ability to watch shows when I want to, instead of when the CBC chooses to air them. That's useful if I'm not home when the show first airs. I'm much less likely to follow a show if I have to drop everything to watch it. The other major gain is that the show doesn't get interrupted by advertisements. I'd much rather view banner ads on the side or top of a website than ads in the middle of a show.

If TV on the internet is so good, why am I even framing this as a competition? TV is, at this point, still better than TV on the internet in some respects. For one, if I were to watch jPod on the CBC website, the resolution would be far worse than the TV version. Not only that, but the episode would stream, and streaming is inherently jumpy. Also, if I happened to be home on a Tuesday night, it would make far more sense to watch the broadcast, since episodes aren't uploaded until after the show has aired. Problematic. But not just problematic for the viewer. Even though the CBC benefits in many ways from making shows available on their website, there's still a major problem: the cost of bandwidth. Streaming a 45 minute long show takes bandwidth. Bandwidth costs money. They now pay not only to broadcast the show on TV, but also to stream it on demand on their website.

Some questions, then, about the good and bad of TV on the internet. Would I rather watch a low res, slightly jumpy version of a show, or have the story constantly interrupted by advertisements? Why, if the CBC is willing to make shows available online, do they not choose a better distribution method? Would it be so wrong to set up a CBC sanctioned torrent? Such a solution might cut bandwidth costs for the CBC, and it would certainly give viewers a better viewing experience. At the same time, would regular viewers be willing to spend time waiting for a show to download, in exchange for better picture quality? Do regular viewers even bother to watch TV on the internet?

If I value flexibility and self determination in my TV viewing, why did I sit down last night and watch TV on TV? Simply, I was home, I had nothing to do, I wanted something lazy to occupy my evening with. So I turned on the TV. I find, though, that the more committed I am to a show, the more I end up watching it on the internet. Broadcast TV, on the other hand, is admirably suited to casual viewing. Plus, commercial breaks are a great time to go and get a fresh cup of tea.

why the shoe repair shop makes me happy (or: what's not to like about mixed use neighbourhoods?)

Often, when I walk past the shoe repair shop, it strikes me just how fantastic my neighbourhood is. Really, it's the prototypical mixed use neighbourhood. Within a three block radius of home, I have access to a grocery store, two hair dressers, a video store, several pubs, at least six different restaurants, a newsagent, a museum, two parks a metro station, the highway, if I happened to want it, and of course, the previously mentioned shoe repair shop. All of that, on top of the whole pile of mixed residential, as well as the office buildings two streets over.

I don't ever need to leave the bubble. And that's what makes me wonder. I have trouble grasping why anyone would want to live in an area that didn't have everything within reach. Is it actually pleasant to have to leave the neighbourhood to get groceries? Is there some factor in non-mixed neighbourhoods that makes it worth the inconvenience? I find it very hard to believe that anyone would be willing to trade the corner store for a detached house and a yard.

My neighbourhood forces me to exercise, because most things that I need or want are within walking distance. Because I can walk, I don't need to spend money on maintaining and fuelling a car. The sheer proximity of amenities gives me the opportunity to be healthier and have more disposable income. What's not to like about that situation?

on our contemporary definition of love

I've been researching a paper that I'm doing for my film studies class. I'm thinking about Legally Blonde, the general category of movies aimed at young women, romance novels, and how all of those media influence gender construction. It's interesting stuff, but puzzling. The problem is that all of this research is making me constantly have to run up against the concept of romantic love. And that's something that I have trouble processing, even outside of the academic context.

Think about it: we have this massive collection of expectations. We expect the undefinable spark that we call love. We expect someone compatible enough to be a very good friend. We expect to find someone who can do those two thing, and then we expect them to stay and make a life as a unit. That alone is an awful lot to expect.

There's more, though. At this point in time, we expect the compatibility, the spark, the life, and a whole other set of things. We expect an environment of mutual respect, which is a fairly new condition. We expect to find our partners interesting. We expect them to fit into our existing lifestyle. We expect all of these things, but we don't seem, as a society, to have a very good track record when it comes to holding it all together.

Even if it doesn't work out a lot of the time, we're fiercely tied to our happily ever after definition of love. From fairy tales, on through happy-ending-girly movies, up to chick lit and series romances, the stories women get told are jammed full of perfect, considerate, attractive, nice men who want to make breakfast in bed and then grow old together

When I think it through, I wonder how much of that ideal is really necessary. And then, because I'm a product of my culture, I kick myself for even imagining settling for less.