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Life Without Cable: One Month, Going Strong!

rocjoe — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:58:23 -0500

It’s been four weeks since I returned the old cable box. Somehow Rogers still managed to bill be over $100 bucks this month. That’s OK, late charges aside I’ll be saving money before the year is out.

Speaking of saving money, I cancelled by “balance protector” premium on my credit card. I found the last straw on my statement for September-- $89 for balance protection? My foot. They only ever pay the minimum due on the balance. My minimum balances almost never top $30 so what the bank is doing is practically robbery. Yes, I agreed to it at some point, but if I was mugged and agreed to hand over my wallet, that’s still robbery right?

Back to the cable. You know, the point of this wasn’t to go without TV, so I don’t feel the least bit guilty about using the Internet to watch TV. At this moment I’m minding the Leaf’s game in a 4:3 stream—combined with the blocky video stream, this takes me back to my university days, watching snowy antenna-only reception at rez. Good times!

I’ve also noticed that I don’t mind working in the evenings now that accessing TV is more trouble than it’s worth most of the time. This is ideal since clients don’t call and ask for stuff until lunchtime so working later means I can have most work done by morning. Wake at 8am, goof around until noon, work until 10pm (with breaks) and watch a movie to wrap up the day. This kind of work day is so un-stressful I have to take my pulse once in a while just to be sure I still have one!

Without cable, I’m watching a lot less news as well… maybe that’s why I feel so little stress.

Ceci n’est pas un blog

rocjoe — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:47:59 -0500

Whoa, sorry, didn’t mean to go all Magritte on you just now. But while we’re on the topic, that really was a pipe. Hell yeah.

You know, at least he’s remembered for something. Apple-faces. Not-pipes. Bowler hats. Not too shabby. Sure you may say “they’re just paintings” but to actually make something that means stuff to other people… well, that’s art and it is a hard thing to do. Well, harder than I can imagine.

Victor Hugo spent 20 years writing Les Miserables. Would it have been a lesser novel if he’d only spent 19 years on it? Would it have been half as good if’ he’d cranked it out in only ten years? Hmm. Really that’s not an easy question to answer, since I believe the idea of a great novel has got to count for something—probably a lot.

It' took me about six weeks to read Les Mis. If all Hugo really had was a good idea for a novel, why couldn’t he dash it out in six weeks, edit for another six weeks, get published and start working on the next masterpiece? What role does time play in making a great work?

I guess if you’re going to make diamonds, it’s going to take time.

Cross-Browser? Explore THIS…

rocjoe — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 15:14:04 -0500

A little over 24 hours ago, I was mostly indifferent to Internet Explorer 8. It was really not on my radar as I’ve happily been using Firefox for years (I started using version 0.4, I think it was called “Phoenix” back then). Sure I pulled out IE every now and then to check my work on different browsers. Differences were noticed but a tweak here and a tweak there and things would get back on track.

Yesterday a client called to say the layout for their next new site was way out of whack. At first I didn’t know what they were talking about until I remembered I hadn’t handled their laptop since I got their office to switch to Firefox. It was still running IE.

So I fire up IE 8 and I find the problem easily enough. The usual disagreement between Microsoft and Mozilla’s “box-model”. Before calling it a job well done I noticed another layout problem, the toolbar was much taller in IE than the Firefox rendering. So rather than waiting for the client to point out the shortcomings of my work I set on doing another tweak…

Four hours go by and I’m just coming to grips with the problem when I find yet even more of my screens are now out of whack from the “fixes” I put in place for IE… Sometimes multi-browser support is like juggling spinning plates—you get one to stop wobbling, turn around and find three are about to smash to the ground.

Basically I learned that IE has some hidden padding on their FORM tags that no margin or padding settings can fix… changing FORM to an inline object does work though. Still, even Firefox has unchangeable margins on their textboxes so I don’t totally fault IE alone on that.

However, after the evening session of fixing multi-browser HTML+CSS I had been using internet Explorer constantly on the same few webpages for about twelve hours and I can plainly see that IE8 is the flakiest browser to hit the market since Netscape 4.0. I would hit the refresh button three times and get three different renderings of the same page… images not loading, CSS rules not being applied. Honestly one reloading to the next wouldn’t always produce pages that you could recognize as the exact same markup and stylesheet.

Really it’s no wonder IE is losing market share. Netscape accomplished the same thing twelve years ago by making a really unreliable product (although unreliable in their case was for different reasons).

It’s almost over. The new site will launch sometime tonight and that’s that. Maybe when I’m less sleep-deprived I my opinion on IE8 may soften… but will anybody else’s?

The Long Search is Over

rocjoe — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:25:33 -0500

More than once people noted that I was always such a “contented smoker”—I really liked my smokes. Smoking for me was a decent pastime. Some people collected stamps, I could sit around and smoke. The taste, the satisfaction, the mental lift—I like it all and rarely grew tired of it.

Then about ten years ago, I quit smoking and have been looking for ways to NOT un-quit ever since. Quitting only happened because I spent the previous year convincing myself I didn’t like smoking. Denial and cognitive dissonance were my sidekicks. Finally quitting put aside the puzzlement yet deep down I really missed the habit of smoking!

Seriously, I’ve tried just about every reasonable smoking substitute imaginable, including but not limited to:

chewing gum
regular exercise
carrot sticks
celery sticks
NyQuil
more smoking
positive thinking

In all honesty I was merely days away from something desperate and silly like vibrating crystals or lasers or laser-crystals.

Then I realized how much I’m enjoying my new espresso machine. Especially how it’s what I turn to for a “break” during the day. Just like smoking. Then I realized I appreciated the taste. Just like smoking. Satisfaction? Mental lift? Yep! Just like smoking.

I suppose if there’s anything to conclude from this, it would be that you never really lose habits, they just change their appearance!

Lesson Learned: Cheap is Still Cheap

rocjoe — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 19:13:00 -0500

Today was the annual trip to Ikea; some sort of natural nesting-instinct that comes with the cool autumn weather that makes you think: “so I’m going to be stuck in this place for the next five months until spring?”

I arrived with a will that was steelier than the chilly nor-wester wind that buffeted the car. I managed to walk straight past a Blop, Spungjit and a Flampsi—yes, even a Flampsi.

Then I walked past a set of highball glasses for four bucks.They are the nice, thick-rimmed, heavy-bottomed highball glass that you expect to find costing more than four measly dollars. No way I was going to walk around this deal.

So I buy them, take them home, wash ’em and stack ‘em.

I felt like blog-posting time was near, so I take one down from the cupboard and mix a smart bit of Gin with some clever ice-cubes. I’m about to pour the tonic in when I see something wrong with the glass: one side is flat. …Flat!

I mean, if you got on a bus and saw your bus driver had this much flatness to the side of his head, you’d think about when’s the soonest you can get off the bus without being late for work. That’s how flat it is.

Well… if I knock the glass over at least I don’t have to worry about it rolling away from me.

Health Kick: Red Wine and Pizza Subs!

rocjoe — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:34:59 -0500

Ah, life is good. This week passed by so quickly—I had something to do every day which is always better than like, doing nothing at all.

I’ve been logging everything I eat for almost a week now. I’m a little startled over how much salt is in my diet… I honestly though I was doing well since I almost never reach for the salt-shaker. Then this week I saw how much salt is in simple things like bread, and favorite pizza, cold-cuts, cheese and so on. Basically if I want to have a normal sodium intake I’m going to have to restrict myself to water and low-sodium air… if I can find any.

For now, I’m taking emergency measures by flushing the sodium out of my body with large gulps of red wine. I do believe it’s working, but I’d better have another glass… just erring on the side of caution, you know.

Late-in-the-Day-Notes

rocjoe — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:59:00 -0500

Well, I’ve got the itch to post something tonight. I have discovered that I like pinot-noir—yeah, I didn’t know it was a kind of wine either. It’s not bad. Actually, it’s kind of really good. I’ve got nice glow going on like a small candle next to a cold window.

The best part is wine is good and healthy for you. At this rate, I’ll be chiseled, tanned and slim by the end of next week. Awesome. Why wait? I’m going to throw out all my old clothes right away.

Well, the mission is almost accomplished. No, I didn’t produce any coherent or vaguely interesting thoughts, but sometimes it’s just better to get out there and run otherwise you might forget how.

In the meantime, enjoy this nice antique-y feeling photo I cooked up today. It’s quite a nice accident… I was sick of looking at all the green, so I removed it and there you have it.

If You Can Read This

rocjoe — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:50:36 -0500

Then you can afford Internet access. That’s something.

If you can afford Internet access, then you’ve got a place to use the Internet. That’s pretty good too.

Having a place to browse the Internet reading personal blogs like this one means you’re probably in a home, and that’s really good.

If you’re reading this blog, then you’ve probably got a warm, safe place to sleep tonight. That makes you lucky, really damn lucky. Luckier than about 1.5 billion other people on this planet (no lie, estimates are about 20% of the world’s population doesn’t actually sleep under a roof, let alone under a roof in a place free of violence, war, etc).

Well, that’s how I see it on freezing cold nights like this. Lucky. damn lucky.

Great Thoughts, or, How to Get Descartes in Just 6939 Easy Lessons

rocjoe — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:47:37 -0500

I’ve been thinking a lot about that stuff Rene Descartes said, the “I think therefore I am” stuff. I call it stuff because I haven’t actually read it in almost 20 years, and I really couldn’t get my head around it back then, hence “stuff”. And I say it like that since I read Descartes for an introductory Philosophy class, hence “hence”.

This line of thought only came about after reading Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. Stephenson really tests my ability to understand abstract ideas. Frankly I lose the thread most of the time (Brian Greene is pretty difficult too, so it’s not poor Neal letting the team down!). Back to the point, I think it was the Hemn space discussion that got me to thinking about Descartes. It’s not that Anathem’s Hemn space has anything to do with Descartes, it just jogged something loose in my head and now I need to tie it down again.

The opening part of the “I think therefore I am” discussion is that Descartes has a piece of wax that he can mash up into any shape he wants, yet no matter how much he changes it, he knows that it’s still the same piece of wax. His explanation for this is that there is something beyond the shape of the wax that remains unchanged, and that is the part that indicates it is the same piece of wax. I think Descartes goes further to take this other part to mean “God” but my memory and comprehension only turns fuzzier and fuzzier after this point.

It’s that idea of the extra something attached to the wax that’s rolling around in my head. Like, what if it’s more simple than a higher being? What if this is how we are sensing the higher dimensions (like the ones Brian Greene talks about)? This idea really works for me because Descartes hands are only handling the three-dimensional part of the wax, the extra-dimensional parts are unchanged. Since the extra dimensional parts don’t change, when we sense the blob of wax in it’s entirety we know it’s the same piece of wax because we sense the parts that changed and the parts that didn’t change at the same time!

Neat. It only took me 20 years to get to grips with that one. If I live to be two hundred I should have this philosophy thing nailed!

How Do You Define Success

rocjoe — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:14:12 -0500

There’s this old story after the Islanders won their last Stanley Cup in 1983 that Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier went to the Islander’s dressing room to congratulate the winning team. When they walked in to the dressing room they were stunned how beat up, bandaged and bruised the Islanders team looked. At that moment both players understood they hadn’t won yet because they weren’t trying hard enough—they won four of the next six finals after that encounter.

Makes you think about what it takes to be a big success in any walk of life. It seems a little harder to grasp once you’re outside the structured world of organized sports… There is no won/lost record to figure out where you stand, no points system and no playoffs. Sure we do have bank acocunts to check, but that’s not the only kind of success.

Speaking of success, I heard a good lyric today:

There is no failure for the one who keeps trying.

Nice one. I think that’s a quote everyone should grow up with. I can think of a hundred times where the only success I had came after a long string of attempts. It never felt like failure because I was always sure if the current try didn’t work, I could always do something else. Success is the outcome of a process, sometimes a really long process but a process nonetheless.

So in a way we’re a little luckier than the athletes, they may know when they’ve won or lost, but we get to keep trying as long as we care to keep trying—there is no final buzzer in the real world.