Rhiannon Coppin: journalist and programmer

Perhaps the end?

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 07:38:00 +0000

I really haven't been into this 'blogging thing' for a bit.

Perhaps it is because I use Twitter to re-post online items I find interesting, and beyond that I tend keep a lot of my thoughts to myself in my personal ideas/drafts/rants files and folders.

Anyhow, I have put on my thinking cap for a challenge for the time being, and will be blogging related items to it at datafaced.org.

So go there.

Nerdcore genius

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 21:49:00 +0000

If you haven't yet seen Weird Al at his best, then enjoy -- even though these videos are each a few years old. Marvelous.

Twitter makes sense, at last

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 21:16:00 +0000

As a fairly new Twitter user, I didn't really 'get it' until being shown TweetDeck and then going to a conference.

For the past four days I was madly following the waterfall of information coming out of sessions I couldn't attend at the IRE CAR conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. Early on, someone announced the "#NICAR11" hashtag, and then we were off to the races.

I was retweeting awesomeness like mad (to all of my 66 followers, some of whom were probably already following #NICAR11) and probably violating the Twitter function- and style-guides due to n00bness; and I realised that the real value for my communities was my doing 'original reporting' on Twitter -- sending out the stuff no one else was sending, to help others lurk in time and space as I had been doing.

But I had made a commitment to myself to be specifically social and to remember names -- which is hard to do when I recognize maybe 10 out of 400 people on sight, and am aware of perhaps 30 other names.

This is where Twitter came in -- I started following people I had met and chatted with, and got to know them better over the weekend, through what they tweeted, and interacted and joked with them through Twitter even though we were in different sessions most of the day.

I also used Twitter as a bookmark, which sounds weird, but it sort of helped me organize the people I met -- if that makes sense.

So my most recent "follows" are all amazing folks I met at the conference and I can go back to my Twitter account to go over just who I actually met. (This is especially handy when it's a year from now and I want to put faces to names and people have put in profile photos that actually look like themselves. A few that I meant weren't on The Twitter, and I was sure to send them quick email notes instead.)

Maybe this is fairly obvious to most Twitter users; but for me the idea that I could 'collect' members of a network and 'save' them for later in any organized fashion was astounding. So cool. #LateToTheParty

Raleigh calling

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 05:11:00 +0000

I'm sitting in a room on the 10th floor of the Marriott in downtown Raleigh, listening to Falco's Vienna Calling on Radio Nigel.

The backstory behind this relatively banal statement is:
1) I'm at a conference that I hope will get me re-up to speed in data journalism, and integrated with the community who are leading it. I want 20% inspiration, 50% skill improvement, 20% social capital building, and 10% vacation out of my time here. This 10% includes making use of the hotel pool and gym, and finding a bottle opener because -- dammit -- this cider ain't twist-off.

2) I've heard this stupid Falco song maybe 13 times in the last week. This is partly because I'm constantly on Internet radio 80s stations, and because I was putting in a lot of work into a data-cleaning project that isn't exactly data journalism. A lot. I've gotten 11 hours of sleep since Sunday, including the 2-hour revivor nap I just got up from. I'm up now because I still haven't sent in the deliverables to work, and I really, really need to. But documenting what is done and what isn't for a final handoff (I *do* *not* want to keep working on this) is not a trivial matter.

I have been so sleep deprived for two weeks straight, and my health has gone right down the tubes.

It was strange and surreal doing the airport / security / customs thing on so little sleep. I felt fairly cracked out, and suspected I looked nervous and sweaty. I've also been shocking myself with static electricity a lot since Monday -- a 4,000% increase over the normal rate, or higher. I have a neurotic line of thought that my sleep deprivation has corrupted my electrolytic balance, leaving me more vulnerable to limb swelling, heart attack, and electrostatic self-shocking. Most of these thoughts are, of course, symptoms of a disturbed physiology. I need to relax, badly and stop relaxing badly.

What was also strange and surreal was running into a former classmate from engineering school on the flight to Toronto. It stung a little that he had lost weight and looked great; and here I am at my heaviest but that's not the point -- as we had a brief conversation from the plane exit to the fork in our corridors, he told me about a whole swack of contemporaries of ours who, like me, aren't doing electronics anymore. Guys are doing sales, law, whatever -- even the smartest guy of our year. I thought I was dumb for sticking with a career path that I wasn't into for so long -- but only as dumb as him, I guess. (And he's really, really smart. So I'm saying maybe I don't need to think I'm dumb: Just human, after all.)

Also, I watched Atonement on the plane and loved it for its British-drama-ness, but also hated it because it was such a stupid twist or whatever near the end. Maybe the book handled it better than the movie, but the denouement overall felt pretty weak. (Mind you, I'd given up my window seat to a kindergartener, so maybe I was just being cranky.) Unstoppable, which was about a runaway freight train in Pennsylvania, was much cleaner in comparison. I'm not sure that the "quotables" in Unstoppable were that great, but I am thinking it deserves a quote-a-day Twitter account.

Never forget this word again

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 07:12:00 +0000

I was driving myself crazy yesterday trying to remember this .. word.

It meant to drive someone crazy with a lot of effort, and I think the example I recall associated with it involved a marriage.

Just now I remembered that anguish, and I googled "word for driving someone crazy psychological torture husband wife."

First result?

Gaslighting - Wikipedia.

Thank you, thank you Google.

It's like William Gibson was telling the CBC Studio One Book Club audience last night -- he doesn't really need to remember or know things anymore, when Google is there to outsource his memory. (He calls it "prosthetic memory" and I write a bit more about the evening here.)

What I didn't write about was how Gibson feels accused sometimes of shilling for Apple -- as in when his characters appear to use iPads, or use Macs because that's the world they inhabit.

Douglas Coupland, who was co-hosting the evening along with Sheryl McKay, make some remark about how if one of Gibson's characters used a Dell instead, it would be telling (something about an unnecessary prosthetic harness).

My husband and I left the show and wandered down to the PourHouse, shared a "darling" pretty beverage from MA, and caught up with Christopher, who we spotted on the street sometime last fall with a Fast Boy.

We discussed "the future" and all sorts of offshoots of the brilliant discussion that we witnessed at the CBC studio. My husband came up with at least two predictions:

(1) “When money [cash] disappears, bartering will come back,” (In response to me saying everything will become a traceable swipe-card and investigative journalism will end because there will be no way to buy untraceable air time on a pay-as-you-go cell phone.)

(2) Prediction: TCP/IP is already going obsolete, and the Internet will have to be re-designed with a better packet encoding format.

I don't know what that came out of. Sometime soon after he said: “There’s something really, really fucking satisfying about hammering metal into the shape that you want.”

Soon after, we called it a night.

Dunning-Kruger, where have you been all these years?

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 21:03:00 +0000

Lo! And behold, there is indeed a word for most things I want to communicate, yet often finding that word is a test of patience and happenstance.

Though a friend convinced me there is a compound German word for most strange feelings and artifacts of everyday life (and apparently other languages have words for complex situations), I thought that the English language was lacking. And it is.

But I just learned a new word, and boy was it a relief to see a cloud of thought made concrete.

On Monday, while checking out a list of the best long-form pieces of the year, I discovered the Dunning-Kruger Effect (henceforthwith to be known as DKE).

The term is illustrated at length in this five-part New York Times blog by Errol Morris. The DKE is described as the state of one's incompetence masking one's ability to recognize one's incompetence.

Or, put more simply, your stupidness makes you too stupid to know you're being stupid.

There's a lovely circular symmetry at work here.

Morris writes that the genesis of the piece was a reply to a Tweet he put out, where he wrote: "A stupid person is a person who treats a smart person as though he is stupid."

Wow. Pet peeve here! We probably all do this a bit on a daily basis, though, don't we? We probably all over-estimate our personal intelligence when faced with behaviour from others that doesn't match up to our wills or whims.

Though sometimes people just treat you like you're stupid based on how you look. And that's really idiotic.

A final passage of Morris' prose, which struck home, where he ruminated over the DKE:

But is it a metaphor for existence? For the human condition? That we’re all dumb and delusional? So dumb and delusional that we can never grasp that fact? It’s so profoundly depressing and disturbing. Even sad.

Yes Mr. Morris. That's what's been bothering me all these years.

I like to think that the DKE is not as formidable a foe now that we've slapped a name on it.

After all, isn't naming the beast the first step to taking the power away from any mythical demon?

Or is thinking that 'we're so smart because we've named it' also part of the great delusion?

The human condition, from the mind of Jay Rosen

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 19:30:00 +0000

Here's a snippet from Jay Rosen that succinctly expresses a secret fear of mine -- that there's no point to investigative journalism, because there's no functioning machine to fix the problems that are exposed:

The mental model on which most investigative journalism is based states that explosive revelations lead to public outcry; elites get the message and reform the system. But what if elites believe that reform is impossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, the public too distractible? What if cognitive dissonance has been insufficiently accounted for in our theories of how great journalism works… and often fails to work?
I don’t have the answer; I don’t even know if I have framed the right problem. But the comment bar is open, so help me out.

-- Jay Rosen, July 26, 2010, PressThink blog

I don't know that in every case "officials" are actively seeking to distract the public. Often the "officials" are a bunch of people doing their jobs, and it's true -- there's too many things going on that we're now aware of (through digital device use, through globalization) to be able to focus on one issue, and see it through to being fixed.

It's the age of TMI, or too much information, of all sorts, at all times, and there is no way that the human brain can adapt to handling it all in a sane manner, except by choosing to ignore, forget, pass over, and let lie.

Put another way, in the face of a huge hanging out of the giant's dirty laundry (in this case, specifically, the Afghanistan war logs), Rosen said:

Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect— not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget.

That's why some of us don't act on our own life problems, right? We think it's too far gone. The mess is too big. It would be an upheaval of everything we know and do from day to day. So we muck through it, and try not to think about it too much. It's the human condition.

Ethical dilemmas

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 20:24:00 +0000

The worst thing about facing an ethical dilemma is the feeling of being muzzled.

If you report on the wrong thing you're being asked to participate it, then you are a tattler and you will receive poor treatment not only from those who put you in the situation, but from others you have yet to meet in the future. You are no longer a team player. You can't be trusted.

If you say nothing, then you are putting yourself under the control of a bad actor. It's feels pretty damn close to the feeling of being harassed, but maybe without the personal shame feeling. But right now I'm anxious, my chest feels hollow and sad, and I want to go scream at someone to relieve this feeling.

That's right. I want to go and scream, even though I know that won't solve anything.

But there's no one to scream at. And if I make an issue of the ethical problem that is making me feel this way, that makes me a bad person. I'm not even allowed to talk to others who might best be able to advise me, because then I'm breaking the "let's try to keep this quiet" order. So I'm muzzled, and I suffer.

I guess that's the essence of it. Once someone puts you in this position -- "break the rules with us (and maybe get caught), or follow the rules against our will and face our consequences" -- it's too late to do anything about it. This bad actor has delivered harm to you, and there's no option of avoiding more harm.

It's a passive, internalized violence.

And I hate it.

And it's wrong.

And I'm screaming, screaming, screaming quietly on the inside.

Brain scraping

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 05:00:00 +0000

I'm racking my head (is that even possible?) or wracking it, something like that, to revise a meaningful, exciting, desirable, important and fun project for the Knight News Challenge, which had a deadline in 1.5 days.

I have a plan that seems to make sense, which involves a local community (Vancouver) that I'm excited about -- the problem is I don't know that the things I'm excited about are also what the majority of Vancouverites are excited about. (Or excitable about, at least.)

So I'm going to blurt out here a list of things that I either know (from news web site traffic stats) or suspect (from being immersed in Vancouverist culture myself for many, many years and generations) Vancouverites like to read and talk about:

-weather
-real estate
-rental housing
-dogs
-coyotes
-property crime
-traffic
-bouncers
-gang members
-drugs (all aspects: health, crime, etc.)
-parking
-food (health and hedonism)
-suburbanites (bridge and tunnel crowd)
-immigration

That was in no particular order.

I'm personally interested in cycling-related reportable issues (collisions, theft), property crime, coyotes, real estate (particularly whether Florida's flipping-sickness has also infected B.C.)

I just spent the last hour or so trying to use "trending" tools to see what other Vancouverites are blogging about or clicking on. Also found out (and tweeted) that Google Maps gives cycling route suggestions (albeit somewhat erroneously); and that ICBC named the ten worst intersections for cyclists in Vancouver. I mapped it out.

So clearly I have cycling on the brain. Yet, Vancouver already has Momentum Magazine doing good coverage of local cycling issues in addition to wider coverage... and there are communities already (forums, Facebook, VACC, etc.) so it's not as though we need something like BikePortland to really bring the scene together (or do we?)

It's hard not to feel that the bike scene in Vancouver is like the food scene -- fairly saturated in many ways -- and not an area that needs a lot of attention. Or perhaps I'm thinking about it wrong way. Maybe it's like districts that are heavy in one type of store -- the bridal district, or the antique area -- more competition enhances the destination.

I have more thinking to do.

First scrape... part two

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 00:06:00 +0000

I'm back, with coffee, a spoon, and the dregs of a container of chocolate frosting.

I unpacked the libwww-perl-5.837.tar.gz I downloaded (tar vxzf libwww-perl-5.837.tar.gz), cd'ed into the libwww-perl-5.837 directory and then did this:
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
sudo su (still logged in, apparently)
make install
and I think that's it. I should definitely have the perl modules I need. So I try a simple page fetch.
I'm going to use TextWrangler to edit my scripts, all of which I'm keeping in /home/scripts.
Okay! After a few missed semicolons, perl perltutorial_get.pl worked.
I fetched this blog, and found the word 'yay' somewhere on it (before writing this post even.)
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
my $url = 'http://rhiannoncoppin.blogspot.com/';
my $content = get($url);
die "Couldn't fetch $url" unless defined $content;
#Do something
if ($content =~m/yay/i) {
print "I was excited about something recently.\n";
} else {
print "I have no exciting news on my blog.\n"
Now moving on to LWP::UserAgent and HTTP:Response.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use LWP 5.837; #Loads all important LWP classes;
my $url = 'http://rhiannoncoppin.blogspot.com/';
my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new;
#$response is an HTTP::Browser object
my $response = $browser->get($url);
die "Couldn't fetch $url -- ", $response->status_line
unless $response->is_success;
die "WTF: I was expecting HTML, not ", $response->content_type
unless $response->content_type eq 'text/html';
#Do something
if ($response->content =~m/yay/i) {
print "I was excited about something recently.\n";
} else {
print "I have no exciting news on my blog.\n"
}
Wow. I'm being very sloppy with punctuation. That took a few tries to run.
Now noting that I might want to set the 'User-Agent' and the 'Referer' strings. And I tried to use those alone to access a certificate-enabled https site that I'm interested in, and it failed. A little Googling tells me to use Mechanize, which I knew was coming at some point, but I have to install the modules first.
sudo cpan
install Bundle::CPAN #this isn't mandatory, but it's good to update in general
install IO::Socket::SSL
install HTML::TokeParser
install WWW::Mechanize
install Crypt::SSLeay #if you're going to automate https transactions
So I do that, try to fetch the https url that failed before... and success!
Not that that means much. At least I got Mechanize to do something for me. Feeling gross from the frosting, and from watching (out of the corner of one eye) a reality show that shall remain nameless.
Daily exercise time again.

First scrape

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 23:33:00 +0000

I'm trying to use OutWit on Firefox to scrape a bunch of pages of book listings.

It looks like this software could be really powerful, but I just can't figure out something elegant as a solution, and the tutorial pages I've found so far are not that clear for the case I'm working with.

Also, I know this collection of listings should be fairly simple to extract with a script written from scratch. The URLs are plain, and just augment with digits: i.e. list1.html, list2.html.... list32.html.

The data I want is in clear plain html format. I have a Mac with terminal (with several shells, good for scripting).

Nothing (really) is stopping me from starting from scratch!

I'm using the book "Spidering Hacks" by Kevin Memenway and Tara Calishain to get me started. It's a few years old, but I don't think it's irrelevant. They first of all recommend ethical spidering/scraping, so first thing I'm doing in checking the robots.txt file for the site I want to scrape data from to make sure it kosher to do so. (If not, maybe I'd shoot an email and ask permission.)

The result:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Cool. The next thing they recommend (p. 11) is to name your spider. I'm building up data capacity for two sites, FixedRecord and DataFaced, the younger sister of FixedRecord who is more interested in visualizations than politics. This exercise belongs to her. The spider is named thus, site_date: datafaced_261110.

On page 12 the authors recommend putting up a web page for the spider and registering it. I'm skipping that for now. I'm going to be starting with Perl, which is cool, because we have a history together (fall of '98! woo!) I know there are powerful modules in Python and Ruby and so on, but I'll move on to those once I know I can work in Perl again.

One of the hardest things for me with scripting is making sure my environments are set up properly. That sounds dumb, maybe, but I'm used to an academic or corporate environment where my IT needs were dictated and taken care of.

su

Crap. I don't have root access. WTF. This is my laptop! Ok... sudo su

sh-3.2# perl -MCPAN -e shell

cpan> install libwww-perl
Okay, these are supposed to run through and make sure I have all the modules I need. Time to water the plants.

Well, that didn't work. Went instead to http://search.cpan.org/~gaas/libwww-perl-5.837/
And tried this: install Bundle::LWP
That's to make sure I have all the dependent modules installed. Next I'll have to do the libwww-perl myself with a download, unpack, and make. I think.

It's getting dark out and I said I'd start jogging again, so off to do that for now.

A great quotation on great expectations

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 04:54:00 +0000

My distaste for the early hours and regimented nature of high school was tempered by the promise of the educational community ahead, with its free exchange of ideas and access to great minds. How dispiriting to find out that college was just another place where grades were grubbed, competition overshadowed personal growth, and the threat of failure was used to encourage learning.

-- "Ed Dante," The Shadow Scholar, http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125329/

Anyone else remember being 19 or so... and having some Reed College student tell you about the inevitability of becoming "disillusioned" with the great big blossoming that was to be your young adult life -- and though you sort of remember the moment now, years of bitterness late, at the times you were just too blissfully young and unaware to understand what he or she meant?

Also, anyone else familiar with the label "grade grubber" or the phrase "stop grubbing"?

Brings back sooo many midterm memories.

I'm not feeling happy, but I'm posting this instead.

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 04:11:00 +0000

Why be all sad in public? Exactly.

Instead of complaining, here's something I newly love.

I've been told it is made out of paper.

What does it take to make a site?

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 01:26:00 +0000

I'm a little burned out right now.

I've spent most of the past two days trying to pull together my Internet presence and fiddle with WordPress widgets and style files to make a decent circa-2007 Web 2.2 home page.

(If I was all "Web 2.7 fancy" I'd be using Django, and if I was making a true 2010 Web 2.8 site, I'd be using the canvas element of HTML5 and do something awesome, like 'The Wilderness Downtown" video.)

At least using WordPress is faster than building something in Dreamweaver, but I feel like I could have done more faster with Joomla (though probably because I'm already familiar with a ton of awesome free Joomla add-ons.) However, this site is not doing much more than hosting some static content, and allowing me to update it from wherever (i.e. even if I don't have an FTP client handy) and Wordpress is fairly good at doing that job.

These were the requirements I wrote down on Monday, before I began:

Goal: to spend way less time doing a site conversion to a customized Wordpress install than it took to customize Joomla with plugins

Requirements:
-Clean, professional
-Fits the format (more site than blog)
-Google/SEO friendly tags
-Google Analyzer integration
-ability to do DB backup
-includes a little business card, pointing to all my outlets
-integrates blogger
-works in safari, firefox, chrome, IE
-has a working email form

Desires:
-Flickr slideshow
-integrate blogger directly, or as a feed, without having to delete blogger
-has a personal favicon

And these are my current "to do" and "done" lists:

DONE
fixed js enough
fixed logo placement
re-direct posts to pages for front
re-save images as PNGs (or f3f3f3)
fix css formatting in body
tested emailer
integrate Flickr

NOT DONE
generate sitemap
submit sitemap to google
add it to robots.txt
add blogspot integration
add posts - stories, etc.
hookup google analytics
post site on Facebook

So it doesn't look like I have all that much left to do... but fidgeting with sitemap and feed generators and Google's submission tools can take time.

There's also a certain amount of thought I had to put into branding... and even re-branding this site a little bit. And I also picked up a new tool or two already -- particularly using Gimp as an alternative to Photoshop.

New website day!

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 18:37:00 +0000

Not so fast. There is no new website yet.

However, after taking most of last week to attend to digi-housekeeping (a.k.a. file, disk, and email cleanup and some backup) I am now doing some online housekeeping.

First, I went in and made a delicious feed of recent articles I've written -- my bookmarks will link to things of mine that have been published online.

Now, I'm going to update my 2004-era personal home page created in Dreamweaver with... something. I'm leaning towards a Wordpress install, just so that I can dip my toes it it -- I have no problem with dynamic CMS maneuvering and database config and backing up, it's just that I've only spent time in Joomla-land until now.

Also, I'm not a graphics person at all. I can't draw, but I can work with paper cut-outs and re-arrange them into a scene. So I'm going to try and use photos I've taken for any website art.

I think I'm then going to create something in HTMl5, to play around with that too... but there are so many other to-do things.. upload a backlog of photos to Flickr, or host my own gallery. It's endless. But my personal web presence is not solid right now. It doesn't feel that way.

And I will be starting a showcase site (or perhaps news site) focusing on data and visualization and using cool apps (I'm looking at you, Google), and I just found one great tool that helped me make sure I registered my domain and email name and username in all the right places before I got too far.

That's all I'm saying about that for now. I heard that over-sharing makes one less likely to stick to one's plan.

Robocars and the future

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:33:00 +0000

I just saw this page about PRT, or personal rapid transit, linked from a link from an acquaintance's Twitter.

What's funny is this is the kind of thing I used to think about, from ages 6 to about 8, if I remember correctly, when being driven around by one of my parents (usually over a clogged bridge, where no one can merge), and thinking 'there must be a better way to do this traffic thing.'

I think after a trip to Disneyland, my vision of a better way to have roads morphed into an expansion of the cars in tomorrow-world, which were propelled by a stick stuck down and attached through a slit in the road to a moving chain.

I never could figure out how it would work to have cars go off the main track -- as in, onto side streets -- or how the automated mechanisms would let cars merge into the main tracks.

Then again, I hadn't ever been on a computer or seen the insides of any mechanism at that age. Barring the huge capital investment in building new special tracks or roads, I still think it's a good idea. I don't think we've adapted, evolutionarily speaking, to giant metal and plastic shells moving at high velocity.

Most of us can't even walk without tripping, and yet we're allowed to drive? Let the robots take over. Please.

On new technology, and the loss of old

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 22:09:00 +0000

I'm a bit of a 'nostalgian' (my new word) for old technologies, and somewhat neo-Luddite in my slowness to adopt the new ones.

I have reasons. It's not fear or cheapness or anything obvious. I think I'm deep-down anxious by nature, and I like dependability. When I find a solution that works for me, I like to stick with it. To the bitter end.

I've always been that way. Like an old cantankerous crone that was once trapped in the body of a six-year-old.

SHOELACES vs. VELCRO

I tell the story quite often that I was unwilling to learn to tie my shoes in grade 1. I was supposedly the brightest kid in the class, and also the only one who couldn't tie shoelaces. Something about the task was perplexing (and many hand-eye co-ordination tasks since have been equally confounding) and I decided the only logical solution was to stick to velcro, which had taken over children's shoes and, as far as I knew, would be a technology to last me a lifetime.

"I don't need to learn," I'd protest. I wasn't embarrassed at all. I thought I'd found a logical solution to what was now a non-problem -- my inability to get the rabbit consistently around the bush and down the hole.

"It's fine like this. I'm just going to use velcro for the rest of my life," I told the teacher.

(As it turns out, my hopes have almost come true. I don't actually tie my laces (for the most part) as an adult. I have elastic or strapless slip-ons, and shoes for cycling that use, you guessed it, velcro. For running shoes, I wear slippery socks and I cram my feet into them, without touching the laces. I do need to tie laces for wearing hiking boots; however, they were always coming undone, and my permanent solution has been to more-or-less stop hiking.)

WHY HAND-WRITE, WHEN YOU CAN TYPE?

Seeing an ad for the Kids' CBC education website made me think about how I'd be as a kindergarten kid in today's technological climate. Pre-school children of a certain class are often on the computer these days -- or on mommy's iPhone and daddy's Blackberry -- and maybe learning to recognize letters and learn to type before it's time in class for the ABCs.

I had enormous trouble learning to print and later, to write. Again, it was a hand-eye co-ordination task, which I didn't excel at. (Still don't. Screw you, video games). If I was a kindergartener today, asked to practice writing my name with the big letters hitting the top line, and the smaller letters squished between the other lines, I'd no doubt throw a fit, and proclaim that:

"I can type already*, and make letters way more better, in Arial, and Helvetica, and Times New Roman, and anyhow, everything you need to write can be sent on the computer, or printed, so why do I have to use a PENCIL and write the letters myself when the computer does it BETTER and FASTER?

(*note: Typing has never had the same degree of difficulty for me as other hand-eye tasks. I think partly because I've learned to touch type... no eye involved, no feedback loop to go awry, no problem.)
I knew it was going to happen, and sure enough, last year, Herbal Essences discontinued the one conditioner that actually worked on my hair and left a nice scent.

I was such a little shit, I know.

However, there could be a day when keyboards disappear... maybe we'll have to rely on hand-writing again... maybe to pass notes that evade online censors or police. Who knows? Old skills are valuable. Don't I wish I could can, knit, hunt, sow, reap, etc. (In other words, do everything that's necessary to survive without 'civil' modern constructs doing it for me?)

But you never think that you're going to *need* an old technology, do you?

R.I.P MIXED-TAPES

Today I hear that Sony is discontinuing the Walkman -- I know change happens, but the result could be that one day I'm unable to listen to the mixed tapes that would-have-been boyfriends made me, or that I painstakingly made for myself to accompany my long railroad-assisted jaunts into the then-forested flatlands of Brownsville. (I have two tape players right now.. but I've burned through quite a few more!)

The headlines have been 'end of the Walkman' but the more appropriate obit would be for the end of mixed-tapes, which were one of the primary consumables of the Walkman, and and early form of distributing cool and asserting your cool to your friends, way before Facebook's 'Like.'

HFA killed the CFC star

I was also pretty bummed (read: livid) the first time I had a jam-up while trying to use one of the 'new, improved' salbutamol inhalers that are CFC-free.

The product I used for, like, 20 years maybe, was discontinued in 2009 not because the inhalers had a huge CFC burden overall, but because the new HFA propellant formulation was patentable! And the price could go up! Yay! Let's all pick on the allergics and asthmatics even more, because they don't lose out enough already!

The old, lovely, CFC-powered inhalers performed gloriously. They never jammed up with "HFA" powder (whatever that is). And instead of running dry randomly and permanently -- as the new ones do, which made me *really* blood-boiling scared-angry when it happened during an emergency -- the good 'old ozone-destroying inhalers would gracefully die, delivering less and less medicine per dose, and giving you enough warning ( a few weeks, or a month) to go back to the doctor or pharmacy for more. (Also, I'm fine inhaling CFCs, but I don't know WTF HFA is, but that's a side note. Performance and reliability matters a f*ckton when your breathing is compromised.)

I guess the only lesson I can take from all this is that over-reliance on just one technology or product or solution is a weakness. Diversity in habit, education, and skill set is just as important as biological diversity for adapting to an uncertain, yet sure to change, future. But try telling that to a six-year-old who thinks tying shoelaces is difficult and, worse, boring.

(PS - Thank you, Herbal Essences for making the best conditioner on the planet for the better part of ten years, and go blow yourself for discontinuing it. If only you knew how many men couldn't resist it's smell. You snatched away my allure, just when I was starting to want and need it. I hate you, and I've switched to Dove, but it's not the best. You were, damn you.)

Something from the Seattle P-I, circa 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 04:36:00 +0000

Just going through old files of mine -- snapshots of web-pages long-past surfed, and this passage caught my eye, from March 2009. I had been in companies in the past that this happened to... made me think back to the days of the "companyhell" blogsite in 2000/2001:

In business there is a phenomenon known as the death spiral, in which the measures intended to rescue a company or industry not only fail to stem the losses, they actually accelerate the decline. - Bill Virgin

This is why I renewed my subscription

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 21:48:00 +0000

From the CJR's cover story for September:

The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake.

The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought.

It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no.

It is copy produced to meet arbitrary productivity metrics...

...The Hamster Wheel, then, is investigations you will never see, good work left undone, public service not performed.

It is the perceived imperative to churn out every story that might have been nice to have had, at some point, maybe, given unlimited resources, but that, given highly constrained news budgets, should be allowed to recede into history unrecorded—or unrecorded by you, even if it is recorded by a thousand others.

Seven stages of man, nine feline lives

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 18:26:00 +0000

I feel like I'm possibly entering a new chapter again, which makes have all sorts of existential and superstitious questions like: do I only get a set number of chapters, so I better mete them out at a slower pace? If cats get nine lives and men get seven stages, what's there for women? Eight chapters? Fourteen? Infinite?

I feel at the end of another career rope, and today is the first day of being able to lie in bed with my laptop all morning, reading news and gossip for enjoyment, and thinking about who I want to be when I grow up more.

A friend of mine recently had me over for tea to discuss freelance writing. She's a newer mom and is ready to go back to work, but needed some guidance first. Another friend, who does life-coaching, suggested she identify her areas of interest and then meet with people in each of those fields to get a better idea about all her options. Sounds methodical, and probably wise.

But I don't go for wise. I prefer for inspiration to smack me across the face while out walking or doing something else that's fairly pedestrian.

But if I truly am going to move on from what I think I was going to do for a career -- how many times have I done this already? How many times have I re-defined who I think I am and who I want to be seen as, whether consciously or not? (I'm talking in big broad strokes -- not stuff like dying my hair or changing my diet.)

This is my list.

Chapter: rough age range: Title: Overriding characteristic or goal

1: 0-6: Sick kid: Came close to dying. Sought relief and love and sympathy and control.

2: 7-12: Butthurt artist and intellectual: Loved to read and craft, learned to hate peers.

3: 13-17: Music and math nerd: Concert to punk band; Self-worth rated by top grades.

4: 18-23: Engineer turd: Thought I was hot poop, and would invent something awesome. Didn't.

5: 24-28: Wannabe literati. Enough said.

6: 29-present: Journalista. Went all Ivy-League on it, still struggling to be a reporter.

Wow. Looking at it like that makes me seem like a perpetual d-bag. Still working on six, and wondering when the jump-ship to #7 will happen... today, tomorrow, ten years from now?

Boba Fett video fractals: Three thoughts today

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 18:42:00 +0000

It's Saturday morning, which means I'm sipping instant coffee and reading the NYTimes and the New Yorker online. (I'm spoiling the paper version of the New Yorker, which won't reach me until mid-week, seeing as I live in the Great White North.)

1) Obits can be awesome. Dying is not awesome, per se; however, by reading the New York Times, I marked the passing of Mr. Mandelbrot, of the fractals we liked to computer-visualize and put up poster of as engineering undergrads. I had no idea that he was still living, partly because I never went to Yale, and partly because I never hung out at math conferences; but mostly because most mathematicians people tended to care about during my schooling were long-gone men.

I had no idea anyone did anything really cool anymore. I just didn't really think about it -- but of course, fractals only really make sense in the computer age. I really liked the coastline analogy -- that the closer in you look, the longer the coastline's path is -- something I sort of realized when trying to find an exact 10km route around Stanley Park's seawall.

I also read the feature on Fish Market Annie. These people are everywhere -- true landmarks of their neighbourhoods, which are ever-changing. There are people like this in Vancouver, but never documented for the most part.

2) Please explain the imminent takeover of video to me.

I can't get my head around where all this talk about video being the future of the online media world is coming from. (The latest is this: "As the emphasis in online publishing shifts further to video, the cost of producing memorable content is going to escalate further.")

I've been the bored-at-work network, which supposedly drives traffic and ad dollars. But you can't watch video at work... you just can't. Unless everyone is hovering around one person's screen to watch something comedic (it's the new water-cooler), it's too obvious you're slacking.

Video is good for entertainment or having on at home while you do something else (e.g. get news while cooking.) But to watch it on purpose, with intent, if it isn't something absolutely riveting? Video goes at it's own pace, right? You can't speed it up... you're held captive.

I'm just not that convinced it's going to take off, unless it really becomes interactive, like the Tipp-Ex Youtube ads. That stuff is fun, and takes advantage of the Internet's talents.
(Note: The choose-your-adventure part of this experience is temporarily down at the time of this post.)

3) Hallowe'en == mashup time.
What has become known as "sexy costume day" is almost upon us, which means I will soon make the trek to Dressew, which is reportedly no longer cash-only. Last night, I was brainstorming costume ideas with friends. I had to show my husband an article on Gawker before bed (the Gap logo?), which led to the Gawker post about 10 costumes to avoid (how did they know we were thinking of the Chilean miners (too soon, of course) and Justin Bieber, who descended upon my city Thursday and made the front page of The Province?)
The 'don't' list's links led us to a costume company's website, a lot of browsing of horrible 'sexy' and couples' costumes, and finally while trying to find latex anime masks, we found this site, and a photo of Darth Pimp from DragonCon 2007.
We were inspired, and kept coming up with stupid funny ideas until we passed out.
So, Star Wars mashups it is.

I considered being a sexy cupcake with a Storm Trooper mask... and many variations of costume-bottoms with Star Wars masks. I think I have it pared down... Though Boba Nurse and sexy Bunny Fett were contender, I think I'm willing to go all out and do Bieber Fett or Boba Gaga. Photos will be posted if they become available.

Vancouver is a small town

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 19:39:00 +0000

"Did you go to SFU? Did you hang out in the computer science common room?"

Admittedly, yes. I did. A shameful act that many of us have tried to disown in the years following university, when we grew up and learned to recognize our follies.

As i was trying to arrange for a photo op for a provincial minister today, the public servant on the other end of the line re-introduced himself as "the annoying one." We laughed. I was annoying back then. We were all annoying back then.

But he's now in government work -- not programming -- and I'm doing journalism, not engineering.

And yesterday, when I arranged an interview with the minister, it was through a press event at the BC Cancer Agency to announce the new cyclotron and radiopharmaceutical lab.

An ex-patient was brought out to lend a real story, and a high degree of meaningfulness, to what could have been an otherwise dry topic (fluorine-18? Yawn.) As it turns out, we were in the same homerooms through much of high school. (Even back to 8-1, I think!)

She was student council president in grade 12, I think, or at least on the exec. And she was good friends with one of my elementary school friends.

And there she was at the cancer agency, describing how she found lumps in her neck as a just-married 29-year-old. Thankfully, she seems to be completely recovered. The story is here.

The standard blog lapse

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 22:34:00 +0000

This is not the standard mea culpa, where the lapsed blogger explains that they were busy working on a project, or unsure of the direction of their blog, etc., which is why the blog has been neglected for so long.
I know exactly why I've been neglecting this blog:
1) It takes me way too long to check spelling/links in my posts and add photos
2) I don't like the way it looks
3) Even as a child, I couldn't keep a journal or diary. I lack discipline for things that don't motivate me.
4) Even when I've felt strong urges to post -- such as after a visit to the radio museum last weekend, or the night I learned about tripcodes, or about cool HTML5 canvas implementations I discovered -- a number of emotions have held me back. These are the standard human life emotions and feelings: grief, rage, anger, anxiety, self-worthlessness, boredom, stubbornness, sadness, doubt, lethargy, distraction, and so on.

I'm living in a state of personal flux and old goals are either met or abandoned, and I woke up one day last year without new goals, and without realizing that my directionlessness was causing me so much distress.

However, I'm not going to stop blogging.

I am re-programming my personal web site, and will either transport this blog to a new ready-made CMS such as WordPress, or I'll integrate it into whatever I code into the new site. (Since I want to learn Django, I might use that for a personal site. Why not?)

One wish I have is for inspiration for a theme, or logo, or colour or tagline to tie everything together. But my tastes keep changing every two years or so, and I dread hating anything that I've used to brand myself -- this is why I've never even considered a tattoo.

Anyhow, I have turned a page, I think, and I won't hesitate to begin write travel pieces, columns, how-tos, or even newsy pieces and publishing them myself. I have too many "stories" that I've been unable to sell or that just seem too hard to sell without being on staff at certain magazines or papers. So what? I'm sick of being muzzled by economic restrictions.

So my new goals, maybe for completion by December holiday-time is:
1) Love my blog, and write anything informative or neat that I can and want into it
2) Update my Flickr with photos going back to New York in 2009
3) Make a home site with Django. Start creating and integrating neat and useful feeds and pages of interest to my communities.
4) Begin publishing databases I've collected as informative or interactive applications. Build a toolbox of reusable elements. Stay away from fading technologies (I'm talking to you Actionscript. We had good times, but I don't think we can hang out anymore.)
5) Decide on how, or if, I'm going to use Twitter. I'm a bit non-plussed about the Library of Congress or whoever archiving all the tweets. I don't know if I want to be recorded that way. It's like my public sidewalk conversations being logged. (Somehow storing all my email with Google is okay with me though. I've been lulled.)
6) Clean-out, or set a process for cleaning-out, all my "old projects." Either do and sell, do and self-publish, trash, or bring to a boil. No more backburner dishes, please. Start 2011 as fresh as possible. Won't that feel good?

Oh yeah, in case you haven't noticed, I'm writing this blog mostly for me, not for you.

More annoying than telemarketers

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 19:18:00 +0000

The only thing that's more annoying than telemarketers is scam-telemarketers.

I just got back from a two-week trip to England, and I was fairly nervous about leaving the house unattended. Some of the back doors bear the scars of break-ins of yore, and my grandfather -- whose house this was -- did appear to have an array of baseball bats and metal bars scattered about the place in the event of a home invasion.

I got home Monday to find the garden only slightly worse than before, the trees wilting just a touch, but no signs of the home being targeted or attacked. So far so good.

The next day, at four, I get my first welcome-back spam phone call. It's an older woman (or perhaps just a heavy-smoking 22-year-old) claiming to be calling from the City of Vancouver.

"My name is Gail Anderson," she said. "This home has been selected to take part in a survey on energy efficiency and home renovations."

However, I am not the homeowner and have no decision over that kind of renovation, so I am unable to complete her survey. It sounds legit -- sort of -- but I'm a fairly voracious consumer of Vancouver area media, so I was surprised I hadn't heard of the Mayor's latest pet-project before now. Also, isn't Gail Anderson, or something similar, the name of a Coronation Street character?

I hang up and *69 the number, which comes up as 604-664-2449.

A reverse phone search on canada411 comes up with nothing as either a person or a business, which leads me to think that yes, it could be an internal phone system number -- or a cell phone.

So I call the City of Vancouver via their 411 information service. A nice fellow named Nick checks on the name and number for me -- it's not theirs. He gives the number of a contact in the sustainability office to call back today, but at this point I can't be bothered. If I'm trying to solve someone else's problem -- like a joint-caser posing as a City of Vancouver employee -- then I'm a one-step solution kind of gal. It's not my problem I'm reporting -- it's yours. I'm done for now.

I'd like to know if there is a phone-scam investigator at the VPD. I've been told there are a bunch of phone scams going around right now, with people posing as Hydro or Telus. There are even other CoV scams, like a fee being charged for applying for some kind of property tax refund, when no such program exists. Goodbye $300 "fee."

I'd like to have a crowd-sourced list of Vancouver-area scams posted online -- maybe I'll create it. It won't stop the targeting of those elderly members who don't have easy Internet access, but it would be something.

Anyhow, if Gail Anderson does read this -- please tell me more about the City's survey. Because they haven't posted a thing that I can find about it.

Recent video edits

noreply@blogger.com (Rhiannon Coppin) — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:44:00 +0000

So here are some videos I edited recently during web shift time at the Vancouver Sun.

I really wish that I was reporting and writing, and maybe even doing a little CAR (now that I'm officially 'qualified' to do those things) but at least editing a bit of video is a change from the usual.

I will note that I think I've improved from what I was doing two years ago thanks to a radio class I took at Columbia -- the basics of audio overlay, fading, consistent background noise, and so one makes for better video too.

I just wish the part about proper mic techniques could happen, but I'm not involved in shooting any of the video. Tant pis!

So here we go, and please note these are embedded off the publication's server, so you get the ads too:

1) Backyard Chickens come to Vancouver. (Not as cool as backyard ducks, however.)

2) Big grow-op. Like, huge. And busted. Footage came from RCMP. Edit: Now, six months later, I'm wondering why I ended up encoding the quality of this video so low? Was it my error? Did someone else export and post this for me? I can't remember. In the end, the difference in quality between this video (poor quality <=400kbps) and the one above (high quality, bitrate >=700kpbs) really illustrates what choosing a higher bitrate does for you when you encode video for the web.

3) Spandy Andy: This was a re-edit of another's work, but I just took it as-is and mixed the audio slightly. I met Spandy later in person at the bike rave.