Those of you who aren't privy to my less-than-public posts, you might wonder what the heck happened to Reinvent and why I'm suddenly talking about The Donat Group. Obviously, it's probably a Bad Idea to talk about the nuts and bolts of it all publically, but here's the gist in my generation's favourite format: point form.

• Reinvent is a fun company with lots of smart people
• It's also run by management that feels that expanding their business into Software patents makes for an acceptable business model.
• I disagreed. I've worked for a lot of companies who did things I felt were Not Good, but there are a few things I won't do... supporting software patents is one of them.
• So I went looking for a company whose morals where more in tune with my own and I found one in The Donat Group.
• I handed in my resignation, offered to work 2weeks before I left and they declined. I guess the brass weren't happy with me.
• I started at Donat today and they seem pretty cool. Very dot.com startup-like but with actual paying clients.
• They like Drupal though, which from what I've seen, is really not good. My first impressions of Drupal is that it's a bunch of non-programmers pretending that they can write real software. Function and variable names bleeding into everything else, no objects, and horror of all horrors: their coding standard requires a two-space indent.

I made a work around for the back-assward indenting thing though. I call it undrupal. Basically it uses a regular expression to strip out the space-based indents and replace them with tabs. Then you can write your code in a sane environment, then use the same script to re-crazy it with spaces again.

Ok, so my first day didn't exactly have me neck-deep in super-advanced code, but hey, it's the first day. I'm really looking forward to this job though, the boss is pretty cool and his politics are more in line with my own, and even more fun is the fact that I'm now labled "Senior Developer" and I'll be able to actually head up new projects and such.

That's it for me now. If you want more details, just gimme a call.

I remember saying to myself that I wasn't going to get too heavily involved in public space issues when I returned home. I wanted to expand my involvement into other community stuff, most notably homelessness given that Vancouver requires some serious work in this area. Things may still go that way, but I'm afraid the Vancouver Public Space Network has me rather excited about the prospect of working with them.

Much like the TPSC, the VPSN fights against the corporatisation of public space, and CCTV, as well as promotes pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, and green space. They have a guerrilla gardening faction, but the also grow food and their event coordinator sorta doubles as Vancouver's version of New Mind Space. Lara will dig this: they're going to hold a Pirate Party on the Seabus!

I went to their annual planning meeting last night (TPSC folk might want to read that sentence again and take note of the phrase annual planning meeting... it's a hell of a concept ;-). Andrew Pask, the coordinator of this now 3yearold group, was amazing, navigating the group through a multi-phased process in which we first identified what we liked and didn't like about public space in Vancouver, then to how we might theoretically fix it, and finally onto a "dot-ocracy", a system that allows each member of the group to vote 6 times for as many or as few of the suggestions made as they like. It sounds complicated, but so is public space and I really feel that we charted a good course for the year.

A lot of the ideas that came out of the mix last night were excellent, but the one I'm most excited about is a move to actively create public spaces within the city either by way of a public non-profit Public Space Trust or by making deals with local land owners (as the gardeners have in the past). There was also mention of advocating the position that binners (people who sift through garbage for containers which they then return for deposit) should be supported in our community as they're providing a public service at little or no additional cost, and an ambitious online (and maybe offline?) mapping project that tracks everything from public transit (based on an open API from Translink) to good places to eat, to free wifi, dog parks, pedestrian malls etc. etc.

I went out for drinks with a few of them after the meeting and was surprised at the number of Torontonian expats we had in the group. Of the seven of us in the bar, there were 4 Toronto folk there if you include myself. Two others were born and raised here, and the last guy was from Iran. Obviously, this isn't a scale subset of the group, but the circumstances were funny nonetheless.

Thanks to the book Stephen gave me, I'm beginning to understand just how Sustainability has to be managed. You can't run it from the top-down, and it can't be haphazard either. Local groups have to build urban gardens, build pedestrian infrastructure and even Green power on their own because our leaders are either too afraid or too stupid to know how to do it themselves. I honestly think that this group has the right idea.

Once again, Bill has sent me a link to something awesome. Faith Fighter is a Street-Fighter II style Flash game in which you choose your holy figure and work your way through the pantheon of the world's gods, kicking ass and taking names.

I picked Buddha and beat the hell out of God, Jesus, Muhammad, Budai, Ganesha and made my way to the top... a mystery opponent -- you'll just have to play to find out who it is.

As Bill said, "Play it now, before someone burns the server down".

I'm here not more than 3months and already I've jumped into the CCTV debate. It's funny, I had no intention of getting involved, but the cover story of the Province was so offensive, I just had to write something.

The story is this, murderous cowards shoot drug dealing murderer in font of a prestigious high-end restaurant downtown. Public is freaked out, mayor says that we need more cameras as a result. However, the cops are already reveiwing footage for 30 other cameras that were in use on the scene as well as numerous eye-witnesses. This may sound a little familiar to the Toronto folk readin this.

Here's the Original article in the Province.

And here's my letter to the editor response:

I am positively baffled by the Mayor's insistence that increased CCTV cameras are the wisest response to the shooting outside Gotham steakhouse. As if the 30 cameras already being sourced by police weren't enough, Sullivan seems bent on wasting more money on devices that clearly will not make the streets any safer.

We have mountains of data from countries around the world proving that these contraptions do nothing but cost millions of dollars and have little or no effect on crime.

We also have a long list of eye-witnesses to the event, and that tells us one very important thing: these criminals don't care about being seen. These acts were brazen and violent and watching it all on TV will not prevent this from happening again.

Ms Fry at least has it half right. We need better citizen interaction with police, better lighting and a crack down on guns and drugs running across our borders. These are methods actually known to work in the prevention of crime.

I don't know if it'll get published, but if it does, I'll post a link here.

Update: 2008.02.07 08:51:00 PST

While I'd given up hope that the letter would be published, it turns out that they did in fact print the letter -- if only a few days late. My parents found it and my grandmother sent me the link, so here you go if you're interested.

I know I haven't blogged publically for a while, so here's a couple things worth reading if you have some time:

In an effort to end the lies, NoMoreLOL.com has been created. Standing on the front lines between honest communication and disingenuous emoting, NoMoreLOL is fighting back with a new acronym: LOI. I think I'm gonna buy a tshirt.

On a more serious note however, knitnut has been nominated for best blog post in the Canadian Blog Awards. Frankly, I'd not heard of the site before the awards, but the post is both relevent and factual, covering something most people reading blogs really don't understand: homelessness.

I was just sifting through my 'Round-the-world pictures and realised something rather important: I miss travelling... a lot. It would appear that I'll have to do it again sooner than I would have thought.

Thanks to Bill, I've recently discovered a wonderful new online booksellter called BetterWorld.com. And since Bill described it so well, I'll just post what he said:

Better World Books. From their own description, they are an online bookseller with over a million titles available, who use their heft to sponsor and support literacy programs, make as little carbon footprint as they can, buy carbon offsets for the rest, provide actual human customer service, and have decent pricing as well.

From a consumer-y perspective, the main thing is that they offer free shipping on any books in the Continental US, and flat rate 2.97 per book anywhere else on the planet.

This is particularly good if you only want one or two books, as the difference in price that say, Amazon offers would be offset by their shipping costs unless you hit their minimum purchase amount for free delivery ($25 US, or $39 in Canada). It's also really good if you live in some godforsaken backwater (IE NOT in North America) and get raked over the coals for shipping.

And it gets to be an even better deal if you are concerned about the social issues.

Another thing that rox is the "Fund Local Literacy" search they have on the front page of their site, which shows you where you can buy local used books in order to support local literacy campaigns and libraries--these books are ALSO under the same shipping fees - free in the US, $2.97 per book anywhere else.

So far, I think this is a very good thing. Does anyone know of something like this that is Canada-local?

Check them out. The prices are just as low as Chapters or Amazon, but the shipping is WAY lower and they appear to at least be trying to do the Right thing.

Reinvent has decided to start playing with Flot, an Open graphing library that uses the <canvas> tag. It dynamically creates graphs like the one you see above using only JQuery and this flot plugin. It's absolutely amazing.

Geeks might be interested in checking out the samples on flot's site.

A couple guys at work introduced me to this yesterday and I can't stop grinning at the pure blasphemy of it all. The LOLCat Bible is a wiki-based bible written entirely in the Lolcat language. Here's a sample of the first few versus that inspired the work:

In teh beginning, Invisible Man make univerz. Invisible Earth wuz invisible. Invisible Man say, "I can has light" Gots light. Light iz good, iz not dark. Invisible Man can has day and night. It be furst.

Invisible Man can has expanz. Below expanz iz water. It happen. Above expanz he call "sky". It get dark, then lite. nex day.

Invisible man can has water over here, no water over ther. It happen. Not water iz "land". Water iz "seas". Iz good.

Obviously, who has the time to rewrite the entire bible into something so befitting the obvious sense of humour meant for the book? Well nobody really, that's why it's a wiki. :-)

My brother Matt is hardworking and talented at all sorts of things. The guy's worked as a night auditor at a hotel, a DJ for dozens of shows around the city, and currently he's doing construction work for the various projects around town while he's trying to break into the event planning industry. Currently, with the weather as it is, the construction work is few and far between and he desperately wants out of the "my bones hurt and I'm only 27" deal. He needs a break either in graphic design (he's taking private courses with Photoshop & Illustrator) or (preferably) setting up shows around the city. Anyone have any suggestions (or better yet) jobs?

Please contact me directly or leave a comment here and I'll hook you up.