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Instrument of Near-Death

January 26, 2011 11:04 +0000  |  Animals Death 6

Warning: the following post can be rather upsetting for animal lovers. If you're at all squeamish about bad things happening to tiny creatures, you may just want to skip this one.

I tried to do the Right Thing, really I did.

As part of the experience of house-sitting for my parents these past few weeks, I've discovered that they have a mouse problem. It seems that when the weather outside gets cold, they look for warm old houses in which to hide out and you know, do mouse-things like eat, breed and defecate.

As an urbanite, I stand decidedly on the side of ignoring the problem until it goes away... since you don't generally have problems like these when you live in a glass box in the sky. Besides, the idea of killing a mouse just seems horrible! They're not bugs, they're cute, and have fur, and tiny little legs!

But then I talked to my parents who insisted that the only right thing to do was to lay out the mouse trap. The little bugger could chew through electrical cables and start a fire, or start breeding tiny little defecating mice all over the house. Catch and release wasn't an option they insisted, they apparently always find a way back, even from as far as 5k away.

I decided to be an adult, do the Right Thing, and set out a trap, a trap I knew to be less-than-instantaneous, but sadly the only trap we have here. Maybe the one time I'd seen it take a couple minutes to kill a mouse was a fluke. Maybe the trap was, as my father insisted, a quick and efficient end.

It isn't.

I never even heard the trap go off. I only know what happened because I checked in before I went to bed. I opened the cupboard to find this tiny mouse just lying there next to the trap, little bits of mouse blood scattered about. It would seem that she managed to struggle free, but now lacked the motor skills to do much more than that.

She wasn't dead though. Looking closely, I could see her little lungs pushing her belly up and down quickly. She was dying and terrified.

I didn't really have any options. I grabbed some paper towels, bent down to pick her up and her little legs waved around sporadically for a moment, and then she lay still. I put on my father's shoes, carried her out into the front yard and crushed what was left of her, little bits of blood coming through the white paper towels. When I was sure she was dead, I tossed her into the garbage, came inside and washed my hands... a lot.

I'm not writing about this to upset the animal-friendly folk on here. I don't think this is cool or even interesting. The whole this is rather upsetting for me, so I wanted to write about it. Maybe I shouldn't be upset, maybe I just need better, more lethal traps, I don't know. I just hate how I feel right now and needed to share.

In Suburban Isolation

January 18, 2011 00:22 +0000  |  Family Job Hunting Unemployment 4

I was considering going for the melodramatic and starting this post off with something like "I am in hell", but honestly, I can think of far worse places to be than in Kelowna. That's not to say that I'm a big fan of this place, or that I'd ever choose to live here, I'm just trying to keep things in perspective.

My parents have gone away for a few weeks on a much needed vacation, and since I'm not working at the moment, I offered to house-sit for them. My reasons for this weren't altogether selfless: I needed to get some isolation as well.

Living "on the coast" (that's what they call Vancouver and the surrounding areas here), I was too close to a lot of distractions. I have a social circle there, and living with the grandparents takes a toll on my sanity. I wasn't getting a lot done, and I wasn't really doing much in the way of thinking regarding my Where To Go From Here question either. Now, here in Kelowna, alone in an empty house with only an SUV to shuttle me around, a bubble in a tiny town full of bubbles, I find I can't really get away from myself and what must be done.

So far I've been pretty productive. I've taken the opportunity to learn Android, something I've been meaning to do ever since the O/S debuted a couple years ago. I'm progressing nicely and may even have my cartographic app ready before I finish up here. I'm also applying for work in a variety of exciting places: Dublin, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, London, even Prague. The progress is slow however. Most companies prefer to hire locals (for obvious reasons) and it's tough to overcome that bias... if I'm even given the chance.

Nonetheless I'm in a unique position to be patient. There's a lot of work out there, I just need to learn how to access it as a foreigner to these places.

Before she left, my mother asked the all-important question: "What do you really want? What's your ideal job?" After talking about it some, we settled that at this point in my life, the location of the job is more important than the job itself, though I know from past experience that my work must be respectful and interesting if I'm going to enjoy my life in any city. I want the kind of work where understanding the language and local customs of somewhere interesting is part of the job. Maybe I don't *need* to live overseas to find that. I suppose my ideal job would be one where I could live in Toronto, but spend a rather large amount of time in some of the cities mentioned above.

Anyone know how someone with my skills can find work like that?

Anyway, I'll post again soon when I have something to show for my last few days of Android education.

My Own "Story of Stuff"

December 24, 2010 19:34 +0000  |  Consumerism Moving 6

For those of you who haven't been privy to the ongoing developments in my life, I'll try to get you up to speed:

  • I haven't found a job yet. Well I did, but the two offers I got weren't a good fit.
  • I'm still moving out at the end of this month, and will be crashing with friends and family until I find what I need out there.
  • To that end, I've been liquidating (nearly) everything I own.

It's that last one that I thought I might talk about. I've been on my own for a long time now, and in that time, I've collected a lot of stuff. Much of it arrived in my possession in the form of a gift, the rest purchased by me, but as I'm slowly coming to realise, I use practically none of it.

My DVD collection, which I've been curating for nearly a decade has literally been collecting dust. I have actually torrented DVDs I own due to the inconvenience of the format. My stacks and stacks of books are similarly unused: read once (or not at all) and left to sit on a shelf, a testament to... what, how smart I am?

Stuffed animals, miscellaneous computer cables and hardware, toys, calendars, games, models... all of it: collecting dust. Despite the evident non-use of these things, I have paid to transport these things across the country not once, but twice. Many of the things in my home have been transported from Vancouver, to Ottawa, to Toronto, and back to Vancouver, and stopped being useful only a few days after acquiring them.

This whole process of liquidation has been as much a lesson in how not to horde stuff as it has been one in how to live simply. I've taken stock of what I actually use on a day-to-day basis, and have determined that even if I were to re-purchase only the highest-end stuff in each new place I live, the total cost would be less than $3k... and I can then store everything that matters in only three or four boxes.

I don't know where I'm going yet, that discovery comes next, but one thing is certain: wherever I'm going, it will be with less stuff in tow.

Wikileaks

December 01, 2010 00:06 +0000  |  Activism Politics The United States 1

Has anyone else got the feeling that world governments haven't learnt the right lesson from the latest series of cables released by Wikileaks?

Here's a newsflash guys, the key isn't to be sorry that you got caught, it's to be sorry that you committed the acts for which you (should be) ashamed in the first place.

Wikileaks should be commended for their dedication to promoting openness in our relations with our neighbours, rather than vilified for distributing to the truth to the world.

Police State

November 26, 2010 07:30 +0000  |  Activism Anarchy Democracy Police Politics Protests Violence 10

It's an ugly phrase. Often overused and misunderstood, it's important to know that despite what you may have heard, Canada is not such a place. It is however equally important to accept that we are closer to it now than we have ever been, and each day I read more and more about us losing the Canada we want for ourselves. Whether we believe it or not, we're closer to a police state than most of us want to admit.

Our police officers in every jurisdiction are out of control. Responsible to the public only in the minds of people who haven't been paying attention, we've seen officers commit murder in Vancouver, sexual assault in Ottawa, and beat non-violent protesters in Toronto. There have even been claims of subverting federal elections. The consequences for these actions have been made clear: there aren't any. In Ontario, officers aren't even compelled to speak to the SIU, the supposedly impartial body designed to look into police assaults against civilians.

This is our Canada, glorious and free.

To those of you who would still defend these people, I say that these acts are indefencible. In the G20 case, the SIU has found that no one may be charged because no one can be identified. The appropriate response to this then is to argue that any officer refusing to identify themselves is in fact a criminal -- at best, a thuggish terrorist at worst. Is it safe then to assume that self-defence can be invoked when assaulting an unidentified officer committing acts of brutatlity? And what, if anything will become of the officers higher up in the chain of command after this incident? Who gave the orders to arrest non-violent protesters, and who allowed the city to burn while our freedoms were crushed beneath combat boots and riot shields?

There is anger brewing in this country... at least, I hope there is.

For my part, I honestly don't know what to do. I feel like I'm abandonning my country when it needs me, that I could do something to fight this if I stayed. But I don't know what that something is. To those reading this, I ask you: what, outside of violent revolution can we do? How do you fight thugs and Fingermen without resorting to bloodshed?

Ramona Flowers

November 26, 2010 07:10 +0000  |  Costumes Fun Stuff Geek Stuff 3

I know that it's been nearly a month, but I suppose that late is better than never for this sort of thing. Here is me in my Hallowe'en costume for this year. For those who don't recognise her, you should look up Ramona Flowers on Wikipedia. The real star of the Scott Pilgrim series, Ramona is the embodiment of awesomesauce, complete with a Bag of Holding, and a giant hammer that's +2 against girls.

In most of the shots with me is Stephanie, who also went as Ramona. No, we didn't think to mention this to each other before we decided. Melanie took the shots with Stephanie's camera in Commercial Drive station just after the Parade of Lost Souls. My costume consisted of:

  • Two layers of pantyhose (1 black, 1 purple, $7 at Winners)
  • One pair of leg warmers (courtesy of Poesy's mad shopping skillz, $12)
  • One pair of booty shorts ($10 at Winners)
  • My Work at Play hoodie (free!)
  • The biggest and cheapest bra I could find ($10 at Winners)
  • Some tissues for the breasts
  • A blue wig (a present from Melanie)
  • The Hammer
    • A wooden dowling ($8 at Home Depot)
    • A shipping box ($4 from Michael's)
    • 2 rolls of shiny duct tape ($2 each from Michael's)
  • The Bag of Holding
    • A cylindrical cardboard box ($4 at Michael's)
    • A yellow cardboard star, cut out and glued to the box ($0.50 at Michael's)
    • Blue and pink paint ($1 each at Michael's)
    • Pink twine ($2 at the local dollar store) and a pink ribbon ($2 at Michael's) for the strap

All in all it was fun, but I don't think I'm going to be a girl for Hallowe'en again for a Very Long Time. It's bloody uncomfortable. The constant compliments on my nice legs though... that didn't suck :-)








The Case Against Drupal

November 15, 2010 22:19 +0000  |  Drupal Programming Software 14

I've been doing Drupal development on-and off for nearly three years now and it's always been frustrating. I'm a pretty vocal and animated kind of person too, so my co-workers soon came to know me as the anti-Drupal guy, which can be pretty rough when your employer has chosen to standardise on the platform. Now that I'm finally out of the Drupal world, I wanted to write a little about the platform, specifically speaking to its weaknesses and failures.

My hope here is two fold: (a) that this post serve as a means of communicating to the thousands of frustrated developers out there that they're not alone in their pain, and (b) that perhaps some of this post will help development shops choose Drupal where appropriate and other technologies when it is not.

For the Drupal fan(girl|boy)s, I ask only that you try to read this with an open and constructive mind. While I may rant and curse about Drupal in my Twitter feed, I've tried very hard to make this an unemotional, hopefully useful post about something I've spent a lot of time thinking about and working with.

Drupal Centricism

Drupal Ideology

It seems to be a mantra within the community: "You don't even need to write code". The Drupal ideology is user-centric, choosing ease-of-use over performance at every turn. There's nothing wrong with this of course, so long as your goal is to let unskilled people make websites. However if your priority is a performant application capable of handling a lot of traffic, you're going to have a number of problems.

Some examples of prioritising user-focus over performance:

  • Silent failures are the bane of any developer's existence. It's important to know when a variable isn't defined, or that writing a record to the database failed, or that a file didn't upload properly. Drupal suppresses such messages by default, and as a result nearly every contrib module in the community is so riddled with errors and warnings that development with these messages enabled is near impossible.
  • Views, the de-facto standard way to store and retrieve data from your database, writes queries to the database, so that in order to perform a query against the database, you must first fetch the query from the database. Similar inefficiencies can be found in other "standard" modules like CCK and Panels.
  • Drupal relies almost entirely on caching in order to function at all. Without caching, a method usually reserved for high to extreme traffic situations, Drupal can't handle even a small number of concurrent visitors. Indeed, some projects I've seen have taken more than 10minutes to load a single page, even in development where there was only one connection in use.

Drupal Magic

It's a term celebrated by many in the community. The idea being that Drupal does a mountain of work for you, so you don't have to worry about it. The only problem is that when you're trying to build a finely-tuned application, most of this magic either gets in the way, or even works against you. You get 80% of the way there with Drupal and its contrib modules, and then spend three months fighting the whole application, undoing the damage it's done, just to get what you need out of your website.

The hook-dependent system requires and fosters this anti-pattern. Re-using code often means unpredictable, site-wide changes. A property is written in module X, overwritten in module Y, and altogether removed in module Z, and there's no way to be certain that these functions will execute in a predictable order.

This problem is notably worse when it comes to new developers on a project, since they will undoubtedly not be privy to the magic that is running under the hood, and will have a difficult time discovering it on their own. To those who will answer this with "the project simply needs better documentation", I respectfully suggest that a good code base is easy to understand, and doesn't require a manual that is usually out of date.

To work with Drupal Magic is to attempt to produce useful code against an unordered, uncontrolled, grep-to-find-what-is-going-on-dependent architecture.

Drupal Community

For all the victories in community engagement Drupal has achieved (a massive, diverse and engaged membership), it's the glaring failures that make the whole project a miserable situation for developers. I've already mentioned the standardising on inefficient modules, but I haven't talked about the mountains of really horribly written code yet. Drupal Core, for what it does, is pretty efficient, but too many contrib modules are written by inexperienced developers, or are simply incapable of scaling to enterprise-level capacity. The result of this is that non-developers (managers, sometimes even clients) will point to the functionality of module X and insist: "don't redesign the wheel, just use that", and you spend the next three weeks trying to work around the poor design of said module, eventually being forced to write garbage that talks to garbage.

Often the perceived strength of the community is Drupal's greatest weakness. Drupal is promoted based on its theoretically infinite feature set, but the reality is that in order to use every one of those contrib modules in your site, the memory footprint will be massive, the stability suspect, and the performance abysmal. And gods help you if you try this on a site with millions of users or a similar number of content nodes.

Drupal Establishment

None of this is a problem however if Drupal is used where its features and shortcomings are both understood and accepted as the nature of the platform. Drupal is a great tool in some situations and a horrible burden in others. Sadly, this has not yet sunk in with many of the decision-makers in the web development community. Drupal is being used and promoted as a solution hammer, with every potential development project, a Drupal-shaped nail.

This has a number of negative outcomes, the most dangerous of which is a lack of skill diversity in developers. Companies that insist on Drupal-centric development are in fact promoting ignorance of alternatives that might do a better job and that hurts everyone. Unless developers at these companies take it upon themselves to spend time outside of their 8-12 hour work day to write code for a different platform or language, this Drupal dependency will force their non-Drupal skills to atrophy, limiting their ability to produce good code in the future.

Conclusion

I'm finally at the end of my admittedly unenthusiastic involvement in the Drupal community. Whether the Drupal shops out there read this isn't really up to me, but I hope that this manages to help some people re-evaluate their devotion to the platform. Comments are welcome, so long as they're constructive (I moderate everything), but I'm not going to get into a shouting match on the Internet. If you think I'm wrong, we can talk about it in 5 years.

Criminalising Dissent

November 11, 2010 18:18 +0000  |  Activism Anarchy Canada Civil Rights Toronto 0

Today is the day that we reserve for Remembrance, a day when each of us are expected to take a moment to acknowledge and remember the bravery and devotion to duty of the millions of men and women who fought and often died "for King and Country" in dozens of wars past. It's also a day when we must remember that it's not only soldiers who die in war, but civilians as well. Often it is the case that for every one soldier killed in the line of duty, ten, or even one hundred civilians are killed.

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As a society, we tell ourselves that war is a terrible, but sometimes necessary Last Line of Defence against those who would attack our Freedoms. It is therefore with bitter irony that I must point out that today the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the National Union of Public and General Employees are co-hosting public hearings to examine police activity during the recent G20 Summit in Toronto.

Every Canadian owes it to themselves to read these testimonies. Canadian citizens, rounded up, arrested, and held for upwards of 32hours in squalid cells, or tagged with bogus charges like possession of tools for burglary (door keys). Unarmed, non-violent citizens punched and kicked, by police not wearing name tags or badge numbers. In one holding cell case, a woman apparently asked for a tampon and was told that she "should have thought about it before", after which he threw his sock into her cell.

In a Free country, citizens must be allowed to peacefully assemble, and to criticise the government openly, and they must be able to do this without fear of persecution from the state. What we saw in Toronto was not what Canada should be, but whether we like it or not, it was our Canada. Unless we stand up and fight those responsible for abridging our freedoms that day, claims that our military "defends our freedoms" will become even more hollow than they already are.

Please take a moment to read one of the following:

Grandma Soup

November 04, 2010 03:05 +0000  |  Family Food Grandma Lidia Recipes 5

So now that I'm unemployed, I suppose I have time to catch up on stuff here. There are a lot of posts I've been meaning to save here, and there's no time like the present to post them all. I'll start with the recipe for my grandmother's chicken soup.

My grandmother (on my mother's side) is the Chef-as-Matriarch of the family. Since I was a kid, she's had the family over for these massive European-style feasts. 4-7 courses, turkey, pork roast, cabbage rolls, roasted vegetables, soup, green salad, egg salad, pie, cake, and sometimes crème caramel if it was my grandfather's birthday.

All of these are amazing, but what she's known for, practically worshipped for in this family is her soup. Below is the recipe for her sour soup. For the most part, the mechanics are the same. You can swap out the stewed tomatoes for any kind of meat you like. The key is the first line, those vegetables make up the base that's used in all good soup. This incarnation is my favourite though. The sour cream step make everything fabulous:

  • carrot, parsnip, celery, onion (one of each, she calls this "miroquois")
  • Sauté in pot with oil until the onions are translucent
  • Add ½ a can of stewed tomatoes
  • Add 2 tomato cans worth of water
  • Add salt and pepper
  • Simmer until veggies are done (about 15minutes)
  • Take 1 big tbsp of sour cream and combine with a small amount of broth and mix until smooth and return to pot.
  • Add parsley for taste
  • Add some noodles

Now that's the recipe, but I've yet to actually make it work. I suppose now I have some more time to experiment.

Suddenly Unemployed

November 03, 2010 20:03 +0000  |  Moving Unemployment Work [at] Play 3

Nearly ten years ago, after a gruelling week of work and late nights trying to get a product out the door, my colleagues and I came into work, bleary eyed, but proud of the site we'd been able to finish on-time and to-spec. We were met with a group meeting, in which roughly two thirds of us were informed that we no longer had a job. It was devastating to most of us, but we all recovered, and learnt from all of this an important lesson: that the business world can be cold, and it's best to be prepared for the worst.

I've managed to benefit from that lesson a few times now. Working in IT, you get used to the often temporary nature of your work, and sometimes that of your employer. You make preparations for an abrupt exodus, establish connections within the community, and find ways to make the transition easier. It's never easy, but over the years it's become less-difficult.

Unfortunately, I've had to deal with such a situation today. My (now former) employer, Work at Play gave me the pink slip this morning, along with another coworker. They're restructuring, position is redundant, etc. etc. The end result is that I'm out of work, just two months before my planned exit and relocation to Somewhere in Europe. To their credit though, the process was respectful and not at all like my exit from Moshpit Entertainment so long ago.

I've already started branching out, looking for ways to cover bills and do some more saving before my exit, and I've been considering bumping up my timetable if that seems to work for everyone. Having never done a move of this magnitude, I'm unsure of which decisions to make on all of these new fronts. I do have some promising leads for some short-term contract work though, so money may not be a problem. We'll see.