Blog Out Loud Ottawa

I haven't been blogging, but I have been getting out a little bit and taking pictures.

Thursday, I made it to the last half of Blog Out Loud Ottawa. It was a terrific event. An excellent demonstration that blogging can build community.

Because Milan was the official photographer for the event and he has better photographic equipment than I have, I concentrated on taking pictures that he might not take.

This is Milan about to take a picture of me.

And this is me just after taking the picture of Milan.

More on BOLO

My BOLO photos on Flickr

I'm back and I don't know where to start

The Road Trip: It would bore you readers, but I feel I should add up how many kilometres I drove in August and share tips on places visited, etc.

Stones Cove, Newfoundland and the Riggs Family Reunion: This topic needs its own website, not just a blog posting.

Lepreaufest: Further proof that I lead a charmed life: I was invited to a private music festival in New Brunswick.

Astronaut Love Triangle: The triumphant debut of a paradigm shattering new force in music and performance art.

Lyle: Still here. Still fine. I've taken over the computer so he is at the window.

Rocks: I have many more rocks now than I did in July.

Hanging with Poets: I had an opportunity to hang out with poets on Saturday and met several that I only knew before through their blogs and facebook profiles.

Round-up

Deodorant and Gender

Yesterday morning, I noticed that the label on my Lady Speed Stick was a sticker. It peeled off easily. I could put on my own label, I thought. Then this morning, Zoom came up with that same exact idea and I realized that I'd better do it fast before the idea loses momentum.

I'm happy with my re-branding, but it is at times like this that I wish I blogged under an alias. I'm sure that if I had a less inhibited alter-ego, I could have come up with something far more masculine for my sweat-control.

Uses for Binder Clips

Our genius friend Megan has identified another fine and appropriate use for a binder clip - adornment. You'll see that she went with a single basic black clip fastened to a collar. Of course, an array of clips in bold colours could make an even more striking fashion statement.

(Do you see why I say she's a genius? It's that juxtaposition thing - the binder clip is the paradigm of a functional object that people don't notice and she has used it so that it's only function is to be noticed. Sheer brilliance.)

Read the TV Guide First

Here is a screenshot that partially demonstrates how reading the listings can keep you from even turning on the TV.

Blogs that Matter

Going back to Zoom, you should read her post from today, The real reason I support the crack kit program.

Me and My Troll

You know that your blog is on the internet radar when you get your own troll. My troll hangs out in the comments attached to my posting about the J*nk Br*thers. About once a week, he googles Scrimshaw J*nk Br*thers, then drops in and adds one or more comments that criticize the bros, or that criticize me for deleting his comments.

If I find his content acceptable, I leave his comment up and maybe give a smart-alec reply. If it is not acceptable, I delete it.

At first I wasn't sure about his gender, but his recent shift to remarks about sexual orientation and sexual practices force me to conclude that he is in fact a male and his mental age is no more than fifteen.

As trolls go, he's not the worst. Some bloggers after deleting troll comments have received death threats. Others are so bothered by troll's insults they have turn off all comments or even stop blogging.

Mind you, my troll has forced me to remove the "recent comments" section from my sidebar for a while. For some reason, blogspot isn't removing deleted comments from there. As soon as I get a few new comments, I'll be able to put it back in.

My old friend John is a Troll for Good

My old friend John is a Troll for Good. He is an engineering professor and he finds blogs that say global warming is a sham and posts comments pointing out the flaws in the arguments. He is unfailingly polite, addresses only the science, stays away from the politics, and ignores the personal attacks made against him. He tells me that after a couple of weeks, the blogs either shut down or stop talking about global warming. When this happens, he goes looking for another pseudo-science blog to shut down.

Unfortunately, because my opinions are so highly rational, I won't be attracting a Troll for Good, but as this blog grows in popularity, I'm sure to get more evil trolls. I expect any day now I'll get one who will suggest that binder clips are over-rated.

Referral to Zoom

I have not been blogging because I am having the kind of week that articling law students are supposed to have. If you've come here hoping to find something to divert yourself, I suggest you go to Zoom's blog and read Mock Spring claims a life.

With postings like these, Zoom reminds me that I could be doing much better work over here.

Dave's Excuses

It is Wednesday night. I stopped working before 7pm tonight and I did not stop at the Manx on my way home. No, I cycled right here. I put some clothes in the washer. I ate some leftovers. I checked my emails. I looked at the TV listings and determined that nothing is on that I need to watch. I played Mumu (a disappointing 435). And now I am creating a Blog Posting.

Yesterday, the organizing book review had the lead in the poll with 5 votes, but since then there have been two votes for "An explanation of why Dave hasn't posted in so long".

This is fine with me because I haven't had time to give the book the attention it deserves.

I haven't posted in so long because:

1. I have 67 unanswered emails that should be dealt with before posting here because every one of those emails could be from one of you readers of my blog who is right now thinking, look he has time for this nonsense, but no time to reply to my thoughtful email.
2. At the end of every year for many years now, I have done a review of major areas of my life and thoughtfully crafted attainable and measurable goals and resolutions for the new year. I have not done that yet this year and should do it before posting here.
3. There is a new computer game in my life. It would be too embarrassing for me to reveal anything else about it.
4. I have been working very hard. Lots of trials and settlement conferences this month to prepare for and conduct, no time off over the holidays. [Milestones: (a) Completed an entire trial, didn't get everything I asked for, but it mostly went the way I argued it should even though the justice of the peace found me confusing. (b) Successfully opposed a lawyer's motion to dismiss one of my cases and won - tip: "that would be a try-able issue" is a magic phrase in this situation. (c) Successfully moved for an adjournment of an appeal while a local lawyer who is often in the news opposed the adjournment - tip: being completely ignorant of the case is extremely helpful in this situation.]
5. I had a cold this past weekend.
6. Phil loaned me two tapes with Battlestar Galactica episodes. Plus Space TV showed the opening mini-series.
7. I discovered Carl Schroeder. He is a terrific sci-fi writer who has written one book with bona fide space pirates (Sun of Suns), and two others that are close enough to count (Permanence and Vesta).
8. I've actually spent some time with other human beings since the holidays started.
9. Among last year's resolutions was: "Clean out the basement" This was the second or third year it was on the list without being performed. I should be working on that instead of blogging here.

New Postings Coming Soon

I'd like Dave's Next Post to Be:
	A Review of the Organizing Book Dave Got for Christmas
	The Mr. T Gizmo
	Dave's latest effort in architecture for cats
	An explanation of why Dave hasn't posted in so long
	The January Picture for Dave's missing calendar
	A new use for binder clips
	A detailed report on Dave's Resolutions for 2006 and 2007
	Video of Dave playing a clapping game with Jane
	Something with cute little animals
	Other [feel free to mention in comments]
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Nominated? Moi?

The Ottawa Xpress is have their annual Best of Ottawa Readers Poll and my blog is nominated! Oddly, the poll form doesn't hotlink to the nominated blogs. So here they all are: Dial 6-1-3_ (music) rob mclennan's blog (lit) The Blog of Amanda Earl (lit/personal) Matilda (personal) Asteroidea Press(personal) David Scrimshaw's Blog (personal) Humanyms (personal) John W. MacDonald's Weblog (personal/photo) Through the Broken Viewfinder (photo) OnVertigo (photo) Space to Live (photo)

Blogger Stalking and the Hockey God at the Cube

I read Vicky Smallman's Blog this afternoon and she mentioned the vernissage at the Cube Gallery. So it was no surprise to see the Vicky, blogger and candidate for Kitchisippi Ward, there at the opening.

She insists they created her slogan "shaping Kitchisippi with you" before she found out she's pregnant. (But isn't that one of those things that anyone with a bit of psychic ability knows before they "know"?)

Anyway, I've rarely been to an opening where I liked such a high proportion of the art. I'm glad I finally made it out to the Cube.

I even got invited for a ride in a limousine to go to two other galleries, but I declined. I'm not the adventurous soul I used to be.

Besides the delightful Hockey God there are some excellent paintings on the walls at the Cube now. The bulk of the show is a collection of pieces by Don Monet. In many he's done a cool mixture of photographs and paint. I was wishing I'd thought of it first, but who am I kidding? I wouldn't have done it so well. [example]

I think the Cube's next show, Candela, the 2006 Ottawa Light Art Show will be a must see.

15 Ways I've Tricked Out This Blogspot Beta Blog

This post is about the design choices I've made with my blog and some of the bells and whistles I've added. I welcome any comments you have on aspects you like, or changes you'd recommend.

I've put a fair amount of research into all of this and I hope it will save someone else some effort.

1. A Simple Template: I chose Douglas Bowman's Minima template as my starting point not because it's the first choice Blogspot offered, but because it is the least flashy. Black letters on white background, no illustrations. I want my blog to be easy to read, it doesn't have to impress people with my good taste in colours.
2. A Serif Font for text: Back when I started doing Scribbles, I asked Joel, who'd been editing a newspaper, what fonts I should use. He told me that the common wisdon is that you should use a serif font for text and a sans-serif font for headlines. I've done that ever since. With all the onscreen reading I've done in the last few years, I believe that I find it less tiring on my eyes to have the little curlicues on the letters. However, Alex Poole (a human computer interaction expert) has done a detailed literature review and concluded that sans-serif fonts are as easy to read and may be easier on a computer screen.It could be about what we're used to, and I'm used to culicues. I'm open to changing to Trebuchet or Arial if I get a popular outcry.
3. A big scaleable font: To allow a reader to change the font-size on their screen before my upgrade, I had to change all my default font-sizes from "px" based to "em" based. This is now the default that comes with the Minima template and I hope Blogger has done it with the other templates as well. When I go to a site that purports to give web design advice and it has tiny text that won't get bigger, I usually decide their advice may be uninformed.

"Erase non-data ink, within reason." - Edward R. Tufte

4. No Picture Frames: In the early days of my career as a data analysis consultant, I read Edward R. Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. It's considered by many to be the best book written on statistical graphics. He has a chapter devoted to the principle that graphics are better when more ink is devoted to data and less ink is devoted to useless information. In my data presentation days, it meant whenever I made a graph with Lotus or Excel, I'd have to spend a few minutes removing all the boxes, shading and gridlines that distracted the viewers eye from the data I wanted them to see and understand. For websites, a reader doesn't need lines around pictures, columns or text boxes to see where they are. To eliminate borders in blogger beta, I set the "border color" to white, which is the background colour, in "Fonts and Colors" [Tufte has a website. I'll have to check it out.]
5. Percentage Columns: The Minima template was set with a fixed width of 800px for the outer wrapper; and something like 500px for the main content column, and 300px for the sidebar. These are excellent dimensions for people using an 800x600 monitor. Most people who come here now have bigger monitors. In the "edit HTML" window of the template, I changed the width of the outer wrapper to 95% (width: 95%;), the main wrapper to 68%, and the sidebar to 28%. When I put pictures in the sidebar, I often set their width to 95% without specifying the height so that the pictures will automatically fit in. If my doing this makes the columns wider than you like, you can make your browser window narrow.
6. Blue and Purple for links: I use blue for new links and purple for links readers haven't followed because they go well with the black text and they are fairly standard so people will hopefully know what they mean.
7. No new browser windows: When I started blogging, I'd make every link open a new browser window by putting target="blank" in the HTML. I did it because I wanted to keep my readers here if they clicked on a link. I've found out since then that there are people out there who consider my forcing them to open a new browser window to be a fundamental violation of their human right to choose how they use their computers and the web. So I took out all my blank targets and now I don't have to spend the effort putting them in. Hopefully you know how to open a link in a new window or a new tab if that is what you woul like to do.
8. RSS through Feedburner: I could just provide the Blogger links to my posting feed and comment feeds, but it was easy to follow the Feedburner instructions and provide links that make it much easier for a reader to add the feed to their favourite RSS reader, or to subscribe by email. The Feedburner feed also also allowed me to put recent comments in a sidebar widget which the blogspot feed wouldn't. As I'm typing this, the sidebar has comments that were recent about a year ago. I'm hoping that's just because of yesterday's republishing when I switched over.
9. Google Calendar: I got a Google Calendar because I wanted to put information about events into a format that lets a reader add it to their calendar or have a reminder sent. Google Calendar does this, and I imagine other calendars do also. I look forward to the day when a single format wins. For now I'm going with the big G. If Yahoo, MS Outlook, or someone else wins, I'll switch. Once I had the calendar, it seemed like I might as well add it to my sidebar and keep it up to date with lesser-known Ottawa events that I think just about anyone would enjoy.
10. Picture Divider: It is very difficult to use blogger to create a post that has images next to text and have only the text you want next to a specific image. I get around this by inserting a divider between text I want to separate. The divider is an image that is the width of the column, the color of the background and 1px high. Here is the HTML for it:

    <img style="MARGIN: 0px; WIDTH: 100%; HEIGHT: 1px; border: 0" alt="divider" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1963/1465/320/whiteline.jpg" />

    [Site that gave me the code so I could display this HTML for you.]

11. Pullquotes: Pullquotes are the blocks of text like the one above about erase non-data ink or the one I'm about to put here that will excerpt

    "Pullquotes... can bring a reader back into your text..."

    from this sentence: "Pullquotes visually break up blocks of text when you have no images and they can bring a reader back into your text when they are skimming." I found instructions in several places for using CSS to make pullquotes easy. Then I spent hours and hours failing to make those instructions work. I don't know if it's Blogger or IE6 or both, but the CSS version never worked. So now I open up my little notepad file where I keep snips of HTML (like the HTML for the picture divider) and paste it into the "Edit HTML" window where I want the pullquote to go.

<div style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-SIZE: 120%; FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 10px; WIDTH: 35%; COLOR: green"><p align="left">"Pullquotes... can bring a reader back into your text..."</p></div>

12. Visitor Stats: I use statcounter.com. It's free and it tells me which pages people are reading, the sites they are coming from and the keyword searches they are using to find me. That's all I need, even though it tells me more.
13. Creative Commons Licence: Putting a Creative Commons 2.5 licence on my pages mostly means that people can use my material if they give don't make money with it and give me credit. If they want to use my stuff without giving me credit, or they want to make money and it's not fair use or fair dealing, they have to ask my permission. If I didn't want people to use my material for noncommercial purposes, they would anyway and it wouldn't be worth my time suing them. This way, people know it's okay; they know I'd like to be credited; and they are reminded I want to be asked if they have plans that go outside what I'm licencing them to do. Added bonus: My pages show up when someone does an advanced Google Search on "only pages that are free to use or share"
14. Open Comments: I've never used any of the barriers to commenting and I've never had a problem on this blog with comment spam. There have been a few anonymous comments that had mean remarks that I deleted.
15. Categories: I was using del.icio.us as a roundabout way to put tags on my posts and categorize them. Now that blogger beta has "labels", I've switched over. Although it would be nicer if when you clicked on a "label" you got a page with only the titles and a the first sentence or two of the posting. To get the cool looking tag cloud, I used phydeaux3's code and followed the clear directions with no modifications. (Beautiful work, phydeaux3!)

Do you have any suggestions for what I could do differently?

My Official Statement

Disclaimers

Who is spoken for: Opinions expressed in postings and comments on this blog are those of nobody but their author, and given the frequent use of sarcasm, are often not even the authors' opinions.

Accuracy: I try to check some facts on this blog. But if I don't give you a reference, I probably didn't check it and am just spouting off. If I did check, I probably didn't go further than Wikipedia.

Tone: If what I'm saying would be crazy or offensive to you if I really meant it, it could be I'm using some of that sarcasm I mentioned earlier.

Claimers

Life Advice: I stand by some of the advice on this blog. In addition to things you'll find in the postings, I believe life is better when you:

• Join a brass band or choir: Both give you the transcendent experience of creating harmonic music in a group, and they both force you to control your breathing
• Swim: Take as many swimming lessons as you need so that you can do a comfortable stroke and then swim regularly. (If you can't swim because of a phobia or a skin condition, walk or bike, don't run, it messes you up and you know it does, you running junkies)
• Sign up for something outside your comfort zone that will be good for you at least once a year. Maybe it's salsa lessons, maybe it's volunteering at a soup kitchen, travelling in scary country. Doesn't matter, stretch yourself.
• You can draw: I'm grateful for the compliments I get on my sketches, but seriously, you can draw as well as me, probably better. It's just that you probably don't draw at all. Draw a picture with a black pen. It will look crappy. Then colour it in with colored pencils. You only need the basic set of 12 colours. It'll look great.

Privacy: This blog is not about embarrassing people. If I've written about you and you're uncomfortable with it, please let me know. Usually I use a pseudonym if I've not asked for your permission. If you'd be happy with your real name or you'd like a different pseudonym, let me know.

Tracking: Because this is a Google product, Google Analytics is apparently doing some tracking here. It's likely other apps on your machine are also doing some tracking of what you're looking at here. I can assure you that although Google will sometimes tell me something like "5 people visited your site last week", I don't do anything to see who comes here or what they're looking for.  

Magic is nonsense: It's true that I live a charmed life, but I don't have to believe in mystical forces to know that the universe is more complex than I'll ever understand, that the smallest thing can be astonishing, and that the ugliest person is more beautiful and amazing than any work of art in the world.

Why I still have a blog

Yes, I know that blogging is really 2006, but I like to have a place where I can put things up and they can be seen by anyone even if they don't have a Facebook or Mastodon account.

I still follow lots of blogs every day using Feedly whose free version works very well for me. 

Two things I especially like about using the RSS reader are:

1. I don't have to individually check every day on the websites I care about.
2. Every now and then, there's a fantastic post from someone who hasn't put something up in months or years. It's like finding a $20 bill in the pocket of a coat you haven't warn since the previous winter.

[Updated January 5, 2023]

Switching to Blogger Beta

I switched to Blogger Beta Saturday Afternoon. Things may be wonky. I've got many posts to go through to get them switched from the old "categories" to the new "labels". Please send me an email or leave a comment if you notice something not working properly.

Onvertigo: Still my favourite Ottawa Photo Blog

I was going to put up a picture of my big Spanish poster, but so far the photos I've taken have been blurry and don't properly demonstrate how big it is.

Last week, I was pretty much either working, watching TV, reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, or hanging out with friends. Since I'm not about to take this blog into fantasy novel reviews, and since after every interesting thing my friends said, they added, "don't blog that", I will bring you my favourite pictures from my favourite Ottawa photo blog from the past week. (Which wasn't my favourite week, but was still a fine week.)

I keep going back to look at Christina's picture of the cat and mouse because I'm hoping she'll tell the story of how these two got together. They look to me like a pair of crime-fighting buddies who have just solved another case.

This picture makes me regret not going to the Ex this year, even if I didn't ride the zipper, I'd have found something for the blog.

Make sure you click on the photos to see them in their proper full size glory.

Another tip: Christina only puts up one photo a day on her blog. She has many more photos at her flickr site.

My Secret New Job

I started my new job yesterday. It may interfere with blogging more than being a full-time student did.

I won't be writing much about my new job because

1. I'm happy to be there and don't want to get dooced;^{[Note 1]} and
2. I want to get called to the bar next June.

But I can show you why I am happy to be there.

Cake for me and the other new guys on our second day:

I don't have a door I can shut, but this is the view from my cubicle:

I'm eager to get called to the bar so that signs like this one will no longer apply to me:

Shoes on a Wire

I don't really have anything to say about these shoes hanging from the lines above Gladstone just west of Kent, so I thought I'd tell you about the dream I had early Saturday morning. Because hearing about other people's dreams usually bores me, I'll skip the beginning part where I was wandering around in Cornwall and start where I was falling off a skyscraper in Las Vegas.

When I am falling from great heights in a dream, I either do the Douglas Adams trick where you switch to flying by choosing not to hit the ground, or I do the body surfing trick to get myself to land in water. [Which I described for real life situations in What to do when...]

I figured that because I was fairly aware I was dreaming, the flying trick might not work, so I steered for water. I found myself over a bunch of lakes, but my subconscious mind was having none of clear blue water and I landed in a giant tank of bubbling, yellow toxic sludge.

So then I was walking in Las Vegas, dripping with toxic waste. I need a shower, I thought, but if I start looking for a shower, this dream is just going to become one of those endless search dreams where I'm trying to get a shower. I know! I'll rinse off in one of those fancy Vegas fountains! And look there's a fancy Casino fountain right here!

As I climbed over the concrete wall around the fountain, I thought: this will be good advice to put on my blog. When you're dreaming that you've been covered in toxic waste, don't go looking for a shower, instead, make a fountain appear and rinse off in it. You won't get in trouble because it's a dream.

Unfortunately, I woke up just then and didn't get to find out what the next part of the Las Vegas dream action would be, but at least I remembered the excellent advice.

Now you see that even if I'm not blogging much because of some dumb exams, I'm still thinking about blogging.

Any thoughts on the shoes?

Amazing Lightning Picture

We had a thunderstorm in Ottawa last night at about 11:15pm. I didn't even realize it. But Andrew Knapp did and he scored this photo. <

Energy Drain - Bar Admissions and MuMu

I'd like to explain why I've had no energy for blogging or doing anything else these past few weeks.

I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about the bar admission course I'm taking. Everything we do seems to have a warning attached to it that goes like this:

Please note that all information prepared for this assessment process must be kept confidential. Failure to adhere to this paragraph may be regarded as "Academic Dishonesty" under s. 43(3) of the Licensing Process Policies.

For all I know, my sharing this note with you is such a breach. So let's just talk hypothetically. Imagine you're in a room with 24 people who have just completed their second or third university degree and you have an instructor asking them questions like "How do we communicate with our clients?"

And then the instructor waits for people to raise their hands. And keeps waiting.

And finally a hand goes up and the hand-raiser says, "on the phone? by email?"

"How else?"

I'm the guy who just shouts out "politely".

When the instructor didn't like that answer, I went back to being the guy who just shouts out the obvious answer right away so we don't have the long cricket chirping silences. Until the instructor asked "do we only write contracts so that the lawyers involved can understand them."

"No," I said.

"You don't have to answer so forcefully," said the instructor, "you could say, 'not necessarily'." Now we're back to the cricket chirping silences, because I'm not into unnecessarily equivocal answers.

Alas, as much as I've admired my fellow law student colleagues, I lost some of my optimism last week. Here's a sentence I used to begin a summary in a memo last week about a letter that our "firm" received by mistake:

This letter is like a live cobra that has been tossed through our window. It may have already bitten us, but if we handle it with care, we may escape further harm, get the anti-venom in time and possibly, but not likely, turn it to our advantage.

My fellow firm members deleted the sentence.

Do you see why I feel like my energy is being drained?

Don't play this game

Then here at home, I came across that damned game MuMu because somebody asked if I could find something to occupy their mind^Note1. I had my computer game addiction down to only about 20 minutes a day before this. A MuMu game takes me about 40 minutes. And when I finish one game, I want to play another. I must have spent six or seven hours playing it yesterday. And I'd promised myself I wouldn't play at all.

This morning I played two games and got a score of 653 on my second game. That's a darned high score and I'm hoping it will satisfy me enough that I never play it again. If you're smart, you won't follow the link I've imbedded into the screen shot.

Inter-species adoption

This is a photo I took on Dalhousie Street on Friday. I've labelled this inter-species adoption, but it's possible that the smaller tractor is actually the crossbreed offspring of the excavator and a bulldozer.

If you'd like to see substantially better photos from around town, my favourite Ottawa photoblog these days is onvertigo. This link is the picture that got me hooked on Christina Mathers' work.

Blogs I Like: Asteroidea Press

There are some blogs I really like, but are so revealing of the authors that a paternal urge makes me want to protect them by not making them more public.

Megan Butcher's Blog is one of these.

She also writes about sex. [Apparently there's software out there that will hide selected blog postings from selected IP addresses, so I could hide a recommendation of her blog from certain readers (namely you, Mom and Dad) but I don't have that software.]

This week, Megan has written a powerful series of postings about her experience of anorexia, and I think it's time I got over my hangups and told you that you should read these and if you want another blog that's always interesting and sometimes makes your eyes pop out, add her to your regular reading list.

• She's So Heavy, Part 1
• She's So Heavy, Part 2
• She's So Heavy, Part 3
• She's So Heavy, Part 4
• She's So Heavy, Part 5

On her poetry blog, she has a poem about being in the Toronto General Hospital that goes with the series:

• Crash

If you get a chance to hear her, Megan also gives a good poetry reading.

Paddy Mitchell News

If you're not reading Zoom's Blog regularly and you're interested in Paddy Mitchell, former leader of the Stopwatch Gang, you'll want to read her latest post.