Bombers Make Diagonal Move

I always thought Michael Bishop had potential to be more than he amounted to.  Maybe getting stuck behind Damon Allen all those years in Toronto hindered his development?  Or maybe getting stuck behind Kerry Joseph that year in Toronto?  Or those wasted years in NFL Europe or the Arena Football League?

He has a cannon for an arm but it always looks like he believes he has to prove something immediately or he'll get released.  In fairness to the man, that does seem to be the pattern that prevails in his life. 

Somewhere I have his Arena Football Card.  Maybe I'll get it signed.  I'm sure I don't have to hurry.  If I miss him this time around, he might actually not come back.  I can't be sure who the CFL will turn to as a mid-season comedy replacement after Bishop, but I have a guess:

 Here's a source if you don't believe me: http://www.winnipegsun.com/2011/09/27/bombers-bringing-back-bishop

Turn to Page One to Begin the Lesson

In an attempt to model a blog post after the way Ken Levine does things, here are some thoughts on Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times.

I was a little concerned when I saw a title credit for History Films as the History channel is flooded with shows about pawn shops, semi-trailers and how aliens maybe helped build Egypt's pyramids.  Gladly, no pawnbrokers, truckers or E.T.s to be had.

A more appropriate title for the doc would be Media Desk: A Year Following David Carr of the New York Times. 

Carr is a recovered drug addict that doesn't pull punches.  A TV show of him going about his daily routine would probably be the highest rated show ever. 

This wouldn't be half as interesting if it didn't cover the year the WikiLeaks became important.

Normally I'd be inclined to blur the plate in a picture of a car I took a photo of, but anyone who is that big a supporter of WikiLeaks has an uphill battle proving to me that his privacy is somehow more important than stolen diplomatic cables.

The doc introduced me to newser.com.  Its ok, but I prefer the low-tech and more Canadian bourque.org. 

Watch the background in shots featuring an editor named Bruce Hedlam.  There seemed to be a different bottle of pills on his desk everytime he is shown in his office.

But don't worry about him, he's Canadian so he can always come back for some health care.

Film maker Rossi threw in some archival footage of all those old white guys slaving away working at a news paper.  In 50 years the same could be said of Page One.

Maybe that's not fair, a couple of them weren't old.

The doc points out the paywall.  Google NYTClean if you want to see how $40-50 million of software engineering was undone with four lines of computer code.

But there are no torrents to download Page One.  Give it time.

There were those update cards for a couple guys at the end, but not everyone.  I like it when I find out what happens to everyone, sometimes the most surprising people end up as state senators.  When in New York, visit The New York Times (ask for Dave).

The election, Web 1.0 and some math jokes

There's an election going on where I live.  Debates, particularly among political leaders are generally a feature of an election campaign and this one is no different.  Today, PC leader Hugh McFadyen, NDP leader Greg Selinger and Liberal leader Jon Gerrard gathered around some mics and got in as many words as they could about crime and health care.  I got to sit in the next room over and and live-tweet along with what was being said.

It was kinda neat.  I've attended/listened to/watched many of these things, managed the occasional question and have talked about them in the past amongst my peers.  But this is the first time I offered running commentary on one to people who weren't in the same room as I.

Twitter was responsible for spreading my message far and wide, to everyone that happened to subscribe to CJOB's twitter feed.  I was handed the keys and told to go for it.  I hope some subscribers took something away from it, I equally hope nobody unsubbed because of it.

This is really the Internet at its best, the near instant exchange of information.  You may not be familiar with that particular application of the Internet as it doesn't get much use for that.    Far more bandwidth is devoted to the scholarly pursuits of listening to theme songs from tv shows of the 80s on YouTube and looking at pictures of cats with purposefully misspelled captions.

But before before the blogosphere there was the information super highway.  This was the world of Web 1.0.  There were no blogs, only web pages.  Real Player tried to bring us audio and video, but it never finished buffering.  Before whatever social media is today and what it will be in the next couple of years, Usenet and IRC reigned supreme.  Both are still around, but are shadows of their former selves.  And who can forget accessing information with the Lynx browser using the once proud gopher protocol?

Really, except for Real Player not being very good and nobody using gopher and Lynx anymore, the Internet hasn't changed.  Web 2.0 just makes things nicer looking and easier to get at.  You could always do what blogging is on a personal web page and people would use IRC to communicate in real-time, more or less like Twitter except it was harder to see what happened before you logged in and your audience was limited only to the people in the room.

I'm just guessing here, but I think that's where hashtagging comes from.  To talk over IRC a person had to join a room, and rooms were differentiated from users by having a hashtag in front of the name of the room.  Rooms tended to be divided by topic, so if you were in the #winnipeg room, you were talking about Winnipeg.  Seems like the same idea to me. 

Anyway, in honour of my walk down Web 1.0 memory lane and for the benefit of some people I know taking an editing class that will soon be focusing on numbers, here are some humorous highlights from bash.org's IRC quote archive. 

<kow`> "There are 10 types of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't."
<SpaceRain> That's only 2 types of people, kow.
<SpaceRain> STUPID

<tadpoleofdeath> Why do so many math majors confuse Halloween and Christmas?
<elfking> why?
<tadpoleofdeath> Because Oct 31 is Dec 25

<IncoherentMoron> choose an integer between 1 and 35
<Elliotw2> F
<IncoherentMoron> base 10, smartass

And something a touch more modern, a photo(!) with one more number joke:

Imaginary numbers, eh?  Could those be infecting the "Crocus calculator" that McFadyen insists Selinger uses?

Ten Years On

It's a decade after the terror attacks of September 11, and people everywhere are remembering. Depending who you are and how old were, you remember different things about the day.

I remember listening to CJOB that morning and it was on that station that I heard the news of the first plane hitting the first of the towers. At the time, it sounded like an accident. I remember thinking about a couple of other aviation accidents few weeks prior and figuring this too was accidental.

At some point, CJOB switched over to CNN's audio feed, so I did as well. I also made my way to work, which at the time was the Winnipeg office of one of the city's members of parliament. Everyone in the office basically just watched coverage all day long, as did pretty much everyone. One of my co-workers was sick when she watched footage of people jumping from the towers.

We had two phone calls that day, one from our office on the hill where the Ottawa staffer told us that that snipers had been posted on the roof of centre block and everyone was being sent home. The other call was someone who needed help with student loans. I'm not sure if that caller was unaware of what was going on, or just unconcerned.

I also remember the internet pretty much stopping. CNN's homepage was reduced to a simple couple of text links taking visitors to other parts of the their site. CBC's site wasn't working so well either. Everyone wanted information and news sites couldn't keep up.

Search engines weren't much better. But I do remember running Osama Bin Laden's name through a search when the initial speculation was that he was connected/responsible for the attack. Among the first three hits was a satire of some sort that on a free host like Angelfire or Geocities that had been done months or years before. I found it again a day or two later and the author had voluntarily taken it down, saying it was in now in poor taste.

The Winnipeg Free Press published a special edition that afternoon. I only remember it was filled with pictures. I assume there was articles with the best information available at the time. I don't think I have it anymore, but I wish I did.

As I did every Tuesday at the time, I went out to dinner with some friends. There was some uneasiness about that, but we forged on and discussed the day's events. I don't recall anything specific, other than speculation about the death toll. Someone at the table said 20 thousand. I remember responding that, if true, the death toll was more than D-Day.

About the only other thing I remember from around that time was going to the first Blue Bomber game following the attacks. The game sponsor was Boeing, and I recall the coincidence being slightly awkward.

Since everyone else is rolling out remembrances, I'd like to recommend "That Day" from WGN radio in Chicago. Its only an hour and available for listening or download via the link above. It's exceptionally well produced and gives a bit of an insight what it was like to be in a news room that day.

WGN has a variety of other audio clips on the site that are worth a listen. Especially interesting is the audio montage and the raw audio they have of other calls and radio traffic from the day of the attacks.

And it's not up yet (and may never be) but their overnight host had an excellent clip-by-clip breakdown of that montage (plus a couple others) between 1 and 2 am which aired on Sept 11, 2011. If it shows up as a podcast, I'll edit a link into the post, so check back.

Baseball Bits

This morning I heard Bob Irving on CJOB talk about the unusual playoff structure that made our Winnipeg Goldeyes play the majority of their games on the road despite having a record better than the other team.  Usually the better team gets to host the final game of a playoff series, but that's not the case in the American Association of Professional Baseball.  Irving also called the AA's playoff structure "bush league."

I'm with him on the Goldeyes deserving the chance to host the deciding game, but are we really fooling ourselves that the AA is anything but a bush league?  It's an independent league, velocities on the radar gun are below that of top high school pitchers, players travel everywhere by bus and rosters are so tiny that the only player available to act as a designated hitter is a backup catcher who hits below his weight.  It's charitable to call the play double-A equivalent and the comparison really only holds up if you don't consider the prospects that populate organized ball.

I enjoy going to watch the Goldeyes but I don't think there is anything wrong in admitting that, in the grand scheme of baseball, the play elsewhere is better.  Games in the league remain competitive because the players are all of a similar caliber.  And its about as good as Winnipeg can hope for as affiliated ball would have to start alongside the majors, which means early April if not very late March.  I can't imagine Winnipeg's weather cooperating enough to allow for outdoor baseball at that time of year.

Elsewhere, phenom pitcher Stephen Strasburg is back in the major leagues, having recovered a little early from Tommy John surgery.  He's back to his old form zipping fastballs by opponents at up to 99 miles per hour.  He kept LA Dodger hitters on their toes by tossing the occasional changeup which would only register between 87 and 92 miles per hour.  Ted Lilly started on the mound for the Dodgers, his fastball topped out at 91.

And while listening to the Kansas City Royals beat up on the Oakland A's (who were once the Kansas City A's), Kevin Costner urged me to go to the World War I museum in KC should I ever happen to be in the neighbourhood.  I probably would anyway, but if Costner is passing out advice he should tell the co-owners of his baseball team to pay its employees.  I guess the AA can at least claim not to be anywhere near that level of bush.

That brings the post pretty well full circle as the only player to remain with the Lake County Fielders after pretty much every player left, was traded or got released was Alan Rick, the very same DH/catcher who was struggling at the plate when when I was talking about the Goldeyes.  I guess things didn't go much better for him in Lake County as he was released August 8.

Shame he didn't make it, he has a nice autograph.

Defining things

Australian artist Denis Beaubois was given a $20 thousand grant from his government.  He used the money to obtain 200 $100 AUD banknotes.  Beaubois did nothing to them other than stack them and record their serial numbers.  He called the stacks of cash and list of numbers art and put the work up for auction.

The $20,000 sold at auction for $17,500. 

Food Network personality Sandra Lee had a show where she creates food.  Unlike many if not all other cooking shows, she doesn't use base ingredients.  Rather, Lee takes pre-existing food and combines it with other pre-existing food.  She calls this process Semi-Homemade food and has her own cable show to show other people how its done.

She will even help her viewers make sandwiches.

Ed Wood wrote, directed, produced, starred in, produced and edited movies.  One of his favourite actors to use was horror legend Bela Lugosi.  Wood once convinced a Baptist church to give him enough money to fund a movie.  With it, he made a contender for worst film of all time: Plan 9 from Outer Space. 

It is so carelessly made that windows that look out to nothingness are right next to ones with visible sky.

If devaluing raw currency is art, making sandwiches is cooking and producing laughably bad cinema is making movies, can the bar be all that high for what constitutes journalism? 

Well, no.  Just like art, cooking and movies, it doesn't seem to matter how outrageous, uninspired or awful something can be, it can still be considered journalism.  In fact, much at this end of the spectrum even has a name: Yellow Journalism.  If it has the word in the name, it must be journalism, right?

Frank Luther Mott defined this Yellow Journalism as:

1. Scare-heads, in which excessive large type, printed in either black or red, screamed excitement, often about comparatively unimportant news, thus giving a shill falsity to the entire make-up;
2. the lavish use of pictures, many of them without significance, inviting the abuses of picture-stealing and "faked" pictures;
3. impostures and frauds of various kinds, such as "faked" interviews and stories, misleading heads, pseudo-science, and parade of false learning;
4. the Sunday supplement, with colored comics and superficial articles; and
5. more or less ostentatious sympathy with the "underdog," with campaigns against abuses suffered by the common people.

Now, that's not all bad, and Mott says that some of those things contribute to modern journalism, notably "banner heads, free use of pictures and the Sunday supplement."  I like comics, so I guess

Those bits aside, the opposite of what Yellow Journalism presents should be what better journalism aspires to be.  Much of that boils down to don't lie about things and don't make up facts.  Sounds good to me.  Some might even say its easy though perhaps not lucrative.

There, I fixed it

Earlier this week, my laptop's charger broke.  Specifically, this bit:

These parts cost 2 cents a piece on alibaba.com, but I have no need for the wholesale quantities I'd have to buy to get that price.  I could solve my problem with a universal laptop charger which many electronics and office supply retailers are eager to sell to people in a similar position as I.  But they run at least $70, which compares unfavourably to the $20 for a minimum order of the bit I actually need.  I'd rather take the $50 savings and hold on to 999 of these things in case I ever to take up model boating and need ballast.

With neither solution all that promising, I took a bit of inspiration from the desperate and unskilled people whose photos populate There, I Fixed It and set about fixing my laptop with whatever is handy.  After all, the problem really comes down to two wires, so this can't be that hard to sort something out.

A good first step for something like this is taking it apart, a fate that befalls the majority of my possessions.  Especially the ones that use electricity. 

Panels underneath come off to display the RAM, processor and fan.  Battery, hard drive and wireless card have already been removed.  This is already farther than people with and Apple product would get, but I'm nowhere close to being done.

Keyboard is removed, screen remains to pinch my fingers as I pry the plastic shell apart.  That screen isn't factory original, I switched that one out after I damaged the lower-left corner with some Windex.

The large blue thing is the motherboard of the laptop, and it's this part that I need to work with.  It's not exactly the brain of the computer, but it certainly represents the rest of the central nervous system. 

To continue with that biology metaphor well past where it should go, I apply a large amount of heat to its mouth and directly connect a feeding tube that can never be removed.  Less obtusely,  I solder a wire directly to the motherboard so it can't ever come off.  Here's a blurry picture.

For the benefit of my readers who are not intimately familiar with the inner workings of an Acer Aspire 5515 and its charger, this is the positive line.  The negative is set to touch the silver piece through which the positive wire has been inserted.  This line could have been soldered to the small silver box there, but I had enough of the previous power connector left intact, so I did this:

I trim it down just a little bit so it doesn't touch the positive feed.  This is a very important step as without it the room fills with the smell of ozone.  Knowing that I'm probably safe, I begin to put everything back together.  Sadly, not everything fit so I start cutting bits of plastic away until everything might fit, resulting in this:

I'm relieved to find that this special modification accommodates my other special modifications and everything fits together as good as it ever will. 

This bring me to the moment of truth, where I haphazardly attach wires together, toss on a bit of electrical tape and hope to produces a green light of success.

When people do things like this to their homes, real estate agents say it adds "character" and it becomes a "selling feature". When I do this to thing I'm told it "violates the manufacturer's warranty" and might be a "fire hazard." 

Putting a laptop back together is slightly easier than taking it apart, and there is always the bonus of left over screws at the end of the day.  I appreciate that companies over engineer their creations to the point where a few missing screws won't negatively impact the performance of the device.  If anyone from Acer reads this, send me your address and I'll mail you the spare screws as a gesture of my thanks.

I was very pleased that my repair works, and am even happier when I inadvertently restore functionality to the left button of the touch pad.  My battery also lasts longer now, which doesn't make any sense, but I won't complain.

Those successes aside, I am not done.  The wires I've soldered on are a little flimsy and there is a large hole in the case that probably should be plugged. 

Hot glue solves both of these problems at once, so I apply a little more than enough to get the job done. 

And now I have a perfectly working laptop that nobody would ever want to steal because it is literally held together with tape and glue.  Next up will be classing up the whole operation with some sort of quick connect mechanism because I dislike carrying electrical tape with me everywhere.  I think 1/4" headphone plugs would be best.