I don’t get why everyone raves so much about Windows 7. In my mind Vista wasn’t that bad, considering it’s a Microsoft product. And Windows 7 seems to be about as good. I had some problems with Vista that have been fixed (or mostly fixed) in 7, e.g. Bluetooth support, but new problems have cropped up. The first is that I can’t pin anything in the start menu. It lets me go through the motions, but nothing ever happens. Then, just now, it went and removed all my desktop icons. All of them are completely gone, except Adobe Reader. Yeah, screw you Microsoft. This was not my idea.

Some people have no idea what I do. Here’s a video of work that will be shown tomorrow at CHI 2010.

I watched “Paycheck” last night. It’s about the third time I’ve seen it, and I quite like it, despite that fact that Ben Affleck is in it. I like the atmosphere, the music fits well, and the mystery is revealed at a good pace. What really struck me this time, though, was the crudeness with which the movie establishes things that will become key in the final fight scene.

First and foremost, right at the beginning (spoilers) Ben Affleck wakes up from his first memory loss job and wants to make sure he is ok. So he goes over to the stick fighting practice range and whacks some big soft pylons with a stick. Gee, I WONDER IF HE WILL GET TO USE HIS STICK FIGHTING SKILLS LATER? Perhaps. A second annoying aspect of this scene is that Paul Giamatti, in addition to being some kind of neurosurgeon, is apparently an ace stick fighting coach. Sidekick for all purposes!

The second ham-handed foreshadowing event is Uma Thurman’s use of her fancy remote control thingy in her plant lab. She hilariously makes robots fly around doing crazy things and makes the wind blow. Gee, I WONDER IF SHE WILL USE HER REMOTE CONTROL TO FIGHT SOME BAD GUYS LATER? Perhaps. Another non-foreshadowing annoyance is this: why would an evil mastermind place his all-powerful top-security future-seeing machine right next door to Uma Thurman’s plant lab? Does the machine run on biodiesel? Would it be wiser to have a bit of distance between the two labs?

I contrast this to the techniques used in “Cast Away”. Right at the end (spoiler) Tom Hanks makes a dramatic escape from the island by sailing a makeshift boat over the breakers. How can he do this? Does he have magical hero sailing abilities? No, he’s established early on as being an accomplished sailor. Not by a heavy-handed establishing scene of an MC announcing “and the winner of this year’s regatta is Tom Hanks!” No. Instead they have a couple sailing trophies in the background of a non-sailing related scene. This is good enough.

Anyway, I still like “Paycheck”.

I never thought that blowing up bombs in Iraq could be boring. The Hurt Locker managed to make it so. I went into this movie with high hopes. I love war movies and war history. I’m currently reading through Max Hastings’ histories of WWII (first “Overlord” and now “Armageddon”), and “Band of Brothers” is one of my favourite TV shows of all time. So how can something as potentially fascinating as bomb disposal be made boring?

The first problem with the movie is that there is no perceivable story arc. The three main characters go out on a series of missions, defuse some bombs and make a series of ridiculous decisions. The end. There is no development that I really care about as an audience member. This in itself could kill the movie.

A larger fault with the movie is that the protagonist is extremely unlikeable. He is totally out of control in a situation where control over oneself is absolutely critical. Not only does this make an emotional connection difficult, it is also impossible to believe that he would be allowed to operate the way he does for more than a day without being busted to private and sent off to peel potatoes. I’ve met members of Canada’s 1st combat engineers who deal with bombs in Afghanistan. I was extremely impressed with their dedication, and the level of seriousness they treated the problem of IEDs. I have a feeling they would be insulted to be associated with the behaviour demonstrated in this movie.

The fact is, even with my limited knowledge of real military life, this movie is totally unbelievable. There is a long list of obvious errors. Why is a bomb disposal tech allowed to act with total disregard for himself and his fellow team members? Where is the oversight? Are there no officers calling the shots here? Why are three bomb disposal techs driving around by themselves in the desert looking for trouble? Since when are bomb disposal techs trained to operate .50 cal sniper rifles to a level of expertise where they can headshot a running target at 800 meters? Assuming a bomb disposal tech is trained in sniping, why does he set up his rifle in the exact same spot where his buddy just got wasted 10 seconds before? Why do we never see the bomb techs communicating with anybody else? They never call for help! Why are three bomb disposal techs running around alleys at night, ultimately splitting up to search more effectively? Why did they leave their humvee, mounted with a .50 cal machine gun, parked unattended in a Baghdad street? How exactly did the protagonist manage to leave the compound searching for the kid’s family? Did he tell the guys at the gate that he was going out for milk? Why was the protagonist referred to as “sir” at least twice in the movie, when he is a sergeant?

When you make a movie about a real conflict, one that is still going on, you are constrained to tell your story within the boundaries of what is actually happening in that conflict. You can stretch the truth, but if you go too far then the movies looks more like a farce then a serious work. Doing this properly is not easy to accomplish, but it can be done, and has been done in the past. This is not something that has to be dealt with by story tellers who are telling fictional stories (e.g. Avatar). They can invent their own context. The makers of The Hurt Locker did not have this luxury, but apparently thought they did. And because of this they failed.

There are some things that stick in my head forever. Some of these are situations where I had a particularly grating interaction with one person or another, and remain irritated by their ignorance and insistence that they are correct.

One such situation occured in grade 11, where we read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and had a small in-class discussion. I imagine everybody has read this short story at some point, but for those who haven’t, it describes (SPOILER!) a small town where all the people get together on a certain day, draw lots, and then stone the winner to death. The End.

So, my memory centers around one question, where the teacher asked something along the lines of “when do you think the story was situated?” A student raised his hand and responded “I think it was set a long time ago, hundreds of years, and these are people following an ancient rite.” Whoah! thought I. I don’t think this is correct at all. The teacher nodded his head, though, confirming the student’s answer as being correct, and prepared to move on. I had to interject, though. I did, and said “Wait, I don’t think that’s correct. There really isn’t anything in the story to indicate any particular time period. The people live in houses, which could occur any time, and there aren’t really any means of transportation that could betray it being set in some time. I think it was left intentionally ambiguous, so that the story could be used to illustrate the risk of slipping towards barbarism, regardless of the era.”

This obviously annoyed the hell out of the teacher. He didn’t want a debate. He wanted to get through the questions. The other students were also annoyed. They didn’t want to listen to me blabbering. So I was dismissed offhand, and we continued.

I remembered this. And periodically I would wonder: was I wrong? Was “The Lottery” actually set in some specific bygone era? Am I an intellectual fraud who suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect? Or did I know what I was talking about?

Well, today I happened across a mention of The Lottery, and it linked to the wikipedia entry. Looking at wikipedia I found these quotes fom the author: “I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers [...]“, and “Jackson lived in Burlingame, California, and [...] reveals that she had Bennington in mind when she wrote “The Lottery”.”

So, not only did she set the story in the present, but she set it in a specific small California town! This isn’t quite the same as my theory that she wrote it to be non-specific to era (although I think there may be an element of that), but it is FAR from the teacher’s assertion that it was set in some ancient village.

So, now I can rest. My teacher was an idiot, I was right, and I deserve better than the B I received on that assignment.

When I was a kid Dairy Queen was special. In the summer we would go for Mister Misty floats (now renamed something gender non-specific), and one time I even braved a banana split, minus the bananas of course. Then, when they invented the Blizzard in 1985, I felt my eyes had been opened to magical new worlds of ice cream awesomeness.

Now I’m older, and Dairy Queen isn’t quite the same. If I wanted I could eat there every day, although thankfully I don’t, and when I do go I don’t get that mystical feeling. That would be fine, and an expected outcome of getting older, but this post has to do with a different aspect of Dairy Queen.

Recently I went to Dairy Queen and ordered some sort of brownie/ice-cream/chocolate concoction. The ice cream was good, but the syrup was too sweet, and the brownie was sweeter than the syrup. Plus, the brownie and syrup comprised over half of the entire desert. The thing was basically inedible, except for the little bits of ice cream that I could excavate from between the gross syrup and brownie parts.

So, I wonder. Have Dairy Queen treats become grosser, or have my tastes changed? I think it is the former, since my tastes in other desserts haven’t changed much. So then why is Dairy Queen making these gross things? Have they focus grouped these desserts and determined they test well with people who like gross things? Are people who like gross things Dairy Queen’s main demographic target? I’m guessing the answer must be yes. They have even started mixing syrup in with the Blizzards.

Anyway, I’ll stick to my Blizzards, and I’ll make sure to request it be kept syrup-free.

Some TV shows make you feel smart. “Everybody Loves Raymond” makes me feel smart because every joke is both telegraphed and juvenile. “Stargate: Atlantis” makes me feel smart because I typically only need to watch the first 5 minutes in order to predict the plot of the remainder of the episode. So, while these shows make me feel smart, it is for the wrong reason, and they are generally unsatisfying (I will admit there are occasional very good episodes of SG: Atlantis).

“Mad Men” makes me feel dumb. There’s not a lot of actual “stuff” going on in the show (take as evidence this tongue-in-cheek fake trailer). There’s a total absence of gunfights, and the tension between characters is frequently hidden under a surface of civility. A result of this is that I often struggle to figure out the significance of what is going on. I can feel that every scene has meaning, but I only occasionally pick up on what is important (the ones I pick up on are often Don Draper monologues). For example, recently I found myself struggling to interpret a scene of Grandpa Gene teaching Sally to drive.

Well, I found a fantastic resource to help those like me who suffer from Mad Men inadequacy syndrome. This blog does an exellent job of analyzing, perhaps even over-analyzing, every detail of every episode. On reading the first entry I felt my eyes opened up to the importance of the show. This is the guide I need in my Mad Men watching. Tangentialy, it reminds me of my favourite class of all time, German Literature 051/052 (in translation) with Prof. William Reeve at Queen’s, where we dissected every detail of some great works (Goethe, Kleist, Mann, Grass). There was just no way I could absorb these works without proper guidance.

So I heartily encourage everybody to watch “Mad Men”, and I also encourage them to find an online guide to help them in their voyage.

Much has been written about the impending death of newspapers. The wealth of information on the Internet is of course threatening the existence of newspapers, where what you are reading is filtered by editors that you may not agree with, can lag actual events by up to 24 hours (!), and costs money.

I actually like reading newspapers. Once or twice a week I will relax at lunch and go through either the National Post or Globe and Mail. It gives me an opportunity to actually cogitate, as opposed to the web experience which, to me, is more frantic and random.

The point of this post, though, is how newspapers are trying to build online presences. Both of the mentioned newspapers have online versions with extra functionality, such as the ability for readers to write comments. This is very nice. Today I was looking at the Post’s website, and ran across a particularly ridiculous article that deserved to be commented on. I felt compelled to do so.

The first difficulty presented was the fact that I had to sign up to comment. This is an unfortunate necessity, as no accepted standard for universal online ID management has emerged, and they need a mechanism for filtering out the vi@gra comments. So, I filled in my info and submitted it. I then tried to comment, but discovered that I had to “upgrade” my account to be able to participate in discussions. This is a bit strange. I’m not quite sure what the point of an un-upgraded account is, as it doesn’t seem capable of doing anything. Anyway, I pressed the “upgrade” button, and discovered that I had to click on a link from an email that they sent me, to prove that my email address is correct. I clicked on the link, and the resulting website said “E-Mail Address Not Found.” So, I must confirm my email address to comment, but I can’t confirm my email address.

I suspect the problem is that the email address I gave them is a Gmail address with a “+” in it. Using a + in Gmail is a technique for filtering incoming email from places you’ve signed up. My suspicion is that the Post’s email address parser has trouble with the “+” character.

Anyway, the outcome was that I wasted 10 minutes, still can’t write comments on the article, have another email address floating around out there in their system, and have a little less respect for newspapers’ abilities to move beyond their current business model.

For the last several months the driver-side power window in my car has been sluggish going up and down. So, yesterday I spent 4 hours replacing two plastic guide bushings hidden in the innards of the door. The bushings are really simple tiny things, and cost about 50c each, but in order to put them where they are supposed to be one has to remove several layers of door material. After struggling through the process I realized that there is a whole unexplored area of usability research just waiting to be investigated: mechanic car interaction.

Researchers have spent a huge amount of time studying how people actually drive cars. We have a very deep understanding of how to design cars from this perspective. But I have never heard of any research centered around the maintenance of cars. I think this is a very interesting problem. On one hand I want car maintenance to be so trivial that fixing any problem is like building a simple LEGO model. Everything goes where it seems it should, and clicks nicely into place. However there are a bunch of competing requirements. The car must remain affordable to build. It must be light enough to have reasonable gas mileage. It must be safe. So, can we design a car that can be maintained by anybody but maintains these properties?

I think the answer is yes. Taking my door as an example, the entire thing contains maybe 50 parts. That is not a high degree of complexity. Once the thing is apart it is not terribly difficult to figure out what does what. The difficulty lies mostly in actually getting it apart. The fasteners used are generally not friendly. To get the first body panel off one must tug at it, fearing the whole thing is going to tear apart, until the fastener finally lets go and pops out of its hole. Then there is a layer of vapor barrier glued on with the grossest sticky black stuff. Then there is the air bag that has to be treated gingerly, lest it blow up in your face. There are bolts that fit into little tabs that tend to break. Finally, during reassembly, there is waterproofing trim that is a freaking nightmare until one figures out that it needs to removed and fit on the floor panel, rather than trying to stick the door panel onto it while it sits on the door frame. All very confusing.

In short, I think a huge difference in maintainability could be made by improving fastener technology, and the way in which parts fit together. Taking the door panels off should be a pleasure. I should be able to lift a lever and have the things slide right off. The camera makers have figured this out. Sometimes I take the lens off my SLR and then put it right back on, just because it feels so nice. Why can’t cars be the same?

Looking beyond door maintenance to more standard car stuff, why do I have to stick my fingers into a dark and dirty hidden place and pull on a sharpish lever in order to raise the hood? I read somewhere that some non-insignificant fraction of drivers never lift their hood. I suspect they would be more likely to if lifting it was much easier. Also, when adding oil why do I have to open this bottle and then pour it into this smallish hole, potentially spilling it all over either the engine or myself? Oil is very unpleasant stuff. There should be a method for adding oil where the oil itself is never arcing through empty air, potentially making a mess.

A while ago I read about a team of average women who were recruited by a car maker to design a “woman’s car,” whatever that is. One of their answers was to make the hood impossible to open, except by a licensed mechanic. I think this is an example of the mistake of letting users design something. They designed what they thought they wanted, not what they actually wanted. And since they didn’t like opening the hood, their answer was to never do it. What they actually want, and what I want, and what I think everybody wants, is a car that lets me change pretty much any mechanical part (maybe stopping short of the powertrain itself), without getting dirty, pinching my fingers, or worrying about breaking anything. Maybe the women from the story won’t go so far as to do the maintenance I did this weekend, but maybe they will be able to open the hood and put some oil in. The point is that the difficulty level of every aspect of car maintenance, from adding oil to changing a bushing, can be made simpler.

As for my adventure with the window, it now opens and closes like it did when it was new. And I only stripped one bolt, and ended up with one mystery washer.

I’ve been slowly making my way through Iain M. Banks’ “Culture” series of novels. If you haven’t heard about them, they are a fairly new series of SF books dealing with a sprawling galactic society where almost all problems (e.g. war, poverty, mortality) have been solved. The members of the Culture spend their time hanging out, having fun, and occasionally meddling in the affairs of lesser societies that have not been granted membership into the Culture, and often are not even aware that life exists on other planets. This meddling is where most of the interesting stories occur.

The stories are well written, having a grand operatic feel to them, but what I find most interesting are the themes that lie on the periphery of the main stories. In particular I am fascinated by the relationship between the human members of the Culture and the machine members. The Culture is so advanced that is has managed to create artificial intelligences that possess almost infinite computational abilities. Many of them, especially the smaller “person-like” AIs are limited in intelligence, presumably so that the humans can relate. There are also many super intelligent AIs that run very large space ships on which millions of people live. The AIs are so powerful that they can monitor everything that is happening on the space ship and intervene if, for example, one of the millions of inhabitants is about to fall down and hit his head. They can also perform complicated reasoning beyond anything that humans can comprehend.

What I find interesting about the concept of the AIs is that, with them around, humans are far from being the dominant intelligence in the society. Humans are so inferior that they can never even really understand the nature of their relationship with the AIs. The AIs SEEM to be nice and supportive, and allow the humans freedom, but how can the humans really KNOW that they are free. A parallel might be a relationship between a dog and owner. A dog can never figure out the relationship between it and the human owner.

Of course the super AI theme has been explored before, for example in The Matrix and Terminator movies. But they are comparatively simple situations, because the relationship between the humans and the machines is purely adversarial. The balance between human and machine in this case is very clear. But the “friendly” relationship between humans and machines in the Culture novels is less clear, and is perhaps quite sinister, simply because the humans don’t and can’t know what is going on.

I recommend Banks’ books for some good but not mind blowing reading. He also writes normal (non SF) fiction. The one example I read was “The Steep Approach to Garbadale” which had a good story, but was marred by overly insistent political diatribes.