December 13, 2020
Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.
I wish it need not have happened in my time,
said Frodo.
So do I,
said Gandalf, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
November 8, 2020
It's tempting to think the outcome of a U.S. presidential doesn't have much effect on the small city in Canada where I live.
But that's not true. I can think of five ways Kamloops will be affected — two good, two bad, and one hard to define.
Climate change and wildfires
President-elect Joe Biden has promised to get the United States back in the Paris Agreement, and is in favour of several initiatives to address the climate crisis.
Kamloops has seen disastrous wildfire summers in recent years. These are costly to fight. The smoke creates health hazards. People have lost their homes and their lives. It may be early to say conclusively that climate change is to blame, but scientists says it is a likely culprit.
Tourism and COVID-19
Biden has promised to make dealing with the COVID-19 his top priority. He will listen to the advice of scientists and public health experts.
The tourism industry in Kamloops has been hurt by the lack of visitors from the United States. The sooner we can safely re-open the border, the better it will be for tourism.
Softwood lumber agreement
Canada and the U.S. have a softwood lumber agreement that regulates how much Canadian lumber can be sold in U.S. markets. This agreement is regularly challenged by the U.S., sometimes to the detriment of Canadian producers.
Washington and Oregon, which are major lumber producers for the U.S., are solidly Democratic and will likely have a more sympathetic ear with a Democratic president in the White House.
The forest industry remains important in the Kamloops region, with many jobs depending on lumber mills. They could find themselves under more pressure with more challenges to the agreement.
Oil and gas workers
Biden is opposed the Keystone pipeline, which Canada considers crucial to the viability of the oil and gas industry. In fact, the federal government has signalled that this will be its top priority in relations with the Biden government.
Many Kamloops residents depend for their livelihood on oil and gas jobs in northern Alberta, where they commute. The industry is going through a downturn that could be made worse if the pipeline is stalled. More jobs will be lost.
The president of the United States, whoever that might be, has an outsized influence on the world. It's like we're passengers on a bus, and we depend on the driver to be cautious and obey the rules of the road.
It's one thing for the driver to take us somewhere we didn't want to go — that's expected in politics. But it's another for the driver to be rude and rash. It turns us into nervous wrecks.
There's a chance the current driver could crash the bus before he leaves, but at least we have the relief of knowing the next driver will stop at red lights. We will at long last be able to let go of the death grips we have on the arm rests.
November 2, 2020
There is a free service so important in these troubled times that it deserves its own post.
It's siftrss. Use it to weed out the news you've had your fill of. A couple of examples that come to mind are trump
and covid
.
If anything truly important happens in either of those areas, the news will find its way to you. Meanwhile, enjoy a little less stress in your life.
You can apparently use regular expressions if you want to match more than one term, although I didn't have any luck with it. The developer, Ryan Gitten, says on Reddit:
You can do that with a little regex magic. In your specific case, the regular expression you'd want to match would be /Android|iOS/. If you don't want it to be case-sensitive you'd add an i to the end of the regex (after the slash), but in this case I'd leave it case-sensitive. Otherwise, the "iOS" part would match "Bioshock" or anything else containing those three letters in that order.
November 1, 2020
News-cation is over. Now begins trump-cation, with unfortunate collateral damage.
When I checked my RSS news feeds this morning, I found 5,199 unread stories. I figured I could ignore the folder with the world news feeds, and avoid infecting myself with the latest from the Idiot-in-Chief.
Unfortunately, he has a way of seeping into other feeds as well. Daring Fireball, a blog by John Gruber about Apple and technology, slips in several examples his president's idiotic behaviour, including edge cases that might might not be covered by mainstream outlets.
I hate the idea of deleting this feed, because Gruber has a lot of great insights, but I'm going to have to do it — at least for a few more months.
Another feed that will have to go is The Atlantic. This outlet provides intelligent in-depth analysis of the news, but unfortunately delves into topics such as the pathology of the Orange One. That's a dark place I do not want to know about.
Ideally, I would be able to filter my feeds based on a key word. Feedly offers this service, but wants $12 a month for it.
Update: I found siftrss — a free service you don't even have to sign up for.
October 31, 2020
My news-cation comes to an end tomorrow, but not completely. I'll continue my detox from world news. I'm not yet ready to stomach whatever is going on in the United States.
Speaking of which, I have long wondered why many Canadians use U.S. networks such as CNN as their primary source of news. How do they know what's going on in their own country? Why do they care about events in a foreign country that have no effect on them?
I suspect it might be the same reason many Canadians prefer the NFL over the CFL. It's more entertaining.
The U.S. news consists of one major crisis after another. You can't help but wonder what crazy thing is going to happen next. And because it doesn't affect us, we can behave like bloodthirsty spectators at a wrestling match.
Political debates consist of little more than opponents shouting over each other. You learn precious little, but they can be fun to watch.
Aside from that, what transpires is on a scale Canadians cannot match. American outdo us at every turn, from COVID-19 deaths to mass shootings. It makes our news seem sedate.
So powerful is the influence of U.S. news that Canadians will organize protests over events that happen there. The George Floyd killing is a perfect example. While that death was undeniably a tragedy, there are plenty of injustices happening right here in our home and native land. When was the last time there were nationwide protests over the treatment of Indigenous people that included non-Indigenous Canadians? Outright racist behaviour in this country is excused and nuanced.
Despite this, I will again be tuning into Canadian news when my news-cation ends. For one thing the toxicity levels are more bearable. For another, it affects me as a citizen. I can get involved, I can cast a ballot.
October 30, 2020
How does Poolside.fm pump out free music on a website, a Mac app and an iPhone app?
Deep down in side, I feel like they're doing something with my email address that I might like. On the other hand, their privacy policy claims they respect my privacy.
In any case, this is one time I was happy to register, because not only do I get a lot of great music, but also the ability to create a list of favourites. I've got 16 so far.
They have five channels: default, Indie Summer, Hangover Club, Tokyo Disco and Friday Night Heat. As you can tell, this is music to party with.
The exception is my favourite, Indie Summer (and maybe Hangover Club). It's dreamy and spacey. Chill. It transports you away from your troubles.
They say the music is "lovingly curated with the sole purpose of lifting your spirits."
It took awhile to get used to the idea of positive music during these troubled times. Now hardly a day goes by when I don't accept this gift.
October 29, 2020
Here's a good way to rank Star Trek TV series — how many characters can you name from each?
My theory is that what people like most about any TV show, including Star Trek, are the characters. If they love the characters, they are willing to forgive a lot, including the occasional really bad episode.
This is especially true of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It had some of the best episodes in the history of Star Trek — but also some of the worst. Dr. Crusher's Harlequin romance with a ghost is found at the bottom of many episode rankings. But fans can overlook this because, well, we love Beverley.
There were also a lot of bad episodes in the original series, but we're OK with pretty much all of these — even the Halloween episode with giant cats — because they had Kirk and Spock in them.
Star Trek: Enterprise eventually managed string together a few good episodes, but it didn't matter. The characters were boring and forgettable. To this day, I can remember the name of just one them — Capt. Archer — and only because the name is cross-referenced elsewhere.
How about the ranking?
1. Star Trek: TNG — I can name all the characters, including those who weren't regulars. That would have to total at least a dozen.
2. Star Trek: TOS — I can name all these characters as well, but there were fewer of them.
3. Star Trek: Discovery — I'm watching the current season, but can only come up with five names, one of whom is new. Book is an easy-to-remember name and he is a cool dude. In the third season, they should be doing better in the memorable character count.
4. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — I can remember a lot of the faces, but only four names come to mind. Worf doesn't count because he came over mid-series from TNG.
5. Star Trek: Voyager — I can remember four names, but one of them is The Doctor, so that doesn't count.
6. Star Trek: Lower Decks — I can remember the names of three of the main characters — more than I expected — after one season. This is why the show is catching on with fans.
7. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — It hasn't come out yet, but I know three of the characters from their appearances on Discovery. This could be a good start.
8. Star Trek: Picard — The only names I can remember are the characters who appeared in previous series. Two of them — Picard obviously and Seven of Nine — are regulars. They need to make us love the newcomers.
9. Star Trek: Prodigy — Another one that isn't out yet, but already looks better than Enterprise because they signed up Kate Mulgrew. So that's Kate versus the guy who played Archer.
10. Star Trek: Enterprise — One. Poor, poor Enterprise.
October 28, 2020
There is almost no mention at all of the Spanish Flu in popular culture.
People of that era looking for entertainment likely found it in celebrations of the end of the First World War. They wouldn't have had the stomach for yet more misery in the form of portrayals of a devastating pandemic.
Also, it would have been just plain difficult to describe the worldwide calamity created by the Spanish Flu. Millions of people died, almost every community was affected. How do you weave something of that scale in to the plot of a book or movie?
If I were to try to describe to future generations what the COVID-19 pandemic is like, I would compare it to a bleak landscape extending to all horizons. It's a terrain you have to cross, and even though everyone else is in the same situation, you mostly have to do it in isolation.
It makes me think of Farley Mowat's description in People of the North of the Barrens — that massive section of the Canadian arctic inhabited by few and explored by fewer. He quotes a letter from a former RCMP constable who had gone into the Barrens to pursue a murder suspect. He barely made it out alive.
I guess it was the emptiness that bothered me most. That damn and bloody space — it just goes on and on until it makes you want to cry, or scream — or cut your own damn throat!
It's not just the coronavirus that's taking its toll. The fear, despair and isolation have eroded many people's mental health.
For some this is a fatigue that refuses to go away. For others it is anger at the world or even the year itself, knowing all the while that it is irrational. Some say to hell with the isolation, go out and party, and get sick — they just don't care any more. Others despair that these times will ever end, that even with a vaccine ready in record time, things will never be the same again. We may forever be trapped in the Barrens.
And so I predict there will be precious little mention of COVID-19 in the popular culture of these times. We want to be entertained, not depressed.
October 27, 2020
The thing about code is that computers don't care what it looks like. That's why you can get away with "minifying" it into a single grey line that extends to forever.
That doesn't work for the average human being. We have indentations, syntax colouring and a few other tricks to help us better understand what's going on.
What this formatting looks like is a matter of person preference, but certain conventions have become accepted. You could ignore them, but others would silently judge you as either a heretic or a newbie.
People working on the same team sometimes agree on using the same conventions, making it easier to understand one another's code. Because it can be hard to agree, a convention might even be imposed by management.
A neutrality has grown around a plug-in called Prettier that is available for many code editors. It is, as they say, opinionated — meaning that in the vast majority of cases it refuses to give an inch on how it decides code should be formatted.
That means almost zero customization, which was almost a deal breaker for me.
For example, Prettier forces you do use <br /> instead of the more modern <br>. This is meant to be a compromise for people coding XML, where <br /> is required. For HTML, it is recommended.
There are a few other things that grated on me, such as putting paragraph tags on their own line if the paragraph's content goes over one line. Also, it puts classes and attributed within a tag on their own lines if they get to be long.
As with a lot of things in life, if you use something long enough you get used to it. That means when Prettier doesn't work — which can happen if you make an error — the code looks downright ugly.
It makes me wish Prettier were more forgiving of my mistakes.
October 26, 2020
In this story, Captain Gallivant travels to a planet where the aliens are humanoid and have a society similar to ours on Earth — but everyone is old. Some of them are hundreds of years old.
Gallivant makes friends with one of the inhabitants, and learns about how this situation came to be.
He is told that at one time they had babies, children and young people, but realized that 90 per cent of their problems were caused by them. Plus, 90 per cent of contributions to society were being made by people over 50.
Scientific advances meant everyone could become immortal, so there was no longer any need for replenishing the population. Medicine had advanced to the point where people could stay in good health for as long as they lived, so growing old was nothing to fear.
With the decision to stop having babies, the population gradually started aging to the point where there was no longer anyone who even appeared to be young. In fact, people stopped having birthdays because after untold years of living, counting the years became meaningless.
Gallivant is outraged, but there is nothing he can do. They can never go back to the way things were, even if he were able to convince them to do so.
He instead goes back to Earth and brings back a dozen babies from an orphanage, believing that if they saw children again it would remind them of how precious they are. And they might be open to boosting their population with young blood from other planets.
The inhabitants are taken with the babies, and insist they be allowed to adopt them. But they don't want to have to care for them. Instead, they hold Gallivant captive and force him to raise the children over the next 20 years.
On the youngest child's 20th birthday, Gallivant blasts off — never to return.