Internewt
Ode to the Glorious Freedom Fliers
They were brothers – that much was obvious as no strangers could share such red colouring. George, Bert, and Peter where only separated by a year and the best of friends. Their father was brutally killed just after the youngest had been born but it was well known that their mother had kept his memory alive. The rotund invaders were a disease that had infected them personally. They grew up hating the portly king with his upturned nose.
Travelling home from the market one day, two soldiers noticed the widow, quickly and quietly passing by, trying to remain unnoticed. She failed. She was known to them. What began as a simple demonstration of their sick power to control ended up in her murder.
The brothers were devastated. The conversation began after her funeral.
“How can this have happened?” cried Bert.
“Why weren’t we there with her?” lamented George, who always took his responsibility as the oldest so seriously.
“Why did that sick bastard ever come here?” Peter added.
They sat down at the kitchen table and clinked their glasses to their dear mother. A few more rounds went by and the irrationality of the drink began to kick in.
“It’s not right to live this way!” George strongly insisted.
“I don’t want us to live in fear!” demanded Peter.
“But what could we possibly do?” Bert said with defeat.
“We could end it…” and with that George set them along the path to their glory.
At first it was just the three of them but it quickly became clear that they would need help. Carefully, cautiously, they approached their closest friends – Alexander Canary, Marcus Raven and the twins, Shawn and Sheila Bluebird. They began training, egging each other on but supporting each other and building one another up. But for all their practice, it was clear that an advantage would be required. They were at a loss. What could they create to give them a victory over evil?
One night the eldest brother burst in on a training session.
“I have it! I know what we can do!” he exclaimed. He gestured to them to come closer and started pointing to a sketch. They nodded at his brilliance and a careful plot was hatched.
“Well, are we ready?”
“As ready as we will ever be”
“Is the weapon ready?”
“Yes, and at dawn we will raise it and begin our fight.”
Dawn. The golden sun lit the clear sky. With the weapon in position outside the king’s house, the fighters formed a circle around it.
“Together, we can do this!” Peter cheered.
“No, we will do this!!” George replied.
They lined up behind the weapon with the king’s palace before them. The fortress of stone, wood and ice loomed but they knew this was their destiny.
The first of them climbed up the weapon and prepared himself. Pulling back and taking careful aim, he shot himself towards their enemy. The explosion took out a corner of the king’s palace. One by one, they followed him, their bodies inflicting damage, until the king could be seen among the ruins, his soldiers lying dead around him. He had lost an eye and was already bruised and battered. The last of them, Alex, dressed in the finery of his family name and glowing as brightly golden as the morning sun, climbed into the weapon. He sent up a prayer above and launched himself. Approaching his victim, he felt a strange sensation along with body, almost like a tap, and with that, a burst of speed. He flew towards his target, exploding him into a thousand pieces.
With the king’s demise, the people were free. Life returned to what it once was and the people let their fear fall away. We never forget our Freedom Fliers and how they gave themselves for us.
Little did we know that in the lands of king’s relatives, plots of sweet revenge would continue to plague us. New heroes would have to step up to replay the battle for freedom over and over, across many different terrains if our new life were to continue. Fortunately we had the Tap of God on our side.
Subtle Patterns
I stumbled onto these guys the other day http://subtlepatterns.com/ They have pretty images for backgrounds.
BBC’s The Spice Trail
So I’ve finished watching this BBC 3-parter on spices and their history called The Spice Trail. The presenter is incredibly enthusiastic, which at some points is a bit grating but the content makes it worth the occasional grimaces. If you live in a non-iPlayer location, looks like you can stream it online with a little googling.
P.S. Vanilla rhymes with quesadilla. I’m still blown away by this.
P.P.S. The process to make cinnamon is incredible! I had no idea.
A single point of contact?
This morning I was catching up on email – including all of the weekly digests I’ve subscribed to and I came across this guy: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/what-will-facebooks-message-platform-mean-for-your-business
Now, at first I kind of blew this one off. I don’t generally use fb for communication. I turned fb messages off pretty much as soon as they were turned on. Facebook is mostly for events and keeping tabs on my sister. But after a second read through and a couple of sips of water while I mulled, I started to wonder if maybe I was missing something.
I have a lot of information streams – Gmail for longer-format communications, Google Reader for blogs I want to keep up on, Twitter for quick messages to friends and relating what new things I’ve discovered and want to share, this blog for when I’m feeling wordy or want to include some commentary, and my iphone for texts and for calls to persons of a particular generation who don’t quite do the other formats.
It’s up to me to keep all of this straight and organized, managing all these different threads. Sometime email conversations will start as a reaction to a tweet from a friend. Sometimes I’ll DM someone and then need to follow up with a text or a call if it’s really that pressing. So far this hasn’t been a pain. I don’t usually forget things (Am I wrong on this one? Are you laughing at me right now? If so, let me know in the comments.) But I have to ask myself, could one solution make things easier? If I could hit one point of contact for a friend, and everything could flow through that, would communication be simpler and easier? Being able to search is valuable. Wouldn’t having that entire record of communication in a single location provide that ability?
BUT! I still get teased for being reserved with access to my information on fb, so I’m not sure that I’m ready to trust them with to that degree. This leads into the next point, who would I trust?
So, attention internet, someone not evil please get on that.
P.S. Does anyone think email is too slow?? I just have different expectations for the timeline on replies…
Rails 101
I’ve started writing a web app in rails this past week. I don’t expect to make money or change the world but I think it should be flexible enough that I’ll be able to learn everything I want on this topic as well as be able to branch out into building an iphone app and probably playing around with a couple of apis. More importantly, I’ve learned two things – one I’m not so keen on admitting to my dev friends and one that surprised me:
1. Coding from scratch is a bitch. I don’t think I’m a complete idiot and google I have gotten especially close in the past 10 days but there’s a vast difference between tweaking an existing thing vs. having to know all the ins and outs of creating something brand new (or trying to remember how the hell Nathan and CT set this up for the hockey draft fb app.) So, programmer friends, I salute you. Try not to rub it in.
2. Constraining my imagination to a minimum viable product is really tricky. It’s easy to have a list of features and pare it down to what version 1.0 will be, but no sooner do I put my foot down but my mind is already whirring away on how I can improve for the second go-round and even the third. This got me thinking about some sort of versionable design app such that I could see what I had laid out for min. viable, and then v2, etc, etc, all colour-coded and organized. If this exists, please tell me. If this doesn’t, can we make it? It should also allow some sort of flow mapping functionality.
utest.com – round 1
A friend recently recommended that I check out utest.com, a site that brings together companies who are looking for qa with testers who are looking to make some extra money. Today I checked it out. Fast forward to now, when I’m so frustrated with the first 30 minutes of effort that I’m blogging about it. Check out some of my other posts to see how often I blog. That I’m doing so now does imply something.
At first everything was fine except it seemed like most of the details were behind their account creation wall so I signed up for an account and was stepped through their profile creation process. Being the more skeptical sort, I opted to leave most of the details empty until I could determine how committed I was to becoming a utester. Although why a company opts to hide information from non-account-holders is beyond me…
So I signed up and was told that as a newbie, my best bet was to check out some of the info in the forums to learn about getting into a project, bug reports, etc. Alright, click on Tester Forums and hmm, another account creation screen? Didn’t I just set up an account?? Well, ok, deep breath in, let’s fill this one out too. Click to create and I’m presented with this:
“contact board administrator…” well ok, but there is no information on how to actually do that on that page. Although, when you put in the wrong login credentials, you are presented with an email address to contact… Thank you, my mac, for making it so easy to take a screenshot. Turns out that I have to wait 24 hours before getting access to the forums so they can verify my email address, which is bizarre as I did all of that during the original account creation process…
I decided that I’d go back to my profile and start filling it in. One of the tabs let’s you fill out what hardware and software you have access to so you can be matched up correctly with testing projects. Pro-tip: If you aren’t going to let me click on a radio button, please for the love of god properly grey out that section so I don’t spend time trying to figure out what’s going wrong with my touchpad. Alternatively, if you can’t do that properly, put the goddamn Edit button in a more noticeable place. If you are designing a site in a language that reads left to right, PUT THINGS ON THE LEFT! IT’S WHERE MY EYES ARE GOING TO GO. Sometimes it’s so inconvenient being literate and all…sigh.
After the Edit button debacle, I checked out some of the other account tabs and found this guy. Anyone want to guess on the difference between change and edit??
So far, utest, we’re not hitting it off. It’s like you’ve told me your in love with Harper and cats are superior to dogs – I’m suddenly wishing I had arranged for a faux-emergency call from a friend half an hour into this date.
CBC Docs: Dolphin Dealer (Oct 2008)
http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/doczone/2008/dolphindealer/
More love for the CBC – this doc is about a Canadian named Christopher Porter who spend 15 years at the Vancouver Aquarium working with dolphins. He set up an export business to sell dolphins from the Solomon Islands to marine parks around the world. Given that tourists will pay $100 to swim with a dolphin, this is a highly lucrative venture and throughout the doc you see clips of happy, shrieking tourists doing just that. However, you have to wonder if there’s any conservation/environmental understanding being taken in, which is what Chris Porter would have you think. You can hardly believe a 5-star Dubai resort is an affordable or natural setting for the average person to encounter these incredible creatures. It’s the classic entrepreneur vs environmentalist theme but still worth a watch, especially as this one runs under 45 min and you can check it out online.
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- I really forget just how well coffee works. Let's go run a marathon! 2011-12-14
- http://t.co/0SMWhxEb via @VladmirPutin #awesome #hottub 2011-12-13
- It is nine million degrees in @dangerbell's place. why??? 2011-12-11
- At Care-It Urban Deli for the first time. Best pulled pork panini I've ever had #dadeoshmadeo #naptime #yegfood 2011-12-10
- The west wing Christmas eps are so good. #shibboleth #noel 2011-12-10
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