I showed up a bit early to pick up Natasha after work, so while I waited in the car I pulled out my long-neglected sketchbook and doodled out the awesome view from the back of the confederation building. This is Parliament Hill’s Peace Tower, looking from just behind and below the West Block. (Can you guess what time I drew this?)
For a 15 minute sketch (with a bit of cleanup afterwards) it’s not bad. The perspective is wonky all over it and my straight lines are messed up … BUT I HAVE NO REGRETS!
VR Researcher (and a major nerd hero in my teen years) Jaron Lanier was here at the last Ottawa Writer’s Festival promoting his book “You Are Not a Gadget”. I missed his lecture, but caught bits and pieces of similar talks he presented over Youtube, which seemed shockingly anti-tech given his body of research to date. (He hilariously rips the head off an Aibo accidentally in a video, then castigates people for feeling sorry for it) With some trepidation, I eventually picked up his book and read it myself.
In summary – Jaron spends the book pointing out how technology sometimes exhibits unanticipated negative pressure on society. A solid example he uses is the Facebook relationship status – with only five options to choose from, it forces people to pigeonhole themselves into categories arbitrarily concocted by a developer somewhere, rather than allowing people to express their relationship (from the full range of human relationships) in the terms they prefer. There’s a subtle backchannel message going on that says “Here are the categories that society has deemed normal and acceptable, and if you can’t pick one you don’t belong.” The same goes for gender (which seems to be a contentious issue lately), sexuality, political stripes, etc, etc. Humans are very rarely easily categorized into neat boxes.
He’s definitely on to something, and the book is chock-a-block full of powerful and interesting observations about technology’s impact on creativity, freedom, economics, that really opened my eyes to the subtle effects of interfaces that even I, as a UI designer, take for granted. However! While I see where he’s coming from on a number of issues, the conclusions he draws are rarely compelling. I had a really hard time reading this book, because whatever starts off as a neat humanist observation ends up degenerating into a 10-paragraph disorganized rant around the point, sometimes further devolving into a wordy tirade about the singularity. At times I felt I was swimming around in an ocean of argument without any really solid conclusions.
Maybe he’s not the greatest writer in the world – I think a lot of the problems I had with the book could have been fixed by a good editor forcing him to consolidate his arguments. (And to stop name-dropping mercilessly!) He’s a very bright man – I think he raises a lot of really interesting issues in his book, but it’s a bit of effort to get at some of them.
Sunday afternoon I heard a loud droning noise from above and looked up over downtown Ottawa just in time to catch a fleet of biplanes and WW2 Canadian warplanes flying in formation. I wasn’t aware of any military celebrations, but Greg suggested it could be the Vintage Wings of Canada out on a practice flight before they do a flyover for Canada Day in two weeks.
(a shot of the Vintage Wings of Canada by Peter Handley)
What a cool, unexpected sight! And how much fun must they be having tooling around over downtown doing formations? Beautiful planes!
Update: Mystery Solved – it was definitely Vintage Wings, and they were doing an “airborne parade” for the Tulip Festival. So much going on now that the festival season is in full swing!
While I’m on the subject of grumpy news… we’re finding the Junebug grubs especially frustrating this year – our neighbourhood seems to have a scourge of them devouring our lawns in wide patches.
Natasha and I are wary about using insecticide – but we tried to dig up some of the grubs along the munching wavefront with a spade. It seems futile – there’s just too many of them, and not enough birds to come help us out with the ones we’ve missed. I’m willing to entertain suggestions. We’re losing about 6 inches of lawn every day, and while I’m at work the grubs are chewing away with impunity. (They’ve helpfully left the weeds behind.)
I looked up some entomological texts to read about Junebugs (aka Maybugs, May Beetles) but altruistic biologists seem only interested in identifying them (by the shape of their penis, strangely), and not destroying them angrily in large numbers. I think our troubles are short-lived – I’ve seen the mature beetles buzzing around our windows in the evening, so I suspect the grubs are all very close to coming out of the ground and “buzzing off”. (After, probably, exfoliating all the trees and shrubs in a hundred mile radius.)
The grass we planted in their wake is growing fast – we’ll probably have a lawn again by the end of summer. (So they can eat it again next spring?)
The summary of all of them is that there’s not much you can do beyond growing a more resistant lawn with longer roots. There’s a nematode treatment you can use to kill them, but it sounds rarely effective.
I’m in a bad mood already and everything is pushing my buttons today! I went on Amazon to order a used book. Check out the pricing details.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME? $60.10 to ship a $6 book to Canada? GIVE ME A BREAK!
I’ll bet the affiliate store is shifting all the costs to the item’s shipping to game the product rankings – this was one of the cheapest copies on the list with the most outrageous shipping price. Are they sending it in a first-class plane seat? Did they train a homing pigeon to bring it to me? Does it come in a rare collector’s edition gold box full of chocolate packing peanuts?
Forget it, you swindlers! Try to rip me off? YOU GET NOTHING! YOU LOSE!
I have a bit of a pet peeve with the way astronomical events are ‘advertised’ to the general public. I had a bad experience back in 2002, bringing a gang out to the outskirts of Winnipeg at 3am on a frosty mid-November morning to catch the peak of the Leonid meteor shower. It was great – except earlier that day the local paper ran a copy of this picture portraying the 1833 meteor shower, setting high expectations. I counted close to two hundred shooting stars in the first hour, but most of the gang packed up and left in a huff when the skies didn’t explode into fireworks.
The lunar clockwork moves along with some pretty regular precision, and that’s why I’m especially annoyed by all this hype about the “Supermoon”. The Moon orbits Earth every 27 days, and it’s in perigee & at full phase (Super!) about 5 times a year, which makes it a pretty common event. It’s the same colour and shape as usual. The supermoon is not really a big deal. Astronomers don’t even observe the event – they call it “perigee-syzygy” and it’s marked in their calendars as a particularly annoying night to try to observe stars.
With a title like “Supermoon” though, you expect some rare fireworks display in the skies – the Moon bleeds rainbows down into the ocean while a ring of volcanoes go off on it’s surface. I think the media pushing the Supermoon story are setting laypeople up for disappointment. When is it going to get Super!? It’s just the Moon – but fractionally bigger/brighter than yesterday!
The Moon’s still cool in it’s own right though. Go out and look at it just for the sake of seeing it!
Following a sign that promised fresh butter tarts, we ended up visiting The Gingerbread Man while we were in Manotick last week. It’s a cute store along a strip of quaint teahouses and things next to Watson’s Mill, where the owner sells gingerbread cookies and pastries. Inside the gingerbread showroom, though, is a full-on gallery of gingerbread architecture.
A bunch of years ago I heard a competition on CBC Morning featuring architects hilariously trying to reproduce their structures out of gingerbread and it put the idea in my head that you could get pretty elaborate with your cookie houses. I’ve since had the good fortune of meeting a very neat family (you know who you are) who do a traditional gingerbread building party every year – and although I’ve only been a few times, my inner architecture nerd is always coming up with unreasonable construction ideas.
I think The Gingerbread Man just inspired me to new levels of madness.
We did a bunch of cross-city driving this weekend, but the upside was that we finally had an opportunity to stop into Vera’s Burger Shack in Bells Corners! Ottawa managed to snag the only location outside of British Columbia, it’s a rare import that’s been getting good reviews on foodie sites. Vera’s is hidden inside “The Butchery” next to the Winners and Metro on Richmond Road, so don’t go expecting fancy ambiance unless you dig counters full of flayed meats. (Vampire honeymoon spot?) There’s three small tables and a bench, which was enough to seat the pretty steady traffic they were getting while we were there.
The burgers are pretty great! Their fresh-ground paddies are beefy, not too seasoned, thick and juicy without being so huge you can’t finish one. It’s served up on a good quality bun, too, which is a big bonus. I don’t know if I’d drive across the city for one, but if you’re in the neighborhood and hungry you’re going to find a better burger here than any of the fast food joints, and they’re considerably more affordable than The Works. I heard that the Vera Sauce is crazy delicious, but I played it straight up on my first visit with my usual toppings. (Ketchup, Mustard, Relish, Tomato, Lettuce, Cheese)
Since Vera’s is inside a butcher’s shop, skip the fries and grab one of the bucher’s prepared stuffed baked potatoes – they’re only like a dollar and they’re delicious. Wendy’s has nothing on this place.
Because the burgers are grilled to order, you’ll have a few minutes wait. They have a paper form you fill out with your name and burger preferences and they’ll call you out when your food’s ready. It’s hilarious to mess with the form – they played along and called me out as Captain Awesome. Fun staff!
Me and a gang of keeners from the office took a walk around Hampton Park with garbage bags and rubber gloves to do some spring tidying. I expected litter and found plenty, but I thought it was weird how much large-scale waste we found laying around. It doesn’t help that there’s a road construction site right nearby – but any thicket that made a suitable windbreak was heaped with jars and bottles and mats of plastic bags.
There’s definitely enough trash laying around in spring to gross you out. We found not one, but TWO mattresses blown off the Queensway. Dirty diapers. Lots and lots of Tim Hortons cups. And then you find a beautiful field of wild trilliums (Ahem: Trout lilies! ), and it reminds you why it’s worth making an effort.
I successfully defended my title as “World Champion of Font Recognition” by figuring out that this lovely font:
though similar to Calibri in a lot of ways, is a typeface called Colaborate by Ralph Olivier de Carrois. I really like the way he’s put descenders on traditionally straight figures, and he’s put little geometric wrinkles in everything to make it feel a bit more square. The kerning pairs are a bit chunky, but if you’re willing to tighten things up manually, it’s a nice display font. You can’t argue with the price! I think I’m going to use this one for a project!
I have to identify fonts all the time, because clients never pay attention to what their previous designers told them. I’ll pull away the veil and reveal all my secrets!
My usual strategy for identifying fonts is four steps:
1) Off the top of my head. (About 80% of stuff in the world is printed in the same set of 30 or fewer fonts, and I’ve examined them all under a microscope.)
2) Try identifont – a site that lets you specify details about the font’s unique traits (angular serifs, etc) and generates a list of known matches. Pretty handy, and sometimes a good resource for learning about nice new derivatives of fonts you like.
3) Try whatthefont – a site that lets you upload an image, and the OCR tries to figure it out (almost never successfully matches for me)
4) Scour the cheap/free fonts sites to see what’s popular. You can almost always find trendy fonts on the front pages. My favourite resources are google web fonts, dafont, fontsquirrel, and abduzeedo’s surprisingly popular Friday Fresh Free Font. Take a look at the first 20 fonts on any of those pages, and I guarantee you’ll see faces that made their way into tons of recent mobile apps, skateboarding magazines, and video games.
So much going on now that the festival season is in full swing!
I think our troubles are short-lived – I’ve seen the mature beetles buzzing around our windows in the evening, so I suspect the grubs are all very close to coming out of the ground and “buzzing off”. (After, probably, exfoliating all the trees and shrubs in a hundred mile radius.)
