Category: Life

Pertaining to, or having as its primary inspiration, the life and times of one Johnathan Eric Nightingale.

Political Hermitage

I am an avid political junkie, and I don’t think it will surprise any friends of mine who read this blog to know it. On the other hand, to look at this blog, or indeed it’s former incarnations, a Martian would have little cause to suspect as much, since I don’t frequently comment on it. If this seems a puzzling contradiction to you, let me offer a third point which I think serves to unify the others quite nicely: I don’t want to be a shrill, hyperbolic, apologist sack of regurgitated talking points.

That last “value” (which has become, most unfortunately, in the current Canadian political discourse of all parties, a sort of empty pronoun for “policy” or “soundbite” or “sentence.” A tax cut is not a value. “Stephen Harper is the devil” is not a value either. Values inform policy, and direct it, but they are not the same thing.) makes political discussions difficult because the truth is that most people who talk about politics, even though they agree with me that that is a horrible thing to become and certainly they would never descend to that, become shrill, hyperbolic, apologist sacks of regurgitated talking points.
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High school moment

For those who attended Turner Fenton, I just had a talk (via Skype) with David Cale. He sends his hellos from Vietnam, on his way to Egypt via Rome, after passing through Bali, Phuket, and Singapore, among others.

6 million scooters in one city, all of them flowing around and through each other like a flock of birds, is what he sees out his window.

R.I.P. Ferocus I

The 2001 Ford Focus is equipped with a range of security features including front and rear crumple zones.

Crumple Zones

This is rarely relevant in day to day affairs, but becomes just outrageously relevant when you get mowed into by one of these.

24ft Ryder Truck

Amy and I are fine. Stiff, accidents tend to do that to you, and we may or may not end up with seatbelt bruises. Basically fine. The car, on the other hand, has been described variously as totalled, wrecked, and my favourite: write-off. Witness:

Wrecked Focus
Wrecked Focus
Wrecked Focus

So much like when we bought the Focus, we are in “must buy a car immediately” mode, which is undesirable, but on the other hand, we have our limbs and skulls attached so really everything else is secondary. Because of the high kms, we’re not expecting much – probably in the $6-8k range but I guess we’ll see.

The focus was amazing – totalled, but the cabin was undisturbed, and we were safe. There was glass everywhere of course, but just the safe break-away crumble. Other than that though, it did exactly what it should do when a ton of bricks runs into your ass – it absorbed the impact, and gave its life for ours. Even my laptop in the trunk managed to survive (can’t kill a thinkpad). Check out our seats:

Focus Seats
Focus Seats

The cops and tow drivers were quite impressed. Apparently the seats are always supposed to do that — absorb the shock, and angle you away from the sides of the car by buckling inward, but they almost never see them like that. Someone said something about “must have been hit hard.” Yeah. Hard is a word for it.

Crunchy Focus Logo

[Amy’s version]

A Secret Passion

The smell of it, as I remove the shipping wrap is sharp. The paper smells freshly cut and printed. It is heavier than I remember.

I glide my fingers across the gloss of the cover, down the spine.

Like any good piece of literature, it is more than the sum of its parts. There are individual pages, individual passages which are artful, beautiful. But taken as a whole it transforms, it blends and mixes and unifies. It breathes. And it speaks. It speaks about a world of possibility and the search for substance over style. Of a lost generation’s yearning to understand what is real and good and pure – maybe of every generation’s need for that sense of solidity; of gritty, healthy profundity.

Of course I devour it. The anachronism, the self-contradiction, it does not engage, it compels. Every page makes you want to live up to it, to be worthy of what it offers. It would be difficult, and expensive, but you think about who you would be if you could really master and harness those forces. You would need no other god. You could literally reach out and grab the world and form it to your will and set it back and say “There. It is done. I have created. And I have done it with love, and with precision, and it is beautiful and it is real.”

The Lee Valley annual catalog is better than porn.

Deliberate Silence

If I were to comment on the state of things at work as they stand at this very moment, it would linger here and be perceived as “current” by those who care enough to read it, and it might well continue to be so perceived long after it was actually true. This would be an error, because things at work are in a state of heavy flux. Not insofar as my employment is concerned – I am still with IBM, I am still changing jobs (and doing so October 18th by the way, since I was reminded that I have neglected to mention that date) and my new job will still have something to do with user experience. The specifics, however broad and exciting they may be, are awash in the aforementioned flux and thus remain, by me and for the time being, undiscussed. In time, dear reader, in time. Suffice it to say that my role, as it is currently interpreted, seems to be… bigger… than I had anticipated. Huzzah.

In order to lend substance to this otherwise profoundly unsubstantial entry, and in the spirit of my cloak & dagger theatrics, I present this absolutely delicious article. For those who follow cryptography and espionage and all that, it is an engaging description of Tolkachev’s life and times as a CIA asset. For those who don’t but enjoy a good yarn it is, I think, a pretty accessible (and unclassified) story of a soviet double agent in the dying years of the cold war, and has some fun descriptions of CIA & KGB tradecraft in that era. I found out about it thanks to the inimitable Bruce Schneier, maybe the smartest guy in security today. (And I don’t hand out that “smartest” moniker lightly.)

The Heritage Bicycle Club of North America

I am member 29111 of the Heritage Bicycle Club of North America. Until tomorrow.

The Ferocus has needed new tires for some time, and I was basically driving its current ones into the ground while I looked into which tires I wanted as replacements. Thus it came as no particular surprise yesterday that, while doing 120 or so on the 407 near Vaughan, our front passenger tire gave up. No blowout, no trauma; just Amy and I realising that the tire was gone and me hitting the hazards and pulling off. Since I like cars, and preparedness, our car is well armed for such a happenstance and it took no more than 15 minutes to swap tires, check pressure on the donut, touch up with compressor, and we were back on the road. It was basically perfectly executed on the tire’s part since I had just that morning cashed the Make: cheque that was going to pay for the replacements, and since I have today off (3 blog postings in one day, you better believe I have the day off) to bring the car in for the swap. Now this is how we roll.

So it came to be that I had to find lunch while the tires were swapped, and was on foot, in Brampton. I meandered south since the road tends to slope that way, and passed by the Crown & Anchor pub. The Crown & Anchor looks, from the signage, like a wannabe Firkin, but since Firkins are sort of wannabe pubs, I thought this might be the very thing I was looking for, a beef dip or halibut and chips being emminently more civilized than your average fast food fare. On the door, I saw a sign, reading thus:

This establishment (The Crown & Anchor Pub, Brampton) has become a member of the Heritage Bicycle Club of North America.
As a result, our services are only offered to members of the club.
One day membership: $1.00
Yearly membership: $25.00
One day memberships can accrue towards cost of yearly membership.

On my eternal soul, I shit you not.

It took me I think a full 3 seconds to process the scam that was going on here, so if you already know the punchline, you are clearly much smarter than I. I walked in the door, grabbed a seat at which point the waitress gave The Schpiel. “This is not a pub,” she said, doing her best Magritte. “Yes, I saw the sign,” I replied knowingly, but she was compelled, I think, to continue. “We are a private club, and there is a membership fee of $1.00 for a one day membership.” I waited. “And this is a smoking establishment.” Bing-, as they say, -o.

She needn’t have bothered. The mind likes familiar things and so it was not long before I remembered pubs with smoke and settled back in; I spent a lot of high school in pool halls and a lot of the last few years in poker rooms, I can handle smoke, but that is not at all to say that it wasn’t immediately, overpoweringly noticeable. The smoke curling off of every (other) patron’s fingers was almost lively, excited to find a room where it could stretch out and fill the space. There was no filtration system in evidence, even the ceiling fans only sort of wandered about their orbits. It felt like I was in a den of iniquity, far moreso than any underground poker game.

The pub (qua pub) wasn’t great, unsurprisingly. My diet coke tasted alarmingly like beer in a way that casts doubt on the diligence of their dishwasher. The beef dip was passable, the coleslaw was mayonnaise, and the tab came to $11.45 including my membership fee. When I got home, I took another look at the card, and dug up the URL. I wasn’t sure what I’d find, but what I did amused me. The site is a sham of course, every page past the opening is under construction or 404. I thought the banner page might militantly proclaim smoker’s rights, I thought they might farcically pretend interest in those big-wheeled bicycles of yore. What they do instead is muddle:

The purpose of the membership is to provide FRIENDSHIP and an understanding of expectations. These expectations can vary and in fact should evolve with the membership.

…

Because of the increased regulations on both sides of the border that increasingly dictate cultural and social behavior, there is a growing need for an organization that can propagate these rules and regulations. Our members can use modern technology to inform themselves about seemingly confusing dictates and find an experience that caters to them.

Now you know the secret, you understand this code language. If you got there because you googled for heritage bicycle clubs…?

I pass no judgement on the whole operation – they did the natural thing when their shared interest became taboo, they turned inward. I’m really more struck than anything, like I walked in on a Knights Templar baptismal ritual, only sadder, more pathetic. I doubt I’ll renew my membership.

Cusped

The aforementioned cusp has come and gone. I’m taking the UCD job.

The more I spoke with the UCD manager, the UCD senior technical lead, and some of my potentially-future teammates in that department, the more I began to get excited, and to buy into the idea that this could be a really good fit. I can, if my readers will forgive me a lapse into what I hope is not perceived as unbridled ego, a lapse which I promise is due only to the necessity of forming a properly considered opinion and one which I will endeavour to keep as brief as reasonably possible, be sort of a smart guy at times, and this job is basically about being paid to think, and to think bigger than individual developers or even individual products get to think. It’s about making things not suck, and about cutting through complex and overcomplicated things to deliver an idea which is comprehensible and intuitive. Maybe I will find it doesn’t fit, and in 6 months I’ll be calling the security guy back — security is still something I follow pretty closely after all, there was never a question that I found both jobs interesting. But for right now, the UCD job is totally the right call.

Everything is clearer on a cusp.

Of course, now comes the process — it would certainly have been less headache to have just quit. As an internal transfer, my old department and manager get a say in whether, or at least when I can make a move like that. This process has always seemed a little broken to me, however well-intentioned. Basically, when an employee at IBM wants to move, they request an “availability date” from their manager: an agreed-upon date after which the employee is free to move. This is done so that managers are able to exert a modicum of restraint on disruptive transfers, to wit, “We are 3 weeks from the end of this product cycle, so it will hurt us much less for you to leave then, instead of now. You are therefore available Mid-August.” And in the case of most employees this is, I believe, how it basically works. However to the extent that you are a high producer or otherwise valuable, it seems that the incentives surrounding corporate culture in general, and management in particular, will motivate your manager to resist, to keep you working for them by giving you a date that is unrealistically far out. Thus those who arguably should be moving the most for the good of the company, people who can land in a department, make a difference, and then move on, are those most discouraged from doing so. I don’t know yet what my date will be, though I have requested one — we’ll see if this means pain or not.