The Aeroplan Game: An ethnography

AeroplanSteph’s sister Jody says my posts are boring. I choose to interpret this to mean that my posts are fascinating, but on topics which do not readily proclaim their relevance to her life. In any event, today’s will be no exception, because I’m going to be talking about frequent flyer miles; but also about voyeurism, so there’s some excitement for you.

Aeroplan, and programs like it, are a real challenge for geeks. On the one hand, as a demographic with higher-than-average concern for issues of digital surveillance and privacy, loyalty programs like Aeroplan which allow a company to profile your purchases and predict which brand of condom you will enjoy are viewed as being somewhat intrusive. On the other hand, Aeroplan miles bear a disturbing resemblance to points, and games with points, where intelligence can be applied to earn more points, well brother, that might well be called our oeuvre.
Continue reading “The Aeroplan Game: An ethnography”

Post of the Moment

Water Sculpture

A snapshot of my cognitive state at the moment, as viewed though a currently-relevant subselection of its outbound content-connections matrix.

Book of the moment: 5 Lessons: Modern Fundamentals of Golf, Ben Hogan. If you’ve ever heard that old saw about how you can’t learn to swim by reading a book, then you’ve no doubt heard the equally old saw about the professor who decided to do so. Curiously the story never includes anything about the professors’ field of study or notable works, so I think it’s safe to assume that he died during the process. Nevertheless, if ever it were possible to learn a specialized, intricate, mechanical process strictly by reading, this is the book with which to do it. It is extremely well written, and perfectly relevant despite being 50 years old. It is also 127 pages cover to cover, and has some of the most living illustrations I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how else to explain them except that in black and white line art, the illustrator (who has a history in anatomical illustration, it should be noted) manages to convey more motion and tension and life than a lot of art I’ve seen with a much richer palette at its disposal.

Restaurant of the Moment: Eggspectation. Apparently there is one in Vaughan Mills, one in the Eaton Centre, one in Quebec, and one in New Delhi. The overuse of “egg” puns is quickly quite upsetting, but the service was quick and competent, and the food was fantastic. I had an.. ahem… “egg-chilada” which is basically an omelette with green, red, and jalepeño peppers, 3 cheeses, and a salsa topping. It was delicious, and Amy was equally happy with her spinach and ricotta crêpes. It should be noted that she did find a piece of cardboard in there, but the staff was suitably appalled (and quick to take it off our bill) that I can believe it is a rare occurrence. They also brought toast with butter, margarine, and 3 kinds of jam. “Always have 3 kinds of jam” is one of the few real absolutes in life.

Link of the Moment: Liquid Sculpture. High speed camera tricks are always good for eye candy, but doubly so when somebody sets out to really plan the water droplets just so. Yummy.

TV Series of the Moment: Battlestar Galactica. We are caught up now and waiting for season 3. We are gobbling up the webisodes. You had us at hello. (Props to little Mikey Beltzner for forcing me to watch the miniseries.)

Car CD of the Moment: Best of Bootie 2005. They aren’t all good, but a lot of them are of sufficiently surpassing quality that the overall excellence quotient is above average to a statistically significant degree. I also can’t get enough of Justin’s Sexyback, Beyoncé’s Ring the Alarm, The Killers’ All the things that I’ve done, and Feist, but I appreciate that since all of those acts have publicity and airplay, enjoying their music makes me a mainstream braindead consumer culture pablum-fed red meat red state suv driving war in iraq gated community white establishment corporate whore, so I try to lead with the Best of Bootie.

[Image credit Martin Waugh]

9/11 NORAD Tapes

It’s relatively long, quite well written, and inescapably sad; but it’s also very human.

It is 12 minutes after United 93 actually crashed when NEADS’s Watson first hears the word. Her voice is initially full of hope as she mistakenly believes she is being told that United 93 has landed safely.

10:15:00WATSON: United nine three, have you got information on that yet?

WASHINGTON CENTER: Yeah, he’s down.

WATSON: What—he’s down?

WASHINGTON CENTER: Yes.

WATSON: When did he land? Because we have confirmation—

WASHINGTON CENTER: He did—he did—he did not land.

Here, on the tape, you hear the air rush out of Watson’s voice.

WATSON: Oh, he’s down down?

MALE VOICE: Yes. Yeah, somewhere up northeast of Camp David.

WATSON: Northeast of Camp David.

WASHINGTON CENTER: That’s the—that’s the last report. They don’t know exactly where.

Vanity Fair Article about the NORAD response on 9/11.

God Bless The Internet

King of the World

The internet never forgets. It’s like a giant fiberoptic elephant in an infinite temporal archive made of peanut butter. This can be a bummer if you’re Sanford Wallace or Bernard Shifman but on balance the creation of a broadly democratized, high availability, modern day Library of Alexandria is probably worth a little embarassment. And it never forgets.

It never forgets, for instance, that I have a couple of websites older than this fine, upstanding blog. And I haven’t even linked to the really old ones findable only in archive.org. Silly websites, serious websites, why, even The Coming Revolution is still up, in all it’s crusty glory. For your reference:


[root@lubis html]# ls -l revolution.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nobody 17445 Jun 23 2002 revolution.html
[root@lubis html]#

4 years crusty. But this is the internet. So it is with less surprise than you might imagine, that I occasionally receive email about this, or other pages. This one came in earlier today:

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Please No Shopping Carts Inside The Restaurant

For those who, according to the BS pop-psych uncalibrated self-tests they had everyone do in 1987, are “visual learners,” or “greens,” or “type IIIs,” or “QNTZs,” or “hippies,” I have finally put something in my flickr account, and provided suitable linkage herefrom. May I present then, without further pomp or ado,

Photos That Please Me – a photoset on Flickr

I believe I was the photographer on every one in which I am not a subject, so hefty derivative cheques come hither. It should be noted that this reexamination of old pictures was greatly facilitated by Picasa2, which you should all go download.