Cut the Chatter, Red Two

Cubs, mushrooms, and a decimetre

2012-05-13T21:25:00.001-04:00

This past Saturday was JOTT, or Jamboree On The Trail, a day where all members of Scouts, of any age, around the world are encouraged to go for a hike. The 3rd Waterdown group that my kids (and wife) are part of does this every year. They generally arrange things so that all the groups – Beavers (ages 5-7), Cubs (8-10), Scouts (11-14), Venturers (14-17), and Rovers (18+) all hike different trails that end up at the same place at the same time for a barbecue. The Venturers start early and hike 10-15 km, the Scouts a little later and a little shorter, the Cubs shorter still, and the Beavers start last and hike 2-3 km. Nicky is a third-year Cub while Ryan is a third-year Scout, and Gail is a Cub leader. Gail was busy this past weekend so I took her place and hiked with the Cubs.

We walked along part of the Bruce Trail from northern Burlington to Camp Manitou, a Scout camp south of Campbellville. We went through forests and meadows and farmers' fields and up and down steep hills and across wooden and metal bridges and boardwalks over swampy areas and rivers, and even along residential streets through the little town of Kilbride. We saw no fauna other than a few birds, but lots of flora including giant mushrooms eight inches across, trees growing on top of huge rocks, ferns, and thousands of pink and white trilliums.

I made a map of the trail we covered. Of course, the straight lines through the forests are very rough approximations, since you can't see the path on the map. I can assure you that the paths through the forests were not straight for very long, so the 3.67 miles (5.9 km) that Google Maps reports is rather low.

Of course, when you have thirty or so 8-10 year olds and no TV or video games, you end up with some interesting conversations. Here are a couple that I overheard snippets of and one that I was involved in:

A: [Talking about digging a hole with a chainsaw] Then I sit on the chainsaw and dig down.
B: Then you'd go all the way to China.
A: You know what? China isn't on the other side of the world.
C: You couldn't do that anyway. This earth has a core in the middle. If you get too close to the core, you'd die. You'd disintegrate.

A: Do you believe in God?
B: Do you?
A: No. You don't have to, you know. It's a person's choice whether they want to.
B: So if God didn't make the world, then who did?
A: I dunno.

A: How long would it take to get to the moon?
Me: I think it took the astronauts about three days to get there.
A: But in space time, it only took them, like, two minutes. Time goes slower in space.
Me: Well, the astronauts were going pretty fast, but not fast enough to slow down time for them.
[At this point, I'm impressed that he has even the most vague knowledge of relativity. Then...]
A: I knew a guy who could stack cups, like, almost the speed of light. Like, a decimetre.
Me: Ummm...
A: How fast is a decimetre?
Me: Ummm...

[A decimetre is a seldom-used measurement of length equal to one-tenth of a metre, or ten centimetres. This is about four inches.]

When it was all said and done, the GPS said we walked about 9.8 km in 3hrs 15 minutes. The Scouts walked a little further, about 10.3 km. Everything worked out really well at the end of the trail – the hot dogs were ready when we got there, and there were lots of apples and oranges and watermelon and of course watery Kool-aid (I believe that is a Scouting requirement). All the different groups arrived within about half an hour of each other, with no missing kids and no injuries. It was also the first JOTT in at least a couple of years with no rain; actually the weather was perfect. I hope the other Scouts from around the world who participated had as great a day as we did.

These kids today and their social acceptance

2012-04-21T08:47:00.001-04:00

When I was a kid, I hated getting my hair cut. Hated it. My mom or dad would say "Graeme, get your shoes on" and I'd ask "where are we going?" and one of my least favourite answers was "you need a haircut". Even going to the dentist wasn't as bad. Was this because I was particular about how my hair looked, and the barbers we went to didn't do a good enough job? No, I didn't generally care what it looked like. Was it an unpleasant place? Did the barber smell bad? I don't think so, but I actually don't remember where we went the times when my mom didn't do it herself. It was because of school. Whenever I got a haircut, the kids at school would make fun of me, and I hated it.

You may be surprised to learn that despite the mountain of manly musculature you see before you today, I was bullied a lot as a kid. (I'll just pause a minute here while you get your laughter under control. Dum de dum de dum... all better now? Great.) I wasn't really short, but in the lower half of the class height-wise. I was also pretty scrawny and not exactly a star on the sports field. This was not helped by the fact that I did grades one and two in the same year and so was a year younger than everyone else. I don't remember being beaten up all that often, it was more verbal bullying, i.e. being made fun of. Whenever I got my hair cut, there were always a few kids at school the next day pointing and saying "Ha ha! You got a haircut!" The brilliant comeback "So?" never occurred to me, nor did the concept of simply not giving a shit, so I just put up with the teasing, silently cursing my parents for not letting me grow my hair to the floor.

I don't imagine I was unique in having to deal with this. I was lucky enough to never wear braces and I didn't wear glasses until high school, but I knew kids who had one or the other (or even worse, both) and they went through endless teasing as well. It was not unusual at all to hear "brace face" or "metal mouth" or "four eyes" or other names thrown about. I remember going to school and seeing a friend wearing glasses or braces for the first time and feeling sorry for them – not because of the problems with their eyes or teeth, but because it meant years of teasing were about to begin. Gail got her glasses in grade two, and endured years of it.

Eventually my classmates and I matured to the point where the teasing stopped. When I got glasses in grade ten, I don't remember being called names or being made fun of at all. For the next fifteen years or so, that kind of teasing was a thing of the past. It was something I just didn't think about. It wasn't until I had kids of my own who started school that I thought about it again. I almost apologized to Ryan when we took him to get a haircut for the first time after he started kindergarten because of the teasing he'd have to go through at school. The next day I asked him about it, and he had no idea what I was talking about. Being made fun of because of a haircut? Why? I was very glad to hear that this wasn't an issue, at least in his class.

A little while later, Ryan said that a girl in his class came to school with glasses for the first time. Again I asked if people made fun of her, partially to make sure that Ryan wasn't one of them, and again he was puzzled. "No," he said, "most people didn't say anything, and some just said they looked good on her." The further he got in school, the more I found that this was the norm for them – people get haircuts all the time, some have to wear glasses or braces, and that's just how it is. Nobody is made fun of because of it, and nobody dreads going to school because of it. Ryan got his glasses back in 2008, just having finished grade 4. I remember being at the optometrist and Ryan didn't even blink when the doctor told him he needed glasses. He didn't get the glasses until something like the third week of June, so we didn't bother making him wear them to school for the last week, but he didn't care either way.

The original inspiration for this article is that this past week, Ryan had a (fixed) retainer put in, and will be getting braces in a few months. We've known this has been coming for a couple of years, and Ryan has never shown any unhappiness or concern about it at all. In fact while I can't say he's exactly excited, it's a bit of a novelty to him right now, and he's curious about how it will work. Two days after Ryan got his retainer, I took Nicky to the optometrist for his annual eye exam, and now he needs glasses too. Similarly, his reaction was a nonchalant "Oh. Cool."

I realize that this is quite a different thing, but I hope that other forms of verbal bullying and discrimination similarly vanish over the years. Right now, I could tell my kids "Not long before I was born, black people had to use different entrances in schools and sit at the back of the bus while the white people sat at the front!" and they'd be amazed. They'd ask me why that was the case, and I wouldn't be able to give them a compelling answer, or even one that makes any sense at all. I envision my kids talking to their kids in a few decades, telling them "When I was a kid, gay people weren't allowed to get married!", and their kids being amazed. They'd ask why, and my boys would have to give the same "That's just the way it was back then" non-answer.

Of course, kids are still kids. The bullying is still there, but it's a little different now: "Ha ha! Alexis' dad only has an iPhone 3, and Matthew's mom still uses a Blackberry! LOSERS!"

Dumbest spam ever

2012-03-15T22:06:00.001-04:00

I received a spam email this morning with the subject "Summary of junk emails blocked – 1 Junk Emails Blocked". It was ironically intended to look like a report from some kind of spam filter saying that an email was blocked. There were a number of links on the page for how to manage lists or configure your settings for this non-existent application. I knew it was spam because (a) it didn't mention what spam application or web site it was using (I'd expect that in big letters across the top), (b) I have never signed up for any such service, (c) my company used to have a similar service but stopped it a few years ago (and this wasn't it), and (d) the email was sent to an old email address of mine that I no longer use but still works.

But the real giveaway that this was fake was that all of the links in the email go to the address 192.168.0.22:10080. Any address beginning with 192.168 is what's known as a private address, which means that it's a special address that's only accessible from another machine on the same network. By "network" I don't mean the Internet, I mean, basically, the collection of computers connected to your local router. My machine currently has the IP address 192.168.0.108. Posting your IP address on the internet for all to see might be considered a security risk, but there is no security problem with posting private addresses because unless you are connected to my network, you can't get there. Not because I'm clever and have set up fancy rules or anything, just because that's the way TCP/IP addressing works.

So if I were to click on a link in this spam email, first of all you'd have my permission to come to my house and smack me upside the head. Secondly, nothing bad would happen in this case, because for it to work, there would have to be a machine inside my network with that address, with an HTTP server listening on non-standard port 10080. The odds of there being a machine on my network that just happens to have that IP address and just happens to have an HTTP server listening on that port and just happens to have evil software running on it are beyond remote. The only other possibility is that some hacker has already penetrated my network, set up a machine with that IP address and an HTTP server complete with malware, and then sent me a spam email to get me to visit that machine. This is unlikely as well – you've already broken in, why bother with the spam? This is like breaking into a bank in the middle of the night, then calling a bank employee from the inside, and while pretending to be the bank manager, asking him to unlock the front door. You don't need the front door unlocked, you're already inside.

The most likely scenario is that the people who created the spam email are idiots. They set up a server on the internet that they wanted you to connect to (that had malware or whatever on it). Since they set up the server in the first place, it's likely on their local network and the way they connect to it is through the 192.168 address. That's not the way the rest of the world would get to it, but they didn't know that. The result is that they have sent out this spam email (and likely paid to do it) and will never get any hits, even from people who do foolishly click on the links.

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys.

The Leafs and Raptors need a Terry

2012-03-03T08:50:00.001-05:00

A little over three years ago, I wrote an article about the General Managers of the Leafs, Raptors, and Rock. The Leafs had just hired Brian Burke as their new GM, and it seemed that the Toronto media had already decided that he was going to save the team; in fact, I facetiously referred to him as Our Saviour for a while after that. Bryan Colangelo had been the Raptors' GM for a year or two, and had done a pretty good job of turning around the mess that Rob Babcock had left behind. The Rock still had Mike Kloepfer as GM, and the team sucked.

My article suggested that the Rock needed to get rid of Kloepfer and hire themselves a "Brian" who would overhaul the team and make them not suck, which Burke and Colangelo were obviously about to do with the Leafs and Raptors. One of the suggestions I gave for who could take over was Terry Sanderson, and another was Jamie Batley. Ironically, less then four hours after I posted that article, the Rock did fire coach Glenn Clark, who was at least part of the problem, and Batley was hired as coach. The rest of the problem was solved at the end of the season when Mike Kloepfer resigned. A month later Sanderson was re-hired as GM. The next season (2010), the Rock went to the Championship game and in 2011, they won it all. We're now midway through the 2012 season, and the Rock are tied for first place in the Eastern division. I'd call that mission accomplished.

I could pat myself on the back for predicting the Rock's next course of action (kind of – I suggested Sanderson though I said it was unlikely), but the original point of my article was lost. It wasn't so much that the Rock needed a new GM, it was that the Rock needed to do what the Leafs and Raptors did and replace their rookie GM who screwed the team up with a proven veteran who could turn it around. The Rock did that, but the Leafs and Raptors haven't had nearly the success that we all envisioned when Our Saviours came to power.

In the 3 seasons prior to Burke's being hired, the Leafs had 91, 83, and 81 points and missed the playoffs every year. In the two full seasons since, they had 74 and 85 points and missed the playoffs every year. This year they're on pace for 83 points and missing the playoffs. ~~They don't have any first-round draft picks for a couple of years because of the Kessel trade, so the rebuilding process will be continuing for a long while.~~

Update: My timing was off. The picks involved in the Kessel deal were for the last two drafts, so that's done now. Thanks Faisal for the clarification!

Bryan Colangelo was hired by the Raptors in February 2006, six years and a week ago. In the first couple of years, Colangelo looked brilliant. The Raptors finished first in the Atlantic division the very next year, and Sam Mitchell was named Coach of the Year and Colangelo Executive of the Year. The Raptors lost in the first round of the playoffs, but made the playoffs again the next year. They lost again in the first round, and then things went south quickly. They haven't made the playoffs since and haven't really been much of a threat at all. Last season they were a hopeless 22-60 and this year they're not much better at 11-25.

Barring miracles, the Leafs and Raptors are not likely to win championships during the Burke / Colangelo eras. I'm not suggesting firing them now, though I think the Colangelo era has run its course and unless the Raptors start turning things around on the floor very soon, Colangelo should be done at the end of the year. I don't think Burke has done a terrible job; he's acquired some players who have been great like Phaneuf and Lupul. The fact that the goaltenders play like Turk Broda one week and a turkey sandwich the next isn't entirely Burke's fault. I'd give him another year or two to right the ship but unless obvious improvement is made, he's gone too.

Three years ago, I said that the Rock needed to find their Brian, and they did. Now the Leafs and Raptors need to find their Terry Sanderson.

There is no reverse discrimination

2012-02-17T07:22:00.001-05:00

A friend of mine posted a Facebook status yesterday about a man who did something, well, dickish. I am not here to defend him; in fact I don't even know the man and I have to assume that the description of what happened is accurate, though I do trust the source. Anyway, someone else (who I don't know) left a comment to the effect that the reason he did this thing was because he was a man and must have been "overcompensating for some deficiency".

I did not leave a response to this comment since I don't know the person who posted it, and it would have been off-topic for the original status, but this person's comment really pissed me off. Why is is still OK to be sexist towards men? If something similar had happened but the offending party was female, and I had posted something like "must have been that time of the month", people would have come down on me like a ton of bricks for being a sexist bastard, and rightly so. Even worse, what if I had made a snide comment about the size of her boobs? That would also have been way out of line, but it's apparently OK to say that this particular man must have a small dick. I thought we as a society were trying to get rid of these kinds of "jokes" and no longer accept sexist, racist, or homophobic humour.

Just because the joke is at a man's expense and not a woman's doesn't make it any less sexist.

Decoded: Brad Meltzer's Decoded

2012-02-03T23:26:00.001-05:00

Recently we happened upon a TV show called Brad Meltzer's Decoded, which was about Fort Knox and what may or may not be inside it. The idea of the show was to take a critical look at Fort Knox, visit it, and talk to people involved to see if they could figure out what's inside. They investigated rumours that all the gold that was originally in the vault is now gone, but they maintain the security to make people think it's still filled with gold because otherwise chaos would erupt. The show was certainly entertaining, and we all enjoyed it.

It turns out that this is a series which just began its second season. Each week they investigate something different, and we've watched three or four of them now. As a skeptic, I was excited by this. Perhaps this would be TV's first show to investigate these kinds of rumours and urban legends from a truly skeptical point of view – a TV version of the Skeptoid podcast. There have been other shows that claimed to investigate these types of things, but they generally sensationalized what they were investigating and ignored the scientific method. I've seen a number of shows that start by assuming rumours to be true and then decide that because they failed to disprove them, they must be true. That's not how it works. A prime example is a show called Ancient Aliens, which Ryan and I watched a few weeks ago. I will have to get to that one in another article, which means I'll have to watch the show again. It may be difficult to write through the fits of laughter I will undoubtedly have at what they called "evidence".

Brad Meltzer is an author who writes political thrillers as well as comic books. I had never heard of him until this show – or didn't think I had. A couple of weeks after we first watched the show, my son was looking over our "bookshelf of books we hope to read someday if we ever find some free time" and found a book of his called The Tenth Justice. I don't even know where it came from. Anyway, Meltzer only appears in the show in front of a green screen showing weird symbols (including the phrase "U83R L33T H4X3RS") and on the phone. He has a team of three investigators (a lawyer, a historian, and an engineer) who do the real work, travelling around the country (and across the globe – they were in Germany in one episode) visiting places, doing research, and interviewing people.

They do manage to find people who were really involved in the things they're investigating. When talking about Edgar Allen Poe's connection to the Declaration of Independence, they talked to a distant relative of Poe's. They talked to General George Patton's granddaughter as well as descendants of both Billy the Kid and the man who killed him, Pat Garrett. They talked to the national head of the KKK (and you could see the discomfort on their faces as they interviewed him). They talked to someone who's actually been inside the vault at Fort Knox, or at least claimed to have been. They talked to the last living person who helped carve Mount Rushmore. But sometimes their interview choices are less useful, like the head of some fringe conspiracy theory group. One time they interviewed the bartender at a bar near Fort Knox, and another patron happened to overhear and offered up his own theories.

In one or two episodes, I found that Meltzer seemed to be sensationalizing a bit – he'd say something like "We've learned that <X> happened" when we'd learned nothing of the sort. We'd heard someone say that X happened, or we've perhaps surmised it, but he seemed to jump to "learned" a little too quickly for my liking. But most of the time, they do a pretty good job of ignoring the rumours and meaningless "evidence" and taking the anecdotal evidence with the appropriate grain of salt. I was impressed that after investigating the death of General George Patton (there have been theories that he was murdered ever since he died in a car accident in 1945), one of the crew basically stated the null hypothesis – that unless we have compelling evidence proving otherwise, we must assume that the accident that killed Patton was just an accident.

Unfortunately, they don't always find what they set out to find. This is not a failing of the show; sometimes the required information is just not available. We still don't know what's inside Fort Knox. We still don't know where the original Declaration of Independence is. We still don't know whether Billy the Kid was actually killed by Pat Garrett at Fort Sumner. But some things do seem to have been dug up. For example, General George Patton died in a car accident, but the soldier who was at fault in the accident was never charged and there was no autopsy. This led conspiracy theorists to suspect that he was murdered, and some ~~nutcases~~ extremists even suspected it was done at the command of Dwight Eisenhower. But after the investigation, it was discovered that Patton himself ordered that the man at fault not be court martialled, and that his wife requested that there be no autopsy. The cynic in me wonders if these things were truly "discovered" by Meltzer's team and weren't previously known, or if they just set up the episode to make it look like they'd discovered it.

My kids and I are enjoying Decoded, so we've set up the PVR to record new episodes. The boys also like to listen to Skeptoid, which I encourage. I'm happy to play my part in raising the next generation of critical thinkers. Unfortunately, the History channel won't let us watch episodes from season 1 online, though it does give a helpful link so that I can buy them from iTunes. It's be nice if History would get with the times and let us watch past episodes online like many other channels and networks do. Hey Brad Meltzer – decode that.

\m/

2012-01-26T20:16:00.001-05:00

This is an actual conversation that took place at my house tonight. Note for the record that Nicky is 9 and has been playing the guitar for about a year and a half.

Me: Nicky, can you practice your guitar please?
Nicky: I can't find my song sheet. It's not in my book.

We searched his room and the office for a while, no luck.

Nicky: Can we look on the internet for the music and print another one?
Me: Sure.

<Fires up the browser, heads to google.ca>

Me: What's the name of the song?
Nicky: Master of Puppets.
Me: O_O

Nicky and some friends, when his hair was longer.

In Lax We Trust archive

2012-01-21T08:32:00.001-05:00

I was part of the inlaxwetrust.com writing staff for almost five months, and wrote 23 articles in that time. Here are links to all of them. I'm not posting this because I expect you, dear reader, to read any of them. This article is mainly an archive for my own use so that if I want to link to one of them, I can easily find the link here.

However if you do want to read one or two, the Salaries of Lacrosse Players one was very popular (especially among lacrosse players!), and the entry draft one too. My personal favourites tended to be the funny ones – I had fun writing the "looking forward" one (more satire than comedy; let me know in the comments (here – comments on that article are closed) if you're one of the few that got the "price is right" joke) and the one about lacrosse movies. For more analysis and less comedy, I also liked the NLL Awards article.

Title	Description
NLL Season Preview: Philadelphia Wings	I investigate the personnel changes and preview the offense, defense, and goaltending of the Wings in the (then-upcoming) 2012 season.
Other Stories from the NLL Hold Out List	There was a lot of talk about the NLL Hold-out list because of the drama surrounding Anthony Cosmo, so I made up some other stories. Teddy Jenner didn't like this one.
Salaries of Lacrosse Players	Probably my most popular ILWT article – several NLL players retweeted the link to this one. I compare the salaries that NLL players make with those of other pro athletes.
Teachers and Firefighters in the NLL	Almost all NLL players have jobs outside of playing lacrosse, but it seems that a lot of them are either firefighters or teachers.
NLL Off-Season in Review: Colorado Mammoth	Review of the changes made by the Mammoth after the 2011 season.
NLL Off-Season in Review: Buffalo Bandits	Review of the changes made by the Bandit after the 2011 season.
NLL Off-Season in Review: Calgary Roughnecks	Review of the changes made by the Roughnecks after the 2011 season.
NLL Off-Season in Review: Washington Stealth	Review of the changes made by the Stealth after the 2011 season.
Upcoming Lacrosse Movies	Some ideas for movies that could be made involving lacrosse. Another fun one.
NLL expansion: Just say no	Another writer suggested that the time might be right for the NLL to expand. I disagreed.
A look back: Looking forward to 2002	Satirical article on how the future of the NLL might have looked in 2002.
Trivia contest answers	Former NLL player and current radio host Teddy Jenner won the contest.
In Lax We Trust Trivia Contest	A year or two ago I won a lacrosse shaft in a contest, so I came up with some trivia questions to give it away.
Renaming the NLL Awards	If the league were to rename its MVP, Rookie, Goalie, etc. awards after people like the NHL and others have done, who would they be?
Behind the scenes at the NLL entry draft	I enjoyed writing this mock conversation among the GMs at the entry draft.
Parity in the NLL: Who do we make fun of now?	Which team do we make fun of as the laughing stock of the league? There really isn't one.
The biggest surprises from the dispersal draft	Some surprising picks from the Blazers dispersal draft.
Farewell to the Blazers	Kind of a post-mortem on the Boston Blazers.
More New Rules Being Considered by the MLL	The MLL announced that they were considering using lacrosse sticks with heads that lit up to indicate who has the ball. This was such a silly idea that I came up with some other potential silly rules the MLL might think about.
Last year's NLL blockbusters: John Grant and Matt Vinc	Analysis of the trade that sent John Grant to Colorado and Matt Vinc to Rochester.
Last year's NLL blockbusters: Tracey Kelusky	Analysis of the trade that sent Tracey Kelusky to Buffalo.
Last year's NLL Blockbusters: Josh Sanderson	Analysis of the trade that sent Josh Sanderson from Calgary to Boston.
Lax Links 8/5/11	My first article for ILWT. Marisa used to do a daily list of links to stories from around the lacrosse world, and she asked me to put the list together on that day.

The Hockey Hall of Fmae

2012-01-14T00:08:00.001-05:00

Considering I've lived in or near Toronto almost my entire life, and have been a hockey fan for that entire time as well, it's somewhat surprising that I have only been to the Hockey Hall of Fame twice. The first time was in the summer of 1991, and I have a short story about that visit. The second time was this past weekend, and I have a few things to say about that as well.

Overall, if you're a hockey fan the HHOF is a must-see, though I'm sure that statement surprises nobody. There are hundreds of pieces of memorabilia from over 100 years of the NHL and from around the world. Here's a picture of the stick and gloves Sidney Crosby used to score the "Golden Goal" in the Vancouver Olympics, as well as the puck itself:

There's also this thing:

Back in 1991, I visited the Hockey Hall of Fame when it was still located at the old Exhibition grounds. My friend Beth and I were at the CNE and decided to check out the Hall while we were there. When we got into the trophy room, the Stanley Cup was sitting in the middle of the room on a table similar to this one. There was no security anywhere to be seen; the closest thing was another table nearby where there were two teenaged girls siting. They had a Polaroid camera and would take your picture with the Cup for $10. I assume they worked for the Hall, but maybe they were just resourceful.

Beth and I walked around the Cup looking at the inscriptions, when one of the other visitors said aloud "I wonder how heavy it is". He put his arms around the Cup and lifted it. Beth and I took a step back to let the security guys through, and put our hands over our ears to protect ourselves from the wail of the sirens, except... nothing. No security guards, no alarms, nothing. The girls with the Polaroid didn't even look around. The guy who lifted it said something like "Huh! Not that heavy" and put it down again. Of course, I took the opportunity to do the same thing, something every Canadian kid dreams of doing: I hoisted the Stanley Cup. It's not that heavy.

When we were there last weekend, I did not attempt to lift it, as there was a security guard there. I asked the security guard how many replicas there were, and if this was one of them or if this was the real Cup. He gave me an interesting answer: there are two Cups and neither one is a replica. There's the "presentation Cup", which is the one the winning players raise on the ice, and the one they take back to their home town. And then there's the one in the Hall (he had a name for it other than "replica" but I don't remember it), which is an almost-exact, well, replica of the presentation Cup, though there are a few names spelled differently on each one. To me, this sounds like there's "The Cup" and "the replica", but the guy at the Hall said that both are officially "The Stanley Cup".

The Cup and the rest of the trophies are usually kept in a place called the Great Hall, but it's closed for the next couple of months for renovation. They moved the trophies elsewhere so we could see them, but it means we didn't see the complete list of Hall inductees. There were a number of displays for individual inductees like this one for Mario:

There were stats and facts and a signature and jerseys and a stick and even a box of Corn Flakes with Mario on the front. There were similar displays for Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, Denis Potvin, Luc Robitaille, Roger Neilson, Ace Bailey (which included one of his golf clubs (?)), Borje Salming, and a bunch of others. There was a computer listing just about every town in Canada; you could select a town and find out what NHL players were born there. Guess who's from Waterdown? Well, nobody. But I grew up in Pickering, Ontario, home of both Glenn Healy and... um, nobody else. OK, I guess I can admit it. I am from the same town as everyone's favourite hockey douchebag, Sean Avery. We even went to the same high school, though he would have started at least five years after I graduated.

There is also a large section of the Hall for international hockey, including the Canada Cup, the Summit Series, various IIHF tournaments, and the Olympics. There are jerseys from just about every country – did you know Ireland had a team? Greece? Mexico? South Africa? Canada won four hockey gold medals in a row at the Olympics from 1920 to 1932, but would you believe their streak was broken by none other than Great Britain in 1936 – the most recent of only two hockey medals Britain has ever won?

One thing that surprised me about my visit to the Hall is the number of mistakes I found. Canada didn't win any hockey gold medals from 1952 until 2002? That can't be right. Seriously though, thinking back to all the places I've visited including castles in the UK, various chateaux in France, museums and other touristy things in London, Edinburgh, Paris, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto, and others, the number of mistakes I found was zero just about everywhere. I'm sure I've seen errors but I can't think of any offhand, and I'm sure I'd have remembered if there were more than one in the same place. At the HHOF, I found at least four in the couple of hours I was there.

In the same room as the Stanley Cup was a big timeline, listing all kinds of events relating to the NHL. The timeline included not only dates of NHL events, but birthdates of future NHL stars, like this one:

Winning the Cup first and the Calder second is a pretty impressive feat, but doing them 55 years apart is even better. This next one contains two mistakes:

The first mistake is not so much a factual error as one of punctuation ("it's" should be "its"). The second mistake was FoxTrax itself.

There was a display of the "lucky loonie" from the Salt Lake City Olympics, although in the middle of the description they spelled the word "looine". I'm sure my dad pointed another one out to me but I forget what it was.

On a somewhat related note, there are also the misspellings on the Stanley Cup itself – a number of players have their names spelled wrong, and there's even one team spelled wrong (Leafs is spelled "Leaes" in one place). Former Oilers owner Peter Pocklington famously put his father in the list of people to have their names engraved on the Cup, and when this was discovered his father's name was X'ed out.

Anyway, as I said the HHOF is a must-see for any hockey fan. There are the trophies and memorabilia and lots of information and stats, a couple of short movies, and some simulation games for the kids – two where you are taking shots on a net, one where you are standing in a net where real pucks are flying at you (similar to the commercial below), and one where you're standing in front of a virtual net trying to react to virtual pucks. There's even a section on collectibles and NHL branded products – hockey cards, toys, lunchboxes, bobbleheads, cereal boxes, stuff like that.

My dad and I spent two or three hours in the Hall. QA issues aside, it's quite the interesting place, and when combined with dinner at the Marché upstairs and a Rock game after that, made for a fun day.

HHOF TV commercial

The best lacrosse writers in the world... and me

2012-01-05T18:02:00.001-05:00

I announced back in August that I was joining In Lax We Trust as a writer, and ended up as co-manager and editor as well. I enjoyed my time at ILWT and wrote lots of articles. A few of them got lots of attention: one on lacrosse players' salaries from November is still getting talked about. Some I really liked and had fun writing: a satirical one about what the "future" of the NLL might have looked like in 2002, an imagined conversation among GMs at the entry draft, and some fictional movies about lacrosse.

In December I made the decision to strike out on my own, and created my own lacrosse blog, nllchatter.com. Around that time, I jokingly asked Teddy Jenner if they were hiring at ILIndoor.com, which is part of Inside Lacrosse magazine, and is pretty much the premiere indoor lacrosse blog anywhere. Rather than the expected "yeah, right", Teddy told me to email Bob Chavez. I don't know if Teddy was saying "That's a great idea! Email Bob!" or if it was Teddy's way of getting Bob to say "no" rather than doing it himself. I thought "what the hell, the worst they can do is say no", and emailed him. He got back to me with a proposal, and now I can announce that I will be joining the staff at ILIndoor.com and will be writing a weekly column called The Moneyballers this season. My column will run every Monday starting on January 16.

ILIndoor.com has some of best-known names in indoor lacrosse, including the aforementioned Teddy Jenner, a former player and current blogger, radio show host, and in-game announcer for the Washington Stealth; Ty Pilson, sports editor for the Calgary Sun and former Tom Borrelli winner (that's the NLL's award for the best writer of the year); Brian Shanahan, another former NLL player who has done colour for many lacrosse TV broadcasts (and yes, he's Brendan's brother); Marty O'Neill, the former GM of the Minnesota Swarm; and other great writers like Bob Chavez, Stephen Stamp and Casey Vock.

The Moneyballers will be a weekly look at the clutch players in the league from a statistical point of view. We have a system that assigns points to players for goals and assists that either tie a game or put their team ahead. Goals later in the game count for more than goals earlier, and OT goals count the most. Each week, I will tally up the points for that week's games, and keep track of the league leaders as the season goes on. Here's a link to last year's season-ending article.

I am very excited about this opportunity, but very nervous as well. The Moneyballers is a series that has been on ILIndoor.com for a few years, and up to this year, was written by another legendary lacrosse writer, Paul Tutka. Tutka won three straight Tom Borrelli awards, so that's a pretty tough act to follow. However, I am up to the challenge. But if you call me on a Sunday evening during NLL season, don't expect me to answer the phone.

Canadian Blog Awards redux

2011-12-28T23:13:00.001-05:00

Back in November, I found out that my blog had been nominated for a 2011 Canadian Blog Award. Well, the results from the first round of voting are in, and I am excited to say that I placed fifth out of 39 in the Best Personal Blog category. Thanks very much to everyone who voted for me, but we're not done yet! The final round has already begun, and now there are only five nominees. The vote counts have been reset to 0, and we vote again.

My blog got 34 votes in the first round, while the blog in the lead got 81, so I've got some ground to make up but with your help, dear reader, we can do it. Please vote, and I don't want to put any undue pressure on anyone or use guilt trips or anything, but if you don't tell your friends and family to vote too, well I guess the terrorists have won. And it's your fault.

Voting began on December 24, and ends on January 20. Go and vote now! (Note that I was unable to see the names of the nominees on the voting page when using Chrome, but IE and Firefox work.)

Again, thanks to whoever nominated me and to everyone who voted for me.

Using Krazy Glue

2011-12-24T10:55:00.001-05:00

For all of you would-be handymen out there, here's a checklist for the best way to get broken pieces of anything glued back together using Krazy Glue. This is my tried-and-true method, the way I do it every time. I hope this helps you.

Take broken pieces to the workshop in the basement.
Clean off each piece of the broken item and make sure you know how each piece should fit together.
Clear off some space on the bench by piling the piles of stuff in the middle on top of the piles of stuff to one side.
Brush away the sawdust that was created when you cut that piece of wood three months ago.
Dig under the piles of stuff you just moved to find the Krazy Glue container.
Remove the lid of the container and smile at the words "clog-free!" on the label.
Squeeze the container over one of the broken items. Ensure that no glue comes out of the tube.
Continue squeezing harder and harder so that if glue were to come out of the tube, it would be shot across the room and land on the wall.
Take a thin, sharp object like a staple and try to poke a hole in the end of the tube. This didn't work the last twenty-three times you tried it, but maybe this time it will.
Get a utility knife and cut a tiny piece off the end of the tube.
Repeat steps 7-10, cutting bigger and bigger pieces off the end each time. Continue until one of the only two possible results occurs:
1. the entire contents of the tube are dumped onto the items you're gluing. In this case, throw everything in the garbage before the glue dries. You're done!
2. the entire plastic bit on the end is gone and there is still no glue coming out. Continue with the next step.
Throw the tube in the garbage.
Go over to the garbage can. Pick up the tube, which is on the floor next to the can.
Throw the tube in the garbage.
Go to the hardware store, buy a new tube. Make sure you get the "clog-free!" stuff, paying extra for it if necessary.
Open the tube, place one drop of glue on one piece and hold the other piece against it for about ten seconds.
Place the item on the workbench, making sure to arrange it so that there is no pressure on the repaired joint.
Let it dry for a few minutes if your wife asked you to fix it, or three days if one of your kids did since they've already forgotten and have moved on to something else.
Make sure you follow the storage directions on the container, so that the tube doesn't get clogged when you put it away.
Six months later, when you need to glue something else, start again at step #1.

Followbots

2011-12-05T19:03:00.001-05:00

Like everything else online, the bots have invaded Twitter. Most of the time these are harmless but there are some spammy ones out there too. There seem to be two kinds of spam on twitter: the spam accounts that follow you hoping you'll follow back, and the spam accounts that mention you in a tweet along with a link to their web site. Luckily, Twitter has a very easy way of dealing with either one – you can simply block the account and report it as spam, all in one simple click. I have no idea what happens after that but I don't really care; once I've done that on a spam account, I never see tweets from it again.

There are thousands of bots out there scanning the millions of public tweets that stream by every minute looking for keywords. Say you have a business selling spatulas. You have a twitter account for your business, where you announce sales and new products and have discussions about current issues in the spatula industry. You obviously want to get as many followers as you can, and one way to do that is to follow as many people as you can. But who to follow? You can follow your friends and tell them to mention you in tweets and hope to get some followers that way, but that's generally slow. An easier and more effective way is to set up a bot.

You'd create a bot to look for the word "spatula" in any tweets, and automatically follow the account that tweeted it. Once you do, there are basically three possibilities: 1. They mindlessly follow everyone who follows them, and so they follow you back. 2. They are interested in spatulas and follow you back. 3. They are not interested in spatulas and just included the word "spatula" in a one-off tweet (and really, who hasn't?), and do not follow you back. Oh well. This is a fine idea, and seems to work well for many businesses. I've got lots of followers who are obviously doing this (including at least three in the past week), since they are very specific business-related accounts that have nothing to do what I generally tweet about, but are related to a particular word or phrase that I used. Here are some of the more fun ones:

pronunciation – I posted a link to an article I wrote on how to pronounce a bunch of lacrosse players' names, and a couple of hours later, I'm being followed by "a simple resource for everything related to pronunciation".
fire suppression – I mentioned that a former lacrosse player now works in the "fire suppression" industry. I was shortly followed by a company that makes fire suppression equipment.
motorcycle helmet – A friend rides a motorcycle and I happened to use the phrase "motorcycle helmet" in a tweet. I'm soon followed by a motorcycle helmet store in California. I don't ride a bike myself, and live several thousand miles away, so they are unlikely to get any business from me.
wind power – this was a while ago so I don't remember the details, but I mentioned something about wind power and was subsequently followed by a company that specialized in wind power solutions. They must have gotten bored with me since they don't follow me anymore.
homeopathy – I tweeted something about homeopathy (the word "bullshit" was likely included), and was followed by a couple of homeopathic practitioners. I think they immediately realized their mistake and unfollowed. I'm pretty sure the same thing has happened with "chiropractor" and "acupuncture".
iPad – mention iPad in a tweet, and people wanting to "give" you or sell you iPads will come flying out of the woodwork.
domain name – I asked a friend in the business about how to acquire a no-longer-used domain name and was followed by a company that sells cheap domain names.
crossover – This is the funniest one. The National Lacrosse League has a new rule called the "crossover" rule. With the new rule, four teams from the East division and four teams from the West division make the playoffs unless the fifth place team in the West has a better record than the fourth place team in the East (there are only four teams in the East). In that case, the fifth place Western team "crosses over" into the Eastern division for the playoffs, taking the place of the fourth place Eastern team. I mentioned the new crossover rule in a couple of tweets, and was followed within minutes by at least three car dealerships. Only one still follows me.
perl – I mentioned perl in a tweet a couple of years ago and was instantly followed by an account for a perl blog. Oddly, one of the writers on that blog is named Graeme.

Last week, I started an experiment. I tweeted that I love spatulas to see if I would get followed by @spatulacentral, Your ultimate source for spatula news and information! No such luck.

Legalized magic

2011-11-29T19:26:00.001-05:00

There is a piece of legislation in Ontario whose mere existence has me baffled. Essentially, it allows people who perform acts of magic to give themselves a title and makes it illegal to give yourself that particular title without being licensed to do so. This is like my having the ability to call myself a frobshmirtzer because I can talk to invisible aliens from the planet Frob, but if you try to call yourself a frobshmirtzer, you will get fined. I don't have to prove or even demonstrate that I can talk to such aliens, or even that they exist. I can just say that modern science doesn't have the right tools to be able to detect these aliens but trust me, I can. The government has decided that someone calling themself a frobshmirtzer without having this ability is somehow against the public good, so they have outlawed it. Only in this case, the word isn't frobshmirtzer, it's "acupuncturist".

I did a fair bit of research for this article. I look around for studies that examined the effectiveness of acupuncture, and found many that showed that it was completely ineffective, or at least no more effective than placebo. There are special tools that can be used to simulate the needles without actually inserting them into the skin (amusingly called "sham acupuncture"), and there are studies that show that sham acupuncture is just as effective as "real" acupuncture. There are studies that show that inserting the needles into random places on the body, rather than the magic acupuncture points, is also just as effective. I did find a number of studies that showed it to be very effective in certain cases, but those studies were either done by or funded by agencies that were associated with holistic medicine and therefore had a vested interest in positive results. I'm afraid that a study showing how effective acupuncture is does not carry much weight with me if it was done by the Department of Holistic Wellness at a Chinese university.

But I have to be honest here. I also found a few studies that showed it to be effective without any obvious bias in the study or flaws in how it was done. Now, I'm not a trained scientist, so I can't always look at a study and see what was done wrong; it's possible that these studies had biases (obvious, unintentional, or well-hidden) in them or other problems that discount or completely invalidate the results. I don't know for sure, so I have to take them at face value. But whenever I hear about such a study on one of the several skeptical podcasts I listen to, the podcasters (who are trained scientists) point out the flaws in the study. Long story short: if there have been peer-reviewed clinical trials showing the effectiveness of acupuncture whose results have been analyzed and repeated by other researchers (none of whom have any conflicts of interest), mainstream science hasn't seen them.

Can I say with absolute certainty that acupuncture never works better than placebo? No, of course not. What I can say with absolute certainty is that nobody has ever given a scientifically plausible explanation of how it works that is consistent with what we know about the human body and doesn't resort to special pleadings about undetectable energy fields. At best it is an unproven and controversial practice. To me, it is appalling that there is an Ontario law that gives it credence and treats it like a perfectly valid and accepted form of medical treatment.

The legislation in question is called the Traditional Chinese Medicine Act, 2006. It's a fairly short act that essentially does the following:

defines "traditional Chinese medicine" as "the assessment of body system disorders through traditional Chinese medicine techniques and treatment using traditional Chinese medicine therapies to promote, maintain or restore health."
establishes a body called the "College of Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners and Acupuncturists of Ontario"
authorizes members of the College to perform acupuncture and to give "a traditional Chinese medicine diagnosis identifying a body system disorder as the cause of a person’s symptoms using traditional Chinese medicine techniques"
states that only members of the College can call themselves "acupuncturist" or "traditional Chinese medicine practitioner" and lists the penalties

This act seems to be a work in progress – five years later, the College has not yet been created. The government has created The Transitional Council of the College of Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners and Acupuncturists of Ontario, whose goal is to "develop regulations and establish the College". One thing I found amusing on their web site was that one of the standards they plan to create is to define "what are considered acts of professional misconduct". How do you define professional misconduct in an industry that is entirely based on fallacy?

I do not believe that all acupuncturists are charlatans, liars or cheats. I'm sure many of them, likely even the majority, honestly believe that what they are doing is effective. The placebo effect is very powerful, and confirmation bias is very difficult to see through. You likely know people, or perhaps you're one yourself, who have gone to a psychic and come away saying "wow, she really nailed it!" Then they can tell you ten facts the psychic said about that person that were exactly right. Did they mention, or do they even remember, the other thirty facts that she got wrong? "I'm hearing a name, a woman's name. Marcie? Marge? Margaret? Mary?" "Yes, I have an Aunt Mary who died two years ago! Wow, it's amazing how she knew that!" She only got 25% of her guesses right and you think she did a great job. That's confirmation bias. It's highly possible that an acupuncturist will unintentionally take credit for those patients who seem to be positively affected by acupuncture, and dismiss those for whom acupuncture does not work as the anomalies, saying "well, it doesn't work for everyone".

I am angered by the fact that our government has wasted time and money discussing the "issue" of non-registered acupuncturists and coming up with a plan to register them. Acupuncturists make their living inserting needles into people's bodies and telling them it will heal them, when everything we know about medicine tells us that it can't work, and countless studies show that it doesn't. This practice, according to the Ontario government, is OK. But calling yourself an acupuncturist when you're not licenced to do so is illegal and you will be subject to a fine of up to $25,000 for a first offense. This is so ass-backwards that it makes my head spin.

A conversation with a 3-year-old

2011-11-26T07:53:00.001-05:00

I took Ryan to the dentist yesterday. While he was in getting his work done, I was sitting in the waiting room pondering the meaning of life with the help of the internet, by which I mean I was reading twitter on my phone. A little boy, maybe 3, came out of the back and sat on the couch next to me. His brother and sister (around 8 and 5) sat in chairs next to the couch while their mother was paying and making future appointments. The kid that sat next to me was very friendly and we had a fun little conversation over the next few minutes:

Kid: Hi!

Me: Hi.

Kid: Do you have a brother?

Me: No.

Kid: You don't have a brother?

Me: No, but I have a sister.

Kid: You have a sister?

Me: Yes. Do you have a brother?

Kid: Ya, he's over there (points to his brother, who waves).

Me: Is that your sister?

Kid: Ya, that's my sister (points to her). Just like you have a sister.

Me: Except you have a big sister. I have a little sister.

Sister: What's your sister's name?

Me: Her name is Trudy.

Kid: Trudy? That's a good name. Are you waiting for your sister?

Me: No, she's not here. She lives in Toronto.

Kid's mom: Shhhh! Don't bother the man! He's trying to read!

Me: Oh no, that's fine.

Kid: (Picks up a sports magazine) Do you play basketball?

Me: No, I don't.

Kid: Do you play hockey? You probably play hockey.

Me: No, but I like to watch hockey!

Kid: Do you play basketball?

Me: Uh, no. I play baseball.

Kid: I play hockey!

Me: Do you? It's lots of fun, isn't it?

Kid: (pauses, looks over pictures in magazine) Do you have a kuck?

Me: Pardon me?

Kid: Do you have a kuck?

Me: Do I have...

Sister: He wants to know if you have a truck.

Me: A truck? No. I have a little car. It's out there but it's behind other cars so you can't see it. (I notice at this point that there's an ad for a truck on the page he's looking at.)

Kid: Do you want to buy a truck?

Me: I don't know. I like trucks.

Mom: (Finished paying, gathering up the kids) I'm so sorry.

Me: Oh, no problem at all! He's quite friendly, isn't he?

Mom: (Shaking head) Oh my God, is he ever.

Canadian Blog Awards

2011-11-16T23:07:00.001-05:00

Yesterday someone left a comment on a recent article of mine. I get the occasional comment when my articles are posted to facebook but very rarely on the blog itself, so the fact that I got a comment at all was pretty cool. The comment said that the article was "brilliantly written", which is even more cool, but the next sentence blew me away:

I found you through the Canadian Blog Awards and no wonder you're up there!

Ummm, what? First off, I had never heard of the Canadian Blog Awards. That's fine, there are a zillion things on the internet that I am unaware of. But how would you find my blog on a blog awards site unless... no.

As it turns out, yes! Someone has nominated Cut The Chatter in the Best Personal Blog category. I am extremely flattered, honoured, and surprised by this. There are a few reasons I'm surprised:

It's just me and my blog. I like to think that at times it's insightful and entertaining, but come on. It's just me. My wife doesn't even read it.
I'm up against some other blogs with hundreds of regular readers. I have three members. Only one of my last ten articles has been viewed 100 times. More people read my stuff through facebook and RSS and I can't count those, but I'd bet that the average article I write here is read by less than 50 people total.
My content is all over the map. Personal stories, lacrosse and other sports, skepticism, technology, music, whatever.
Sometimes I write four posts in a week, sometimes four posts in a month. No consistency at all.

So that's why I'm surprised about the fact that I was nominated. But I'm also surprised about the nomination process itself:

Whoever nominated me did not tell me they were nominating me. To the nominator: First off, thank you very much. Secondly, please don't feel pressured to reveal your identity to me. If you would prefer to remain anonymous, that's totally fine.
The awards site itself did not contact me to tell me I was nominated.

That second one seems especially weird. The site itself (which is simply a blog with links to pages on a generic polling site) is obviously not updated very often – the 2010 award winners were announced last October, and there are only three articles since then. One of them says that the 2011 awards were delayed because of a lack of nominees. The About/Contact page talks about "this year (2010)". The Rules page talks about the 2010 awards as being in the future. It makes me wonder how many people actually vote on these awards – did the winner in a particular category get 50 votes? 500? 50,000? I have no idea. Oddly, there are also the Canadian Weblog Awards which seem to be unrelated to the Canadian Blog Awards.

Having said all that, regardless of whether these awards are voted on by 50 people or 50 thousand, it's a cliché but it's true – it's an honour just to be nominated. I'm truly flattered by this, and every time I've thought about it since I found out yesterday, I smile and just shake my head. Last week someone at work told me that he enjoys reading my facebook statuses and notes (i.e. blog posts), and that made my day. Then this past Monday, someone on twitter told me that I was her favourite lacrosse writer, and that also made my day. And now this.

I never wanted to be a writer, I never studied journalism, I never even liked creative writing in school, and I hated writing essays. I started this blog on a whim in April of 2005 and have been writing about whatever ever since. It's only in the last three years or so that I've discovered that I really love doing it, and to have people tell me they enjoy what I write is amazingly rewarding. To be nominated for this award and have people vote for me is just mind-blowing beyond words. Thank you so much to ~~my secret admirer~~ whoever nominated me and to everyone who's voted for me.

Well, what are you waiting for? Don't waste any more time listening to me gush. Go vote!

I'm sorry. It's not you. It's me.

2011-11-08T07:26:00.001-05:00

I'm really sorry, my occasional companion of several years, but I think it's over. It's just not fun for me anymore. The first couple of years were great, and I looked forward to all the good times we'd have in the future. And then last year I got really sick and had to leave you for a while. Now I'm better but it's just not the same between us, so I think I'm going to have to move on. I tried, I really did – this past summer I kept persevering despite my lack of enjoyment. I kept hoping I'd get that old feeling back, but I never did. It's no use fighting it anymore.

I've decided to quit running.

We first met in October of 2008, when I "accidentally" ran a 5k. I meant to walk it, but decided at the last second to start off running and just never stopped. I hurt for days, but it kind of felt good at the same time, and we started our relationship. I started running regularly the next spring, and by September I was running 10-15km per week and loving it. I'd be approaching home after having run 3 or 4 km, my legs sore, sweating and breathing hard but feeling good, and think "do I still have enough in the tank to circle the block once more? Or go around this crescent, just to add an extra half-kilometre?" Sometimes I would go the extra bit, sometimes not, but the thought was always there. I looked forward to my runs and was disappointed when I got up and it was raining and I had to run on the treadmill instead. Each week or two I'd go a little bit longer until one day I ran from home along Dundas to Hollybush to Parkside to Hamilton and back along Dundas home (which I know means squat to those of you who don't live in Waterdown), a distance of about 5.8 km. I remember the feeling I had coming home from that particular run. It was my longest ever and I still felt great. I started to think that by the next summer, running a 10k wasn't out of the realm of possibility.

I bought special running shoes and clothes. I ran outside during the winter as long as it wasn't too cold and the ground was mostly clear. My sister and parents bought me an iPod Nano with Nike+ for my 40th birthday, and I started "broadcasting" my runs on Facebook and Twitter. I subscribed to a running magazine. I brought my running stuff on vacation with me. I was a runner. Me and you, baby, we were going hot and heavy.

And then I got sick. February 5, 2010. Severe acute necrotizing pancreatitis. I've written about it before so I won't go into the details here, but in a nutshell, it was a nightmare. I spent two months in hospital, ate no solid food the whole time, had major abdominal surgery, and was off work for another 3 months after coming home. In the hospital, my exercise consisted of taking my IV pole for a walk around the floor – two laps if I was exceptionally energetic. Once I got home, it was walking up and down a flight of stairs four or five times, and then lying down on the couch because I was wiped out. I got home from the hospital at the beginning of April, and in mid-May, I started walking around the block (less than 1km). By the end of the summer I could walk several kilometres without being exhausted, but it wasn't until November that I started actually running again. But, my dear, things were different between us.

I started off with the path I used to take when you and I were first starting out. About 3 km, and I'd run until I got tired and then walk for a while, then run again. It wasn't as much fun as I remembered, but I'd gone through a lot and in some respects I was still recovering, so I figured I'd give it some time. I didn't go out much during the winter, and I tried to run on the treadmill now and again but you know how it is, dear, I never liked running on that thing. Then spring came and I could run outside again. It still wasn't great, and it took a long time before I could even run the 3k path without stopping to walk in the middle. I ran a lot in July, then fell off the wagon in August, got back on in September and have been doing OK since then. But I'll be honest, it really hasn't been fun for a long time.

I have yet to get back to 5k – my longest this year was 4.12km. Only a couple of times did I finish a run without stopping to walk for a couple of minutes. My stamina seemed to plateau quickly, and I got frustrated with my lack of progress. Not once did I think about running just a little longer like I used to – it was always "how long until I can stop?" Getting up early to run was a chore and I had to force myself to do it. A few times I convinced myself I heard rain so I went back to bed – only to find the ground completely dry when I did get up. Sometimes while running I decided to cut the run short because it was colder than I had expected or my legs were exceptionally sore or whatever, it was one excuse after another. But the root problem was always there – it just wasn't fun anymore.

So my dear, I'm afraid this is the end for us. It was fun while it lasted, and I'll never forget some of the great times we had together, but I've changed and it's just not working between us anymore. It's an old cliché but it's really true – it's not you, it's me. I still want to stay in shape, so I'm going to try and hit the weight bench a couple of times a week over the winter. I hope you're not jealous. Maybe next spring when the weather gets nice again I might give you another try, but I can't promise anything. Take care, sweetheart.

Tweetdeck vs. MetroTwit vs. Seesmic

2011-10-23T19:10:00.001-04:00

Twitter is one of the most popular web services anywhere, but once you become fairly active on it, I find the web site itself is impossible to use. If you follow lots of people (I follow a little over 300), one single stream of tweets is just too much, and trying to keep track of conversations or random people mentioning you is next to impossible. Luckily there are numerous applications out there designed to make this easier. Most allow you to separate your stream into multiple columns so you can put the people you're following into various groups; for example, I have a group with techie people (Scott Hanselman, Joel Spolsky, Leo Laporte, and the like), another group with people I've "met" online through my interest in pro lacrosse, another one for other sports people (Bruce Arthur, Dave Hodge, Down Goes Brown), and so on. This makes it much easier to keep up. You can also add a column for direct messages or mentions so those are easy to see. This makes having a conversation with someone on Twitter possible, where replies to you from others don't get lost in the deluge of tweets.

I tried three of the most popular such applications: Tweetdeck (now owned by Twitter itself), MetroTwit, and Seesmic, and made some notes on each. Note that there are lots of options in both Twitter and these applications that I never use (eg. tweeting from multiple accounts, trending topics, Foursquare, LinkedIn, etc.) so I can't comment on those. For each one, advantages/drawbacks are ordered roughly in order of importance to me.

Tweetdeck and Seesmic also have web versions that allow you to do much the same things as the desktop apps, but through a web interface so there's nothing to install. I didn't investigate these at all.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is the first Twitter application that I used, and I used it for about a year so it's the one I'm most familiar with. It handles multiple Twitter accounts and you can add accounts from Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Google Buzz (why?) as well. I really only used Twitter. I occasionally updated my Facebook status through Tweetdeck, but only when I wanted to set my status to something and tweet it at the same time, which was rare.

Version: 0.38.2

Advantages:

A global filter hides tweets you don't want to see based on hashtags, other content, user, or application. This makes it easy to ignore useless Foursquare tweets.
The colour scheme is nice – dark background (but not too dark) with white text
There are versions for Windows, Android, and iPhone.
Pops up a little window for images from twitpic, yfrog, lockerz, and others, as well as for youtube videos.
Easy to click on a user or tweet and jump to it in a browser if you want to
I like the little whistling sound it makes for notifications.
You can follow/unfollow people right from the interface and even modify Twitter lists.

Drawbacks:

Columns are not resizable. This means that you have a maximum of six columns on a 1920x1200 screen if the window is maximized (and you can't see all of the sixth column). Any more than that and you have to start scrolling horizontally. I hate that.
Rearranging columns is silly – you have to click little arrow buttons to move columns right or left one position. You can't just grab the top of the column and drag it to where you want it to be like you would expect. Dragging columns works in both MetroTwit and Seesmic.
To mark a tweet as read, you either click on a tiny little dot on the tweet, select "Mark tweet as seen" from level 3 of a nested menu on the tweet, or click the "Mark all as seen" button at the bottom of the column. Not at all intuitive. I got around this by simply clicking "Clear all" at the bottom once I'd read everything to mark then all as read and remove them from the column entirely – though once you've done that, you will never see those tweets again through Tweetdeck.
If you've marked all the tweets in a column as read but not cleared them, there is no obvious indication that there are new tweets. Unread ones have a little dot next to them, but it's hard to see and not obvious at all. (This is why I clear out the whole thing.)
If you see a reply to someone but want to see the rest of the conversation, you can click on the "in response to" in the tweet (this feature was also not obvious). However, this link shows up on the same line as the username, date and time, and application used (eg. "Twitter for iPhone") so it's not always visible. If you can't see the link, I have found no way to get Tweetdeck to show the conversation.

Drawback specific to the Android version:

If you haven't updated in a while, you have to scroll through everything to get to the top. You can click on the title bar of a column to automatically scroll, but it still actually scrolls and if you have several days worth of tweets to scroll through, this can take a while. I couldn't find an obvious way to simply jump to the top or mark everything as read.

MetroTwit

A couple of weeks ago, I had a problem with Tweetdeck popping up a weird empty "Updating" window that never went away. (It got fixed the next day.) This was not a big deal at all, but I tweeted about it anyway. A friend responded and told me that he had tried MetroTwit and had never gone back, so I decided to give it a try as well. I had a tough time ordering the advantages below since the top six are excellent features.

Version: 0.9.0.0

Advantages:

Columns are resized as they are added so if you only have a couple, they're wide but if you have lots, they're narrower but still all fit on the screen – no horizontal scrolling. This is fabulous. I have seven columns and can see them all easily. I haven't tried more but I assume if you have too many it will eventually either not let you add more or will be forced to make you scroll.
A big number appears at the top of each column telling you how many unread tweets are in that column, though I've occasionally seen situations where the number is off by one.
Clicking on a tweet marks all tweets below it as read, so you can mark an entire column as read by clicking the top one.
A mark appears in the scroll bar for each column indicating where the most recently read tweet is.
The most recently read tweet has a line and arrow at the top to indicate "you've read up to here". Very nice.
You can have the application's icon change to include a count of unread tweets or replies or messages or whatever. I have it set to replies only so I can glance at the icon on the taskbar to see if I have any unread replies.
If you hover over shortened links you will get a tooltip containing the real URL.
Images from yfrog, twitpic, etc. will pop up in the interface when you click on them. I prefer the way Tweetdeck pops up a window to display images, but this isn't bad.
The link to see the rest of a conversation is always visible and obvious (i.e. it's a link on its own line that says "View conversation").
All three apps will autocomplete usernames when you type a '@' but MetroTwit will also autocomplete #hashtags, choosing from those that you've previously used as well as current trending ones.

Drawbacks:

When you minimize the app, some more tweets come in, and then you restore the window, the columns sometimes show the latest tweet, sometimes they show the most recently read tweet, and sometimes they show some random tweet that may be in between the two, or one that may be days old. It seems random which one happens – consistency would be good. This happens when you close and restart the app as well.
No built-in filters, so no way to get rid of Foursquare tweets. There is a filter from something called proxlet.com, but I haven't tried it yet.
The scroll bar is very narrow and it's hard to grab the scroller thing.
You can follow/unfollow people but I couldn't find a way to modify lists from the application. I generally do that from the twitter.com web page anyway. I only list it here because Tweetdeck can do it.
Not quite as easy as Tweetdeck to click on a user and jump to that user's page in a browser. It's two clicks instead of one.
The dark colour scheme is very dark, and the white one is hard to read. I prefer Tweetdeck's colours.
Twitter only. No support for Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
Doesn't handle multiple Twitter accounts. Apparently this is "coming soon" but may only be available in the not-free "Plus" version.
Windows only. No Mac/Linux version, and no mobile versions.
There is an ad (OH NOES! ADVERTIZING!) at the top of one column. It's a different colour than other tweets and you can't get rid of it, but it's not really a huge deal. You can pay for the app ($14.95 Australian which is roughly the same in Canadian or US) to upgrade to "MetroTwit Plus" to make the ads go away.

Seesmic

I had nothing but problems with Seesmic. I installed it a few months ago and was less than impressed. I uninstalled it a day later. When I decided to write up this article, I couldn't remember what I didn't like about it, so I re-installed it and tried it for a while. "A while", in this case, turned out to be about an hour. I've given it a few more chances since then but they've always been short and frustrating.

First off, there were authentication issues. I authenticated with Twitter, but when I stopped and restarted the app (required to disable most of the myriad of plug-ins that were automatically installed and enabled (grrrrrr...)), I had to authenticate again. But this time the authentication failed – numerous times. I tried shutting down the app and trying again with no luck. I checked to make sure the Twitter site itself was up, and it seemed fine. After about ten minutes I tried again and everything was fine. Note that I was copy-and-pasting my password from KeePass so it was not a case of simply mistyping the password. This hasn't happened since then, so perhaps it was a one-time thing.

Version: They call it "Seesmic Desktop 2" but the version number was 1.2.0.1891.

Advantages:

It lists retweets other than my own. If a user I follow retweets a user that I don't follow (i.e. a "real" Twitter retweet, not just adding "RT" in front of the text), I'll see it in Seesmic but I don't think I will in either MetroTwit or Tweetdeck.
You can create a Seesmic account and it will do extra stuff like be able to synchronize your configuration among machines. I did not do this, so I can't comment on that feature.
Windows and Mac versions as well as Android and iPhone.

Drawbacks:

The columns don't resize.
Each tweet that you haven't read is marked with a little yellow circle, which goes away when you click on the tweet or select "Mark all as read" from the menu at the top of the column. But that's the only way to mark things as read. Not quite as bad as Tweetdeck, but worse than MetroTwit. You can clear out the tweets marked as read (i.e. empty the column), but when you close the application and start it up again, they all come back.
There are two buttons in the bottom left panel with no indication of what they do. One looks like a solid rectangle, the other a series of smaller
rectangles but when I click on either of them (they seem to be mutually exclusive toggles), there were no obvious changes anywhere. There are no tooltips or text anywhere to indicate what they're for.
There didn't seem to be any way of determining or controlling how often it refreshes the feed. I could find no way of manually causing a refresh either.
At one point I had a Home column (i.e. my entire Twitter feed) plus a Sports column, made from a list I have. Several users in the sports list had unread tweets in the Home column but not in the Sports column. The tweets did show up in the Sports column some time later, but it didn't make sense to me that one column was updated while the other wasn't.
If you right-click on a tweet, there is a large list of things you can do (i.e. reply, retweet, block user, etc.). There is a little menu at the top of each column but if you right-click there, you just get a small and useless Silverlight menu.
Bug – when I tried copy-and-pasting my Facebook password, it seemed to think I was pasting in several hundred or thousand characters, as the password field kept scrolling horizontally for 10-15 seconds. My password is 8 characters long and when I typed it rather than pasted it, it worked.
There were about 10-15 plug-ins automatically installed and enabled. I disabled all but about three of them.

Conclusion

On the desktop, I've moved over to MetroTwit. It has resizable columns, and tells you at a glance how many unread tweets you have in each column without having to clear the column, and changes the application icon to indicate how many replies are unread and makes it brain-dead easy to mark tweets as read. Lots of big plusses. However, I tend to keep my Twitter application open but minimized most of the time, and the scrolling behaviour I described earlier is annoying. Big minus. When I bring up the application (whether starting or de-minimizing), ideally I'd like the columns to automatically scroll, showing new tweets, until the most recently read tweet is visible at the bottom with the unread tweets above it, and then stop scrolling. This way I can instantly see the oldest ones I haven't seen, and then continue to scroll up as I get to the newer ones. Actually I'm not sure what Tweetdeck does in this respect, since I always clear the column (because it's not obvious which tweets I haven't yet read).

I wouldn't touch Seesmic with a 39 ½ foot pole. It seems like beta software that got released too early. Maybe I'll try it again in a year or so to see how it's improved.

I still use Tweetdeck on Android because there is no MetroTwit for Android (or iPhone).

What song has the most "na"s?

2011-10-14T22:24:00.002-04:00

The question that everyone has been wondering in the back of their minds for decades has finally been answered. What song has the most "na"s in it?

And the winner is.... Centerfold by the J. Geils Band, which has 221 "na"s, one more than Hey Jude.

No, I did not google this, I actually did my own research, as any good journalist would do. This consisted of listening to each song, typing an 'x' whenever they said "na", then counting up the x's. Why, how did you spend your Thanksgiving?

Facebook changes and rumours

2011-10-07T08:32:00.001-04:00

From Twitter:

Scientists: Hey, I think we discovered particles that travel faster than the speed of light. World: OMG new Facebook!

Facebook made some changes to their interface recently, and just like every other time they've done this, a bunch of people lost their minds. There were postings about how to get the old interface back by changing your locale to the UK, and I heard the tired old calls of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". There were even petitions demanding that Facebook change it back. These petitions will never work.

It's not that Facebook doesn't care what its users think, it's just that they have so many users that they have to cater to the majority. If you make a petition telling Facebook that you hate the new format and demand that they change it back, and you get thirty five million people to sign it – the entire population of Canada – and print it out and drop it on Mark Zuckerberg's desk, do you know what he'll say? He'll look at the 35 million signatures of people who hate the interface and say "This means that ninety five percent of our users love it! Success!"

Meet the new Facebook, same as the old Facebook

Of course, two days after the change, the postings all stop as people become accustomed to the new interface, realize that everything they've been used to is still there though perhaps in a different place, and that the new interface really isn't so bad after all. Everything is once again fine in the Facebook world until the next time they make a change, at which time people will lose their minds once again – because Facebook has changed away from the interface they complained so bitterly about the last time.

Ever notice that the people that complain the most about the Facebook changes are those who update their status fifteen times a day and are the least likely people to leave Facebook? Facebook knows this, which is another reason they don't worry about the complaints. I'm not making judgements about people who are on Facebook a lot – I am quite active on Facebook myself, as well as Twitter, and I have my own blog fer cryin' out loud, so I'm not about to criticize others for ~~wasting~~ spending a lot of time online.

Regarding the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" – do you really want Facebook to keep the same interface and features forever? That's not the way the software industry works. We software engineers are always looking for ways to make our product better. Sometimes this comes from adding features that have been requested by customers, other times it's stuff we come up with ourselves. (Make a note of that word "customer" – I'll get back to that in a minute.) Facebook engineers are no different – they want to improve the customer experience. Their problem is that many people are using Facebook twenty times a day and become accustomed to how it looks and how to do things. When that changes, people are suddenly uncomfortable with something that they've been comfortable with for a long time. The fact that they have seven hundred million users also guarantees that no matter what change they make, millions of people won't like it, and we all know that people who don't like something are more likely to comment on it than those who do. How many postings did you see talking about the Facebook changes and how great they were?

Does Facebook have privacy problems? Sure they do. I used to know exactly what the defaults were and how all of that worked, but Facebook has added new features and changed things often enough that now I don't know what happens by default. I have found in the past that once you change your security settings to be something different from the default, new features tend to be off or more private by default, while if you have never touched your settings, everything's wide open by default. I don't know if it's still that way and that topic is beyond the scope of this article. I did want to mention it to acknowledge that Facebook is not perfect – for those people who read this article and think I'm some kind of Facebook fanboy who would never say anything negative about them.

You will never pay for it

Another rumour that I've seen a bunch of times is that Facebook is soon going to start charging people to use the site. I can guarantee you that these are rumours are false. Facebook will always be free. You will never need to worry about paying Facebook anything as a customer. Why? Because you're not the customer. Facebook is not in the business of building a social network, they are in the business of selling advertising. They built a social network in order to attract people to their website, and they sell those pageviews to advertisers. You are the product Facebook sells. They make far more money selling advertising than they would charging people to use their web site, since they know that a large percentage of the well over half a billion users they have would not pay for the service. Classmates.com never understood this.

So don't worry about rearranging your finances to have an extra few bucks a month for Facebook, and don't worry about how you are going to keep in touch with your friends in Texas or Scotland or Italy or Japan without Facebook. Will it be around forever? Who knows. But it's the most popular web site in the world right now, I don't see it going away any time soon, and you'll never have to pay for it.

9/11 was an outside job

2011-09-26T07:30:00.001-04:00

I watched a YouTube video recently called Loose Change. This is one of the most popular 9/11 conspiracy videos out there. The description of the video on the YouTube page is as follows:

For anyone who still has doubts about 911, weigh out the facts and the overwhelming amount of evidence supporting the reality that the events of 911 were one big set-up.

This exposes the lies, disproving every aspect of the bogus 911 commission report put forth by the corrupt government.

Judge for yourselves, but investigate the facts and evidence before jumping to a conclsuion [sic].

The video is about an hour and twenty minutes long. The film is professionally shot and edited, and there are a number of computer animations which are also professionally done – what I mean by that is that it looks good. This is not something done in the basement with a hand-held video camera by some conspiracy theory nut. The film states and attempts to prove that all of the terrible events of September 11, 2001 – the destruction of the World Trade Center towers and the airliner crashes at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania – were designed, orchestrated, and then covered up by the American government. It contains descriptions of physical evidence, scientific discussions, and interviews with witnesses, firefighters, airline industry spokespeople, and scientists.

It is also complete and utter horseshit.

There are numerous web sites out there (here, here, here, here, here) that address the claims made in the film in great detail, some of them point-by-point, so I'm not going to do it here. Suffice it to say that the makers of this film get many facts wrong, misinterpret facts and evidence (whether accidentally or intentionally), and use many of the standard logical fallacies including straw men, observational selection, appeals to ignorance, and red herrings.

For me, the most damning evidence that this whole conspiracy theory is wrong is the lack of whistleblowers. If this were a government plot, the number of people that would have to have been complicit is immense. The people that flew the airliners (who must have been OK with a suicide mission). Pilots that fired the missiles at the Pentagon. Demolitions experts that planned and planted the explosives. Air traffic controllers and other staff at the airport in Cleveland (where United flight 93 landed in this scenario). Communications experts who faked all of the cell phone calls from flight 93. There must have been some firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and other first responders that were in on it, so they could hide or destroy evidence of the explosives if any was found in the rubble. Many experts in many different fields to come up with ways that this could all happen but still look like a terrorist plot. The President of the country. Numerous senior members of the armed forces, CIA, and FBI. Who knows how many other members of the Executive Branch as well as advisors and assistants. There would have to be people whose job it is forever to ensure that any evidence found in the future is covered up, and witnesses and others involved in the conspiracy paid off or killed. We're talking about hundreds of people here.

If this was a government plot, the majority of the people I listed above must have known about the plan, or at least part of it, beforehand and agreed with it. None of them had any trouble planting bombs in the iconic twin towers in downtown Manhattan that have hundreds of thousands of people going through them every day. None of them had a problem with firing a missile into the Pentagon. Even if they didn't know about the attacks or agree with them beforehand, they've had plenty of time since then to realize what they were a part of and reflect on their role in this event. But in the ten years since the attacks, not one person has had a change of heart and come forward. Perhaps the American government has had each and every one of them murdered in such a way that their friends and families didn't suspect murder. If that's the case, why hasn't the government just killed the makers of this film for revealing the truth?

The funny part is that the conspiracy theorists describe the most complicated conspiracy ever conceived, which was apparently pulled off to perfection, and at the same time point to many mistakes that the conspirators made and clues that they left behind. So they're saying that the most evil government conspiracy ever was pulled off by a bunch of incompetent boobs.

There was no government conspiracy to kill American citizens on September 11. The attacks were pulled off by a bunch of Islamic extremists who hijacked four airliners. That, my friends, is the 9/11 truth.

Three and one from the Jays game

2011-09-22T23:51:00.001-04:00

Quick post about the Blue Jays game I went to with my dad the other day. Three weird things and one complaint – a complaint about complaints.

Weird thing #1: At one point, the Angels had back-to-back doubles, with no outs or stupid baserunning plays in between, and nobody scored. How do you hit a double with a guy on second and not drive him in? Glad you asked. The second double was a popup a mile high to the right side, so the runner on second had to wait to see if it would be caught. The batter, of course, just kept running. When it fell in front of Bautista and behind Lind and Johnson, the runner on second only had time to make it to third but the batter made it to second. Nobody blew the play so it wasn't an error, so the scorer had no choice but to credit the batter with a double. I'm sure it's not unique in the world of baseball, but with your standard double, you can usually assume that all the runners will move up at least two bases, and a baserunner scoring from first on a double is not unusual at all.

Weird thing #2: During Eric Thames' third at-bat, the scoreboard showed that he'd flied out to LF in his first at-bat then flied out to CF in his second at-bat, so my dad and I decided that he should hit it to RF this time. I said "Put it over the right field fence!". Thames hit the very next pitch over the right field fence.

Weird thing #3: "Batting ninth, the designated hitter, David Cooper." The DH hitting 9th? Does someone not understand the concept of the DH? Yes I know: end of the season, the team is out of the playoffs, give the young kids some at-bats, and all that. Still weird.

The complaint about complaints involves Vernon Wells. Each time his name was announced, there were both cheers and boos coming from the crowd. The people booing Wells irritated me. Wells played several seasons for the Jays, and in some of those years he was very good and in the rest he was excellent. After one excellent year he was rewarded with a huge contract. Was he worth it? Probably not. But can you blame him for taking it? If someone said to you "We're going to give you $125 million over the next seven years", are you going to ask for less because you don't deserve that much? Not on your life. So he took it and promptly got injured, hitting 20 home runs only once over the next 3 years. Then he returned to form in 2010, hitting .273 with 31 homers. Are these $15-million-a-year numbers? No but again, his inflated salary is not his fault, it's J.P. Ricciardi's. Wells was traded solely because his contract was so big. He never asked to be traded (Roger Clemens) never said he didn't want to play in Toronto (again, Roger Clemens), didn't sign somewhere else as a free agent (where do I start?) and never admitted to not giving his best during games because he wanted to play somewhere else (Vince Carter). I have even heard the tired old line about "now that he's got the big contract, he doesn't have to play hard." I don't buy that for a second.

Any player playing at the major league level has likely been playing baseball all his life because he loves the game. To get to the highest level in the sport, he'd have to have worked hard and excelled in Little League, high school, college, and several levels of minor leagues where he was making very little money. His hard work and determination paid off, and he made it to the majors where he continued to work hard and excel. And I'm supposed to believe that when he gets a huge contract that ensures that he can continue playing at the highest level, he suddenly doesn't bother trying so hard anymore? The previous 20 years have been solely for the unlikely possibility of the huge payday? No. He's been working his ass off and playing as hard as he can his whole life - he doesn't know any other way to play. That refers to any professional athlete, not just baseball players, and not just Vernon Wells. Well, I guess it doesn't apply to Vince Carter.

Hey Vernon, I was clapping for you.

OK, so that wasn't such a quick post.

Educating the public

2011-09-22T08:09:00.001-04:00

This letter to the editor appeared in the Flamborough Review on September 17, 2011:

I was puzzled – but not surprised – to read the comments offered by the provincial candidates regarding education (Review, Sept. 8). The big picture to these players is the bricks and mortar and infrastructure. They really need to pay attention to the people.

Wait, where have we heard that before? I am a parent, and the biggest concern among all parents I talk to is the curriculum.

We are inundated with fundraising for this, awareness for that. The kids come home telling us about all the “activities” they do.

Wait a minute. What happened to the three R’s?

What happened to sitting down and having a deep discussion about something relevant? Has school turned into glorified daycare?

I’m sure there are some teachers who are just fuming right now, but I don’t care. The public system is failing our kids. The adage that they “never leave a child behind” because it may affect his “self esteem” doesn’t wash with me, or many other parents. Who will worry about their self esteem when they can’t fill out a job application?

I don’t agree with technology and keyboards in primary schools. What is wrong with pen and paper? Apparently, spelling tests are too much to bear anymore. Standardized testing is also an issue with many parents. Many teachers I have spoken to say that they are pressured into spending more time in preparing the kids for these tests.

Let’s get back to basics. Our kids need a stable base of readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic, not volunteering activity time to promote corporate marketing.

Kevin Inglehart
Lynden

The only phrase missing from this rant was "Back in my day..." My first thought upon reading it was "spoken like a man who hasn't set foot in a school in thirty years." Gail, who has been involved as a volunteer and on the school council at our kids' school for eight years and is currently going through teacher's college, was indeed fuming when she read it. If Mr. Inglehart had done the slightest bit of research before writing this, he might have understood the current goals of the education system and why they're different from those of years ago.

"What happened to the three R's?" – Literacy (which is far more than just reading and writing) and mathematics (which is far more than just arithmetic) have always been the core of the education system and still are, though they are being taught in a different way than in the past. When my parents were kids, and to a lesser extent when I was a kid (I'm currently 42), mathematics in primary school was mostly arithmetic and was almost entirely memorization. Here are the times tables, learn them by rote (i.e. repeating them out loud over and over and over until it's burned into your head). There you go, that's math. Did the students understand what it was they were memorizing? I'm sure some did but many did not. In public school, we had to memorize the times tables up to 12 times 12. To this day, I can instantly tell you that 12 times 12 is 144. If you asked me 12 times 13 it takes me a half-second longer to come up with the answer – but I can come up with the answer. In all modesty, I am one of the ones that understood how the times tables worked (I always did well in math and went on to get a Bachelor of Mathematics degree) but I know that some of my classmates would have been completely lost because 12 times 13 wasn't on the chart we ~~learned~~ memorized. That's not the way math is taught these days. Kids are not just given the answers but are taught how it works so that they can figure out the answers for themselves.

"What happened to sitting down and having a deep discussion about something relevant?" – That depends on the grade level. Just try having a deep discussion about anything with twenty 8-year-olds and see how far you get. That hasn't changed in a hundred years and so has nothing to do with this issue. But I know what kinds of projects Ryan (currently in grade 7) has worked on over the past few years, and they are having deep discussions about relevant issues.

"The public system is failing our kids." – Evidence please. Don't go spouting off a claim like this without backing it up. Show me evidence that children are coming out of public school less prepared for high school or university than they were twenty or forty years ago and I'll start listening.

"Who will worry about their self esteem when they can’t fill out a job application?" – Show me a teacher that allows a student to pass their class with high self esteem but without the basics of reading and writing and I'll show you a teacher who needs to be fired. That's not the way the public education system works, now or in the past. The difference is that now teachers consider a student's self-esteem whereas in the past they did not. Were people in Mr. Inglehart's classes ever singled out and humiliated in front of the class? Let me guess, stuff like that "builds character", right? It doesn't take a genius to realize that humiliating a student or telling him he's stupid because he didn't do well on a test or assignment does nothing to help the student learn. If a child is struggling in school and you tell him he's stupid, after a while he will come to believe it himself. Alternatively, you can give him extra help – both in the curriculum and in believing in himself so that he has the confidence to continue. If a student's self esteem is ignored and he struggles, he is more likely to hate school and leave as soon as possible. How is that good for the student or the community?

"I don't agree with technology and keyboards in primary school. What is wrong with pen and paper?" – Technology is not replacing pen and paper. Both of my kids go through plenty of paper during the school year and they do far more printing and writing than typing. But considering the pervasiveness of computers and technology in our world, how does it make any sense not to start familiarizing our children with it as soon as possible?

"Apparently, spelling tests are too much to bear anymore." – That's because many studies have shown that spelling tests are ineffective. Students learn how to spell the words in the few days before the test, write the test, and then promptly forget them. Teaching them the fundamentals of English grammar and phonics is far more effective in teaching kids how to use language.

"Standardized testing is also an issue with many parents. Many teachers I have spoken to say that they are pressured into spending more time in preparing the kids for these tests." – Then whoever is pressuring the teachers doesn't get it either. The idea is to prepare the children for life – teach them how to think, not how to answer the questions on the test. Once you've done that, they will succeed on any test you give them.

I don't know what "corporate marketing" thing Mr. Inglehart is referring to in his last line, but I assume it has to do with fundraising which he mentioned earlier in the letter. It's a fairly well-known fact that schools are given far less money now than in previous years. As for why that's true, that's a political issue that has nothing to do with the teachers or how they teach. When I was in school, all the materials we used were provided by the school itself. Now, teachers spend their own money to outfit their classrooms. Over the years my kids have read and studied many books that were purchased by (and then borrowed from) their teacher, not the school or the Board of Education. Fundraising is a way to help further equip the schools. Without it, schools wouldn't be able to afford many of the materials necessary, and programs like music and art may need to be cancelled altogether.

Mr. Inglehart needs to realize that society is constantly improving its knowledge of how children learn, and changes must be made to the education system to reflect that knowledge. Yes, sometimes money is a factor in such changes, but not always. Things don't work the same way as they did when he was a kid, but that doesn't make the changes unnecessary.

There are always people who say things like "it was good enough for me when I was a kid", but is that really what you want for the next generation – "good enough"? Don't you want "better"?

Make a teaching fairyland

2011-09-18T19:20:00.001-04:00

Nicky was given a toy last week – a 3D puzzle of a Ferrari racing car. The puzzle was made in China, and the people who created the packaging were obviously not English-speakers. Perhaps they had access to Google Translate and decided that translating the Chinese text a word at a time was the best way to go. We had a pretty good time reading the instructions:

Use hand and head --- Training kid's flexible for their proportion on the hands and eyes. Develop them imagination ability. Make a teaching fairyland.

Design munificent --- It can be assemblaged detached over and over, and looks like veritable. It needn't any assist tools.

Perfect in workmanship --- Materials are daintiness. Safety and slightly. Full of colour printing.

It could certainly be said that it's not fair to make fun of these people because their English, as bad as it is, is better than my Chinese. This is absolutely true – I don't know a word of Mandarin, Cantonese, or any other Chinese language. But I'm not writing Chinese text for a product that will be sold in China. If that was my job, I might try talking to someone who actually speaks Chinese. If I were to write it myself, I'm sure it would be pretty damned funny to Chinese speakers.

Mini movie reviews

2011-08-30T19:29:00.001-04:00

We saw a few movies over the past week or two; here are some mini-reviews of each. Sorry, no haikus.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Pros:

Special effects were excellent, but that's becoming less of a draw, since lots of movies have effects that are just as good
Leonard Nimoy saying "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" was cool. A bit of a Star Trek II homage for those of us old enough to get it.
John Malkovich is always good

Cons:

The movie was far too long. The robot fight scenes over the last hour or so were long and drawn out and could easily have been cut down. It was amazing that with so much stuff happening on the screen, I was still bored.
I find it odd that a movie that stems from a toy (I laughed at the "in association with Hasbro" during the credits) has so much violence, bad language, and even sexual content that I won't let my kids watch it.
There were lots of scenes of robots fighting and transforming all at the same time. I found it overwhelming – I couldn't tell what was happening half the time.
Several blatantly cheesy 3D effects. If you want to see a movie that gets 3D right, see Avatar.
I found it hard to tell the bad robots from the good robots, other than Optimus and Bumblebee. And the two little annoying and pointless robots, Comic and Relief.
The first Transformers movie was entertaining and while the plot wasn't brilliant, it was OK. I don't really remember the second movie. This one was somewhat entertaining at times but the plot was just dumb. Sentinal even says at one point "I created this technology that defies the laws of physics" so they didn't have to explain anything.
WARNING: spoilers below
Patrick Dempsey as the bad guy was not believable. At the beginning I could kind of understand it, but once it became obvious that the Decepticons were planning on enslaving the entire human race, why was he still trying to help them? It's not like they said they'd spare him or he had any reason to believe they might.
Similarly, Sentinal's whole "the only way to save our planet is to join with the Decepticons" thing was not believable either.
Optimus's execution of Sentinal (shooting him in the back of the head) was out of character.

Spy Kids: All The Time In The World

Pros:

Jessica Alba! Quite possibly the most beautiful actress in Hollywood today. Can she actually act? Who cares?

Cons:

I fully agree with the "family is the most important thing" theme, but they pushed it too hard and it ended up being corny.
The time-travel stuff. I know that time travel is (very likely) impossible, but some movies that involve time travel at least try to make some sense of the whole paradox thing. Back to the Future did a great job, and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure did some neat stuff with it as well. This one didn't even try, and as a result it made no sense.
Too many poop jokes. Then again, it's possible that "males in their early 40's" is not the target demographic for this movie.
The movie was presented in "Aroma-vision". When we got our tickets, we were given a card with 8 scratch-and-sniff circles on it, and when a number showed up on the screen, we were supposed to scratch the corresponding number on the card and be surrounded with the aroma of whatever was happening on the screen. This worked perfectly, assuming the aroma for each of the numbers was supposed to be "cardboard".
The kids who starred in the original Spy Kids movies haven't had many significant acting roles since. Their performances in this movie help to explain why.

Knight And Day

Pros:

Cameron Diaz in a bikini! She's no Jessica Alba, but still, wow.
Sure he's a wacko, but I really like Tom Cruise.
Lots of chemistry between Diaz and Cruise

Cons:

During the movie, I couldn't help wondering about the movie's budget for Tom Cruise's platform shoes.
The idea of a battery that never runs out of power is not possible. It sounded like the writers needed some small yet extremely valuable thing for the bad guys to chase after, and precious gems have been done to death, so they picked this without giving it much thought.

The Adjustment Bureau

Pros:

I really enjoyed this movie. The concept was interesting and made you think – sort of Matrix-y that way.
Matt Damon. I think I've enjoyed every movie I've seen him in.
In a way, I wanted them to explain more about the Bureau and the Chairman and so on, but I'm sort of glad they didn't. The fact that they didn't is what makes you think.

Cons:

Can't say I'm a fan of Emily Blunt. She was OK, but she just doesn't do it for me. I'm not talking looks here, I just didn't connect with her character.