Cthulhu and other crazies

Blog redone

Swizec — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 01:15:18 GMT

This is in fact a test post to see if I can post now that everything has been turned upside down and renewed and such. The RSS is what troubles me mainly.

17 hour workday Sunday

Swizec — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:39:07 GMT

Yesterday was the busiest Sunday I\'ve had in a long while since usually I devote my Sundays to leisurely activities with my girlfriend. This weekend however the girlfriend went on a trip to Tirol with family and I seized the day (and night actually) to remake my blog - something I\'ve been planning to do for several months, but never quite got around to.

So on Saturday I started working on the software part of everything, some modules needed an upgrade or two, a touch up here and there and certain things I had to develop from scratch. Ten hours later, at around three in the morning, that bit was done, time for shuteye. And then came The Sunday. Got up and almost immediately started working. Set up my scanner, scanned in my notebook, torn pieces of paper, torn up sketches and other stuff that I needed.

And so, at six in the morning, a full seventeen hours later, the blog was complete, uploaded and quite functional. This was the first time I ever achieved anything like this on such a short timescale, then again, usually the designs I have to implement are quite more complex and tedious to make work. However most of my time was spent creating the images needed. For example photoshopping scanned in pages of writing onto torn paper (you can see the result bottom left) was especially difficult since I had to figure out how to do it in the first place. It turned out quite well if I do say so myself.

Anyhow, over the next few days I\'ll be making touch ups to the design here and there, perhaps ironing out a bug or two and essentially making the whole thing even better. Bear with me please.

Switching to feed readers

Swizec — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:51:58 GMT

When I was redesigning my blog I had the marvelous idea of adding a reBlog widget to the sidebar on the left. The main reason behind this idea was that since my readers hopefully enjoy what i have to say they might also enjoy giving a glance or two to the things I read myself, seeming as how when it comes to authors of published works people are always interested in seeing where the influence and ideas come from. Therefore I decided to simplify this process for people and a conventional blogroll simply wasn\'t enough.

Why it wasn\'t enough, though, is a complex reason. Mainly I find them to be overly static, quite boring and rarely attracting any sort of attention. My reBlog feature on the other hand is useful to make my website a tad more dynamic, which is something google and other search engines love very much. it also serves as a simple way to be quickly involved in any buzz going through the blogosphere ... also raising hits.

The most profound change in my life coming from adding reblog was that it suddenly made me realise how awesome feed readers are. I was probably wasting several hours daily on making sure I kept up to date on everything from slashdot to different blogs and more often than not I\'d simply forget about a blog or two and then be happily surprised when I found them again later. This is why I promptly installed Akregator on my home computer and Vienna on my mac.

Vienna I don\'t like so much, it\'s better than others but I do have my qualms. Akregator is rather awesome though and now my life is simpler. So here\'s to a simpler life via RSS feeds!

The mind of a wandering software poet

Swizec — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:50:32 GMT

The mind of a wandering software poet is a piece trying to depict what the true creators of software think like. We all know there are many coders out there who think of themselves as good, but they are not artists and it is only the true artists in software development that create beauty through code, magnificence through design and otherwise make a true art out of the craft. Everyone else is just mindles peons bashing at their keyboards, making products people hate and despise.

Beautiful design, however, often goes unnoticed. People don\'t see the code, managers don\'t care for beauty and sexy, all they care about is productivity. This is why, with this piece of art, I sought to point out the clash between what a programmer wants and what they are forced into doing by circumstance. The roses depict seeking ultimate beauty while the small and scattered chrisantemes try to show how much random nuissance comes into play with development.

Scattering the pieces of paper with code amongst the beauty I tried to show the way a true programmer thinks - constantly scraping code that is less than perfect, constantly thinking in several threads, keeping wildly different parts of the project in their mind at all times. These papers then try to live amongst the petals in hopes of learning from them, in hopes of improving, of becoming as beautiful and perfect as The Rose.

The background is transparency, the foreground a computer GUI, these depict clairvoyance to see far ahead - predicting problems before they arise, and the basic tool of every programmer.

Good code is poetry.

Drug use is not abuse

Swizec — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 08:57:50 GMT

We all use drugs, every each one of us, especially when we take the liberal meaning of what a drug is - anything that can cause addiction. The thing with addictions is that they can range from very severe to very light and because the human brain is wired to release endorphines into our head to induce pleasure any time we do a pleasurable activity we can get chemically addicted to pretty much anything. Many people out there, for example, are addicted to adrenaline sports and can\'t quite function normally without something rushing through their veins every now and then - then we have the television addicts, sitting in front of the damned telly all day long and let\'s not forget to most recent entrant to the addiction scene internet. Very many people I know can\'t fathom life without internet for more than a week or two and whose to blame them, us geeks made the world even more internet dependant than it is fossil fuel dependant.

But let\'s look at a less liberal definition, the one where a drug is \"any chemical substance that, when absorbed into the body of a living organism, alters normal bodily function\".

Most people simply do not make a distinction between using and abusing drugs, especially when it comes to illegal drugs. But that\'s not the case. There is such a thing as responsible drug use that is not abuse. There are many examples out there of people drinking alcohol, but not being drunks. People smoking cigarettes, but not dying of cancer. People popping ecstasy every now and then, but not dehydrating to death. People doing some acid to increase the spectrum of their experience, but not jumping out of windows. People smoking a joint here and there, but not ... ok what\'s the proverbial \"bad thing\" people do when stoned? Lounge around and eat?

This is why I believe it\'s wrong that we teach our children and everyone around us not to do drugs, because, simply put, drugs are cool, everything from alcohol to caffeine and THC is quite simply awesome. We get a buzz, we broaden our lives, we ... whatever. But we must be responsible. No driving under any kind of influence, no getting addicted (and it\'s easy not to get addicted really), no doing stupid shit and we must always be wary of what we do. For example the moment I start noticing I\'m doing a certain drug too much I stop. That\'s right, quite simply stop. Why? Because I don\'t want it becoming a habbit as it would then lose its alure and become just another plain and boring aspect of my meaningless existance (more on how all our existances are meaningless tomorrow).

I don\'t understand how some people can think only those without a real life, without anything to do, can use drugs. Because drugs aren\'t about filling the void that resides within us, it\'s in all of us and we fucking have to put something in there to fill it up lest we be empty. Some people put telly in there, some make children, some fill their lives with work, some go to mountains, some fly high up and jump down, while the others opt for a few hours of chemically induced fun.

Personally I\'ve tried several different drugs, many legal ones, very few illegal ones, actually just one illegal drug, and I can safely say I\'m addicted only to two - caffeine and the internet. I don\'t want to cure this addiction because I don\'t see a reason in it, when I will, I\'ll ween myself off them. Until then ... do drugs people, they\'re fun, but be responsible about it.

Oh, on a sidenote, our society as a whole should start condoning drugs, because when they\'re regulated and taxes are paid, they become controlable and there\'s less addiction and overall less bad crap from them.

Twitter solves massive bug

Swizec — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:28:10 GMT

Today I resolved a bug lurking deep within the workings of my Chlorine Boards framework and I have twitter to thank. When I made a blogpost about how drug use is not abuse a person following me on twitter immediatelly picked up on the post, gave it a read, retweeted and wanted to leave a comment. But couldn\'t. Immediately @OneLuvGurl tweeted to me about how she can\'t comment.

We tweeted back and forth for about an hour about the issue when I finally just asked her to send me the comment and I\'ll see what I can do. It turned out that it was indeed, as I feared, the comment\'s fault. So I started poking around until I found what was wrong. The comment was too long ... but how can this be? The darn thing isn\'t very long at all.

Two hours later I finally found out what the issue was and was able to resolve it. It would appear that three, or was it four, years ago I\'ve made a terrible design flaw - I decided to use GET requests for ajax instead of POST requests. Since GET requests have a limited length this was naturally a disaster waiting to happen and I\'m surprised the issue could go so long without being noticed, but I\'m glad it\'s resolved and I\'ve already updated all the websites running on Chlorine Boards with the surprisingly simple fix.

This event just goes to show how much more than just status updates Twitter has become and just how awful bugs can be.

Blackberries are arsehats

Swizec — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 12:45:19 GMT

On Tuesday I bought a blackberry to replace my old phone and make a step into the new age of ultra connectivity on the go. But there was a hitch - it was the blackberry.

Don\'t get me wrong, I love my Blackberry 8310, but its user interface is just such a horrible mess I feel like hunting down the UI designers and bludgeoning them with an axe or something similar. Half of the time the damn thing is making me feel like a complete idiot, even making me turn to the user manual or google for answers, and the other half of the time the blackberry\'s UI is making me want to hurt somebody.

Can\'t sync via bluetooth - not supported, have to turn on bluetooth receiving in media gallery (rather than the bloody SETTINGS menu) to receive files, trackball scrolling of long lists making my thumb fall apart, no obvious way of locking keyboard with a single key, having spent all night trying to figure out how to update firmware to 4.5, music player forgetting where it\'s left off last time, three clicks AND scrolling to write a bloody text, several clicks to get to contacts, all different kinds of optins being scattered all over the place instead of staying inside \"settings\" ... to name a few I can think of off the top of my head.

Seriously UI designer guys, doesn\'t it tip you off that there is something horribly awry going on when you have to have access to \"Help\" in every single menu? Or when your phone has to ship with a special \"quick tips\" booklet that teaches people how to use the bloody keyboard? You might call it well documented, I call it poorly designed because a well designed UI doesn\'t need a user manual since users can use it intuitively.

But there are many things I do love about the blackberry (let\'s leave alone the fact it\'ll take me ages to get used to its keyboard). I like that it feels big and solid in my hand while remaining light, the way it displays text as a conversation is a bloody marvelous idea, the calendar showing next two appointments on main screen and being very easy to manuever and see what you\'re up to - fucking awesome. The fact that it can sync with my iCal is brilliant as well. I love the fact normal headphones plug into this phone instead of proprietary crap, regular mini USB port is brilliant as well. And I\'m sure that once simobil stops being a fuckup I\'ll love my internet stuff as well.

Overall I quite enjoy the blackberry and love it thusfar, just the UI ... seriously, are you kidding me? Could stand to be a little quicker as well, but alright, it\'s a phone and packed with stuff, I\'m sure the hardware is straining to keep up.

This only leaves simobil to rant about. What the fuck guys, I bought a blackberry in a blackberry only package, and I can\'t get internet working because I didn\'t order a data plan!? What the hell! Sure you later admit to having given me the wrong fucking plan. But how on earth did you manage confusing the specifically-for-blackberries-and-blackberries-sold-only-with-it plan for that other generic crap? Bastards.

Hopefully simobil will correct their fuck up quickly and I\'ll be able to use the blackberry to its full extent, until then I will remain with an oversized, overkeyed ... telephone.

Vienna day one

Swizec — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 18:24:45 GMT

Today the girlfriend and yours truly arrived at Wien for a four day trip the climax of which is to be Amanda Palmer\'s concert at Szene ... hopefully we\'ll get tickets to go in as well! For some strange reason I don\'t really feel like talking all that much at the moment, not exactly certain why, but I\'d just like to mention that mobile google maps in combination with the GPS on my blackberry are fucking fantastic!

Seriously, this thing shows you where you are and how to get where you want to be, it gives to the minute accurate public transit times, what public transit to take and so on. Quite marvelous really, don\'t even want to think about the outstandingly absurd GPRS charge I\'m going to get next month.

Anyway, here\'s some pictures of some places we\'ve been to today, better report to come on Tuesday ... pictures daily.

Vienna day two

Swizec — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 18:24:53 GMT

Today my girlfriend held a monster by the boobs and I got to see a very nice looking castle aptly named Schoenbrun and we went to see an art gallery inside Belvedere where there were pretty pictures.

And now since I\'m a tad knackered from all the walking, here\'s a bunch of photos you probably won\'t want to look at since you\'re all bastards.

Wien is nothing special

Swizec — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:13:06 GMT

As some of you probably know I came back from Wien (vienna) yesterday after having gone on a four day trip with the intent of seeing Wien a little since I was going to a concert there anyway. But it all turned out a little less pleasurable than intented and came with a slightly bigger toll than anticipated.

It turns out that not having bought tickets in advance we were left high and dry by the sold out concert, which invariably cast a dark shadow over the whole trip making it seem somewhat redundant and like a waste of time. Don\'t get me wrong, I love the fact that I spent four full days with my girlfriend and we did have fun and did see some very beautiful things. I am just so disappointed by the concert fiasco that I can\'t at all appreciate the rest of the trip and can only think of how I wasted time and money for both myself and the girlfriend ... I mean she didn\'t even want to go, I practically bent her arm and forced her to go.

The problem is that if it was just about the trip we could\'ve taken it at any other time. We could\'ve gone when she had more time in regards to school, we could\'ve gone when she had more money to spend and, hell, we could\'ve gone when I was having less of a fuss at work and what\'s more, we could\'ve gone for a longer time period and thrown other cities into the mix for an even better trip. Right now it just feels like we\'ve taken an impromptu half-arsed vacation that was a waste of effort.

Perhaps my feelings about the trip would\'ve been better if Wien was more impressive, as I\'m sure they\'d be awesomely high spirited if we got into the concert. Wien, as a whole, is pretty much like Ljubljana. The architecture is the same, the basic layout is the same and even the vehicles on the road are the same. Let\'s not even get into the chavs who are exactly the same as home, same language, same style of clothing, same nauseating behaviour and the same kind of cars.

The only hint at being in a different country was that streets and such were in German, but even that didn\'t dispell the feeling of only being on a trip to a different city in the same country. London was a much much better experience last year, in fact I was probably making my girlfriend sick by constantly comparing our trip to the trip I\'d taken last year.

So all in all, I don\'t regret traveling with my girlfriend per se, I just regret the poor timing.

What blogs are all about

Swizec — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 17:42:51 GMT

Right now I was procrastinating blogging because there\'s a little something, perhaps the first proper blog entry I\'ll ever write, itching inside my head and I\'m at girlfriend\'s house and her lame arse keyboard that is bent on destroying me. Well anyhow, I was clicking random tags on my blog and came upon this entry about my funny cat that I made a year ago and it made me realise what blogs are all about.

You can say they\'re about readership, citizen journalism, monetisation, political mongreling, but the truth is they are about one thing and one thing alone - blogs are about preserving the moment, the current emotion of the world. They will one day hold the perfect time capsule of each and every day that\'s happened since the early 21st century. They have the unique ability of preserving not only the view of some historians, the view of some paid journalist, the view of an artist or writer, but the view of each and every one of us and in the future we will data mine the blogosphere to gather the daily, even hourly, zeitgeist of the world.

Blogs show a cross-section of our society ranging from the poor mom and dad with five kids to a rich lawyer with five siblings and even that lonesome dude always reading books alone in a crowded room. Blogs ARE society!

10 questions you thought were polite but aren\'t

Swizec — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:51:16 GMT

There are many questions people ask in an attempt to be polite and fulfill their social obligations on par with proper social etiquette, but many of these questions upon further inspection prove to be quite rude, at times even insulting.

How are you

This is a very innocous question right? Seems quite polite to ask someone how they are, but answering it in fact poses quite some problems for the askee. First they must consider the level of acquaintance between you so as not to divulge too much information while at the same time not divulging too little. They must consider whether you\'re just being polite or are actually interested (this question often seems to get used instead of hello). Furthermore, they must consider why it is that you are asking them, do you not know them well enough to see how they are from their body language, tone of voice, etc.? If the acquaintance is so close that you are interested in their actual state of mind, shouldn\'t you intrinsically already know?

Personally I only ask this question as a conversation starter. I try to give the person a chance to speak up about what\'s troubling them, or simply a chance to smile, shrug it off, and say they\'re alright.

What would you like for birthday/christmas/whatever

Gift giving is a time honoured tradition meant to deepen acquaintances and inter-personal bonds. In this light people often ask what somebody would like as their present thinking how polite it is of them to be so considerate as to ask rather than buy the wrong thing. But this is wrong, instead of being a polite move it implies that you do not know the person enough to know what they\'d like, that you don\'t even have a clue as to what might brighten their day, that you can\'t even think of anything bland and generic that nearly everybody likes. It implies, obviously, that you do not care to put any sort of effort into gift selection. The only thing worse than asking is giving money because that ... that\'s just lazy.

See the thing with gifts is that they\'re supposed to be a way to gauge your care for the person whom you are gifting, it shows how much you are willing to spend on them (needs to be tried against how much you can afford), it shows how much thought you are willing to give and if you plain old ask then it is upon the giftee to put a value on your relationship and that\'s just mean. They\'re supposed to be the one enjoying your gift, not the one doing all the work.

How was it for you

I often ask this in one way or another after sexual coitus, I\'m just curious, but it implies that I don\'t know my partner and that I can\'t tell from what they\'re doing whether it was good or bad and, what\'s worse, that it perhaps wasn\'t good for me and I need to ask if it was for them - seeming as how I wouldn\'t be asking if it was prefectly great for me and I\'d rather be enjoying it. Seriously, whomever ever thinks this question is polite is an idiot, I don\'t even know why I put it on the list.

Who was that on the phone

People will sometimes ask this question when somebody in their company breaks conversation to receive a phone call. Seems perfectly polite right? Not. Asking this is an invasion in privacy, it asks the person to divulge certain information they might not want divulged, because if you had clearance to know who it was, or if it was in some way important, the person would tell you anyway without being asked. This question is doubly tricky when asking a boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse since it implies distrust, sure you should technically have security clearance to know anything, but this particular call might just be unimportant to you. However it is similarly impolite for the other person not to tell you because that implies they have something to hide and whenever somebody in such close relationship is hiding something dark clouds start brewing.

Conclusion

Alright, I\'m afraid I can\'t think of any more impolite polite questions even though I\'ve been brewing this post for a week. You got four questions you should be careful asking and a pretty clear guideline to discover your own questions of this kin. Yes the number ten in the title was pure sensacionalism, but screw it, I\'m pretty sure you can fill in the gaps.

Dirty hacks are everywhere

Swizec — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:15:48 GMT

Humans are most noted for their ability to think up solutions to problems quickly and efficiently - we in the technology industry call these solutions dirty hacks and try to avoid them at all cost, not because they were intrinsically bad, but because they are difficult to maintain.

See when something becomes riddled with quick dirty hacks it may work, at the moment and it might even work in the next moment, but as soon as you start to make adjustments to change, try scaling the darn thing, or making any kind of modification it all just starts breaking apart. To an average human being this is most easily explained via real life dirty hacks we like to use every day.

For example, you come home and find that you need to put something down but have no proper place to put it. So you look at the nearest semi-available flat surface - usually a chair of some sort. You put the thing there. Then you neatly forget about having to put it away and just leave it there; hey, it works, don\'t change it right? Then somebody comes over and you need the chair. Your solution must scale.

So you put the thing that was occupying on the chair somewhere else, also usually an impromptu solution. Over time, with these kind of incrementally quick solutions you achieve something horrible. There is a flat surface somewhere in your home, or even just a floor corner, where a large pile of crap has built up over the week/month/year that is so high in fact you don\'t even know what\'s in it anymore ... and now you suddenly absolutely need that surface for something!

Regardless of all this, I used a dirty hack last night when I wanted to read on my bed and still have tea available nice and easy. So I wedged it between the wall and the bed. By some strange coincidence I spilt not a drop.

Late-night fun

Swizec — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 03:26:25 GMT

This is probably the most fun conversation I\'ve ever had at four in the morning, certainly the most entertaining I\'ve ever had on slashdot.

phantomfive:

Seriously. I like the idea of doing research for the sake of research, and I would probably respect this more, except Microsoft keeps representing it as
The coolest thing they have ever come up with.
The future of computing.

and it is neither, it is just cool research. It\'s so cute the way Microsoft has gotten all senile and out of touch in its old age.

OK, off to do laundry now. When will they make a robot that does my laundry for me? Now THAT will be progress.

swizec:

It\'s called a washing machine.

snowraver1:

He\'s talking about a folding machine, and it would truly be a great invention. Just dump in the laundry and out comes a folded pile. Bonus if it sorts socks!

swizec:

It\'s called a wife.

Even good blogs need help

Swizec — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 21:59:14 GMT

Blogging has a very big problem over all, and it\'s not the fact that most blogs out there simply suck, it\'s that there are many great blogs out there, but because the people making them aren\'t marketing geniuses they get lost in the sea of blogs. This is a problem writers used to have, so they invented managers, it\'s a problem open source software had, so we invented OSS list sites that help spread the word of good software.

Neither of these approaches will work very well for blogs. Managers are out of the question since blogging doesn\'t really make that much money and we don\'t want to pollute it with such mumbo jumbo anyway. Sites with lists upon lists of blogs won\'t work either since they\'re far too satured. So Chuck Westbrook had an awesome idea and I\'m biting. In a blogpost entitled How you can help end the problem of blogs with great content and no readers he proposed a sort of reading group for blogs. We sign up for the idea, read a different blog every two weeks and if we like it ... I guess we\'re supposed to do what we do with all the stuff we like. Talk about it.

Anything to find new blogs, let\'s do this.

Upgrading to ubuntu 8.10 hurts

Swizec — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:07:20 GMT

Let\'s get one thing straight from the get go, I love ubuntu and I enjoy 8.10 as much as I enjoyed 8.04 so even though this post is about to sound quite inflamatory be sure that I nontheless advise you to use this distro over other available linux flavours.

Yesterday I decided that it was time to upgrade ubuntu mostly because I had installed so much crap that it was starting to misbehave and my computer frequently crashed or otherwise behaved like a proper arse. A little upgrade won\'t do harm right? Can only improve things right? Ha!

And so I went and informed myself a little bit about the possible problems I might run into, didn\'t seem too major, some scary crap about nvidia graphics cards was the worst I found. The upgrade itself was very interesting, all I had to do was run Adept with a special flag so it showed the \"Distro upgrade\" button, clicked it and whoooosh, off I was.

After a surprisingly quick download (13 minutes) and a remarkably quick install (20minutes even though it warned it might take hours) the upgrade was complete and I had to reboot my computer. Great, I thought, just this reboot and I can get to work, this wasn\'t too bad. But little did I know just what a world of shit I was heading too.

The freshly rebooted computer greeted me with a very broken GUI, artefacts staying behind everywhere, I couldn\'t even scroll inside windows. But worst of all, internet wasn\'t working and since I\'m using the computer as our main router for the apartment, there was NO internet. Scary stuff in this day and age. I finally had to resort to the radical step of simply using the old kernel with the new ubuntu; luckily it remained installed. This step gave me back properly working graphics, working sound and working internet connection.

So we come to my main gripe with the upgrade process. Somebody had the bright idea that it would be cool if all my kde configurations went down the drain. Now this is the reason why I keep a separate partition for /home, so configurations stay put no matter what I do to the underlying linux. So why the flying fuck did I have to completely reconfigure my desktop and everything? I can understand Windows users losing their desktops and settings after a major upgrade or reinstall, but we\'re geeks here. We understand that shouldn\'t happen, we even take steps to prevent it! Hell, I\'d understand losing config if this was a major upgrade, but the fact is nothing much actually changed, just some apps had new point releases, and most of those I already had installed anyway.

Kids, don\'t think you will be quick to upgrade ubuntu, it takes much longer than anyone can anticipate and to add insult to injury, your fancy 12 button mouse is suddenly turned into a 5 button one. Yay.

Obama wins

Swizec — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 04:21:28 GMT

The twitter crowd in america seems to be saying that Obama has won the election and the world now has a black president. Yay, hooray. Notice I said the world not the US, that\'s the bad connotations right there, seriously, the US has way too much power and if I know anything about politics no Obama will ever change that, in fact I\'d say he\'ll try and give his country even more power.

Difficult to tell right now whether anything will really change now that Obama took the rein, but time will tell. He certainly was saying some pretty good things in the race to power, I mean votes. Must say I\'ve never seen anyone deliver speeches as well since Hitler, in fact, I\'d venture to say he\'s the most informed and thinking politician I\'ve seen in my life time, almost certainly the best we\'ve had on the scene since the likes of Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler and Kennedy.

But I fear that no matter how awesome Obama may be, unless he finds a way to become an absolutist he\'ll never be able to change anything since Money is still where the power lies in the US.

Moo cards - best thing since kitten litter

Swizec — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 09:12:47 GMT

Last week I read a blog about Moo cards are by Jure Cuhalev and a few days later decided to go and order a batch to see what the fuss is about. So I went to moo.com and clicked around, quickly set up a profile and started designing my cards. Since over the years I managed to accumulate a large quantity of somewhat decent photographs on flickr I decided it\'d be best to just import from there.

The interface was amazing very simple to use, just drag and drop images to and fro. I actually had fun designing my moo cards and that, I believe, is quite a feat of interface engineering. After this was done there was some waiting involved and two days ago the cards were waiting in my mailbox.

Upon opening the package I was greeted by heaps upon heaps of branding, but it was unobtrusive and quite a joy to read. The little discount moo cards I got to disperse around are a touch of genious if you ask me. Very good way of getting new customers. Immediately, I was doing this at work, I was asked to share the love and gave my new cards out to people who were all quite amazed and found them endearing.

Later, at school, I gave out more cards and everyone seemed to enjoy them and asked many questions as to where they came from. This speaks to the greatness of these moo cards (or is it the greatness of my photography?) so even though I have absolutely no idea of how actually useful moo cards might be, I guess they\'re good for personal branding? Anyhow, they may not be very useful, but they are fun and the people you give them too will actually enjoy them, you know, unlike a business card that usually finds its way to the bin quite quickly.

Took IQ test - found problem

Swizec — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 12:20:21 GMT

Last Friday I went and took a proper IQ test issued by mensa, because I was sick and tired of all those online tests of all weights and sizes telling me how bloody smart I was. Time to find out for real I thought.

The Mensa IQ test deals away with the largest issue IQ tests have in general - that they\'re very knowledge and not very intelligence centric. They demand you know anything from maths to language skills and whatnot. While I do agree that the ability to do maths in one\'s head is a great marker of intelligence, it doesn\'t mean someone not good with numbers isn\'t just as smart, but in a different way. The way Mensa does this is by issuing a test based solely on numbers and pattern recognition, arguably the most cross-platform, if you will, way of finding somebody\'s intelligence.

The test itself seemed surprisingly easy and I even managed to finish ahead of time, how much of what I\'d done was correct and the rank of my IQ remain an issue to be found out after mensa\'s psychologist evaluates the tests and sends out the scores.

There is a very important reason as to why I cannot say that hey, the test was easy, I must\'ve gotten a big score. And that reason is lateral thinking. I\'m not going to brag about being a very huge or very awesome lateral thinker, but that\'s something very difficult to put a value on. How do you know you\'re a lateral thinker and not simply stupid? You can\'t and this is where the image-pattern IQ test fails.

See the thing with patterns is that ok in many cases the pattern is very obvious and pretty much everyone finds the same one. But as soon as you get into very complex transformations different smart people will find different kinds of patterns in the sample set. This could, of course, be solved by giving a sample set larger than eight (for example when I\'m finding a pattern during programming I usually work with sample sets of hundreds). That would introduce a whole bunch of other problems of course, namely the speed factor of processing a large sample set.

All in all, I believe the IQ test I was given to be the best possible compromise, but it has a great potential for giving a wrong score.

My twitter goals

Swizec — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:00:05 GMT

Initially I wanted to write this as a comment to TwiTip.com\'s Twitter goals post, but it grew and grew and felt more like a blogpost of its own.

I use twitter to be a popular twitterer. That\'s the only goal I really have.

But there are hidden goals of course. Like just _what_ comes from being a powerful twitterer? Well there\'s the personal branding thing, everyone\'s doing it right now and it\'s useful for a number of things pretty much everyone knows. Another thing powerful twitterers have is an instant readerbase, have a new project? Announce it on twitter and instantly hundreds of people know about it ... that\'s a very powerful promotion tool.

Last but not least, is the knowledge aspect of being a powerful twitterer. You find out many things, very many things you find out near instantly and a lot of that information is in fact very good, useful information. The old saying goes \"Valuable information is only valuable while it\'s fresh\". Ding ding.

So yeah, twitter goals, I say don\'t go overboard, just go out there and have fun. The rest will follow.

Clean Code and speed coding

Swizec — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 09:21:32 GMT

Some weeks ago I finished reading Clean Code by Robert C. Martin, which is something I may have spoken about already, but I can\'t remember. Well it was an amazingly good read and it instantly changed a lot about the way I code and even the way I think about things. At first a lot of what was mentioned in Clean Code made the optimiser in me cringe and whince. Things like putting conditionals into a separate function and so on.

But later I realised that hey, modern computers are fast enough, some wasteful practices like that aren\'t going to hurt too much and the saved time in development can only do good. See, the thing is that if, for example, you encapsulate conditionals in separate functions you don\'t only achieve greater code readability, you also get the ability to change an important part of algorithm behaviour (when to do something) by changing a single function and the change automatically propagates throughout your code.

I believe that due to my new practices of writing code cleanly I have been able to develop Twitulater as much as I have in the past twelve days. It\'s reached version 0.3 of all things and is fast becoming useful. So far the version update cycle, starting from 0.1, has on average been 2.5 days and that, if you ask me, is quite astounding - especially taking into account this is the first time ever of me developing in Adobe AIR.

The reason developing can be so quick once you acquire clean code practicess is mostly that, as Uncle Bob says, developers spend much more of their time reading code than they do writing it and when that code is super readable it takes much less time to read. Furthermore, due to many of his advice, the code is also much more searchable and better structured so it doesn\'t take as long to find what you\'re looking for - this especially applies to us text editor types who abhor IDE\'s.

There is another reason that I believe is of even greater weight, now that I keep code clean I find that I can write large chunks of code, without testing, and have it working correctly the first time it\'s run. With Twitulater it\'s happened that I wrote a hundred lines of code, ran it, and it just worked, just like that.

Now all that\'s left for me to do is acquire test driven development practices so I can cut my debugging time in half. Oh and if you didn\'t glean from the rest of this post: You want this book.

I are officially kind of smart

Swizec — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:59:41 GMT

Some of you might remember my taking a Mensa approved IQ test about a week ago, well today, finally, results came in and what I found out was surprisingiy similar to what I\'d already known. My IQ seems to be 134, which is supposedly in the top 6% of the human population - not perfect, but good enough I say, I\'ve got objective proof that I\'m smart rather than stupid as I so often feel I am.

But how on earth did I know I\'d get about that result? Online IQ tests to be honest, for some reason I\'ve been nearly obsessed with knowing my IQ for the past few years and have thus solved many online tests. Some better, some worse. The results, accordingly, varied quite a lot, but a clear median shined out from the masses and that was 130-ish.

See, I knew enough not to trust the tests that want to sell me their results, the whole point of those is giving a high score so you\'d be tempted to buy the advanced results. I also knew not to trust the tests that asked for too much knowledge because hey, how am I supposed to know what a friggin\' nickel or dime is?

Lately, however, I\'ve solved the facebook IQ test and found it to be the most accurate of them all and it in fact showed a result quite similar to that of Mensa\'s test. Facebook says my IQ is 143 and given the fact that performance can vary between days, that I took the facebook test in my natural environment, nighttime, and some other factors, I\'d say it\'s a rather accurate way of gleaning one\'s IQ.

History of Everything

Swizec — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:22:38 GMT

History of Everything is a song by The Bare Naked Ladies and has been loved by me for the past two years as the theme song of The Big Bang Theory, the best show on earth, but more on that later. This post can only be done justice by your watching the following video.

The underwear your girlfriend really wants you to wear

Swizec — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:48:36 GMT

Sparkica wrote in a recent blogpost about a sexy man in minimalistic loose underwear. Initially I only shrugged it off as interesting, but then it got me thinking about just how often women talk about men\'s underwear. You\'ll often hear a passing remark here and there, often they\'ll even give comments on your underwear flat out - especially if it\'s \"that kind\" of relationship.

What\'s most interesting to note here is that women seem to like a lot of different underwear as along as it\'s on the right body. They like small and loose, like sparkica, or not so small and tight, because it supposedly makes balls look better, not sure, some even like small and tight. But the majority, like a classmate I recently asked, seem to like regular old boxers best.

This means of course that if you\'re a real man you already have what it takes in your trousers - boxers. Sure your body might not quite make the cut or anything, but at least you can\'t go too wrong with regular boxers, most of them will like it. Strangely enough it\'s a completely different situation with men. We like thongs and other tight, revealing underwear, whereas girls don\'t really like wearing such all that much. Most prefer nice comfortable granny pants, at least when they\'re not in a social situation.

But most of all we must notice that women talk about men\'s underwear not what\'s in it. This tells us that they want you to keep it on, so no matter what you\'re wearing, just remember to keep it on. Nobody likes those pesky one-eyed trouser snakes.

Old at one and twenty

Swizec — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 18:13:20 GMT

It is not long since my twentyfirst birthday anniversary, couldn’t have been longer than a month, and yet I feel, for all intents and purposes, ... old. I know full well I have yet to see the world and there is bound to be someone out there who will disprove all my notions of having seen humanity at both its best and its worst, but nevertheless I cannot bring myself to aknowledge that life has anything more left to offer.

So far in life I have experienced everything from putting all of myself into a project and having it flop all the way to not having put any effort whatsoever and having a raging success. I have gotten jobs far beyond my skill level and exceled, and I have had jobs far below my skill level and fail miserably.

I have had raging blind love, I have had love denied, at this young an age I even managed living a stable love naught can shake to rubble and yes, I have even had love torn from me at such a pace it felt like being ripped to shreds and fed through a cow.

At twelve I considered mysteries of mind and matter that men of fourty never think of, at barely twenty I had been working my career for a decade and now I am bound to a girl I dearly love but cannot stand, whom I cannot live without, but can sometimes not bear to look at. A girl who would walk through fire for me and I for her, the girl who, in all likelihood, will remain at my side for ever. I am starting work on projects of such large a scale men at thirty dare not think of and I am miserable beyond comprehension of men at sixty.

I blunder through life with relentless ease. So much passion I put into everything I touch, so much care and wonder into every thought, so much of myself into every thing I create that all my thoughts, my loves, my babies take a little bit of myself, take a little out of my life and put another nail in my coffin.

If I ever live to see my twentyseventh my life will have been by far too long, I will have been spent beyond belief of ancient men and women. So much passion I put into everything nothing is able to give enough back to sustain me, nothing I ever touch will be enough to make me happy and yet I will be enough to turn every single thing into gold. Deeply vain of me, I know, but so it is, I cannot help it.

You see, I am only twentyone and passion is nearly leaving my breath, I have hardly any more to spend and it is tiring. It makes life feel empty and leaves one wanting.

But there is one thing life does have left to offer, that one single thing I have yet to experience and seems such strong an event it can make or break a man - the death of a lover. And even that feels all too near at times, you poor lover thing, I know I must make you suffer tremendously, even this very letter will most probably make you cry, but you must know dear person, you must know how terribly deep my suffer, how terribly dark my soul and how terribly incapable of making you better I am.

I will spend you my dear, I know it even though you protest, you say I can help, you beg it of me, you go as far as expecting it sometimes. But I am a lordly fool, I have naught to offer but hugs and suffering, you will grow old with me all too soon ... it is a faith I would not wish upon my enemies, the effort of knowing me deeply, and here you are, knowing me deeply and suffering nearly as deeply as myself. I have only so much passion left to spare dear friend, only so much love more to give and what when I die? When my fire is truly extinguished, what then will fill your life, what then will keep you going for we both know you have no passion of your own. You are bound to me, bound to me in pain and suffering and no matter how many rainbows I try and paint over them, one day you will see, truly see, through the mirage that is your Swizec.

I am sorry.

My first weekly photowalk

Swizec — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:54:26 GMT

Today I went on my first photowalk, an activity I promised myself I\'d henceforth partake in at least once a week. First time I came into contact with photowalking was in some retweets by people on twitter that were talking about photowalklist.com and after observing for a while it touched something within me - the photographer I used to be quite some years ago (got my first proper camera at about 4 and then continued dabbling until about 15).

Taking night-time photography of Ljubljana covered in the first snow of 2008 was bloody wonderful, sure I found out I need a tripod, yes I\'m displeased with most of hte photos because they\'re too bright and of course my fingers damn well nearly fell off. But that\'s what photowalking is about, finding out how much you suck so you can improve.

I will be making a photowalk post every week from now on and will include a lovely widget from Fotonauts - a photography sharing website/app that I\'m helping beta test.

Five reasons you should develop in Adobe AIR

Swizec — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 12:38:36 GMT

Some weeks ago I\'ve spoken about clean code and speed coding, that tried to allude to the fact of how writing code that is clean helps you write code quicker and better. Everything focused around Twitulater and how well its development was going, but today I\'d like to give mention of another very important reason development is going so well. Adobe AIR.

AIR is simple

Because Adobe AIR is based on javascript and html everyone with a history of serious web development should be able to pick it right up and start working practically without a learing curve. Design your GUI in html+css and all the logic goes in javascript, even things like jQuery and other javascript frameworks can be near fully utilised to make the transition quite seamless.

Personally the biggest problem I\'ve ever had with desktop development was building the GUI\'s; since I\'m not an IDE kind of guy my life is really made miserable by having to add all the event listeners, positioning items etc. In Adobe AIR I just do it the way I\'m used to.

AIR is multiplatform

Ever developed a really cool application for Linux and then wanted to have it run on Windows? Or maybe you\'re a windows kind of guy, but your public is suddenly starting to switch to better platforms? What do you do?

Well up until now you had to build from scratch, or worse, take great pains in porting your software over to another platform. But Adobe AIR theoretically deals away with all of this. Since all the porting pains are done for you by Adobe so all you have to do is develop your application on a system and there is a big chance it will run everywhere. Sure there might be some issues with certain features, but those can be quickly amended.

One css/js/html implementation to rule them all

The biggest issue us webdevelopers ever encounter are differences between browsers. Everything has a few quirks of its own, be it an odd javascript implementation, a differing DOM object model or even something as simple as miriads of css bugs. To be honest these issues are fast driving me out of webdevelopment because I simply don\'t want to bother anymore and would rather turn to a platform that at least tries to be developer friendly.

Users like AIR

Users in general are quite fond of Adobe AIR and prefer installing apps that run on Adobe AIR than native applications. This is because running a native application always poses a certain level of risk, if you don\'t trust the issuer then they could be doing pretty much anything to your system or maybe they\'re installing a bunch of crap alongside their app. So for small-time developers it\'s much better to work under an umbrella system like AIR.

What this does to users is they can be certain the application won\'t mess with them too much and most of all it\'s easy. Most Adobe AIR applications can be installed automatically right from the browser where the download and installer running are completely transparent to the user. Another reason I believe users prefer AIR to native applications is that most small-time applications look like crap whereas with AIR nearly everything has a decent look to it.

Bigger target audience

Because users love Adobe AIR so much and because there are already so many applications developed for it there is a large target audience for these kind of applications. People want and need a whole bunch of small, quick and painless applications which would be too cumbersome to use if they were native. Think widgets and dashboards and that Vista thing. Why are all of these popular? They enable a simple way of displaying critical information without anything cluttering up the user experience or their taskbar or whatever.

AIR fills that niche rather nicely, so if you have something of the kind to develop then there\'s a big chance your users will already have AIR installed and won\'t think twice about installing yet another such application or they will be lured into the AIR world by its simplicity. Even before I started working on Twitulater I asked my followers if they\'d prefer it to be native or AIR and the response was resoundly in favour of AIR.

So there you have it, five reasons you, as a developer, should use Adobe AIR. Join me in a few days when I will try to find five reasons why not to use it, because every coin has three sides.

Five reasons a developer should avoid Adobe AIR

Swizec — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:32:07 GMT

Last week I spoke about five reasons you should develop in Adobe AIR, which got surprising amount of hits even if there were no comments. I was pleased enough with the response to write the promised second installment of my review - because every coin has three sides.

It\'s javascript

Even though I touted this as the biggest advantage of Adobe AIR it also happens to be its biggest handicap. The reason behind this is that javascript is invariably slow, no matter how fast your computer, no matter how fast Adobe\'s javascript implementation, it\'s still a scripting language - albeit compiled and will thusly run much slower than native code.

This is of course a criticism geared towards all scripting languages, but fact remains that most desktop applications are not written in them. Why do you think things like OpenOffice and other mission critical systems are written in C++? Because it\'s extremely fast and efficient. There is no way of getting something like that out of javascript.

Imperfect abstraction

Adobe toutes AIR as a great, almost perfect, abstraction layer between operating systems that enables developers to painlessly develop for all platforms. But as I\'ve recently found in dveloping Twitulater this is not so. One problem I\'ve found was that on Mac the javascript implementation automatically translates http://user:pass@domain.com uri\'s to proper authentication and does all that\'s needed seamlessly, whereas on Windows (Vista) trying to access such an address produces an error.

That was one very long debugging session before I figure that one out. The solution was telling AIR to ignore authentication and make my custom auth headers - which is dirty if you ask me. AIR should do that seamlessly and without annoying pop-ups.

Oh and on Linux it simply doesn\'t work yet at all, but Adobe are working on it so I remain hopeful.

Mitigating window managers isn\'t easy

Another issue I\'ve found is that there is no simple way to adjust your application for different window managers. You can\'t count on what size scrollbars will be, resizing the window is based upon outer height and width even though window decorations could be covering your content.

This wouldn\'t be a problem if styling Adobe AIR appplications was done in a similar way native applications are, where you can just position the elements and the window manager takes care of the rest. Because you\'re constrained to html you have no access to the window manager\'s settings. You\'re as constrained as if you were developing a website.

Tacky interfaces and flawed integration

Because developing with Adobe AIR is much like creating a website a big issue crops up. You can\'t make your application look like the rest of what the user is seeing. Whatever you create will invariably stick out of the user\'s desktop like a pack of wolves amongst three sheep. If users weren\'t picky this, of course, woudln\'t be a problem at all, but as we all know users are more and more concerned with how things look and less with how they work.

Or has it been like that all the time? Whatever it is, there are bound to be users out there who will refuse using your application just because it doesn\'t integrate well with their overall user experience and you, as a developer, will feel dirty for it.

Only for widgets

Adobe AIR is a powerful widget framework, perhaps the best I\'ve had the pleasure of working with. But that\'s all it\'s for and everyone trying to build proper applications should opt for something a bit (or a lot) more powerful.

Lately I\'ve seen different kinds of important applications like Klok for time managment and some lovely thing De Monsters are making built and create on Adobe AIR. While this might be nice and lovely for the time being, I don\'t think it will really survive. They will hit a glass ceiling when trying to improve their product and at some point will be forced to completely remake it. In that light Adobe AIR could be seen as a great prototyping tool for important apps, but I fear many developers aren\'t realising that.

Conclusion

Let me conclude by saying that Adobe AIR is a wonderful compromise, but it should never be confused with being anything more than a good compromise between simplicity and speed of development and functionally and user experience. You get a quicker development cycle with a shallow learning curve, but sacrifice integration and efficiency.

How to drive a 800% traffic spike to your blog

Swizec — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:19:22 GMT

This is a small howto aimed at small blogs, really small blogs when looked at globally, who would like to feel the love. So I decided to share what I learned from having recently driven a 840% traffic spike to my blog with a single entry and increased comment count from zero to 10. I know the comment bit isn\'t much, and I do realise that traffic spikes aren\'t exactly the kind of traffic people want, but hey, if you can get 10% of those people to become constant readers that\'s still nice. If I manage that I will some day write a blog about how to do it.

If you\'d like to wake up to a graph like that, keep reading, but beware if your traffic is already high this might not work and if it does will bring your server to its knees.

Catch the latest buzz

This is probably the single most effective way of getting a lot of readers to read your stuff. If you follow the right kind of people on twitter and in general keep up with the web you will soon find that there is a buzz about something, then it dies away. You want to write something about the buzz in the middle of it.

When something is buzzing people want to read as much as they can about it, they want the information. This is something newspapers have thrived on since the dawn of time, their whole business model is catching the latest buzz and adding in their own two worthless cents. It doesn\'t matter if you write something of value, it doesn\'t even matter if it\'s good, people will read it.

Be opposite

This is perhaps the most surprising thing I\'ve learnt. When I wrote about what Adobe AIR is good for the traffic spike was 150 people and there was a single comment. When I wrote about what it isn\'t good for there were 400 readers over two days and more than 10 comments, that\'s a THOUSAND percent more comments.

Obviously when you\'re writing about something people in general hate you should write some positive things about it. The reason I believe traffic works this way is that people are more interested in reading something that goes against everything else they read or they just see the title and go \"Meh, more of the same\". This also might be why conspiracy theories are so succesful, people give more value to anything that doesn\'t follow the herd, but still manages to make a good point.

Make a good point

Whatever you write about, it\'s paramount that your blog makes a good point. Don\'t just sputter idiocy, but make an effort to write something people will connect to and will want to give others to read. If a reader comes in, reads your blog, and thinks they\'ve wasted their time they won\'t tell others to read it. But if you create something of value they\'ll want to tell their friends and whomever.

Digg it

Digg is something I\'ve always been neglecting as a silly thing that isn\'t really good for anything. But it\'s surprising to notice just what kind of power it has - even just being dugg 10 times will increase your traffic by a hundred people ... and to many of us that\'s a lot. On a similar note you should probably also tweet a link to your post and if it\'s any good it will get retweeted and go at least a little bit viral.

Conclusion

Perhaps to many successful bloggers out there all of this seems a little straightforward and even silly, but there are a lot of blogs out there who fail at these simple things. The biggest issue many bloggers seem to fail on is being relevant and interesting, they don\'t take blogging seriously you might say.

So if you want that traffic spike now and anon and would like to feel the love, follow these rules and perhaps if you follow them regularly enough those traffic spikes will come so frequently nobody will dare calling them spikes anymore.

Photowalk #2

Swizec — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:50:39 GMT

Last week I took my first photowalk and was instantly hooked. Well, today I managed taking another one and have incorporated many of the lessons I learned last time - namely not to overexpose so much if I want to retain some semblance of night-time and since I still don\'t have a tripod I tried resting the camera on anything I could find rather than pretend I was superman.

Christmas decoration Ljubljana was lovely, I\'ve always loved walking in decorated cities, but Ljubljana takes the cake. I believe we\'re the only city in the world with sperm and DNA as christmas decorations ... anyway, this year we have a new mayor and I\'ve noticed a great improvement. Instead of just a single street being full of money wasters we now have that same street, plus two squares and another street full of money wasters and party time. This is mostly benefactory to those of us who don\'t like very tight crowds and the people now spread over a larger area. Also the classical music that used to only play on one street - the oldest in Ljubljana - now plays in the whole strict city center.

Here are the photos, hope you enjoy them.

Human rights day and why it shouldn\'t exist

Swizec — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 13:30:48 GMT

Today, as many of you probably know, is Human Rights Day. Personally I didn\'t know until I happened upon one @anca_foster and her One Day For Human Rights campaign on twitter. At least I think it\'s a campaign, maybe it\'s more of a marketing scheme for an already universally accepted day - I\'m too cynical to ever have managed reading what it\'s about, but I did sign the petition, because I believe in sticking it to The Man even if I don\'t believe in human rights.

The problem with human rights is that they do not exist. I\'ll say it again: There is NO such thing as basic human rights! See there is a subtle distinction between what most of us understand basic rights to be and what they actually are. Most proponents of human rights seem to believe that they\'re universal even though they\'re far from being universal. Firstly even though we have a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that\'s supposed to ensure the same basic rights for everyone. But upon closer inspection you\'ll notice it was only accepted by the United Nations. Now, even though that might seem universal to us western people but to be honest Slovenia, for example, was only accepted into the UN some years ago (within my lifetime) and most of the world still isn\'t part of it.

What this means is that whatever country isn\'t a part of United Nations is not legally obliged to uphold basic human rights. Let\'s not even get into the whole discussion of a country not necessarily being a nation right now. Furthermore, even the countries within the UN don\'t give their citizens the same kind of basic rights. Each declaration is different in many subtle and less subtle ways. Just for an example, in the US the right to bear arms is a \"basic human right\" whereas nowhere in Europe does anything like it exist.

Ok, so basic human rights aren\'t the same anywhere and thus are in no way universal - let me mention at this point that even if the whole world would agree upon the same basic rights they still wouldn\'t be universal because we have no way of knowing what other sentient beings might there be in the universe and what THEIR basic \"human\" rights are.

Notice I mentioned \"agreed upon rights\", but when people hear the words \"basic human rights\" they don\'t think of something that\'s agreed upon. They see it as coming from an outside source, they\'ll either say \"they just are\" or eventually, after enough pressure, will go to the last argument of an idiocy sputtering man of \"Well they come from god, they\'re god given rights\" (yes I stole this bit from George Carlin). Well if this so called god were the one giving rights, everyone would get the same and most of all, they wouldn\'t differ religion to religion, let alone civilisation to civilisation. They don\'t come from god, nor are they universal, the only thing these \"rights\" are, is an agreed upon set of privileges a certain society decides to give its members in order to sustain relative peace and ensure functioning as a society. They\'re, so to say, rules and even then they\'re more actual guidelines than rules. Laws try to amend this problem by enforcing actual rules.

But my biggest problem with \"rights\" is the amount of wars started in their name. You\'ll notice a leader or two, or even a whole civilisation, every few decades decrying a neighbouring country as \"OH NOES, THEY DON\'T RESPECT BASIC RIGHTS\" and suddenly, out of nowhere, attack that country and attempt to \"civilize\" those people. Stop it.

And all you new age activists are no better, you\'re all enforcing your will and opinion upon others with your senseless activistic endeavours. Far as us westerners go, don\'t we have a so called \"right to one\'s own opinion\", so why do we waltz in so many other countries and cultures, like say the African cultures, and try to teach them what to think and how to act? Don\'t THEY have a right to have THEIR OWN set of rights (call it an opinion if that makes it easier)?

So please everybody, before you make another big fuss out of something that doesn\'t really exist, think about what you\'re actually doing and let people have a culture where everyone has the right to rape anyone in the streets.

What does The Picture of Dorian Gray mean

Swizec — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 12:24:27 GMT

Recently, quite very recently, yesterday in fact, I finished reading The Picture of Dorian Gray by dear old Oscar. Yes, how very shameful of me to have only read it now, but if it makes you feel any better I did read an excerpt once in school a few years ago. Just never quite got to reading the whole thing until I bought Oscar\'s complete works a few weeks ago.

Having read the book and somewhat understood the story, I can\'t seem to quite figure out what it was about. Oh I know what it talked about. Seeming as how it\'s real art, however, there\'s supposed to be a meaning to it. Something it was about.

At first I thought it was a sort of guide on corrupting young souls through paradox and too great an insight into the intricacies of life. This was inspired by Henry Wotton\'s corruption of Dorian Gray and I should say throughout the story I identified a lot with Harry. What does that say about me? Probably nothing, perhaps a lot. What\'s more interesting is that when Dorian became a more important part of the story and Henry was just mentioned sporadically my opinion of what the book is about changed. Now it was Dorian that corrupted others, in fact he corrupted them even more than Harry ever did because he could hide his evil under the mask of youth. Interesting isn\'t it? Corruption is greater when coming whence we don\'t expect it.

So perhaps the book was a poltical comentary? There is so much corruption everywhere around us these days, but most simply fail to notice it because it comes under the guise of good ... Anyhow, that\'s probably not what the book is about. My final idea is that it was about the burden of guilt. Dorian, because of his looks, can do much more bad in his life than any normal person ever could. But it also means he is never physically or otherwise burdened by his actions, it is only his intellect that suffers. See, when normal people do something bad it shows in their face, others notice, others help carry part of the burden by, for example, moralising and nagging at you.

But for Dorian nobody could help cary the guilt, nobody even believed he was capable of anything bad and it eventually got to him. He could no longer suffer nobody believing in his true nature (that\'s quite a burden to cary I believe) and killed the picture - the image of his guilt I think was what he called it.

Therefore, I believe the underlying story of The Picture of Dorian Gray to be that guilt is much harder on an individual when nobody is around to burden you with it.

What does The Picture of Dorian Gray mean

Swizec — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 12:24:47 GMT

Therefore, I believe the underlying story of The Picture of Dorian Gray to be that guilt is much harder on an individual when nobody is around to burden you with it.

What does The Picture of Dorian Gray mean

Swizec — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 12:25:21 GMT

Therefore, I believe the underlying story of The Picture of Dorian Gray to be that guilt is much harder on an individual when nobody is around to burden you with it.

Klok - the missing PIM application

Swizec — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 22:20:14 GMT

For the past few weeks I\'ve been giving Klok a spin. Last time I\'ve mentioned Klok it was just after a quick install and neglect, but I did always intend on giving it a try. Then when its creator Rob McKeown commented on the post I knew there was no escaping giving Klok a try. So I started using it full-time to track my time, however odd that comes out when one says it.

Klok is a time tracking system rather than a time managing system. What this mean is you feed in a bunch of different projects then when you\'re working on one you just tell klok about it. The great thing about this is that it enables you to easily track how much time you\'ve spent on a project and the fact it also makes automatic time sheets shoudl be a bonus for anyone who\'s ever worked as a freelancer or has otherwise been engaged in multiple projects at a time.

The biggest advantage Klok has brought to my life is that I find it easier to \"just get to it\" rather than procrastinate until a full hour or whatnot. This is because before klok I used to procrastinate until such an hour as it was easier to track time from because I\'m usually paid on an hourly basis and need to know how much time I\'ve spent with something. Since klok tracks the time for me I can now give accurate hour reports even if I work 20 minutes now, 34 later, 12 even later. Of course you have to learn to always punch in to the application, but hey, sure beats having to manually calculate amount of time spent working on something. Especially since I usually forget all about time when I get into something intersting.

Another feature I love is cost calculation. You can specify cost per hour for any given projects and klok will automatically tell you how much money you\'ve earned or spent. This comes in extremely handy when you\'re developing something for yourself, but would like to give it an objective value when somebody asks.

It\'s also very nice that klok supports sub projects. The way I use this is to have \"projects\" that are actual different clients and then having subprojects for everything that I do. However I find the lack of telling klok what I\'m doing to be a large fault. There are many situations when I need to have a list of things I did for a certain project, but it would be a waste of time and resources to have every little thing listed as a subproject.

Another thing that bothers me is how slow Klok is. I understand using a beta version brings certain problems to the table, but I\'m only using it because the latest stable version is so stale it doesn\'t even allow right-clicking and is overall useless. The beta, although functioning wonderfully, needs a lot of polish.

For example when I first open klok and want to immediately start working on something I sometimes have to wait up to a minute for klok to start responding again. Then sometimes different projects in the week view (inspired by iCal I believe) show without labels so I can\'t even tell what they are. The fact that resizing the application window is encumbered by the fact klok\'s interface has to reposition itself is also a big ew. Then there\'s other little things like not being able to change project\'s colour even though the interface is there ... oh well, it\'s beta what did I expect.

Over all, Klok is a wonderful piece of software that I would advise everyone and their dog to use. Hopefully Rob will take care of the bugs and make something truly magnificent.

Oh and I love the design, very shiny.

iFart is making me want an iPhone

Swizec — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:56:02 GMT

Today I came across iFart on twitter via @styletime and it\'s made me want an iPhone. Let\'s set aside the fact I\'ve wanted one for a while because any reason I wanted it wasn\'t nearly as cool as this nor as big of an incentive to spend too much money on a telephone.

But iFart changed things. It is a perfectly admirable piece of technology that enables your telephone to fart whenever you want. You can make iFart fart right away or perhaps you want to do it with a timer - this could be used to time tea brewing in a somewhat disgusting manner. And the piece de la resistance - security iFart! Just set your iPhone down somewhere, leave it alone, and the moment somebody moves it the damn thing starts farting at full blast, leaving you with an easy way to catch somebody red handed with their fat sticky fingers all over that shiny touch-screen of yours.

Let the video tell you more.

Ljubljana Kabaret vs. London Cabaret

Swizec — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:12:39 GMT

Last night I went to see Kabaret at MGL with the girlfriend (who desperately needs a proper blog for me to link to in such cases) and naturally, having seen the London version, I had to compare it to what I\'d seen with Peaches (who also needs a blog) a bit over a year ago in London.

First let me say that both shows were very much fun and not only because I love anything theatre more than many other things. Both had wonderful actors and wonderful music and everything else wonderful. Kabaret is by far the best play/musicle I\'ve ever had the pleasure of seeing in a slovene playhouse and, sadly, is the only such I\'ve ever seen in a foreign playhouse. But whatever, rules of the internets say I\'m an expert after seeing something once.

The biggest difference I noticed is that Kabaret replaced front-row with proper actors and had a set of six patrons embedded into the stage with a table and chairs and everything else to make it look like a proper kabaret. Mostly they just sat there in costume, but at certain points of the musical they partook in the acting. Which is both a stroke of genius and a shame. A stroke of genius because it really brought out the idea that we\'re not looking at something that\'s supposed to be real, but at something that is in fact a depiction of something acted. But the sad part is that now front-row people didn\'t get the handshake from the lead like I did in London.

Another striking difference is that in Kabaret the backup dancers were actually females, and one really hot one at that, whereas in Cabaret they were men. I feel MGL dropped the ball with this move because they went too far into realism. Maybe it\'s a misinterpretation on my part, but I understood the musical to be a humorous depiction of 1930\'s Berlin and mostly that all modern cabaret is a satirisation of real cabaret. In fact, in no other cabaret, video or real, except in Slovene Kabaret, have I seen the girls to be depicted by anything other than funny men. Guess I had more to look at in MGL, but having men do the female roles (except Sally Bowles) would be funnier and more entertaining.

Other than those two differences I really couldn\'t find anything that would strike me as odd or too different, even the translations of all the songs were quite nearly perfect even though I noticed they screwed up the meaning on a few points to help the sound. But no biggie, it was lovely hearing the songs in Slovene and I am still quite impressed by the whole musical\'s mixing of different languages. Quite fun.

Seven christmas truths

Swizec — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 13:46:17 GMT

Was going to write a post about anything, pour out some thoughts for you, one of my boring essays that for some reason you all keep reading, yes both of you. But since, given my current mood, that would instill too much fear and spoil someone\'s holidays I\'ve decided just to play the tag game of spouting seven truths about oneself. Sparkica tagged me, now I feel so included and recognised it\'s almost heartwarming.

I find miss piggy extremely sexy, always have, always will. For some reason this extends to real girls, just keep them round and juicy, I need something to hug comfortably without fear of breaking myself on a bone.
I often go out of my way to say something in such a manner as to allow for it to become a quote later on. Most of the time they won\'t become quotes, but it\'s a valiant effort.
Political correctness is bullshit. Nobody cares people and you should understand that any time you do something politically correct it just makes the rest of us laugh.
I severely dislike people who get hung up on petty and frivolous crap all the time. Sadly this means I also hate most women because it often seems they don\'t do much else than get hung up on petty frviolous crap and in silly ways nontheless.
Emos ... don\'t even get me started, you guys ruined perfectly good music with your stupid behaviour and clothes so that now we can\'t listen to it just because it\'s emo. Fuck you.
I hate that at times I\'m still too teenagery and care about something being emo or not. Why should I care? All that matters is whether I like it or not. Bah, stupid silly person.
I wear only black not because it\'s such an awesome colour, not becuase it\'s simple and neither because it\'s slimming. I wear it because according to traditional colour theory black staves off evil and protects a person from bad crap. Sadly some people don\'t know this and continue to throw bad crap my way despite my clothes.

So there you have it, seven truths about myself and now I\'m supposed to list seven other bloggers, but here\'s the catch. I don\'t really know seven other bloggers who aren\'t niche specific, but follow the slovene convention of blogs being personal nonsense sputtering places. So here\'s a list of what I can think of: had, rat on crack, robert basic, dr. onyx and fuck, that\'s it.

No wonder I have so few readers! I\'m not doing much reading myself, crud.

In year 2009 I will ...

Swizec — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 14:53:20 GMT

New year\'s resolutions are a fairly popular phenomenae right about now and since I can\'t remember ever making any and probably even if I had done them I forgot since they weren\'t written down, I\'ve decided to once for a change give you a normal blogpost. I will write down my very own new year\'s resolutions without cynicism, without criticising others for making them, without even calling the population at large stupid for taking this time out of the year to make ground breaking decisions instead of revising their daily lives on a daily basis. No, that will come tomorrow or the day after that. Perhaps.

So, in year 2009 I will ...

... do my best to achieve the target weight I\'ve set for myself quite some time ago and haven\'t managed to achieve. Despite what you might be thinking this isn\'t about losing weight, I would like to put on ten more kilograms, but of muscle rather than fat. Fat is too easy.

... do everything in my power to make the next few steps to becoming filthy rich. No silly \"oooh rich people be dumb because they take our money durr\" from me, no, I will be rich. Rather sooner than later.

... do everything I can to make Twitulater the next best thing since sliced bread and at the very least as popular as TweetDeck. So far it\'s looking promising, mustn\'t fuck up now.

... buy a beemer because I\'ve promised mum I\'d save up for a vehicle and buy one instead of paying rent at home. But I\'d also promised myself my first bought car would be a beemer. Saving up looking promising so far.

... become even more cynical and convoluted than I was so far. Why? Because I love fucking with people and there is no better way to fuck with them than not caring about most of the things you say and being completely reliant on your ability to repair any damage your words do.

... buy a cane because I\'ve wanted one for ages.

... finish first year of uni. I have to, I must stop being so stupid about this whole thing and even though I don\'t believe in formal education, the rest of the world does and if I ever want to have a backup plan in case all my become-filthy-rich schemes fail I need to have some sort of formal degree.

... try my best to screw with my girlfriend and learn as much as I can about the female psyche from her.

... not push my mental experiments on the girlfriend so far as to damager her or our relationship.

That\'s it for now I think, have a lot of work to do next year, best get cracking right away.

And so it ends

Swizec — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 21:01:27 GMT

For the first day of 2009 I\'ve decided to have a proper holiday for once. Unlike the rest of this extraordinarily long holiday season lasting a full 14 days when I have been or, as it is, still will be busy with a bunch of projects that have insane deadlines during or right after the season, today I haven\'t done any work whatsoever.

So all I did today was have an extremely long lay in with my girlfriend, in fact, we got up only two hours after having woken up and that felt insanely good. No idea why we don\'t do it more often because she\'s the utmost divine squeeze. Dear girlfriend, why don\'t we have lay ins more often, not like we have anything much to do early in the mornings on weekends?

Last night was quite fun as well I might add while I\'m digresing like that. Was a tad cold though and the crowd we were with, most of them I\'d only just met the previous day or at best this week. Shocking, I know. Not usualy that kind of guy, but hey, need to be a proper student now and anon right?

Anyhow, the rest of what I did today was play with my new chess set. To be honest I can\'t even remember how long it\'s been since I first wanted a proper chess set with figures large enough not to make you squint and a nice wooden board that goes tock when you set a piece down. Seriously, whomever invented plastic chess pieces coupled with cardboard boards should be guilliotined.

But since all good things must come to an end I will now have to get back to work and try finishing something today that should\'ve been finished yesterday but alas, wasn\'t. And oh joy, if I finish it tonight then I have a full three days to do the massive cursework assignment by next week, but at least that\'s much more fun seeming as how I\'ve found a way to work on my personal project as cursework. Yay.

Please take care to look at the two sexy photos accompanying this post. They are quite awesome.

Why being creative sucks

Swizec — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 11:56:56 GMT

Creativity is rather awesome, I\'m certain we can all agree to that. Creativity drives the world forward, it opens our eyes to new scientific discoveries that sometimes help improve our lives, but mostly just make it more difficult for the average joe to understand. Hell, creativity even opens our eyes to new artistic discoveries, even though I don\'t think much progress has been made on that front in the past century, regression even, but we\'re picking up from even that in this new millenia that\'s slowly getting old so much we might even stop calling it new.

But creativity has a dark side, a very brooding, very dark, very difficult side, a side that is almost unbearable, a side that gives \"come to the dark side we have cookies\" a whole new meaning, a side that ... oh shut the fuck up, you get the picture right? It\'s a very dark side.

Everybody creative, for the sake of argument I include myself in this crowd, will probably agree with me when I say that the biggest problem with creativity is the creativity itself. Anythign and everything constantly makes a creative\'s mind give birth to new wonderful ideas,w hich all seem spectacular and awesome at the time. But when push comes to shove, you suddenly realise you\'re already working on so many ideas you couldn\'t possibly start working on another one. So you shelve it.

Once you have time for this wonderful idea, which might be ten minutes later or ten years later, you suddenly realise it\'s turned cold and damp, very boring, moronic and even, dare I say, mediocre. In short, most of the ideas we come up with never get realised, never come to life and, quite simply, if someone less creative came upon one of them they would cherish and nurture the poor thing until it became ... something.

So if you think you\'re creative, slow the fuck down, write down everything you come up with no matter how small, and as soon as you find somebody uncreative give them some of your shelved ideas you\'ll never have time to get to. Perhaps we can make the world a better place one uncreative person at a time.

When you can\'t algorithm, photowalk

Swizec — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 19:26:56 GMT

Today I had a rather frustrating time with some algorithms that were later surprisingly easy to conquer but hey, guess I was stuck and needed a break so I decided to say FUCK YOU to the algorithm and go for a photowalk. It was rather lovely being out there on the snow although when I got to the nearest hill\'s top the air was strangely foul and stank of smoke. Interestingly enough at ground level it\'s very nice air ...

For the record, I do realise I once promised photowalking on a weekly basis, but I just can\'t seem to manage that for some reason, must be all that silly work that tends to pile up and the shortnes of days. Pictures are much nicer when taken in well-lit conditions you know.