Monday May 27

Warning, Yellow, Stone

Thursday May 16

Sunday May 12

Red, Green, Blue

Friday May 3

Reading Binge

Recently I've been on a bit of a bender - it seems like I go ages without getting enough reading in, work-related or otherwise, only to eventually overcompensate by burying my nose in 5,000 pages or so.

Ava by Carol Maso is a gorgeous, subtle, 300 page poem, each line a fragment of a memory of a woman dying of a rare blood disorder. Snippets of conversations, confessions, books read, pillow talk - each line is a document circumscribing a life led. I plucked this at random from the library shelves, and fell for the blurb.

Elyse Friedman's Then Again is a dry, funny, heartbreaker of a book. I'm a sucker for hip Can Lit, and this was the first book I've read in ages that prompted me to write fan mail to the author. It's a weird little story about growing up in the late 70's and 80's, and a deeply strange sibling relationship which eerily echoes my own. I "got" every pop culture reference with frighteningly vivid recollection, and the ending has the razor sharp ironic calm reminiscent of a Doug Copeland novel. Great book.

Hellmouths Of Bewdley, Tony Burgess. A creepy little novella of related short short stories, describing a tiny resort town in Ontario gone horribly, horribly wrong. One of the best depictions of bleeding to death ever.

Now here's the spooky part: Hell Screens by Alvin Lu is a Chinese ghost story as though coceived by William Burroughs. The book itself is distubing enough, but the Twilight Zone of it is, as soon as I'd read the last page, I read the blurb on the back - by Carol Maso, the author I mentioned above. Two books plucked at random at completely different sections of the library - different genres even - and this obscure literary connection on which I unconsciously acted.

The only work reading I've done is Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House, a scathing critique of modern architecture. This is background info for a course I'm teaching this summer on the history of design.

For some reason I've been thinking about a long ago reading bender, the summer of 1986. I had a thing for South American authors, and I remember in a single weekend chewing through Pen Sword and Camisole by Jorge Amado, No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits. These, and Nin's Diaries of Mexico, coloured my imaginings and no doubt my recollections of my travels in Mexico and Brasil.

Thusday April 25

We have what amounts to a new family member. An adolescent female raccoon, intensely curious, clever, and beautiful. I watch and learn from her. She's made absolute peace with the cats, who trot out to meet her and they sniff each other politely.

Apparently there was an otter in the neighbour's yard last week, and at night I can here the barking of the coyotes along the train tracks to the south. I love that random shock of wilderness - raccoons and squirels in the middle of a skyscraping city of glass with 2 million people.

Friday April 19

The significance, like any film noir or dime store detective novel, is in the waking. I woke up next to my lover, in my home, on a slightly overcast morning in April. My children asleep in their rooms. I can see the light dappled on the ceiling. Which, as I've said, is significant.

Twenty years ago today I died, briefly, for four minutes, in Lions Gate Hospital. I was 15, and suffering from a form of meningitis. My brainstem became swollen and crushed the brain against the skull. I was rushed to hospital, stopped breathing, and flatlined. I came out of a "shallow" coma ten days later, largely paralyzed and mostly blind. So the fact that I woke up this morning, 20 years on, is something of a miracle. That I have a family and friends and books and wine and parties and a passport and a good kitchen repertoire is pretty damned impressive, too.

On the skin on my back is a tattoo of an ankh, the ancient egyptian symbol for eternal life.

Friday April 12

Starfucker: For the first time, more "Hollywood" movies are produced in Vancouver than in Hollywood. Sunset beach is dominated by John Travolta's tree-on-the-patio condo, and Goldie Hawn just bought a place in Shaugnessy and is routinely seen jogging about town. I hear Alex Trebek even moved here. Vancouver: It's not just for X-Files anymore! Well, not even, I guess.

About twice a week you run into the trucks - big snaking cables, bored overpaid locals in ball caps, heavy walkie-talkies and reflective vests - I don't think there's a little old lady in the lower mainland who doesn't know what a "hot set" is. Everybody's an extra, either on purpose or by accident.

So here's a few people I've run into in the last six months; Billy Dee "Lando Calrissian" Williams (filming), Bruce "Lone Gunman" Hardwood (library), The PCS overcoat guy from the commercials (elevator), Douglas Copeland (Art Gallery), Bif Naked (parking) - um, I'm sure I remembered others when I started writing this. Alas, no ex-locals Carrie Anne Moss, Jennifer Tilly, or Gillian Anderson.

The cornerstore-cum-Italian-deli here in Chinese-Victorian Strathcona is Benny's, something of an institution. Apparently Kissed's Molly Parker used to live upstairs, and the film's director, Lynn Stopkewich, lives across the street.

All this musing was prompted by an article in WIRED about an incident in which Moby, escorted past the velvet ropes in some LA club, is enjoying a Bud when a pack of P DIddy thugs elbow him out of the way while Coombs is escorted to the VIP lounge. Celebrity is a plague, a mutagen, a vile curse on our generation.

Gimme.

Tuesday April 9

The other morning I woke up with a song in my head, which I mistakenly took for a Smokey Robinson track. The song was "Just the Two of Us" which a little web research shows to be a Bill Withers tune, but I didn't know that at the time. The song is early 80's psychic debris: mall music. The really surprising thing is that I know all the words.

So there I am lying in bed appalled that I know they lyrics to this alleged "Smokey" tune, and I start thinking of others. I come up with about four or five, and realize to my horror that I know every line of these, too. Oh my god, I thought, turns out I'm a huge Smokey Robinson fan, a secret so twisted I've managed to hide it even from my self.

So I spin the psychic radio dial a few notches and come up with other "It's 1982 and Motown is dead but these guys keep making records" tunes, most notably the Manhattans' "Shining Star" and Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing". Lyrics aplenty. So not only am I a closet Smokey, for years I've been a closet Gaye.

I need a support group. We'll all wear white suits and groove to Reverend Al and Barry White and drink Pina Coladas and fall for lip-glossed big-hair girls in backless lame. Remember, the first step is admitting you have a problem.

Tuesday April 2

Re-reading Erik Davis' Techgnosis. It's an amazing exploration of the idea that, as a species, we have a shamanic reflex: a desire to see the world around us as animate and malleable. This is the root cause of our tendancies towards the mystic, the magical. The book argues that those of us who spend much of our time online exist within this Hermetic (literally of the god Hermes, trickster and messenger of the gods) world carved out of living information. Virtual reality as an alchemical pursuit. When I developed the New Media Arts Program for Pacific College I made this the ultimate extra-cred book. Good chewy stuff.

After this I'm looking for a copy of Baudrillard's Simulation and Simulacra - I've read a number of reviews and excerpts and ready for the real thing, if I can find a copy. It's pretty damned obscure.

Monday April 1

Lots of talk about web usability lately, with all the experts wrong. I love it when that happens. It makes me feel like Frank Lloyd Wright - all obstinate and superior. The expert argument (and don't get me wrong, I have enormous respect for the Jakob Nielsen's of the world) is that the web is an information medium, dominated by text, and needs to be accessible to the widest possible audience. The essence of the web, they argue, is in the natural desire of information to be dissemenated, flowing and free. Therefore only by reaching the theoretical everybody (with a lynx browser and a 28.8 modem) are you really using the medium correctly.

I would agree that 99% of Flash is a waste of time - only very rarely does it make sense to use it as a technology at all, and then sparingly, to provide navigational feedback. There's a good Guide to Flash Usability here.

My argument (and the reason why I'm right and the experts are wrong) is that the web is primarily (but not exclusively) a narrow-channel, visual medium. By this I mean if I'm selling socks, I only want to communicate to sock-buyers. Not even sock wearers, necessarily. If I'm building a site for elementary school kids to learn about dinosaurs, I'm going to use the highly visual language unique to that audience, and yes - I'm aware that visually or cognitively impaired kids are going to have a hard time with that. Does that make me a bastard, or just a good communicator?

What I'm advocating is (where appropriate) a text link at the top of every page where you care if even a small percentage of your audience is missing out. You can use HTML 1.0 for this page, with ALT tags aplenty. I've done this a lot in the past, but not so much in recent years when corporate communications has been my bread and butter, and to be honest my clients couldn't care less if a fractional 1% of their audience was blind and annoyed. Let me be clear - if I was building a policy site or government info site or a community centre site I'd make damn sure that it worked at 640 x 480 in 8 bit over a 28.8 in a text browser. And the growing ubiquity of cell phone and PDA browsers make this increasingly important. But an antique auction or a fashion catalogue? A picture's worth a thousand ASCII characters.

It's the visually impaired who are most ripped off by the web, to be sure. But the blind are not idiots. They take sighted friends with them shopping, and they take sighted friends online. The deaf have a gazillion year head-start on the rest of us when it comes to communicating over distance via digital text. Many with cognitive problems or dyslexia PREFER a visual or iconic approach to presentation. I and many designers like me simply ignore outdated usability rules that dictate the use of tables for visual formatting. The problems of the visually impaired on the web can be worked around by technology (a meta tag offering a WAP or HTML 1.0 alternative site, and a sniffer in the code to see if the text browser or cellphone browser wants it) but there is zero need to shackle the web with static, visually uninteresting sites. There's enough of them out there already.

Sunday April 31

What if everything was a server?

I've been thinking a lot about this since 1989, when I first discovered the Internet, Unix (as a NeXT developer - an OS I'm happy to see reincarnate on my laptop as OS X as I write this) and network computing in general. This was at the end of a decade dominated by the liberating idea of the personal computer - cheap, powerful, human scale beasties that were customizable to the needs of ONE individual user via off-the-rack software - no programming required other than macros and the occasional batch file.

1989 was the year the servers struck back (coincidentally it was also the year I first learned about the Y2K problem, in a The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll). IBM, Sun, HP, all ran seminars across the country touting how PC's made great "dumb terminals" in a model where "client-server computing" would dominate the coming commercial Internet. And they were largely right. But there was a "moral" argument to be made, and it's largely a matter of perspective. My own experience with relayed networks had been limited to BBSs, and FidoNet in particular. You joined the network, and at midnight or 3 am or whenever it was your turn("mail hour" in your zone), your machine dialed in to your neighbour's machine (or close enough, usually within 100 km geographically, but not always) and got your big package of files, news, and mail, and kept it on your massive 10 megabyte hard drive until somebody dialed in and asked for it. Chunks of data lurched around the planet that way for years, PC to PC.

I saw the Internet as a "grown up" version of that. After all, wasn't every IP as important (to the network) as any other? Wasn't a packet a packet? Didn't my Mac II have the same power and abiliies as the sexy Sun pizzaboxes aimed at corporate clients with 20 times my budget? Wasn't it just a matter of time before some handheld ruggedized wireless cellphone-pager-pocket-calculator went to go toe-to-toe with a mainframe? It took me a long time to realize how heretical this basic outlook was, even though it was shared by hackers, technovangelists, and others.

Part of the big boys' (IBM et al) argument was that their servers had more computing power RAM storage bandwidth than you did on your desk. Sure, I agreed, but for how long? And I keep asking that question. As we approach the various Holy Grails of data processing - molecular or optical computing, blue light lasers - and everybody has an exabyte of EVERYTHING scratched into their thumbnail (every movie ever made, every book ever written in every language, every spectral analysis of every known galaxy and every pirated mp3 ever) - isn't everything a server?

It seemed to me that we should be exploring and tinkering with models that reflected this free-floating soup of processes and objects, rather than just enshrine clearly outdated models of "time sharing on steroids" (thin client my ass). The Newton explored this soup model as an operating system (and beautifully, if commercially unsuccessful), and JINI takes this to the network arena. But shouldn't we be doing more to pioneer what will undoubtedly be the dominant model of how digital citizens interact with their informational lives in the next decade or so? I have this sneaking suspicion (I'm a Gnostic, therefore by nature I'm optimistically paranoid) that beneath the plastic cowlings of the XBox, the PS2, the GameCube, there's some port-and-processor combo sleeping under all the polygons that makes your remote and your Palm pilot and your microwave and the GPS in your car all hum the same tune. So the next time you whip out your cell phone or check your mail on your Blackberry, ask yourself if it wasn't time already that these things stopped having to ask permission from some distant box somewhere to do what you bought them for.

Friday March 29

Yes, it's a Hello Kitty Vibrator. I speak a lot about the fusion of pop culture and intimate personal relationships with technology. I used to use the Tamagotchi as pretty much the ultimate metaphor (a mid-90's pop gadget that existed only for the user to interact with and grow fond of it) but I think this knocks that out of the park. Regardless, Kitty's got nothin' on Vooz's Pucca Funny Love.

Thursday March 28

Long story short: About a km from my house is a beautiful 1912 brick building with a gorgeous cuppola - the Sun Tower. You might have seen it cast as The Crow's hideout on tv. Anyway I've wanted to go up there for some time, and as I was walking downtown yesterday I had the opportunity to breeze past security like I owned the place and push the button to the 17th floor, in hopes of looking out the magnificent round windows.

As soon as I entered the elevator, a young woman came in behind me. She's a "type" of woman I've taken to calling a "Jim Girl" - my friend Jim has an appreciation for short, blonde, curvy, slightly dishevelled, bright women who come over as kind of ditzy. She smiled at me and I smiled back. She got off on the 12th floor, and when the elevator doors opened I caught a glimpse of about a dozen Jim Girls waiting in the reception area of a casting agency - possibly the largest untapped reservoir of Jim Girls in the Greater Vancouver area.

Back to Round-Window-Quest-2002: I got off on the top floor only to discover there's no easy access to the TOP top floor, although the floor itself is circular but you can only see these tiny square windows up there. It's an architect's office, and profoundly cluttered. I muttered something about being on the wrong floor and went back to the lobby.

Wednesday March 27

We live in a visual culture - I think everyone has a favourite picture of themselves. This is mine. I'm four years old, it's the summer of 1970, and I'm asleep in the back of my father's station wagon. Television is black and white, I know all the words to "The Seekers" and "Meet the Beatles" because my mother listens to these during housework. I'm Canadian but I can pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States because they do that before they run the cartoons out of Bellingham. I have a big sister to fight off nightmares. I think about death a lot. I'm afraid that wolves will jump in through the window. Sometimes I sneak out of bed before dawn and watch the farm report and wait for the cartoons to start. I bite. When nobody's looking, I can fly, just a little, for short periods of time.