~mathowie blog feed

Electric Sheep

2015-02-12T07:12:27-08:00

I had a strange dream.

I’m flying into Las Vegas, and I’m using an android phone.

The plane lands, and my phone perks up and I’m presented with a simple driving game where I have to compete against three other racers on a track.

I do poorly, and as a result, the game informs me that while I’m in Las Vegas, my phone will be using substandard fonts. If I won the race, I would have gotten to keep my original fonts the OS was designed for.

I remember being pissed off afterwards, and tweeting about how it sucks my phone is harder to use because I didn't meet some unknown challenge, and it wouldn’t get better until I left Las Vegas.

Then I woke up.

Google, don’t build this.

Books: Pro Cycling on $10 a day

2015-01-03T08:32:20-08:00

The other day, I felt like opening my Kindle app instead of Threes! before I went to bed, and I started reading the giant stack of titles I’ve gathered over the years, but never quite got around to finishing (or starting in most cases). To be clear, this isn’t a New Years Resolution to read more, but I happened to not be able to sleep around January 1st and decided I should read more, so I am.

I follow cycling and bike racing and have read dozens of books about the sport, so when I heard great reviews of this book written by a domestic US low-level pro rider that (spoiler alert) eventually rode for a ProTour squad, I picked it up immediately. I read it in a couple days, it’s pretty light fare.

Overall, it was just ok. I’ve noticed Phil’s riding and watched him in results, read his columns in Bicycling magazine, and what struck me first was the book is basically like a random diary. Everything is told in chronological order from when he discovered cycling and later bike racing, through his time on many squads. Each chapter is basically a collection of essays all keyed off a title without much holding it together. I imagine he made an outline years ago and wrote a story under each phrase and boom! he had a book.

Phil’s famous for his honesty and opinions, but frankly a lot of the book felt gossipy and a little bit mean towards a lot of riders and companies, and there were times I was reading it where I thought “who would sponsor this guy when he might later tell the world just how awful the organization is being run?” There were good parts of the book. It was amazing to hear how cash-strapped bike teams are and how little they pay riders (he got checks for $166.67 a month for a year), making it clear how much the sport is a labor of love and god does it sound like years and years of toil to get there. It was fun to follow along as he rose in the sport, and I loved the story of his US PRO almost-win that I watched live and felt heart-broken for Phil. It’s a bummer the book ends when it does, since I’d love to hear what his year with Garmin was like (it was brief, he’s back down to a US domestic team now).

Overall, maybe 3 out of 5 stars.

Unsolicited plug: Tile trackers

2014-12-27T12:27:01-08:00

A few months ago, mostly out of curiosity, I ordered a few Tile trackers. I’d backed earlier Kickstarters for similar products, but the Tile seems like a smaller, sleeker package. After they finally arrived a few months later, I didn’t have an immediate need for one so I just attached the first to my keychain.

I honestly didn’t think I’d get much use out of it, but after a couple months I’ve had to invoke it about twice a week, and it’s been amazing being able to find my keys within a few seconds. I honestly didn’t think I lost my keys that often, but it’s way more often than I thought.

About the only downsides to the Tile is that it works only within about a 50ft radius of my phone/WiFi, so it’s not good for a roaming pet that wanders your neighborhood or a laptop bag you might lose on a plane.

I’ve also found that after setting up a second one, I tried to give it to a friend but there’s no universal “reset” to a Tile. You have to manually email customer service, wait about a week, and ask them to change the owner accounts on a specific tile.

Is that because they want people to be able to track people on the sly? So maybe thieves can’t turn a Tile off? I found it a bit weird, as well as the included high strength double-sided tape that came with the devices. I know they were aiming for things like TV remotes with it, but the tape gave off a vibe of “stalk your ex by attaching this to their car” when I first opened the box.

Templateitis

2014-12-27T08:07:22-08:00

We should have a term for when you see a whizbang template, spend an hour incorporating it, then realize it’s actually terrible (only after you have sunk considerable time into the effort).

The internet of buggy things

2014-12-18T22:04:31-08:00

For the last 15 years or so, I’ve tried out pretty much every home automation thing under the sun. The good news is products are generally getting better and easier to use as companies jump onto the Internet of Things bandwagon, but the bad news is many things are still unreliable.

It’s a tough problem to design to, since virtually everything in a house is very nearly 100% reliable all the time. When was the last time a light switch just up and died on you? And having everything use WiFi as a backbone, itself kind of an ad-hoc standard that sorta mostly works most of the time combined with house electronics is a recipe for disaster.

I really have been locked out of my house twice due to spotty WiFi. I am hesitant to try out any of the WiFi-enabled door locks as a result.

One of the most user-friendly line of products out there is the WeMo line from Belkin. They’re easy to set up, offer flexible options, but after using two hard-wired light switches, three wall plug units, and two motion detectors for the past six months or so, I have to say they don’t hold up over time and it’s baffling how they have failed.

A couple weeks ago, one of my wall switches stopped working on the iPhone app remote, but also the physical switch no longer functioned. A day later, it worked again.

I have a rule for another light switch set to turn on at sunset, and off automatically at 10:30pm. The time of “sunset” doesn’t seem to shift, but amazingly the shut-off time does. Right now, the light goes off every night at 10:08pm. Keep in mind, this is a light switch hard-wired to electricity and has an always-on WiFi connection. Not a single engineer working on the project thought to write some code to maybe check a time server once a day or at the very least once a week? I’m amazed that a time drift of 22min is even possible.

Lastly, one of my WeMo plugs is connected to a set of backyard lights that are fairly far from the WiFi base, but I’ve set up two WiFi extenders closer to the backyard and still the device can connect to the network only sporadically.

Anyway, I know these aren’t easy problems to solve, but given that I prefer my house to be close to 100% reliability, bringing things in from the world of computing that often come up short of that number isn’t really a recipe for success. To anyone considering Internet of Things objects in their home: tread carefully and prepare to be disappointed.

Training the workers of tomorrow

2014-12-05T10:29:17-08:00

So last month, after seeing loads of Twitter ads for a HTML/Javascript class in Portland, I signed up for a class from Code Fellows. The class finished last week, and I wanted to write up some thoughts about it.

The class was their introductory “Foundations I” course and the aim was to introduce students to HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, and the fundamentals of computer science. That sounded like a heck of a lot to cover in 8 2hr sessions over 4 weeks, but you’re probably wondering why I even signed up for it, since I know HTML/CSS pretty well and probably have introductory experience with everything else. My answer is that I have never learned javascript, like not even a hello world or basic understanding of the fundamentals and I’ve always wanted to sit down and do that. The second reason is that I was curious what a crash course in technology is like and what companies are doing today to try and train people to get into the industry. I wanted to see what coursework covered and how continued development and/or recruiting followed from it.

The course overall was good. The first week we dove right into the basics of javascript, with loads of homework assignments and small group work, and I felt like I was drowning in a good way. It was pretty intense right out of the gate, and continued for the next week. We kept progressing with javascript mainly, and after a couple weeks finally got to jQuery. It was nice to see why jQuery made things easier (we spent two weeks writing javascript by hand, to learn “the hard way”) but I would have understood if the class was jquery-only instead. After the first couple weeks, the organization of the class kind of got murky. We didn’t have tons of small homework assignments and instead did bigger projects once a week. There was still some group work, but it was mostly to help each other solve our own project problems instead of work together. The third week of the course we covered algorithms and it turned out to be a really good section that taught me how to evaluate efficiency (I know what Big O, n log n vs. linear n vs. n^2 all mean). The final week we just mostly worked on our final project.

The course covered a lot of things outside of the basic subject matter in the course description. We had to learn how to use github and all the tools around that and we spent time getting deep into Google Chrome’s devtools which was key to javascript debugging. We covered CSS a bit and only HTML briefly -- I suggested to the instructors that they drop “learning HTML/CSS” as any part of the class and instead assume future students know enough about HTML/CSS to use them fluently in the class. I felt bad for anyone that came into that class never having viewed source before.

The course instruction could have been a lot more organized. It felt like we used a dozen different tools and web apps to do the class to the point where during a possible ice storm that would cancel a class meeting I had to check in three places to get updates (chat, discussion board, announcement site). I kind of wish they built their own CMS to handle everything in one place instead of requiring so many outside tools. The homework was fun, challenging, and intense the first week, less so the second week, then non-existent until the end. Our homework assignments were to make little javascript guessing games and improve existing ones, but I felt like more real-world homework could have been better. Perhaps give us 80% completed code projects we have to finish, or a 100% done project that has significant javascript syntax errors (this is closer to what real coders do each day). I also wish the class taught people how to progressively enhance a web page, so that maybe on day 1 we build a basic homepage for ourselves and by the end of the course it’s all parallax and jquery and impressive looking.

Overall, I had a good time for the energy and costs involved, I finally got a basic understanding of javascript and I completed a bunch of codeschool and codeacademy tutorials I never had the motivation to finish.

My final project is here, and our assignment was to make a visualization of sorting algorithms where we compare one form to another in any way we felt. I remembered the story my old friend Chris Wetherell told me about trying to join Google eons ago, and I used that story as a jumping off point to illustrate some basic number array sorts.

With this course under my belt, I’m working on a new small project I hope to finish this month that basically just requires a bit of jquery and HTML to get working.

I could also tell this intro class was mostly a gateway drug to the more advanced stuff Code Fellows teaches (and the pricing goes significantly up), but I don’t see myself joining their next javascript class with my barely introductory proficiency, but I am curious about their intense python courses for real world web development (but that class runs $10,000, guarantees a job at the end, but only after months of intense daily classes and work). I’m not sure if I’m that into Python just yet.

Hoder is free

2014-11-20T16:20:13-08:00

I’m elated to hear that Hossein Derakhhshan, otherwise known as Hoder online, is finally free from prison in Iran. I used to read his blog and I would get worried whenever he talked about being harassed by the Iranian gov’t while in Canada. I remember him talking about his trip back to Tehran and worrying about it, but I was shocked when he was thrown in prison for a nearly 20-year sentence.

A couple years ago a friend was working on a campaign to try and get him freed and asked for my help. I said yes and we talked about the case and he had to remind me at that point Hoder had been put away for 4 years, while I had thought it only happened a year or so before. I felt devastated for a few days after as the whole thing felt so hopeless.

I was ecstatic to hear he has been freed today after six years. I went to look up his Twitter and Facebook accounts and found out it appears he joined Twitter two weeks before his trip, in October 2008. He has only tweeted five times, three times leading up to the trip, one tweet when he got to Tehran, then six years later upon his release.

I hope he gets back to Canada safely soon and can start talking about it. It was a horrible thing and I can’t imagine the horrors he has endured but I’m curious what kept him going and how he finally convinced them to free him.

Opera

2014-11-14T23:19:20-08:00

I checked into my hotel in San Jose today and the staff warned me that the hotel was completely booked, and they’d be adding higher security procedures, on account of everyone being in town for the opera.

The lobby was filled with people dressed up fancy, so I agreed to show my key to enter the building later that night. For hours afterwards I wondered why everyone was so into the opera. Was someone from movies or Broadway crossing over into opera? Is opera really big in the bay area or something? Why would people stay at a hotel to see an opera anyway? I wracked my brain for hours thinking about opera, how I didn’t understand it though I found small bits of it I heard really beautiful, especially sung live. I eventually chalked it up to the continuing saga of all the mysterious things about the Bay Area these days -- apparently they’re way into opera now.

It wasn’t until the evening, when the lobby was filled with middle-aged women in nice outfits, but not opening night ball gowns and where were all the dudes in tuxes? Why was there literally only women in the hotel lobby? Then I saw someone holding a printed program in the crush of people waiting for an elevator.

I had misheard the hotel front desk earlier that day. It wasn’t the opera causing all the ruckus. It was Oprah.

Threes

2014-11-11T21:40:40-08:00

Threes is the most enjoyable game I’ve had on my iPhone, since the device debuted over 7 years ago. I’ve had 2 or 3 games I’ve played during idle times over the years but Threes is easily the most enjoyable, still almost a year after I started playing it daily.

I play it every night before bed (in dark mode aka inverted colors from Apple’s accessibility options), and occasionally during downtimes in the day. I quickly got to about 20,000 points as my high, but couldn’t really improve beyond that for a few months. I eventually found a Threes playing robot on Twitch.tv that everyone was linking to, since it was playing live games. The bot was easily scoring in the 50-60 thousand point ranges so I watched it for a couple hours and realized it was playing very defensively, and as soon as I changed my game a bit I was getting in the high 20k range. My highest score was about 32k points for the last 6 months. Day after day I tried and tried again, but could never quite get two 768 tiles together.

Today was that day, and after a few games I had a good run going and saw the two 768 tiles were coming together a few moves before it happened. I don’t think two 1536 tiles could ever fit on the small field so I’m happy with getting just one of them. I’ll still play it nightly, though I doubt I come close to this again anytime soon.

html 5 rewrite

2014-11-07T19:15:21-08:00

Ignore this post, just testing out new layout template changes.

Day two

2014-11-04T22:47:04-08:00

Today I wrote a Rock, Paper, Scissors game in javascript and after three hours of completing tutorial lessons, I was happy to say I completely understood the whole top half of Paul Ford’s Actually.js code here.

Paul also wrote this thing on Medium that desperately makes me want to go back in time and give 12 year old Paul Ford a hug and to tell him everything works out OK later on.

Day one

2014-11-03T20:52:17-08:00

This is the first javascript I’ve ever written from scratch. It still needs work, but you get the idea.

Drop dead

2014-11-03T14:27:30-08:00

I’ve had a Dropcam for the last six months or so, mostly to keep an eye on my house and pets when we’re gone. It has a couple monitoring features where it records video loops when it detects motion and takes photos when it detects motion as well. You have to pay a monthly fee to get access to both, but you still get periodic emails when the camera senses activity and it’ll send a medium sized low-res picture several times a day embedded in the message.

I never thought much of this until I opened an email to see a photo of me completely naked walking by the camera, on my way to grab from a pile of recently folded clean clothes after I took a shower.

Obviously, that’s a bit of a shock, but I was home alone and I’m the only one that opens my email, so I wasn’t too disturbed by it. But then I realized that image is on Dropcam’s system. And Google bought Dropcam so my photo is somewhere in Google’s cloud. There’s a web-accessible photo of my naked ass (with no black bar added above) somewhere and I have no idea where it is or how easy it is for anyone to find. Wonderful.

It’s at this point you ask yourself if having a net-connected camera for monitoring your house was a good idea after all.

Fatherhood

2014-11-01T22:02:22-07:00

I liked the movie Chef more than I thought I would. I think I’m getting sappy in my old age, as I’m really starting to dig any movies with a good family relationship story in it, and I thought Chef’s family story line was more than the typical one-dimensional story you normally see in films.

There’s this one scene that blew me away. Jon Favreau’s character explains to his son everything entailed with running a restaurant business as they start a food truck. At one point, they both take a break from the line while there is food prep going on and customers lined up and he says to his son something to the effect of “Look at all this, this is what I’ve spent my life doing and I’m proud of it and I’m really good at it, and I hope you can appreciate that” and they have a moment, and it’s really great.

Then I thought of my own life and how I could impart that same lesson with my own daughter.

I’ve spent over a third of my life building communities online and designing applications and their interfaces, but what concrete thing can I point to as proof? I suppose someday I’ll have the same Favreau talk with my daughter. We’ll stand next to a laptop showing the typical comments section at the bottom of a newspaper article and I’ll say “for the last 15 years I’ve done everything in my power to prevent that kind of shit-slinging you see on this site. It’s what I’m good at and I’m proud of it, and I hope you can appreciate it now that you’re older.”

Going back to nerd school

2014-11-01T19:21:39-07:00

The one big thing tilde club has taught me is that despite nearly 20 years spent building websites, being dumped back onto the command line reminded me that I know very little about actual programming. To remedy that, I just enrolled in a college night course in javascript and python for web development that runs all through November.

This is going to be fun.

Pretty web apps

2014-10-28T18:22:33-07:00

I see Google is putting a ton of effort into reinventing email with their new Inbox option. I’ve loved Gmail’s automated folder system since it debuted, and out of the box, it properly sorted about 90% of my email, only showing me the most important bits front and center, and cutting my personal stress and anxiety by shuffling the rest of the junk off into the corners. I suspect that maybe email marketing companies were tired of being relegated to the Promotions tab and forced Google’s hand back into a single inbox with grouping. For my uses of email, that 90% of noise is back in my Inbox front and center, and I dislike it greatly. I hope to god they never disable Gmail entirely.

One long-standing pet peeve with Gmail (and all similar email apps) is that they don’t offer a “slow” reading option. Email is a fast, efficient, intensive sort of activity, so the UI is as practical as possible, but if I ever need to write more than four paragraphs, I find myself often composing text in Google Docs or even Medium draft posts, both that get shared as a link over email. I know how much I don’t like reading tons of text in an email interface so I purposely push them to a place with larger fonts, more comfortable margins, and a way to soak in the words in a calmer UI. Go read stuff over there, where words are respected properly instead of your punch-clock email machine here.

Why doesn’t Gmail sense when an email is greater than a thousand words and automatically offer up a “pretty” option for more relaxed reading for recipients? It knows I wrote a couple pages at Google Docs, why can’t that be embedded somehow in Gmail with a similar layout as what it would have at Google Docs?

Sarkeesian

2014-10-24T10:37:03-07:00

I downloaded Forza Horizon 2 on my xbox one the other day, and naturally my first new video game in months got me thinking about it through the lens of the work of people targeted by gamergate.

The default character is a guy, whose voice dominates the game as the all-powerful ruler/director of what you do next, and you can't change it to a female character (incidentally, you are never shown on screen). There is a female character that runs the garage for modding cars, and that's an interesting (and probably new-ish) choice, but she's stick thin and looks like a supermodel. There are women in the crowds after events, but they’re just cheering and don’t appear to be other drivers and they all look like supermodels.

Now, it's just a car game where you rarely see any other drivers as humans, but would it kill the game studio to do a female (optional) main god character and voiceover? And maybe to have a mix of people in crowds after races, possibly showing women as drivers too instead of treating women as little more than eye candy in the game?

Also, it would in no way diminish the game if these additions were in place -- you could still have dudes around controlling the gameplay, it's just that the other 50% of your potential game playing audience would also get to see themselves in the game, and isn't that the point of games in the first place? To have fun and put yourself in a fantasy world? And wouldn’t the game get better if gameplay was inclusive of men and women?

The best of the indie web

2014-10-22T14:26:50-07:00

Today I was thinking about the recent resurgence of the “indie web” — the notion that instead of posting all our daily writing into corporate silos with bad APIs and zero export options, maybe we should go back to independent blogs and voices on our own servers, with some sort of glue-code in between. That made me think back to posting 4–5 times a day on my own blog, and RSS (and The Time Before Google Reader Was Killed), and even back before that. I tried to think of the ultimate time for the indie web, when I was experiencing my favorite setup during the early days.

From about 2002 to about 2005, I feel like I was enjoying my favorite time on the web, a “golden age” for independent content if you will. My setup wasn’t based on RSS but instead on the ping service blo.gs. You could add a sidebar to your browser that listed all your favorite sites in the order in which they were updated, so when you had time to kill, a few times a day you’d load it up and hit the first 3–4 sites, read their most recent updates, and enjoy it in each site’s full design. Back then, most of the blogs I followed were written by web designers, so I felt it was important to see their content as they intended in their site’s own design, which would periodically undergo redesigns, which used to be a big thing. I avoided RSS until the blo.gs server got bought by Yahoo and stopped functioning soon after, mostly because I didn’t like content robbed of its design.

It reminds me a lot of the Tilde club’s recently updated list, and how I scan it a couple times a day looking for familiar usernames, and how on Twitter the other day I was suggesting to Anthony that I wished I could build a list of my favorite tilde sites sorted by last update, which is essentially asking for a tilde version of blo.gs. I bet someone could build that in a day with current tools and technology.

Solving Mainstream Problems

A big criticism of Silicon Valley these days is that companies and developers are mostly solving niche problems for a small number of people instead of aiming at the mainstream. And like some sort of laundry or snail mail pickup service would be a killer app for a 24 year old programmer who is busy working at Facebook all day, but would be largely overpriced and unnecessary for someone living in a rural community, even ten years ago I’d say those of us helping shape what the blogosphere looked like and how it functioned suffered from the same problem.

Take my Golden Age above. It required first adding a weird ping service to your blog to notify it whenever you updated, and thousands of people runing blogs had to do the same. Next, you would use bookmarklets to add blogs you read in your browser to your account at blo.gs. After you had a list going, you’d have to then install a browser extension/hack to get a permanent sidebar, and then you could read your favorite blogs as they updated. Also, there was no central service to suggest new blogs to follow, so you kind of had to surf around to find any to get started using the service.

I’d say Myspace was a close mainstream approximation of my Golden Age of blogs described above. Myspace let people blog, showed your friends list in the order of recent updates, and let users customize their pages to often hideous (yet very personalized) degrees. It didn’t require bookmarklets or customizing your browser, and you didn’t need to be a web designer that could install server software that also wrote daily. It brought the same kind of world I enjoyed to a much larger audience.

Obviously, Twitter and Facebook very much followed Myspace and took away the quirky custom designs and differentiation and instead moved everything to a more predictable and easier to digest feed. This allowed writing and (micro) blogging for the mainstream on an order of magnitude bigger scale than Myspace ever did. The move to reading timelines also reminds me of the “River of News” RSS early apps that I didn’t much enjoy since they robbed each blog of its original design (though I relented and went all-in to RSS around 2005).

Anyway, I really miss blo.gs and would love to see that kind of service come back to tilde.club.

Oregon local politics, summed up

2014-10-20T18:17:24-07:00

The front page of the local paper covered a tight County Commissioner race going down to the wire in November. These big pull quotes from both candidates perfectly sum up small town Oregon politics. Top guy sounds like he wants to do a better job helping people, bottom guy sounds like he not only wants to actively do less, but makes you wonder if he wants the job at all.

Sad thing is, bottom guy will probably win since that strikes a chord with the older conservative voters that dominate local polls.

No no no, I asked for that on the side

2014-10-18T19:18:27-07:00

Tonight I was at a Chipotle behind someone trying to complete one of the most complex orders of all time. Four different dishes, each with extra this, light that, and something on the side, and everything had to be in an exact order. The staff got a little mixed up with the crazy order and the woman started to lose her shit. The staff didn’t want to screw up any more so they’d ask her things twice to make sure they didn’t screw up again and that just made her exaggerated sighs even louder. I worked for years in food service and hungry people have very short fuses.

To get an idea of what they were working with, I distinctly recall the very end of her order. A burrito bowl that was supposed to have light amount of pico/tomato, the hot sauce on the side but also on the bowl, then extra sour cream and extra cheese and she nearly flipped her shit when they gave her hot sauce only on the side, then put it on top of the cheese, making it out of order with how she wanted it (“Cheese on top, I said!”). Keep in mind, that’s just the second half of her last of four ordered items.

As she was paying (and the line of 30 people behind her grew) she said she had a terrible experience and would definitely be calling the manager. I felt bad for the staff, whose faces fell. Incidentally, entitled white people have only two power moves, it’s either “I’m calling your manager!” or if they eat a mushroom, grow to twice their size and deploy the super power move, it’s “I’m having my lawyer send your company a sternly worded letter!”

I am fluent in exasperated white people complaining, I hear it spoken around me all the time, and I honestly had a hard time following this person’s insanely complex order and the Chipotle staff did the best they could in the situation.

Anyway, long story short: don’t be a dick to service workers.

Dichotomy

2014-10-17T09:13:36-07:00

You can pretty much divide the world into two groups: those that hear the start of a famous song and think "Oh boy, Vanilla Ice!" and those that say "Oh fuck, I hope this isn’t Vanilla Ice and instead is Queen & David Bowie... oh thank god it is"

No one at Marvel wants to lose their job

2014-10-16T21:50:02-07:00

Guardians of the Galaxy is easily my favorite movie of the year. It’s not perfect, but it was entertaining enough that I saw it three times in a theater and I’d likely see it a few times more if I could, but it is no longer playing anywhere nearby. It doesn’t come out on DVD/video/streaming for another month (I already pre-ordered it on AppleTV), and what I find really strange is that after searching the farthest reaches of the darknets, I can’t find anything remotely watchable in terms of bootleg copies of it. High quality leaks a month before release happen regularly, so this is unique.

Other summer comedies that aren’t destined for video release for another month or two are easily available in 1080p blu-ray quality, but even after several months, there’s just one awful camcorder copy of Guardians. The film is beloved by geeks everywhere and got both critical and popular acclaim, and yet, there aren’t any R5 russian bootlegs in decent quality and no early DVD rip releases, which seems pretty uncharacteristic for such a popular movie.

The G in GIF stands for Graphic

2014-10-15T22:45:23-07:00

Fuck GamerGate

2014-10-15T11:08:28-07:00

I was sitting in a restaurant with my nine year-old daughter, waiting for our food to arrive. We’d talked about her day, her week, and I told her what I did all day. We played a couple 2-player games on my phone across the table and then she asked if she could play Subway Surfers, a popular Temple Run-type game.

I handed her the phone, and wondered how long it’d be before our food arrived as I watched some Monday night football on TV in the restaurant. I looked over a couple minutes later and she wasn’t playing the game yet, but using the character settings screens. I asked why she wasn’t playing the game since our food would arrive shortly, and she said she was picking out a female avatar because “I’m tired of all the games having a boy as the default character”.

I told her to take her time and play with whatever character she wanted.

That moment crystalized the sheer stupidity of anyone rallying against the work that Anita Sarkeesian is doing. Sarkeesian’s end-goal appears to be asking game developers to write better characters for women, portray them well in games, and not go to the well with lazy female story tropes we’ve seen hundreds of times before. My daughter just wants to play games with a character that looks like her.

How on earth is there remotely any chance of “killing” the video game industry by simply asking game writers and developers to do a better job?

"hacking"

2014-10-12T12:43:51-07:00

I spent a couple hours trying to learn enough javascript to parse JSON to make a nicer tilde.club mobile site for browsing on a phone, but eventually gave up. I really should go back to remedial javascript courses at Code School or something, since js has never clicked with me at all.

It's now weed's Eternal September

2014-10-10T16:03:43-07:00

I turned 42 today and I decided this week that I’m going to start smoking pot for the first time in my life. I can buy legal weed just an hour from where I live, and we’re about to vote in legalization next month in Oregon. Like gay marriage, there’s not much of a case made against it and I suspect laws will fall state by state over the next year to the point where the whole thing will explode in popularity. The US should have a sane drug policy and I think we’re finally going to start getting it.

Friends keep asking me why I changed my tune. I avoided it through my teens because in high school I made money working in bike shops and doing BMX tricks in “Just Say No” shows at schools and churches. I didn’t feel strongly one way or the other towards pot, but I got paid $50 to ride my bike in circles for 15min every Saturday so really my abstinence was simply bought off.

In my twenties, I was mostly hustling, trying to get straight-A’s through college, then grad school, then into a career. Pot frankly sounded too good to be true and I feared procrastination would get the best of me if I spent any idle time mellowing out with it.

My thirties were mostly about building a family. I moved, bought a house, had a kid, sold a house, bought another one, quit my day job, hired employees, and proceeded to get stressed completely out by the end of the decade.

Things have slowed down a bit after 40. I ride my bike a lot, go with the flow on the business/career front, and frankly could use something to help me relax once in a while (the therapist I saw a couple years ago has retired and I haven’t found a replacement).

So far, my initial experiments aren’t blowing my mind and it’s incredibly difficult to find good newbie information about this stuff online. I suspect due to the dodgy laws and checkered past, very few site publishers seem to be gearing info towards people new to pot. Every review of every device, strain, or technique is done by life-long potheads talking to other life-long potheads about the minutiae of things only a lifetime of experience would teach you. If ever there was a time for an explosion of content about this subject, now would be the time.

I hope there’s a PVRblog of pot out there for someone to come along and launch so I have something aimed at people like me, looking for honest, real information and dumbed down enough that even a newbie could understand. I’m sure I’ll find it soon.

The Mens

2014-10-10T09:48:40-07:00

This photo from a conference about women in tech of a panel on women in tech featuring four dudes reminds me of every time there is an Ask MetaFilter question from a woman asking very specific questions about how to care for her lady parts and some guy will come in and try and answer with “Dude here, um, I think you should try shaving with this blade and this cream and...” and I have to delete it every time I see it and shake my damn head.

The edgiest of edge cases

2014-10-09T14:46:57-07:00

When my wife and I got married, we picked a month in the Fall when it was still warm and that happened to be the one both our birthdays were in. Then we picked a Saturday we could get a venue and suddenly we were getting married on her birthday. This is pretty rare as I’ve never met anyone else with this sort of lucky 2-for-1 day but I never thought too much about it.

Tuesday when I logged into Facebook, it was that fateful day, and curiously I only noticed it because the sidebar of their site where special messages go told me I was celebrating an anniversary today. It didn’t mention her birthday at all.

So somewhere, an engineer had to write a condition that if both those things matched for someone on the same day, the anniversary was more important than the birthday, so only show them the former, drop the latter. I’d suggest maybe showing both, just added a new line for the birthday as well, but then I know there can’t be that many of us magical unicorns around that share that condition.

No Fun

2014-10-08T19:59:24-07:00

So you record a short video clip, and you want to show it to friends. Your phone lets you open it up in iMovie, and attach a song you purchased from iTunes as the background. It looks great, sounds great, and will crack up your friends.

You hit "share" and upload it to Facebook. You load up your Facebook, but no video, instead you are being read the riot act about how you've just committed a copyright violation and you have to click a box to agree you did a very bad thing and feel bad before they hide the scolding message.

You hit "share" again, but this time you go to Vimeo. Great, after waiting 20 minutes for their queue, you wait another 15 for processing. When you play the video, it is silent, killing that perfect song you picked to crack up your friends. Oh, you've got a new message from Vimeo Staff. We had to remove your copyrighted music from the clip, and it will remain silent and a private video until you agree you have done a very bad thing and you feel bad.

Alright, alright already. Let's "share" this on YouTube. Whoa! Immediately after upload, Google slaps you down with a message saying you have one violation strike against your account. I don't know how many strikes I have ever had, or how many mean "you're out" but I feel like I did a very bad thing and I feel bad.

You know what kills the fun of sharing a short video clip you score with music on your phone? Getting Content ID violations on Vimeo, Facebook, AND YouTube immediately after uploading.

Fuck these assholes, I shared it on my own FTP server.

carwash.mov (36Mb)

Very happy indeed.

2014-10-07T21:51:41-07:00

How happy am I to be able to use my tilde club space and interact with others over Terminal but I don’t have a gmail inbox filled with “~so-and-so is now following your Tilde” emails? There’s something nice about a playground of a place that isn’t obsessed with “engagement” and “retention” like so many others are.

Like the old days, except now my copy of Photoshop is licensed

2014-10-07T21:30:31-07:00

Tilde Club is largely about nostalgia to me (I think it was Erin McKean who was the first to call us the digital equivalent of a Civil War reenactment society), and today I remembered I used to dick around in photoshop and post really dumb images fairly regularly, so I decided to do two dumb ones today. The top one required slapping my face on top of an existing famous animated GIF, by tweaking 59 frames by hand of it, and I knew I did a fairly bad job at it but it doesn’t matter. Then I put it on matt.cash because that domain was cheap and freely available and I think the new TLD system is utter nonsense and will continue my quest to buy more stupid domains for one-off joke pages.

The second image I did just for me, because I wanted to have this handy as a reaction image to drop in chat threads in the future.

As they say “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”, and post your dumb photoshop images more often.

Halloween 2014

2014-10-07T07:24:21-07:00

“Dude, what the fuck are you wearing at my costume party? Are you wearing nothing but a giant brown garbage bag with nudie mag covers glued on it, topped with a too-small lab coat with the words “CONSPIRACY” written all over?! What the fuck are you supposed to be?”

“I’m a pile of misogynistic bullshit cloaked in a flimsy layer of ‘corruption’.”

“Oh, sweet costume. You’re dressed as #GamerGate.”

Dumb domains

2014-10-06T11:32:30-07:00

About a year ago I was really enamored with This Is My Jam, the small fun service where you pick a favorite song, find it on Soundcloud or YouTube and tweet it out to friends. You can also get a feed of everyone’s favorite jams and it was a fun light music discovery web app that appealed to me as both someone that enjoys music as well as someone that likes to build little web apps.

I got an idea to do something similar (basically a clone of it), but let people pick whatever silly thing they think is their current “spirit animal” so I bought the domain. I imagined each week you could say kale salad is your new thing and tweet out kale.salad.is.my.spiritanim.al and that page would have a picture lifted from the Creative Commons Flickr pool and the name and date of when you set it up, and I suppose when other people could mark that off too at later dates. Same concept, same goals really.

As I was looking around at simple Twitter auth libraries while thinking about how to set it all up, I searched on the “spirit animal” term and got some really well-written criticism of the entire concept, on Tumblr posts like this one that lay out all the ways in which it’s offensive and appropriating native culture. I instantly soured on the idea of poking fun at this concept online and wondered how I didn’t think to look this up sooner but I freely admit I have a lot of big blind spots about my own privilege that I was so clueless about it previously. I don’t want to build anything that perpetuates this.

So I still own spiritanim.al, and I pointed http://tilde.club.is.my.spiritanim.al/ here as a quick goof, but I don’t really want to own it anymore or build a thing that appropriates culture in a shitty way, so I will let it expire in a year or so when it is up.

Ev's not here man

2014-10-05T20:33:11-07:00

When is ~evhead going to exist on this system?

While we're talking nostalgia

2014-10-05T11:17:53-07:00

I remember a time when I used to make ten blog posts a day instead of one per year. It feels good to be back.

Today in /~tabs

2014-10-05T11:06:41-07:00

I wish I could mark selected tilde.club sites as favorites, but then I guess that’s what this tool does?

A helpful the social “who’s on” list here makes me wish I knew more command-line social tools (my wife and I used to ‘talk’ on an old VAX in the days before IM). Another helpful tool lets you see whose sheep is eating all the community grass here.

Also #tildeclub on Twitter is really fun to read as a constant stream of experimentation going on. I suppose we could re-create it locally if we really did get our own local USENET spool.

Machine made is not hand made

2014-10-05T10:36:36-07:00

I gotta say, looking at all the recent tilde club updated pages, I'm envious of those hand-coding a single page blog. The simplicity is appealing as it definitely speaks to the nature of the entire tilde club experiment, but I really wanted something to manage entries when they need to scroll off the front page.

I must admit though, in voting for convenience I am giving up a lot of personality in the process, and this probably mirrors the blogging “boom” of 1999 when we first got tools to manage posts but suddenly handmade single one-off pages started to be increasingly rare.

I wouldn't encourage anyone to use the tools I am, I really like what others are doing by hand a lot more and may scrap this whole blog engine thing in the end.

Pointless nostalgia isn’t proper nostalgia if you don’t stick to the original tools.

Truth

2014-10-05T10:16:03-07:00

Consensus: #tildeclub is a better social network than #ello at the moment.

Godfather of the tildeverse

2014-10-05T09:14:50-07:00

This is the tilde.club origin story.

I remember when I really learned HTML, after reading Justin Hall’s how-to but never making my first page. One day I committed to coding up my first webpage so I went out and bought a book (at a Waldenbooks?) on “Authoring pages in Netscape”. I started reading it at 9pm, and finished the thing cover-to-cover and published my first fully-baked webpage around 5am the next day. I bought the book the day before xmas, 1995, and the rest is history.

I remember the book heavily suggested any readers looking for webspace sign up with a site that gave out server spots in the form of users.companyname.com/~your_username and the reason I didn’t sign up was they only set up new accounts when you mailed them a check, which I felt was too much trouble for 1995, and instead I used an old workstation in my graduate school lab.

Anyway, tildes are kind of fun, glad to see them come back.

One last test

2014-10-05T08:44:07-07:00

Just wanted to see if image uploading works in the editor.

A realization

2014-10-05T07:40:36-07:00

I just realized now that I have a desktop blogging setup working, it is tied to a single desktop, which happened to be my laptop when I set this all up. That means if I’m on any mobile device or my main computer which is an iMac, I won’t be able to blog. Now I see the genius of all the command-line filled, dropbox-backed-up, github-based, network-based static blogging engines. At least you can edit/post from anywhere with those.

They all seemed to use markdown though, and I don’t like using markdown. Oh well, I’ll just have to imagine my laptop is a dedicated tilde blogging engine now.

First!

2014-10-05T07:13:26-07:00

Testing out a ridiculous app to see if I can blog using it. The state of static blog engines is kind of appalling, but then since blogging is long since dead, there can’t be much of a market for it. I just spent two hours looking through simple static file generating blog engines, but they’re all a mis-mash of developer-friendly toolsets but in the end I just want something simple, something easy to edit and manage, something that can incorporate a desktop app -- I don’t want to fix typos in vi at the command-line.

A hilarious museum of options were presented with each successive Google search. CityDesk. Radio Userland, etc. I actually downloaded a few apps but none of the mac options would run in a modern Yosemite beta install. Newer apps like Day One might do the job, but don’t offer custom publishing out to an endpoint or simple indexes/archives/permalinks.

Let’s see if this works.Holy crap it did, and boy is it ugly. I will try and simplify this template.