the flying squirrel

Things to do before the end of the week:

• Spend more time with Ellen (very important)
• Help co-ordinate Kwartzlab’s move to our new location.
• Write up a press release about Kwartzlab’s Trillium grant acquisition
• Take Ellen to visit her grandmother.
• Plan the Kwartzlab grand opening.
• Invite MPPs to said grand opening for Trillium announcement slash press event.
• Eat left-over Chinese food from Monday’s party.
• Relax a bit.

An open letter to Nicholas Briggs, executive producer for Big Finish and voice of the Daleks on Doctor Who:

Dear Mr Briggs,

I recently had the opportunity to re-listen to the Dalek Empire series and was once again taken aback not just by the masterful story-telling and compelling human drama, but also by the portrayal of the Daleks. It occurred to me that you, sir, have a better understanding of the Daleks than any living writer who has dared undertake them. Dare I say, I believe you have shown a better understanding of what the Daleks are and why they are a true menace than even Terry Nation himself, the man who created them.

It further occurred that the Daleks on television seem to have lost their way. After Mr Shearman’s brilliantly realized Dalek, they’ve gotten a bit silly again.

I don’t demean in the slightest the formidable skills of the Doctor Who television writing team. In my opinion, the Daleks have never quite lived up to their full potential on television. What is needed, I think, is a true expert to provide the standard to which future writers can aspire. That expert, Mr Briggs, is you. I believe the time has come for you to give voice to the Daleks in the one way that matters most: as their writer for television.

Think of it! A pair of episodes modelled after your Dalek Empire stories in the main range, where the Doctor, as necessary, wins the day but where there is a true victory of the Daleks. And then, having restored themselves to their former glory, the way is paved for a series of Dalek Empire spin-off serials which showcase the true menace of the Daleks when the Doctor isn’t there to save us. Proper sci-fi space adventures of the sort so sadly lacking on television these days.

And what could be more fitting for Doctor Who’s 50th Anniversary year than a celebration of the creation which made the show a hit? After all, Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary is the Daleks’ as well.

Please be sure to pass my proposal along to Mr Moffat when next you see him. You may assure him that you were reluctantly driven to make this suggestion on behalf of your mutual fans, and that it is in no way mere crass self-promotion on your part. Thus assured, I have every confidence that he will see the wisdom of this idea and give us a 50th anniversary of the Daleks which lives up to the high standards we Big Finish listeners have for the Doctor’s greatest foe.

I still love you. Really, I do. It’s just that between work and Kwartzlab and Ellen (who continues to be awesome), it’s like I haven’t had time for you.

I know, that’s just an excuse. If I really loved you, I’d make time. It shouldn’t be like this, but would you even believe me if I promised to do better? We all know how that goes, in the end.

No! No, I’d never break up with you. Really, I… I just need more time, that’s all.

You’ll forgive me?

Don’t be like that, of course you have a choice.

Honey, Twitter and I are just friends! You know that.

Wait! I know you’re upset, just… wait!

Come back!

I haven’t…

You…

Never mind.

What a difference a day makes.

Here we are less than a year from the last provincial election and I’m going to the polls again.

Just my riding and one other, though. Only the good people of Vaughn have similar luck.

Actually, I was a little bit giddy when our long-standing MPP, Elizabeth Witmer announced she was resigning to take a plum government appointment. Not because I was ecstatic to see her go (we could, after all, do much worse), but because the result of last year’s election was an ever-so-slim Liberal minority. Picking up this one seat in a by-election would put them in a majority (sort of, but I’ll get to that). So the stakes are super-high. Which means this is going to be interesting.

And call me weird, but I like interesting in politics. So long as nobody has to suffer too much for it.

Eric Davis (Liberal)

I am, for the record, a card-carrying member of the Liberal Party. I am such not because I love them whole-heartedly and unreservedly, but because I think they generally tend to go in the right direction, but I feel like they need a prod every once in a while when they start going off track.

And at this point I feel like they’re going off track.

A win in this by-election would not give the Liberals an actual majority (even assuming they hold Vaughn). The house would be tied with ties broken by the speaker. They wouldn’t be able to pass whatever bills they wanted because the speaker will not vote to pass bills. But any nonconfidence motion would be defeated because the speaker will always vote to continue debate. It would give the Liberals breathing room but not carte blanche.

I do actually want the Liberals to serve out a full mandate. I think there’s a lot of stuff they’re doing that’s good. And I think if an election happens, the PCs will likley win and start undoing the good stuff they’ve been doing. And I’d rather that didn’t happen.

But I’ve been incredibly unimpressed by how McGuinty has chosen to run his minority government. When you have a minority, you have to actually work with other parties. He seems entirely unwilling to do that. He seems intent on running from the Stephen Harper play book. I really hate that. I understand politics can be a rough game and playing nice isn’t always the best way to go, but you measure success based on whether or not what you’re doing is actually working, and it’s hard to say what they’re doing is actually working. The PCs are an incoherent mess but they’re still beating the Liberals in the polls.

Eric Davis isn’t helping them much for me, either. Sure, he’s a bit cuddlier this time, talking about his family a lot, but otherwise he never strays from the talking points, to the point where you never get much of a sense of his own personality. I’m not confident that if I came to him with a problem that went against Liberal government policy that I’d get a fair hearing. I would expect to be brushed off. Because he’s a party guy. He’s not terrible–I voted for him last time. But it seems to me he’s just a place-holder for the party.

What really gets to me more than anything, though, is how they’ve gone about fighting this by-election. They engineered this thing, giving Witmer her appointment. I expected them to be better-prepared. But it seems like they’re flailing around uselessly. What’s worse–as soon as it looked like the NDP had a chance to take this thing, they swung into attack mode. When the Liberals start launching ridiculous American-style attack ads against the NDP, it never goes well. I think that’s a big reason they were decimated in the last federal election. Attack ads turn people off. They’re only good for making voters stay home. The Liberal vote is soft. When the Liberals attack the NDP, more Liberal voters stay home than NDP voters. Because the NDP voters are angry and the Liberal voters are disillusioned.

I mean, look at this. It’s just plain deceptive. And I hate it.

I could write an entire blog post about everything that’s wrong with this flyer.

C’mon guys, you can do better than this. You’ll have to do better than this if you want me to vote for you.

Tracey Weiler (Progressive Conservative)

As far as I can tell, the Tories are going to do pretty much everything the Liberals are going to do (except, of course, for all the things I actually like), but they’re going to be meaner and angrier about it.

I was never going to vote for them anyway. We still haven’t recovered from the damage they did last time they were in government (and this is something else that I’m annoyed at McGuinty about).

Stacey Danckert (Green)

The Green Party is my go-to vote when the Liberals are pissing me off for whatever reason. And, if I’m honest, I love the Green Party. We’ve had some really good Green candidates. They bring things to elections that would never be aired if they weren’t there. And their platform more closely reflects my views than the Liberals. But only just.

Ms Dankert’s pitch is she could be like Elizabeth May in the Ontario legislature. Except she’s wrong. Elizabeth May is an outspoken defender of what she believes in in a Conservative majority government. She’s very good at her job. But practically speaking, she’s largely impotent.

If a Green won this one seat, she’d have real power. She would hold the deciding vote on whether the Liberal government lived or died. She could use that power to push for policy changes. She could manoeuvre the political waters, negotiate hard and make things happen.

I don’t think Stacey Danckert has it in her.

If she was Elizabeth May, I’d vote for her in a second.

Catherine Fife (New Democratic Party)

I’ve never voted NDP. I don’t particularly like NDP policies. Some of them I do, and on some issues I agree with them more than I agree with the Liberals, but I usually get the impression the NDP and I see the world differently. C’est la vie. I do respect them, however.

Catherine Fife is clearly the best candidate of the four parties. She’s smart and well-spoken and I think would do a fine job if elected. I think she would take my dissenting viewpoint seriously, at least more seriously than Mr Davis. (James from King & Ottawa disagrees, but then she won’t be in a position where she has to defend whatever bad thing the government might hypothetically be doing to me).

And she has momentum. Her signs are everywhere. The Record is running editorials about how she might actually win. It’s plausible she has a chance. For the first time since the NDP was the CCF and Waterloo was part of a much more rural riding, the NDP could actually take this seat.

So what the hell, I’ll get on board. Like I said, I like interesting in politics, and handing this seat over to the NDP would certainly be interesting.

My one reservation for voting for Catherine Fife is the message it sends to NDP party strategists. If they get it into their head that the Orange Wave is sweeping across Ontario and they need to topple the government ASAP in order to bring about the second NDP coming, that will make me very sad. Because I have a strong feeling it’ll mean Tim Hudak will become premier. And I don’t want that.

If this were a general election, I doubt I’d be considering voting NDP. If Catherine Fife turns out to be an OMG AWESOME MPP and the Liberals roll out another red-painted dog, maybe. We can talk. But I’m pretty sure my vote will be different in the next real election.

All the fear tactics about the NDP during this by-election are just stupid and wrong. It’s still a Liberal minister who will be negotiating with the unions. If they really want to break the unions, the Conservatives will gleefully help them out with that. Giving this seat to Catherine Fife doesn’t significantly change the political landscape in practical terms. What it does is send a message.

I want the Liberal government to serve out its mandate. But I want them to do it in a way that doesn’t make me hate them. Which means Dalton McGuinty needs a smack upside the head. If the first NDP MPP for Kitchener-Waterloo is what it takes, I’ll happily jump on that bandwagon.

The Others

There are ten candidates running in this election, not four. Communist Party candidate Elizabeth Rowley has been very vocal about being excluded from supposed all-candidates meetings (including the one I had time to go to). And I agree with her. I respect anyone for expending the time and energy to run in an election. I also think minor parties get majorly shafted by our first-past-the-post system. The least we can do is hear them out come election time.

I haven’t had time to go digging around their websites or anything, though. I make no pretence about being a serious reporter. As with Stacey Danckert, this would be a fine time to vote for a strong independent. I don’t think we have one of those, though. Because if you’re the sort of person who could pull off the political manoeuvring necessary to work your one vote to our advantage in this minority parliament setting, you’d be the sort of person who could make yourself heard even with the media steadfastly ignoring you.

To her credit, Ms Rowley is making herself heard. Trouble is, I’m a bit of a bourgeois capitalist, which makes it hard for me to vote Communist.

If the four candidates with party name recognition aren’t doing anything for you, I’d seriously consider checking out the minor party candidates and independents to see if one of them does. You never know.

This is not the first time I’ve bought a smartphone. Back in 2004, I did a bunch of research and bought a Palm Tungsten W through Rogers.

It didn’t end well. I cancelled my contract within a month and vowed never to do that ever again.

Well, it’s been nearly seven years, which isn’t exactly never. But I bought a smartphone.

Keen observers of culture and technology will be the first to tell you that things have changed a bit in the meantime. Pretty much everyone I know has a smartphone. My sisters have smartphones.

Thing is, I have wanted access to email and IM ever since I held one of those LCD RIM email pager thingies back in 1998. But the combination and hatred and distrust of cellphone providers, coupled with a distate for the direction general purpose computing is being taken by device manufacturers has kept me out of the game.

This isn’t something I wanted to rush into. I’ve been thinking about it for months, mulling over the various options and trying to figure out what I’d be comfortable with.

The provider was a toss-up between Wind and Koodo. Koodo has the cheapest smartphone plan at $30/month with a sort of pay-as-you-go thing for data. But they’re tied to Telus, one of the Big Three cellphone providers in Canada (admittedly, the least offensive one, not that that’s saying much). Wind is a new entrant, and I have no small desire to help support new entrants in the market. Being new, however, they don’t have great coverage. Meaning I’d be without data service whenever I went home to Belleville.

For the phone, I really wanted something with a keyboard, but I also wanted to get the newest Android version, Ice Cream Sandwich. That, coupled with the recommendation of the awesome online comparison tool Sortable (and local startup), I decided to get the Galaxy Nexus.

Koodo doesn’t offer the Galaxy Nexus and it’s $600 unsubsidized, which tipped the balance towards Wind. And, honestly, not having to worry about data usage is pretty nice.

A few observations:

• A smartphone makes eating out alone slightly less socially awkward, but walking down the street slightly more.
• Twitter was made for smartphones, but I kinda knew that already.
• Podcasts work better this way, but podcast client software isn’t nearly as good as I’d like it to be. It’s better than my previous (mostly manual) process, and frustrating close to what I want, which makes the gaps that much more noticeable.
• Angry Birds Space! Woo!
• I miss having a physical keyboard. I’m using Swype, and it’s pretty cool, but auto-correct makes me sad.
• Another drawback of the Galaxy Nexus is the lack of an SD card and USB mass storage access. This probably isn’t a big deal to most people, but I like having access to file systems. And there are a whole bunch of apps that seem to expect you can access an SD card directly for import or export.
• Those are the only two faults I can find with the phone, really. I don’t have much to compare it to first hand, but it’s a great little machine.
• I’ll probably post a round-up of apps I like once I’ve done some more exploring.

A couple months ago, the Canonical Design Team asked for feedback on a new multi-monitor Launcher set-up on their blog. People had complained that if you had a whole bunch of monitors, mousing all the way over to the top-left one to access the launcher was kind of annoying, so they wanted to do something about it. Fair enough.

I tried out their prototype. Their solution involved putting a launcher on every monitor. Okay, sure. But what surprised me was by default they caused the mouse to stop at the monitor boundary unless you move the mouse above a certain speed.

I didn’t like this very much. Good thing I was involved in the design process and caught it early! They asked for feedback in blog comments, so I left one.

Please, I asked, provide a way for me to disable this feature. I don’t use the launcher very much and it’s more important to me that I can move smoothly and seamlessly between applications on different monitors. I like Unity because it gets out of my way and lets me work. This will get in my way.

I upgraded to beta1 today for the Global Jam. I was disappointed to see my request seems to have been ignored. So I’ve posted a bug. And I’ve changed the request slightly: please just give me a config setting somewhere that allows me to pass between monitors without being hindered. Maybe it’s really hard to implement an option to turn off per-monitor launchers and that’s why my suggestion was ignored. Who knows?

To illustrate the issue (since it’s easier to show than to explain), I made a short video using a two-monitor setup. It’s a bit rambly and could probably use editing, but I think it eventually gets the point across. Also, you probably want to watch it in at least 720p and full-screen.

Click here to watch video on YouTube.

PS: To the Unity hataz: I know that by posting something like this I’m going to get a tonne of “Unity/Canonical/Ubuntu/all y’all sucks!” and “You should use $FAVOURITE_WINDOW_MANAGER!” comments. I use Unity and I like it. I want to keep using Unity. Thanks, though. If you’ve found something you like better, great! Keep using it! I’m glad you’re happy with it. I’m aware of the alternatives. But maybe you could post your on your own blog saying that $FAVOURITE_WINDOW_MANAGER has some cool feature or other or some annoying bug you don’t like, and I can learn more about it that way. Maybe even with a cool video! That’d be great!

The new video lens in Ubuntu 12.04 features searchable content from across the Internet. It also shows region-specific content, like the BBC iPlayer if you’re in the UK.

Wouldn’t it be cool if the video lens gave Canadians access to videos from the CBC, CTV, NFB animations and documentaries or Comedy Channel shows like The Colbert Report? I think it would!

Now, I foresee a number of possibly insurmountable problems from the start.

1. I have no idea how the Ubuntu video lens project is managed or how welcoming they are of contributions.
2. Or what sort of guidelines they’re looking at for adding content channels.
3. Or how ridiculously complicated they’ve made it to add new channels.
4. I will be very surprised if any of the above-mentioned sites have publicly-accessible APIs I’d likely need to support this.
5. Or what policies they might have that would that prevent using their content in this way.

Other than that, it should be easy!

Does anyone out there in Ubuntu Planet land have any suggestions or insight that might help overcoming the difficulties above? Comment here! Or poke me (dscassel) in #ubuntu-ca on Freenode.

This Saturday, join the Jam!

The Waterloo Region Chapter of Ubuntu Canada will be jamming at Kwartzlab in Kitchener

What’s an Ubuntu Global Jam, you ask? Well! This video may help give you an idea:

Or you can read this interview I did with Charles Proffitt of the New York LoCo Team.

Basically, we’ll be trying out the first Ubuntu 12.04 beta (to be released this week!), triaging bugs, fixing things, working on artwork and promotional materials and anything else that we feel can help Ubuntu be better than ever. If you don’t have a computer you can bring, we have some at the lab you can test with.

We’ll also have drinks for sale, order out for food and maybe break out a game of Hedgewars or Teeworlds. Because games need testing too!

See you there!

Larry Lessig is something of a hero of mine. He’s a Harvard law professor who started out campaigning against modern intellectual property extremism that is locking up our culture and making creativity and innovation more and more difficult and more and more expensive. He created the Creative Commons to give artists a way to contribute to a free culture that they benefit from, despite laws which make that increasingly difficult.

A few years ago, though, he stopped fighting the battle against copyright extremism.

He stopped because he realized that increasingly overreaching copyright laws were merely a symptom of a much larger problem. It, along with inaction on climate change, pizza being classified as vegetables, ruinous deregulation and subsequent bail-outs of the financial industry and hundreds of other dysfunctions in American government were going to continue unless it is addressed.

The problem, as he sees it, is that people in government spend nearly as much time seeking campaign contributions as anything else. That large contributions grant access to the political process that ordinary citizens can’t hope to have. And that cynicism about this is so widespread, no-one in America believes that government can solve any real problems anymore.

I’d encourage you to watch the video above. He makes a very compelling argument.

And if we’re feeling smug as Canadians, well, we do do at least some of this right. The Harper Government has already erased some of the Crétien era campaign finance reform, however. And the US State Department exerts considerable sway in Ottawa, enough to get US-style copyright legislation like Bill C-11 passed. We are not immune.

Even if SOPA and PIPA are defeated, it’s inevitable that something like them will be passed eventually. Because Congress will eventually obey their paymasters as soon as it politically expedient to do so. It’ll happen unless the system is changed. Unless we are persistent and vigilant.