Blessed by the Potato

Though I don’t write with a mind to what people might want to read and just write/rant about whatever happens to interest me at the time, I always kind of fancied having people read what I say. I know that I really only have about 3.5 readers (the half is the guy who keeps checking in every few weeks just to say “TLDR”), and suddenly I think that might be a good thing.

Right now I’m struggling, really struggling, to finish writing a paper. I like science, I like what I do (err… mostly), and I love the fact that I’m advancing knowledge, possibly standing on the forefront of a major revolution in medical care. Of course, all my work is really for naught if I can’t share it with the world, which is where the publishing process comes into play. Publishing my work and contributing to the body of knowledge of the human race is perhaps the coolest thing I will ever do, but I also find the whole idea patently terrifying. This is not a small or friendly audience I’m trying to address, and once the paper is out of my hands there’s very little I can do to affect changes if a mistake slips through. Just thinking about what potential reviewers might find to criticize locks my brain up in a kind of writer’s paralysis; stage fright of the written word. When I don’t really care what people think when they read my writing, when everything is at least psydoanonymous, and particularly when I can play it fast and loose with the references (how I hate referencing), I can hammer out prodigious word counts. Most of my blog posts go up almost as fast as I can type them out, often without any proof reading even — a few thousand words a night is not uncommon (this post was hammered out in like 20 minutes and has 373 words). When it’s for a serious publication, suddenly I lock up and my output drops to something like 50 words/day average. I just churn the keyboard, writing and re-writing and deleting and staring and thinking and worrying.

This blog is not popular. I think that might be a good thing, or else it might not exist at all.

First off, I haven’t updated WordPress…. ever, but my search isn’t working as well as I would like: it returns 10 hits on the first page, and then “previous entries” actually goes to the same place the “previous entries” link does on the main page, which is my previous 10 posts, rather than the next 10 search results. A few choice pages are indexed in Google, but not enough for me to be able to use Google to search my site. I was looking for my really old post on Rogers’ digital cable, and did find it with my 2nd try at search terms, but I still wonder if I should upgrade to WP2. Unfortunately, I didn’t like the escaping it did on apostrophes over at Netbug’s blog so I haven’t tried it yet, but his search string seems to work better. Oh, wait, I see now: I think something’s malformed in my search results stylesheet, because if I enter into the URL /?s=searchterm&paged=2 then it works beautifully, including the links to follow on to paged=1 and paged=2. Why that’s not there on the first results page is beyond me.

Anyhow, the reason I wanted to link to that post is that I got a call from Rogers today. They were telling me that 2009* is right around the corner, and luddites like me with basic analog cable were going to be forced to upgrade to digital cable then. Would I like to upgrade to basic digital for “only” $8 more per month? I pointed out that that was the regular price of digital cable. He said yes, but I would get all the benefits of digital including more channels and “digital clarity”, plus I could lock that price in and avoid any potential price increases in 2009. I pointed out that it was a pretty raw deal: I saw digital as a gain for Rogers and an annoyance for me, since I hate the extra boxes, so I wasn’t going to pay any extra for digital. Plus the price difference would have to double to make locking in for 1 year over 6 months in advance of the change make sense for me.

This got me thinking: I haven’t turned my TV on in over 2 months (ok, I’ve turned the tube on to play the PS2 or Wii, but I haven’t actually watched something on TV in that time). This is partly because I’ve been gone for almost a month of that time on conferences, and partly because it’s the summer so all the shows I watch are into reruns or on hiatus until the fall. However, I probably could go without TV entirely through the year… though that’s because I can download my few “must see” shows, and can pull Global, CTV, and CBC from the air for those rare times when I just want some noise, e.g.: when working out. Wayfare, however, doesn’t seem to like the ergonomics of watching shows on the computer, and it is a little tiresome to burn stuff to DVD on a weekly basis, and trying to stream video to the TV via the Wii’s wireless ethernet sounds like the devil’s work to me. But for $360/year, I wonder if her mind can be changed on that score…

I am really keen to try a digital antenna/converter (ATSC) and see what’s over the air in that format. London’s a bit far from the US broadcasters to pick much up on analog, but I might have some luck with digital. I heard that in Toronto, there’s better digital-over-the-air service than Rogers’ basic cable.

* – Note: Feb 2009 is the digital switch-over for over the air stations in the States, and I believe Rogers is going to attempt to change their cable network to digital only at the same time. Canadian over-the-air switchover isn’t until 2011. However, Rogers will only be allowed to force the switch if 85% of their customer base voluntarily goes for digital. The CBC reported in 2007 that, at their rate of growth at the time, yhey were about 4 years from reaching that figure. That tells me that the Rogers caller was full of shit.

My connection to Rogers went dead in the middle of the night last night, and when it came back up I had a new IP. That might cause a few minor headaches for readers of the site (hopefully no one noticed — traffic has been really light lately so I don’t really know if anyone is reading this anymore). My new IP is in the 99.* range, which is a new range of IPs opened to Rogers in the last few months. Reports are that they’ve been a bit of a hassle — most of the rest of the internet doesn’t know that they belong to Rogers, so sites that say, for example: “welcome, visitor from Canada” don’t quite know what to make of you. Likewise, many routing tables aren’t optimized for that block of IPs yet, so reports have been that it was a slow IP range to have (by now, I guess those problems must have been fixed since I haven’t noticed any problems… yet). Also as a heads up, my IP tends to change fairly rapidly in bursts and then settle down for a few months, so there might be more spontaneous changes in the days to come.

I need birthday present ideas for my mom. Please leave any ideas you may have for me in the comments section (or email them to me).

I’ve been screwing around with my stylesheet again — a few people have recently been criticizing the white-on-black. Personally, I like it, I think it’s classy, and find it pretty easy to read (all my presentations are done in white-on-black powerpoint as well). Plus, it’s sort of been the site’s motif for over 5 years now. But, if it’s giving other people eyestrain then I better change it, especially since I can wax loquacious on occasion (and I don’t want people to stop reading the really long ones due to a colour scheme!). It’s not perfect yet, but it’s close to how I think the new look will be.

I’m thinking I’m going to keep the dark-ish post headers with the grey bar as is, but let me know what you think. I’m definitely going to tweak the dark stripes to the sides (that’s actually a background image), but first I’ve got to find a replacement image I’m happy with.

Edit: just to note, you have to hit reload (possibly twice) to download the new stylesheet if the page looks the same. The white bar above the black page header is somewhat unfortunate, I’m not sure how to fix that yet.

Oh, and since I’m on the topic of stylesheets and powerpoint (sort of), I have to mention that I find it strange how the default font packages are so different amongst MS products. News Gothic MT became one of my favourite fonts, and was set as the default on my old computer for all Word documents (and also this site if you have it; otherwise it probably looks like Century Gothic or Schoolbook Gothic, or whatever falls next in line for your web browser, likely Helvetica or Times New Roman). Yet it hasn’t been included in Windows 2000 or XP, or any of the Office versions since 2000. Likewise, there’s a Franklin Gothic font I have on my work system that I use sometimes for presentations and forms/CVs/other miscellaneous Word documents that aren’t left as Times New Roman, but it’s not on any of my home systems (instead, they have a “Franklin Gothic Medium” that looks quite a bit different). I also remember using Arial a fair bit in middle school and high school a bit, and thought that it had spacing that was similar to Times New Roman (though I also had better eyes and used to use 10 or 11 point fonts by default), but now see quite clearly that Arial is a fair bit bigger (and that can make quite a difference when you have limited space for an application). Also, the Mac default font (Helvetica) isn’t even an option under most Windows packages. And while there are a number of plain, boldish, strange, and script fonts to choose from, there aren’t really any good “title” fonts in the MS library to go with. Nobody using Word could print off a small newsletter with a fancy, embellished title (such as that many newspapers have) without going out to download a font.