Over the past ten years of riding on the TTC, Toronto’s public transit system, I’ve noticed a steady increase in personal space in subways and buses. I don’t think it’s due to declining ridership; there are people left waiting for the next vehicle when the doors close. Continue reading “Dancing cheek to cheek”
Whither our weapons?
I sure hope the University of Toronto has a good supply of weapons, both melee and ranged. A university probably ranks rather highly on a list of attack target for zombies — at least if they have any braaains.
Digital distractions
iPad has been receiving a lot of press, lately. Much of it is positive, although it has its detractors. Much of the negative press seems unwarranted and looks like a FUD campaign. Indeed, many of the hits to my “iPad? How bad?” post are from searches for the terms “iPad” and “bad” — people looking for ammunition; these people should fuddle duddle. One thing that seems to be brought up consistently is the inability for iPad to run multiple applications at once at the behest of the user.
Green Backups
If, say, your entire office burns down due to an electrical fire from a photocopier next door, off-site backups are worth their weight in platinum. If you don’t believe me, just look up how much professional data recovery services cost and compare that to the weight of a hard drive or fifty. Some people use e-mail as a back-up system, but it isn’t really appealing as a long-term, scalable solution. Amazon’s S3 provides variable pricing and is scalable, but may be overly complicated for backing up small amounts of data. Some off-site back-up services such as Backblaze are great deals for people with large storage needs ((I am not affiliated with or endorsing Backblaze. I just find their blog posts interesting.)).
The Silver Lining
I think my research supervisor‘s optimism is contagious. Last Tuesday, I returned home to discover my laptop wouldn’t boot. After a couple of hours of trying to coax it back to life, at around 2 am on Wednesday, I realized that the problem was that the hard drive was dead.
Cur bloggo?
People keep blogs for many reasons. So why do I blog? I haven’t really figured that out, entirely, yet. All I know is that this blog is here to help with my research… somehow. It’s sometimes helpful just to write thoughts down. Feedback is useful for more mature thoughts. My recent blog posts are all related, if only tangentially, to my depth paper. I’ll start posting excerpts here, soon. Meanwhile, some of my blog posts will magically be transformed into my depth paper. I hope to update this blog on a weekly basis (instead of every other day as I have been for the last few weeks). We’ll see how that works out!
The Big Toolkit
When the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail. — Abraham Maslow
I used to think versatility and choice were always good things. In fact, I wrote something to that effect just over a week ago. Knowing what is out there means not having to reinvent the wheel. It means being able to select the right tool for the right job. When all you’ve got is a hammer, you end up writing messy 50-line snakes and ladders programs in assembly language when you could instead write the same thing in 7 elegant lines of Python. But?
More on Paper vs. Screen: The Creative Process
I thought that, as a reasonably quick reader and a user of a laptop that sips 8W of power while in use ((With the screen turned low and with wi-fi turned off.)), it would almost always make sense for me to work with content electronically (To Print or Not to Print?). While sitting in a meeting, it struck me that, on an almost daily basis, there are pages of text with which I spend more than an hour. I was, of course, thinking about writing my depth paper.
Continue reading “More on Paper vs. Screen: The Creative Process”