Scott’s Blog

Jenn got us a Wii Fit a couple of days ago at Wal-Mart. I set it up last night and gave it a go. I tried all the strength training exercises that were available, the balance games, and some of the yoga ones, and then ran out of time. I will give the aerobic ones a go tonight.

One thing I discovered is that you need a big room to use it. A lot of the fitness exercises require some serious room. Particularly the things that put one foot on the balance board and one off, like lunges, or the Warrior pose in the yoga activities, and the v-sit exercises take up a lot of room. I found myself moving the couch out of the way, and even then I kept having to slide the balance board to different places on the floor to have enough room for each activity.

I noticed that there is a lot of clicking and futzing with the wiimote, pressing A all the time to continue. That’s a hassle, because during most of the exercises, you don’t want to have the wiimote in your hand, and because the exercises take so much room, you won’t be exercising close to a standing-height thing to quickly put the wiimote down on and pick it up again. I don’t want to lay it on the floor next to the balance board, because I don’t want my spastic balance to cause me to step on it. Being over six feet, with a BMI of (very high) if I stepped on the wiimote it would be dead. I may have to hack up some kind of small floor-friendly button that I can step on to simulate a press of the A button. Our DDR dance pad might work for that. Either that or I will have to rig up a thing to hang the wiimote from the ceiling and pull it down when I need it and have it auto-retract, like the microphone in the centre of a boxing ring.

Anyways, I did work up a sweat, and combined with the hour of swimming I did (real swimming) I burned a few calories all told.

I just finished reading Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow. I read a lot, in the order of a couple of hundred books per year. Many books are promptly forgotten, but this is one I’m going to add to my re-reading pile. I’m also going to buy a few copies and give them to a few people. For those who are into reading e-books, the electronic versions of many of Cory Doctorow’s works are freely available from the author’s website, published under a creative commons license, like my blog. That right there earns my respect, and I’m presently perusing the rest of Cory Doctorow’s catalog.

I’m always having these discussions with my wife about this discomfort I have with the idea of surveillance societies and the loss of privacy (ironically, considering how much information about myself that I voluntarily publish). The book Little Brother is a fictional story about what gives me the willies about the attitude “I have nothing to hide, so why should I care if they video me everywhere, read my email and wiretap my phones?” I think that attitude is based on a logical fallacy, that privacy only has value to people who are hiding something. That’s called a false dichotomy. Privacy is valued by people who are not criminals and do not have a guilty conscience too. Otherwise, why do we have curtains? If you have the “I have nothing to hide” attitude, I suggest you read this paper on the fallacy of that idea, written by George Washington Law School Professor Daniel J. Solove. Click the link and scroll down to find several links to the actual PDF of the paper.

Surveillance societies give up essential freedoms in the name of safety. Unfortunately, the sacrifice of freedoms is generally in vain, because the increased surveillance of citizens does essentially nothing to prevent crime or terrorism. Search with Google. There are many many articles and reports indicating western societies are no safer from terrorism than before September 11. In fact, many think we’re worse off, and now we have the added fear of misuse of all the surveillance information by the authorities.

If, like me, you are Canadian, you might think that there’s not much surveillance going on in our country. If that’s the case, do a little experiment. When you’re out and about, think about every instance during your day when your location or activity is recorded by somebody or some automated system. Do you go into a store? You’re on video. Do you buy something with credit or debit? Somebody knows what you bought. Use cash? If so, what about your Safeway Club card or Save On More card? They still know what you bought. Buying online? Same thing. What about traffic cameras looking at your license plate as you travel around town? Somebody could know everywhere you’ve been, and when. Now read Little Brother, and think about the picture of your life that all those little points of surveillance that could be constructed if a single authority were able to combine all that?

Really, I’m only a little paranoid, and I freely share a lot of info about myself. However, as is famously and often stated, just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

Sleep well.

I just finished my usual last-minute tax filing and payment. This year I have 2 hours and 30 minutes to spare. I used UFile for the third year in a row. For anyone who does paper tax returns, I highly recommend getting with the 90s and doing your taxes electronically. UFile is super-simple to use. You enter your name and SIN, your spouse and kids’ info, and then just follow the steps, adding each form you got from your employer, RRSP vendor, sports club, dentist or whatever, and it automatically calculates the best way to apply your deductions between you and your spouse, and calculates your refund or amount owing. Then, if you have a CRA passcode, you can NETFILE your taxes right away and you’re done. My bank even lets me pay my return’s amount owing by Internet banking. Everyting is quick and simple, and it cost me twenty-six bucks.

I’m trying to post a blog posting from a text editor called TextMate on my Mac. If you can read this, it worked.

Last night APEGGA hosted a “Science Night” at the kids’ school. We went and had fun watching the kids build tinfoil boats, paper airplance, electric motors, newspaper towers, and gak (some kind of slimy silly putty). We also got to watch interesting demos of the structural strength of eggs, the percussive power of baloons filled with hydrogen and oxygen, and the foaming power of baking soda. Mack particularly liked the explosions, and he also seemed fascinated by the minerals that the geologist guys had. Emily was more into the tinfoil boat building, and enjoying the demos with her classmates.

I secretly thought that the chemistry demo with the hydrogen balloons would have been more fun if the chemistry professor giving the demo had shown us how to generate and capture hydrogen at home for some home-based “experiments” since blowing stuff up at home is such good entertainment.

It was so much fun that next year I think I might volunteer to man a table during National Engineering and Geoscience Week at some of the local schools.

I’ve been playing lots of Wii games lately. First, my old friend Tim from high school, who works for Vivendi Games, sent us a copy of Crash of the Titans, made by his company. Mack and I played that for several hours on Sunday, and it’s a hoot. I also did a little Wii Boxing on Sunday evening. Then, I finally talked Jenn into playing some Wii with Emily and she got hooked on DDR Hottest Party. Jenn and I played until after midnight on Sunday night and another couple of hours last night. I spectacularly suck at DDR, but it’s exercise, anyways. Jenn has much more dance-coordination than me, not surprisingly.

I just helped Jennifer finish off the bylaws for the Thunderbirds Water Polo Club. She’s been working on it for days, and was done except for some problems with formatting. She was using Word on her Macbook. I helped her tag the paragraphs so that it would automatically generate a table of contents. If you were to have some preconceived notion about how that should work, Word does it in exactly the opposite way to what you expect every step of the way, and then refuses to show you the result until you do a print preview. For what it’s worth, I really think OpenOffice Write is much easier to work with. This session with Word reminded me why I write anything of any length using docbook tags and let the style processor do all the formatting for me. Emacs is my word processor and .txt is my .doc.

I have a 5th gen 60 GB iPod. A while ago, the headphone jack casing cracked, and made the headphone jack wiggly. It still worked okay for a long time, but recently it has become worse and the right channel doesn’t make proper contact. I googled for “broken ipod headphone jack” and found this page explaining the repair procedure. It linked to www.idemigods.com as a source of replacement parts. I ordered a replacement headphone jack / hold switch assembly for $32 including shipping, and I’m going to try to fix it myself. When the jack gets here I’ll photo-document the disassembly and (hopefully) reassembly of my iPod.

For 16 years, this hardworking 486 desktop computer has served our company. It started out life as a high end CAD workstation, progressed through the ranks as a spreadsheet number cruncher, then a word processor, then an IT lab workhorse, and finally served for the last eight years as our primary public DNS server. In that time, it ran OpenBSD 2.6, which was updated with security patches while they lasted, but the machine has run exposed on the Internet without a single patch and completely without downtime since 2002.

Last week we had a scheduled power outage in our building, and the box was shut down. When it came back up it’s hard drive was all corrupted and messed up. Some repairs to the filesystem got it running again for a few more days but on Saturday it gave up the ghost. I built a temprorary replacement for it today, but somehow I don’t think the new box will last us quite as long.

Denys suggested we take it to a taxidermist and have it mounted for display. I’m thinking that might be a good idea.

These made coffee come out my nose. Warning, foul language.
First video
Second video