Ratsofrass

So I was browsing Digg thinking again how lame most of the submissions are when I run across this:

He Took a Polaroid Every Day, Until the Day He Died

This is a brilliant post about a brilliant find on the internet: A guy who took a Polaroid every day, shooting something in his life. The blog entry explains it way better than I ever could.

Take a look at all the pictures, here.

Some I like:

That’s all I dare do right now. The site is slowing to a crawl in it’s popularity.

It’s raw, kinda unpolished, but it’s beta; wasn’t really ready for public viewing. As of today it’s hugely mainstream. I see the Digg article is well over 7000 diggs, at this rate it’s going to be one of the most popular articles of the year. Reading some of the project blog pages this thing is getting media attention of all sorts.

I’m trying to put a finger on why this touches a nerve with so many people. I found myself going through the pictures going “let’s see what he was doing in ‘88 when I was in university” or checking on random sets every few years to see how his style changed.

It’s his end though that gets ‘ya. He’s got cancer and having to deal with death at the doorstep. He gets engaged, and married two days later. Only 20 days later we see his last picture.

I have to say, it is interesting to see the story that thousands of photos can tell versus thousands of words.

Highly recommended reading:

When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide.

I am not a huge music fan. I used to buy the occasional CD, occasional becoming even less so due to my frustration with a)Finding any music I liked b)Price of said music found. A good part of my old music collection is stuff that I recorded on radio or copied off of friends because I wasn’t going to pay for collections that were steaming piles of crap wrapped around one good song. It didn’t help that the only way I was going to find out about the crap was to buy the album, because I don’t listen to the radio - they are not going to play most of what I buy anyways. The last two CD’s I bought were from artists who directly burned their own stuff and collected all the profit as a result. Previous CD’s were from MP3.com - which was an early victim of the music industry’s heavy handed tactics to maintain control. (more…)

Another predicable boring election is over in Calgary - other than Helene Larocque being voted out of my former Ward, the rest of the results I mostly don’t care about. But there were some good signs - voter turnout up to 33%, still dismal but not the pathetic last election turnout of 20%.

The story of this election is that 19 year old Jeremy Zhao spending a total of $1853 gets 8007 votes (unofficial City of Calgary numbers) - good enough for 5th out of 9 candidates while Alnoor Kassam spends around $1.2mil and gets 35443 votes. Bronco still won by a large margin, at 128111 votes, 61% of the vote.

The big deal is, when you do the math, Alnoor spent a whopping $33.85 per vote received, Jeremy spend 23 cents per vote. Bronco comes in at $7.81 per vote - I am assuming here that he spent about a $mil for his campaign, and Alnoor was at $1.2mil for his campaign. Jeremy, as per his website is at $1853 - the only website I could quickly find his donator list and spending easily. It would seem Jeremy is the only one that gets that open accountability promises start with how you run your campaign.

Since I’m posting this rant on Flickr’s discussion boards, I’ll blog it as well, cuz, well, it’s too good not to blog as well.

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Personally, I want the “cosmopolitan” character we have now with about half the people. I’m born and bred Calgarian and let me tell you, this city is a lot more “cosmopolitan” than what it was when I was growing up.

Now as to what that word means to me, I expect to be able to go eat / drink and have a choice to partake in most world cuisines. I expect that the nightlife will also have a selection of cultural events that span the world. I expect different architectural styles in different parts of the city. I expect there to be little Italys and Chinatowns. I expect to be able to find other people with my own interests and tastes, be they common, or on the more eccentric side. And, from this site’s POV, I expect there to be endless opportunities for photos on a range of subjects.

Are we there yet? Hell no! We will never be there in some respects - New York is New York partly because it’s had the time to develop all the interesting facets it has, unlike Toronto, or Calgary. But, we do have more of the good stuff that makes a big city a tourist attraction than we had 20 years ago. Unfortunately, we have more of the problems too.

I rode home on my bicycle from downtown for the first time today during “rush hour” and I just can’t believe how stressful it is now compared to the last time I would’ve done that oh, 15 years ago or so. *Most* people are fine and reasonable, it’s the assholes and idjits that you remember, and their are enough people on the paths now that the 2% human scum factor is getting to be a real problem. OTOH, I can have a nice ride home along the Bow River (even with the idjits) and not have to fight with the traffic for a good part of the ride home. Not too many cities where you can do that, for sure.

Let me comment on Trever’s original thought, specifically

“anybody coming in that does not have a place to live and a job already, can get turned away.”

What the hell is wrong with that? He’s pretty much stating Ralph Klein’s Creeps and Bums speech in a different way - why would you move to another city without a job and a place is beyond me - but people do it all the time - and in Calgary right now, if you try it, you are more likely that not to get burned. Turning them away would be doing them a favor - there are enough people with jobs but can’t afford a place who end up living on the street as it is. The word has to be gotten out to the rest of the country that a $10/hr job alone is not enough to dig up roots and come out here - you’d better have your living space covered too, and while you’re at it, get a $15/hr job.

Darwin Awards - anyone who has had internet access for the last ten years must surely know about them. In the last month I have received two emails regarding this year’s Darwin Awards. One was a link to the Darwin Awards site’s 2006 awards winners.

The other seem to be part bogus email, and part truth, as the “winner” in this email was actually the 1995 winner, now proved to be an urban legend that fooled even the Darwin people.

I got thinking about how many times I have received bogus Darwin award winner emails over the years and further more was thinking ‘why do people create these things in the first place?’ I can only come to the conclusion that there are quite a few pathological liars out there who just have to email all their friends with the cool stuff they are finding out on the internet. I’ve experienced only one of these liars and the stories they come up with can on the surface sound quite plausible - but once you dig into them a bit, they fall apart - sound familiar?

The problems start when these pathological liars send emails out to their naive friends - who might be naive about internet lore in general, and/or be naive in general and just buy everything their pathological friend tells them. The naive friend will likely have other naive friends, who have even less of a chance of knowing the reliably of the previous source. And they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on…

… causing those of us who have been on the ‘net a long time to periodically get these bogus or semi-bogus emails, from those that we love but whose computer we must often support.

So what I end up doing is heading over to the real Darwin Award site, and checking out any email I get claiming to be “This Years Darwin Awards”, then going and informing said naive friend about the bogus nature of the email they sent me. I do this because I hate mis-information, especially its rapid spread through emails from trusted friends.

I think at some point, proven pathological liars are just going to have to be denied publishing privileges by any means on the internet. Either that or Darwin Awards are going to have to stop so I can just fire back an instant “This is bogus…” email without having to check into the veracity of the email I have just been sent. But that would be selfish of me. I can’t explain why Darwin Awards seem to be a more frequent target of “bogusification”. Perhaps pathological liars feel the need to one up the stupidity level told in the real stories?

On the other hand, Darwin Awards do present some useful use other than their obvious entertainment value. I can instantly peg someone’s “‘net cluefullness” by what kind of Darwin Awards email they send me. Something along the lines of “This year’s Darwin Awards are up {link to real Darwin Awards site}” tells me that they are cluefull and on top of it, assume I am cluefull. The ones who send me emails with some pasted text in them: definitely less cluefull. Not necessarily stupid, just not as experienced in what kind of crap floats around in the toilet bowl of email these days. I definitely use the BS filter on future emails from these people, because even if they thought it was worth sending, it could still be just another form of chain letter, scam, or well, BS.

I suppose I should answer my original question; good idea or tool of Satan.
I guess it’s good, overall, at least I get some useful information out of these emails, even if the email itself is crud.

You know, Canadians spend so much time bashing Americans we forget that Americans at their best produce some truly awe - inspiring feats unmatched the world over. Specifically today I am referring to the Mars Rovers, which are sending back pictures like this one. If you have not been following their travels lately, check out the pictures taken by Opportunity at the edge of Victoria crater.
These two robotic explorers, designed to last 3 months, are now on their 32nd month on the red planet. The pictures of rugged terrain coming back now are both beautiful and potentially laden with science information about our neighborhood planet. Way to go USA - I hope those rovers keep going for another 32 months of exploration where no one has gone before.