Pie Palace

For those of you who don’t participate in the Pie Palace community features, I’m promoting gawp’s short (yet lucid) treatise on keeping it real:

Few people consider the cognitive load that keeping it real imposes. As well as determining what ‘it’ is, one has to determine what reality is and maintain synchronization between the two. No simple task. Consider keeping things only partially real, or restrict the activity to weekends and evenings.

He’s right. As one who attempts it keep it real at all times, I hadn’t considered the toll it was taking on my mental health. This bears further consideration.

In the past six months I’ve slowly escaped my pupal student stage, and been metamorphosing into a nine-to-five workin’ stiff. It’s come with a raft of benefits: income, interesting work, as well as relative security and predictability. Sadly, there are also costs.

Gone are the days when I’m my own manager. I can’t decide that a topic or idea interests me, and then take a day and a half to get a handle on it. I suddenly have deadlines imposed by others, that I have to deal with. I also have to handle the needs of co-workers (”hey erigami, my flux capacitor just stopped working. is that your fault?”).

But the part that’s hardest to handle is my free time. I suddenly work 40 hours a week, and finish the work day feeling pretty tired. I find that I don’t know what to do with myself when I get home. I would like to spend time with friends, doing something active, or learning more about the world.

All that, while keeping it real…

I’ve just finished reading Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s Stamping Butterflies. I recommend it: it feels like an Ian M. Banks novel, but with more believable characters and much less incest.

xkcd has a fine ninja/opensource cartoon.

I try to stay away from talking about products on this blog, but I have to respond to a Coolhunting post effectively parroting a press release.

The battery in my Braun foil razor died after 10 years of dedicated service. When I was wandering around the Rideau Centre, I couldn’t find a store that sold Braun razors for under $180, so I decided to give a $125 Axis “Nitro” a shot. It’s a foil razor, and I assumed, that despite it’s ugly red colour, it would provide a decent shave. It didn’t. It ground away at my skin like it was sand paper. On top of that:

• it feels poorly made: the red looks painted on, and ready to scratch; while the rubber hand grips look ready to peel off; and the head looked flimsy and breakable
  
• the pop-up trimmer was tiny and kind of jagged, painfully scratching my neck
  
• the foil did a lousy job of cutting my three days of unshaven growth. Instead of cutting, it kind of yanked the hairs giving my face a $125 pluck

I returned it got a Braun for the same price. It had the same price tag, but it was infinitely easier on my face. The Braun is the exact opposite of the Axis: well made, easy on my skin, and painless to use.

The bus started abruptly, causing a 15 year old kid to almost fall over. The kid responded by muttering “Hey Mr. Bus Driver, keep it real!” under his breath. I think I’m going to say that whenever I get a chance.

I tend to think of technology as a big waste of time. I would be surprised if anyone’s life has been improved by the gadgets pumped out of our consumer culture. Having said that, I’m also a bit of an optimist. The toys we build ourselves have so much potential. That’s why I’m weirdly excited about Fon. In a nutshell, it’s a for-profit WiFi sharing network, that provides wireless routers that allow personal and public use of existing access points.

Best of all, these access points are being given away for free. Go get one! Set it up! Give people access to your bandwidth! The source for their firmware can be found on their website.

I’d rather use a truely community oriented infrastructure, but Ottawa doesn’t seem to have an active community wifi group. =(

I’ve updated the MiniPosts plugin. This is a fix of a bug that was exposed by WordPress 2.1. In a nutshell: to detect changes in a posts aside status, the original author of MiniPosts hooked the edit_post action. It turns out that the edit_post action is called when comments are added to a post, which caused the callback to de-minipost-ify the blog entry.

Since the edit_post hook is called from all over the place, I’ve associated a nonce¹ with the checkbox that the user fills out for the miniposts. That allows the plugin to tell the difference between a legitimate change request, and a random one triggered by the promiscuous edit_post hook. That approach was suggested by Mark Jaquith.

Download version 0.6.4 or visit the MiniPosts project page.

1. A nonce is a secret number that has no real meaning, but occurs alongside of data you care about. Whenever you get data that you care about, you check it to see if the nonce is the value you expect. If the data is forged, the attacker will have to guess a value for the nonce. Since there are a huge number of possible nonces, an attacker has a pretty low chance of getting it right and fooling you into thinking that it’s coming from a legitimate source. (back)

According to the OC Transpo website, there are 89.6 million passenger trips on OC Transpo every year¹. Meanwhile, OC Transpo has an annual budget of $266 million.

So let’s whip out the ol’ calculator:

   $266,000,000 / 89,600,000 trips = $2.97/trip

Using those numbers, gleaned from the OC Transpo website, we see that each trip costs about $3. Which is much less than the $6.50 mentioned elsewhere.

Curious about the breakdown of ridership?

• 37.6% of revenue comes from regular, ecopass, and express passes
  
• 22.1% of revenue comes from students
  
• 2.2% of revenue comes from seniors
  
• 36.7% of revenue comes from cash and tickets (ie, we can’t make a guess about the demographic of the rider)

Those demographics are clearly understated. A third of OC Transpo’s revenue comes from cash and tickets, which may be used by students or seniors, or “other”.

Hmm. I’d like to get ahold of historical numbers for fare costs. It’d be fun to graph against tax rates.

1. The OC Transpo website says 89.6 million passengers. If we multiply the number of weekday riders by 260 weekdays per year, we get 90 million, which seems to corroborate the number of trips. (back)

As much as I like Ubuntu, it does have a few quirks, not least of which is Flash’s out-of-the-box inability to display text. It’s easy enough to fix: just install a few more font packages:

$ sudo apt-get install gsfonts-x11 msttcorefonts

Hat Tip: Ubuntu Blog