I'm wearing a light sweatshirt to work today because it's been rather cool for the past couple of days. Meanwhile all of my friends in Toronto have been talking about nothing but the heat wave. Talking to one of them on IM kinda goes like this:

Me: hey, how are you doing? :)
TorontoFriend: fhdjkssnm,oooooopofklr
Me: huh?
TorontoFriend: sorry, those were my sweat droplets falling onto the keyboard and hitting the keys.
Me: um, okay, eww. how are you doing?
TorontoFriend: I can feel my muscles literally peeling away from the bones from this heat. soon they will melt off and form a puddle of goo on the floor and then evaporate and all that will be left of me is the crisp ashes of my bones.
Me: uh, talking to you is getting kinda creepy. how about you ping me when this heat wave ends?
TorontoFriend: g2g, my timer just went off and that means it's time for me to rotate which cat I keep in the freezer and which catscicle I put on the back of my neck. seeya!

So this seemed like a good time to bring up a topic that I'm already a few months behind in discussing: global warming and climate change. Yesterday a representative of The Climate Group came to give a talk at Google following a meeting between Tony Blair, the Governator, our own Sergey Brin, and other CEOs from far and wide. His slides closely resembled the message proclaimed by An Inconvenient Truth. And if you haven't seen that movie yet, you should go. Right now. Stop reading this blog, step away from the computer for a few minutes, and go find your nearest theatre that's still showing it. Go on. I can wait.

The point is that global warming isn't just a topic for grade 3 science fair projects where kids use saran wrap and a blunt thermometer to prove that global warming does happen even though it didn't happen in their experiment which was due to something called "experimental error" which is totally legit and not worth any marks penalties if you explain why you suspect that the error occurred, which was likely due to the fact that you were trying to explain a very complicated chaotic system using a bowl and saran wrap, as much as because you kept lifting the saran wrap to see if anything was happening underneath.

Global warming's gone way beyond that and into the category of "things we should all be concerned about". The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled in the last 30 years. Malaria has spread to higher altitudes in places like the Colombian Andes, 7,000 feet above sea level. The flow of ice from glaciers in Greenland has more than doubled over the past decade. At least 279 species of plants and animals are already responding to global warming, moving closer to the poles.


We here at insanecats care very strongly about things like staying alive. So we've prepared a list of five things that our readers can do to help reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that they're producing.

1. Drive less - You're producing one pound of carbon dioxide for every mile that you drive. Carpool or take public transit. Or better yet, get off your ass and do some walking or biking for once. I wasn't going to say anything, but you look like you've been getting fat.
2. Reduce, reuse, recycle is an ordered list! - Stop buying those products with tons of packaging and then saying to yourself, "it's okay because I'm going to recycle it." Yes, do recycle -- recycling half your household waste can save 2,400 lbs of carbon dioxide every year -- but remember that the old "reduce, reuse, recycle" is an ordered list. Reduce if you can. If you can't, reuse. If you can't reuse, then recycle.
3. Become a tree planting ninja - A single tree absorbs one ton of carbon dioxide in its lifetime. Plant a tree in your backyard or at your cottage. If you don't have yard space, sneak into a park in the dead of night and plant one there -- that way not only will you be helping the environment, you'll also get to feel like a secret world-saving ninja. If you take photos and send them to me, I'll post 'em.
4. Use less hot water - If you "do laundry" by throwing all your clothes into the washing machine and totally don't sort by colour, then you're not a laundry-snob enough to know the difference between the temperature of water that you wash with, so you might as well wash with cold water and save us 500 lbs of carbon dioxide every year.
5. Switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs - Each bulb you switch will save 150 lbs of carbon dioxide every year. IKEA sells them cheap. And while you're there, buy yourself a poäng and a expedit. You'll thank me later.

So while you're sitting in the crazy heat wave, fantasizing about sleeping in a bathtub of Chunky Monkey ice cream, consider making some of the changes above instead. We'll all be the better for it!

I heard dishes shaking in my cupboard and my first thought was "is the cat trapped in there?" She sometimes jumps into closets and such and then gets stuck when I close the door and freaks out.

But then I glanced over at my couch and Mota was sitting on it, her head up and she was looking right back at me. We exchanged "if that wasn't you who was it?" looks.

And then there was a small jolt, as if a car I was in had just stopped.

Three seconds later, dantekgeek sent me an instant message: "feel that?"

Within five minutes, I was chatting online with a dozen friends from SF, all of whom were oohing and aahing at our 4.4 earthquake. We filled out the form with our addresses, adding our data to the rapidly growing set of earthquake information (isn't the internet great?) and watched the data flow in and reading through Technorati as the blog posts came in live. Very cool.

Check it out! I was in a tiny earthquake. Wicked. :)

...these should be them.

1. Sneakily browse the web while it looks like you're working on a typical Word document -- wicked. Link
2. Send customized Snakes on a Plane audio messages from Samuel L Jackson himself. Link
3. Totally disgusting (not safe if you ever want to eat again) photos of a maggot infestation in Sweden in which bicycles and trees are completely covered in a cocoon that's filled with masses of writhing larvae. Link

My banks are trying to drive me insane. I swear.

First of all, I found out today that the Bank of America has decided to freeze all my money.

No credit card, no debit card, no taking cash from the bank teller, no anything. No retrieving any cash from my account. You know the money that Google keeps depositing into your bank account? You can't access it. Enjoy eating cardboard.

The bank couldn't really tell me exactly why it was frozen, either. The best that the dude could come up with was that when I opened my bank account, I didn't have a social security number, and someone might have seen that and decided to freeze my account. He gave me the number of the employee who did the actual freezing and told me to call him on Monday.

"Can I take out some cash with you right now, so that I have access to money between now and Monday evening?"
"No, I'm sorry. Your account is completely frozen."

Eating cardboard.

Next, I receive a credit card statement from the Bank of America. They say I owe $70. Which is strange, since I haven't bought anything on my BoA credit card yet. So I look into it more closely.

Apparently I now owe a total of $70 in late fees. The first month was $35 in late fees, and the second month was another $35 in late fees, equalling $70 that I owe.

Okay, so let's do some math here.

Amount I owe = $70. Late fees = 2 x $35. Amount I owe - late fees = amount I'm getting charged late fees on = $0. That's right. I'm getting charged late fees on my balance of $0. What. The. Hell.

On the Canadian side of things, things aren't going much better.

I owe a handful of dollars on my Canadian credit card but I can't find a way to pay it. They're refusing to take my bill payments from my American bank account. They only accept payments from a Canadian bank account.

So could I just transfer money from my American bank account to my Canadian bank account and then pay it that way? (Pretending, of course, that my American bank account wasn't frozen, which it is.)

No. Because the only way for me to transfer money from my American bank account to my Canadian bank account, say both the American and the Canadian banks, would be to write a cheque to myself and then be in Canada to deposit it at an ATM. They both agree that there's no real way for me to get money from the US to Canada without being in Canada.

So let's recap:

• I'm being charged American credit card interest fees of $35/month on my balance of $0
• They won't let me pay the money I owe on my Canadian credit card
• My entire American bank account has been frozen and I can't withdraw money in any way shape or form

I am a little ball of exasperated fury.

The theatre is packed. I mean, packed. There's a quiet buzz of excitement in the air, but the main noise is coming from the front of the theatre, where a musician is playing the organ.

He finishes the song he's playing and switches to another song and the audience explodes into uproarious applause. He's playing the theme from 2001.


And why shouldn't the audience shower him with excited applause? This is what we're here to see. The Castro theatre playing a late night showing of Kubrick's 2001 presented in 70MM on the big screen.

The live organ sinks into the stage, the curtains pull back, and the movie begins.

There's the audience's laughter during the amusing parts, and awestruck silence where tribute is due. The entire experience is magical.

And I'd thought that I knew how to watch movies.

Here's how I thought the story went: you head down to the local Paramount supermagamoviecomplex, walk past the hallway of crazy neon lights, and purchase an obscenely large bucket of popcorn approximately the size of Michigan, wait in line to hand in your ticket next to the tweens, unable to hear anyone nearby due to the loud music and loud talking.


Then you walk into the theatre itself and watch twenty minutes of ads mixed with 'trivia' questions ("this actress co-starred in Twister but is better known for a show you shouldn't get too 'mad' about"), and then the lights dim. Next is another twenty minutes of ads, this time video ones, followed by twenty minutes of previews, followed by the feature presentation.

That is how you watch a movie.

I knew it and I loved it. Even the ads. The idea of missing previews always seemed sacrilegious! What if there is a really hawt advertisement like that PSP commercial and you miss it? The advertisements are part of the experience. The crazy neon lights are part of the experience. The obscene amount of noise outside the theatre and pin-drop silence inside the theatre is a part of the experience.

It wasn't until I saw the alternative that I realized that I'd been brought up in the age of Paramount supermegamoviecomplexes, and that the art of movie watching had nearly been completely lost to me.

The Castro theatre doesn't have any ads. It just has a guy with an organ, an oldstyle theatre with statues instead of neon lights, older movies, and an audience who isn't scared of laughing out loud.

And it's amazing. I'll be back twice later this week: Baraka and Tron.

It's here. The movie event of the decade. The day that I've been writing about for eleven months. It's finally here.


A little snakes on a plane music, Maestro if you please.

Tonight at 10 pm the Metreon is going to be showing a special pre-midnight screening of Snakes on a Plane. Already hundreds of tickets have been purchased for this event (including mine!), and people are promising to come dressed up in snakes costumes, pre-parties are being organized, and some fans are even using the event as a dating opportunity.

This ain't yer typical movie premiere. And what's more: all these cultish fans can't possibly be disappointed because we're anticipating the worst!

Worst. Movie. Idea. Ever.

And I can't wait to love it.

Now they're crawling all in my coffee,
Oh it's appalling, they won't get off me.
There has got to be much more to it.
This can't be a movie, no it's too damn stupid.
Snakes on a plaaaaane.

In many ways the move to this side of the world magically teleported me to a land of like-minded people. From open source to organic chocolate, SF is the mecca for the merger between politics and geekery. It's not unusual to wander into a café and overhear a conversation about net neutrality, genetic engineering, or zombie flash mobs. What more could a Catspaw want?

But some wise person warned me that when you have a concentration of ideas in a single place, it's easy to forget that there's a world outside of your immediate surroundings.

This is dangerous from a technical perspective -- if everyone you know has no problems opening up a terminal and typing a few commands, this is going to affect how you design user interfaces and how you treat new users. But it's even more dangerous from a political perspective. Tech-savvy norcal residents making silicon valley salaries can afford all sorts of economic, philosophical and political luxuries that just aren't accessible or practical to the rest of the world.

I've been recently watching through Penn & Teller's Bullshit! series in which the famous magician duo set out to debunk an array of metaphysical, supernatural, and popular misconceptions. Most of the episodes I agree with in their entirety, and it's a pleasure to watch them undermine misconceptions that have been bothering me for years. Finally a demand for critical thinking and scientific integrity over advertising and superstition! But in many ways, I'm enjoying even more watching the episodes that I don't agree with. Here are two extremely pragmatic guys (who I respect intellectually) who are arguing, in a very convincing way, opposite to what I'd always believed was self-evidently true. It's forcing me to think. Why am I so adamantly against guns? For rational reasons, or because they cause an emotional, visceral "guns are bad" reaction that I've neither researched nor thoroughly debated? Am I using exact kind of opinion-forming process that I abhor when others use it on other issues?

Being presented with rational opposition to your ideas is important, if not essential, to maintaining healthy opinions. Philosophies are complicated things and circumstances can (and should) change them when appropriate. There will always be absolute nutcases who disagree with you, but if they're the only opposition that you encounter, you'll forget the reasons why it's important to keep an open mind on these issues. There are also very intelligent people out there who disagree with you, and they're the ones who you should keep around.

In most ways, this city is absolutely fabulous in that you can't take three steps without tripping over a bright software geek who is biking a (paper) bag full of organic groceries back home. But it means that I'm going to have to work extra hard to make sure I get my daily dose of opposition.

So if you hate Google, tell me about it. If you think smoking bans are immoral, let's chat. Whenever I blog something and you find yourself frowning and thinking "hrm, that's not right", comment about it. Just because I'm fairly certain that you're wrong ;), doesn't mean I won't take into consideration the off chance that you may have something to offer to the mix.

I've been trying to weasel my way into being a campus recruiter at UofT this year for Google. And it's not only because of the free trip home.

Way way back many centuries ago, when I was an undergrad (remember then? Almost four months ago!), I participated in a lot of recruiting events for UofT. You only need to do it a few times before you start developing great answers to tough questions. And the high school kids always seemed so relieved to talk to you, like it actually didn't matter what words you were saying so long as they could hear a real human voice that belonged to the scary, huge institution that they were applying to.

Now despite the fact that I'd like to think that I could sell punching yourself in the face as a new fad, what I really enjoyed was the opportunity to sell something that I believed in.

(Sure, I did my share of complaining throughout undergrad. But cynicism and overblown, histrionic complaints are my thing! My raison d'être. The point is that behind the years of unprecedented whining, I do believe that the CS department at UofT can take a fleet of undisciplined, cocky top-o'-the-class high school students and churn out far more talent than they would have naturally grown in those four years. And -- more importantly -- that the environment provides the opportunity for growth beyond pure computer science. All of the opportunities of the world are lying there, and any student with the ambition to take them is granted all that they can carry. ... But I digress.)

As I was saying, I enjoyed recruiting for UofT because I really did believe in what I was selling. And it's just as true here at Google. I dance the dance of "zomg my job rules" because every day I'm astounded by the fabulousness of my own life.

It's like having two friends who don't know each other, but you know that they're both extremely bright, have the same sense of humour, and would totally get along. You can't help but just yearn for the opportunity to introduce them to each other.

I want to sell UofT to Google, and to sell Google to UofT.

And of course there's the element of wanting to be on the other side of the presentation I remember so well, when Google came to talk at UofT and I thought that maybe, just maybe, I'd drop my resume into the pile. I want to stand in the front of a lecture room in Bahen and try to convince the me's in the crowd to do the same.

And that's when I realized that in another life, I must have been a cult leader. Because every time I find something that I enjoy, my first thought is "how I can bring others along with me?" Google is far too awesome for me to keep all to myself.

So for those of you back home, stay tuned. I may be coming back to try to bring some of you back with me. And I'll be bringing the purple koolaid.

Aside from a great article about why Joi is awesome, this article on Joi's life also delves a little into why I think that World of Warcraft is awesome.

It has nothing to do with elves and dragons (though the gaming part of me does think that that part's cool too), and everything to do with the social and teamwork aspects of the game. You haven't seen effective organization until you've seen a team of forty people, coordinating via text and audio alone, execute an extremely elaborate and technical raid.

It's the last day of August. And for the first time that I can remember, September won't entail getting ready for school.

Instead of a todo list that looks like "Buy textbooks, find lined paper, clean out old binder so I can reuse it this year", my todo list looks like "Visit bank re: account problems, call phone company re: automatic payment problems, call mattress delivery company re: late refund".

Being a grown-up totally sucks.

Between electricity bills, figuring out how I want my RRSP to work, checking every sentence I say to make sure it doesn't violate an NDA, dealing with the bank from hell, trying to eat healthy, an endless stream of laundry and dishes, etc., sometimes it feels like being a grown-up has approximately the same number of advantages as stapling your hand to your desk.

And then I read this comic by xkcd:


Suddenly it all made sense. That's what it's all about.

Being a grown-up? Bring it on!