Yesterday Slogs handed me this link: Vote by Issue. I highly recommend that all Canadian readers, once you're done reading this very important entry of course, click on it and spend a few minutes on the quiz.

On every page is an "issue" (eg: health care) and four opinions about it, one for each of the major Canadian parties. You choose which ones you agree or disagree with and at the end it informs you which party you agreed with on each issue.

Now you aren't explicitly informed which party belongs with each issue (there's a little '?' next to each one). Sometimes it's really easy to tell --- "Gee, which party think we need fewer gun controls?" --- and sometimes it's a lot harder. It turns out I knew nothing about each party's opinion on farming.

So why am I bringing this link up? Not just because it's something fun to do and "good for you".

I think it would be a really cool way to vote.

I know a few of my friends who took this are already surprised by the results ("I'm a conservative?! No $*# way!" to "Ewwww, NDP?!"). I suspect that the majority of Canadians only know about a very small handful of issues that each party subscribes to.

So instead of voting for the dude who's gonna sit in parliament for you, what if you voted on issues and each candidate was allowed one-sentence to describe her views on them, but you weren't given any indication of which candidate said what.

Then everyone would have to vote on how they feel about each issue, rather than their favourite colour of sign to put on their lawn.

Though I can't prove it, for some reason I feel that this would be better.

Btw, if anyone's wondering, the quiz rated me as: So no real surprises for me.

Tomorrow metac0m and I are off to London to take over the world give a presentation on ... [pause for suspense] ... internet censorship. Okay, not exactly the most surprising of topics, but it's gonna be fun.

I may be forced to put on a Monty Pythonesque accent for at least the first 24 hours after we land, for my own amusement (and the irritation of those around me (sorry Nart)).

I'm there til Sunday, and then I have an exam on Monday, and then if I survive, I'm spending a full week doing nothing but sitting on my couch and staring at the ceiling, occasionally watching a DVD or sleeping. And then I think I have some other exams. I'm kinda ignoring that part.

Anyway, I have no idea what the blogging situation'll be like til then (do they have the internet in England?), so it may be quiet here for a while.

I'm sure you can all amuse yourselves. I highly recommend rolling and unrolling a ribbon repeatedly. It's about as exciting as it sounds and it passes the time. Feel free to offer alternative time-passing suggestions to each other.

Observations of London:

• They don't offer you tea and crumpets when you step off the plane. Is there someone I can talk to about this?
• I can't seem to find the queen. I've looked all over and haven't found her anywhere. Is she hiding?
• It's ridiculously funny to say "cheerio" while in London. Ridiculously funny. It hasn't gotten old yet.
• Transportation costs about a hundred times more in London than it does anywhere else. Want to travel a single block? That'll cost two hundred dollars. Take a bus for one stop? Three hundred dollars.
• It's even more ridiculously funny to say "jolly good" while in London. Ridiculously funny. It hasn't gotten old yet either.
• You know those british guards who aren't supposed to smile even if you're poking them in the arm with a stick while quoting Shakespeare with a French accent? They're not so tough.
• Everyone from the UK is right: Toronto needs some Marks & Spensers downtown.

There you go. Presentation tomorrow. Bed now.

A few evenings ago (I'm back in Toronto and post-exam now) many participants of the conference went out for a dinner together. And as we sat at two very long tables, waiting for the food to arrive, topics of conversation sprung up about everything from taxis around the world to how the media portrays blogs.

But there was a split second moment when I was able to distance myself from the interesting conversation and take a look at what was happening.

From where I sat, I could reach out and touch citizens from the UK, Canada, US, Hungary, Tunisia, Iran, and Malaysia. And everyone was sitting there laughing in agreement about some trivial meme that had taken blogs by storm last year.

I have no really deep insightful comments about this moment, though I'm sure I could put some together if asked --- about how tiny the world is today, or about how diverse our lives are, or about how "blogger" has become a nationality into and of itself --- but I wasn't thinking of any of that right then.

I just thought, "cool", pure and simple, and then the food arrived.

Not all moments in time have to have meaningful thoughts accompanying them in order to have significance. But I thought this was pretty cool.

She said, 'what is "historicity"?'

'When a thing has history in it. Listen. One of those two Zippo lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt's pocket when he was assassinated. And one wasn't. One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. As much as any object ever had. And one has nothing .... You can't tell which is which. There's no "mystical plasmic presence", no "aura" around it.

[The Man in the High Castle, pages 65-66]

After just a few days in London, I noticed something back in Toronto. We lack in historicity. I don't walk the streets of Toronto and think about what might've been happening a thousand years ago on the same piece of land. I suspect that the reasons for this are numerous and varied, but I've tried to figure out a few of them.

In The Man in the High Castle (quoted above, which granted I haven't read in a few years) they later talk about that the real difference between the two Zippo lighters mentioned is that one has an accompanying certificate which certifies its historicity. London has its own certificates which certify its historicity: history books. I can see what the UK looked like a thousand years ago. I can read, in surprising detail, about what was happening. And regardless of how accurate or true this detail is, it provides the city with historicity. Things Have Happened Here.

North America didn't just magically pop into existence a few hundred years ago. "Quick, someone european is coming! Better create some land!" The ground under my house has been sitting there just as long as London has. One thousand years ago there was "conflict near modern day Toronto between two tribes" but that's all that I can find on Google. Oh, and Vikings first landed in Newfoundland.

The second reason that I think Toronto has much less historicity than London is that far, far less has happened in Toronto that is of significance to modern times. In The Man in High Castle, the valuable Zippo lighter wasn't just in anyone's pocket who was assassinated, it was in the pocket of the President of the most powerful country in modern day. If today the US was some little shithole country that most people in the civilized world hadn't heard of, then it would probably be worthless.

Things Have Happened in London that we care about. Heck, some of the cool Things That Have Happened aren't even real; they're works of fiction that took place in London and are now associated with London's historicity.

I've decided that Toronto, a city I love, needs more historicity. It doesn't have to happen right away ... I'm patient to wait a thousand years or so ... but we'd better start making awesome things happen. Glancing at cities around the world, and evaluating their historicity, I've decided that the following are ways of gaining instant historicity points. Perhaps Toronto could take a lesson from some of these:

• Get seriously bombed by another country. (Bonus points if they're trying out this new bombing technology for the first time.)
• Build huge stone monuments. (Bonus points if no one can figure out what they were for.)
• Have someone who's later really, really important be born in your city.
• Raise the largest army to date, take over most of the known world, and have this city be your capital.
• Gather together a lot of philosophers, artists, politicians and such, and start a revolutionary enlightenment movement.
• Do something every year for a thousand years in this city.
• Start telling people from your city that they have to take part in a pilgrimage to return there. (Bonus points if there's a fiery afterlife in it for them if they disobey.)
• Have a massive genocide take place in your city.
• Build a new city on top of the existing one. Repeat a few times.
• When machines take over the world and plug everyone into a virtual world, convert your city into the last remaining human city.
• Make your city suddenly become "lost" but leave clues in surrounding nations about where they can find it.
• Write up your own version of history that includes a thousand years of glory in your city. Then destroy all other history books.

Although some of these are obviously impossible for Toronto (we don't have enough stone to build huge stone monuments), there are others which we could certainly give a try.

If we work hard, one day someone can walk down the streets of Toronto and reflect in awe, "Wow, think about all that's happened here..."

Feelin' fine.

Disclaimer: With an entry title like that, any sort of "this will be a rant" disclaimer would just be redundant; but here's one anyway... As insanecats' readership has expanded to include bosses, profs, ex's, and bridges I don't want to burn, there's been a serious decrease in the number of full blown rants that I've included here. For the purpose of being diplomatic, I've toned down most of my rants into a dull "here's something that kinda bugs me". But this issue has boiled over the edge of my tolerance. If you're quoted in the below and that makes you feel uncomfortable, good. You probably deserve it. I don't name names, but I know that some of you read this blog and will recognize your own words. You know what? You shouldn't have said it to begin with. Here endeth the disclaimer.

Several people have recently forwarded to me a call for papers for an anthology called She's Such a Geek which is looking for papers by female geeks about any of many topics relating to their lives.

As soon as I heard about this anthology, I forwarded it to a few people I know who write very passionately and would do an excellent job documenting some aspect of their geekdom. (They all responded with "but I'm not a geek!", but that's an issue for another day.) During my incessant nudging that their contributions would be extremely valuable, I somehow promised that in return I would write something too.

Not one to back out of deals easily, I've been giving this a lot of thought. What should I write about? Programming? Open source? Computer games? Blogging? Internet censorship? Society and computers? Female geek role models? World of warcraft? MOOs? There were dozens of topics that I felt could easily fit into the constraints of this anthology. So instead of committing myself to a topic, I decided to sit on it for a while and think.

I finally decided that the theme of whatever I wrote should be a positive one. It's easy to write a negative "there are fewer females than males 'round these parts" paper. There needs to be more which are positive. Empowerment, not war stories. It's not a constant uphill battle being a female geek. In fact, it very, very rarely comes up. And usually only when someone asks me, "What's it like being female in CS?" No one cares what gender I am. Right?

(This is where things go downhill quickly.)

The problem is that I can't just peacefully be a geek who happens to be female. When it comes down to it, that's all I want to be.

But somehow it always gets made into an issue, as if female geeks and male geeks are somehow fundamentally different.

"I've found that a lot of my female colleagues find XML parsing hard because it's too structured."

"You're probably good at leading a team cuz girls are better with that social crap."

"This article actually uses pico when showing an example of code being edited? Oh, it was written by a woman. Nevermind, that explains it."

"Katamari's a good game for girls because there aren't complicated controls."

"Python's a very feminine language. it's less powerful but more user friendly. that's probably why you like it."

It doesn't shock me (anymore) to hear these comments. It also doesn't shock me that people nod, as if this knowledge were commonplace. What does shock me is that often the speaker has no idea that what they're saying could possibly be seen as offensive.

Seriously! Are you completely oblivious to your own words? Your brain's not even connected to your mouth, is it?

"All the hot girls are in engineering. The ones in computer science are math dogs."

"Can we stick to facts or do we have to deal with all of that touchy, feely, girly stuff?"

"The only women Google hires are asian."

"I've come to the conclusion that no hot chicks blog."

But the thing that bugs me the most, out of any of it, is when people pin success on gender. As if I won the gender coin toss and now my life is going to be a simple series of abusing being female over and over again.

"I hear that Google has been recently hiring a lot of hot females to try to improve their image. No offense. I'm sure you have mad skillz too."

"It's not that profs have favourites. It's just harder to get noticed in class when you're a guy. I'm sorry to say it, but tits do wonders when it comes to the grade curve."

"Do you think you would have gotten this far if you'd been a guy?" (Do you think you would have gotten farther if you hadn't been an excuse-searching ignorant asshole?)

I've put together a little list for people who have been quoted above and are horrified that their comments were taken in a negative way:

1. Female geeks does not imply n00b.
2. Even if they are n00bs, they are not n00bs because they are female.
3. Sexist comments are not okay just because you think there aren't any girls around to hear 'em. Or ever.
4. Female geek does not imply that my life is handed to me on a silver platter.

Not everyone needs to hear these guidelines listed out like this. The wide majority of people I have contact with would never say anything listed above. In fact, many would actively chew out anything like that if they heard it. But this is in part because I chose to seek out this type of person.

But there are some of you who this does apply to.

Grow up.

I'm a geek and I happen to be female. I also happen to make a mean oregano porkchop. And I don't see you pinning all of my successes on that. So either grow up and we can all discuss which videogame platform is gonna be hottest next season, or fuck off.

There. I've said it.

After a few weeks of calling the holiday my new favourite term, "giftmas", someone on IRC corrected my sacrilegious, and ultimately incorrect, word.

<JaredCE> coke day
<Catspaw> coke day?
<JaredCE> the day when coca cola tradittionaly is drunk by old men with white beards and red pajamas world over

Of course! Coke day!

Merry Coke season, everyone!

(And just after fLufFy and I went out and decorated a giftmas tree and everything. If you're wondering, her name is Felix and she's decorated with colourful lights. The tree, not fLufFy. fLufFy's name is fLufFy and she's decorated with sap.)

Technology has done many wonderful things for us. Technology has enabled my coffee maker to make me a cup of coffee at the exact time I want one every morning. Technology has allowed for such wonderful games as Katamari Damaci and Blowing Things Up 7. Technology has created the field of computer science, meaning that I don't have to major in a useless field like medicine.

But arguably the most important thing that technology has given us is meeting backchannels.

Before technology existed (back in the early 90s), people had to sit in meetings and listen to what people were saying. Sometimes the speaker would say something that could be interpreted in multiple ways; often the unintended way was humourous. But the listeners in the meetings had to judge whether or not it would be appropriate to interrupt and make a sarcastic comment. It was a tricky call, and often potentially amusing conversations were abandoned in order to side with etiquette.

Thanks to instant messenger, collaborative editing programs like SubEthaEdit, and IRC backchannels, this waste is a thing of the past.

At the recent Global Voices conference I attended in London, the idea of an IRC backchannel was actually embraced by the conference. People participated remotely by connecting to the backchannel, and several on-sight people connected as well. It meant that two conversations could be happening at the same time.

At first, this may seem rather rude. Shouldn't the speakers in-person get full attention?

There's a very different dynamic, however, between the main conversation and the backchannel. The main conversation usually involves one person talking for a while (in this case with the microphone), and then it's passed off to the next person. It's a lot more formal, and people usually don't participate unless they feel that they have something very valuable to say.

Backchannels, on the other hand, have a lot of fast dialogue. People are more willing to throw in a quick sentence or two, even if they're not positive about their idea. Backchannels get off topic more frequently (suddenly people will be discussing how cute a photo of a puppy is) but because the topic ranges more, often times there will be interesting tangents raised that arose in a very unstructured fashion and wouldn't have been possible in the main channel.

These two channels don't have to compete. At Global Voices, someone was explicitly assigned the job of folding IRC conversations back into the main dialogue. So when an excellent point was being debated or raised on IRC, that person would request the microphone and bring it up with the rest of the group in person. Likewise, when someone said something controversial in person, it would often then be debated in the backchannel.

These backchannels don't just happen in conferences, either. In lectures, for example, it's not uncommon to see a small group of students chatting with each other on instant messenger. Often times it's about something completely off-topic, but if the prof says something that they don't understand, they are much, much more likely to ask about it on the backchannel than to raise their hand and ask the question.

There are obvious disadvantages to backchannels. Attention is divided, not everyone gets to hear both channels, and there's more room for goofing off.

That said, backchannels will happen. People like them. They feel the need to discuss things perhaps slightly off topic with a smaller group. Whenever there is a structured lecture/meeting/presentation environment, there will be a pull to create an unstructured backchannel.

There are three options. The first option is to fight it. Tell students to close their laptops. If they have a question, ask it infront of everyone. If they have a comment, say it to the whole group. The warning with this option is that if the group is large enough, when you get everyone to shut off their laptops, they'll start passing notes. They'll whisper. They'll find other ways to create backchannels, because when a group gets to a certain size, many participants will want one.

The second option is to make lectures and meetings less structured. Create one channel, but let it provide some of the needs from both channels. Have more dialogue and throw more crazy ideas around. Let things get off topic. This can be used sometimes at conferences, but is obviously not always possible.

The third option is to accept backchannels and make them into something productive. Provide a formal IRC channel for students in the class. Have a representative tell the rest of the class when a good question was asked in the backchannel, so that they can share in the wealth. Let people connect remotely. They'll goof off a little, but let them find the right balance. This isn't appropriate in small meetings (less than, say, 30 people), but I think it's exactly right for large lectures and big conferences.

Backchannels are gonna happen somehow. But with a little structuring and planning they don't have to be a bad thing.

Bruce Schneier often writes wonderful things on security, somehow managing to strip away all the hand-wavey techno mumbo jumbo (which is of course a technical term) and leave nothing but the soft chewy center.

He has a great article today on what the NSA domestic spying actually means.

Read it, then pass it along.

I finished my last exam today which means that this term is officially over. So I take a giant step back, slouch onto my couch, and reflect on how the term went.

First off, and perhaps most importantly, I'm a hundred times less stressed now than I was in September. The weight of several years of working up to grad school was on my shoulders at the start of the term.

I think what terrified me the most was the idea that I might end up with a mundane existence. I feared ending up in some mediocre grad school that might lead to a mediocre job and mediocre life without any real accomplishments. What I really needed to do was look at my life thus far -- since when has any of it been normal?? -- and realize that mediocrity wasn't gonna happen even if I wanted it to. Even if I'd ended up in a crappy grad school, I would have found some way of making it into an interesting experience; weird things have their way of finding me. A crappy grad school wasn't going to change that.

As fate had it, I ended up with more than I could have hoped for. September-me couldn't've foreseen it and sometimes I still don't believe it. It's not the end of the road of course; ha!, far from it. But I feel like I was given a free pass to skip the grad school years and start making a difference immediately. And though a few people have snickered at that ("you're just going to be yet another coder there, sitting in a cubicle, not someone who makes big decisions"), since when has my life been normal yet? ;)

The other thing that's really changed this term is that I think I've rediscovered how to have fun with courses. Part of that stems from not having to obsess about grades quite so closely; part of that stems from having a fun team to hang around this term; and part of that stems from being on a victory lap year. But it's been a whole lot easier to laugh in them and have a good time than it has been for several years now.

I may not have learned very much academically this term, but in September I was a little ball of super-stress just waiting to explode, and now in December I'm totally chilaxed and having an awesome time with life. If that's not progress, I dunno what is!

My iBook is sick. :(

After reading apple forums, this is apparently a not-unheard-of problem that costs an arm and a leg to fix.

This makes Catsy very sad.

I'm currently applying the denial (maybe it will go away) solution. I'll let you know how that works out. ;)

After spending many hours at the Apple Store, the conclusion was that my iBook had gasped its last breath.

The logic board failure would cost about the same as a new iBook in order to fix, and would take 4-6 weeks to repair.

So this week is going to involve a long funeral service of transferring corner's data and applications to keystone, my new iBook.

It sounds like something cool ("oh, you have a new iBook!") but the moment is bittersweet at best.