Millennial

It's my thousandth post! So I'll take the opportunity to look back on what I've been writing about all this time.  Unleash the spreadsheets!

Sports, technology, politics.  Yes, that sounds like me.  But which sports?

Really, I wrote about cricket once? But it's not surprising that I spent so much time complaining about hockey.

Wow, Blackberry takes a beating here too.  But the others do seem to be in proportion to how much I use them.

TV ads are the real king of media. And comic strips made the list; that was when I still had a physical newspaper.

Again, why did I block about the fifties? And of course, the oughts still haven't become a real topic of nostalgia.

I guess that's about right for the last few years.

Didn't see that one coming.  Of course, mostly those posts were complaining about pop-culture.

See mom and dad, the degree came in handy after all.

Another big surprise, and those Baby Boomer posts weren't even all complaints.

Yikes! I've contributed to the centre-of-the-universe syndrome.  Of course, the Toronto posts were inflated by the Rob Ford Era.

Okay, there was a bit of bah-humbugishness in those Christmas posts.

Not surprising that the most popular countries were my own, the noisy neighbours, my family's origin, and then the places that are usually in the news.

First Real Bloggiversary!

I've actually been writing this blog for four years, but since I thought it would be funny to start the blog on February 29th, this is the first real anniversary of this blog. So to celebrate, here are my favourite posts:

• Cracking the Maclean's code - I become a real-life Robert Langdon, with better writing
• Kansas, and friends of Dorothy - The untold story of American demographics
• Who, CPA - I make fun of nationalities across space and time
• We're Cruisin' For A Nukin' - In which I expose a little known Canadian attack on Britain
• And Now Here It Is, Your Moment Of Absolute Panic - My reasons for being the first to get on the Donald-Trump-is_scary-not-funny bandwagon.
• Half-Dialog - I explain that unrealistic video games are better than reality
• Selfie Steam - In which I make more photobooth jokes than anyone this side of Jay Leno
• Olympic Butthole Surfers - I try to broker some understanding between music and sports
• With Six You Get Beanroll - In which I help us empathize with the founders of Chinese restaurant
• I'm Sure They're Up To Plan Thirty Or Forty By Now - I explain that my reasons for hating Sharknado were far more sophisticated than yours.
• Panic! In The Winter - I get new respect for winter and Canadian Science Fiction
• Great Expectations - In which I disagree with Bono on how to achieve greatness
• I Declare This Post Didn't Really Happen - I come to understand the complexity of Star Wars
• How Not To Look Foolish On The Internet - pretty self-explanatory, isn't it?
• Soccer Stars - I complain about the Cristiano Ronaldo Galaxy
• Laettner Has Scored For America - an alternate view of Canada's Summit Series win
• Missouri - I finally understand the sixties
• I Think You Can Read 'Bout Dyson - In which I give the Dyson vacuum cleaner guy some advice
• I'm Going To Comic-Con As The American Middle Class - I explain cosplay and the decline of Western Civilization
• It's Gotta Be Da Symbol - In which I critique the then-new Raptors' logo

Thanks for reading!

I Still Get Paid The Same As I Normally Do, Right?

You remember clip shows?  That's where a TV show makes an episode out of clips from previous episodes, usually set up by the characters reminiscing about the past. They don't seem as popular as they once were, and I imagine that in the Netflix era they'll completely disappear.  After all, if the viewers want to relive past episodes, they can just relive past episodes.

But why not do the same thing for blogs?  I could put together a post that's made up of links to past entries.  I got the idea for this because in the last week I've often found myself thinking, "I should write about that - oh, wait, I already did, history is just repeating itself again."

I see OK Go has made another memorable video that's getting viral attention.  Once again, they're surprisingly comfortable with that set up.  But I believe I mentioned that before...(Imagine blurry dream-sequence effect then click here.)

Stephen Fry was criticized for joking during the BAFTA awards that a certain recipient looked like a "bag lady." That he would take flak for that is significant, since he's complained in the past that people in today's society are too fast to take offense.  After receiving the criticism, he quit Twitter.  Boy, for a guy who expects everyone to accept jokes and insults without offense, he sure gets offended easily.  Didn't I say that once before?...(click here.)

Hey, there's more news about the supposed Apple car.  There's a company in California that is believed to be owned by Apple, and neighbours are complaining about "motor noises" coming from one of their buildings.  That same company has bought an oddball classic car, possibly as design inspiration. There's talk that internally, Apple execs are worried that the project is draining too much time and attention from the company's other businesses.  I could have sworn I heard someone say that building a car would be much too large an undertaking...(Cut to a much younger version of myself typing away at a keyboard and click here.) 

Having said that, Jason Torchinsky from Jalopnik has an unusual but intriguing theory about the nature of the project.  He thinks Apple is building a fully-autonomous vehicle for goods only, not human passengers.  Order something on line and your car will automatically go out and pick it up.  That's essentially flipping the script on e-commerce as usual: instead of Amazon using mail, couriers and drones to get things to your door, you take responsibility for going and getting them.  I'm not sure that's any more efficient, but making a vehicle not meant for people would relieve Apple of a lot of the difficulties of car design, like crashworthiness standards.

Apologies for that bit of original thought at the end of an otherwise repetitive article. But I see the flimsy excuse to have all our characters sit around talking about the past has cleared up, so we can go on with our lives.  See you for original adventures next week.

Bragging About Length

I figured I should eventually back up this blog, in case, you know, Google goes bankrupt or something.  So I've cut and pasted all the entries into a word processor file.  Of course, I was also curious as to how much I've written altogether.

The answer is: 354 pages, single spaced. Or in words, 193,632.  Or to put it in terms more people can understand, that's somewhere between Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Or, close to the length of Johnathon Franzen's The Corrections.  I should get around to reading that; maybe it won't feel so intimidating now.

Or, it's around a third of Infinite Jest or War and Peace. Or it's the Bible almost to the end of Judges.  So that's pretty good for a little over two-and-a-half years of part-time writing.  But still, don't expect my Great Canadian Novel soon, unless I go in to NaNoWriMo.

...But Go Ahead And Discuss Religion

I realized recently: I hate talking about politics. That's quite a surprise. After all, the "politics" tag in the cloud in the margin is one of the larger words.

So why do I like writing about politics, but hate talking about it? For one thing, the discussions go rather differently. Generally people just state their opinion on things.  Fair enough, you've got opinions, but it doesn't really do anyone any good to hear opinions.  Unless you can give the reasoning behind them, opinions themselves are useless. 

Here in the blog, I try to take an even-handed view and not promote a political agenda. I do have such an agenda, but people promoting a political viewpoint are all too common, even outside of the Internet.  So instead, I'm trying to analyse things, taking a more objective look at the world.  But not many people talk about politics that way, so when the topic of a group discussion turns political, I cringe, and look for an excuse to get out.

I guess I don't mind talking about politics, but I hate people telling me their politics.  

Read This Before I Erase It

An article in the Wall Street Journal warns of the coming "erasable internet" which may spell the end for Google. Wait, what? He points to the success of Snapchat - the app that allows you to send pictures that disappear after 7 seconds. If that idea is expanded to other internet services, it would be the end of a service like Google, which catalogs existing web pages.

I find all this hard to believe. Snapchat may be appealing to teenagers who are unfamiliar with the concept of "screenshots," but I don't know how many other services could benefit from a transient quality. Could you imagine a Snapwikipedia, which has to be re-written every day? Even Twitter, which seems to be fast-moving and temporary, actually stores tweets permanently, with no harm to most.

This seems to happen with every new technology and success story: people start assuming it's the beginning of a permanent and universal trend. Snapchat is successful: everything will be temporary. Foursquare is successful: everything will be location-based. And it goes the other way too: when something waned in popularity, it and everything similar is forever a part of history. Take blogging. I've heard many claims of its death, but this blog's popularity is proof of... Okay, bad example.

Partly, this phenomena comes from wanting to simplify a complicated and ever-changing field. And some of it is Emperor's New Clothes, where no one wants to be caught using instant messaging if the cool kids are using Snapchat. But what's really happening is that were building and exploring a new world, and acquiring new tools, and each of those tools finds a use appropriate to its qualities. Blogging is a great example of this. It's declined in popularity during the rise of Twitter, Facebook and others, as people just looking to stay in touch or make the of observation leave. But blogging remains strong among those who want to read or write regularly in a slightly longer format.

Consider Cthulhu

Today I found out about a web site called, "I Write Like."  It will analyse a sample of text and determine which author your writing style is most like.  Needless to say, that was an hour of productivity out the window.  I put my most recent blog posts in, and these are the authors it chose:

• I Still Think Digital Watches Are A Pretty Neat Idea - David Foster Wallace  
• Advanced Tweetology - David Foster Wallace  
• Well York U Too - H. P. Lovecraft  
• It Won't Work - HP Lovecraft
• One Of My Biggest Pet Peeves Is - David Foster Wallace
• Politics From the Fifth Dimension - David Foster Wallace

...thus giving me the third time in recent weeks that I've name dropped David Foster Wallace.  That may sound pretentious, but I deserve it dammit; I read all of Infinite Jest, even the endnotes, so I deserve some post-modern literary swagger.  And just to see if my writing style has changed in the year-and-a-half that I've written this blog, I tried one of my earliest posts, and the author gave me was Dan Brown. So then I tried some other sites:

• Wired - Cory Doctorow
• The Onion - Dan Brown
• Stereogum - David Foster Wallace

So Dan Brown is really taking a beating in this post.  I also compared news sites, each of them on a report of today's shutdown resolution:

• BBC - William Shakespeare
• CBC - David Foster Wallace
• CNN - William Shakespeare
• Fox News - Mario Puzo

Speaking of authors I've name dropped recently, this all started with a post on John Scalzi's blog in which he asked fans what authors he has a similar style to.  Someone fed a sample of one of his book Old Man's War into I Write Like, and the result was James Fenimore Cooper.  I put the blog post itself in, and it chose H.P. Lovecraft.

And finally, I put the first page of David Foster Wallace's essay, Consider the Lobster in for analysis, and the author chosen was, again, H.P. Lovecraft.

Bringing Micex Back

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the Moscow stock exchange, and how it's called Micex, which sounds like "my sex."  Well according to the stats from Blogger, it got about ten times the hits a new post normally gets. 

You might thing that's just because it was one of the few posts I've written that prominently features the word, "sex."  But not necessarily.  In the past, the stats have claimed that I get a lot of traffic coming from Russian sites.  So I wondered if it was interest in Micex itself that was driving the popularity.  But when I looked at the breakdown of visitors by country that day, most of them were either from the U.S. or France. 

So my guess is that it really was the references to "sex" that caused the extra visits.  Mentioning sex in a post generates traffic, because people search for sex.  Yep, that's what people use the Internet for, sex.  That's what's on their minds, sex, sex, sex. 

Why it was so specific to those two countries, I don't know.  We always thought of them as being opposites when it comes to their attitude to sex.  But now we've seen France's division over gay marriage, we realize that they share more with the Americans than you'd expect. 

Bloggiversary!

Yes, it's been one year that I've been maintaining this blog.  This isn't the anniversary itself, though.  I had to be weird and start the blog on February 29, so it doesn't have an anniversary this year.

So what have I learned in a year in the blogosphere? 

• I surprised myself at how much and how regularly I can write.
• Based on Blogger's stats, people browsing Russian pharmacy sites have a strange interest in my life.
• If I had signed up to put ads on the site, I could have made two or three dollars by now.
• I'm wordiest in early evening.
• It's surprising how much you can type on a touch-screen keyboard.
• I'm the only person in the world who can't figure out how to import pictures from Google Drive.
• Blogging seems more natural for me than Tweeting.
• It takes more than a year of blogging to get a book or movie deal.

Thanks everyone for reading!

Smartphoning It In

I was going to write a post here, but there seems to be an embargo against producing any new content in a communication medium this time of year.  One is only allowed to produce retrospectives and best-of lists.  What am I supposed to do, my ten most obscure post titles?

Well, they do have some stats here at blogger let's see what we can do.  Here are my most popular posts of the year (and thus all time):

1. Keep Calm and Something Ironic
2. Prodigious Firestarters
3. I Think You Can Read 'Bout Dyson
4. Katy Perry doesn't get Demographics
5. Beeb Fever
6. Olympic Butthole Surfers
7. How Not to Look Foolish on the Internet
8. Jason Lets Slip His Quaint Media Experience
9. Cracking the Maclean's Code
10. Hockey Night in the Eastern Bloc

And If You Want To See The KHL, I Can Get You There Cheap

My earlier post about choosing a team in the Kontinental Hockey League attracted an interesting spam comment.  I've had spam in the comments before, making a generic, non-specific statement before offering a link to CutRateCialis.org or something.

This time, however, the spam was clearly triggered by my mention of Donetsk, a major city in the Ukraine.  (Argh!  I mean "a major city in Ukraine"  I seem to remember someone getting angry about calling them "The Ukraine.")  It went into a discussion of how important Donetsk has become, and how you can still get cheap hotel rooms, in spite of it being the happenin' place on the Black Sea.

Odd, that's never happened before.  I haven't mentioned that many cities in the blog before, but they do come up occasionally.  I've made random-sounding references to Chinese cities before, but never received details on car-rental deals in Fuzhou.  So I'm guessing this is an Eastern European thing.  So we'll see if just mentioning places like Gdansk, Ljubljana, Tallinn, Tirana, and Bratislava is enough to trigger spam bots of the East.

A Trip Down Tag Lane

One thing I wanted to get out of this blog, besides the fame and fortune, is the tag cloud.  That's the "Labels" box you see at the side of the page, assuming you're using the full-size desktop-oriented version of the site.  The size of the labels represents the number of times it's been used. 

I was curious how much each topic would come up.  It seems popular culture and sports pop up a lot, since those seem to be easy to write about, but not necessarily my two favourite topics.  Britain, Canada and Facebook seem to come next, the three places I've spent most of my life.  That's followed by books, movies, music, politics and technology, all things I spend much more time on.  It seems that the formula for how often something appears in my blog is the amount of time I spend thinking about a topic, times the amount of annoyance that it gives me.  I sort of pay attention to pop-culture and sports, but find both full of aggravation. 

But then there are all those one-time-only tags.  For instance, I have a "Kony" tag, for the one time I talked about the Kony2012 video. In my defence, I have to point out that when I started out I assumed that the Tag Cloud Gadget would only show the most-often used labels, and leave out the singletons.  So I just happily attached any labels I felt like.  When my first post was about Angelina Jolie's dress at the Oscars, I added "Angelina" and "Oscars" as labels.  But it always shows all the labels.  Since then I've learned not to create any labels I'm unlikely to use again.  So I wrote a whole article about Chaz Bono without a special label.  But still, that tiny "Angelina" tag has been sitting at the top of the cloud ever since, never growing any bigger.  It will probably still be there years from now when this is blog is an indelible part of popular culture beloved by millions.  Hopefully it will at least mean that Angelina Jolie will make an appearance in the movie adaptation.

This Post is (About) Filler

I was just looking at Blogger's configuration options.  Here's the window that pops up to let you adjust the look of the mobile version of your blog:

It shows you one of those QR codes (and as an aside, don't get me started on them) and a small mock-up of a mobile site.  You'll notice that the sample site has some sample text in it.  Usually in a situation like this, graphic designers will use some nonsense filler text such as Lorem Ipsum.  But take a look at what the folks at Blogger used:

Yes, Sarah Palin's speeches have become the new filler text.