Another year down the drain. A good year, in the end.

2010 Geek Achievements

1. Wrote some code...
   • cow-blog - The engine running this blog.
   • oyako - Clojure ORM library.
   • gaka - CSS compiler for Clojure
2. Finished a huge project for work, my first AJAX-y web app (in Rails). That was fun, albeit stressful.
3. Learned a lot of git.
4. Learned a lot of Clojure.
5. Learned a lot of Emacs.
6. Learned a lot of Javascript.
7. Learned a lot of PostgreSQL. It's good to be free of MySQL.
8. Switched to ZSH. This was a good switch.
9. Tried to learn a lot of Japanese, but kind of fizzled out at the end of the year.
10. Alllllllmost got a Clojure gold badge on Stack Overflow. I'll get it soon though. Not losing any sleep over it either way.
11. Read a lot of books. The best: probably Feynman's books of anecdotes.
12. Blogged a bit. Got an article in Hacker Monthly. Was flamed repeatedly. Learned a lot in the process.

2010 Non-Geek Achievements

1. Immigrated to Canada. A good move, without a doubt.
2. Lost 25ish lbs. :)
3. Learned how to cook better.
4. My most important achievement from 2010 is actually non-geek: I finally obtained a bit of an offline social life. This is not an easy task for one such as myself.
5. Continued to learn to appreciate good beer. Longwood Dunkelweizen, mmm.

2010 Failures

1. Did not blog enough.¹
2. Did not write enough code.¹
3. Missed the first Clojure Conj. Maybe next year.
4. Re-gained 10ish lbs. :( ²

Plans for 2011

1. Re-lose 25ish pounds. I'd like to reach the weight I had in college.
2. Finish my rewrite of oyako. I have ambitious plans for it, if I can just find the time.
3. Finish my rewrite of cow-blog to match oyako.
4. Keep working on the RPG my wife and I are creating (in Clojure).
5. Attend the next Clojure Conj, I hope.
6. Learn more Clojure.
7. Learn Haskell? Trying and failing to learn Haskell has become somewhat of a tradition, no sense stopping now.
8. Learn all 2000+ jouyou kanji by the end of the year.
9. Supar sekrit projekt. But I haven't signed the contract for it yet so I won't talk about it until I do.
10. Maintain social life at acceptable levels.
11. Buy a house.

I feel like I have solid plans for completing each of these things. Blogging more often and finishing oyako are high on my list of priorities. I expect 2011 to be my most productive year to date.

Via Slashdot, it seems soon you may be able to subscribe to newspapers on the iPad in the near future.

Sure. Why pay $10 for a paper copy of something when you can pay the same $10 for a likely-DRM'ed copy that can only be read on a $500 portable computer?

In all honesty though, instant delivery, lack of clutter, "take it anywhere", being able to archive issues indefinitely, text search... those features might be worth the money, if it was a really good newspaper/magazine.

But wait, there's more.

The Cupertino company has agreed to provide an opt-in function for subscribers to allow Apple to share with publishers their information, which includes vital data that news organizations use to attract advertisers, industry sources say.

...

While the leap into the digital tablet market comes with short-term problems for newspapers, the iPad and future tablets will provide a new digital palette for publications to create sophisticated and lucrative ads, said Needham & Co. analyst Charles Wolf.

"I would say it's a risk, but I would argue it's a short-term risk," Wolf said. "If you can put animation and multimedia into ads, that will greatly enhance reader views. I am certain of that."

So as I understand it, first I buy a $500 gadget. Then I pay for a newspaper subscription. Then a bunch of companies want me to give them personal information about myself, so they can share it amongst themselves. And then I have to view ads.

Animated ads.

The only thing better would be if the iPad also woke you up at 4AM and tried to sell you life insurance. Maybe Apple would let me install a free ad-blocker script for my news reader though. It is my hardware, after all... pfffft, yeah, I could't keep going with a straight face.

And thus my desire to get an iPad, kind-of sort-of building over the past couple of months, once again flatlines.

In a previous post I outlined the ways in which Dell's customer service sucks. I finally got my computer yesterday, a Studio XPS 9000. Here are my first impressions.

Why did I order a computer from Dell? I guess I had a good opinion from 6 years ago when I last bought something from them.

Let's count the ways in which their customer service has failed me. (And my computer isn't even here yet.)

1. As documented, their website couldn't process my credit card without a phone call.

2. After a week of my computer being "in production", I started getting more phone calls from an unidentified phone number that Google told me was Dell. Fearing another billing problem, I called back. And I was told "Thanks for calling, but our order tracking system is down. And we're all going home. Call back tomorrow morning.".

   If only Dell had some means to acquire reliable computer systems on which to build their order tracking database.

3. I called the next day and was told my order was fine. I was also told (per script, I'm certain) that I could check my order status on Dell's website. Which of course I knew. I know it costs the company money every time someone calls, and they try to strongly discourage calls for that reason, but their script made it sound like I was an imbecile.

   I found it quite condescending. I dislike these canned scripts pander to the lowest common denominator of customer. They should be happy to take my call. I just spend upwards of a thousand dollars on their crap.

4. Turns out the phone calls I was getting were from someone trying to give me "free internet from Shaw or Telus for 3 months", and I was eligible because I bought a Dell computer. So I was being telemarketed before my computer even got here.

   I said I already had internet service, and they said "Oh, too bad, it's for new customers only." I do not appreciate this.

5. I got an email saying my order shipped. Joy! 20 minutes later I got an email saying my order was delayed, and if it didn't ship in 5 days I should call. What?

   It really did ship though, I have a tracking number. Why the contradictory emails?

All of my phone dealings with Dell were via some offshored far-eastern country, judging by the accents of the phone reps. I have nothing against this in principle; I'm not a xenophobe. But the phone connection is always so static-filled and laggy that it really puts a damper on communication.

My computer isn't here yet, and I just hope to God it works and doesn't break in a month. I kind of wish this article had come out a week earlier.

That'll teach me for trying to save time, I guess. Next time I'll build my own system from scratch. Dell goes onto my List of Companies Not to Buy From in the Future (LCNBFF), along with Westinghouse and oh so many others.

I am an alien. An American who emigrated to Canada. This has resulted in a lot of fun and a bit of pain as I've managed to break the systems of many of the businesses I deal with.

As a programmer I can appreciate the importance (and sometimes difficulty) of handling edge cases. It's been an interesting experience living as an edge case myself.

What if when your car stops at a red light, your license plate displays ad banners? What could possibly go wrong?

Quoth the person(?) who wrote this bill:

"We're just trying to find creative ways of generating additional revenues," he said. "It's an exciting marriage of technology with need, and an opportunity to keep California in the forefront."

The forefront of annoying the hell out of people. Certainly what I need is more distractions on the road. I mean, what if there's a new brand of toothpaste and I didn't find out yet? Someone somewhere needs to earn a dime for telling me about it by any means necessary.

I'm just waiting for the first company to propose paying new parents a few hundred dollars to tattoo ads on their babies.

As further evidence that there are no depths to which companies won't stoop when it comes to advertising, HP has come up with a great idea: Get people to hook their printers up to the internet and then spew advertisements out of their printers.

Well, it's a win-win situation for the companies doing the advertising: Not only will people see your ads, they'll pay for the ink and paper to print them. Maybe not such a great situation for the end-user though.

And then there are the privacy implications of targeting ads based on geolocating the IP address of the printer. Which I find a bit disturbing, but I guess advertisers already do that with online ads. But wait, there's more:

Ads can also be targeted based on a user's behavior as well as the content, said Vyomesh Joshi, head of the HP's Imaging and Printing Group.

Looking at what I'm printing so you can try to sell me things? Just a bit creepy.

Most troubling to me is the intrusiveness of the whole thing. They're taking control of a physical object in my house and using it against me. May as well kidnap my cat and train him to spell out "BUY PEPSI" in his cat litter.

Quote some slimeball at HP:

"What we discovered is that people were not bothered by it [an advertisement]," Nigro said. "Part of it I think our belief is you're used to it. You're used to seeing things with ads."

Translation: "We know this is a really horrible idea, but if people are complacent enough to sit there and take it without complaint, what's stopping us?"

He's right though, people are used to it.

I guess TV, radio, internet, phones, product placement in movies and games, print media, billboards and the postal service just aren't enough. Clearly what the world really needs is another ad-delivery mechanism.

I should start a running series of these.

I haven't had much time to blog lately because I was busy moving all my stuff to Canada. I'm finally here and starting to get settled a bit, so I thought I'd write about the culture shock, or lack thereof. Here are some differences and similarities between Canada and 'merka.

There's an interesting article on Ars Technica about how blocking ads is somehow unethical, and "devastating to the sites you love". The idea that I have a moral obligation to stare at an advertisment, the thought I have an ethical obligation to voluntarily annoy myself for the sake of a company's profits... it would be hilarious if it wasn't so repugnant.

Let's talk about ethics. How about some ethics for businesses?

1. Stop making the world a garish and hideous place to live by flooding it with ads.
2. Stop trying to grab my attention, evoke emotional responses in me, manipulate my mind, and trick me into spending money on crap I don't need. This is what advertisement is. Stop disrespecting me and insulting my intelligence. Stop viewing me as an anonymous, money-spending piece of cattle.
3. Stop trying to track my every move online. How many people understand tracking cookies? How many companies make it clear that every click is being recorded and data-mined? How is this ethical?

Here's the state of the world today: I can't drive down the street without seeing billboards everywhere. The radio is literally 25 to 50% ads, which is why I don't listen to the radio. Television is what, 20 minutes of commercials per hour? Which is why I haven't had television in 6 years. Newspapers and magazines are saturated with ads, and of course I don't read them either. Even then, ads are nearly unavoidable.

(By contrast, books (for example) are awesome. I pay for a book, and then I read the book start-to-finish with no ads, no distractions. A few pages at the back maybe, but I can ignore those. Books are nice.)

The internet is also a wonderful thing. FIRST a person or company puts a lot of information somewhere that everyone can read it effortlessly for free, and THEN they sometimes expect me to look at their ads. And I can simply choose not to.

If you want to force me to look at your ads, make me sign a contract or consent to an agreement before you display your site to me. Otherwise I owe you nothing. If your business is about to go bankrupt, and your business is so important to me that I want it to stick around, I'll give you money. Real money. I've done it before. But I will never give you my attention for free. No business has a right to that.

Businesses are not your friends. Businesses are not ethical entities. Businesses do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. Businesses exist to milk you of as much of your money as possible. The only sane reaction for the average person is a similar one: I want to deprive businesses of my money. I want to get as much from them as I can, while giving up as little as possible.

If I politely suggested that it's "unfair" for a business to have such a huge profit margin, and "if they cared about their customers, they would lower all their prices", I'd be laughed at. Why would a company do anything less than the absolute most they can do to bleed money out of me, after all? I laugh at any business (e.g. Ars Technica) which says the same thing to me. I will bleed you of product, as far as it's legal to do so. It so happens that advertisements are devastating to my well-being. Up to this point I have rarely read Ars Technica, and from now on I'll make it a point not to. If I do read it, I will block ads with the greatest feeling of malice I can manage.

I run my own website(s) at a loss specifically because I'd rather pay out of my own pocket than force people to look at ads. Admittedly my sites are so small that it's not much money. But there you have it. If I had to generate revenue to keep my sites going, I would find a way other than advertising to do it. Or I'd shut them down.

I love my ad-blocker. The only thing better would be an internet where I didn't need to use it.