the-inbetween.com

Visa Application

Like an unstoppable freight train, the date of my Canadian escape draws nearer and nearer. I had my Canadian passport done a month ago. Today I submitted my application for a Polish –European Union– passport at the Consulate. Yesterday I purchased my airfare and a week’s worth of accommodation in London. I fly out July 7th. I return November 3rd.

The last item is the scary one. It makes the whole thing tangible. It’s no longer just an idea that I might shake; it is real, paid for, in my hands and with a firm deadline. It’s a realization that I’m still trying to come to terms with but that might be due to the sticker shock. It’s not the price of the airfare — that was pretty much expected — that’s doing it to me, it’s the ridiculous taxes that come with it: a rate of, just about, 70%. Ouch.

The return fare is important for two reasons. It gets me back into Toronto so that I can pick up my Polish Passport (five month processing time?!) and it frees me of any complicated visa entry problems. I contemplated getting a Work-Holiday visa but the process cost money, was annoying and required a little too much personal information. All for something that would be moot when I do get my EU passport. Anyway, I did go through a large portion of the application process and was mostly amused by this page:

Oh, British humour strikes again.

1. What war criminal would answer YES to such questions?
2. Have you, ever, committed abuse, on commas and other, punctuation?
3. All YES or NO radio button questions must be answered in English.
4. The rather vague are you considered a person of good character? question.

It wasn’t long after this page that I gave up on the application. I don’t need it anyway. The UK Visa page tells me as much in plain English:

I’m visiting for a short time, have proof of departure (return ticket) and will have proof that I can sustain myself and not use public funds while I’m there (as soon as I get all the pay cheques I’m currently owed). As long as they don’t find out that I publicly mocked their grammar and application questions, I should be fine.

Pentax K20D

I have a penchant for overly expensive hobbies. When I’m not playing an over-priced game on an expensive console connected to an even more expensive HD television — like right now, with the XBox dead in the water — I like to go out and take pictures. Photography, even if you go digital and remove the film and processing costs, is not a cheap hobby if you want to pursue it seriously. It’s a relatively new interest for me but it is, yes, something I want to pursue seriously. Hence, I bought a new camera. It was an impulse purchase.

Those that are in the know would ask “but didn’t you buy a new camera less than a year ago?” Well, I did. It was the Pentax model previous to this one. It was a fine camera and was a very good introduction to the world of SLR and I took many photos with it, but I gave it to my sister for Christmas. She had more use for it than I did, being a third year photography student and all. After several months, however, I started to miss that camera. Lucky for me, a new model was just around the corner. No, I did not need all the new stuff — the K10D was perfectly good — but something about the new and top-of-the-line appealed to the technodork in me. When I found out that it was released, earlier than I anticipated it, I had to have it. I like being bleeding edge on the pro-sumer front.

There isn’t a whole lot of difference between the two cameras, especially to an amateur that’s still learning. The body is practically identical. The UI is practically identical. The features are mostly the same, except for some additions like better ISO, “Live View” and other more advanced features. I think the sensor is new too, but I’m not sure. Most notably the biggest change is numerical: the K20D has 14.6 Megapixels compared to the K10D’s 10.2.

That is a fucking lot of pixels. The uncompressed RAW files it generates are over 24MB each with a resolution of 4457×3104 at 240dpi. That is a fucking lot of pixels. To better visualize what that means, here is a picture at a 1:1 pixel ratio:

Now here is the picture it is taken from, scaled to fit:

It’s really quite striking. I can’t imagine taking too many photos at that full resolution, but it’s nice that it’s there. Of course, any photos I take as I learn and familiarize myself with the camera will be posted to my flickr feed so if you’re curious about what the camera can do check that out and also look at the fledgling K20D flickr group.

Oh. I should also mention one other reason why I purchased this camera: I quit my job, I am moving out of my apartment and moving to Europe. It’s a minor thing.

Probably Promotion

If Duke Nukem Forever is released in 2008, everyone who comments on this post* will get a free, RETAIL game from me.

I’m not sure what the buzzword for this type of advertising is but it seems to be coming up more and more. It all basically follows the same formula: if event X (outside of the company’s control) then free (or discounted) Y. In the above example, if Guns N’ Roses releases Chinese Democracy this year, Dr. Pepper will give away free drinks. During last year’s World Series, Taco Bell offered a free taco to everyone if a base was stolen. This wasn’t the first time they used such a promotion. In a more localized setting, Pizza Pizza offers every ticket holder at a Raptors game a free pizza slice if they score 100 points. This has caused some odd reactions during some blowout games.

In some ways, these kinds of promotions can be regarded as gambling: there’s a prize and it’s dependent on chance. I wonder if there are any legal implications? The payoff for the marketer, of course, is that if the chance event doesn’t happen the company gets free advertising. On the flip side, if it does happen I’m sure numerous statisticians were employed to crunch the numbers to ensure that the possible risk is still worth the benefit. So even if they have to pay, the cost is minimized by the advertising and side-purchases it brought them (a single taco isn’t going to fill you up. Want a drink and fries with that?) I’m also sure that numerous lawyers were used to ensure there were appropriate outs and loopholes to ease the potential damage. There’s always a catch.

That said, I figure I’m not above self promotion. I can get in on the act. If Duke Nukem Forever is released in 2008, everyone who comments on this post* will get a free, RETAIL game from me. Make sure you leave your email address (will not be shown.)

• * Before the comments are closed, which is usually about 30 days or at my own discretion.

A Source of Random Medieval Information

Amongst the many ridiculous events in the Church’s history, the Cadaver Synod has to rank in the top five. Basically, they dug up a dead pope, cut off his fingers, put him on trial, found him guilty, reburied him, dug him up again and then threw him into the river. Here’s another article about it.

Anyway, that’s all inconsequential. What’s interesting is that the wikipedia page’s discussion is categorized as “Low-importance Middle Ages articles“. Following through to that will reveal a vast depository of obscure and random medieval history. If you ever feel the need to write historical fiction set in the dark ages, this is the place to be.

PS. Don’t forget about my Tumblr, I’ve been posting there frequently.

Run Button

Eight years ago when I was looking for a domain and dedicated web host for my fledgling weblog, I came across WestHost.com. It offered a lot for a very fair, and student friendly, price. I registered the-inbetween.com through them for the full $70/2 year price tag that domains had back then. The package had unlimited bandwidth (remember those days?), a capacity of 15 MB and full PHP3 support. It was good for the time. In those years that account has been automatically upgraded and I now have 2000 MB worth of space and PHP5 and all sorts of other nice things that I don’t ever use.

Halfway through that run dreamhost started promoting themselves with their weblog friendly hosting packages. Webloggers, and others, started to switch. They raved. The packages were tempting and I was considering the switch myself, but I figured that domain transfer would be annoying and that, well, nothing was wrong with my current hosting provider so I chose to stick it out.

Nowadays I hear nothing but complaints about Dreamhost. Their status page reads like a comedy of errors (Due to a typing error on our primary router while trying to block a denial of service attack, DreamHost is currently offline.) People are canceling their accounts and looking for new options. Meanwhile, my account with Westhost just works. I am glad I never switched.

So when I was looking for some extra hosting for some possible projects, I went with WestHost again. I’m not one to normally plug companies like this but eight years of happy service has to account for something. If you ever need reliable and simple web hosting, give WestHost.com a look and put ‘the-inbetween.com’ as a referral.

Anyway, as I was signing up for that new hosting account I needed a domain. With the help of some friends on IRC, we came up with a list of potential (and available) domains. Since I can’t register them all I offer them as free domain name consultation service to you. They’re all available as of last week.

• bossattacks.com and bossattack.com
• blockpuzzle.net (unfortunately it’s a .net so it ruled it out for me)
• badicality.com
• f0il.net and m00d.net (more .net domains, but these are 133t)
• resetthis.com (not a fan of the double ‘t’)
• loadbutton.com
• levelledup.com (very good for subdomain fun, ie. mike.levelledup.com)
• isnonplussed.com and isacynic.com and enjoysthings.com (for more subdomain fun.)

In the end, I settled for Runbutton.com. It’s brief and snappy (three syllables); it’s not inherently game-y; it is totally game-y; it’s an obscure reference to weird game-y things (the most useless button ever: the dedicated run button. I’m looking at you Mortal Kombat.); it was available.

What kind of projects are going to go there? I’m not sure right now but the first might be in response to this TIGSource competion and it might look like this:

Tumblr

With my growing ambition to extend myself to every corner of the internet, I have created a tumble log. I’ve been aware of Tumblr since it launched but never really considered it useful at the time. I already had a weblog. I already used del.icio.us. What did Tumblr do that I already didn’t have done?

Then I had a revelation. Tumblr fills that little tiny niche that exists between a so-called “proper” weblog and a linklog like del.icio.us. It’s great for ephemeral snippets and pieces of the internet. Of course, if I had an invite I’d probably be using ffffound for that too. But yes, n0wak.tumblr.com.

Also, it made for a fine birthday gift, to me from me.

Time to bring out 28 cock candles

Two Tips for New Bloggers

A couple of weeks ago Wired wrote about the 10th anniversary of “weblog“. I’d be remiss to not mention that yesterday, December 31st 2007, was the eighth anniversary of, in its many incarnations, this weblog. My Blogger profile, where it all started, says December 1999. That’s a long time. 80% of the life of “weblog”.

I still have those first few posts archived somewhere, on some long buried CD, but everything else after February 2000 is out there if you know where to look (though I suggest otherwise as it is all a little embarrassing). I, of course, do have easy access to all that data and looking through it, as I did recently, is a nostalgic experience. All those posts act as a mental time capsule preserving the I of the year 2000. That first year is full of freshman whines, before the eventual drop-out; all sorts of links to sites and content that is now long gone; small signs and portents of a budding interest in the development/design side of the web; very little to do with my current primary obsession, gaming, since that was before the future job, money and Playstation 2 rekindled it in me (sadly, it meant that I missed most of the Dreamcast era until after the fact); and an over abundance of commas and a severe lack of capital letters. Most shocking of all, however, are the hints of a personality that hasn’t changed much at all in eight years’ time^[1].

Wired also has the additional list of Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers From Original Blogger Jorn Barger. They’re all well and good though they do tend to assume the classic definition of “weblog.” In the ten years since it was coined that word has evolved from that initial “list of links” meaning to something encompassing links and journals and editorials and essays and fiction and everything else following the “newest entry first” format. They’re good tips for maintaining that del.icio.us feed but most of them don’t apply for more writer-ish endeavours. For those, new tips are needed.

In my eight years of maintaining a weblog I’ve come to realize enough to be able to provide my own weblog tips for new Bloggers:

1. Do it for yourself. Do it to improve your writing or to learn HTML or to document things you like or anything as long as you do it for yourself.
2. Don’t care about anything but #1. If you do it for yourself, links and feedback and hits and ad revenue, though nice and welcome, aren’t going to change why you do it.

That’s it. That’s the secret to longevity. Here’s to another eight years^[2].

And yes, I’ve made the first design change in years to commemorate the anniversary (I actually started it in October but have been too slack!) so some things might be wonky and/or subject to change.

1. The personality might be the same but tastes are vastly different.
2. I’ll be in my mid-thirties. THAT is scary.

2007: A Year in Photos

2007 was the most documented year in my life. The sheer number of photos taken this year is astounding. Various logs and notes have tallied where I ate my lunches, what games I purchased and what movies I watched. Actually, I tapered off with my OCD note taking half way through the year so the last few months are a void… but next year I’ll do better. Anyway, going through my photo library is very much like traveling through the year all over again, so I have compiled the best and most descriptive (and “only” for some slow months) photos of the year. Low bandwidth users beware!:

Read the rest of this entry…

Heading South

Canadian dollar vs US dollar:

I’m off to the States for a few days to make use of this. Adios.