In mid-November I sent an email to Nature’s Path’s director of marketing. Nature’s Path is a company that makes organic cereal. They’d started a marketing campaign involving several different posters that talked about their cereal in a “fun” way. On my way to and from work each day, I’d pass by a couple of these posters at the Burlington GO station. For a while, before I wrote the email, I’d found myself repeating the phrase of one of these posters in my head. I wasn’t sure why it struck me so much more than other advertising I’d read, but it did for some reason. The day I wrote the email, I stopped and actually concentrated on re-reading the poster and trying to figure out why it kept demanding my attention.

Here’s what it said: “We’ve found that social and environmental responsibility go particularly well with milk.”

Thinking to myself that there must be something wrong with that, I set myself to figuring it out what it was – and I did so quickly enough. In my email to the marketing director, I told her that the ad copy wasn’t right. It should either read “responsibilities go” or “responsibility goes”.

She wrote back and thanked me for my interest, and asked me for my mailing address. She wanted to send me something for my feedback. Just today, New Year’s Eve, I received a beautifully designed box with the following items inside:

Flax Plus Granola: Pumpkin
Flax Plus Granola: Vanilla Almond
Flax Plus: Pumpkin Raisin Crunch
Flax Plus: Red Berry Crunch
Optimum: Blueberry Cinnamon
Synergy: 8 Whole Grains
Pomegran Plus with Cherries
Whole O's
Hot Oatmeal Variety Pack (Apple Cinnamon, Flax Plus, Maple Nut, and Multigrain Raisin)
Optimum Energy Bar: Peanut Butter
Optimum Energy Bar: Orange Chocolate
Optimum Energy Bar: Pomegran Cherry
Optimum Energy Bar: Blueberry Flax & Soy
Optimum Rebound Energy Bar: Banana, Nut, Matcha & Flax
Weil: Goji Moji Pure Fruit & Nut Bar
Weil: Banana Manna Pure Fruit & Nut Bar
Weil: Chocolada Walnut Pure Fruit & Nut Bar
Weil: Pistachi-Oh! Pure Fruit & Nut Bar
Weil: Chia Razz Pure Fruit & Nut Bar

Who says that using proper grammar, and pointing out its misuse, doesn’t pay? (Incidentally, I can spot two problems with the grammar used in the names of these products. Can you?)

If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s revisionism. Whatever happened in the past should be reported that way as time goes on. To change something is to be giving a false statement about how things used to be.

For some reason, I’d missed the controversy of the recent re-release of Apocalypse Now on DVD (and soon to be released on Blu-ray). The issue is that it was originally filmed and presented in the theatres in a 2.35:1 aspect ration. But, when the latest DVD was released, the directory of photography, Vittorio Storaro, decided that it should be cropped to 2.0:1. This caused major waves among film purists, who insisted that by doing this the original framing and presentation as seen in the theatres was no longer possible to experience.

Storaro defended his action by saying that he’d intended it to be seen in 2.0:1 all along, and was putting it out as it should be. However, in frame by frame comparisons of the original and the re-release there are some scenes that have suffered. Further, as people who argue with him in outrage for having “crippled” his movie, the question is raised: Why in the world would the original film have been screened in 2.35:1 in the first place if that’s not how it was intended to be shown? Storaro has no response to this – at least none that I’ve read about.

The film The Last Emperor, which he also photographed, has just now received the same cropping treatment for its Blu-ray release by Criterion. Criterion has defended their publication of the film in this version, saying that it’s how Storaro and director Bertolucci wanted it released. But that doesn’t appease film aficionados who don’t care about what these people want from a current version – they just want to see the movie as it was originally presented in the theatres.

To further complicate matters, Storaro has been known to say that he doesn’t like watching widescreen movies on regular TV sets – because he finds the black bars annoying. For “home viewers” he would rather present them with an aspect ratio that helps eliminate this “issue”. He also doesn’t believe that typical home AV equipment lends itself to a good viewing experience of exactly the same thing you’d see in a theatre. So, when he says that both Apocalypse Now and The Last Emperor were intended to be shown in 2.0:1, rather than 2.35:1, his critics are saying that’s garbage. All he’s really trying to do, they say, is push his own values of what he’d like to see at home on other people. They all doubt that if he were to screen these movies again in a theatre that he would do so in anything other than the original 2.35:1 aspect ratio.

While I understand that a photographer (and director) may have certain wishes with respect to their own material, I have to say that I’m in the camp of his critics. I don’t have a standard TV, I have a high definition widescreen TV that’s fully capable of giving me a theatrical experience as it should be. And, personally, even if I did only have a “crappy” 10 year old standard resolution TV, I do happen to be one of those aficionados who would still want to see things in exactly the same way they were presented in the theatre when originally released. Even if my experience wouldn’t be the same, being able to view all of the picture would be more important to me. I don’t like having what I should watch being dictated to me. I don’t care if it was shot in widescreen, full screen, or whatever – so long as when I watch it, I get to see it as it was presented originally. (The only exception would be if there was a clear case where it was actually presented in the wrong aspect ratio in error. Something that I haven’t heard of happening – although I imagine it would be possible – and which I don’t believe was the case here.)

I have the same problem with Steven Spielberg editing the guns worn by police officers in E.T. to make them into walkie talkies, or with George Lucas making even more sweeping edits of the Star Wars films, such as making it so that Greedo shoots first, rather than Han Solo. These are just examples of directors changing their minds after the fact – and while it may be what they’d like to see now, it isn’t how things were done, or they wanted to see them, at the time. People talk of directors’ cuts. In some cases, movies are released in a way that directors aren’t happy with at release time. I have no problem with seeing a re-release of what their vision was at the time – but, for budgetary or production reasons, were unable to bring to the screen. So long as there is still a theatrical version that’s also available. And, also, so long as that really was what they’d wanted back then – and not what they’ve since changed their minds about now.

Storaro, in 1998, proposed a new film format called “Univisum” that is 2.0:1. It’s, apparently, an attempt to standardize things between small screen TV and big screen movie theatres to a standard that can “work” equally well on both. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but I don’t like the fact that he’s now going back in time and “re-writing” what he had wanted to do with his films shot in a different format – or the fact that he’s trying to have everybody else live with this revisionism when buying these films to watch at home.

For my part, I probably would buy the Blu-ray of The Last Emperor. (Which, after all, may be the only aspect ratio version ever to be released.) But I’d be cognisant of it being a somewhat “crippled” version, and not quite what it was when it was first released. If / when a “corrected” version came out, I’d buy that version and then get rid of the edited version.

The latest in “scandal” news is Sharon Stone offhandedly suggesting that the recent earthquake in China might be related to bad karma for that country’s treatment of Tibet – and how it made her cry when she heard about Tibetans helping out Chinese afterwards, despite them having been treated badly. Because, shouldn’t we all do our best to help others out, even if they aren’t nice to us?

This has apparently outraged several people in China, one a theatre owner who’s now banned all of her films and complained about how she’s bringing personal politics into the discussion of a natural disaster.

I find this quite humorous. Of all the cultures to understand a passing comment about karma and how things come around in cycles, you’d think that China would be somewhere at the top of the list – given that they embrace philosophies that embody that principle to a degree more than most others.

Disagreeing with the implication that they have done something bad to warrant the disaster in return is one thing, but reacting in such immediate hostility to the possible suggestion of karma at work (as well as to the positive sentiment toward Tibetans) is silly.

I have a problem. After having watched Blu-ray movies on my home theatre system I’m now spoiled. While regular DVDs still look good, Blu-ray discs look even better. This is now preventing me from purchasing any more DVDs – unless I suspect that they might either never be released on Blu-ray, or that their source quality is such that Blu-ray, itself, won’t make things look better than they already do.

My problem, however, is my existing movie collection. How many of the movies that I currently own do I want to “double dip” on? In other words, what do I buy in Blu-ray that I already have in standard DVD format? One answer is anything that relies on really good cinematography. Another, is any movie that I really like. The issue with the second answer, however, is that I only have movies that I really like in my collection.

Also, what do I do with all of my regular DVDs when I end up with their Blu-ray equivalent? Keep them, give them away, sell them somehow?

For years now I’ve used TextPad as my text editor and have always liked it. When it went from version 4 to version 5, however, I found that the new version (written in a different language) had some issues. This was especially evident with the initial version 5 release. The community forums had a common theme: people complained about a major version change that seemingly only introduced bugs and degraded the user experience. The minor version updates fixed most of these. But the whole experience of a major version release with no new significant feature set changes, and things being broken initially, soured my experience with it. I could have gone back to version 4 again (and I did briefly) but my nature is to remain at the latest release of whatever I use.

I started looking around for some alternatives. I looked at freeware products first, my first choice in applications. In that category, I can highly recommend PSPad. It does everything that TextPad does, and some more, and just feels more comfortable to me. Plus, it’s free. The only thing that prevented me from switching to it was a lack of good macro support. I review, and report on, on daily basis Bugzilla entries for new and fixed SeaMonkey problems. I had set up a series of macros in TextPad to do this, but was tired of not being able to have it solicit me for input, paste what I’d entered into my document, and then continue working with that. So, unfortunately, I had to leave PSPad behind.

I finally settled on UltraEdit, and paid for a license. I’ve just now finished tweaking my macros, and I must say that my daily bug reporting experience is now far better than it ever was under TextPad. I know that I’m using only a portion of UltraEdit’s features, but I already ready know that it’s a far better product than TextPad. (Not that I want to disparage TextPad – it served me well over the years – it’s just that UltraEdit is, relatively speaking, a better tool.)

My opinion of American politics just keeps on being reinforced. Most recently by two examples of what I would call absurd reactions to factual events.

Both Florida and Michigan violated Democratic National Committee rules by holding their primaries earlier than was allowed. As a result, these two states have had their delegates stripped from national results. Now, however, people are complaining because the race between Obama and Clinton may be too close to call if neither Florida nor Michigan are counted.

What’s the answer? That’s something for the DNC to decide. But, if I’m to give my personal opinion, whatever answer is arrived at must not include counting anybody in either of these two states. There should be no second primary, there should be no counting of partial results, and there should be no “proportional” or 50 / 50 representation as have been variously proposed. If you violate a rule, and are then penalized, you don’t get a “redo” just because of other events that happen.

If the DNC wants to change its by-laws to say that any state that violates its rules gets no representation – unless by having this happen something inconvenient happens down the road, in which case something else happens – that’s fine. But they haven’t done that yet. Also, assuming certain assumptions about regulatory boards and by-laws, any by-law change at this point could not apply to the 2008 primaries and election, only those held in future years. (I may be wrong about the timing here, and it may actually be possible for a by-law change to take effect for this election, but I’d be surprised.)

In short, get over it, live with it, and come up with another solution. I would almost find it fitting if, because of this screw up, there was no viable Democratic nominee at all. While this would not be my personal choice in terms of who I’d like to see as the next American President, it does make some kind of logical sense to me.

The other thing that really bugs me is the reaction to Geraldine Ferraro’s statements about race and the number of votes given to each candidate. The word “racism” is meant to denote an irrational negative reaction against somebody, or some group of people, based on ethnic origin. Ferraro was not saying anything negative about anybody, she was simply making a statement of fact. The statistics clearly show that the majority of black voters have been voting for Obama. Similarly, Clinton has captured a majority of female voters. Statistics cannot be racist – or sexist.

While it’s certainly possible that there is some explanation for Obama getting the majority of black votes, and Clinton getting the majority of female votes, aside from the fact of their race and gender – it’s far from likely. In the absence of any kind of confirmed alternate hypothesis, the most likely reason for the votes that they’re getting has to be seen as due to their race and their gender. If the two candidates were the same race and gender, the voter demographics would be considerably different than they are right now – and votes would come down purely to a consideration of policy and personality.

But, given that they are not of the same race or gender, I see no reason why Ferraro’s statement should have caused anybody to react to her in a negative way. Anybody looking at the facts reasonably should be able to see that, statistically speaking and everything being equal, Obama would not be getting the same number of votes if he weren’t black – nor would Clinton be getting the same number of votes if she were not a woman. (As a sad commentary on the way people react to such things, however, I do understand the political reasons behind Ferraro having to leave the Clinton campaign. I don’t think that she was wrong in what she said – I just think that she was politically unwise in saying it.)

I have no doubt if there were a presidential candidate in a wheelchair that they would be garnering the majority of votes from people also in wheelchairs or otherwise handicapped. While it’s nice to think that “justice is blind”, and people vote purely on policy and personality, this is not the case. It’s just not human nature to completely ignore things like this. Look at nationalism. Does it really make sense that, only because of my geographical location, I should be prouder of Canada than any other country? Surely, that should be based on things that the country does better than others – not just on the fact that I happen to live here. The same goes for sports. Are the Maple Leafs really the best hockey team, and the team I should be rooting for, just because I happen to live closer to Toronto than to any other city? No. But that’s how things work. It’s human nature and it has to be acknowledged.

Here’s just another example of political correctness being taken to a silly extreme. Jane Fonda was recently on The View and was talking about The Vagina Monologues. At one point, she referred to a section of the show by it’s name – “Cunt”. Shortly after this happened, Meredith Vierra decided to issue an apology on behalf of Fonda, The View, and NBC. All sorts of other people also got up in arms, including the Parents Television Council, calling Fonda’s utterance, and NBC allowing it to be broadcast, an “outrage”.

So, it’s okay for the Bush administration to defend the torture of alleged terrorists by snowboarding, to attack other countries on suspicion of harbouring weapons of mass destruction, to have no problem with blood, mutilation, and other graphic violence in mainstream movies, and to reap the profits of the exploitation of society by oil companies while at the same time denying or not acting on global warming – because this would impact their bottom line. But, apparently, despite this, it’s not okay for somebody to appear on a supposedly educational adult talk show where the subject is a respected and critically acclaimed play whose purpose is to encourage the open discussion of human sexuality, and to show that the repression and fear of words that describe these things hurt us rather than help us. How ironic, then, that Fonda was hypocritically censored for the very thing that The Vagina Monologues argues against.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Fonda said the word on purpose. Not in a hostile way, or because she was swearing or trying to put somebody else down, but because she was hoping to get exactly this kind of reaction and point out the continuing stupidity of American culture. She was, after all, one of the vocal opponents of the Vietnam war, so she’s no stranger to this kind of thing.

If NBC didn’t want such a thing to be expressed on air, maybe they should have decided not to talk about The Vagina Monologues in the first place? Oh, but wait. If they start not talking about anything that might lead to something “inappropriate” I guess that means that they might as well not be on the air at all…

Again, I’d been holding off on posting anything here – hoping that I could report our condo renovation completely finished. However, there are still a couple of bits left to go. Luckily these are relatively minor. On the whole, everything is done and we’re enjoying our time in our new place.

At work, I have transitioned away from technical support and am now one of the team members on our “KCS” (Knowledge Content System) project. This is an effort to categorize and streamline all of the problems that customers report, along with their solutions. If done correctly, we feel that we can significantly cut down the number of support calls – as people can locate the answers to their problems (at least the common ones) quickly online. This will also help new support engineers coming into the company.

The title of this post is one that I came up with in a recent 3 day brainstorming workshop. Everybody liked it so much that we’re going to have it printed on T-Shirts (or some other clothing) and use it as an “unofficial” slogan for the project. A more official slogan will also be developed.

I am really enjoying my new position at work, and I don’t miss support at all.

I hadn’t written about it at the time, but I’ve re-hauled the left-hand side of this Web page. I think that the buttons that link to resources now look better and take up less space.

I’ve also updated the version of the Blog software from Movable Type 3.x to 4.x. While this should have no noticeable change in terms of the site itself, my own experience (as I type and edit entries) is significantly different.

On one last note related to “appearance”, the renovation of our condo is now almost complete. We ended up moving out for a month and staying at our local Hilton hotel while the work was being done. There are still some things left, but the bulk of the work is done, and the rest should be finished within the next couple of weeks. (Hopefully before our “House Warming” in two and a half weeks.) It looks really good, and we’re both glad that we went ahead with the project.

I wanted to save this post for something important. Before I get to that, I should mention what prompted my extended absence – it’s been almost 9 months now since I’ve posted anything here.

It all started last December. I got a phone call from Cogeco to say that they wanted to install a new cable modem. I thought to myself that would be fine, it never hurts to get a newer model from time to time. They came by and installed it while I was at work. But I came home to discover that they hadn’t replaced my old modem – they’d simply installed a second modem, to sit alongside my existing one. Up until then, I’d been running VOIP and business Internet from the same device without a problem. Somebody in “administrator land” decided that this couldn’t happen, and that if I wanted (residential) VOIP and business Internet, I’d need to have two separate devices, one for each account.

Aside from the inconvenience of having another device sitting under my desk in the study, I had a more real problem with this. By using two different modems, the cable signal was being split yet again. I suppose that in normal circumstances this wouldn’t really be a problem. However, in our condo the signal strength from Cogeco sucks in the first place. This has been a problem ever since we moved in. The wiring in the building itself is a mess, as is the actual infrastructure under the city streets – but this isn’t something that Cogeco has ever been willing to properly address because of the cost involved in doing so. Needless to say, I wasn’t happy.

I removed the extra modem and re-wired things back the way they’d been. It didn’t work. I called Cogeco and explained things. They weren’t able to fix it at their end.

At this point, things devolved into a surreal nightmare. I spent about 5 hours on the phone with Cogeco over the next two months, as well has having 3 other visits from technicians. I got involved with technical supervisors and a sales manager for the region. The short version of the story is that even though there was no technical reason to have two modems, that was what was decreed and they couldn’t do anything about it. For the last two weeks, I had accepted having to have two modems – but even then, with both hooked up, would things work. Something about the way they’d configured my account’s technical settings had changed at their end – and they had no idea what it was or how to fix it. One day, it just “magically” started working again.

During these two months we were without either Internet access or VOIP (so we could neither send nor receive calls except on our cell phones). At times, we were without either. For some brief periods of time we were also without TV. Also, during the course of all of this, I had to “undo” damage that was done by various technicians to my home theatre set up – which resulted in TV shows not being recorded. Additionally, I had to force the cable to be split in a certain way (not as anybody defaulted to doing it) and insisting on getting a new “splitter” at the cable drop source to support this split. Otherwise, the signal strength would simply be too low to service all of our cable based devices. Poor Michelle. For the first few visits, somebody would show up from Cogeco while I was a way – and mess things up. I’d come home, get upset (not at her), put things back, and then phone Cogeco again. Towards the end, I had to make sure that I was there in order to babysit and prevent them from doing things incorrectly.

At one point, when I was in touch with the regional sales manager – in order to leverage escalating my situation – I mentioned that I was on the Board of Directors of our condo, and that we were thinking of switching everybody in the building over to Cogeco. She stated that she would have a building inspection done, and then call me back after she returned from her vacation to set up a meeting between the Board and herself. This never happened. I also never bothered contacting her again, since, by then, we’d finally got our cable working properly. I can’t say that my opinion of Cogeco has changed much since then.

But I never did “recover” from this extended outage and get back into posting articles here. When I did start to think about it again – I realized that my next post would be me 200th, and I thought I’d wait for the event of the next paragraph to finally occur…

For the exciting news to be conveyed in my 200th post – we finally got our inheritance from my grandfather’s will. The amount that was available to us in the first week was enough to pay off our CIBC loan, one of Michelle’s credit cards, one of my credit cards, and give Michelle’s mom some funds for her Ireland trip. It also paid for a pool table. More on that one shortly.

The remainder, and bulk, of the funds will be freed up next week. With it, we’ll pay off all of our other debts (aside from our mortgage) and then use the rest for some renovations in our condo that will greatly help our home comfort. Primarily, we need a new shower, but everything else we do (including enlarging our existing shower when we do get a new one installed) will only increase the value of our property above and beyond that of the cost of renovation itself.

Getting rid of all of our debt is a huge thing. I think I’ve carried a balance of some kind on one of my credit cards ever since I was a student at Trent University. But, more than that, all of the money we’ll be getting on our pay cheques will be going straight into our pockets. (Again, mortgage payments and condo fees aside – but I can live with that in the context of there being nothing else to worry about.) This will drastically reduce our stress and our ability to just lead our lives as we’d like.

There is also more financial good news on the horizon. VMware had an IPO just yesterday, and, while valued at $29/share the previous night, it opened at $52/share when trading started. I was given a not insignificant number of options in VMware stock a couple of months ago, based on my number of years at the company and my current employee level. While it will be a bit before I can exercise them, converting them into either cash or stocks, I have no doubt that I’ll be in a good situation. I have no doubt that VMware stock will be going up like either Microsoft or Google in the years ahead. If / when we get more money “that we don’t know what to do with”, picking up more VMware stock would certainly not be a bad idea.

Also, on the subject of stocks, I went and looked at my EMC stock. I was able to exercise some options whose vesting period had passed. I now have actual stocks in EMC, rather than just options. That’s pretty cool. So, I’ll be ending up with stocks in both EMC and VMware in the not too far future.

Lastly, in the year to come, I believe that we’ll be getting even more money. Not only was some of the inheritance money held back, just in order to make sure everything works out okay for Rachel and her farm, but there will still be the proceeds of the sale of Kay’s house – which I believe she also intends on sharing with us to some degree. I feel a little bit like a lottery winner – even though I still feel a bit conflicted about the actual source of the money.

As for that pool table. There seems to be a consensus that our condo’s gym could use a pool table. It’s all just been a matter of when and how to come up with the money. The Board doesn’t, currently, have a budget for it. One of the owners recently presented us with a low-end pool table / ping pong table as a possibility. It’s a decent enough table, although not really a “proper” pool table in any sense of the word. (But, everything else aside, it would have been okay.) However, in researching both the current value of this table and that of more standard pool tables, I found an incredible bargain. A tournament sized (4.5′ x 9′) Dufferin pool table for 1/4 the cost it would be new. This is just like the tables I’m used to playing on at Boston Manor – where we go play when we feel like it. I’ve immediately jumped on it. Pending “official” approval of a committee and the Board, and sorting out some issues in the gym (things need to be moved around, and some electrical work has to be done in order for that to happen) this seems like it’s on its way. I’ve already given the current owner a deposit to “reserve” it against a final decision next week. If (hopefully when) this happens I’ll be ecstatic owner of my own table, and have access to it whenever I want.

In terms of our condo suite itself, renovations aside, I woke up last Saturday and ripped out the hedge that had been dividing our patio in two. The landscapers will be coming tomorrow to trim everything back (this is now longer overdue) and will be removing all of these bits. We’ll be left with a nice clear view of the lake – and of our own patio, from one side to the other. We’ll be putting some earth in the, now empty, planter and some flowers. We may or may not do something else with the space next Summer.