Burlesqued

Cycling deaths in the city

Dear Mayor Ford,Another cyclist has been killed in Toronto, this time a block from my house. I think it’s time to reverse your attacks on cycling infrastructure. Surely you don’t want your legacy to be a collection of cyclist deaths, do you?

Sincerely,
Isaac Quinn DuPont

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PRINT THIS POST WORDS: 11/8/11, 9:38am Short URL: http://tmblr.co/ZjDqbyBfpSiH

Review of Lasko 42” Oscillating Tower Fan (2554C) - Skip it.

The fan has decent build quality, and is not bad looking, but it’s actually quite large (where am I going to put this thing in the winter now!?). It has a nice array of settings, but they are deeply marred by the confirmation sound every time a key is depressed (a screeching buzz); this is especially problematic with the “sleep” function. The fan offers you the option of 30 minutes to 6 hours of sleep timing, but at the end of the timer it emits the loud confirmation sound—-easily loud enough to wake you from your sleep if you have the fan in your bedroom. Also, for such a large fan it really doesn’t move all that much air—small blower fans move much more (and it isn’t any quieter than those). So, skip this one. Purchased at Best Buy for $79.99

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PRINT THIS POST WORDS: 7/21/11, 2:47pm Short URL: http://tmblr.co/ZjDqby7MU7Up

scintillating
scin⋅til⋅lat⋅ing /’sɪntɪleɪtɪŋ/

adjective

1. brilliantly clever • scintillating wit • a play full of scintillating
dialogue
2. marked by high spirits or excitement • scintillating personality
*syn: *bubbling, effervescent, frothy, sparkly
3. having brief brilliant points or flashes of light • the scintillating
stars
*syn: *aglitter, coruscant, fulgid, glinting, glistering, glittering,
glittery, scintillant, sparkly

PRINT THIS POST WORDS: 7/10/11, 3:13am Short URL: http://tmblr.co/ZjDqby6xxj-2

Don’t use Tao Effect’s Espionage (OS X) encryption tool #dataloss

After looking for an encryption tool to properly secure Dropbox and Evernote I decided to take Tao Effect’s Espionage encryption tool for a spin. After about 30 seconds of use, I can strongly suggest that you do not use it. I had read on their blog that it was problematic to use Evernote and/or Dropbox with Espionage, which I thought a shame, since that’s my main goal. Nonetheless, I decided to try it out. Upon installation I discovered, to my mistaken delight, that it included an “application framework” for Evernote, and even Chrome (but not Dropbox)! I turned on both and then the fun began. Nearly instantly Evernote crashed hard, complaining about a database error. Then, trying to back out my encryption of the Evernote database Espionage went into a CPU lock (spinning beach ball), not stopping until I force-quit the application. Finally, after a restart of my machine I was able to get back in to Espionage and undo its disastrous work. It’s a near miracle that I didn’t lose all my data.

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PRINT THIS POST WORDS: 7/4/11, 5:11pm Short URL: http://tmblr.co/ZjDqby6lXckP

I was totally going to make the website: theroyalweddingforgeeks.com

And it would be blank. There is no tech angle. Seriously. Don’t try.

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PRINT THIS POST WORDS: 4/29/11, 9:32am Short URL: http://tmblr.co/ZjDqby4iSMYo

If programming languages were religions: http://www.itu.dk/courses/BPRD/E2010/religion.txt

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PRINT THIS POST WORDS: 4/28/11, 11:35am Short URL: http://tmblr.co/ZjDqby4gr7k-

Stanley Fish takes a hit of ecology, and comes out hallucinating

Stanley Fish’s recent NY Times post suggests that our limited epistemic net prohibits us from sharing ethics with things that can’t communicate their agency, e.g., a tree’s desire to keep its fruit. Suspicious as it is with respect to a conception of ethics, it’s also an old concern. The Judicium Jovis, written around 1495, tackles this ecological question as well, but complicates the Christian response. Let’s call it a Tuesday old-meets-new juxtaposition.

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PRINT THIS POST WORDS: 4/26/11, 1:50pm Short URL: http://tmblr.co/ZjDqby4dgNpz

Determining Rdio’s streaming music bitrate: a quick experiment & review

Rdio is my current (de jour) music streaming service . I was using Slacker Radio, but I’ve switched to Rdio and I vastly prefer it. Being located in Canada, the options for streaming music services are pretty limited, but generally speaking I’m quite happy with Rdio (although I get pretty annoyed with the number of albums not available in Canada… probably about 1/4-1/3 of the total I search for).

Rdio has been infamously cagey about what kind of quality they are delivering. They say that their iPhone app uses a higher bitrate stream when on WIFI, compared to 3G, and they claim that the web and Adobe AIr application have “CD Quality” streams. For comparison, Chris Breen suggests that many of the competitors offer between 128kB/s to 320 kB/s (320 kB/s LAME encoded MP3s are generally considered “transparent”, that is, indistinguishable from CD quality sound). NOTE: Chris Breen’s article says that Rdio uses 320kB/s streams, but my results (below) differ substantially.

Generally speaking, I think Rdio streams are acceptable. I’ve got something of a tin ear, and a decent but by no means audiophile setup (T-amp with Mission 700 Leading Edge speakers, streamed through Apple Airport Express), and I don’t feel like I’m missing much. Yet, in the interest of science, I conducted a quick real world bitrate test. Using Wild Nothing’s Gemini album, on my Rogers 25mB/s cable connection, over WIFI (B/G class) I monitored my network traffic using Codebox Software’s BitMeter OS application.

Here’s the results (I’ll continue to monitor the stream, and if it looks like these are unusual results I will post an update):

The bitstream spikes and then drops way down, pretty consistently, and averages just under 40kB/s!

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PRINT THIS POST WORDS: 4/5/11, 10:20pm Short URL: http://tmblr.co/ZjDqby44nbCX

Jobs for PhD (are there any?) Two articles

They’re Mad as hell <— That’s PhD students.

The article gives sage advice, which mostly sounds like re-adjusting your own sense of worth, under a patina of blaming those encouraging professors. Viz, “When I got a good job, it felt less like an achievement than an improbable success in the lottery”

And the follow-up, noting that PhD students may be bright, but they can also be delusional: “But I think his mind-set is typical of a lot of graduate students these days: They know the odds are long but continue to believe they’ll be among the lucky ones.” He goes on to suggest that a kind of internship program might help out recent graduates, so that they can gain experience and such, while working at low-level colleges. Great, except everyone knows that the PhD is either a) an exercise in top 1% excellence, or b) an exercise in convincing yourself into thinking that it’s an exercise in top 1% excellence. And, yes, we all think we’re in that top 1% (personally I waffle between “I’m the best” and “I’m a horrible, stupid, ugly good for nothing person”).

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PRINT THIS POST WORDS: 3/24/11, 7:24pm Short URL: http://tmblr.co/ZjDqby3oTvJ6

Well well, it looks like Google is copying me again

Seriously guys, this Posterous blog has been running intermittently for well over a year now,

and you think it is wise to name your new Quarterly (oohh la la, we post slowly) the same as my excellent blog?

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PRINT THIS POST WORDS: Notes: 12 3/24/11, 1:08pm Short URL: http://tmblr.co/ZjDqby3oBh-J