Category: Uncategorized

best. job. description. ever.

Go to Switching to Glide a music blog for Canada.

My new side blog – whatever will I do with it? Thanks Steve.

This was on MetaFilter just now: a University of Toronto’s massive collection of Arctic records, including photos, from the late 1800’s.

It didn’t totally suck.   Sitting in a suburban Baptist church
for an hour and a half listening to 43 kids pick out something on the piano and
bang the tamborine is not necessarily the way I want to spend a Saturday
afternoon – especially when there is college football to watch and forget about
two minutes later.  I hope the parents whose kids just don’t have the mojo
know it.   Music is a great learning experience which I would never
dissuade the most tone deaf from getting into but, man oh man, there are those
that have it and those that do not – regardless of the number of years of
training.  The jury may be out on our’s still but she’s having fun and
if she’s not Sarah McLaughlin one day perhaps she’ll be Ethyl Merman – “wouldja
sing “Oklahoma” for your old man one more time, kiddo?” 
Fortunately, I am not in charge of these things so everyone gets a warm fuzzy
from the whole event.   And it is surpisingly quite nice to hear 5
kids out of 43 pick out the tune to Hockey Night in Canada as their
favourite winter tune.

Looking at your reading patterns it is clear we do not have enough insomniacs among us. To over come that weakness, I am launching a campaign to include more items of interest to our pals down under: Kiwis, Aussie, Micronesians, the lot. Trouble is I have no idea what would possibly be of interest.

I got the White Stripes last CD Elephant the other day. It kind of sounds like Led Zep meets Springsteen’s Nebraska, homemade, but loud buzzy guitars, Robert Plant Houses of the Holy trembly “ahhhh, oooh, yeah baby” kind of singing in the choruses. I wonder what Ogg, child of the ’60’s London blues scene would think? My wife said, you know, I don’t really like music like that – which is odd as she does like Zep. Provides any boy’s daily requirement for loud.

The downfall of the internet is its failure to know what it contains and
provide it back to humans in an organized fashion. Its successes include the
ability to perform to the level of its failure to any degree at all. In 1998, only 3% to 34% of the
indexable Web was indexed. In 1999, 16% was
being claimed. In 2001, Google
was claiming up to 42%. In February 2003, many
serious problems with efficacy were still were not solved. Add to this
failure to even be able to contact all internet based information on a subject
the compounding problem of the inability to assimilate and evalute the
information

The December issue of
Wired leverages a great article – on efforts to place content into
the hands of internet users – with the point that we do not know how little was
know:

Kahle hates the idea that when people think of
information, they think only of what’s accessible via Google. “Seventy-one
percent of college students use the Internet as their research tool of first
resort,” he says, citing figures from a 2001 PEW Internet Study. “Personally, I
think this number is low. For most students today, if something is not on the
Net, it doesn’t exist.” And yet most books are not on the Net. This means that
students, among others, are blind to the most important artifacts of human
knowledge. For many students, the Internet actually contracts the universe of
knowledge, because it makes the most casual and ephemeral sources the most
accessible, while ignoring the published books. “It’s shameful,” Kahle
continues, “because we have the tools to make all books available to everybody.

Amazon has been
taking steps to place non-digital text on the web in a manner which works
with copyright while also supporting, rather than corroding their core mission
to sell text on paper. Amazon’s
tool is here. The results of a search for the word “ale” in a book not
primarily about beer can
be found here. The article also refers to the new feature on the Wayback Machine, a beta search engine of the 11
billion pages of text held there.

What these tools recognize is that irretrievable information is useless. I
would add dangerous as it is a form of stupification. What I would like to learn
about is how information can be organized automatically before it is presented
so that while it is not unless as inaccessible it is useless as overwhelming –
another form of stupification.

If it weren’t for knowing about the gays friends of my mother who were
separately killed – aka bashed – for being who they were, this story might be
just funny and an example of a moron. The opinions of the former Baptist
preacher Canadian Alliance MP should lead to his removal from office but they
won’t. They will cause an outrage, then a rallying of the stupid and then
another entrenchment that my faith somehow is related to this sort of idiocy.

What is most galling is that the efforts of the hateful, were they actually
focused on the principles of the faith, might actually advance the cause, feed
the hungry, shoe the children, increase the mass of love in the world – that
sort of pidly stuff. Why is “judge not” so easily forgotten by those so eager to
be first in line for the buffet in heaven?

Later: Well done, Mr. Harper.