On March 5, I complained that Netflix, the internet video rental service, wasn't available here in Canada. Well I didn't have to wait long for someone else to fill the void. In comes Zip.ca, which claims to let you rent an unlimited number movies, four at a time, for about $25/month.

So far, I've built a "Zip List" of a couple dozen DVDs that I'd like to see, and I'm very impressed with their catalog. Zip has lots of movies that the local video shop wouldn't touch (i.e., anything that requires you to think). I especially like their specialty lists (top 25 Canadian films, top international films, etc.) and their sub-categories. The science fiction category has eleven sub-categories! Geek heaven!

Here's how it works. You create a large list of movies that you'd like to rent. This "Zip List" shows their availability and lets you prioritize them. When the movies are available, they'll send them out by Canada Post along with a postage-paid return envelope. When you feel like returning them, mail them back, and Zip sends you next movies in your list.

I'll see if this works out. Already I can see potential problems with ordering multi-part DVDs. I put the first five Farscape discs on my list, but Zip mailed #4 and #5 first. Doh!

The best part for me... no late fees. Ha! Take that, Blockbuster!

BoingBoing notes that forty years ago, the cubicle was first inflicted on the office workers of the world.

But Propst's forward-thinking motives were misinterpreted by some companies, which simply crammed more workers into smaller spaces and took advantage of the system's huge potential for savings and tax breaks... *

At first the news made me slightly queasy at the thought of generations of drones being stuffed into tiny boxes for their entire office careers. But what would modern offices be like without walls? Without even that much privacy, we'd still have the sweatshop-like typing pool arrangement, where the supervisor watches all the screens for signs of slacking (or blogging).

So really, I'm glad I have my cubicle walls. I only wish they were a little more stylish. And had a door.

Link: Metropolis Feature: The Man Behind the Cubicle

Link via BoingBoing: Happy 40th Birthday, cubicle!

Washingtonpost.com reports that Quentin Tarantino, director of several ultra-violent action movies, will appear in a Muppet-filled Disney remake of "The Wizard of Oz". Have the producers at Disney been hitting the bong a little too hard? This has got to be the most surreal match-up ever conceived.

I can't wait for the scene where a jumpsuit-clad Miss Piggy disembowels the flying monkeys, while Kermit grabs a straight razor and goes medieval on the wicked witch.

Link: Washingtonpost.com: Reservior Frogs: Kermit and Tarantino Join Forces

Renovations have begun on the Aerodrome's level 4. The stodgy "Aerodrome Club" is being temporarily transformed into a hip dance club for DJ Lola Bombay's big debut. More on that event later in the week. Inside, the windows are blacked out and spinning lights hung around the DJ setup, and we've added a new lobby.



Also at the Aerodrome, various visitors have been startled to see a gigantic 737 airliner barelling down the runway towards them. Apotheus Silverman has implemented what I suspect is the first stage of a grand plan for A.I. planes that fly around the world.



For now, the planes rez at the west end of the runway, take off, and fly a short distance into the neighbouring sim. Refreshments will not be served on this flight.

Yesterday I began to think about space. Although I'd ventured to relatively high altitudes, I'd never been to space. In a vehicle, the highest you can go is the mysterious vehicle barrier at 4,096 meters, where all vehicles mysteriously vanish. I'd flown with a flight-assist device to about 10,000 meters once, but rumours say that there's something strange far, far above the hills of Second Life. Some say there's a region where physics are not the same, and where distortions in space-time lead to insanity... and death.

I had to find out if these rumours were true. I strapped on my "skydiving badge" for lift and wore some clothing appropriate to a trip into space -- my Starfleet uniform. My destination: one million meters above the ground.

All the way to 750,000 meters over Abbotts Aerodrome, the ascent was fairly predictable. As the ground fell farther away over this flat land, a strange band of darkness developed between the edge of the ground and where the sky began. Overhead the sun was bright, and the sky a dark blue.



Then, suddenly, there was a change. At about 768,000 meters, the sky and ground vanished, thrusting me into utter darkness. My avatar began to shake violently and became somewhat distorted.



I put on my flight jacket, partly to keep out the cold, but also for comfort. Up here, I was utterly alone and in the dark. After a while, the shaking stopped, and everything took on an eerie silence as I watched the digits on my altimeter rush towards one million.

I had made it to my target. I was one million meters above Abbotts Aerodrome, although not quite in the same shape as when I left it.



My return to the ground was less dignified. I flew into Cordova and began to fall. Impatient to reach the ground, I re-logged to find my avatar lying on a Cordova hillside in a puddle of its own blood. No matter. I have seen space, the final frontier.

I'm becoming more interested in these elusive wireless "hotspots" where you can surf the web wirelessly. It sounds like an intriguing idea, but just how many hotspots are there in my neighbourhood?

I found one site (jiwire.com) that not only lists them, but allows me to search for hotspots near my current location and show them on a map. How cool is that? Here's an example of the results you get, displayed in a MapQuest map:



By the looks of it, a lot of really nice hangouts in Vancouver still don't have wireless. Also, there are at least a couple of hotspots that I know of that aren't on that map.

Does anyone know of a more complete, searchable hotspot map for Vancouver?

At BoingBoing today, they note that a Hong Kong company has created a virtual girlfriend for your cellphone. It struck me, as I read this, how similar it is to an idea that appears in Adrian Bedford's novel Orbital Burn.

Unlike the sophisticated AI described by Adrian, the cell-phone AI is mostly designed to part lonely geeks from their money:

If players neglect her, she will refuse to speak.

The company says the amount of money players will have to spend has yet to be determined.

But unlike other computer games, it seems that cash, not skill, will enable players to climb the different levels in the game. *

Link: BoingBoing: Virtual Cellular Girlfriend

Link: BBC Hong Kong: HK firm develops cyber girlfriend

As I passed a little café today, I noticed that they had an 802.11 wireless hotspot. Inside, a woman with a sleek little notebook computer happily surfed the web with a tall, foamy beverage on the side. And I thought to myself, I want to try that.

Sure, my Dell laptop is a little too chunky to be fashionable, and doesn't sport the cool glowing-apple logo on the lid, but I could relax in a pleasant atmosphere and... do whatever it is that I usally do at home in a more comfortable chair. I guess I'd read the news sites or something. E-mail? I could log onto my favourite multiplayer game, I suppose, although it would be dead slow.

Even though I occasionally see the bohemian-geek in the corner of Lugz or The Grind or Starbucks or Blenz, typing out their manifesto-poem/one-act socio-eco-political play, I couldn't possibly focus on writing with so many distractions.

It might be more relaxing to sit with a newspaper instead of a keyboard and screen. And at home, instead of a hard chair. Ah, screw it. I'm not going wireless.

There was a white box van in front of me on my drive home from the grocery store. On the back, it said "A&S Meats & Poultry". At first glance, I thought it said "ASS Meats & Poultry". Sometimes it's absolutely vital to spell out the word "and" in full.

I'm just back from seeing Adrian Bedford at the first stop of his book tour -- a reading at The Grind Café. It was excellent to finally meet Adrian and Michelle. It's an example of the power of the net to allow people to make connections all over this floating ball that we call Earth. Neat stuff.

If you haven't met Adrian yet, I'd highly recommend it, as he's a clever and witty guy, and he'll sign your copy of Orbital Burn, absolutely free! Even in the short time we were able to chat, he imparted a great deal for me to mull. I'm mulling even now. Principally, his advice was to start small and work my way up, which seems far more sensible than what I was doing. I started with an epic, 1,500-year plot and worked up from there, expecting to finish in a couple of months. Maybe that was a bit too much for my first attempt.

I wish Adrian and Michelle all the best as they wend their way across the continent, stopping in Calgary, Regina, Saskatoon, Toronto, New York, and finally Boston for the 62nd World Science Fiction Convention.

It must be a sad sign of my geekdom that I didn't even notice when my cell phone stopped receiving calls or taking messages. Honestly, I'm so wired to the net that I conduct almost all of my exchanges via e-mail and chat. While I was happily e-mailing with everyone, I didn't notice that my last received call was on August 5th. No voice messages.

So far, only one person has sent me an angry e-mail, and I'm truly sorry about not calling back. If you called and left a message since the 5th, please try again by e-mail. I'm not ignoring you. I'm just oblivious to finer points of operating this "telephone" device.

Over the days that followed from my previous entry, the unusually-shaped pod morphed itself into the cockpit of this Space 1999 inspired shuttle.



Unfortunately, I went a little overboard with the prims. The limit for a functioning vehicle is 30 (plus an avatar). This has around 170.

Needless to say, it can't ever fly like a normal vehicle. I played around with it as an attachment for a while, but it's nothing I can actually use or sell. Like other interesting failures, I'll send it into the dark corners of my inventory.

Yesterday "Raised by Penguins" got its ISBN, and I was surprised to see that it ends with an X. That's right, nine digits, followed by the letter X.

Confused and bewildered, I Googled for some kind of explanation for this aberrant character. I found it here: Mathematics and Writing in Action: The International Standard Book Number Check Digit Scheme.

The ISBN Check Digit Scheme

For a₁a₂a₃a₄a₅a₆a₇a₈a₉a₁₀, the ten digit ISBN, the check digit a₁₀ is appended to the nine digit identification number a₁a₂a₃a₄a₅a₆a₇a₈a₉ such that a₁₀ satisfies the equation

10a₁ + 9a₂ + 8a₃ + 7a₄ + 6a₅ + 5a₆ + 4a₇ + 3a₈ + 2₉ + a₁₀ = 0 (mod 11)

If the check digit a₁₀ is 10, the letter X is used instead.

The remainder when a number is divided by 11 could be any digit from 0 to 9 or the number 10. Since the ISBN scheme uses modulo 11 arithmetic and wants the check digit a₁₀ to be a single character, it assigns a10 the value of X when 10 is to the check digit. The ISBN for the book Linear Algebra and its Applications, by David Lay, is 0-201-52032-X. The X indicates that the check digit is the number 10.

So X, as it turns out, is a legitimate character for an ISBN, and my book has one. Great, except that the catalog form at Cafe Press rejects any letters in the ISBN.

A rumour was spreading. Words were exchanged in hushed tones by the photocopier. In furtive conversations in darkened corners, news of its arrival passed among the cubicle dwellers of the sixth floor.

I was cleaning my coffee mug when I heard. I won't reveal names, so let's call her "X". Her name doesn't really start with an X, so don't look for her in the company phone list.

"Do you, uh... hold on." she began, and checked the door to see if it was clear. She leaned towards me confidentially and indicated my coffee mug. "Do you drink coffee?"

As I dried my mug, I confirmed that, yes, I drank coffee. I turned and shuffled towards the vending machine, wondering where exactly X was going with this.

"You know about... upstairs, right?" she asked. No, I hadn't, I said, and just as I reached to select a cup of "Hawaiian" blend from the vending machine, she grabbed my wrist and said, "It's true. It's TRUE. They have real coffee. I've seen it."

"What?" I recoiled involuntarily.

X pressed on, "The others think I'm mad, but I found it! The fabled COFFEE MAKER OF THE SEVENTH FLOOR!!!" Her shouts prompted a nearby cubicle dweller to shush her. She pulled me physically away from the vending machine behind the water cooler. "You don't need to drink this... this... filth," she spat. I wiped my face with my sleeve.

"Thank you," I said, "for the tip. I just wanted a cup of coffee really."

"No!" she hissed. "You must find it. You must seek the Coffee Maker of the Seventh Floor and drink of its...er..."

"--of its coffee?" I suggested.

"It is not merely coffee," X sneered. "It is the purest of sources. It is the black nectar of the gods."

"That sounds...uh...nice," I agreed, glancing at my watch.

"Yes," she nodded. "It is... nice." At that, X slipped a scrap of paper into my hand and slipped out of the kitchen, pausing only to say, "It is up to you. Find the source and bring back a thermos. A thermos filled with the nectar of the gods!"

"Ssshhh!" said the cubicle dweller.

Back at my desk, I examined the scrap. It was a CD liner from the MSDN CD library. On it, in red ink, was a hand-drawn map that led to an "X", beside which it said "coffee maker".

So it began: my quest for the the fabled Coffee Maker of the Seventh Floor. I would not rest until I found it, if only because I was afraid of being cornered by X by the coffee vending machine again.

In the past few months, I've been very good about lunch. Oh, I still eat awful things, like big stacks of deep fried things with noodles, and choke down foot-long cheese-steak subs, but for the most part I've entirely eschewed the Scottish restuarant.

Until today. Today I had a bit of a lapse. As I walked past McD's, stomach grumbling, I found myself walking in the door, against all better judgement. And as I chewed the first bites of a "Big eXtra" burger with "cheese" (that one definitely has to go in quotation marks), it struck me as never before that McD's "beef" (also should be in quotes) tastes remarkably like oily foam rubber.

No, there was nothing wrong or different about this particular McD's burger -- I suspect that they've always tasted like that. I just hadn't previously been away from them long enough to truly appreciate how awful they are.

The fries, on the other hand, are full of lovely tallow-ish flavour, and give you a full week's worth of salt in only one serving. Hold on a sec--

*cough* *cough*

Come on heart--

*cough* *cough*

Ah. There it goes. I'm ok now. Yes, I can't get enough of those fries.

RoboHelp is probably the most popular tool that technical writers use to create help and on-screen user guides for Windows applications. Ironically, when you select Help > Contents in RoboHelp, their own help system fails to open.

I think the "7-Eleven" name on the corner store actually means there's between 7 and 11 customers waiting for the slow cashier. Or maybe it's an estimate of the time you'll spend in line.

Well, Cable Guy showed up precisely between the hours of 5:00 and 9:00 the other day and swapped out the old cable modem for a new Motorola cable modem. It wasn't as simple as that, however. Because Cable Guy didn't really know how to use a computer, I had to help him test to see if it worked. He was grizzled-looking guy, and I could tell he was a Newfoundlander by his accent and the fact that he called everyone "my friend". As in, "Hello, my friend, I'm here to work on your cable modem."

Cable Guy had to wait twenty minutes on hold while phoning the technicians at Shaw. Apparently they keep their own employees on hold too. When he finally got through ("Sacred Heart, my friend, where is everyone?!") he got me a new IP and a roaring fast 5 Mbps account. The wait was worth it. Downloads are zippy.

On my drive to work today, I saw an ad on the back of a bus. It was for "JugoJuice", a chain of juice bars, and it showed a woman with a delicious-looking cup of orange juice with the caption in giant bold print: "It feels good.™".

Although I'm sure that the cup of juice does feel good (unless you've misundertood how it's supposed to be used), how can a company trademark the words "It feels good"? Lots of things feel good, and among them a good many of those things are products. Are they implying that people can no longer sell a product by saying whether it feels good? Do they really expect this to hold up in court?

I'm getting tired of seeing the ™ show up in everything. I'm waiting for someone to trademark the letters "TM", and sue anyone who uses the ™ symbol on any trademarked words.

(Trademark notice: "the" is now a trademark of CubicleDweller.ca. Any use of this word for commercial purposes is prohibited.)

Coming soon... something pod-shaped. I think.



So many of my vehicles start as just an interesting shape before I know what it's for.

Today I will recieve an honoured guest into my home. Today, between 5:00 and 9:00 PM on-the-dot, the cable guy will visit and fix my net connection. Well, he'll look at it, to be accurate, and see if it can be fixed. I'll hope for the best.

For the last few weeks, I've had a packet loss problem. 75% to 100% packet loss is not a good thing, as it basically cripples any network connection. I don't know where these packets are going, exactly, but this kind of packet loss is only exceeded by the folks at Canada Post.

Where are these packets going? I can only imagine. Maybe there's some guy in Sweden, sitting at his BØRK pine-laminate computer desk when up pops a bunch of my stray packets.

"Hey Ingemar, did yøu write sømething abøut de cubicles?"

"Nø. Wøuld yøu like anøther meatball?"

No worries. The Cable Guy will fix it for me.