grantwarkentin.com

I’ve gone retro.

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing 10-year-old video games I never had a chance to play the first time around.

Thanks to Good Old Games, a site run by CD Projekt, makers of my favourite RPG of all time The Witcher, I was able to pick up Giants: Citizen Kabuto for $6. It’s a game I always thought looked interesting, but never managed to play.

Wow, did I miss out back in the day.

The game is a blast. I’ve finished one third and it’s fun, humourous, challenging and satisfying. Plus, the 10-year-old graphics are still cute.

You start out as the Meccs, heavily-armed goofballs who crash on their way to a vacation planet. They end up fighting the evil Sea Reapers, who are oppressing the native Smartie population. You can jetpack around, blast bad guys from a mile away and carry weird aliens on your back. You can also blast the indigenous life forms for meat. Fun.

I also picked up Outcast, which I’m saving for later. The story is a bit of a hybrid of Stargate and Timeline, but not too derivative. And the sound is great. The voxel graphics are interesting. The game plays like a Zelda game, with guns and aliens. So far, it’s fun.

Retro gaming is fun, and cheap. The best part is, these games might not have graphics up to today’s standards, but the gameplay is so good that I forget the graphics after a few minutes.

That’s the mark of a truly great game. Graphics are not the most important thing — gameplay, story and fun factor are.

In biblical times, you couldn’t go to the market without encountering some kind of miracle, according to the tales in the bible.

People getting healed, enemy armies getting blinded and slaughtered, talking donkeys, people rising from the dead. And there are many Christian stories from the past 2,000 years of miracles that were even more amazing.

But funny thing, as soon as cameras and film and video recorders and tape recorders were invented, miracles seem to have all but disappeared, except for the odd case of someone’s aunt being healed something which showed up as a dark patch on a scan which may have been cancer. Maybe miracles have gone the way of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and UFOS, which still cannot be captured definitively on film or video even though almost everyone has a camera with them on their cell phone at all times.

Although video and photography equipment has become cheaper, higher quality and more accessible, we still have to make due with rubbish blurry photos that could depict anything. That’s because there was nothing real to begin with.

Are miracles the same? Are they only real when no one can prove they happened? When the only way of recording them is through word of mouth?

Is the age of miracles over, like some conservative Christian churches teach? Funny, the bible doesn’t seem to suggest that there were any “ages” or that miracles would ever stop.

What’s the most likely answer? God doesn’t do miracles when anyone can prove them, because they must be taken on faith? God doesn’t do miracles anymore because the bible is all anyone needs to believe?

Or there never were any miracles to begin with?

Maybe miracle stories are just stories, made fantastic in the retelling. I’ve seen this happen many times. A number of years ago, our newspaper received frantic calls about a “chainsaw massacre” and we had to investigate. One person in the office even said she’d heard about it and offered some lurid details. Turned out some guy had been walking down the road with a chainsaw, and may have waved it threateningly at someone he didn’t like. No one was attacked or “massacred” with a chainsaw, but the story spread and turned into the plot of a B-movie splatter flick.

Maybe that’s how miracle stories work, too. All it takes is a small grain of truth to be twisted into a story about something that never happened.

Watching that Olympic hockey game and watching Crosby’s goal, and then immersing myself in the closing ceremonies was almost a spiritual experience. I am still riding the high.

After the game we took the kids out for ice cream (in February?) to celebrate, then watched the closing ceremonies. Thank goodness for PVR — we could pause it while we got the tired crabby kids to bed.
Today I felt more proud than ever to be a Canadian. And although they lost, Team USA played a great game and really earned the silver. It could have easily gone the other way too — but I think Canada wanted it more. It means more to us.

I think I convinced Quatchi to move to Campbell River.

Yup, after the Olympics are over, I’m pretty sure the cuddly, hockey-loving sasquatch mascot of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games is going to come check out our fine city. Well, the woods, anyway. Sasquatches are really shy creatures, unless there’s a hockey game going on. But he might be interested in a patio home near the forest.

We met the big lug when we took our family to Vancouver this past weekend to enjoy some of the sights and free activities downtown. There was plenty of free fun, enough to keep us busy all day, from concerts to free admission to the art gallery, outdoor art displays and even some collectible freebies.

But although I would have loved a chance to wander through the art gallery for free, some things aren’t possible when you’re backpacking a two-year-old and also trying to keep a four-year-old girl from dashing into the crowd.

As far as she was concerned, the whole reason we were there was to watch the “Mascots on Ice” show on the ice sheet underneath Robson Street.

“Can I see Quatchi now?” she asked about six million times.

I wasn’t going to let her be disappointed. I handed off my cranky two-year-old son to my wife, hauled the girl up on to my shoulders and barreled through the crowd, staking out our spot at centre ice 15 minutes before the show began.

I have to hand it to the Olympic organizers – they’re very considerate of kids. Rather than making the thousands of little ones hunkered around the ice sheet wait for the mascots, Quatchi, Miga and Sumi showed up early, high-fiving and hugging kids while the rest of the skaters got their costumes on. And they stayed for a few minutes after the show, too.

While my daughter screamed in joy and tried to rip out handfuls of Quatchi’s fur every time he skated by, I adjusted my “City of Campbell River” pin and did my best to act as an ambassador for our community.

And I think it worked. Quatchi kept skating past us to check out my pin. I think he might be coming up next month to check out our fair city. If you hear a rustling in the woods, that’s probably him. Pray it’s him. If it’s the “Fuwa” things – the mascots from the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics – be afraid. Be very afraid. They only smile before they kill.

Quatchi mentioned that other mascots from previous Olympics (barring the Fuwa) are interested in relocating, including Hidy and Howdy, the two polar bears from the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, and my favourite, Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat, who was the unofficial but popular favourite mascot of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia.

I hope our tourism promotion offices can get it together to attract them here, but I’m not confident. The campbellriver.travel website… well… it sucks. Sorry. Tiny little boring pictures and lots of text. Sasquatches and wombats aren’t going to read all that. It needs big, beautiful pictures of the Campbell River region, and less text. Maybe a video testimonial or two. Maybe they’re there, I don’t know, I didn’t bother looking past the front page, it was too dull.

And RiverCorp the city’s economic development agency, well, who knows what they’re actually doing. They’re apparently helping attract new businesses to town, but we can’t tell because they never call, they never write, and when I try and talk to them about a feel-good story all I get is “no comment.”

I sure hope Quatchi doesn’t want to start up a business here to ease his way into retirement, I don’t think he’s going to get a lot of help from them.

As for the rest of them, I know there’s a long, boring history in this community of little tourism and business fiefdoms battling each other to see who can get the biggest pile of crumbs, but come on. It’s only going to work if we put the grievances of the 1980s and 1990s behind us and look at the future.

We’re only 10 years behind. Time to catch up. The mascot market is waiting.

It’s nice. It’s very nice. Faster than Firefox, less hits to the slow little SSD in my AspireOne netbook. This, I like. I will see how this does over the long-term. If Google wants the netbook market, this will be the way to get it.

Chrome for Linux

I am using Ubuntu 9.04 on an Acer AspireOne netbook (with the slow 8 GB SSD) and so far, performance is better than Firefox 3.0.17 (the latest version officially supported for Ubuntu, which has been giving me strange error messages for Gears ever since the last update. Not good, because I want to use Google Docs offline.

Now to test how Chrome and Docs and Gears all play together…

EDIT: Bwa hahahahaha Gears is not supported in Chrome?!

“What does Gears require to be compatible with my Linux system?

If you’d like to run the Gears for Firefox on a Linux (32-bit) platform, please make sure your system has glibc 2.3.5 or higher and libstdc++6 (Gears 0.3) or libstdc++5 (Gears pre-0.3).”

Off to the package manager then…

ANOTHER Edit:

OK, for whatever reason, Gears and Chrome and Linux do not work together. That’s an irritant. The only reason I want Gears is so I can sync my documents online and offline. I have some stuff I would hate to lose, and I like having it in an online location and on my netbook.

So I found a way to do it backwards, which is actually better. There’s an extension for OpenOffice which lets you export whatever document you’re working on to your Google Docs account. It lets you import from Google Docs too, but I haven’t tried that yet. Just click the icon, and voila, punch in your account name and password, and the document is in or out of Google Docs. Google Docs has no problem with Open Document format.

It was a bit of a pain in the ass to set up though. The default OpenOffice installation in the netbook remix version I’m using is pretty bare bones, and the extension requires some Java extras. The easiest way to make it work was to open up the Synaptic Package Manager, look up OpenOffice and install the latest Canonical version (the one with the icon beside it). That triggered all the dependent files to be installed or reinstalled too, and after that it was easy to install the extension — just run the OpenOffice extension manager, look for the downloaded extension file and voila. Done.

So with that problem solved, I love Chrome, and I love OpenOffice again. Google Docs is now a storage solution. As long as I remember to export the document before I close it, everything will be synchronized.

So on Sunday the pastor ended his sermon with a bit of a monologue about the situation in Haiti, and made reference to the idiot Pat Robertson’s comments that the Haitians got what they deserved for supposedly making a pact with the devil. The pastor soft-peddled Robertson’s comments and suggested they were taken out of context by “the media.”

Then he really pissed me off. He said that many people are looking at the horror in Haiti and asking how a good and loving god could allow something like that to happen. He said we should turn it around on ourselves.

“How can a loving god not allow devastation on us?” he said, suggesting that North America is just as sinful as anywhere else in the world, and just as deserving of destruction.

“How can god not allow his judgment and wrath to be poured out upon us?” he said.

We live at a point of grace, he said, suggesting that as long as we tremble in fear at the foot of the cross, kept safe by hiding behind Jesus, God won’t squash us like the worthless bugs we really are.

Some kind of love. That’s an abusive relationship. God only hits us and hurts us and kills us because he loves us. That’s what abused spouses tell themselves.

This is not a god of love. Threatening to destroy us unless we kiss his ass is not love.

Then the worship team came and led the congregation in singing love songs to Jesus. I couldn’t stand it and walked out.

“How can one little insulated wire bring so much happiness?”
– Homer Simpson

There’s a war waging over free TV, which is apparently a fundamental human right.

That’s the argument advanced by cable companies, anyway, who launched a campaign earlier this year against the “TV tax.”

“You can dress this up any way you like, but the so called fee-for-carriage is a tax on TV viewers with absolutely no benefit,” says Jim Shaw, CEO and vice-chair of Shaw Communications, in a statement on the company’s website.

Them’s fightin’ words, and it sounds like I should be outraged about it, whatever it is.

“It is unfortunate the cable and satellite providers have resorted to scare tactics and misleading information,” fires back Paul Sparkes, executive vice-president of corporate affairs for CTVglobemedia on the “Local TV Matters” website.

Huh? What the h-e-double-hockey-sticks is this all about? Turns out TV stations are asking the CRTC (deep breath – the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission) to allow them to charge cable and satellite TV companies fees for reselling their channels.

The CRTC is the federal government organization which regulates all communication services in Canada. And unless people speak up, they’re going to allow those nasty greedy broadcasters to charge us more money on our monthly bills – so say the cable companies.
Cable and satellite providers have been trying for months to get people to leave comments with the CRTC opposing the “TV tax.” On Nov. 2, the CRTC will stop taking comments and will make a decision on whether or not to allow the fees.

CTV and other broadcasters across the country, including Vancouver Island’s A Channel and CHEK, have launched a counter-campaign, asking people to support their request for the fees, which isn’t new – broadcasters have been asking for them since the 1970s when cable TV started replacing over-the-air broadcasting as the norm.

These days, they really need the fee. Broadcasters can’t rely on advertising anymore. The stampede to high-definition, digital TV has required them to spend millions on new equipment, and they can’t get that investment back because the recession has been brutal for any media company which relies on advertising as its primary source of income. Recessions kill spending, which kills advertising, which kills pretty much every form of media you consume on a daily basis.

But what do you care, as long as you’re still getting it for free, right?

True, you pay a monthly fee for TV. But TV stations in your “basic package” don’t see any of it. Cable and satellite providers resell the stations and give them nothing in return.

That’s why they’re so desperate for the CRTC to let them charge fees for carriage to cable and satellite providers. If they don’t get it, stations may close, or at the very least, say goodbye to home-grown programming.

In contrast, while TV stations struggle to stay alive, during the worst part of the recession this spring National Bank Financial analyst Greg MacDonald called Canadian cable companies a “safe haven” for investors based on stable profit margins. And just this month, Shaw Communications reported that “despite the worst economic recession in seventy years, revenue and operating income for the year climbed 9 per cent in fiscal 2009. The company earned operating income of a whopping $1.54 billion on record revenues of $3.39 billion.”
Wow. What does that tell you? Maybe cable companies can afford to eat the new fee, which by the way is charged to them, not the customer. Cable companies are trying to paint the fee as a “tax” on customers, which is only true if they decide to pass it on to you.

They could choose to pay the fee out of their healthy profit margins. Pause for uproarious laughter.

Meanwhile, the war of words between cable companies and broadcasters is getting ugly as the Nov. 2 deadline looms. Cable companies accuse broadcasters of incompetence. Broadcasters accuse companies of greed. Customers shift uncomfortably in their La-Z-Boys as they struggle to decide whether or not to care.

Viewers could always turn off their TVs and read books instead, but we know that’s not going to happen. So I’ll make it easy. If you want to back the cable companies, go to the CRTC’s website and file a comment opposing the fee for carriage. If you want to back broadcasters, follow the same procedure, but file a comment in favour.

It’s easy, and you can at least say you had a chance for input.

And you can do it during the commercial break.

E-books trend is paradise lost for book nerds

The experience of finding an unexpected treasure in a used book store always gives me a buzz.

Guess I’m a book nerd.

This summer, at a dusty old shop in New Westminster, my attention was captured by an ugly, leather-bound monstrosity on the bottom shelf in the poetry section. Burned into the thick leather cover by an amateur hand was a picture of a log cabin in a forest by a river, with the word “Milton” underneath.

I sat down in the aisle, my back resting against a stack of dog-eared Beatles records, and opened the stiff leather cover. Inside was a homemade leather bookmark attached to the cover, as stiff as a steel-toed boot. I flipped it out of the way to discover a rare treasure – a 125-year-old printing of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”

The pages were gilt, like an expensive Bible, and the engraved illustrations exquisite. The words appeared to gently rise off the page, a side-effect of the printing techniques and quality paper used in making books a century ago.

But that wasn’t the best part. As I flipped through the pages, I came across an unusual bookmark – a carefully-clipped piece of newspaper, an 1897 birth announcement for Nellie McClung’s first-born son. Nellie McClung, who Canadian women can thank for fighting to get them the right to vote in 1916. It made me wonder whose book this once was.

I looked at the home-made cover again. Obviously someone loved this book enough to recover it once the original cover tore off. I imagined McClung, or her son, sitting by the woodstove on a freezing cold Manitoba night, reading by flickering firelight one of the greatest works of English literature.

I caught a whiff as I closed the cover again and brought it to my face to take a sniff. My nostrils filled with the aromatic smell of pipe tobacco. I again imagined one of the McClungs sitting on their porch at dusk, reading the book and smoking a pipe.

Guess I’m a romantic book nerd.

Fighting to keep a neutral, disinterested expression on my face, I dropped $8 in toonies into the hand of the bored-looking store owner and carried my treasure out of the store, striding nonchalantly around the corner before I felt it safe to crack a huge grin. I have no idea if the book’s actually worth anything and I don’t really care. To me, it’s priceless.

That’s why I think e-books are stupid. Once we’re all reading disposable Word documents on yet more Internet-enabled glowing rectangles, who will go into used bookstores looking for priceless treasures?

I also wonder what will happen to our libraries. It seems people would rather spend $300 to $400 for an awkward Star Trek display pad device that lets them read Dan Brown books electronically, looking like quasi-futuristic idiots in the airport lounge, than go to the library and borrow a book for free.

I suppose there must be some good reason to drop that kind of cash on a device to read books you can get for 50 cents at the thrift store, but I don’t know what it is. I’ve tried e-books. I’ve read lots of books on my Palm Pilot, mostly during city council meetings. It’s not fun, and not just because I’m at a council meeting.

The only good thing about e-books is the massive amount of classic books available for free through Project Gutenberg. For some of them, it’s worth staring at a glowing rectangle. Other than that, I can only think of two reasons why paper books will someday be replaced with e-books: one, humans are technology magpies who will adopt anything that looks futuristic and shiny, and two, there’s a lot of money to be made from them. Ergo, the powers that be will do whatever it takes to make them the de facto standard.

And there is a lot of money to be made. E-books sell online in Sony’s e-book store from 50 cents on a special deal to $10 for a new bestseller, to up to $20 for other “specialty” stuff. What a ripoff, it’s all the same to the publisher. Once the book is electronic, it costs them pennies to host a server somewhere for you to download it, regardless of whether it’s on “special” or not. A quick look through the store shows it’s actually cheaper to go buy a paper version you can read without charging the battery.

Out of curiousity, I found an electronic version of Paradise Lost in the store for $2, but I wouldn’t buy it. It’s just 3.5 megabytes of ones and zeros, and I’d never remember or absorb any of it by staring at a screen.

But I will remember and cherish the passages I read by firelight from my ugly, leather-bound monstrosity.

A deeper look: why e-books are stupid

As soon as you enter the electronic world, you quickly discover that not everything works the way you think it should.

I downloaded a pile of interesting (and free) books from Project Gutenberg, classics of religion, philosophy, archaeology and science. But some of the books displayed with errors on my Palm Pilot, and I had to mess around with changing settings, installing better reader software and formatting the downloaded files to work properly. Some of them were worth the hassle, others were not.

With a boring old paper book, you just open it up and start reading. It works on any platform, from tables to pillows to floors to your lap.

Holding an electronic device is just not as comfortable as a paperback, although engineers have tried valiantly to overcome this. You can read a paper book from any angle, and your eyes miraculously adjust in almost all lighting conditions to make reading comfortable. With an electronic device, you are stuck looking at a small, glowing rectangle which – at least in the case of my Palm – emits a slowly-maddening buzzing sound and is hard to see from even a slight angle.

Paper is the standard, whether e-book reader makers like it or not. I find it amusing that Sony’s e-reader offers “astonishing” paper-like display.

Why not just read a paper book, instead of an electronic device painstakingly designed to look like paper? What’s the appeal?

I guess you could argue that an e-reader lets you carry a whole library with you. But why? You can only read one book at a time anyway. When you’re finished the book, put it back on the shelf and take another one. Easy.

And be aware, e-books are not cheaper. A quick look through the e-book store run by Sony shows that while some books are available for 50 cents, and bestsellers are often on for about $10, the average price is the same or more than what you would pay for a paper book. This is absurd when you think about it. When books are first released, hardcovers are always more expensive, but those are the best quality. Wait six months or so for the $10 paperback if you don’t want to pay $30 for a hardcover. The price point for an average new e-book seems to be $13-14. Pretty pricey for something that only exists as ones and zeros.

I shouldn’t pick on Sony. There are other e-book sellers out there, but even if I wanted to buy an Amazon Kindle and download and read e-books, I can’t do it in Canada. Brilliant! Hooray for international copyright and digital rights management!

But I guess I must be one of a small number of people who think that paper book technology is just fine, thank you, and needs no electronic upgrade with all the headaches that brings. Even Disney has launched an e-book store which, for an annual fee, lets kids read “interactive” books featuring all their favourite Disney characters. Now, you don’t even need to read with your kids anymore, or encourage them to use their imaginations while reading a story. Disney will do it for you.

Do your kids a favour. Read with them. Read real books from your local library. Don’t just hand them another glowing rectangle to keep them amused while you watch TV.

I knew the boy was too quiet.

Out of my sight for a few minutes, he had climbed up on to the kitchen table and started playing with his sister’s play foam, one of the presents from her weekend birthday party.

The stuff is small styrofoam balls, held together with magic glue that doesn’t stick to your fingers. It’s a bit like playing with the mix for Rice Krispies squares, before you bake it. It’s actually a lot of fun.

He seemed OK, just pulling it apart and sticking it back together, so I let him play with it on the floor beside me while I worked on my website.

I looked down a minute later and he was tonguing a great wad of green and yellow foam out of his mouth.

I grabbed him and despite his attempts to escape, bite off my finger and burst my eardrums, I picked the rest out of his mouth. I put the foam away.

This morning, he filled two diapers with little balls of coloured styrofoam. I was horrified, but had to laugh. Guess he swallowed a bunch when I wasn’t looking. Maybe that space-age magic glue will help clean out his garbage guts.

We didn’t try and salvage the foam that came out in his diaper, in case anyone was wondering.

Well, I’ve linked this site to my own domain name now, grantwarkentin.com

How vain of me, I know! Ooh, look at me, I have my own dot-com domain for my name! How precious!

Well, maybe I’ll figure out a way to make some money at this. I’m also launching a new business website, more details to follow on that, but I think it’s a good idea. I just need to get my butt in gear (what a strange metaphor) and do it. I started, so hooray.