Head Tale

Calgary Reconsidered

Another great piece in The Walrus by Chris Turner looking at Calgary’s history, mythology and current culture.

It touches on many of the things Shea and I experienced when we lived in Calgary – from the youthful energy that pervades the city to the embracing of the redneck stereotype (both ironically and otherwise) by Cowtown’s citizens to the unique joys of everything from floating down the Bow with a beer cooler tied to your raft to the wonder of a winter Chinook.

It’s been a LONG time since I did a list so let’s go…

FIVE THINGS I MISS MOST ABOUT CALGARY
1. Falafel King.
The irony is that the first time I tried this downtown institution, I mis-read their sign and thought it was a Burger King! But I got so hooked on their chicken schwarmas – the messiest, spiciest, drippingest ones I’ve ever had that I went there nearly every Friday for lunch after I discovered them!

2. Calgary Flames Games
I couldn’t afford to go often and mostly went through the generosity of various other family members who also lived in Calgary. But I always loved the whole experience of going to an NHL game, something that I only got to experience twice in my life before moving to Calgary – once in Winnipeg and one pre-season exhibition game in Regina as a kid.

3. The Skyline
Because Calgary’s downtown is built in a low area around the river and there are numerous hills nearby that the city spreads outwards towards and over, I always loved how you could be walking or driving, come over a rise, and see the city laid out before you – whether driving down Elbow Drive, 17th Ave from the west, Scotsman’s Hill or so on.

4. The Arts Community
Having worked for the Writers Guild of Alberta, I’m biased. But my biggest shock upon moving to Calgary was the strong-beating artistic heart that lie just beneath the city’s conservative, pro-business surface. And the pro-environment folks. And the highly educated folks. And the strong tech folks. And that’s why Calgary surprised the world by electing Canada’s (and North America’s?) first Muslim mayor of a major city.

5. Hop In Brew Pub
The single best pub I’ve ever been to in my life – yes, better than Bushwakkers! (Okay, maybe not quite that good. Let’s not get blasphemous here!)

¶ Posted 29 May 2012 § MemoryLane ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: alberta

Music Monday – “I still look for you in crowds/In train stations and bus stops, on sidewalks/In the middle of the night”

As the person who uploaded this video observes, it’s amazing how Fred Eaglesmith can go from hilarious to heart-ripping in a second. This is one of my favourite songs of his…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcbSUyHX4yg

¶ Posted 28 May 2012 § MemoryLane § MusicMonday § PopCulture § Video ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: music, ontario

Sappy Sunday – Lip Dub Wedding Proposal

This one’s pretty sweet…

¶ Posted 27 May 2012 § PopCulture § Sad § Video ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: cool, cute

Saturday Snap – Customer Service

Often times, working in libraries means you’re getting abused – by patrons who are mad that you won’t waive their hundreds of dollars in fines or pissed that you won’t give them unlimited guest passes on the Internet or that you don’t know the name of that book that they want to read “that’s blue”. Or by co-workers who want you to read their mind or drop a major project on you Friday at 3:55pm or who don’t respond to e-mails until you prompt them half a dozen times.

But then sometimes, after you make a small gesture of going above & beyond what is expected in the regular course of your daily work, you receive a surprise gift in the mail like this. And it’s all worthwhile…

¶ Posted 26 May 2012 § Library § SaturdaySnap § Work ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: cute

Friday Fun Link – Library CKI/CKO Simulator

This simulator doesn’t work quite as well as you’d hope but it’s a library check-in/check-out simulator that’s intended to help you figure out how long you have to wait until a book you have on hold comes in.

I found this simulator on a MetaFilter thread where a patron was asking exactly that question – if there was an easy formula to predict how long until a book you have on hold comes in.

Turns out there’s also a known mathematical formula known as Kleinrock’s Queuing Theory that helps you predict how long until your book comes in. But that formula was originally created as part of one computer scientist’s work around the queuing of network packets on the Internet – who knew?

¶ Posted 25 May 2012 § FridayFunLink § Library § Work ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: book

ReadLists

ReadLists is a new site which allows people to combine and share collections of web pages – articles, reviews, recipes, course materials, etc. – in a single package that you can easily download to your smart phone. I’m not necessarily endorsing this site but just sharing a cool find. Feel free to read the original MetaFilter thread where I found this for a more full discussion of copyright implications, moral rights, the impact of format-shifting for digital technologies and so on.

(via MetaFilter)

¶ Posted 24 May 2012 § Library § PopCulture § Technology ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: book, cool

How To Fix the Google+ Engagement Problem

I don’t log in to Google+ as much as I did when it first launched but I still find it a nice option when the stream of kid and vacation pictures on Facebook gets to be too much (and I’m as guilty of those crimes as anyone.)

My Google circles are mostly made up of people I don’t know but have something in common with (Reddit, MetaFilter, Librarians, Random People From Saskatchewan) and that’s the gist of this presentation – Google is a fundamentally different type of network than Facebook or Twitter. Where Facebook is (mostly) for connecting with your friends and acquaintances and other people you know, and Twitter is (mostly) for following people you don’t know, Google+ is for discovering people you share an interest with, whatever that may be (and a natural extension of their circle metaphor.)

Interesting stuff indeed!

¶ Posted 23 May 2012 § Technology ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: cool, economics, facebook, google

Family Hockey Pool Update

For the past few years, a cousin in BC has run a just-for-fun hockey pool for family members across the country, both regular season and playoffs.

I usually enter a few teams each time the pool comes up – a team or two for myself, a team for Shea using the strategy of picking either the funniest and/or longest name in each box (she used this strategy while picking for a guy who didn’t show for one of our local hockey pools when we lived in Calgary and ended up picking a team that came in second! Who knew Miroslav Satan was going to have a banner year that year? Plus that was a hockey pool with cash sums involved so I think the second place guy ended up giving her half his winnings as a thank-you! Those were fun pools because instead of a set entry fee, you drafted based on the player’s salary. So if a player made $10 million a year, it cost you $10 to draft him. So that meant that instead of the usual suspects being picked in the usual order, you were trying to find under-priced diamonds in the rough to minimize your cash outlay and maximize your potential points production. Tangent over.)

For Pace in the fun family pool, I use the fairly random strategy of just picking whichever name is listed first in each of the selection boxes.

This strategy is usually a disaster as the secret to winning a hockey pool is picking two teams you think will go all the way and the more players you have who go further into the playoffs, the more you maximize your potential for gaining points with each round that goes by. (That’s why all the BC cousins did so well last year when the Canucks made the finals and sucked a puck this year when Luongo crapped the bed in the first round!)

But this year, the random names Pace “picked” included a few guys – like Claude Giroux – that a) put up a shit-ton of points and b) (another winning strategy) were guys that were off the radar which meant Pace was getting points from players that few other people picked.

Anyhow, Pace has been in the top spot for pretty much the entire Stanley Cup playoffs but without that concentration of players on the same team or two like some other top participants have, it looks like he’ll finally lose his top spot – maybe even tonight since the third place person has a lot of Kings in their pool (as does my dad who’s in spot #4 and who I think may end up taking the whole thing once the Kings put the Yotes out of their misery.)

As for me, I’d picked the Predators and Capitals to go all the way which is why I’m sitting in the middle of the pack.

Maybe next year!

¶ Posted 22 May 2012 § Family § MemoryLane ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: hockey, parents

Music Monday – “I want to help you lift enormous things/A pinch, a sting/I don’t feel a thing/And as the Earth revolved around the sun”

New Tragically Hip single!

And as a Hockey Night in Canada Intro:

¶ Posted 21 May 2012 § MusicMonday § PopCulture § Video ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: hockey, music

Omni.com (and Some Thoughts on My Current Digital Life)

Information overload is a well-known condition these days and the situation is only getting worse as more useful web sites, more granulated social networks and more cool media outlets gain popularity and battle for your attention.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that and increasingly, I find myself wishing there was a single web site where all aspects of my digital life – personal, professional – could combine in one place. I call this idea Omni.com (which, if it were to come true, would mean a small metal fabricator would be in for a BIG payday!)

What would a single spot for your digital life encompass? Let’s take a step back…

First off, I need to define what my Digital Life is. For all that I do on computers and all the time I spend on the Internet, it really all boils down to a few main elements:

E-mail
Web surfing
Digital Photos/Videos
Music
Documents

That’s it. Five things. Now, let’s see how I work in those five areas (with things that are local to my computer rather than cloud-based in italics):

E-mail – Thunderbird for main account, Gmail as back-up I give to companies when I want to be on their mailing list but maybe not dealing with all their e-mail regularly/spam-catcher account
Web surfing – Firefox & Chrome
Digital Photos/Videos – iPhoto as main repository with iCloud enabled, also YouTube for some video clips
Music – iTunes was my main home for music but recently has been supplanted by Rdio which only lacks in some of my favourite artists – big (Beatles) and small (indies like Sam Baker)
Documents – OpenOffice for local archive of stuff going back to undergrad essays but have increasingly been transferring old stuff and creating new stuff in Google Docs

So you see what a mish-mash it is and also how things may come and go? For awhile, Flickr was my main choice for hosting many of my photos. But then, not even replaced by a better service, we just stopped using it. (I think the amount we used it wasn’t enough to justify the paid account so we let it slip.)

There are lots of sites trying to be this all-in-one shop – Facebook is the obvious one but their blatantly abusive approach to user privacy is discouraging. Google is another contender but they’re not much better than Facebook in the privacy department although they put up a slightly better front. Right now, they’re probably the site that comes closest to being that all-in-one shop. But beyond privacy, I always worry about outages and unexpected changes. Google Docs recently updated their underlying software and so you were encouraged to update to the new version – except you got a pop-up that all your revision history would be lost. For most of us, not a big deal but if you’re an author who’s counting on that revision history as you complete your work, that change could be disastrous. Apple may be the best positioned as they’ve got the media-sharing stuff down (photos, video, music) and do have e-mail server capabilities although most people (even Apple fans) don’t use MeMail as far as I know.

Amazon is somewhat similar but also seems purely focused on external content they sell rather than being a place where you can share your own photos, videos, etc.

And there are lots of little up & comer sites that could perhaps grow into a type of Omni.com – Evernote, DropBox, etc.

There are lots of unresolved questions of how this service might work – privacy and guaranteed access are two of the biggies but there are also questions around cost, security (can I easily set one area to be private, another to be only accessible to certain people and other areas to be completely public) and function (Google Docs continues to improve but is still a long way off from being as flexible as MS-Word.)

Anyhow, that’s my current billion dollar idea. Anyone reading this is free to take it and run with it. I’d just be glad to not feel like I have to follow six different social networks to stay in the loop with what’s going on in my world!