Michael N. Dundas

This post is not security or technical.

Today, we attended the first annual Splat Fest.  The festival was on the McCully’s farm in St. Mary’s, Ontario.  It was Sunday, something to do and seemed interesting.  It featured locally produced heirloom tomatoes.  I found them to be really good and the different tomatoes had quite different tastes and textures.  It is interesting what you don’t know, when your main source of food is a Loblaws, or other superstore.  Need to find the time to visit more of these farms and purchase food directly.  I don’t even mind paying a little more given the difference in taste and selection.

Our daughter brought a friend of hers along.  There was a corn maze, horse rides, bunny’s to hold, goats to feed, and tomato throwing at a target.  There is also a store, that smelled wonderful.  I purchased two home made pies.  For the first splat fest it was done well.  Look forward to next year.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbusch/2945015981/

We rented a friends cottage this week.  Ironically it is located at the same beach I had spent vacation on for years as a child and teenager.  Amberley beach is where my parents rented a cottage there for every summer for two weeks years.

About 3 km north is Point Clark.  My daughter, her friend and I biked up to the Point Clark lighthouse and went for the tour.  The tour was run by a girl named Meaghan.  She was in grade 10 and it was her summer job.  What was interesting was she was obviously nervous.  Once the group arrived, you could see her clearly ‘shift’ into a rehearsed speech about the lighthouse.  Fair enough, I am not a presentation expert and I’d be very nervous too.

Meaghan explained the history of the light house and how it was built and we then all climbed the 114 stairs to the top of the lighthouse.  At the top, Meaghan again explained the lighthouse, it’s historic features, views and other interesting things.  At certain points when she would break from speaking to let everyone look around, I started asking her questions.  I was trying to get her to relax a bit.  She responded very well and articulately.  She would answer me easily.  It was obvious she had done her homework and knew the information.

After we came down from the lighthouse, we went to the museum, which was actually the light keepers house where he and his family lived.  She came to a set of pictures and pointed to them and said “This is my great aunt and uncle, one of the light keepers here back in …”.  I was shocked, and if you looked at the rest of the tour, you could see the changes on their faces.  From this point on, the group completely changed how they viewed Meaghan and information she was conveying.   They asked more questions, and showed much more interest in what she had to say.  Even Meaghan seemed to relax a bit.

After the tour, I spoke briefly to Meaghan thanked her for the tour, said she did a good job and suggested she mention at the start of the tour that her great aunt, uncle and grandparents were lighthouse keepers at the lighthouse.  She seemed genuinely thankful that I commented on her tour and for the suggestion.  I really hope she does.  I am not a presentation expert, it is something that I have always struggled with, although I do enjoy presenting when I have something to say in an area I am experienced in.  Having personal experiences like Meaghan has where her family directly worked at the lighthouse gives so much credibility to what she is saying during the tour.  She is portraying the same information, but adding that personal family history makes it all the more real to the tour guests.  They pay more attention to what she has to say,  ask more questions and listen more attentively to her responses.  Being able to add examples, or experience in any presentation helps make the presentation even better.  I was told that by a excellent presenter a while back, and I always try to do that when I present.  This was a perfect example of why that works.

Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/dokas/102499448/

I picked my daughter from school the other day. As we were driving home she said. “Dad, did you know that downloading is illegal?” I asked her who told her that. She said a teacher told her. I then asked her, what is downloading? Her answer was “when you get movies and songs from the Internet”.

It really upsets me that the MPAA, RIAA and other lobby type groups have the power to actually influence the educational system in this way. It bothers me more that I have teachers teaching my child concepts that they themselves obviously do not understand and probably have read some propaganda from one of these lobby groups and assume that it is truth.

I suspect this is going to surprise some people but … downloading is _NOT_ the process of obtaining movies and songs from the Internet. Downloading _IS_ the transfer of data from one device to another, where the device receiving the data initiated the requested.  Sure you can download a movie or a song, but you can also download a word processing document, you can download a database file, you can download a custom graphic, you can download a piece of open-source or free software, you can download anything really. The concept of downloading has nothing to do with what you are downloading.

Is downloading bad? According to my daughter it is.  An analogy would be teaching the concept that guns are bad.   As a normal citizen in Canada it is illegal to carry a handgun. Any citizen wandering around with a handgun strapped to their belt will have people scared, running away and win themselves a meeting with a police swat team very quickly. If you see a police officer wandering around with a gun on their side, there is no panic, no running away. People just carry on. The gun isn’t bad. It is who has the gun that determines good or bad. As a society we assume that police will only use their guns for good and so seeing a uniformed police officer with a gun is perfectly acceptable.  This is one of the reasons why plain clothed officers go to great lengths to hide their side arms, the general public can not be certain they are law enforcement just by looking at them.

With downloading, everyone has the ability to do it and there are no restrictions. It has been and continues to be a normal part of computing since the days when on-line bulletin board systems were popular.  The concept of moving data from one device to another is what makes the Internet work. Every time you go read a web page, blog, or watch a news clip from a news site you could argue that you are technically ‘downloading’.

I am now slowly educating my daughter on the concepts of downloading and uploading. Once those are grasped, I’ll work on what is illegal and what is not when using downloading. I hope that if schools and other educational institutions do choose to teach children about why downloading content that you do not own is wrong, they first understand the concepts themselves and teach it properly.

As our house is being shown, I am working from a nearby Starbucks.  I have had a Starbucks card for a while now and had not used it much till recently.   I started using it because the Starbucks around here find it necessary to charge for Internet access which bothers me.  With a Starbucks card you get 2 hours free a day, so I started populating mine and using it.

I just logged in to check it while sitting here, and found they keep a history of your purchases so you can review.

I bet like most companies that provide cards, the information they store on you and analyze for research is much more extensive than what is available to you on the website.  With all this data, you could data mine quite extensively for patterns.  Questions such as What do you tend to purchase and when? What else was available in the store at the time that you didn’t purchase?  How does your pattern compare to others that purchased items in the same hour?  What is the average spending per day/week/month based on postal code?  Many other questions, but you get the idea.  I wonder if you requested to see ‘all’ the information they have obtained on you, they would actually show you?

The other reason for the Starbucks card was a friend of mine who said “The cards are great!  It’s not real money that way”.

With the entire family now suffering from the flu (it started with me on Thu), we decided to attack the storage room today.  The storage room contains years worth of stuff and not just Anna and my life together.  There is elementary, high-school, and university items that have been collected.  Add to that everything Anna and I have collected over the last 18 years.  In fairness, I am the pack rat.  I keep things till I am sure they are no longer useful.  Anna will toss things at a moments notice.  Consequently, a good portion of the storage room is considered ‘my stuff’. Some of the stuff I kept made me realize how much older I am than I feel.   I took pictures of some of the items of interest to me before tossing them.

I installed and maintained Novell UnixWare and Netware for service provider while I was in school. I learned a lot and it was very applicable, leading edge at the time all 28.8 kbps dial-up.

This was my first mobile phone.  I purchased it from Bell and it was expensed by the service provider I was working for.  I can’t get over the size and weight of it.  It had an LED green screen.  At the time it was cool.  I tried to charge it and subsequently power it up, but it no longer functions.

Foxpro was a database that I did a lot of programming with, first just on my own out of interest and then for work at the library.

I actually did some work on OS/2.  Not a lot but I recall this book being recommended as I was more familiar with Windows.  As I recall it was not very helpful in the end.

Pascal was the first language I taught myself after basic in elementary school. I used it quite extensively till I switched to C. Netscape Livewire was a platform that I had to develop in at one of my summer co-ops employments. Ecco was a contact management system used as a very simple CRM system by the ISP I worked for during school. I wrote some simple batch interfacing to it for the ISP. Impromtu was a reporting module used in another co-cop term by the company. I was responsible for the database server and associated applications, so I had to troubleshoot it at times.

A bunch of other books I purchased and used at one time or another in my career. Check out the last book entitled Finding it on the Internet — does anyone remember gopher, archie, WAIS?  I do and I used them.  Not for long, but it still makes me feel old.

I really wanted to change the look of my blog.  The previous look was quite ‘old looking’.  I am not an artistic creative type, so I found a new template, used Gimp and poof.   I also switched from blogger.com, to wordpress.com.   The wordpress interface has much improved, as well as much better selection of templates and options.

Well written article by a former manager / advisor to me entitled “What I didn’t get for Christmas.”

I was catching up on some of my reading last night when I couldn’t sleep. A friend of mine had posted a link to an article on the difference between ‘traditional workers’ and ‘web workers’. Personally, I definitely fall into the ‘bursty’ or ‘web worker’ category and my office I realize has a ‘mix’ of both types.