Word of Nathan

Cass and I took a walk down to Yonge/Dundas square yesterday, hoping to check out the Street Festival a little. So what do I have to say about it?

Wow, how insanely disorganized! I completely didn’t expect it to be so badly done. We had hoped to see some of the street musicians and acrobats, but as soon as each event started, the crowds just closed into a ring around each acrobat or flamethrower or juggler so tightly that it was impossible to see anything at all.

Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration; I saw what must have been an acrobat’s foot sticking up in the air, and once a hula-hoop tossed up, and I could see heat waves from the flame throwers, but no live actual flame. And I think I saw the top of a sand castle that someone was building - at least, I think it was a castle. Maybe it was a sand townhouse…I couldn’t really get close enough to tell.

You’d think that people in Toronto have never heard of stages. That’s what they’re designed for, to give everyone a chance to see. I guess the few hundred people out of the thousands there who were lucky enough to see anything might have enjoyed it. For me, just a big waste of time.

We’re going to try it again today at a different site, but I don’t really have my hopes up. Maybe I’ll be proved wrong.:-)

In one of those great ironies of life, apparently at approximately the time that I was writing the post below dealing with fire, an apartment at the top floor of my building actually caught on fire. Fortunately, it was contained and the only damage was apparently to the originating unit and some smoke damage on that floor.

Does this mean that I’ll see a fox later today?

I’ve been reading the old Myths and Legends of China by ETC Werner and the second-to-last chapter deals with fox legends. One of the superstitions mentioned by Werner was that foxes were believed to be able to start fires by striking the ground with their tails.

This reminded me of the old bible story about Samson and the foxes, where the so-called hero ties foxes’ tails together and sets them on fire before releasing them into the locals’ fields to burn their crops down. I can’t help but wonder if there are other cultures which have legends about fox tails and fire, and if this is inspired by the color of the tail or something else.

I glanced at Wikipedia but didn’t see anything jumping out. I did run across an interesting article on the kitsune, or fox spirit of Japan, which has lots of parallels with the Chinese legends. I’m familiar with the names from the Magic: The Gathering card game, so it’s nice to see that the card game authors did their research and seem to have got most of the surrounding legends dealing with kitsune correct.

Speaking of foxes, I still haven’t solved that annoying Firefox problem I mentioned in my last post. And wow, there’s another connection between fire and foxes! Cool.:-)

I’m a big fan of the Firefox web browser, but lately I noticed something strange. Under Windows, if I click a scroll wheel button on a tab, it will close the tab. If I click a link, it opens a link in a new window.

Under Linux, when I click a link it opens in a new window. However, if I click the scroll wheel on a tab to close it, it does a Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” search on the words in the tab title, or indeed on any word or phrase highlighted in the page. That’s actually pretty annoying. Has anyone encountered this before and do you know how to turn it off?

I was looking for music online to supplement my collection and decided to check out some of the more interesting new software available. A bit of searching around, and I stumbled over Moodamp.

The premise is good, at least. You tell the software what mood you’re currently in, and then rate each song as you hear it. Eventually, Moodamp “learns” what you feel like listening to in that mood and plays mostly songs that you’ve given a Good/Awesome rating. Moreover, Moodamp contains a P2P module that you can enable, which will search/download music “like” the songs that you currently think are “Awesome” in that mood.

Reality is a little rougher. Moodamp doesn’t have any way of scanning new music predictively in order to tell if you might like it. This, combined with the fact that it gets new music from P2P by searching for the artist name, leads to some amusing (but annoying) problems. For instance, I have a collection of Lamb (the trip-hop band) songs, which I rate as “Awesome.” Moodamp helpfully goes to download new music for me, and comes back with songs by “Lamb of God” (some sort of heavy metal screamer band) - needless to say, that isn’t at all helpful. And as you might imagine, Moodamp won’t find songs by Hooverphonic or Bjork which might sound vaguely similar to Lamb, since those artists are not named “Lamb.”

After a few more technical glitches, like having no way to tell Moodamp “never download any more Lamb of God music” and no way to delete what it already downloaded (close to 350MB of irrelevant music, most of which I rated as “Bad”), I gave up. A bit more searching and I found indy.tv.

Indy.tv promises to be a search engine for independent, freely available music. That sounds good to me, since I don’t like the possibility of getting sued for downloading. I installed the player (and it has a very, very nice interface) and started rating songs. Indy.tv claims that the player will compare songs you rate favorably to the playlists of other people who have rated those songs favorably, and end up improving its offering such that you hear mostly things that you like.

I spent about 3.5 hours playing with it. After that, I still hadn’t rated a song higher than three stars (”I’d listen to the whole thing” according to the Indy.tv “How to rate” guide). There’s entirely too much pop, country, folk, reggae, and rap, and just plain people-being-silly. I prefer trance, rock, metal, trip-hop, etc. I only heard one song that vaguely qualified in a “techno/trance” category, and it wasn’t good enough to give three stars. I finally just gave up, although I intend to spend another evening playing with it in hopes that I gave up just before it gave me some really kickass music and it’s just waiting for me to fire it up again. (I doubt it.)

I guess I’m still waiting for a music search engine that will scan your collection of music stylistically and somehow match that to music out there. That way if you have no country songs, it won’t waste your time giving you someone’s rendition of Achy Breaky heart, or give you a thousand Bob Marley covers if you listen to nothing but drum’n'bass. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but they’re starting to fall asleep.

According to this article, a “rose by any other name” might actually not smell as sweet.

From the article:

British neurologists report that the naming of an odor strongly influences a person’s perception of that scent.

For example, individuals were asked to sniff a cheddar cheese odor that was labeled either “cheddar cheese” or “body odor.” Participants uniformly rated the odor as being much more pleasant when it was labeled “cheddar cheese,” compared to when it was labeled “body odor.”

At least Shakespeare can’t be embarassed, since he’s dead now.

Someone pointed me over to read an article about weblogs at cba.org. I was scanning the article when I noticed that apparently there’s a new word floating around the (*gag*) “blogosphere.”

More and more lawyers are joining the “blogosphere” (the loose confederacy of those speaking out on the Web) every day, authoring their own blogs (or “blawgs,” a term coined by American lawyer and blogger Denise Howell).’

“Blawg.” Oh, “law” and “blog.” How clever. Someone shoot me.

A couple of things worth seeing - I’ll try to bring a bit of these every day or two, to keep you entertained:

• Scary Baby Pictures
• The Future of Design @ Inhabitat

Also, some musings on the search engine wars: Google is better at indexing blogs/forums, but Yahoo! seems to be doing better on the static page front.

Try searching for “HTTP” in both; Google returns companies like Microsoft, Yahoo! returns useful information regarding the Hyper Text Transport Protocol. If you search for me, using either “Nathan Simpson” or “Nathaniel Simpson,” I’ll come up sooner on Yahoo! than Google. However, if you search for something I’ve written about, like “NG Resonance,” Yahoo! doesn’t return any results from my site at all.

I know that Yahoo!’s search is “beta” stage, so maybe they haven’t gotten around to indexing blogs/forums yet. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes. If Yahoo! does as well once it’s fully indexing (assuming they intend to), it might convert me away from Google. Nothing sucks like a bunch of irrelevant results:-)

Over the last year or so, I’ve noticed some unusual traffic on my site. It’s a bot, typically, one hitting every file on my site, but not affiliated with a known search engine such as Google. Being the curious type, I tend to plug in IP addresses to this nify “whois” service in order to find out who’s playing around on my site.

The first bot I noticed was Cyveillance. This one has been around a while; at least since 2003. The company’s website claims that it “is focused on helping organizations monitor the Internet for issues such as identity theft, fraud, security risks, unauthorized product distribution and many forms of brand abuse.” It’s interesting that this bot never identifies itself as Cyveillance; you can only tell that it’s a bot by watching the rate at which it chews through your bandwidth.

The second one I observed was NameProtect, which bills itself as a company aiming to “empower our clients with proactive, filtered and actionable eMarket Intelligence supporting the protection of brand assets, recovery of diverted revenues and detection of online identity theft & fraud in today’s global economy.” Again, this bot did not identify itself.

The most recent one, which I observed last week, was MarkMonitor. This company claims to specialize “in protecting corporate intellectual property online from infringers, scam artists and online black-market activities.” The bot, unlike the other two, did identify itself as a Markmonitor bot.

I found an article at CSOOnline where someone from World Wrestling Entertainment was discussing their use of MarkMonitor to find everything from black market DVDs to misappropriated website images.

I suppose overall I don’t really blame companies for tracking this sort of thing, but it does occur to me that these companies are making money (in part) from my bandwidth and that of a million other small website owners. I imagine that the majority of website owners these days are not sitting around trying to figure out how to steal your intellectual property, and if some evil bastard does steal your property, somebody eventually will complain. Hell, your money would be better spent if you paid web-savvy teenagers to tattle on bad, wicked website people; they seem to be jumping at the chance for spare cash. You won’t generate goodwill by stealing bandwidth from people who buy your products every day.

Furthermore, Googling these various bots (and indeed, my own personal experience) reveals that the bots are not well-behaved guests. They completely ignore robots.txt instructions, crawling wherever they please on your site. Some people have gone so far as to ban blocks of IP addresses from these companies. I’m too lazy to do that.

Not completely lazy, though. Seeing these bots on my site gives me a near-irresistable urge to pull a South Park movie Cartman and scream “Coca Cola IBM Nike Armani Gap Honeywell McDonald’s Sony Hershey’s Mattel Harley Davidson Jesus H. Christ!!!!!!!”

Just in the case, you know, that the IP Police are listening.

I usually wouldn’t bother, but since no one (as far as I can tell) has presented a dissenting opinion, I’d like to add one.

I stumbled across Seth Godin’s post on the “new digital divide this morning. It’s an interesting concept, but one that seems to completely ignore history and the nature of people.

Seth says that the ‘net is dividing into “Digerati” and “Left Behind”, distinguished by Firefox-using, Google News-reading, RSS-attention deficit, caffeine-high geeks vs. the IE-only, television watching, blogless dirty masses (okay, I embellished a bit) . I think this is catchy but completely useless.

First of all, this “divide” is not new. People have said the same thing about Windows vs. Linux users, internet users vs. the offline, McAfee vs. Norton, whatever. Believe it or not, there are people who consciously choose to, say, use Windows or who won’t use Firefox. There are even people who don’t use RSS because of RSS spam. I think the hype about the bleeding edge drives its adoption, but it isn’t necessarily the case that people “without” are deprived: SUVs anyone?

Secondly, a lot of people still prefer to watch the news instead of reading it, largely because watching the news is media-rich and a bit easier for people who don’t read a million words a minute. Likewise, not everyone cares about Flickr; I don’t. I glanced at it when it came out a few months ago, uttered a “Meh.” and went on with my life. I’m sure it has great productive uses, but I can’t think of any offhand.

And the final point I disagree with: blogging vs. reading. It’s all well and good to say that if you don’t blog, you’re left behind. But let’s be realistic. Blogging is time-consuming - very much so. It takes quite a bit of time to gather links and properly put everything together, assuming that you want to do more than write about what you had for breakfast. A hell of a lot of people don’t have the time; if you’re working two jobs trying to pay the bills, no way are you going to blog if your jobs aren’t blogging-related.

In summary, it’s great to be “digerati,” but unless your job involves working closely with technology, you may just find that you don’t have the time. You’ll be better served in the long run by spending time talking to your friends in the manner that is most comfortable for you (cell? SMS? coffee shop? IM?), instead of wasting it trying to play “keep up with the Digerati.”