I overheard someone talking about their resolutions and it reminded me that I'd forgotten to set some new ones this year. I rather liked what I overheard though.. things like: Gain more weight, watch more movies, make fun of the man. Awesome!

My goal for the year is really just one thing -- gain some balance. This last year was of course wonderous but challenging. I'd like to get more sleep even if sleeping in is gone for the next decade (you listening Little G?), catch some TV and movies and relax. More gaming (woot!). Less reading -- I've been surviving the long nights by reading ebooks.. at least 1-2 a week. I'd really like to lose a bit of weight but not through silly diets .. just shaving off a little here or there, and eating better. Eating different. I've already - yes, truth be told I'm shocked too -- managed to give up cola (and I miss it so!)

Ultimately I want to amuse my young daughter, be a big part of her life and raise and educate her as best as I can. But you can't do it 100% of the time can you?

I've often ranted about how incredibly terrible our data plans are in the Great White. I mean, not just bad, but actively terrible .. to the point it probably harms the market as a whole. We're often told that in the US one can score unlimited data for their PDA or smartphone for $30 or $50 a month, where in Toronto you cannot even get unlimited anymore .. and each MB is doled out pennies at a time. In my heart, I know it is simply because even geeks aren't aware how much data they consume in an average normal browsing day, and non-geeks have no idea how to even measure the information. ie: Data plans here are measured in how many Megabytes (MB) you get for $x -- a really big expensive plan might get you 25MB for the month .. and if you're browsing someones photos, you might be pulling down a single megabyte every few photos worth. So an hours browsing, or maybe just a couple youtube videos, and you're down a hundred bucks. _brutal_

Pretty much every Canadian whose looked into it is miffed. This one lad has written a pretty fine article about it, so take a peek:

Angry Oshawa Pilot

BTW, I just have to add -- why is it that writers so love the phrase "high seas" -- where are the "low seas?"

I've always been a critic of ebooks -- not the concept, just the implementations we have so far. And by that, I mean the DRM (and to a lesser extent, the stores since there is a much more limited supply of ebooks than real books, and they tend to cost a lot!)

I can live with the requirement for batteries (if not for page turning with e-ink, but at least for backlighting, say) and so on and so forth, and one cannot argue with carrying a hundred books in your pocket. But as in most forms, DRM is just plain evil. Buying a locked down file means that someday it might be incompatible with some version of the application you need, or perhaps becomes unsupported as the source company goes out of business.. or maybe the book just times out or other silliness. As such, I've been stuck with DRM-free ebooks which are much harder to come by -- a very few stores and titles, or using the Gutenburg project, or converting from one DRM type to a non-DRM type if software is available. Painful.

Anyway, with that out of the way (I should just make a standard template used as a prelude to ebook posts) the question remains -- is any of this dire stuff really going to happen?

Well, maybe, and big too. Consider..

Mobipocket Reader has been around for probably nearly a decade now, supporting Palm OS, Windows Mobile (CE, Pocket PC, etc and so on), Symbian and others I'm sure. Amazon bought them a few years back and started moving more content over, so a lot of people took this as a sign of confidence in the platform. I mean, it was hard to get a good catalog of ebooks, and here comes Amazon getting in, so obviously Mobipocket could be a good readewr system to go with.

Fast forward to this month, when Amazon released the Kindle product, a new ebook reader using e-ink. Well, as an ebook consumer I thought I'd take a look at the specs and lo and behold, something as silly as Microsofts PlaysForNotSure is potentially going on -- the Kindle uses a new proprietary format (AZW files or somesuch) downloaded over the air, but also supports _unDRM_ed Mobipocket files. So wait, the latest and newest Amazon product doesn't support their own ebook store, Mobipocket. (ie: You buy a new book, its got DRM on it, and thus isn't usable on the Kindle. By which I mean.. any ebook you've bought from Amazon is only good on the existing devices (PDAs and Windows, say).. but not the new device.

So, is Mobipocket to be phased out? All those customers screwed? Or is the Kindle firmware going to get updated to support the format later?

Who knows, but suffice to say -- this is why DRM sucks.

*sigh* Another year where I'd like to buy some ebooks, but can't.

After a recent brief trip across the border, I would like to offer up the following:

1. Firearms (hunting rifles, say) can be found on the shelf (Walmart.)
2. Alcohol is found on the shelf (every other store.)
3. Prophylactics are within locked glass enclosures (K-Mart.)

Neo-con agenda explained!

Now, one thing I should add -- crossing into the US via the Peace Bridge and back out via the Rainbow Bridge, there was no line-up whatsoever (great timing eh?) On the way in they looked at our birth certificates and waved us in, taking all of 30 seconds. On the way back into Canada the friendly border agent didn't even take our ID at all. With all the horror stories of security nightmares, it makes you wonder ..

Apparently another edition is coming out, this time the Real Final Directors Actual Cut, or something. Blade Runner: Final Cut. Of course, so many good lines but near the end one that cannot be missed:

"I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life, anybody's life, my life. All he'd wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do was sit there and watch him die."

The time to say this has passed now, by a week, but I did write some of this during The Bleak Days so I thought I'd pollish it a bit and let it out, Chris Tolkien-like.

Now, before I get started, let me just get this out of the way -- we all know women are the heroes of the day - the very stones upon which society is built. Any woman, sick as a dog and with one arm can still get a family ready for school and work and out the door while doing laundry and preparing a dinner for later while paying bills. The man will prick his thumb will be out of commision for a week. Furthermore, my child is also the most beautiful and crafty little baby in the world, bar none. With that, I may continue.

As I mentioned once before, men don't really get recognized over-much for what they're up to in this whole Papa thing. And thats fine, since we're usually the kind of lugs who don't care to be recognized since all we're doing is nothing special.. it is expected, it is the norm, it is merely what we do. Life and all that. Still, I I thought I would spill a little image of life out here, for fun.

The baby was sick for awhile, and teething at the same time. Which is to say she couldn't stay asleep because her nose wus plugged and so couldn't breath unless being held upright (or sitting in a bouncy chair but thats hard to set up and a trifle risky). The poor girl was moaning or crying a lot due to the pain, and it upset her eating and sleep habits terribly. Thats fine for awhile, but this dragged on for weeks, which was something. Sometimes these teeth just give us all a wallop.

So for a few weeks, my day went something like this ... get up (usually a little late I might add), head to work. Work my tail off (near year end it is always like this) and rush home soon as could be to relieve the wife.. a day with a moaning unhappy squirmy baby is a challenge to be sure. Get home, take care of sed child intently (you just have to play with this little bundle, she loves it so much!) until she gets extra cranky and head up to get her to sleep. With luck maybe a cold dinner, but that was merely optional. During this period of time the poor little girl was in such discomfort that it literally took anywhere from two to four hours to get her to sleep.. oh, for sure she might fall asleep for a few minutes, but she'd be back awake, so I'm counting when she'd actually sleep for any length of time. Also for sure is my wife helped out a bit .. it takes more than 2 hands to get sprays into a squirming baby's nose, or to get cough medicine into her mouth and so forth. But all told it was a good through-to-midnight or more to get her to sleep, and almost certainly she'd be up a half dozen times at night. Not too bad all told since we did manage to catch a few hours of sleep (interupted, but still) each night. But the thing that really got to me was the days whizzing by with not an instant to myself. Babies train you to lose the 'selfishness', thats for sure.

Due to a loooong history of being a night person who awakes and sleeps instantly, I'm night warden by choice. Love it :) Still, it was a trying couple of weeks when I'd stumble off to bed at midnight or one, and be up for work at 8am after helping the baby back to sleep two-four times in the night, or having to hold her for another hour or two during the night.

Wow! Now, many nights weren't that bad during this period, but many were.

You might recall my intense dislike of ebooks, mostly for reasons of DRM and interface. Still, if you can get a good book an rtf, txt, html or other actually open format, the DRM argument can be dropped. It is a rare book that you can obtain in sed formats of course, but there are tools for converting forcibly between some formats... so I made the plunge and fired up a very fine book reader on my PDA. (PDA because it is backlit, so I can read at night time or in the dark.) I've always ignored ebooks (I think I blogged about them in the past but if not, I can rant easily enough), but for this purpose they work well -- a baby on your shoulder half asleep or sleeping and you can still read.

I mention this only because, sick as it might be, I've been reading two books a week for awhile, almost entirely at night time. Not short books, either. (OKay, they're not Cryptonomicon either.) The days literally breezed by.. no TV, no chilling time for anything .. just work and sitting in the dark. Crazy times.

At least I've been catching up on some reading .. its been too long. About 9 months :)

Fortunately (for all of us), the baby is only a little sick now and seems to be finishing the current bout of teething -- good for her the little trooper, she doesn't deserve that punishment any more. So the last couple nights we've actually gotten a touch of rest.

Anyway, so there you go, thats the life of a daddy. Women do the hard tasks.. teaching the baby in her early months and all that, not to mention the entire birthing process. But lets not understate what daddies go through, too :) One thing I suppose worth mentioning is now that the baby is better and I have gotten a bit of time to myself, I have forgotten what it is I used to spend my time doing. I mean really..

.. isn't it all about the family now?

Funny how life teaches you the real shit.

I think I will write a couple blog entries over the next little while to talk about the hardships of mommying and the usually unmentioned and swept away difficulties of daddying. Crazy stuff really, but perhaps I either need to get it off my chest or its enlightening.. probably more of the former than latter :) Oh and for the neeks out there, I'll post a short how-to on porting code from PSP-Fat to PSP-Slim.

Yes, I know, I should be focusing on Razor (a flashback 'movie' in the new Battlestar Galactica series; I'd not watch it at all except I'm a year behind and well, this fits right into that timeline, so why not?) but alas my time has been so hard pressed and fragmented of late that I cannot focus; I am watching, but will have to take it in again later. Ensign Ro is still an evil wench :) And IKEA still sells BSG merchandise. Oh, I sort of enjoy, but not being hit so heavy wih it, the imagery that on Pegasus they hold the 'phone' upside down, since they only talk into it.. while on Galactica they hold it like a phone, so they can talk and listen too. A not so sublte message. Well done.

The last few days the poor baby has been teething and sick; her nose has been plugged with phlegm and so she cannot sleep very well and thus we spend some large time getting her to sleep, so that she can wake a couple minutes later. Very trying and takes me back to about 8 months ago when she was just a peanut in our hands .. pacing up and down the halls all night long while wishing for her sake she could settle, and for my sake since I .. guilty as it may be, just wanted to sleep for more than a few minutes. Anyway, I noticed something over the last day or two - the poor child has learnt to be afraid of the dark. Our nightlight wasn't sufficient, so with the addition of another one.. my god, she sleeps a little bit more and a little bit easier. The poor girl has suffered so much the last week and a half, it breaks the heart. But this in its own way is cute, and something we can roll with to make her feel better. The other day I spent some 4-5 hours over the night just getting her to sleep. Man.

Its really been a known thing for a few days or a week now, but the official announcement is out -- Goggle has launched Android, its Linux based mobile phone OS platform. This is the foundation with no house on top, but if it proves to be a robust foundation (solid, flexible enough to be ported to many devices, easy to lock down for telcos and easy to develop applications for), it could be a good thing. It'll be fun to watch the next few days as people inevitably compare it to established stacks like Apple's iPhone has (ie: an OS with a relatively complete application suite and a year head start) and the traditional smartphones OSes (Symbian, Palm/ACCESS and Windows offerings.)

As usual, Michael Mace has a very good article on things here -- I really love the closing lines:

It's going to use open source and alliances to suck the profitability out of anybody who creates a proprietary island that it can't target.
It'll be interesting to see if and how Google applies this principle to the upcoming frequency auction in the US.
Or to anyone else who gets in its way.

So many topics have come to mind the last few weeks, but just as easily drifted away. On the rough nughts when the baby is gnashing through her growth spurts and clawing her way through the rising waves of inputs, time goes quickly as we cheer her. On the easy nights when she plays away and giggles with fascination at her new found skills, what stone-hearted scoundrel could avoid playing with hose tiny probing fingers? So either way the days tumble by, rocks in a slide. (Last night was a funky night, so I will cop out on the rest of this posting :)

A very good friend of mine who had comforting thoughts a year ago when they were welcomed, resent an excerpt from a novel that was timely then. It is excellent stuff, clear and precise and binding. So I rcord it here for when it might be needed again, and as a mini review .. I've not read the novel but I think I must based on these few paragraphs. Perhaps they will entice you as well. (And if not, go read some Neal Stephenson. He'll mess you up.)

...too many others were gone, and I sought chill comfort in an analogy of death that has been with me for years. It doesn't explain or justify. It just seems to remind me how things are.

Picture a very swift torrent, a river rushing down between rocky walls. There is a long, shallow bar of sand and gravel that runs right down the middle of the river. It is under water. You are born and you have to stand on that narrow, submerged bar, where everyone stands. The ones born before you, the ones older than you, are upriver from you. The younger ones stand braced on the bar downriver. And the whole long bar is slowly moving down that river of time, washing away at the upstream end and building up downstream.

Your time, the time of all your contemporaries, schoolmates, your loves and your adversaries, is that part of the shifting bar on which you stand. And it is crowded at first. You can see the way it thins out, upstream from you. The old ones are washed away and their bodies go swiftly by, like logs in the current. Downstream where the younger ones stand thick, you can see them flounder, lose footing, wash away. Always there is more room where you stand, but always the swift water grows deeper, and you feel the shift of the sand and the gravel under your feet as the river wears it away. Someone looking for a safer place can nudge you off balance, and you are gone. Someone who has stood beside you for a long time gives a forlorn cry and you reach to catch their hand, but the fingertips slide away and they are gone. There are the sounds in the rocky gorge, the roar of the water, the shifting, gritty sound of sand and gravel underfoot, the forlorn cries of despair as the nearby ones, and the ones upstream, are taken by the current. Some old ones who stand on a good place, well braced, understanding currents and balance, last a long time. A Churchill, fat cigar atilt, sourly amused at his own endurance and, in the end, indifferent to rivers and the rage of waters. Far downstream from you are the thin, startled cries of the ones who never got planted, never got set, never quite understood the message of the torrent.

-- John D. MacDonald, _Pale Gray For Guilt_

I mean, one can question the Bush administrations motives and efficiency and so-forth (though I don't doubt for a minute Dubyah is actually a bad person; I really do think he is sincere. And a fascist, but I digress.) But when a prominent wing of the government outright attempts to trick the public Orwellian-style, and furthermore actually believes they can get away with it.. the only conclusion one can draw is that they believe the American public is stupid enough to go for it. Or else this stunt was during the World Series so no one would notice. Pretty disgusting if you ask me. This is one administration that needs to facde jail time or serious fines .. anyone else tries to pull those stunts (*cough* Enron) and they're up a creek.

Riddle me this Batman -- why does the word Pacifist include Fist. And Passing one.