Keeping myself honest

Seeing as I just won a ‘Diplomatic’ victory in my game of Civilization 4, I decided I should sit down and do something productive (other than specing my new links management system) and write about something that has been on my mind to put on the blog for a while; and that is a question of how people use the internet and what their digital footprint is.

I first starting thinking about this a lot while listening to the first episode of the Out of the Game podcast entitled ‘Born Before Digital’ as one of the topics brought up is how life will be different for kids growing up in this age when a large chunk of their life will be recorded online for everyone to see indefinitely with things like myspace, facebook, blogs, twitter and message boards.

Like some of the member of the podcast I too did many a thing in my youth that I don’t think I’d want to be on the internet when they happened and certainly wouldn’t want to be reminded of now. That’s not to say there a great deal of things that I regret doing in my life but there are many things that people do (and some of the most entertaining) that you don’t want or need an exact record of.

I remember in late university cleaning up some files on my computer and coming  across some 5 year old msn conversations that I usually save so I can go back and find information I might have been sent. It was nostalgic and also weird as many of the conversation were very intimate and private and while I had a vague memory of them it was a much different thing to see them line by line completely correct and unbiased by the passage of time right in front of me.

This would be amplified if I had facebook from the time I was 10 and I (or anyone else) could look back and see the dates I started going out with (and then broke up with) past girlfriends, the social events I attended in high school, the fads I thought were cool and the people I used to associated with. Now I wouldn’t consider any of this information privileged and would tell it to almost anyone who asked me about it but there is a difference between that and it being right there for everyone to see.

This is probably only a matter of perception but that can make all the difference in the world. If I tell my grandmother about the crazy bachelor party I just attended (this is hypothetical, way to go Josh and James for having no strippers) she’ll probably just laugh and say that’s part of life, whereas if I post pictures of me on stage with a face full of boobs I’m guessing her reaction is along the lines of disowning me.

—- Woo once again almost at 500 words and not really into my main topic, so continuing on after a Call of Duty 4 break—-

My main thought for this blog is the idea of a person’s digital footprint and how it gets used both by that person and by the rest of the world.  For a long time I didn’t have a blog or get on facebook or twitter because it seemed ominous that the information could be out there for everyone to see until the end of time. As I’ve matured I’ve taken on an attitude of being very open and honest with everyone I meet as I found trying to satisfy everyone and change your attitudes in different situations was a recipe for disaster.

Earlier in the year I figured that as a programmer I should have a professional and public profile, hence the creation of my website and the blog along with it. While the website doesn’t have a lot of things on it right now I’m statisfied with what it is for now and I’m working on some Silverlight applications and a links manager to keep me busy. The blog is a more interesting entity as it exists and a lot of the time I’m not sure what I should be talking about (although when I come up with something it’s usually long) as I feel like I should be writing for a broad audience (anyone on the internet) and should say something both insightful worth reading.

It takes a certain kind of ego to start up a blog or twitter feed as you need to believe that you have something worth while to write and it it sometimes hard for me to get into that mindset as there is so much good writing out there that I often don’t have time read so why would any of my stuff be worth it for someone else. For anyone about to send me a ’snap out of depression’ email the last statement isn’t meant as a ‘woe is me’ statement but to bring some insight on how I view my writing.

So to bring this conversation full circle to make my blog something that I feel is worth reading I decided to use it for long form, more formal writing about topics that interest me or are important to and at the same time I feel I can talk intelligently about and bring something interesting into the conversation with the reader. Twitter is where I like to write quick little tidbits of information and opinion, while also trying to keep it interesting for anyone reader. I’m still learning the ‘performance’ part of writing online but I can’t be doing all that bad cause you just read to the end of this blog post.

Scotty B Commentary, Personal, Technology

Well because Mesh (a great free service for online file storage and web remote desktop from Microsoft) is down, I’m here watching curling  and internet so I thought I’d quickly make a rant blog post on a story I just read.

The story is this one Sperm bank sued under product liability law. No if you think the title is absurd enough, read the article I’ll wait for you to finish and come back. It will also give me time to get sufficiently angry to write a good rant.

Ok so I will start with the first thing that should be coming from everyone reading that article: WHAT THE HELL!!!!! I had a conversation over dinner last night with an old friend and my mother in which the topic of parenting was brought up. While my parents were somewhat strict when I was growing up I am glad that it taught me not to be an idiot and have some common sense  and respect for society and other people.

What continually amazes me is not the people who come up with the hair brained ideas to sue people for no reason and the people who will jump on the bandwagon for a quick buck. What amazes me is the courts who allow these moronic people to get something other than thrown out for how dumb their claims are. The idea of having judges and not computers deciding law is that it brings in the element of common sense and realizing that there are areas of gray to everything.

I’m not here to condemn lawyers or judges, because like every section of society they have those who are good and bad in their talent and common sense. It just baffles me that stuff like this can happen, if you look at it logically where can this go? Recently a Quebec man lost his appeal after he was sued by his daughter when she was grounded and couldn’t go on a school trip, once again common sense does not prevail even on a second chance.

So now you can be sued by your kids for grounding them and possibly having bad genes, something that my science friends will point out you can’t control. Next on the list you should sue over your hair colour, that fact that your mother didn’t have large breasts and you think you deserved a pair from birth. Can we take this the other way? Can society sue you for bringing up kids who get arrested, can parents sue their kids for the money they have to spend in order to feed and cloth them after they get a job? Do we not let people who have bad genes procreate as a public service so they don’t get sued by their kids later?

The answer is NO, I don’t know where this sense of entitlement came from and what happened to taking responsibility for your actions went but they seem to be gone from a lot of society. Guess what people, like if unfair, it sucks sometimes, deal with it. Dealing with it does not entitle you to a free ride by suing people because you feel like some tiny little detail in your life is somehow unfair in your opinion, you want to see people living with a life that is unfair go move to a third world country, I’m sure they would be happy to switch places with you.

In the mean time let the rest of us spend our time helping out those who actually might need it, sit in your room for the week your grounded and read a book, you might learn to have some common sense.

Scotty B Commentary

Well as I say around this time every year (at least for the last 5 or so), I’m getting old. Having just turned 24 (or 24 for Chris Langley) and coming back from a run with my brother in which my knee is totally killing me the previously stated fact is definitely true. Unlike many on the web I’m not here to prove how deep I can be and instead like to be straight to the point.

I had an interesting conversation with a good friend of mine on my birthday and we talked about seizing opportunities and being at an age where you should go out live and have fun with life. This was interesting as my party, which I had planned to be large and more over the top than my usual outings (last year was finding an xbox and copy of rockband and playing it all night), but ended up being hanging out at the bar for a couple of hours.

While I enjoyed the night out and all of the unexpect (and amazing) presents at the end of the night I couldn’t help but feel a little underwelmed by the experience and for that I have no one to blame but myself. I’m making my night sound bad which it definitly wasn’t but maybe this is just a lesson in expectations and how to manage them. I’m sure I could have dragged everyone dancing and will at some point in the future but the night seemed to move at a slow pace and continued that way until the end of the night.

I’m now left to ponder the parallels between that night and my own course on the road of life right now, and whether I should even care. Currently I’ve taken the road that has lead me to finishing my university degree in 4 years and then 2 weeks after that starting my career which will be one year old in a few weeks. While this has left me with in a very stable position in my life it is never the most fun course to take and my friends are great but usually low key (ex. The bachelor party with no strippers).

Maybe I need a little more spice in my life (not the Dune kind) or maybe I’m just a reserved person who doesn’t really go over the top and has settled into his spot in life, the only problem right now is that I can’t really tell where I am. Like Battlestar Galactica (at least until the final episode) I don’t really have the answers just a lot of question, so we’ll see where they lead.

Apparently my next post will have to be comedy related to make my previous statement about not being pretentious on my blog into a reality, onto something with YouTube and hookers!!

Scotty B Personal

Saturday evening was a very special day in the life of two of my very good friends, now Mr. and Mrs. Josh and Joanna Zaslow. After all the stress (for them not me, all I had to do was remember how to tie a half Windsor) and running around and waiting the big day was finally here.

Unlike most subjects I write about there’s not a lot to say even for this somewhat unconventional wedding. There were only 30 people in attendance and it was held at the pub just around the corner from our house. The ceremony was short and sweet and I had a very awesome chair, and the first and only dances that followed were nice.

The rest of the evening was simply hanging out with the bride, groom and rest of the guests chatting about memories and congratulating the newly weds (and some shots too). The event was low key, as what probably should have been expected from the two parties involved, but it was nice and intimate and reminded me of seeing your favourite band in a lounge as opposed to a stadium.

Even with the lack of spectacular fireworks the night felt very genuine and still was one of the best parties I’ve been too in a long time and even had a few surprises including us convincing the groom’s parents to do shots with us.  This made the night easily the most memorialble wedding I’ve ever been too and a great event to partake in.

In closing to my dear friends I know I don’t say it enough (and you’ll probably never stumble into this corner of the internet) but I wish you all the best. It was very obvious from the first time I saw you together that you both made each other very happen and were going to make it to this day. The way you both are able enjoy yourselves and each other in one of the healthiest relationships I’ve ever seen gives me hope that statistically I might be able to find someone before I give up. It was a privilege to be able to partake in your wedding and share in event.

Here are some pics of the evening:

Chris Langley and I

The Happy Couple

One of the rounds of shots

The final bar tab looked like a laundry list and came in at just under $1000. I think in total I drank:
- 2 Pints
- 1 Bottle of Beer
- 3 Rum & Coke
- 1 Irish Carbomb
- 1 Yager Bomb
- 1 Shot of Something Blue
- 1 Shot Liquid Cocaine
- 2 Shots of Swedish Berry
- 1 Shot of Vodka

I’m impressed that I was able to consume that much and then go one my run the next morning without dying, now we’ll see how I fair on my birthday.

Scotty B Personal

Last night I saw Fleetwood Mac in concert in my continuing series of concerts by bands that were popular before my parents were married. I’m going to try to keep this short as I’m not good at the short concise blog post and should try to get better at it because it would probably lead to me blogging more often.

First, no matter what anyone tells you Scotiabank place is a pain in the ass to get too and any traffic problems that would have been caused by it being inside the city would be moot, as I could have walked downtown in the amount of time that I was sitting in my car not moving and getting parked (and this doesn’t include the commute out there).  Great now I just started ranting and took up three (now 4) perfectly good lines that could have been used to actually say something, oops.

The show itself was great, for fans of the band it was everything you could have asked for with no opening band to get you right in the action followed by two and a half hours of music (including two encores). The inclusion of Stevie Nicks’ solo song Stand Back right after Go Your Own Way was a pleasant surprise and even though the band has aged to varying degrees (I still don’t know how Stevie Nicks looks that good at 60) they were still able to rock out as hard as any band I’ve ever seen with Lindsey Buckingham doing a guitar solo that must have lasted over three minutes and Mic Fleetwood is still able to set a furious pace with the drums.

It was interesting to see how Nicks and Buckingham each dealt different with the lose of their higher vocal range. While Nicks tended to change her line or move to harmony Buckingham would always go for whatever note he was feeling at the time. Both these attitudes could also be seen with their on stage performance with Nicks being very deliberate with her actions and costume changes and Buckinham running all over just having a good time rocking out.

I found myself taking one of their final songs to heart more than I normally would as I realized how much it applies to my current situation. I sit here in an interesting point in my life where I’m as stable (or possibly more so) than ever before and still everything is moving at break neck speeds around me even when I might want to find somewhere to settle in. I have a wedding of two close friends to go to in a few days as well another in the summer, friends of mine are still getting engaged left, right and center, people all over work are having kids and my small list of university friends still living in this city is dwindling day by day.

As the song says “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow, It’ll soon be here better than before. Yesterday’s gone, don’t you look back”

—- Dammit still at 500 words and 30 minutes longer than I wanted, guess I have to work on this

Scotty B Personal

Apparently my blog lately has somewhat revolving around the plot of the SciFi (or SyFy, but that’s an angry rant for another day) series Battlestar Galactica which ended on a mixed note last Friday. Most of the general consensus I’ve been hearing in my group of friends and the Internet in general is that with the exception of the mutiny episodes (which could be two of the best episodes of the series) season 4 has been average compared to the rest of the series.

With the series being so good when it came out and the buildup in the fist part of the final episode I had high expectations for the finale and even though they weren’t met the episode was still good, but it just didn’t cut it. Looking back at it now on paper (by the way obvious huge spoiler alert here) the episode had everything I wanted and hoped for in the finale: An epic battle, character resolution and very uncommonly for this series a happy ending for the good guys and some justice for the bad guys.

I think in the end they tried to do too much for whatever reason which is disappointing because despite my lukewarm reception there were moments that reminded me of why I loved the series. The most of the first half is great and gives us some foreshadowing of the scale of the battle to come and gives you the most defining moment in Baltar’s life as a character to finally do something not selfish, and the battle itself while not extremely epic does do justice for it being the final battle for the show. The Tyrol killing Tory and completely screwing over what seemed to be the happy ending and dooming the cylon’s to extinction was totally unexpected as well as the president dying while Adama is talking and not paying attention to her.

I found two things very annoying about the finale: first were all the flashback sequences, they seemed tacked on and it didn’t feel natural to be trying to tell back story this late in the game; and my second problem is the epilogue. The problem is in the length and how direct the epilogue is. They spell out in big capital letters most of the mystery of the series and then don’t explain at all one of the biggest questions of what Kara was and how she was the harbinger of death when she didn’t destroy anything more so than she has in any other episode. I did enjoy the Ron Moore cameo and the inclusion of the Jimi Hendrix All Along the Watchtower but the overbearing nature of how the anti technology message is given is somewhat insulting given the tone of the rest of the series, the original shot of the dancing robot was funny but the montage that followed seemed very preachy.

What I enjoyed about the messages in Battlestar were the fact they were asked, given context but were never overtly answered and it was always up to the viewer to make their own opinion on what they thought of the topic and the messages inside the show. I should be listening to the commentary for the episode tomorrow as I normally do which will give me some more insight into the context of why the decision were made and will probably temper my feeling at little, suffice to say I’m glad I had the series to enjoy for the past 5 years but I’m also glad its over.

Also seeing as I didn’t have time to read this before going to the concert, it was great more thoughts on it tomorrow (I’m going to try to blog more often, we’ll see if it actually happens).

Scotty B Commentary, Personal

So it’s been a while since I last blogged due to a me being extraordinarily busy at work combined with the fact that I don’t blog very often to begin with. After catching up on some of my blog reading I ran into an interesting post on Jeff Green’s blog (For those who don’t know he was the former EIC of Computer Gaming world and host of the funniest gaming podcast ever) about how twittering has cut down the number of posts he makes on his blog.

This is interesting to me because I find myself in the same boat as I got on the twitter bandwagon around the same time as blogging which means I caught onto one trend before it got popular and the other one I was very late to the party.  I use twitter a lot because it is literally always at my finger tips on my blackberry and the 140 character limit means that everything has to be to the point and there is no room to edit or sit on your thoughts like a blog.

I also find it interesting how I use twitter, until recently I only followed people and posted updates so that I could see them updated on my websites but recently I’ve been getting into more of the conversation aspect of it with friends of mine joining combined with people commenting on facebook where I push all my twitter updates to.

Segueing into another aspect of online conversations a word of warning to not install spam filters for your blog’s comment section after getting home from the bar at 3 am.  Well ok installing the filter is a good idea and would have saved me from accidentally deleting one of the two real comments I’ve ever gotten. I’m sorry aunt Irene  I did read your comment and actually had approved it a few days earlier but unfortunately the UI puts all my comments in the same screen so when I went to delete the 44 spam comments yours got clicked on as well so hopefully this filter does its job and I won’t do that again.

As this point I am reminded of why I don’t do this often as I’m now sitting down for a second time to try and finish this post and it is already past 380 words and I haven’t really said anything yet and have so much more running around in my head that I could be talking about at the moment so here goes before I lose the interest of the one person reading this (Hi Mom, o wait you don’t like computers…. so you’re probably not here) .

Last night was a great time out, even if we couldn’t convince josh to go to the strippers (and before you judge me it was a bachelor party, as far as tradition goes I think you’re supposed to have them). The 67’s won and we had a good time at the bar afterwards with more yelling than my voice could handle apparently.

The first part of Battlestar Galactica’s series finale will be watched with the usual group later tonight and while the last couple of episodes have been pretty good I’m hoping they go for broke in the finale and we get to see a huge battle with the kind of payoff the series deserves.

On the gaming front I’m enjoying the DLC for Grand Theft Auto 4 and the character development hasn’t fallen flat and I think has a better chance of sustaining itself because it’s so much shorter.

Lastly my ‘playoff’ beard is coming in a lot better than expected considering every time I try to grow one I shave it off in under a week as I think it looks ridiculous but this time I am committed to keeping the it until version 3.0 is done or the wedding because even if it is growing in well I still probably looks ridiculous with it.

Scotty B Personal

I’ve been a big Battlestar Galactica fan since I was introduced to the show in the middle of the second season. At first I shied away from watching episodes as the dark, somewhat depressing storyline made my stomach heavy always waiting for the next shoe to drop (which it always did in the worst way possible).

I grew to love the story, the characters and to some degree the dark atmosphere (what can I say I’m somewhat of a pessimist and also enjoy dark humour). As I got further into it and started listening to the episode commentary I realized that some of my other favorite Scifi (Star Trek: TNG and DS9) was also written by executive produce Ronald D. Moore and I got on board for the usually intense ride that showed up each week. Even when the series took unexpected turns (such as moving the story ahead by a year in the blink of a eye)  the resolutions of the twists were always good and made the overall story stronger.

When I started this post it was purely to say how absurd the casting of John Hodgman in last weeks episode was, which in itself is a possible jumping the shark moment, but after watching this week’s episode I have a bad feeling that that might have only been the beginning. Despite all the exposition (and there was a lot) and the questionable casting (which made it so I couldn’t take a brain surgery scene seriously)  the episode from last week was very solid and did a good job of explaining one of the major mysteries of the in a coherent and interesting way.

Fast forward to this week…

This week everything seems to have fallen completely flat. The sections that are supposed to be the big emotional releases (Adama falling apart because of what he has to do to save the ship and the baby dying) leave something to be desired and don’t grab the you the way they should. This is usually the difference between a good acting and bad acting as sometimes these things just click. The part that really got me was the inconsistency in the story. How does the chief have a sudden 180 degree turn of opinion on whether to stay or not right after getting his rank back and convincing Adama to use the cylon material to save the ship? The only answer is they needed a tie in the votes so they just decided to change his character’s stance on a whim.

The worst offender of this is when they decide to give the religious cult guns for no reason other than Baltar (a man we know to be honest and trustworthy…)  says there is civil unrest. No kidding! We just finished a mutiny arc where Adama was almost executed by his own men, and he’s willing to just give guns away to one group of civilians to keep another in check?! Other than a ham handed metaphor for US foreign policy there is no logical reason for this to happen and just seems like the writing are creating a possible huge problem from nothing just to have more conflict in the show.

I will watch the final four episodes and hope that they deliver on the great storytelling and mystery that I’ve come to love but I doubt I will watch the spin off series as without the action there is definitely something missing in the formula that makes Battlestar great.  So here’s to lots of explosions in the finale.

Scotty B Commentary

So as I sit here completely swarmed by work and other mundane duties it finally has dawned on my what the little something I’ve been missing to make my day to day life fun. You may be shocked at what I found but the missing piece was stress.  Now for most people in the world stress is something you avoid at all costs because well its stress and its usually indicative of something not going well.

Apparently not for me, I have fun with stress and thrive on it to some degree. There’s something about a stressful situations that seems to bring out the best in me. I’ve been trying to figure out why this is and I can only come up with the fact that if something is stressful than its both important and challenging.

Easy things aren’t stressful because they don’t take a lot of effort to do so there is little chance of them being done improperly or with a sub standard level of quality. Thing that aren’t important aren’t stressful because there is little consequence for them not being completed or being partially completed as the more important events take more priority.

So it probably seems weird to most people to like stress but I do so apparently all I need to do now is find a job that is stressful and I’ll be set for the rest of my life. That should be easy to do, right?

Scotty B Personal, Work

So as we speak, or more accurately I type I’m still in the middle of some updates to both my blog and the site. I’ve added a feedburner plugin to make handling rss related tasks easier and to work around the retarded security features that silverlight has installed (Seriously I can’t make a web request for an xml  file without your permission what kind of idiot thought that up).

I’ve also changed the theme of the blog to be a little more clean and less resource intensive and will probably be tweaking it for a while to come. The main site should soon have a silverlight blog reader even if there are still some bugs to work out (I know the text looks like crap but it’s not my fault). Internet Explorer is also being very annoying and not processing style sheets the way it is supposed to so I have to do some rigging there as well.

In other software news, I find it hilarious that someone actually got a research budget to produce songsmith at Microsoft. If you haven’t looked this up there are a ton of youtube videos showing it butchering different songs. On the opposite end of the scale I am so far very impressed with the Live Mesh and WIndows 7 Betas so I suppose all this proves that in a company a big as Microsoft you get a full range of projects and talents.

I don’t think I can put into words how good the latest episodes of Battlestar Galactica are and I am stunned at how hard they are running towards the end of the series and they have definitely grabbed my attention again and I’m waiting on the edge of my seat to see what they’re going to do next week.

Finally on the gaming front I’m almost done Gears of War 2 so I’ll probably have some wrap up thoughts when I do.

Scotty B Personal