There’s been a lot of talk recently about how Facebook is repressing my posts, people aren’t seeing them, OMG Facebook is censoring my news.

Good I say.

Here’s the thing, if you’re on Facebook you’ve probably “liked” a lot of things, from your favourite TV show, to your friends pictures, to your local community library. All those people and things have updates and they all want your attention. Chances are you don’t want to see them.

Now I’m not going to go out on a limb and say that Facebook isn’t evil, but they are (with some notable exceptions) doing what’s best for the users and censoring the news feed to show you things that you are interested in[1].

Chances are that the things you are interested in on Facebook are things like your friends announcing their baby, your mom posting a picture of her new cat, your college friends’ updates, and that sort of thing, not Drobo posting a new blog post about why their RAID technology is the best, the photographer that you follow posting a new image to his portfolio, or a website announcing a new contest (“like us and follow us on twitter to enter!”). The thing is, everyone feels like their posts are important, especially those companies, who would love to have you see everything they post. These are (in general) the ones that are complaining that “Facebook is censoring me, make sure you click our page and select ‘add to interests’”.

If you’re friends or have liked with more than a few people on Facebook, seeing everything on the news stream is going to be overwhelming, and you’ll scroll down three or four pages just to see the last hours updates, which would make the Facebook experience tiring to say the least. Facebook is very smart about retaining engagement with users, and know this, so they have sophisticated algorithms (or at least I assume they do) that let them track what gets your attention and what you do see and engage with, and show you more of that and less of the contest to win a new DSLR (“Just like the page and share this post to enter”).

The thing is it seems that most of the people up in arms about this are companies and journalists, beating the drum that their posts and publications posts aren’t being seen. I have yet to hear a user or friend actually complain about this, unless they’re just parroting back a post about it.

So I say good for Facebook for keeping my news stream (mostly) clean of posts, and good on them for taking money from people who aren’t engaging enough with people to get “real” attention and exchange it for giving them more visibility (even if it is really annoying as the user to see the promoted posts popping up).

Recently the big new Facebook news is the revamped news feed which actually does go to some extents to “fix” the “censorship” issue. Part of the new design is to let you see everything in order (i.e.: no more missed items, but you see everything) as well as separate pages for friends only, companies only, etc.

[1] The exception here is of course the sponsored posts, ads, “8 of your friends like allstate”, and so on that are obvious marketing and ads jammed into your feed.

There are many Pebble Smart Watch reviews, all similar, all unique.

This is mine.

I heard about the Pebble Watch on Kickstarter the day that it made it’s goal, and even though I didn’t write about it, I did back it immediately. I got back into wearing a watch a couple of years ago with a gift from my grandmother, but the watch strap has been slowly deteriorating, so it felt like a good excuse to replace it.

The Pebble team originally planned an October 2012 release, but as time moved on, it became more obvious that they weren’t going to make it. Instead of promising another release date, and potentially breaking it, they did the smart thing and said nothing until they knew a schedule that would work. They announced that shipping would start January 23. Long story short, mine finally arrived today, after an extended stay in Vancouver customs and one false start.

The “out of box” experience is good, the shipping box is unique, fits the watch well, and there was no shifting of the watch. There was no documentation inside, no quick start guide, but I suppose if you’re the sort of person who guys a Smartwatch off of the internet via Kickstarter, you can figure stuff out yourself. The watch is smaller than I thought it would be, but still not “tiny”. Definitely not a downside.

The screen is just the right size I think, or pretty close to it. The wrist strap is less “plastic-y” than I thought. Seeing the reviews didn’t prepare me for the soft plastic that it is made out of. Not low quality as far as I can tell (not being a plastics expert), and pleasant against the wrist.

Watch build quality is good, but not perfect. The seams aren’t perfect, and there is a bit of odd distortion on the e-ink display that others have noted. Not a big deal though.

The software is simple and easy to understand. There are some bugs (being able to re-order downloaded watch faces, some backlight oddness, etc), but they are all (potentially) easily fixable with software updates. Some software updates to the watch has already been made to fix things like notification display and backlight control. The ‘flick your wrist to turn on the back light’ is a nifty feature as well.

I’m not a BlueTooth borg person, so I’m not used to having my phone tethered to BlueTooth. I was a bit worried that the battery would die sooner than normal, but my iPhone 5’s battery has only seemed to wind down a bit faster than normal (maybe 5-10% faster?) but it’s hard to tell as usage is pretty much dependant on the user. It’ll take a few more days of use to see.

Right now the watch is a bit plain. On the iPhone it can:

• show the time, with different watch faces that can be used.
• control the music on your smartphone
• display some notifications for SMSs, calendar events, incoming phone calls, and emails (android is less restricted by Apple’s draconian rules about what you can and can’t get notifications for, and lets you have much finer grained control of what notifications (and you get more of them))

… and that’s about it. No, not buyers remorse, but you have to remember that this is, in essence, just a watch with a couple of extra bits, not a magic do-everything smart watch (yet). That said, the ability to see what my phone is trying to tell me without pulling it out of my pocket is pretty awesome. Is the text ignorable? What thing is it that I’m about to be late for? Etc.

So conclusions…

Is it cool? Yes. Is it worth the (now) $150 cost? Probably, but it’s definitely something for people with a bit of disposable income. Do I love it? Hell yea :)

Had a nice time last night with the now-sort-of-annual New Years Eve party.  It's actually more of a "we are old and lazy and don't want to go out so why don't people just come to our house" party if I was to be honest.  Only 3 people showed up, but there was still lots of great snacks (and actual real food that A made), lots of drink (not irresponsibly too much of course), and fun.  

Among the fun was swapping computer hardware, which, even a bit tipsy, is possible.  A's computer died a couple of weeks ago (dead hard drive) so we got her another one (after 5 years that's not bad).  I got a gift card for NCIX so I got myself a(nother) SSD drive, and then last night swapped the hard drive out of my laptop, put the new SSD in, and put my old drive into her old computer.  A few (amazingly fun) hours of installing Windows Vista, and voilà, usable laptop, and a now super-speedy drive for me.

Slept in late, woke up feeling... mostly alive, got up, made eggs, and am now watching Lord of the Rings (the original trilogy I heard it referred to a couple of days ago, awesome), while A and Shaun play Age of Mythology (she's kicking his ass.... again).

Merry 2013 everyone!

First of all, no one reads this blog anymore, and secondly, it’s my birthday soon, and with Christmas coming up I figure if I don’t get this out of my head and somewhere else, how would the elves know what to get me? So here’s my 2012 birthday/Christmas wish list

Dream camera setup

• Nikon D800 (but magically not as heavy)
• 24-70mm/2.8
• 70-200mm/2.8 (ditto about being not as heavy for the big lenses too)
• 85mm/1.4 prime lens
• Battery grip

New laptop

• 15” MacBook Pro, retina, fully maxed out memory and SSD drives

New iMac

• 27”, new super thin model, fully maxed out memory and hard drive + SSD combination (in fusion drive configuration of course)
• Why not throw in a second 27” cinema display just for fun.

Miscellaneous gadgets

• Full on color managed workflow setup from X-Rite
• Tripod from Really Right Stuff or Manfroto, the perfect one of course, a combination of tough and lightweight and heavy duty
• Epson 3880 large format printer
• Infinite supply of ink and a selection of fine art paper to go with said printer (very useful for printing out all my cat pictures)

New car (this is a dream list right?)

• Anything that James Bond has driven (almost). DB5 from the latest movie… I’m looking at you.

Other

• World peace
• A fantastic dinner at mom and dad’s
• Hugs from my wife and abuse from my cats

From the list above I am pretty sure about the last two items, the rest, well, maybe I’ll be used to generate good publicity for some rich and famous person looking to give someone the Christmas of their dreams out of the goodness of their heart.

6 years ago I wrote that the future was now and was incredible, that you could get raw images from a Martian lander on an FTP site minutes after that were transmitted…. from another planet.

Today it’s different, you can see images tweeted from the @MarsCuriosity twitter account minutes or seconds after they’re sent, and something like 65,000 people watched the live stream of the control room as they waited for the lander to touch down and released barely a day later is video of the actual decent. How’s that for amazing.

I remember something very clearly from when I was maybe 11 or 12 years old at a boy scout jamboree on Vancouver Island. A group of kids were assigned jobs as if we were with NASA, one was flight commander, another mission specialist this and that… The leader looked at us and said “it will be your generation that puts a man in mars.”. No pressure. Of course at the time I thought “hogwash” (or possibly “duh, of course”), but thought nothing of it. I guess I haven’t done much with my life for this, but looking at the people in the control room, well, they were all looking from their 30s to last 40s, so maybe us kids did listen.

Ironically as I re-read this now I have actually looked up the entry that I thought about, I see that I recounted almost exactly the same story as above back in 2006. Oh how predicable I’ve become. I’ll bet when I write this again in a few years when man is finally on the surface of mars I’ll tell the same story once more.

I’m still waiting for my flying car.

So I am an animal rescue hero today. Well, “Hero” might be a bit strong. Maybe “super totally awesome cat rescuer” is more accurate. Perhaps “fool”.

Noticed on Facebook and an ex-coworker had posted the question of:

How do you get a kitten down from a 35’ tree? :(

The kitten in question is one of the 4 that I fostered from 3-7 weeks old, who had been graciously taken in by Shaun and was a great little kitten, so I wanted to help.

Of course being a veteran cat-owner I immediately suggested (as my father has in the past with his great knowledge of cats) that if cats can’t get out of trees there’d be tons of cat skeletons in trees, and why not just leave the cat there and he’ll come down in a bit when he gets tired of being ignored. Then it turns out that the cat’s actually been in the tree for over 24 hours, so that’s when I leapt into action, and headed over after work.

The kitten was indeed up the (40+ foot) tree, mewing a lot, with a gaggle of kids at the bottom of the tree trying to see him and figure out what to do. Talked to Shaun a bit and because of the shape of the tree (big and bushy) it would be hard to put a ladder nearby (which would be too short to reach the kitten even if you could get it in close to the trunk).

Then after some looking, again, think “Hero” here, leapt into action, and climbed the tree.

It was actually a really easy climb, all things considered. Big branches, not too dense. Took me about 30 feet before I actually could even see the kitten (“Shadow” BTW) as he had gotten himself up in quite a spot. I can’t say that he couldn’t have made it down on his own, but I can see that for a non-tree-experienced little kitten that the spot she got in was a pretty tight one.

It was funny that when I got close enough to see the cat (maybe 10 feet) he started yowling harder (as in “get me out of here stupid monkey”) and purring loudly. Finally reached him, grabbed the little shit by the scruff of the neck and threw him over my shoulder and started down.

Now for a kitten I can understand that being on a moving shoulder with no control over your destiny being probably worse than being on a nice stable tree (albeit stuck), so he kept on trying to walk off my shoulder and onto the tree branches. I’d have to hold on, grab him, throw him back over the shoulder and go down some more, until we finally reached the bottom and the throng of children clapped and cheered (see, HERO). Shadow seemed quite happy to be back on solid ground (though when he did get free he went back to the base of the tree into a little’un grabbed him… stupid cat). Shaun then took him into the house and popped a full tin of tuna in front of him which he proceeded to eat until I left a little while later (I can’t imagine not eating for 24 hours, much less 4 hours…).

In short, kittens are cute and climbing trees is still fun even at 36.

So a bit of follow up to my car “incident”. You’d think that going into the insurance company to be looked after when a truck, driven by a driver who was known to be negligible (as the police officer saw that he ignored the flashing “you’re too tall” lights), hit a bridge and sprayed your car with debris causing damage to it. Well you’d think “there’s no way that I can’t come out on top here”.

I even jokingly set my Facebook status to “Going into ICBC. These guys will take care of me, right?” pretending that there was some way that I could get screwed over when in this case you know, just know that you can’t possibly be in the wrong.

Sadly when dealing with ICBC this isn’t the case. I guess I’m not technically “in the wrong”, but turns out that the truck was registered in Alberta. Which means that the insurance company (ICBC for anyone not the 3 people other than my mother who reads this), can’t just talk internally to itself but instead they have to go out and find the private insurer that the trucker used, negotiate with them, if he has insurance, hope that they don’t push back, and blah blah blah. In the end this means that I pay my insurance deductible and they probably can get it back for me, but I’m still out the cold hard cash until they can talk to the Alberta insurer.

It all sounds reasonable when you’re in the office talking to the adjuster of course, with lots of nodding and smiling and then when I got out I thought to myself “wait a minute, did I just get screwed over here?” I figured no, not totally. Yes, I’m out money but my faith in the goodness of people (* cough *) says that they will be able to find the insurer and there won’t be a fight and I will get my deductible back.

Then I started hunting for a place to repair the car and that showed more issues. See when the form says that you pay the deductible, you are in a different class of people when you talk to the insurance company. Yes, they know it’s not your fault, but because of the way things are structured it’s almost as if you were at fault, because I guess their deal with being paid from ICBC is different.

To quote a friend, “icky bicky” (ICBC).

I did find a place that would take it in this week (or so I was told) and could get me a courtesy car, and wouldn’t write my car off (though he did ask me if I wanted it written off or not). Fingers crossed to get a call from them tomorrow telling me that they have a car and to bring my beast in.

Unsurprisingly a search of this blog doesn’t hold a single good mention of ICBC back to 1997. I can’t imagine why.

Today I had a photoshoot with the lovely Terra Jean downtown Vancouver, helping out my friend Danielle who is working to break into the makeup artist business. Headed down there mid-afternoon with my friend Len and did the shoot over the next few hours. Two models, a makeup artist, a location of a hot tub in an apartment building, and three photographers. Things went great and the shoot was awesome.

We left late, around 8:30 or so and headed back home. I took Len back to Surrey and we had a bit to eat (sushi of course) before I dropped him at home and then headed home myself around 9:15 or so. A late day yes, but not so late that I couldn’t get home for a decent night’s sleep and a bit of relaxation time post-shoot to catch up on The Internet.

This is where things started going wrong, and where the real story starts.

Driving home down the number 1 I took the 264th exit as I always do. As I was driving along the exit, which as anyone here knows goes parallel to the highway for a bit, under and overpass and the loops around to the exit. A bit ahead of me on the highway in the outside lane was a truck and trailer (later I found out it was actually a truck with a big flatbed on it with a Ben & Jerries truck on top of that.

So on the exit, minding my own business with the truck beside and ahead of me. We hit the overpass except it hits the overpass. You know how you see videos of it happening on the internet or on spoof reels? Well, that happened right beside me.

Kinda like this:

Kinda like that, except way more violent and with way more debris. Whatever the top of the truck is made of it basically exploded all over the road, and because of the angle of the the overpass, it all sprayed directly to the right, i.e.: right at me. I swerved and braked and thought “Oh wow” or words to that effect.

The car was fine I thought so I pulled over, and did notice that there was a bit of an odd sound. I got out of the car, as did the couple of cars behind me, and found that a chunk of girder from the top of the truck had embedded itself in my front quarter panel where the headlight is. Youch!

A bit of a closer view:

Luckily I didn’t think until later what would have happened if that chunk of girder had hit the windshield or drivers window!

A few things were going through my head, some I’m a bit ashamed of

• I wish the light was better so I could get some better pictures
• Wow I’m really glad that I just renewed my insurance
• Holy crap I can’t believe that just happened, I wish I had a video camera out I could become an internet star!

So no damage to me, just the car luckily. I called the police, talked to the guys behind me (who also had many four letter variations on “oh wow, I can’t believe that happened”. It really was like something out of a movie. The guy driving the truck pulled over a couple of hundred meters up the road and eventually wandered back, fairly calm I thought for someone who had just had the top of his truck ripped off, and said “I thought I was ok till number 3 road”.

When the cops showed up statements were taken (writing? with a pen? Analog? How arcane!) and he said that he was working on a stolen car up the road a bit and had noticed the flashing “over height” lights that are supposed to warn truckers when the system detects that they’re too high to fit under an upcoming over pass.

When I finally drove away around 11:45 after statements were given, I had (finally) managed to yank the girder out of my car and a few more pictures were taken of the aftermath things had calmed down a little, but because an overpass was hit there were structural engineers on sight working on things and a few other police cars with lights on, people working to clear the debris off the road, and other fun stuff.

Tomorrow (technically today) I’ll have to deal with ICBC and get an appointment to get my car in (which is drivable but is definitely making a throaty noise it wasn’t making before, probably due to chunks of the headlight now several inches close to the engine than it was before), figure how much things are going to cost, and do all the other fun stuff that dealing with car accidents involves.

Thanks to all my friends on Facebook and Twitter who popped up to offer tools, ride, and express happiness that I wasn’t road pizza.