I’ve been thinking of buying an iPod Shuffle for a long time now, ever since the new clip-style design came out in fact. Although I already have an 80GB 5th Gen iPod, it’s just too big for taking running, using in the gym, etc.

With the weather taking a turn for the worse here in Vancouver, outdoor running is going to take a back seat, so I’ll be on the treadmill or the rowing machine in our gym. There are a number of podcasts which will be perfect for the gym, such as CBC’s Quirks and Quarks and NPR’s Science Friday so I figured now would be a perfect time to stop procrastinating.

Last night I took the plunge, went down to London Drugs and picked up a green one, mainly because Nathan already has a silver one, which would have been the logical choice. Once home, I left it charging overnight, then loaded two podcasts for the walk in to work this morning. I was a bit worried when it refused to play the podcasts, claiming there were no ‘songs’ available, so I left it at home.

A quick check of Apple’s support site revealed that it doesn’t play podcasts in ‘shuffle’ mode, so once I’d set the slider accordingly all was well. The only downside is that the headphone cord is quite a bit shorter than the one on my regular iPod, so I can’t plug it into my desktop at work and kick back in my chair. However, that will be an advantage in the gym, which is what I bought it for anyway, so I can’t complain.

I just got my passport back from the Australian High Commission in Ottawa, with my permanent residency visa inside, so I’m officially allowed to live and work in Australia, and possibly New Zealand, for the rest of my life. Whether that makes me a pseudo-Aussie at this stage, I’ve no idea.

Once I’ve spent two years living there I have the option of applying for citizenship, which will give me the right to vote and access to an Australian passport, though I haven’t decided whether I’ll go down that route or not. They’ve just instituted a really dumb test which you have to pass if you want to become a citizen, stemming from a desire to keep out ‘undesirables’. In today’s Australia that’s shorthand for Muslims, but in the past it’s been Vietnamese, Greeks, Italians, Irish etc.

The logic seems to be that forcing new migrants to learn enough about Australian culture to pass the test will ensure that they integrate better into Australian life, and will therefore be less likely to cluster together in nearby neighbourhoods. It just seems like a flawed plan dreamt up by idiots as a sop to the anti-immigration, i.e racist, element in Australian society. Sure, there’s plenty who claim there’s nothing racist about it, but there’s no argument about white, educated, English-speaking immigrants like myself, just those who are “different”, or “not like us”.

Having said all that, it’s not a problem unique to Australia, with the UK and most of Europe sharing similar concerns, though quite how knowing who Don Bradman is will alleviate the ‘problem’ is anyone’s guess!

Steven Frank has an excellent article which explains exactly why PCs are a total pain in the arse. The whole thing is worth a read. It’s exactly how I feel when asked to come around and help a friend set up their new PC.

The VAIO came loaded with so much shovelware that it took in the ballpark of fifteen minutes just to boot the first time. After the desktop came up, the disk just kept grinding and grinding and grinding, as Norton (60 day trial!) popped up, followed by Trend Micro Anti-Spyware (60 day trial!), a dialog box warning me that my Bluetooth module was not set discoverable (uh, thanks?), a cascade of Sony windows (for which they designed their own window style), the Ask! Toolbar conveniently pre-installed itself into Internet Explorer, some bubbles asking me to set up such-and-such piece of hardware, and, I’m not kidding, an “All Programs” menu in the Start Menu that spanned three columns.

There’s a new look around here. I’ve thrown out the old WordPress and PHP based site and written my own in Rails and added some geo-coding features.

Now, when looking at posts, or photos, you may see a longitude/latitude number pair, which when clicked will take you to the location on the map page.

I plan on expanding this a bit more in the future, so you can pick a point on the map and see all photos within a certain distance etc.

Anyway, enjoy the new digs.

Stephen Fry, yes, that Stephen Fry, has started a blog, and his first post is on the evolution of SmartPhones.

Windows for Mobiles is certainly better than Windows for PCs or, God help us all, us all, Vista, but it is still an insulting offering. The feeling, as with all things Microsoft, is that all design features and functions are there to suit MS rather than to delight, enthuse and compel the user. Compromise, short-cuts, inconveniences, vestigial residues – no one responsible is likely to pat themselves on the back for the design or the s’ware engineering, any more than the architect or project manager of a 60s council flat is likely to point it out with pride as he rides by with his grandchildren. You’re only on this planet once – do something extraordinary, imaginative and inspiring. That’s the difference, ultimately. Those behind Palm OS and the Psion can justifiably be proud of what they did, what they created. WinMob just muscled in on a market they never spotted and they did it in a clumsy, bullying, ugly manner, exactly as they had with Windows before, and exactly as IBM had with the PC itself a decade earlier. Break free, all you corporate software engineers and designers: the excuse that you are under the rule of dullards, greedy share-price number crunchers and visually and ergonomically illiterate yahoos is not good enough. Persuade them. Otherwise we all get a digital environment that’s a vile as a 60s housing estate.

I was surprised just how French Montreal actually is. Sure, I knew everyone speaks French, and are proud of their French heritage, but I still wasn’t prepared to feel as though I had landed in France itself. In comparison to Vancouver, it’s a much older city (about 300 years older), so it has a lot of classical European architecture which is completely missing in Vancouver, and almost all other North American cities. The ethnic mix is completely different too, as there are a lot more North Africans and Muslims than in Vancouver, which I suppose makes sense when you consider the location of France’s ex-colonies. I’d imagine that anyone arriving to start a new life in Canada from the stretch of coastline between Lebanon and Cote d’Ivoire would naturally gravitate towards Québec from a language perspective at least. Add French street names such as Rue Saint-Denis, and suburbs like Verdun… though there are some concessions to Canada’s bi-lingual nature, like Rue University instead of Rue Université

Despite my schoolboy French laying dormant for years, I was able to make myself understood enough to order food and metro tickets without encountering any blank looks! We’d been told that people wouldn’t speak English to us, either because of inability, or a simple refusal, but of course it never happened. Everyone we met was friendly and helpful, and quite happy to talk English, though I still made the effort to start conversations in French. I might even sign up with the Alliance Francaise once I get back to Sydney.

Another thing which stood out is how many churches there were. There seemed to be one every few blocks; the Cathédral Marie-Reine-du-Monde is on one side of Place Canada, with St. George’s Anglican on the other, with construction of both starting in 1870. I also went to Notre Dame Cathedral and took a few photos. An usher had to come over and tell me to take my hat off. I’d completely forgotten, so the years of indoctrination as a kid are clearly wearing off. Mum won’t be too happy though ;-)

Photos: [on foot] – [by bike]

This is an awesome summary of all that’s wrong with the world today: Seven Minutes of Truth.

Via Effect Measure

In the U.S., there are regular arguments about whether or not there should be a mandatory waiting period between purchasing and receiving a gun. Some states have a waiting period, some don’t. In contrast, Amsterdam’s mayor is proposing a three-day wait before you can buy magic mushrooms!

Mayor Job Cohen wants to require the wait period to allow mushroom buyers to fully understand exactly what it is they are purchasing, ANP news agency reported today.

The proposal seeks to prevent impulse purchases and follows several incidents that have occurred in the city involving tourists who have eaten hallucinogenic mushrooms.

I loved my Formula One racing when I was a kid, and used to pester my parents to let me stay up late, or get up early, to watch the far-flung international races. One of my favourite drivers was Gilles Villeneuve, father of Jacques, who died tragically in 1982, shortly before my 10th birthday.

Myself and Jacqui rented bikes yesterday, and decided to ride around Montréal for a few hours. We’d walked around Vieux Montreal on Sunday, so I decided we should take the bikes and do a lap of Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, named in his honour, and site of the Canadian Grand Prix.

The photo above is the Start-Finish line. I’ll post some more photos when I get a chance.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I signed up for the running clinic and things are going pretty well so far. I’ve been running three times a week, anywhere from 6-12km at a time, and the results are starting to show. My cruising pace is now about 5:20/km, which is a step up for me and should mean I have no problem breaking 50mins for the 10K. I’m going to try a run faster on a single run next week, maybe doing 2-3km at 5:00/km pace and see how that feels.

Speaking of racing, I’ve entered the Turkey Trot here in Vancouver, on October 8th, so I’ve 5 weeks left to train. Heading off to Montréal next weekend, for five days holiday with Jacqui and her Mum, will put a dent in the training plan. Maybe I should bring my running gear with me?

I’ve also managed to sort out my running issue which meant that I’d get really sore calves after each run. I’m landing a bit more flat-footed and not so much on my toes, and have stopped pushing off on each stride, instead trying to “peel” my foot off the ground. It’s working so far, even allowing my to run uphill without destroying my calves, though I’ll have to wait and see if it’s going to cause other problems instead. So far, so good anyway.

So, my web host, TextDrive, have been undergoing a bit of a re-organisation as they’ve morphed into Joyent over the last few months. As part of the morph, they’ve been telling us for ages that we’d be moving from the FreeBSD-based boxes onto shiny new Solaris Accelerators.

Well, on Friday, I got my golden ticket so here’s the details on my new home… I’m sharing a Sun Fire x4100 and 4GB of RAM with only 30 other people! 10Gb of disk space, up to 50 databases and up to 50 domains! I’ve spent the last 24 hours moving my various sites onto the new box and it’s been painless. And the great thing is… it’s screaming along. WAY faster than the old FreeBSD box. Another bonus is that if the shit hits the fan and the machine does crash, it only takes a minute or two to bring back up, rather than the hour waiting for fsck to run on the FreeBSD box. Sweet.

Anyway, it’s all good. Enjoy the speed boost ;-)

So, one of Jacqui’s school friends, Sally, is coming up to visit us from New Jersey with her husband, Brett. Brett’s a PGA Professional, so naturally we’re all heading out for a round of golf. Well myself, Tom and Nathan are. The girls are going shopping or something.

Brett’s decided he wants to play Nicklaus North, which suits us perfectly as we’d been talking about trying it out. Now that we’re finally committed, I decided to check out the web site to see what’s in store – turns out that it’s got a rating of 72.2 and a slope of 133! Even before I tee off I’ll be losing 6 shots compared to the normal courses I’ve been playing, with rating around 66, and then it’s got a slope 10 higher than the hardest course I’ve played before!

My usual round is about 101, so I’ll be hacking around for hours! My only consolation is that Tom’s usual round is about 95, and Nathan’s is 97 or so, so I doubt they’ll be too far ahead. We’ll have to come up with a handicap system for Brett though ;-)

The game’s not until the first Saturday in October, so I had better spend some serious time at the driving range before then.

Rob Styles:

“[On Sunday] in mistakenly awarding a penalty, I accept that I may have affected the result of the match and for that I apologise.”

‘May have’?? I think the word he’s looking for is ‘definitely’. Ah well, at least he’s got a month off to make an optometrist’s appointment.

A couple of good articles this week have commented on the ramifications of Joe & Josephine Public’s lack of intellectual curiosity.

First up is David Colqhoun, whose article Science in an Age of Endarkenment was picked up by the Guardian Science site. He comments…

The enlightenment was a beautiful thing. People cast aside dogma and authority. They started to think for themselves. Natural science flourished. Understanding of the real world increased. The hegemony of religion slowly declined. Real universities were created and eventually democracy took hold. The modern world was born. Until recently we were making good progress. So what went wrong?

The past 30 years or so have been an age of endarkenment. It has been a period in which truth ceased to matter very much, and dogma and irrationality became once more respectable. This matters when people delude themselves into believing that we could be endangered at 45 minute’s notice by non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

It matters when reputable accountants delude themselves into thinking that Enron-style accounting is acceptable.

It matters when people are deluded into thinking that they will be rewarded in paradise for killing themselves and others.

It matters when bishops attribute floods to a deity whose evident vengefulness and malevolence leave one reeling. And it matters when science teachers start to believe that the earth was created 6000 years ago.

He then goes on to bemoan the increasing popularity of quack medicine such as homeopathy and crystals despite any hard evidence for their efficacy.

In a similar vein, Charles P. Pierce’s article in Esquire, entitled Greetings From Idiot America, was originally written back in 2005, but has even more relevance today. He tours through the nonsense surrounding creationism, and the onset of the Iraq War, while lambasting modern society for valuing gut instinct over fact and showing a willingness to believe what they’re told without applying any critical thought to the matter.

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents — for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

Richard Dawkins also has a new documentary entitled Enemies of Reason which is now showing on Channel 4 in the UK. I’ve downloaded the torrent of the first episode to watch later tonight. Should be interesting. Beats the reality shite hands-down!

I’m now an accomplished car thief! Jacqui managed to lock the keys in the car, only a couple of days after Nathan did the same thing. So, using a coat hanger and knowledge acquired while watching movies, I attempted to open the lock, and to my great surprise, it worked. It only took me three minutes – how reassuring!

Just as well the car is a shitbox no-one would bother their arse to steal ;-)

Update: turns out I literally did break and enter. Now we can’t open the driver’s door with the key. Have to open the passenger’s first ;-)

Last night I signed up for a 10K Running Clinic with The RunningRoom. It was a spur of the moment decision! Jamie, one of the guys in work, runs quite a bit and had recommended these guys, so, although I’d missed the first week, I decided to go for it.

The course costs $75, which is nothing when you consider what you get in return: a technical running shirt, 2 instructor-led runs per week and a weekly talk on a topic related to your training. The talk this week was on shoes, though nutrition and biomechanics will be covered in coming weeks, which I’m looking forward to.

Last night was my night, so I wandered down wondering what I was in store for. All the usual questions: how fast is the group, are they friendly, etc.? The talk on the different types of running shoes was pretty interesting and well presented, with Alex, the shop manager, exhibiting a pair of feet with absolutely zero arches! Talk about flat feet!

I was less than enthusiastic when I found out that the run on the agenda was a 4km time trial. Seeing as how this was the second week of the program, I was being thrown in at the deep end. The idea was to set a time so they could group us into our pace groups, so we were told to run as fast as we could without killing ourselves. We were taken down to the seawall where there are kilometre markers along the run route and one of the instructors was at the 2km mark to provide splits.

There’s about 20 in the group, none of whom I’d met before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. We all started together and I hit the front early, a little bit worried that I was setting off too fast. I felt fine though, so just kept going, even though my HRM was telling me that my heart rate was about 20bpm more that it usually is when running – probably the chilli chicken and beer I’d had for lunch – not exactly ideal preparation!

The tentative plan was to stick to a fixed pace until the 3km mark and then pick it up towards the end if I hadn’t spewed in the meantime. I hit the halfway mark in 10:15 feeling a bit out of breath, but nothing serious. At the 3km I still felt OK, so I picked up the pace a little and managed to finish in 20:29, splitting 10:14 for the second half. Even better was that I had beaten everyone else by almost 2mins which was a bit of a surprise – we’ll see how I go once the distance increases though!

So, the journey has begun. Hopefully the fact that I’ve joined a group will force me to be a bit more disciplined in my approach to training. Time will tell…

The Tour de France has been crazy this year. I’ve been doing my usual thing of watching the stages live, which in Canada means from 6.00am to 8.30am on Versus. It’s a far cry from good old SBS back in Oz, since the Americans deem it necessary to show 3mins of ads for every 5mins of bike racing until the last few minutes of the stage.

Cycling gets lots of bad press for having a serious doping problem, and the run-up to this year’s Tour was no exception. The good news is that a serious effort is being made to clean up the sport and the word is now out that doping is definitely not going to be tolerated any more. Teams are making riders sign contracts which commit them to not doping, the UCI is requiring teams to promote an anti-doping stance, and to fire any rider caught doping, and they’re also requiring the riders to commit to not doping, and to agree to surrender a year’s salary if they test positive. The latter provision may not be enforceable, but there’s no doubting that the pressure is on.

The sport is now in a transitional phase, with the young, up and coming riders perfectly aware that doping is not permitted at all, but there’s still been a few big doping stories in the Tour which are dragging the sport’s name through the mud again, and embarrassing many who are trying to turn things around.

T-Mobile have spent the last year revamping their team after revelations surrounding Ullrich, Riis, Zabel and others who have passed through the team over the years, and have been at the forefront of the anti-doping push. Halfway through the Tour it turns out that one of their riders, Patrick Sinkewitz, tested positive for testosterone before the Tour started. Strike Three.

Pre-Tour favourite, Alexander Vinokourov, has been criticised for working with Michele Ferrari, a known proponent of EPO, though he claimed he was working with him solely for his training nous. Vino had a shocker of a start to the Tour, with a bad crash leaving him with up to 30 stitches in each knee, but he produced a barn-storming individual time trial result to make up some lost time. Yesterday it emerged that he’d tested positive for blood doping after that stage. Strike Two.

While watching today’s crucial Pyrenean stage at the ungodly hour of 4am, news hit the wire of another positive from Stage 11. That rider turned out to be Cristian Moreni of Cofidis, whose team must have been mortified, as they’d just signed up to be founding members of Mouvement pour un cyclisme crédible (MPCC) the day before. Strike Three.

Finally, before the dust had even settled from that announcment, it emerges that the Tour leader, Michael Rasmussen, has been sent home by his team, Rabobank, and fired, for lying to them about his whereabouts in the run-up to the Tour. Rasmussen has been under fire for the last two weeks after it emerged he’d missed some out-of-competition drug tests because he wasn’t where he told his national association he would be. He claimed he was late filing the paperwork, and that he’d been in Mexico training (his wife is Mexican), but it turns out he may have been in the Dolomites all along. He hasn’t tested positive, but his team aren’t taking any chances. He’s been under suspicion for a while, and his cover story is starting to unravel, so he’s gone. Strike Four!

So, there have been three guys during this Tour who performed above and beyond – Rasmussen, Vino and Discovery’s Alberto Contador. Only one is left untainted. It would appear that Occam’s Razor still applies in the cycling world…

On a positive note, no pun intended, the times they are a changin’ and soon we can look forward to cyclists grimacing in pain as they struggle up the Col d’Aubisque unassisted.

Last Sunday was Canada Day, a celebration of Canada’s 140th birthday. There was a fireworks display held in Vancouver Harbour, starting at 22.30 once it got dark. Some of the best vantage points were just down the road from our apartment, so myself, Jacqui, Tom and Anna headed down for a look…

[Fireworks Photos]

The Register has a great, sarcastic article on the recent ‘terrorist’ attacks in the UK. The amount of media space given to this was ridiculous. Even here in Vancouver, CNN covered the Glasgow side of things almost non-stop for over an hour before the room was clear and I could go out and turn it off.

It might be a test of ministerial mettle if thousands of British Muslims were burning cars every night, as has happened in France. But what we seem to have here is some foreigners burning just one car and failing to burn two more owing to almost unbelievable incompetence.

The mindset of a man who’s willing to set himself on fire to make a point – as one of the Glasgow terror-clowns seems to have done – but not to spend any effort at all on researching methods is a difficult one to understand. Even if these jokers were illiterate or had no internet access (seems unlikely, one of the suspects is apparently a doctor) they could have at least done a test. In my part of town, fun-loving teenagers burn out a car or two down by the canal every week or so: nobody would notice another one with some nails in it.

Given the current idiot in charge, and the wanton refusal to engage in any form of international diplomacy that doesn’t serve an extremist right-wing agenda, it’s easy to forget about the many good points of American life. Today’s Observer has an opinion piece outlining the less visible side (at present) of American life:

God-bothering is, of course, a pain. But at least it is kept out of state schools so no parental piety – real or otherwise – may snaffle a choicer education from a more deserving child. And speaking of children: we only hear of the one who runs amok in West Virginia; from the other 58 million, we have lessons to learn. Even in deprived, no-go-after-dark downtown, teenage boys stand to look you in the eye, call you ma’am and have no familiarity with the language of the monosyllabic grunt – if only because their mamas, white and black, will have it no other way, not because the government is sponsoring ‘initiatives’ on ‘respect’