Today I learned about the tiny island nation of Mauritius, which is East of Madagascar. (For those of us who enjoy comparing the sizes of other things to the sizes of US states, it's "about the size of Rhode Island.") Apparently, Mauritius has the second-largest GDP in Africa, but more importantly, the whole island is a wireless broadband internets hotspot--or at least, that was the plan in 2005. I can't find any news about whether this ambitious goal has been met. I love that the Department of State entry linked above contains this sentence: "In recent years, information and communication technology (ICT) and seafood have emerged as important sectors of the economy, growing by an average of 40% last year." Information and communication technology and seafood are the future.

You don't see Rhode Island installing no universal wireless.

I am enjoying using bad grammar today--I'm not sure why. It will pass, though. It always does. Saying "internets" instead of "internet" is probably here to stay, though.

I'm in ur library, answering ur chat reference questions.

Notes from the Underground

i. What is up with the scowly people? There are so many people around who scowl at complete strangers (ie., me) for no apparent reason. A lot of them are old, but that's no excuse. I am often tempted to sit down and have a talk with these people. As in, "WHAT? What did I ever do to you? Do I look like the ninja that killed your family?" And they would have no legitimate response. Because you KNOW I don't look like no ninja.

I'm not the world's friendliest person, but at least I don't appear to wish the deaths of complete strangers just because I had a bad day. I've even been known to smile, from time to time.

ii. When the LRT pulls into the University station now, the cool, collected voice on the LRT radio says, "University station. University. Please exit to the right(/left) of the driver." I had this whole rant ready about the dumbing down of our society, and how if someone can't tell when a train pulls into a station which side the platform is on, then that announcement may solve that particular problem for them, but they'll still be a moron. And how signs and announcements and instructions in our society seem to be catering, more and more, to the dumb and litigious-- a tyranny of the moronity. (That phrase is now copyrighted, so don't even think about it.) But then it occurred to me that it is probably for blind people, and that I am a jerk. And THEN it occurred to me that I may not be able to copyright just that one phrase, even if I did invent it, because this whole page is published under a Creative Commons license.

Heh heh. The title of this post is the name of a book by Fyodor Dostoevsky, but it's also literal because the subway goes underground... sigh. Nothing is ever enough for you people, huh?

Work is making me very tired and depressed today. As much as I complain about school (and I DO complain about school) I much prefer it to waking up every morning and putting on stupid clothes and coming here and staring at my computer screen. Work brings up existential questions, which I dislike, such as "What am I really doing here?" (That's 'doing' in italics, not the normal kind of 'doing') and "Is the point of life just to make enough money to keep on buying food so you can keep going to work?" and so on. I don't like to be left in a windowless hallway with an empty desk and questions about the nature of my own existence. Even if I DO have my own stapler. I much prefer to be distracted.

Plus it seems like more things used to happen to me, before, which I could blog about. Now nothing happens to me, and it takes forever.

Like the RIAA, only older and slightly less annoying

Via BoingBoing: No license is granted.... The restrictions placed on records released in the early 1900s. "This record is leased solely for the purpose of producing sound directly from the record and for no other purpose..." Selling records for less than $1 is killing the music industry!

looking for another girl

1. From Foreign Policy: a list of the world's worst currencies. Poor Somali shilling--no one takes it seriously.
2. Two funny sites: passiveaggressivenotes.com, which collects notes and signs that are passive-aggressive (or sometimes just aggressive-aggressive), many of them written by roommates. And the office sign project.com, which collects funny signs from workplaces for the world's amusement.
3. reCAPTCHA is a cool project that harnesses the power of users (and their superior intelligence) to aid with digitization projects. These are the little anti-spambot captcha thingies (you know...), but instead of nonsense character strings, you are identifying a word that OCR software can't identify in digitized books. Plus, their website is pretty.

Visual aids

Who Participates and What People Are Doing Online [from Business Week]. An interesting visual representation of what age groups participate in what activities online. Apparently, 24-year-old grad students update their blogs while they are supposed to be working. Who knew?

Mmmmmmonday. Like Mmmmmmcookies.

It's Monday, so that means it's link time, although the pickins are a little slim today:

the comic book economy-- a set of scans of old comic book ads. Fascinating and compelling. Hosted on flickr.
pacman's skull, a paleontological miracle as envisioned by an artist. Whose name I don't know because je ne comprends pas le website en francais.
Two crafty sites: burdastyle, an open-source sewing site; and u-handblog, a blog all about sewing handbags. That might sound a little too specific, but believe me, to the obsessed (including me) it makes perfect sense.

My Tylenol/Coke cure totally worked, I feel 80% better today. I should totally be, like, a doctor or something. And I get paid tomorrow so I am totally going to be ordering some things from Etsy. Like cute cards, and an emo wallet. (I'm not posting the links because then someone will buy them right out from under me, you bastards! I know you would!)

Weekend projects

I.

I got my Warcraft alt to level 40 and bought her a pretty grey sheep to ride around. This may seem insignificant, but... yeah, actually, I got nothing. It's insignificant. It did take quite awhile, though, and now I can keep up with my friends as we run around having crazy simulated adventures.

II.

I finished my latest screenprinting project--a $17 (on sale!) jacket from Old Navy that I decorated with pretty pink pomegranate flowers. In this picture, I am sort of blurry with enthusiasm. Or tiredness.

I have gotten sick, suddenly, so today I am sticking to the time-tried formula: soup, Coke, vitamins, and cold Tylenol. I'm not a doctor, but I think it will work. Something about acetominophen, caffeine, and the power of positive thinking.

I tried to complete the personaldna test over at personaldna.com, but then I was confronted with this:
Aaah! WHAT?!? I don't like to answer personality quiz questions on the Internet if they look like conceptual models for information-seeking behaviour, or something. I go on the internet to ESCAPE conceptual models. Plus, I cannot work their slider technology.

So, instead I shall explain briefly why I didn't like Christopher Priest's book The Prestige. What I loved about the movie was how intricate it was--complex, and yet all the elements fit together in this extremely concise, intentional way. Nothing was extraneous or misplaced. The book was completely lacking in that kind of concision: clumsy, sprawling, vague. Obviously the movie could not have happened without the ideas set forth in the book, but in terms of the kind of experience the viewer/reader has of the story, I liked the movie so much more. And I would like to think that it would be the same, even if I had read the book first (although I never would have even finished the book if it weren't for my admiration for the film).

Anyway, you don't care about any of this. Let's talk about Friday.

Earlier entry: as I may have mentioned already...

Kids & Money: clips from a documentary by Lauren Greenfield about kids, consumption and materialism in Los Angeles.

I'm a pretty big fan of McSweeney's and its various publications, especially The Believer (not to mention its dispatches from a public librarian, which are both funny and sad), although I am also occasionally pleasantly baffled by much of what they produce. I like to know that there are people who know more about these things than I do, and that those people have a means to publish their work, and I try to support them so they can continue to baffle me in the future. Now is a good time to give some of that support in money format, because they're having a huge sale precipitated by the bankruptcy of one of their distributors. Progressive fiction deeds (not to mention original artwork), done dirt cheap. If I hadn't already spent all my money at etsy, I would be so busy buying things I wouldn't even be here.

Earlier this week I saw a guy wearing a shirt that said, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the substrate," which made me laugh the laugh of someone who passed Chemistry 20. And the word "precipitate" reminded me of this chemistry shirt, so for all you know, I have dozens more chemistry terms in my mind, just waiting for me to have a chance to use them. TITRATE!

When I have kids, I'm going to sing them the Neil Young song "Helpless," and teach them all the words. And then their friends will be like, "why do you know the words to that song?" and they won't know. Much as I know the words to a number of Canadian folk songs--it's the circle of life. There is a town in North Ontario...

I am all about doing four of my favourite things in one night:

1. Watching X-Files
2. Eating takeaway butter chicken
3. Screenprinting
4. Finishing a book [Christopher Priest's The Prestige--I don't like it! Is it possible to like a movie and not the book it was based on? Am I biased because I saw the movie first? In some heretofore undetermined future post, I address these issues and more!]

Any time I spend updating this site is time I am not spending doing the four things. See ya.

This quote made my whole day. And I mean that LITERALLY.

Homeless guy #1: Damn! I just got kicked out of the library! Damn!
Homeless guy #2: What did you do, man?
Homeless guy #1: I don't know. I don't know.
Homeless guy #2: Aren't you drunk?
Homeless guy #1: Well, yeah. Also, I might have been looking at dirty pictures on the computer.
Homeless guy #2: Aw, that's not so bad.
Homeless guy #1: And they said that I was being disrespectful to the librarians.
Homeless guy #2, freaking out: No way, man! You can never, never disrespect the librarians! Always respect librarians! What were you thinking? Are you an idiot?

Outside Boulder Public Library
Boulder, Colorado
overheardintheoffice.com

19th-century weapon found in whale [Yahoo news].

"Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale's age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old."

Cool.

From cracked.com: The 13 most ridiculous TV shows ever to get green-lit. Featuring a surprising number of shows featuring space, aliens, alien impregnation, superpowers, and unlikely crime-fighting teams or duos. You couldn't come up with dumber premises, except maybe if you drank a bunch of Kahlua first.

May I suggest you buy this? #2

Polaroid T-Shirt


$10 by make something new

Some links, plus one sentence on the subject of vocation

From the Wall Street Journal: How various presidents stack up in terms of approval ratings. Poor Gerald Ford--that guy had nothing BUT bad days.

An interesting article from Malcolm Gladwell about the development and marketing of SUVs and the impact on safety. From 2004--don't ask me why these things suddenly show up on digg. "According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills." SNAP!

A diverting yet pointless page demonstrating lakes and islands in various combinations. Did you know that the largest island in a lake on an island in a lake is in Mindemoya Lake on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron? I sure didn't. Thank God. The very idea of knowing such things makes me exhausted.

Today made me think that maybe I made a bad choice in becoming a librarian, since I have so little patience for the stupidity of others.

Paranoia, from a computer gaming angle

I started my first ever Horde character on Warcraft last week, and it has given me an interesting perspective on the politics of good and evil. (The Horde are the "bad" guys in Warcraft--orcs, trolls, undead, and so on. Although my character is a tauren, by far the cutest of the horde races, because I know that in fantasy literature, and presumably video games, what's on the outside usually stands for what's on the inside. In computer games, as in life, my mantra is: "Always be as cute as possible.") More than once, playing the other side of this game has prompted me to wonder, a la George Bush: "Why do they hate us?" The solution for ethnic wars may actually be a computer game that forces people to play the opposite side! Wow, I totally just came up with a plan for world peace and it's not even lunch time yet!

From Terranova: The Horde is evil-- a fairly serious examination of the ideas of good and evil as they are expressed in the factions of World of Warcraft.
A study on Alliance vs. Horde demographics shows slight differences in what motivates players of either faction.

Paranoia, from various angles

Alarmed about password security and the state of the world, I have recently stopped using variations on the same password for all my accounts, and I have even added numbers to some of my passwords--and not the lazy man's password numbers, which are adding "1," "111," or "123" to the ends of passwords. ("That's like a code an idiot would have for his luggage!") Essentially, my online identity is now impregnable. Or possibly, you could impregnate it, but you would have to get it pretty drunk first. The problem with this new regime, however, is that I can no longer remember my passwords for anything, and they're impossible to guess--by hackers, but also, by me. I can never clear my brower's cookies, or I will be dead in the water.

My project for this summer--for we must have goals, without them we are nothing--is to watch the entire series of The X-Files, from beginning to end, including the movie and all the later seasons which I have never seen. Returning to this show and watching it again has really helped me to realize how I've matured. (I'm being serious; stay with me.) Teenage Jocelyn couldn't get enough of Mulder, with his suffering and his convictions and his puppy-dog eyes. And the show is kind of obsessed with him, constantly finding ways to linger on those things. But Teenage Jocelyn also liked Skinner, and I have to say, in retrospect, that he's the much more interesting character of the two, because unlike Mulder he doesn't have puppy dog eyes, he's bald, and his life is constrained by danger and responsibility. He's like a grown-up! And Grown-Up Jocelyn can't get enough of him, and his head-butting! (I sometimes like to say, out loud, what I know the characters are thinking, and for Skinner it's usually: "STOP. SMOKING. IN. MY. OFFICE.")

Two other observations on The X-Files: (1) One thing I find hilarious about this show in the early seasons is the extent to which we are clearly expected to find Mulder adorable. He's always got his shirt off for one reason or another. Usually he is running or swimming or something, and all sweaty. And yet Scully is constantly appearing in her giant, superhero-esque overcoat over a series of puffy-shouldered power suits. What happened to the male gaze? Has it been disregarded completely? (2) The other thing I have noticed about this show, at least in the early seasons, is that Scully is in more or less constant danger. She is always being threatened, kidnapped, assaulted, held hostage, or otherwise messed with. And Mulder is always rescuing her, although sometimes she does a pretty good job of rescuing herself. Is her vulnerability because she is a woman (a) meant to reflect the fact that the world is a dangerous place (sometimes) for women, which I think is true (b) trying to suggest that she is weak, which I don't think is true or (c) just giving Mulder lots of chances to save her, since the show tries really hard to valorize him? I'm not sure. I hope it's the first one, and I really hope it's not the second.

Anyway, none of this matters at all. It's just the usual attempt, on my part, to clear my head. I'm not a TV-ologist, but I do watch a lot of TV.

Love,
The Joceosaurus

Earlier entry: In defense (well, sort of...) of CSI
Even earlier entry: Notes from Season 4 of The X-Files

Seemingly superfluous business idea #1,279

Possibly the best thing about Alcohol Controls - Loss Prevention Products for the Bar Industry is their slogan: "Protecting your liquid assets."

The good news is, I can now name all 53 countries in Africa in under three minutes. It wasn't easy, but I memorized this list, and with some hard work and extreme work-induced boredom, you can too.