It's Labour Day weekend here in the still green Great White North and looks to be a nice one. I'm taking the weekend off so I don't have to labour over this blog.
Links, rants, and raves will resume next week.
In the meantime, enjoy this picture of some swans diving for whatever they eat in the bay.
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| Swans diving for food in the bay |
This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.
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| The marsh in summer |
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
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| The east marina |
This week's photo is of swans on Frenchman's Bay. I took this with my Pixel 8 Pro using the 5x zoom.
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| Swans on the bay |
Syd Perry is a young reggae musician who lived around the corner from us and went to school with my son. We've kept in touch as he's moved away from Pickering to further his musical journey. He's currently touring British Columbia after spending time in Jamaica, Hawaii, Nigeria, South Africa, and Australia.
His latest project is a 5-song EP, Green, which follows two earlier EPs, Gold and Red. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
In the early 1980s, there was a radio show about the new world of home computing called The Famous Computer Cafe. The hosts of the show included major figures from the computing industry and other well known public figures, includuing: Bill Gates, Jack Tramiel (Atari), Timothy Leary, Bill Atkinson (Apple), and many others.
Fortunately, the show episodes were recorded on reel-to-reel tapes. Unfortunately, the tapes were lost, but recently some were found and digitally restored, and are now available to listen to on the Internet Archive Site.
I wish I'd been able to listen to this show back when I was first getting into computing in 1983. As it is, they're a fascinating historical artifact of an important era in tech history.
Canadian politics often echo those in the United States, though sometimes with a time lag and softer edges. With the rise of social media, that's been less true recently. A good example, is Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the federal Conservative Party of Canada. I've sometimes referred to him as Canada's "Trump-mini", but as the Toronto Star points out, a closer comparison might be to J. D. Vance.
Yet these everyman pantomimes are substantively lacking. There is an obvious hollowness to them. The two men are both clinically deficient in what the kids call “rizz.” That is: charisma. Whatever one may think of Donald Trump (I happen to despise him), he is no doubt magnetic. He’s full-up with the kind of sleazy, snake oil salesman charm that abounds across America’s long history of charismatic con-men. By contrast, both Poilievre and Vance seem ill-at-ease among the large crowds they draw. Trump can whip people into a frenzy doing a baffling bit about “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” during an extended tirade against asylum-seekers.
Personally, I can't stand Poilievre. His voice sets my teeth on edge, and his speeches are full of right-wing talking points with no substance. More troubling are Poilievre's connections to and courtship of far-right extremists.
Of course, “being a bit of a dweeb” is no disqualification in politics. Some would argue it’s a prerequisite. More troubling than a paucity of raw, animal magnetism is the manner in which both Vance and Poilievre have leveraged their modest appeal. The two have, in different ways, hitched their political wagons to extremist movements that have crept into political life. In 2021, Poilievre threw his lot behind the so-called “Freedom Convoy,” which saw Ottawa jammed with truckers protesting COVID-19 mandates. On Facebook, he called the truckers “peaceful, kind and patriotic.” The protests were sometimes peaceful. But they also featured white supremacist and Nazi symbols, with some organizers having long, checkered histories of Islamophobic agitation. Vance has likewise courted various fringe far-right figures, including Holocaust denier Charles C. Johnson. Recently, he blurbed a book by Jack Posobiec, an online troll who successfully propagated the conspiracy that top Democratic operatives were performing Satanic child abuse rituals in the bowels of a Washington, D.C. pizza parlour.
Unfortunately, Justin Trudeau shows no sign of emulating Joe Biden and stepping down before the next election, and the Liberal Party lacks anyone who has the chops and popularity to take on Poilievre. I'd love to see the NDP leader, Jagmeet Singh, in power but the NDP don't have the national base to overcome both the Liberals and Conservatives. If we're lucky, they'll spoil a Conservative majority in 2025.
I have just resolved something that, if not quite a bucket list item, has been bugging me for years. When I was in university, I worked at the student radio station, as both a DJ and assistant manager. I remember playing a song that I thought was called "Ante Aviator". Despite many searches, I was never able to find it.
Well, thank you Google. When I searched today on "Ante Aviator" it came back with: Did you mean: "Auntie Aviator" by Beverley and John Martyn?
BINGO!
And it is just as atmospheric and lovely as I remember it. After more than 50 years, I still remember the chorus.
Zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom
I'll never let you down
Zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom
We'll never touch the ground
And if we don't want to we won't come down
I don't remember much of the rest of the album, though I will listen to it with fresh ears, but this track is a joy.
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
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| The entrance to Frenchman's Bay |
This week's photo is from a walk I took on Friday down to the lakeshore. This view is looking to the west, with the two lighthouses for the entrance to Frenchman's Bay in the foreground, and the Toronto shoreline in the distance. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.
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| Lake Ontario shore looking west |
This week's musical treat is a double feature with a video documentary and a BBC compilation album of British psychedelic rock from the 1960s.
These days many people tend to think of the San Francisco scene when they think of pyschedelic rock but there was a thriving pyschedelic scene in Britain too that influenced major acts like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
First, here's a BBC documentary called Psychedelic Britannia.
Documentary exploring the rise and fall of the most visionary period in British music history: five kaleidoscopic years between 1965 and 1970 when a handful of dreamers reimagined pop music.
When a generation of British R&B bands discovered LSD, conventions were questioned. From out of the bohemian underground and into the pop mainstream, the psychedelic era produced some of the most ground-breaking music ever made, pioneered by young improvising bands like Soft Machine and Pink Floyd, then quickly taken to the charts by the likes of the Beatles, Procol Harum, the Small Faces and the Moody Blues, even while being reimagined in the country by bucolic, folk-based artists like the Incredible String Band and Vashti Bunyan.
The film is narrated by Nigel Planer with contributions and freshly-shot performances from artists who lived and breathed the psych revolution - Paul McCartney, Ginger Baker, Robert Wyatt, Roy Wood, the Zombies, Mike Heron, Vashti Bunyan, Joe Boyd, Gary Brooker, Arthur Brown, Kenney Jones, Barry Miles, the Pretty Things and the Moody Blues.
Following that, here's an album of music from BBC radio broadcasts called British Psychedelic Rock at the BBC 1967-1969, Part 2 featuring Herd, Episode Six, The Glass Menagerie, The Pretty Things, and more. I remember listening to a few of these groups when I was in university but most are new to me. If there is a Part 1, I haven't been able to track it down. If anyone has a link, I'd really appreciate it if you would post in the comments.
A bad user interface can make a website hard to navigate or a software program hard to use. But in the real world of physical things, a bad user interface can have more serious consequences. This article by Adrian Hanft describes how bad design contributed to the collision that killed ten sailors and wrecked a destroyer.
Two years ago a Navy destroyer was ripped open by the nose of a Liberian tanker. Ten sailors were crushed or drowned as their sleeping quarters filled with water after the collision.
At the heart of the tragedy is a single checkbox on a touchscreen. This is the untold story of how bad design caused a crew to lose control of the $1.8 billion John S McCain destroyer and the mystery around how designers manage to avoid blame when their creations cause death and destruction.
Before going any further, I want to make it clear that I am just a civilian piecing together this story from whatever information I can glean from the internet. I have trudged through hundreds of pages of technical documents and dense reports. Much of this documentation is intentionally vague, some of it has been redacted, and all of it has undoubtedly been scrubbed by lawyers and PR professionals. As a result, there are probably errors in my analysis and conjecture. However, with that disclaimer in mind, I believe the following story may be the clearest, most human-readable account of the McCain accident that you will find anywhere. It may also be the first and only public source of real design criticism ever written in the two years since the accident. I am not sure how the responsibility fell to me, but I am happy to describe the role that design played in this tragedy.
It was a big weekend for awards in the science fiction and fantasy field. The winners of the Hugo, Sidewise, Aurora, Analog Anlab, and Asimov's Readers' awards were announced as well as the nominees for the World Fantasy Awards and the Analog
The winners of the 2024 Hugo Awards were announced at the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, Scotland. These are the fiction winners.
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
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| Our Rose of Sharon in bloom |
This week's photo is from a trip into Toronto to see Colin and Jay Linden at Hugh's Room Live. The club recently moved into a new and hopefully permanent home on Broadview Avenue, right in the middle a neighbourhood known as East Chinatown.
This photo is of a building on the edge of a parking lot about a block from Hugh's Room; there is a large Chinese arch monument on the other side. This is the first time I've been in the area in about 40 years; on first glance it doensn't seem to have changed much. I used my Pixel 8 Pro for this photo and cropped out some boring pavement in the foreground.
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| A wall mural in East Chinatown |
This week's musical treat is a video compiling performances from 1967's Monterey Pop Festival. It's been a while since I've seen the movie so I can't be sure of this, but I think these are probably outtakes; if this list is correct, none of the performances here are from the released version of the movie
What is included here is:
This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.
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| Condo construction by night |
WordStar is probably responsible for me sitting here today at a computer typing a blog entry. Sometime in late 1983, I visited friend and fanzine publisher (at the time, now a full-time writer and editor) Robert Runte. He had an Obsorne PC with WordStar. The computer was clunky and the screen microscopic, but I took one look at WordStar and that was it; I had to have it. Later that year, I bought an IBM PC with WordStar. Eventually I moved on to WordStar 2000 (which was a mistake on both the company's part for making it and mine for buying it) and then Microsoft Word for DOS and later Word for Windows.
But WordStar has a place in my heart as it led directly to my career as a technical writer.
WordStar hasn't been published or updated in more than 30 years, but still has a small cadre of devoted users, among them several successful writers, including George R. R. Martin and Robert J. Sawyer. Now Sawyer has taken it upon himself to assemble and publish an archive site for WordStar 7.0, collecting the program, along with documentation, and useful tools in one place.
I wanted there to be a monument to this, the finest word-processing program ever created. As Anne Rice said, “WordStar was magnificent. I loved it. It was logical, beautiful, perfect. Compared to it, Microsoft Word is pure madness.”
And, I suppose I’m thinking a bit about my legacy, too. Once I’m gone, my literary estate will need to deal with my electronic manuscripts, and my executor should be able to work with them on her own computer rather than just mine. Also, there are countless other writers who are no longer with us who wrote with WordStar, including Arthur C. Clarke; I hope this archive I’ve created will be of use to scholars.
Anyone can have WordStar for DOS 7.0 up and running on a Windows computer in a matter of minutes using this archive; with just a little bit more work, WordStar for DOS 7.0 also runs just fine under Linux and Mac OS.
The Register describes the history of WordStar in more detail in its article about Sawyer and the archive.
WordStar has a long and exceptionally involved history, as the Wordstar.org fan site used to chronicle. It started out on CP/M, was ported to DOS, multiple incompatible programs of the same name launched, and later still ported to Windows. The last ever release was part of an obscure office suite. Sawyer is correct: the final DOS version really is the true classic.
MicroPro, the company behind WordStar, was repeatedly acquired. At one point it was part of SoftKey, which was acquired and became the Learning Company, which was bought by Mattel in what BusinessWeek called "the worst acquisition of all time." As a result, the software business was spun off again and bought by Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep.
Kudos to Robert for taking the time to help preserve a piece of our computing history.
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| Cover for Torus 3 by Taral Wayne |
It's another long weekend up here in the hot and humid Great Green North. July was the wettest month on record for Toronto, beating out October 1954 (of Hurricane Hazel fame) and that weather pattern looks to continue for a while. It's been a bit hectic around here, so I hope to have a quiet and relaxing weekend.
I'll be back on Tuesday. In the meantime, enjoy this tranquil scene along the Talbot River, taken with my Pixel 8 Pro during a family get together last weekend.
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| Along the Talbot River |
Disinformation can have some serious real-world consequences and in the last week I've seen more examples of that.
Movies and TV shows that Nancy and I watched in July. I do these posts mainly so I can keep track of what we've been watching, so the reviews are cursory.
