For rebeckler

Because another one is scheduled to roll into town tomorrow and to answer rebeckler's question of what's a chinook? (I think she had at least four ???? though, and yes, you guessed right that it's a wind), I dug up the following:

According to the Weather Network:

The term Chinook comes from an Indian word which means snow eater. The Chinook wind is a warm, dry wind that descends the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains and sweeps across the foothills and other parts of Alberta. When it moves over heavy snow cover, it can melt and evaporate a foot of snow in less than a day. Also, the temperature rises sharply, sometimes over 20 degrees Celsius in one hour. On average, southern Alberta gets 20 to 30 Chinook days per year.

Wikipedia's entry for Chinooks in Alberta is interesting, including the following facts:

In most recent winters (since the 1980s), chinooks and warmer weather have all but banished winter to just a few spells of sharp cold of one or two weeks, and some midwinter months have averaged high temperatures over 5°C (41°F), similar to the West Coast of British Columbia, where Canada's warmest winters are found.
In Lethbridge, chinook winds can gust in excess of hurricane force (120 km/h or 75 mph). The winds gusts can be strong enough to shatter car windows through air pressure differential. On November 19, 1962, the winds there gusted to 171 km/h (107 mph) in an especially powerful chinook.
In Pincher Creek, the temperature rose by 33°C (60°F) in one hour in 1962. Also, trains have been known to be derailed by chinook winds there.
Calgary is also well known for getting many chinooks, as the Bow Valley in the Canadian Rockies west of the city acts as a natural wind tunnel funneling the chinook winds.

For some, the chinook is a mixed blessing. While it's great to get relief from the cold, persistent chinook winds can fool plants into germinating thinking that spring has arrived, and the changes in air pressure can negatively affect people. Not to mention all that melting snow creates a heck of a lot of slush! The Mountain Field Guide notes some of the effects the Chinook winds can have on people and the landscape:

Relief from sub–zero temperatures
Highly strung people may begin to shake or fidget
Susceptible people may get headaches or suffer nervous disorders
Psychologically, many people fell “better”
Wood may split due to extreme dryness
Fire hazards are increased
It may cause violent grass or forest fires, or cause small fires to spread quickly.

You can tell a chinook is around by the distinction chinook arch that forms in the sky above Calgary, which looks especially nice at sunset.

The newest thing in computing?

I've been reading Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital, a book that's been recommended to me by several people, so I thought it was time to pick it up. I found the following passage interesting:

The general interface with personal computers has been treated as a physical design problem. But interface is not just about the look and feel of a computer. It is about the creation of personality, the design of intelligence, and building machines that can recognize human expression... The challenge for the next decade is not just to give people bigger screens, better sound quality, and easier-to-use graphical input devices. It is to make computers that know you, learn about your needs, and understand verbal and nonverbal languages... The burden of interaction today has been placed totally on the shoulders of the human party. Something as banal as printing a computer file can be a debilitating exercise that resembles voodoo more than respectable human behaviour.

Having recently purchased a replacement computer with Windows Vista (the only choice outside of going with Mac), this debilitation is making itself felt. For example, our (new!) printer does not have the drivers for Vista, meaning we cannot print directly from the new computer!

Sad thing is, Negroponte wrote that passage in 1995. We're now past the decade during which he proposed that we make computers more useful, and they've become more of a burden on the human user than ever before! At least with my C64, I knew exactly what I was getting and if I didn't know how to get it, I knew I had to go back to my BASIC code book and figure it out. Now? I haven't a clue. I can turn in on, then I usually just hope for the best!

Innocence and precocity

Answers provided by Grade 2 students:

What's the difference between moms & dads?

1. Moms work at work and work at home & dads just go to work at work.
2. Moms know how to talk to teachers without scaring them.
3. Dads are taller & stronger, but moms have all the real power 'cause that's who you got to ask if you want to sleep over at your friend's.
4. Moms have magic, they make you feel better without medicine.

What does your mom do in her spare time?

1. Mothers don't do spare time
2. To hear her tell it, she pays bills all day long.

What would it take to make your mom perfect?
1. On the inside she's already perfect. Outside, I think some kind of plastic surgery.
2. Diet. You know, her hair. I'd diet, maybe blue.

If you could change one thing about your Mom, what would it be?

1. She has this weird thing about me keeping my room clean. I'd get rid of that.
2. I'd make my Mom smarter. Then she would know it was my sister who did it and not me.
3. I would like for her to get rid of those invisible eyes on the back of her head.

CYA

So I had this long rant about my job that I - thank god - saved as a draft after writing because, well, that's what drafts are for - to let you cool down before posting or sending something disastrous. Now the post itself wasn't particularly disaster-causing and not even very caustic. It was even rather nicely constructed, and dare I say a tad witty... of course I can say that, you've never seen it so you have to take my word for it!... But I decided it prudent not to publish it.

Suffice it to say I've been busy... and not always in a good way.

Today I did something new. Do I dare admit it?

Sure, why not?

Today, I created a series of powerpoint slides. There. Now I've admitted I've never used powerpoint before. Yes, I know. Everyone has used powerpoint. Even little children know how to use powerpoint. Your dog probably scratches out his requests for walks and doggie treats using a powerpoint presentation complete with sound and graphics.

But I've never used it. That is, till today.

It's a pretty nifty program, though it is constraining in its formatting, regardless of how many choices you're offered. That's part of the reason I've never used it before. I've sat through too many powerpoint presentations that bored me out of my mind. I never wanted to inflict such boredom on others.

In an effort at full disclosure, I wasn't actually creating a presentation today. What I was doing was creating individual slides that I could then save as JPEGs so that they can be mated with the video and audio files we'll be producing for our latest project. So I didn't mess with slide transitions, or animations, or sound, or anything like that. But for a first time, it was kinda fun. Maybe I'll have to rethink my aversion to the program...

Fainting Goats

It was one of those 'you have to be there' moments, but these fainting goats came up in conversation at a party last night. So I thought I'd share them.

Snow is definitely worse than sand

Certainly as a vacation destination, I'll take sand over snow pretty much any day. But I suppose that's because I grew up in snowy climates.

But that's not what I was thinking about today. I was thinking that snow is definitely worse to run in than sand. Easier than in sand above the tide line, but definitely more difficult than sand below the tide line. Not only is the snow an obstacle and a shifting surface that you have to negotiate, the additional challenge of snow is that the snow we have now has been subjected to wind and sun since it fell, so it has a little bit of a crust on the top. But it's not thick enough that you can run on top of the snow. So when you run through it, the crust makes the slippage of your foot as you break it unpredictable. First you lurch to the left, then the right, then the heel, then the toe. It breaks your cadence and makes for a challenging run, that's for sure.

I was so excited about the possibility of running outside again. A chinook has finally blown in after some below seasonal temperatures, and the snow has stopped falling after a week of constant shovelling. The city here is really pretty good about clearing the walking trails, so I figured it would be the perfect day to go.

Alas, the city very efficiently cleared the snow several days ago, but the south end of the canals is all exposed land - housing developments are non-existent or just beginning - so there was a lot of drifting. At first I hopped over the drifts, actually enjoying myself, but then I turned a corner and the pathway was nothing but drifts! After ten minutes of slogging through them to come to a clear path again, I came to the conclusion that I'd rather run on the beach, than in snowdrifts!

Famous Puppet Death Scenes - Scene: The Feverish Heart

We spent our weekend pleasantly, celebrating the mid point between birthday and Valentine's day. This production was one of the activities for the weekend.

Yes, I realize this is the third time in the last half year that I've blogged about a puppet production. It's really just coincidence, since I'm not deliberately seeking out puppet productions. This one - Famous Puppet Death Scenes - is a hard one to describe however, so I leave you to just enjoy the clip. We were delighted with the show, but it is so unique that there's no frame of reference to use when describing it. I first heard about it through an article in the newspaper describing how it was a big hit when it played in NYC, and since it's a homegrown group, that seemed all the more impressive.

I really do wonder why it seems puppets are so attractive right now - perhaps it has something to do with their materiality, or with the presence of the puppeteer within the production. I don't have plans to see any more puppet shows though, so you should be spared further puppet talk at least.

Hiatus

I seem to be in an impromptu hiatus on this blog. It hasn't been intentional. Mostly it's a result of adjusting to the difference between working in the corporate world and the academic one. In the academy, I know exactly when my busy times will be, when I have to complete tasks, and what my weekly schedule will be like (give or take a meeting or two) at the beginning of every semester.

In the corporate world, even though I'm a contractor, I need to maintain a good relationship with my contractee, who is essentially my boss. I'm finding that he operates on a much more immediate basis than I do, often telling me only days ahead of time about a project deadline (like he did this week). That makes it difficult for me to calculate my workload more than a few days ahead of time, which is something I'm not used to. So it's a bit of an adjustment.

Since boss man is out of the country for the next three weeks, I will hopefully have a bit more control over my life and get back on track with my academic work as well as blog posting... but I suppose only time will tell.

So my apologies if you've been logging on and seeing the same thing over and over. It should improve over the next few weeks.

Stop right there!

Gene Police

You!!
Out of the pool!

Blown away

The weather channel is saying the gusts of wind outside are hitting 75 km/hr (that's almost 50mph for those metric-illiterate). I suspect out here near the edge of the city, we're feeling it even more than people protected by the buildings.

I thought I was just that tired. But no, those gusts are strong enough that the house actually shakes with a few of them. Even my computer monitor is wobbling on the desk, the wind is blowing so hard.

Last week, I tried to run in this kind of weather - the gusts were only 60kph, but even then, I felt like I was running fully steam uphill when I was going into the wind, even though it looked like I was almost standing still. Made me feel old and out of shape. At one point when I rounded a corner and the wind angle changed, it almost ripped the ear buds of my mp3 player right out of my ears!

Today? Thank god for the treadmill. It's boring, but at least it won't steal my breath away!

Flying beer cans

Got directed to this cartoonist's site: Pearls before Swine by a friend. I especially like Friday's cartoon - hope you enjoy it too!

Passport woes

So, the rumours you've been hearing about long wait times at Canadian passport offices? Yep, they're all true.


Stood in line 4 1/2 hours yesterday to try to get new passports for myself and two kids since they expire in a couple of months and we'll be travelling within that time. It's supposed to be easier to get it if you fill out the application form online first, but you can't do that for a children's application, which I had of course. Also, the lineup for the south office is supposed to be shorter, but because the building is smaller, it snakes outside for most of the time, so I went to the downtown office, where although I waited a bit longer, I was inside the whole time. Which was nice because there was a wicked wind blowing that day that would've felt really chilly.

The thing that surprised me the most about the line was not so much it's length (though that was a bit shocking) as the people in it. There were a few expressions of the wow-this-line-is-really-long kind, mostly at the beginning when we first started lining up, but other than that, everyone waited pretty patiently. Sure, the kids were running around, bored out of their minds (and I forgot my mp3 player, so had to listen to ALL of it), but aside from a few conversations here and there, people mostly waited patiently for the line to move forward.

It got me thinking about the last time I was in a government office waiting for a long time. I'm not sure if it was the Social Security office, or the DMV, but either way, the waiting people there were certainly much more boisterous about the whole affair. I know the last time I was at the DMV, there was one gentleman who kept following us around, talking to us, and another who was demanding rather loudly to be served (and who was promptly escorted out by security).

Although there was a sign at the passport office telling people that if they were harassing they wouldn't be served (much like the signs at the DMV) the mood of the crowd was such that I would've been surprised to hear anyone complain. Mostly, people stood quietly, or talked amongst themselves.

Now maybe the comparison of the group at a Social Security office and a passport office isn't fair - there isn't probably much of an overlap between the two groups. But at the same time it makes me wonder if in addition to spelling and pronunciation, we also inherited the British facility for queuing.

The language may be different, but we're really talking about the same thing

I had a meeting for work today that wasn't quite what I expected or was used to. It actually went better than I thought, mostly because the person who I thought would create the most waves seems to have not read the document I sent out at the beginning of the week. I'm not one to get offended if you don't read what I write, so it worked out well.

It was the biggest meeting I've been in to date - 6 of us - which might not seem like much, but most of my meetings have been with 2 or 3 people at the most. I wasn't looking forward to it because I suspected it would drag on - it did - but it consoled me in some ways because it quelled some misgivings I'd been having about this job.

I took the position because I had the experience to pull it off and I thought it was close enough to my career goals that I could actually include it on a cv. (Even at my most creative, I don't think I could make coffee schlepping at Tim Horton's into a line on the cv) But much of the work I began with was mundane or seemed far removed from academia.

But today's meeting made me realize it's really just a question of a different vocabulary. It was a pre-production meeting, where we were hammering out the aesthetics and optics of how we wanted to present the content that I'd developed for our project. We've already done one project with the same host website, so it needs to look similar to the existing project, which gave us a basic framework to start from. But we still needed to think about how this particular project will demand a different approach, and what tone we want to take with it as well as what combination of text, image, video, and audio we wanted. As we talked about it, I began to realize that our talk of users and scripts was really the same thing as audience and voice that we talk about in academia.

I had been afraid that my work for this company might be perceived as lying too far afield from my academic work, so I was pleasantly surprised to realize much of what we were talking about was the same things we talk about when writing within the academy. We just use different words.

True, I've really only talked of audience and voice in the context of teaching writing composition to undergrads, and not really in terms of my own scholarly work, but there's something to be said for paying attention to audience and voice in scholarly work that I don't think we get much instruction in as graduate students. Perhaps that's because we're supposed to know this and I'm the only one who doesn't. But if recent research, like the article in this year's edition of Profession put out by the MLA is any indication, I'm not the only one who isn't taught this stuff. Maybe it would make moving from student to scholar a clearer transition if we did talk more about audience and voice in the context of say, the dissertation. But that might be a post for another day.

What's in a name?

Did you know that Dolly the sheep - you know, the one that was cloned - was named after Dolly Parton? Apparently one of the stockmen who helped deliver her came to name her after the chesty country singer because Dolly was cloned from a mammary cell. One of my coworkers found this out recently and couldn't wait to tell someone. My boss's question about how my dissertation on clones and cyborgs was going gave him the perfect opportunity.

...I wonder if there's a place for Dolly in my dissertation...

All dried up

Not much blogging. Plenty happening. Just don't know how to blog it.

Instead, some retro-blogging.

Last year today, I was contemplating oldest daughter's plans to leave.

The year before that, I had just heard my grandmother died.

And the year before that, I apparently thought readers might be interested in what I was reading myself.

Time flies

It's hard to believe that this day last year I was preparing to write my exams. It seems both longer than a year ago, and shorter at the same time.

I remember even before my exams being very excited about the possibility of working on my own stuff, and I suppose that's part of why it 'feels like it was so long ago' because I haven't been working on my own stuff - I've been trying to slog through stuff other people want me to do in order to get their approval so that I can finally do my own stuff! At least the end is in sight.

But at the same time, work is starting to really heat up and it's demanding more of my time these days. On the other hand, I think we're finally getting the grad conference planning under control, so I hopefully can spend a bit less time emailing the other committee members about that.

It is true that work expands to fill the time available, isn't it?

Spiders On Drugs

The Hinterland Who's Who is one of those childhood memories that anyone my age will remember from Canadian tv, but this one puts a new twist on an old (and tired) educational media spot.

Strings

A while back I wrote a post about storyworlds, mentioning one of the key features of a fictional storyworld being internal cohesion. In any non-realist narrative, the rules of the world have to be consistent within the story frame. We all know the frustration of watching movies or reading stories where something happens that's difficult to believe because it lies outside the realm of possibility.

When you're making a film with puppets, well, then your storyworld has to not only be consistent from the perspective of its narrative, but you have to respect the nature of the medium - the puppet - in telling the story.

The Ronnie Burkett show we saw a few months ago, while it didn't foreground the puppeteer, kept him in the audience's view, so that as an audience member, you always saw him and could not forget about the presence of the puppeteer. You saw Ronnie at all times, so you were hyper aware of his movements, and at some points in the narrative, I found myself following the puppeteer, watching him create the show, rather than watching the puppets themselves and attending to their storyline.

During that show, when Burkett got some strings tangled, the audience could see his embarassment, but also delighted in his deviation from the script by inserting a comment about the tangled strings into the mouths of the puppets themselves. Had the puppeteer been hidden during those comments, they would've ruined the storyworld created by the narrative by reminding the audience of the puppeteer. As such, they simply reinforced the audience's awareness of his manipulation of the puppets. In some ways, Burkett's show mirrored metafiction's foregrounding of the author as producer of the text e.g. Calvino's If on a Winter's Night.

Strings (2004) is a movie without a terribly original plot line - royalty, betrayal, love, a quest, death - but it uses puppets to tell the story. What is unusual about the movie is that it, like Burkett's show, does not attempt to hide the strings attached to the puppets (though unlike Burkett's show, we do not see the puppeteers).

Instead, the narrative uses the strings as a way of creating the storyworld.

The strings of a puppet are essentially its lifeline. A puppet cannot come to life without strings, and the realism of a puppet's movement depends on the skillful manipulation of those strings by the puppeteer. In this story, the strings are not just metaphorically the puppet's lifeline - they are its lifeline within the world.

When a puppet's head string is cut, it immediately dies, though puppets can also die if enough of their other strings are cut. But being puppets, with interchangeable parts, they also have the advantage over humans when it comes to regeneration. One of the early scenes in the movie shows the prince having his hand string cut off. All he needed to do was call down to the dungeon, have a hand removed from a slave, and attach it to his body in place of the broken one.

The storyworld rules with the strings going high up into the heavens, beyond sight, mean that a puppet can never go underneath something. So their gates are like reverse portcullises, rising up out of the ground to a height that no puppet could jump, and no puppet can traverse past because the bar prevents their strings from moving forward.

Consequently, all of their buildings are roofless, and with the rain, you can tell who are the oldest puppets because the wood of their bodies shows their long exposure to the elements. Also, in the dungeon, puppets are locked up by dropping them through a grid, so that they can't move outside the lines of the grid.

When a puppet is born, its mother develops a second set of strings that are intertwined with her own. Meanwhile, a baby is carved in preparation to receiving those strings - in the movie, it is the father who is carving the baby, but since it's the only birth we witness during the story, the narrative doesn't indicate whether other people might also be charged with carving the baby. When it comes time, the mother can tell, and she needs the assistance of someone else. The strings that are intertwined with her own life strings start to loosen and that other person - the midwife - grabs the strings before they break (they're fragile at this point) and inserts them into the carved baby. The strings then change color and thickness, as they carry life to the child. When all the strings are attached, the child is alive.

The film is an excellent of example of a storyworld axiom: puppet strings are really its lifeline and extend high into the heavens, that is then carried to its logical conclusion in every aspect of that world. It's like imagining if everyone could change their gender whenever they want to, or that dragons can fly - the axiom is adhered to in every aspect of the character's lives. It's a very involved storyworld, and even though the plot is particularly clever, it's worth watching just to see how the plot unfolds within the confines of the storyworld's rules.

Unintended effect

In a strange kind of Eisensteinian montage moment, I found myself making connections between two back-to-back commercials that I doubt the advertisers had intended.

First, a commercial from Fidelity Investments about rolling all your old 401ks into a single IRA to maximize your retirement savings. This was immediately followed by a commercial from Osteo-BiFlex featuring a 77 year old woman who still works as a waitress. She says, "I’m 77 years old and I work as a waitress. I work 10, 12, 14 hours a day… I just couldn’t do it without Osteo-BiFlex."

Maybe she wouldn't have to do it if she'd listened to Fidelity...

Dissertation fix

I've been jonesing for my dissertation lately, and the Christmas break finally gave me a chance to work on it.

Yep, I'd say it was a bit of a compulsion, and having the chance to put other projects aside (and work) for a week and spend some time reading the stuff I really want to read was such a relief, the only thing I can compare it to would be how it would feel to have a cigarette again. Getting back to the stuff I want to read might not quite be that lightheaded, relaxed feeling I would get from a puff, but it sure did feel good.

Not that I haven't been doing work on the dissertation, but for the last two months, I've been responding to a reviewer's request to add material that holds little interest for me, and it's been tough going.

It's also taken me a long time to adjust to my new line of work. It's not that I'm working a lot, but that I'm unsure of what I'm doing, so I spend a lot of time thinking about it when I'm not actually working, which eats into time I could be spending reading things I really want to read!

So I finally got to read some criticism on cyberspace, and a book about Star Wars (only marginally relevant, but on my to do list) and I felt reinvigorated about the dissertation. Now I even feel like I can slog through the rest of the material my one reviewer told me to read 'cause I'm remembering what I'm in this for.

So one of my new years resolutions? Not to quit this compulsion, but to encourage it. Unconventional for a resolution, but if it works, who am I to worry about protocol?