Circadian Shift

Do you remember that Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs disguises himself as an orchestra conductor and makes life hell for some overblown opera singer? Ever wonder why everyone kept calling Bugs "Leopold"? This is why.

(via Reflections in d minor)

One thing that I didn't mention is that, along with my newly rejuvenated PC, I now have high-speed internet access (yes, I've been on dial-up this whole time). So now I'm like a kid in a candy store, going apeshit with the music downloads.

Currently playing through my nice desktop speakers with big badass subwoofer: this road is glowing, a 3-song EP available for free download in Ogg Vorbis format. It offers a soothing array of synthesized pulses, clicks, and deep swirling textures -- damn fine stuff.

The hosting site is something called the Kahvi Collective, whose stated mission is "to gather and provide free electronic grooves". My hard drive may well fill up very quickly.

(Kudos to disquiet for the linkage.)

Addendum: Also of interest is mixoftheweek #239: Public Handshake -- 50 minutes of blippage and pulsating wierdness from the likes of Stereolab, Mouse on Mars, Boards of Canada, and others.

Firefox has released an incremental update -- version 0.9.1 is available for download.

3259 unread items in the aggregator

I don't remember how I stumbled across it, but only last week I came across A Mixed Blog, which is a project of The Multiracial Activist.

They've provided a bunch of links relating to a recent Canadian Social Trends report that "(u)nions involving partners from different ethnic origins, religions or visible minority groups still represent a low proportion of the total in Canada, but they have gained ground over the last decade".

They further note:

Now would be a great time to contact StatsCan to see if they will allow mixed people to self-identify on the next census, as people can in the UK
Contact Anne Milan (613-951-2756; cstsc@statcan.ca), Housing, Family and Social Statistics Division.

Yeah, you don't often see a space next to the "Other" checkbox on a survey, where you can further clarify what your "Other" is. I only once recall filling in one of those blanks, and that was back in high school.

Here's hoping for more blank space in the future...

Tesugen has put together a "mood board" to help him focus his ideas while designing a website:

I'm a total sucker for having visual stimuli around when I'm working on stuff -- something which has caused some small measure of consternation and bafflement at my current place of employ. Now that I know that this is a recognized tool for conducting qualitative marketing research, I figure I can push the envelope a little more with my cube decoration.

(Thanks to Plasticbag for the link.)

[Addendum 29 June 2004: IAwiki has a nice page dedicated to Cubicle Decoration -- links to all sorts of diagrams and posters of things related to Information Architecture (spotted on del.icio.us)]

• Can You Hear Me Now? All Too Clearly, I'm Afraid

  Because cellphones are tiny, some people assume there's a need to shriek into them. "On a small phone, you can't hear yourself; therefore, you don't think anybody else can hear you," she said.

  (via Nathan's Notebook)
• I Want to Be Alone. Please Call Me.

  Consider the case of Lilia Belkova, a passenger earlier this month on a US Airways flight from Miami to Philadelphia. She refused repeated requests by flight attendants to turn off her cellphone so the plane could take off. Hanging up on her caller, she said, would be rude. Things got so out of hand that the plane had to return to the terminal, but not before Ms. Belkova, 38, had slapped a federal air marshal.

  (via Follow Me Here)

I finally got around to getting one of my long-neglected desktop PCs up and running (I've been relying solely on my notebook PC for far too long), which means that I can also get around to doing things with my other long-neglected websites. Stay tuned.

(Photo courtesy of PixelQuelle.de)

[Addendum: One consequence of having a newly rejuvenated PC to play with is that one does not leave the apartment, even if it's nice and sunny outside. Perhaps I should remedy that. Meanwhile, Graig has cat pictures.]

Dear People Who Ride the Subway:

You are not doing anyone any favours by standing during the ride when there are empty seats available. Why?

1. Nobody can get around you, because you're blocking the aisle.
2. Nobody else can sit down either, because you're blocking the empty seats.

Kindly sit your ass down and get the hell out of the way.

That goes double for you standing there in the doorway.

Thank you,

Jen V.

• ResearchBuzz! points to a Google search scraper bookmarklet that lets you save Google search results as a comma-delimited file
• NewsLookup lets you search for news articles by media type, source region, and other criteria (also via ResearchBuzz!)
• Information Literacy & You is an interactive guide to research techniques and strategies from Penn State University Libraries
• Dave Pollard has been working on a list of Essential Links and Free Downloads; meanwhile, Jason Lefkowitz has compiled The Big List O' Quality Software (via Robin Good)
• it also wouldn't hurt to check out The Spyware Infested Software List (via Meryl's Notes)
• Time has a list of The 50 Coolest Websites that have popped up on the radar over the past year (the impatient/time-pressed may just wish to skip through to the complete list)
• researchers and info-junkies can check out this list of Mozilla keyboardlets, which provide shortcuts for sending queries to various online resources (via del.icio.us)
• then there's this Overview of Windows Graphical Brainstorming Tools to help you deal with the new thoughts and insights gushing out of your brain (also via del.icio.us, courtesy of Seb); a separate page gives an Overview of Windows Outlining Programs to put everything in some semblance of order

I got these in an email, and of course, I must share...

Over at Gaping Void, Hugh's got yet another brilliant cartoon online:

He's also got some great thoughts about it here.

Given that I have to put in an appearance at the office today, I should be sleeping right now. Of course, I'm not.

What else to do, then but play with Mr. Picassohead.

Go look at the sidebar, and/or my links on del.icio.us, why don't you...

In my ongoing avoidance of the contents of my aggregator, I've come across the following linkage about the brain:

• I Sing the Body's Pattern Recognition Machine -- "(The brain) simplifies and organizes, reducing a deluge of sensory information to a manageable sum. From that small sample, the brain produces an effigy of the world, whose features it monitors. Anything that doesn't fit, or signals trouble, draws a response. As it learns, it compares new phenomena and experiences with old ones."
• Decyphering the Grammar of Mind, Music and Math -- "A new field... sometimes called biomusicology, is preoccupied with how music affects the brain. What regions of the brain respond to changes in harmony or melody? Is there a single region that makes sense of music?"
• Gene Expression Shows Human Brains Age At Different Speeds
• Being Bilingual Could Protect Your Brain -- "Being fluent in two languages could protect against age-related cognitive decline, says a study in the June issue of Psychology and Aging." (via MemeMachineGo!)

The rest of my regular online reading has gone to hell in a handbasket, but I might as well kick out some new links on information slinging and wrangling.

• just in case you missed it when I linked it in the sidebar, here's a Q & A (on) Managing Information Overload; also of interest is a related article on Decoding Information-Worker Productivity
• visual types may appreciate this Search Strategy Chart
• ListGarden RSS Generator is program written in Perl for creating and maintaining RSS feeds; you can run it locally on your home machine (PC, Mac, or Linux) or on a web server (via NHS eLibraries)
• Practical Research, 7th Edition is a companion website to a textbook of the same name; the list of "Web Destinations" has all sorts of fun linkage for the discerning information junkie
• eFeeds(sm): Web Feeds from Electronic Journals is a "categorized registry of electronic journals that offer RSS/XML, Atom, or other Web feeds"; at the moment, journal offerings are from the anthropology, biosciences, chemistry, information and library science, medicine, physics, and social sciences disciplines only, but will possibly expand into other fields of academia in the future (via ResearchBuzz!)
• SortByDate is an meta-search tool for various news and blog sources that'll grab lists of the most recent postings by keyword (also via ResearchBuzz!)
• Vivisimo has added a 'Clustering Engine' to its arsenal of search tools; you can play with the clustering search functionality for Slashdot (yet another link from ResearchBuzz!)
• lastly, found on Slashdot (via the afore-mentioned clustering-thingy) is a discussion of Best To-Do List Software that's freeware/open-source and geek-friendly

I currently have 1958 unread items sitting in my aggregator.

The facilities people just mounted a picture on the support column nearest to my cube.

This seems relevant:

.... or have the spammers been extra-super-busy this week?

I checked my e-mail this morning, and there were 75 new messages; 72 were spam.

I've been having trouble remembering what day of the week it is.

(photo courtesy pixelperfectdigital.com)

Villagers with Pitchforks has this handy guide to calibrating non-weekday enjoyment:

My definition of a good weekend: it's a good weekend if all you can remember about your DayJob is where you work.

Which reminds me of a quote from an old Dilbert strip:

Morning Amnesia: Nature's way of keeping you from waking up screaming.

I stumbled across a comic strip yesterday that I had seen on a co-worker's bulletin board a few years ago -- The Adventures of Action Item will ring true with anyone who's been exposed to too much office jargon.

The Nub points to two excerpts from a book called Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruining Our Lives -- part 1 is here and part 2 is here.

Lastly, someone on del.icio.us posted this link to a tale about Downsizing the Human Deadwood.

Carnival of the Canucks #22 is online at PolSpy. The week's theme is Canuck Photography.

Enjoy.

The latest version of Mozilla's leaner, speedier cousin is available for download.

And, while not prominently listed, there is a ZIP file version for Windows (5.99 MB) available -- perfect if one finds oneself using a PC that doesn't allow you to install new software.

(I'm just saying, you know...)

Rum and Monkey has a bunch of Personality Tests & Web Toys that you can waste your time with. Naturally, I availed myself of a few of them:

My japanese name is Fujiwara (wisteria fields) Kumiko (eternal beautiful child).
Take your real japanese name generator! today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.

And

Which Office Moron Are You?
Rum and Monkey: jamming your photocopier one tray at a time.

Also, it's been eons since I contributed anything to the big list. Should you wish, you can go view a list of Things That Have Accumulated in my Daytimer.

Look out the left the captain said
The lights down there, that’s where we’ll land
I saw a falling star burn up
Above the las vegas sands

• On representing the backlog caused by an absence of cerebral RAM... -- "What I need is some way of actually ambiently reflecting my personal weather - without all that clunkiness of actively choosing states of mind. What I actually need is some way of representing that I'm just really really behind..."
• Mindball -- "The brain waves are detected by sensors attached to the headbands which are connected to a biosensor system. The biosensor system, registers the electrical activity and the player who is the most relaxed can make the ball roll over to his opponent’s goal with his brainwaves."

Up there's a heaven
Down there's a town
Blackness everywhere and little lights shine
Oh, blackness, blackness dragging me down
Come on light the candle in this poor heart of mine

• The Blog-Only News Diet -- "See if at this stage in the evolution of blogging, weblogs are an adequate entry point to current events -- if they could replace more traditional forms for people who want to learn what's going on in the world."
• A No-Blog News Diet -- "Most people, by default, rely on a no-blog diet. Despite ever-increasing buzz over blogging, it's still very much a niche phenomenon. Forrester Research last year found that 79 percent of Americans had never even heard of a "blog", and less than five percent of U.S. households had ever read one"

Turn this crazy bird around
I shouldn’t have got on this flight tonight

(With thanks to Joni Mitchell.)

Yeah, been busy/preoccupied/brain-damaged/whatever.

If you haven't been checking the home page, you're missing out on my del.icio.us links; or you can subscribe to them via RSS.

Accidentally yanked out one of my speaker wires from the stereo, and in fumbling to replace it, knocked a bunch of my old notebooks off the shelf. Of course, I started flipping through them.

From an entry dated 10 August 2000:

the best way to deal with someone from marketing is with a wooden stake & lots of garlic

Oh, good lord -- now I'm one of them...

Newly-listed term on The Word Spy:

information environmentalism n. The movement that seeks to reduce information overload and its effects on people's lives.

And...

• Blogs raise the ante in communications-saturated society
• Confessions Of A CKO: What I Should Have Done -- "KM has traditionally been about building and populating databases with useful content, creating portals -- generally, making more information readily available. The consequence has often been to drown workers in hard-to-find information of dubious value just in case they should find themselves in a position to use it."
• The artful logger -- "Smart logging can capture a wealth of compelling data. The trick is in deciding what to log"
• Eyes for Text
• What is information?
• Driving by the seat of your pants -- "When a person is bogged down with information coming at them through their eyes and ears, haptics devices utilise the one channel that can still pump vital data into their brain: touch."

Not only can Microsoft Word be used to produce valuable marketing reports, it can also be used to draw cartoons.

At what velocity would one have to fling a stapler (Swingline #405, full strip of staples) for it to penetrate the human skull?

I've been dodging the issue for months.

There was an article that appeared on Boxes and Arrows back in February about Planning Your Future, which provides a good template for mapping out both your short term and your long term career goals. And I'm going to have to sit my ass down with it this weekend and bash out a few thoughts before Monday, when I'm scheduled for a meeting with my boss.

Yikes.

I don't dislike what I do here on Planet Marketing (although it could be better). But I find I miss being an Information Architect. It's all the more bloody frustrating because I wind up documenting/measuring websites that someone else designed, and the architecture is just fucking brutal.

sigh

Also, I've been saying for a while that le blog here is due for some changes. It's still going to happen, but I've hit upon a few technical snags that I have yet to iron out (it's not difficult -- I just have to make the time to do it). And there is the ever growing backlog of posts in the aggregator.

Anyway, thanks for continuing to read, and especially for your great response to Carnival of the Canucks #20. I'll try to post some stuff on the weekend. Meanwhile, there's always the sidebar.

G'day, and welcome to the 20th edition of the Carnival of the Canucks.

All the other kids had some snappy theme for their Carnivals. I was originally going to go with something centred around Canadian time zones (in keeping with my brain's tendency to pick its own time zone to function in, regardless of where my body might be situated), but it wasn't really coming together.

So instead, I'll just go with my usual schtick of spewing clumps of quasi-related linkage. (Oooooh, bad mental visual. Sorry.)

Anyway, here we go....

The Federal Election

Yep, we Canucks will be going to the polls soon. Not surprisingly, those in the blogosphere have a few things to say about it:

• besides keeping his regular blog going, Richard has set up Paper Vote Canada: "Electronic and Internet voting are a danger to democracy. This blog is dedicated to preserving the existing Canadian paper-based, hand-counted voting system." No doubt, much of the material will also be of interest to our friends south of the border.
• the ever-erudite Dave Pollard surveys the current electorial landscape and provides more linkage of interest to the conscientious voter; Dave also looks at Media Spin And Its Impact On Public Opinion
• Vicki from Cowtown has been watching the universities watching the media watching the politicians, and notes that the rise of "on the campaign trail" media coverage seems to coincide with the popularity of reality TV
• Tilting at Windmills comments on Getting What You Vote For
• Darren Barefoot sees Signs, Signs, Everywhere a Sign, but wonders if they really have much an impact any more
• if that isn't enough for you, Blogs Canada has this handy index of Canadian Political Blogs -- good luck trying to read them all before the election

Food

I don't know why, but I kept seeing all these posts about food which made for good link-fodder:

• in the battle of Krispy Kreme vs. Tim Horton's, Jane points to evidence that the donut from the North seems to be winning
• blork blog offers a quick and easy alternative to pre-packaged veggie burgers: portabella burgers
• David Fleming offers his own cheap, simple, tasty, and healthy tomato florentine soup
• and stacey waspe blogs the recipe for her Mom's Wicked Banana Bread
• An American Parrothead in Canada is missing some Southern Comfort, and thinks Canucks are missing out by not chowing down on goodies like grits and gumbo
• lastly, in the food arena, Graig offers some hard-won life lessons learned this weekend -- don't try these at home, kids

Insights and Helpful Hints

• Bruce Gottfred has figured out that the North needs penguins
• meanwhile, Acts of Volition reveals that following rules makes you stupid
• Eva offers some tips on home decorating, feline style
• Something Up With Which I Will Not Put relates some dinner-time chat that would make a fine conversational icebreaker
• Fred tours the Wychwood TTC Car Barns and learns that you should wash eyes for approx. 15 minutes to remove acid etc.
• This Chick's Life covers The "Art Of Dating" online-style

Business

• here's a first -- a blog post that's appeared in not one, but two Carnivals; I've had search engine marketing on the brain lately (thank the day job), and found Canuck Wayne Hurlbert's advice that content and links are both important in the SEO game to be something worth considering
• Paul Denton covers 10 years of Walmart in Canada
• Robert Paterson looks at the changing workplace culture and suggests that we try unjobbing
• Richard Eriksson has been reading The Corporation by Joel Bakan, so you don't have to; here are notes on Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, and Chapter 5

Oh, Canada

We'll close out with a some bloggings about our home and native land:

• Lynn and Lawrie Stewart are doing a road trip across Canada, and there are pictures aplenty
• should there be any doubt: My Canada Includes Accordion Guy
• it also includes Raging Kraut

Addendum: Argh. Dork that I am, I completely forgot to mention:

• info about future Carnivals can be found on the Carnival of the Canucks home page
• there'll be a special Stanley Cup edition of the Carnival, next week over at All Things Canadian
• the next regular Carnival will take place on the 15th at PolSpy

Any submissions, or inquiries about hosting future Carnivals would be appreciated.