that canadian girl

Latest adventures…

  • Is borrowing free wifi stealing?

    “A man has been arrested after being spotted allegedly sitting in a street with a laptop using someone else’s unsecured wireless connection. Is it immoral to do this?”

    This BBC article made me laugh. It must’ve been a slow day for the coppers in that area for them to resort to arresting cheeky wifi thieves.

    Couldn’t help but pipe up on the topic. I personally don’t think it should be considered a crime to nick somebody else’s open wireless connection. Now, I’m not condoning using your neighbour’s connection to do your illegal bidding or max out the connection on BitTorrent, but the occasional browsing via your phone or laptop when you’re in another area where the nearest legit hotspot is miles away, it’s a pretty inoffensive activity.

    What no one has mentioned so far is the risk of using an open connection. It’s quite possible for someone to setup a wireless connection as a trap for naive people who choose to use it for online banking, online shopping or logging in to email and other accounts. Snap their details on it’s way to the World Wild Web and you’ve got yourself some very useful personal information to pay for your next shopping spree.

    Now, to the real guilty party – If you’re enough of a doofus to leave your wifi open, you should expect somebody to borrow the connection. In fact, if you’re that doofus, pay your router a little visit and go stick a nice little password on there. It takes 5 minutes and it stops the freeloaders.

  • Twitter is ignoring me: Please fix my username

    Since April, I’ve been asking Twitter to fix a problem.

    Twitter doesn't love meBet I’m not the only one coming up with bug fix requests and ideas. They must have bug fix requests coming out their ears. I appreciate that. But they’re ignoring me completely. So I’m going to publicly stamp my feet and have a bit of a strop, and hope something happens.

    I signed up for Twitter in December 2006. At that point, I selected the username “thatcanadiangirl” because I’m original like that. The system didn’t complain about it and I went on my merry way using Twitter. Later on, I tried to change some of my settings, but this wasn’t possible. Documented on Flickr and emailed Twitter flagging up the bug. No response.

    I coped with it figuring changing my full name wasn’t exactly important. But curiosity killed the cat and a few months later, I figured out I was now able to change my settings! So woohoo, go add my real name in there or a URL or something!

    Twitter username brokenBut nooo, Twitter had fixed this the lazy way. By truncating my username to 15 characters with no regards for us existing 16 char users. Umm, do I cut a foot off your body because you’re too tall to fit in my front door?

    So now my username is “thatcanadiangir”, without the L. I probably miss half my @replies but Twitter isn’t fussed. No replies to emails I sent again.

    So here I am, with an incomplete username and no response from my otherwise beloved Twitter, sobbing into my beer, alone in the corner.

  • iPhone and AT&T: No more itemised bill for iPhone users

    An update from i-Justine on her iPhone bills. No more 300 pages bills!

  • Two riffs on learning

    Learning to cook

    Back in March, I wrote about my disbelief at Britain can on average only cook 4.1 meals. I’m still adamant that this stat has got to be wrong, my brain won’t let me accept that people can have such a creativity lobotomy that they’re unable to put 3-4 ingredients together in a pan to make something vaguely edible.

    Yet, in the past few days, I’ve heard enough conversation from otherwise very clever people (most of them anyways) to convince me that the unfortunate reality is as grim as The Scotman’s research described. I then watched one of my favourite podcast trainwrecks, otherwise known as Ctrl+Alt+Chicken, where Alex & Heather try to make Chicken Cordon Bleu and massacre the chicken, to say the least*. These people speak of Cooking (with a capital C) as a mystic, black hat Art, to which only select people are privy.

    HELLO!? This isn’t Scientology. You don’t need to put 10 years of your life and a few million bucks to find the Truth. That’s simply NOT what cooking is.

    The truth is that cooking is all about experimenting. I consider myself an excellent cook, but I still poopoo the occasional meal. I’ll make a dish which ends up too salty, slightly undercooked, too watery or contains some oddly-matched flavours. Does it matter? Nope! It’s never been such a failure that we’ve had to resort to takeaway menus, but yes, mistakes happen. It just means that the next time, I’ll have a better idea of how to pair flavours and how long to cook the dish for.

    Learning to take on new projects

    If cooking is about creativity, experimenting and watching closely for results, then it’s a whole lot like brewing up any new project, isn’t it? Except in the latter, you don’t get tomato sauce splattered all over your new white top.

    New projects are all about leaving the known comfort zone, look at what others have done, and then take a different tangent. Keep it simple the first time if you’re nervous about it. Sometimes (often?) it’ll totally bomb, but if you clean up the war wounds and move on, one day, your experiment is bound to turn into an absolute chef d’oeuvre. Too many people seem to be holding back for fear of failure.

    So whether it’s cooking or creating your own business, web app or clothing shop, get excited and try something new. I’m sure it makes life a whole lot better.

    [* I’m really ragging on Ctrl+Alt+Chicken but they’re a laugh to watch, so if they ever read this, I hope they won’t take offense at my comments and let me buy them a beer if the occasion arises.]

  • Apple TV, Diggnation and chicken stories

    A few weeks ago, we bought an Apple TV. For those who aren’t familiar with it but have used a recent Mac, just picture it as Front Row on steroids. And on your TV.

    Apple TV

    The first logical thing to do was to put as much music as possible on its weighty 160GB hard drive, so that we could listen to it without worrying about having a laptop nearby to control the music being piped out by an Airport Express into the lounge stereo. While that was good, it became about 10 times better once we added our own pictures instead of the handful of default flower pictures Apple sticks on the Apple TV!

    Every time we listen to music in the lounge now, we’re treated to a medley of pictures going back as far as ten years. “Who on earth is that?” “Was my hair seriously that bad?” “Wow, she was drunk at that wedding…” It’s a laugh really. As long as there are no cheeky snapshots of me in only my underwear, post-sunburn on holiday, trying to take a tank top off while causing myself the least amount of pain possible. *grumbles*

    But in the past few days, we’ve discovered a whole new side to the Apple TV. Video podcasts. I’m not new to podcasts at all, or videocasts. But watching them on a normal tv instead of the corner of your computer while you’re working brings them to life.

    My video podcast diet recently has mostly consisted of:

    • Diggnation episodes: The format is two guys sitting on a sofa (Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht), some beers, two laptops, a bunch of ranty stories. Somehow, it should suck. Yet, it’s oddly entertaining.
    • Some Ctrl+Alt+Chicken which can be described as non-cooks cooking, drinking and generally risking food poisoning. Or more succintly, as something resembling a TV trainwreck. But I still like it.
    • Some surreal TikiBar TV: Still can’t figure out who’s making money and how out of this show. It’s plain weird.
    • All topped off with a few eps of the Merlin Show which hasn’t had me as riveted to the TV as I had hoped. I’ll give it another chance though.

    You can download any of these via iTunes. And you can feel free to recommend any of your own favourite video, or audio-only, podcasts!

  • SXSWi panel picker

    SXSWi logoIf you’re thinking of attending South by South West Interactive (lovingly known as SXSWi by the regulars) in March 2008, why not make yourself heard and go have a pick of your favourites in the Panel Picker? I’ve gone through all 683 events, selecting all the interesting mobile, search, blogging or social/community panels.

    The festival is in Austin, Texas, which isn’t next door, that’s a given. But from all the feedback I’ve had, it’s absolutely worth attending. Now fingers crossed I get to attend.

    Who’s going with me?

  • iMovie '08: What the bleep!?

    Having just read David Pogue’s review of iMovie ’08, I think it’s safe to say it doesn’t appeal to me and I won’t be rushing out to get a copy. Going from a somewhat buggy but generally nicely featured video editing application to what sounds like a painfully basic piece of software doesn’t strike me as such a great idea.

    IMovie ’08, on the other hand, has been totally misnamed. It’s not iMovie at all. In fact, it’s nothing like its predecessor and contains none of the same code or design. It’s designed for an utterly different task, and a lot of people are screaming bloody murder.

    The new iMovie was, as Apple admits, designed primarily for throwing together movies quickly. It lets you scan through a clip to see what’s in it, isolate the good parts, and rapidly drop them into a sequence.

    But iMovie 6 was just as good at those tasks; you could scrub through, chop and drag its clips just as easily. Meanwhile, iMovie ’08 is incapable of the more sophisticated editing that the old iMovie made so enjoyable. The old iMovie offered the essential tools of professional programs like Final Cut Pro without the cost or complexity.

    The new iMovie, for example, is probably the only video-editing program on the market with no timeline—no horizontal, scrolling strip that displays your clips laid end to end, with their lengths representing their durations. You have no indication of how many minutes into your movie you are.

    What more can I say? Other than “Bollocks to that, I’m sticking to the old one!”

  • SAD in Summer

    This country is completely bonkers this summer. We’ve had so little sunshine, no opportunities for BBQ and a ridiculous amount of rain, I’m finding myself feeling like I’ve got some sort of Seasonal Affective Disorder, causing me to feel completely knackered and sleepy!

    I would love a sunny weekend, hot enough for shorts and a BBQ!

    At the moment, I just want a kitten to curl up with and a good book. (As an aside, I finished reading Harry Potter last night. Shame it’s all over now, it’s such easy holiday-style reading!)

    So yeah… cup of green tea and some music will do.

  • Ecto 3 Alpha

    I’m getting unhealthily excited over Ecto 3 coming out in the near future. I’ve tried to use Ecto as offline blogging app before, but there were a few deal-breakers for me in the way it dealt with my messy updating of drafts on the web or offline in Ecto, so I’ve always ended up going straight back to WordPress’ online editor and plain TextMate files while offline.

    However, Ecto 3 is now in alpha (download at your own risk) and Chris Messina documented it nicely in screenshots. I’ve only just downloaded it so it’s too early to say whether my deal-breakers have been mended, but I’ll be having a play with it as soon as I have some more spare time…

  • 30+ Tools for working with WordPress

    Now that I spend hours a day looking at the WordPress admin section, I’ve started using a few plugins that make my life easier, like ViperVideoTags and a Technorati tagging tool, which I’ll detail later on.

    But in the meantime, here’s a useful list of writing tools for other WordPress users. Spotted this in Mashable and thought it was too good not to share.