23 Feb
So there I was at Best Buy, finally taking care of that “backups” business.
Since Apple added their super-convenient Time Machine app to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, I’d been meaning to get around to using it. A year later, I bought a simple external USB drive, a Western Digital MyPassport. Easy. Tiny. USB-powered.
So I finally made it to the counter to pay for the thing. No, I hadn’t shopped there before. Would I like to sign up for the Best Buy blah blah card thing? I sure would! And I proceeded to do so. Take that, people behind me in line.
“Oh, my email address? Certainly. It’s ‘catherine’…”
*tap tap tap*
“at”
*tap tap tap*
“catherine–”
*DELETE DELETE DELETE*
“Uh…no. I mean, yes, my name is Catherine. You spelled that correctly. My email address is Catherine at CatherineWinters.com.”
*tap tap tap*
“Catherine with a ‘C’.”
And so on and so forth. So that was pretty fun.
Protip: Once Best Buy security agrees not to call the police if you promise never to set foot in the store again, you can partition your external drive as half Time Machine and half storage, formatting it for convenience’s sake as NTFS, not MacOSX-native HFS+. The NTFS 3G driver for OSX allows you to both read and write NTFS-formatted drives, and you’ll still be able to connect to Windows PCs should need arise.
If you do this, however, you have to be really careful about ejecting the stupid thing properly. If any files get damaged, you’ll lose write access to the NTFS partition and the resulting error message will in no way be helpful. If you suddenly find that you can’t write to an NTFS-formatted disk, plug the thing into a Windows PC and run chkdsk on it to fix the errors.
Congratulations, I just saved you three hours of Googling.
Next Time: In Case of Fire.
23 Feb
“Wow, Catherine! You’re wearing a sling and everything!”
Yeah! I tore my rotator cuff doing extreme sports.
“It’s a good thing you wore your loosest possible jeans to work then, isn’t it? Really tight ones would make going to the bathroom really, really difficult.”
It sure would. Dammit.
15 Feb
Contrary to popular belief, I will not be speaking at the upcoming SL Pro! conference this month. I had some recent questions about that point, so I wanted to clear things up in case you were planning on emailing me:
- To say you are excited to hear I was speaking
- To ask questions about why on earth I would speak at SL Pro!
- Expressing surprise that I have been in Second Life at all in the past 2 years
- Telling me I have no business speaking about anything
- Complaining about a video you saw of me
- Complaining about LSL
- Complaining about a script I wrote in 2004
- Asserting that women who use computers or are literate taint the purity of the Aryan race–yes, even women of colour–and that gays and lesbians should be arrested and sent to concentration camps.
So yeah, I just wanted to clear that up.
16 Jan
Dear CBC Commenter:
I understand that “some of [your] best friends are Haitian” and that you’re only talking about the “bad ones” when you say “Canada will be overrun by gangs and HIV” if we fast-track the immigration process for Haitian refugees. I get that you’re not really a racist, I do.
In fact, I totally agree with your thoughts on it being “their problem” for living on a fault line, or that “those people” should have taken matters into their own hands and risen up against the succession of vile dictators more frequently. Clearly a country with such a rich history of coups could do better. Heck, the Americans were there for 20 years to help out, and where are their thanks?
And let’s face it, a country that poor? “What would they do for us,” indeed?
…you complete asshole.
31 Dec
January 1, 2000
The Y2K bug does not result in airplanes falling from the sky, stock markets crashing, or nuclear missiles launching on their own. Pundits decry the wasteful spending of billions to ensure nothing significant happened. IT departments worldwide sputter in bewilderment. “But! But!”
October, 2000
I come out to a few select friends and family. My parents immediately fight over which one of them is most accepting of it. It later turns out the answer is “neither”.
September 11, 2001
The American Century comes to a close. The subsequent decade sees Western civilization dig its heels in, ineptly seeking security and short-term gains at all costs. I watch CNN for 6 months straight.
October 23, 2001
Apple releases the iPod. I fail to see what the big deal is. Investors disagree significantly on this point.
December 20, 2002
“Second Life? What’s that?” I ask as I click the link. “What a stupid name!”
February 1, 2003
I move to Vancouver on an ill-advised whim. The next three years are…interesting. To this day, I still wake up thinking cockroaches are eating dead skin off my face.
January 14, 2006
Some dude cuts most of my face off and totally goes to town on my skull with power tools. Fortunately, he was a doctor. I can breathe through my nose now.
August, 2006
As a part-time contract LSL developer, I am paid in US dollars. Currency fluctuations force me to give up LSL development in favour of working a minimum wage retail job. I like it a lot better.
November 18, 2006
I manage to get published for the first time. It is not exactly my finest work.
December 20, 2006
I’ve just been told about this new CMS that’s supposed to be pretty good. “Drupal? More like Poo–pal!” I exclaim to a circle of blank, embarrassed faces. Nice.
April 21, 2007
A lab test indicates I may have cancer. Subsequent tests indicate I have stress. I consider remedying both by having alcoholism.
July 22, 2008
My Palm Treo dies. I buy an iPhone. Unfortunately, everyone I know can be divided into two camps: People who already have iPhones and people who don’t care that I am now the coolest person ever.
August 15, 2008
I learn my knee pain is likely to be the result of osteoarthritis. At such an early age, the implication is that I will not be able to walk in 10 years.
September 1, 2008
I am told I do not have osteoarthritis after all. As such, I am likely to continue walking for some time. “Your knees look great,” the doctor says, peering at the x-ray. “Say, how much exercise do you get?”
January 1-Dec 31, 2009
I endure a great deal of bullshit. My friends are kept appraised of the situation–to their dismay.
And that’s what I did during the aughts. How about you?
25 Dec
I just got back from Kingsway and Broadway, the scene of the latest highly suspicious fire in Mount Pleasant.


For now, I’ve uploaded a Flickr set–tags to follow shortly.
With typical Vancouver cynicism, consensus among most of the bystanders (also, news media, city workers, firefighters, etc.) seemed to be that the soon-to-be-constructed condo towers at Kingsway and Broadway and Main and Broadway would be very nice and profitable indeed.
Update: The Vancouver Sun has also posted an extensive gallery of pre-dawn photos.
Update #1: I made a Google Map illustrating what might be in store for Main Street when developers get some of this land rezoned.
22 Dec
“Your family just moves from one crisis to another,” my therapist said.
As an introverted, queer teenager, I’d been forced to talk to a pretty long list of psychologists and psychiatrists. Despite this, I’d certainly had never heard one make a lot of sense before. Psychotic fundamentalist bullshit, certainly, but an accurate observation?
I was shocked. I hadn’t seen her long, but so far, we’d mostly talked about my strained relationship with my parents. And she was right. We totally did. She emphasized to me that she was my therapist, not my parents’, but made no bones about the fact that she thought a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder was pretty fitting for one of them.
Ten years later, I suspect I’ve still got the ‘crisis’ habit, despite my best efforts. My friend S. disagrees, convinced mine is a calm, measured response to the universe’s inherent anti-Catherine nature. Still, my therapist’s words have always stuck with me, as I worry about whether I might have inherited anything more serious than a habit.
On that note, this article from Scientific American was particularly interesting to me, as it discusses biological components of BPD, but also implies that, as with autism, ADD and mood disorders, there exists a “drama queen” spectrum. Neat. Maybe there’s a drama queen Kinsey scale.
“Dangerous Liaisons: How to Deal with a Drama Queen” (via Pete Quily)
14 Dec

Eugene Cernan walks on the moon, Dec 13, 1972
I’m skeptical of the usefulness of manned spaceflight, even as I believe in its long-term necessity. (Besides, should it be necessary for humans to leave Earth, we could get that going on fairly short order. The technology’s straightforward, even if we don’t have interplanetary ships today.)
I was born almost a decade after the last time a human stepped foot on the moon. The Apollo program was Cold War nose-thumbing and sabre-rattling at its most blatant. It was a corporate boondoggle on a scale scarcely seen since. It was a distraction from the horrors of Vietnam and from the waning popularity of two Presidents.
Landing on the moon was also the most impressive thing humans have ever achieved.
Despite all its flaws, I’ve been a big supporter of the space program for my entire life. Building better telescopes and probes is absolutely necessary for the same reasons the Large Hadron Collider is necessary: because if we don’t seek out knowledge about the universe, if we don’t appreciate it, what the hell is the point?
36 years ago today, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt stepped into their lunar module and returned home, the last humans to step foot on another world. That’s not appreciating it, guys.
07 Oct
So there I was, waiting to meet a friend for sushi, when she called to let me know she was running a little behind. What to do, what to do? Why hello, Liquor Store!
This particular BC Liquor Store is located in Vancouver’s classiest shopping establishment, Kingsgate Mall. Home to the Worst Washroom in Canada, Kingsgate also features stores that sell knockoff swords, hooker boots and hospital scrubs, as well as a Shoppers Drug Mart, which is usually the sole reason I go in there. Also, sometimes Payless stocks Catherine-sized shoes. Mostly not.
On a side note, I was just buying a replacement bottle of vodka–my previous one having gone to a good cause: lowering the collective IQ of Vancouver’s Twitter community by about 2%. So this was more of an errand than anything likely to get my 2-day chip taken away.
Being a smart shopper, I generally avoid buying alcohol in the evening because, well, who wants to be waiting in line for 15 minutes? Exactly: bored people.
While standing there, being told by a variety of drunk, jonesing, toothless and urine-smelling people that my hair, hat, paintbrush case and eyes were pretty, I noticed a display in the “impulse purchase” rack promoting Woodbridge cabernet.

The first thing that struck me about this display was not that it was positioned where the gum and Archie comics are supposed to be, but rather that it appeared that some of the other people in line with me had been given a copy of CorelDraw and hired to make wine ads.
I’m actually not really sure where to start. At some point, I’m sure there was a designer, art director, photographer, the whole deal. Sadly, it appears something happened on the way to the printers’. (“I said ‘creative’! Throw some more fonts in there!”)
Possibly the stock photo of the man and woman enjoying ham and pineapple with root beer floats is not the most representative image of “any evening” with “6 friends”, but hey, it looks like a really good ham, yeah?
I do like the fact that the inexplicably wordy “Enter to Win” bubble communicates its relation to the prizes mentioned in the ad’s footer by totally overlapping some of the text with its drop shadow. Pretty effective, right?
In fairness to Woodbridge, Robert Mondavi, and their staff of talented media professionals, the “ENTER TO WIN the following prizes!” bubble does implicate the importer, Vincor Canada. I do also get that $11.50 wine that comes with a chance to win prizes is unlikely to have its reputation besmirched too unduly by some bad drop shadows. However, I don’t think I can forgive the “yes, we’re using Arial” copy:
6 friends
any evening
2 hours enjoying the conversation
1 bottle of Woodridge BY ROBERT MONDAVI
You know, it’s not terrible. That sounds like a pretty good evening, actually. Fun times, am I right? Er, wait, what? One bottle? How big is it? Are we sure this wine actually comes in a bottle?

750mL, 13.0% alcohol.
I see: 750mL. Not being a huge wine drinker, I was a little confused, as this sounds to me like a fairly small amount. In fact, I can recall sharing a single bottle of wine with only one other person. Maybe I am an alcoholic. Is that one of the definitions?
So what gives? The LCBO, Ontario’s counterpart to BC Liquor Stores, describes a “standard” glass of wine as being 5 US fluid ounces (147.9mL) and a 750mL bottle as containing 5 glasses of wine. In fact, the LCBO goes further, providing a handy “Party Calculator” that estimates a more reasonable volume of wine for “6 friends” to chug back whilst “enjoying the conversation for 2 hours” is four bottles.
Sweet. I knew I wasn’t some kind of insane lush. Ad writers: you’re clearly there anyway. Make sure you run your marketing copy by the line at your local liquor or wine store. It’s important.
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