Omega Point

Catherine’s Guide to Backups, Part 1

So there I was at Best Buy, finally tak­ing care of that “back­ups” busi­ness.¹

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.²

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.

1. Yeah, you know that time that your com­puter died and you lost every­thing and you said, “next time, I’m going to do reg­u­lar back­ups” and then you didn’t? I’m mar­gin­ally smarter than you. [↩]
2. Unfor­tu­nately, my 5-year-old Dell 24″ mon­i­tor has a crappy, crappy USB hub that causes my Mac­Book Pro to ker­nel panic when­ever Time Machine starts–Windows users: that’s the OSX ver­sion of a blue­screen. There’s an app for that. So I lose a USB port; no hub for you, WD My Pass­port! This is actu­ally a good rea­son to use Firewire, come to think of it. [↩]

In which Catherine is even more conspicuous than usual

“Wow, Cather­ine! You’re wear­ing a sling and everything!”

Yeah! I tore my rota­tor cuff¹ 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.

1. Yes, again. [↩]

Catherine is not speaking at SL Pro!

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.

On Haiti and Sarcasm

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.

A decade in the life of…

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?

Mount Pleasant burns down… again.

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.

Better living through labels

“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.¹

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)

1. Remem­ber kids, the secret to not being crazy is to con­stantly ask your­self if you might be. [↩]

Sure, we can put a man on the moon, but we can’t put–oh, right.

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.

Failed slogans: “Woodbridge: the wine that takes 2 hours to choke down”

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,¹ 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.² 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.³

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.

1. Dur­ing my sole visit, I was able to accu­rately dis­cern the height of one of the pre­vi­ous vis­i­tors to the stall. Think about that. [↩]
2. Shop­pers Drug Mart is awe­some. [↩]
3. Inter­ven­tion averted! [↩]

Who is Catherine Winters?

That’s a good ques­tion.