Omega Point

Catherine Winters is not the top hit for “Second Life Vancouver”

This week, the Geor­gia Straight’s Stephen Hui inter­viewed me for Straight.com’s weekly Geek Speak fea­ture.

I just fin­ished read­ing the inter­view and I’m happy to con­firm that I didn’t sound insane or say any­thing ter­ri­bly inap­pro­pri­ate this time. I find I do have some­thing of a ten­dency to do this. If we’ve spo­ken in any capac­ity, you may have con­firmed this for yourself.

Case in point: at the end of the inter­view, Stephen said, “We did a story last Decem­ber on Sec­ond Life and Google Lively. I wish our writer had been able to get in touch with you for it.”

“Oh, am I not the top hit on Google for ‘Sec­ond Life Van­cou­ver’ any longer?” I asked.

I really can’t believe the things that drift out of my mouth sometimes.

But more impor­tantly, no, no I am not the top hit for ‘Sec­ond Life Van­cou­ver’! In fact, I’m not even on the first page.

Cur­rently, the top hit is an arti­cle about the Van­cou­ver Police Department’s recruitment/awareness project under­taken by the Mas­ters of Dig­i­tal Media pro­gram, prior to my employ­ment there at the Great North­ern Way Cam­pus.

That’s only periph­er­ally related to me! Man.

Any­way. You should go read the Q&A at Straight.com!

Critical Pride Part 2: Midnight Mass & the Dyke March

As a fol­lowup to some of the dis­cus­sion result­ing from yesterday’s post com­par­ing Pride and Crit­i­cal Mass, I thought I’d extend the metaphor to my pre­ferred alter­na­tive events: Mid­night Mass and the Dyke March.

Speak­ing per­son­ally, Pride is gen­er­ally not gen­er­ally my thing: it’s loud, it’s hot, and the parade, at least, is not really par­tic­i­pa­tory. I don’t like watch­ing things, I like doing things. One of the things I like doing is the Van­cou­ver Dyke March.

Rather than a spec­ta­tor, I find myself tak­ing the role of a par­tic­i­pant, walk­ing up Com­mer­cial Drive with friends, amongst a fairly laid-back crowd, where one is more likely to see women with strollers than thongs. Hon­estly, I like the fact that it’s a smaller event, as well: for me, there’s a much greater feel­ing of com­mu­nity than I feel at Pride.

But back to Mid­night Mass. (“That’s a Catholic thing, right?”) Some­times! In this post, how­ever, Mid­night Mass is Vancouver’s answer to LA’s Mid­night Ridazz group: a reg­u­lar late-night ride through LA — with a num­ber of reg­u­lars num­ber­ing in the thousands.

When I look at the Mid­night Ridazz site, the first thing that stands out to me is a shout-out to an LAPD offi­cer that escorted them on a recent ride:

The Mid­night Ridazz would like to extend a sin­cere thanks to the LAPD and espe­cially to the offi­cer (whose name we did not get) who recently helped to escort our ride through the streets of Los Ange­les. We are all part of the neigh­bor­hoods we ride and we sup­port the LAPD!

Hear­ing this mes­sage from a loose group with a strong DIY, anti-commercial per­spec­tive is likely sur­pris­ing for any­one expect­ing this to be Crit­i­cal Mass at night, but the Mid­night Ridazz’ site describes the ride as both anti-confrontational and apo­lit­i­cal as well.

Respect for space, dri­vers and the sleep­ing res­i­dents of the neigh­bour­hoods through which they ride is also a core value of Vancouver’s Mid­night Mass com­mu­nity: In this post to Vancouver’s Mid­night Mass Live­Jour­nal com­mu­nity from 2007, one par­tic­i­pant shares his con­cerns about the ride becom­ing too rowdy.

We don’t need to ride 6 peo­ple abreast and block 3 lanes of traf­fic. There are only like 20 odd peo­ple; this isn’t Crit­i­cal Mass. We really should keep over to the side and just take one lane. It is all we need.

I can appre­ci­ate this because it’s not jus­ti­fy­ing, nor crit­i­ciz­ing Crit­i­cal Mass. The point is that this isn’t Crit­i­cal Mass. Rather, the author is just point­ing out the dif­fer­ences between con­duct expected among the small crowd present at Mid­night Mass and what was observed.

“So Cather­ine, if you’re skep­ti­cal of both Pride and Crit­i­cal Mass and a fan of both their smaller, less-flashy coun­ter­parts, does that make you some­one who just hates things because they’re popular?”

You hush. The Dyke March has its roots in some­what more con­fronta­tional pol­i­tics than the Pride parade, orig­i­nat­ing as a protest both in favour of les­bian (and later, bisex­ual and trans­gen­der) rights, as well as against misog­yny within the gay rights move­ment of the 80s and 90s.

(Also, yes, yes it does.)

So, if you’re inter­ested, the Van­cou­ver Dyke March begins walk­ing towards Grand­view Park from McSpad­den Park at 12 noon this Sat­ur­day, August 1st. I hope to see you there!

Mid­night Mass Van­cou­ver occurs every sec­ond and fourth Thurs­day of the month, start­ing from Grand­view Park at 12 mid­night. I am usu­ally in bed by this time.

Orga­niz­ers of both events rec­om­mend show­ing up early to meet fel­low participants.

Critical Pride

On his blog this morn­ing, Buzz Bishop posed the ques­tion: Are you proud of Pride?

In his post, Buzz asks if the imagery we’ll see in Vancouver’s Pride Parade this Sun­day is really the best way to demon­strate that gays are just like every­one else. This reminded me of another famil­iar argu­ment, about Crit­i­cal Mass: are 3000 peo­ple on bicy­cles block­ing com­muter traf­fic really help­ing the image of cyclists?

Hon­estly, Buzz does raise a good point, though it’s hardly a new argu­ment, going back to the exclu­sion of activists we would today con­sider to be trans­gen­dered in the imme­di­ate post-Stonewall era.

Still, as I wrote in Buzz’s com­ments, it’s a debate I feel is pretty well moot at this point. As of last week, it’s been four years since we for­mally enacted gay mar­riage nation­wide here in Canada, an anniver­sary that totally passed me by due to no men­tion what­so­ever in the media. Peo­ple don’t care.

At the same time, though, it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that Cana­di­ans are very cau­tious not to offend. At all. Ever. (We’re very passive-aggressive, though.) The prob­lem I have with this is that it’s fun­da­men­tally dis­hon­est. Frankly, as much as I like not hav­ing bot­tles hurled at my head should I choose to hold my girlfriend’s hand in down­town Van­cou­ver, it would be nice if peo­ple adver­tised their hate and intolerance.

“Cather­ine, stop blog­ging while drunk,” you might say.

No, I’m seri­ous. I want to know who to avoid. I want to know who’s trust­wor­thy and who’s biased against me. It may not be pop­u­larly accepted that we’re all prej­u­diced, but I’m sorry, we are. Frankly, humans are a bunch of xeno­pho­bic jerks. Our abil­ity to pigeon­hole “the other” is why, as I men­tioned to @_lisas on Twit­ter this morn­ing–in the course of explain­ing why I’m freaked out by birds of all things–there’s a sin­gle species of human sur­viv­ing today.

Everyone’s a lit­tle bit racist. Sure, we’re taught that it’s wrong, but I think this leads less to dis­cus­sion and edu­ca­tion, and more to big­ots becom­ing clos­eted themselves.

So… obvi­ously my friends are cool with it. Very few of the peo­ple I know are homo­pho­bic in the least. But I don’t date a lot. I haven’t had a girl­friend in… well, let’s just put it at “a while”. Very few peo­ple I know have seen me totally mak­ing out with girls. Doing so wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily pro­voke a homo­pho­bic reac­tion, more “Cat does PDAs? Since when?”

Would my land­lady be on board with my being gay? Prob­a­bly not, but it’s never come up. She’s con­tent to assume that my extreme height is what has pre­vented me meet­ing a suc­ces­sion of hor­ri­ble, chainsmok­ing boyfriends to bring home to the hottest 300 square foot apart­ment ever known to mankind. But at the same time, it’s not like I would bring boys there if I was into that sort of thing either.

Last year, I remem­ber her express­ing skep­ti­cism about Obama and his abil­ity to han­dle the finan­cial cri­sis, which I pre­sumed to be of the usual Cana­dian vari­ety: “Can you believe he doesn’t sup­port single-tier health­care!?” It turned out that, no, she liked McCain bet­ter. I had def­i­nitely never heard this view expressed by any­one in Van­cou­ver. I real­ize I’m stereo­typ­ing, but there is a bit of a cor­re­la­tion there.

The major­ity of Cana­di­ans are in favour of gay mar­riage, with an over­whelm­ing major­ity at least being on board with some sort of “sep­a­rate but equal” equiv­a­lent. The most con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment of my life­time has stated the mat­ter is set­tled. That may be debat­able, but it’s just not some­thing we’re spend­ing time on.

At the same time as this was going on at Buzz’s blog, there was a con­ver­sa­tion occur­ring on my Twit­ter feed about the VPD advi­sory regard­ing the esti­mated 3000 cyclists par­tic­i­pat­ing in this month’s Crit­i­cal Mass. (Mind you, I’m highly skep­ti­cal about the like­li­hood that so many peo­ple will brave 30° Cel­sius weather just to irri­tate com­muters and climb up on top of the Lion’s Gate Bridge.) Still, the eter­nal “yay, Crit­i­cal Mass”/“stop being ass­holes” debate rages on.

You know what? I sup­port the Bur­rard Bridge bicy­cle lane project — which seems to be work­ing out just fine at this point. (I do agree with Van­cou­ver City Coun­cil mem­ber Andrea Reimer, how­ever: “Enough about the Bur­rard Bridge.”) I sup­port the con­struc­tion of increased cycling and tran­sit infra­struc­ture. We need bil­lions of dol­lars more for tran­sit and mil­lions more to improve bike lanes.

But is Crit­i­cal Mass the way to con­vince other peo­ple to get on board with this plan, nec­es­sar­ily? Yeah, prob­a­bly not. I actu­ally do under­stand the “now dri­vers know how we feel!” argu­ment. But, dude? No they don’t. Now they hate cyclists even more. And the dri­vers who didn’t ever con­sider cyclists much? Yeah, they remem­ber that it took them two hours to make their 20-minute com­mute home after a long week.

And ulti­mately, this acts against my inter­ests as a cyclist.

At the same time, Crit­i­cal Mass looks like a lot of fun. It’s just fun at the expense of other people’s day. And I’m a staunch believer in the idea that we’re all enti­tled to do what­ever we want until such time as what we want inter­feres with oth­ers’ abil­ity to do what they want. Also, sep­a­ra­tion of church and state.

So how do I pair my this with my moral out­rage towards post-Stonewall activists fight­ing for “straight-acting” gay and les­bian rights 30 years ago, or my posi­tion that it was was wrong and ulti­mately self-defeating to delib­er­ately exclude the rest of the LGBT community?

I don’t know. I’m judg­ing his­tory from the per­spec­tive of some­one who didn’t live through it, who just inher­ited the world activists worked towards a gen­er­a­tion ago. And frankly, that’s dan­ger­ous. Today, it may seem obvi­ous that includ­ing bisex­u­als, effem­i­nate men, butches and trans­gen­dered peo­ple has always been the right thing to do, but I have to con­sider the pos­si­bil­ity that I can even assert that posi­tion today because of the fact that they were effec­tively booted out of the move­ment decades ear­lier. Which is actu­ally really depressing.

So, would a 21st-Century-style Pride parade and LGBT move­ment have flown in the early 1970s? The spec­ta­tors and par­tic­i­pants def­i­nitely wouldn’t have been the same, but the fact of the mat­ter is, if you think The Queers are doing things to the soil, nobody’s going to con­vince you oth­er­wise with a float cov­ered in incred­i­bly ripped guys wear­ing thongs.

So maybe that’s not what Pride’s for any­more. Maybe it’s just a party. As Buzz’s com­menter Eter­nal­Cana­dian points out, hon­estly, what’s the dif­fer­ence between Pride and Mardi Gras or Carib­ana?

Edit: Also see Crit­i­cal Pride Part 2: Mid­night Mass and the Dyke March.

Blogathon 2009: What does Marcellus Wallace look like?

So I’m work­ing on a single-serving site to finally make use of my other domain. Func­tion­ally, it’ll be a busi­ness card of sorts, fea­tur­ing a more coher­ent bio, with links to the var­i­ous ways I can be con­tacted online.

Ulti­mately, I sus­pect I’ll roll this site into it.

Any­way, while the art style I’m using is very, very dif­fer­ent than this, both use a nice slab serif type­face called Rock­well. While select­ing it, I came across this this video I liked from a cou­ple years ago: the “Say ‘what’ again. I dare you.” scene from Pulp Fic­tion, in type form.

Blogathon 2009: All in One SEO Pack must be configured.

So ear­lier today, I was informed by all-around nice guy and occa­sional WordPress-handholder Tris Hussey that I ought to be using the All in One SEO Pack on my Word­Press blog.

So I got it, only to dis­cover that all the con­fig fields were empty. Appar­ently ver­sion 1.6.4 has a bit of a prob­lem with not pre­pop­u­lat­ing the fields with the proper strings and escape char­ac­ters. Whoops.

For­tu­nately, Tris found a site that had a giant screen­shot of the actual set­tings here. So in the event that you’re tak­ing advice about the ver­sion 1.6.4 of the All in One SEO pack for Word­Press, do check that out, won’t you? You’ll have to retype every­thing, but still, awesome.

I really don’t want to see this yel­low “All in One SEO Pack must be con­fig­ured” mes­sage at the top of all my posts, and hey, bet­ter SEO stuff would be super, too, so I’m fix­ing that right now.

If you’re not using it, you should be. More hits are bet­ter hits.

(Thanks, Tris!)

Blogathon 2009: What kind of site do you think this is, anyway?

So I was check­ing out my Google Ana­lyt­ics stats just now to gauge the impact Blo­gathon is hav­ing upon my site traf­fic. Answer: lots. Obviously.

How­ever, I couldn’t help but notice a num­ber of inter­est­ing searches by which peo­ple are com­ing here.

Okay, that’s different.

This sums up my day fairly accurately.

Other bewil­der­ing search terms peo­ple used to arrive here include:

• brid­get botelho choco­late sweet deal
• omega.com robot chat
• pen­ta­gon demon
• the omega point that could make the end
• vac­uum ejaculator

You peo­ple. Seri­ously, what the hell?

Blogathon 2009: “Legally, we have to refer to you as Catherine December.”

After hear­ing Dave Olsen talk a bit about the restric­tions being applied — in par­tic­u­lar, to the “pedes­trian cor­ri­dors” being estab­lished here in Van­cou­ver dur­ing the Olympics, I’m con­cerned about the impli­ca­tions for free speech, as well as the poten­tial for these laws to endure after the Olympics have ended.

I’ve been con­vinced for a long time that the biggest threat to free speech in the 21st cen­tury is not, as in past eras, some kind of trend towards author­i­tar­i­an­ism, but rather, intel­lec­tual prop­erty encum­brances. The idea that VANOC can trade­mark lines from O Canada is appalling to me. It’s bad enough that the Olympics have become so branded and mired in the exclu­siv­ity of the brand that they’ve threat­ened Olympia Pizza in Vancouver’s West End, to say noth­ing of the actions taken since then.

Thus, I whole­heart­edly sup­port the choice to the True North Media House in response to the line trade­marked by VANOC.

But I’ve been think­ing about sit­u­a­tions where The Author­i­ties have con­fis­cated mem­ory cards or deleted pho­tos and so, I’m won­der­ing about tech­ni­cal workarounds to this: I would con­sider using an EyeFi card in my cam­era to tether with a 3G phone (say, a jail­bro­ken iPhone or pos­si­bly some­thing with rea­son­able bat­tery life.) to auto­mat­i­cally upload my pho­tos to my web­site or Flickr so that I wasn’t actu­ally stor­ing any pic­tures, I was post­ing them live. Short of jam­ming or Iranian-scale net­work mon­i­tor­ing and packet inspec­tion, there would really be lit­tle any­one could do, assum­ing the images them­selves were legal.

If I take a photo of a poster with the Olympic Rings, is dis­tri­b­u­tion of that photo a trade­mark or copy­right vio­la­tion? Is my use of the words “Olympic”, “2010”, “Win­ter”, or “Games” in this post action­able? No, but what if I’m doing so in protest of some­thing involv­ing one or more of those words?

I mean, I don’t seri­ously con­sider myself at risk for hav­ing the last name “Win­ters”, or for writ­ing under that name, but it’s so impor­tant to explic­itly affirm that I have the right to do so when propos­ing –or pass­ing!– any law that pur­ports to restrict speech.

Blogathon 2009: Dave Olsen & the True North Media House

Dave Olsen stopped by Work­space this evening to cheer some of us on and tell us a bit about the social/indie/citizen media project he’s work­ing on for the 2010 Olympics this year, the True North Media House.

From the TNMH website:

We intend to cre­ate a space in down­town Van­cou­ver to serve as a media resource cen­tre with high-speed inter­net, audio and video pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties, green screen and inter­view space, press con­fer­ence space and workstations.

This project was launched by a group of media mak­ers who cov­ered the past sev­eral Olympic Games as un-accredited media. The orga­ni­za­tion has grown into a exten­sive group of vol­un­teers from var­i­ous indus­tries and bring­ing diverse skills and moti­va­tions to the project.

Nice, right? Dave notes that they’ve been care­ful to iden­tify as a group dis­tinct from anti-Olympic pro­tes­tors as well as the IOC itself. He says that his inter­est is in find­ing the sto­ries the main­stream media can’t or doesn’t cover. He wants to make friends with peo­ple from other coun­tries, hang out with them and enjoy a game or two: this is what breaks down the dif­fer­ences between us and makes it hard to hate peo­ple from “over there”, wher­ever that may be.

And he’s right. Stud­ies demon­strate resid­ing in large, diverse cities, or inter­na­tional travel — even reli­gious pil­grim­age — increases tol­er­ance, respect and under­stand­ing for peo­ple lucky enough to be able to make the trip. And isn’t that what the Olympics are sup­posed to be about?

Unlike a few friends and blog­gers, I’m not a huge sports fan myself. At the same time, I’ve been known to enjoy watch­ing a game, tak­ing in an event. But it’s the sto­ries Dave’s inter­ested in telling that are most inter­est­ing to me. And that’s why I’m going to go to the next TNMH meeting.

Blogathon 2009: WordPress, WordPress, Wordpress!

This is what hap­pens when you spend all day at Blogathon:

• “Cather­ine, do you want any­thing?“
  “No, I’ll get some­thing upstairs at Word­Press.“
  ”…what?”
• “Raul, is that your phone?“
  “No, it’s WordPress’–WordCamp–Work. Space. It’s Workspace’s phone.”

Blogathon 2009: 3 killed, 14 injured. Also, kitty videos!

So this has been bug­ging me for a long time: Digg.com seems to have grown past the point of use­ful­ness lately.

Digg is osten­si­bly a link-sharing site, where the most pop­u­lar sites peo­ple are read­ing and vot­ing upon are pro­moted to the front page. The down­side to this is that pop­u­lar­ity does not equal rel­e­vance. When we sum­ma­rize what’s pop­u­lar, we get this:

• Five Awe­somely Stu­pid Infomer­cial Products
• 150 Dogs Found Dead in Freez­ers in Michi­gan Home
• N. Korea Pub­licly Exe­cutes Chris­t­ian for Dis­trib­ut­ing Bible
• Stretch Limo in San Fran­cisco FAIL
• Ubuntu to make Linux appli­ca­tion instal­la­tion idiot proof

Yeah. It ends up being some mix of scary, depress­ing, and gen­er­ally button-pressing news, as well as silly pic­tures and reviews of expen­sive hand-held elec­tron­ics. Unless you’re the sort of per­son who obses­sively reads and up/downvotes arti­cles on Digg all day –and I’m will­ing to enter­tain the idea that a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of its vis­i­tors are– most of those sto­ries are not use­ful to you.

There’s also many CMSes and tem­plate engines capa­ble of imple­ment­ing a Digg clone. There’s Drigg, which is based on Dru­pal, Blinkk, FolkD… suf­fice it to say, there’s a bunch of them.

Just as oth­ers have argued that Slash­dot has lost rel­e­vance as it’s grown, I think Digg has come to the same point.

Smaller, more focused com­mu­nity sites like Buz­zfeed or Kirtsy, a straight­for­ward Digg clone run by a group of women, are sim­ply bet­ter posi­tioned to com­mu­ni­cate infor­ma­tion to their respec­tive tar­get audiences.

Seri­ously, what’s the value in wait­ing for a site to aggre­gate pic­tures of baby zoo ani­mals that you have to pick through when you can go right to the source?