Strategic advantage

Being a programmer (or "programmeuse," in local parlance) has certain perks.  One of them being that you can crunch your own data without too much fuss...or even using Excel in ways that the laws of Mathematics and Boolean Logic never intended.  Another being that you can help other folks do the same--with the added bonus that they think you're a genius.

But one definite downside is the frustration of discovering broken code...even when it's code that you didn't write.  Particularly code that's broken in front of the whole Internet 'n Everybody.  By which I of course mean websites with glaring errors.  From the standpoint of someone browsing the site in question, it's easy to blame the lazy/incompetent web developer(s). 

As a programmer, however, one has more tools available for sussing out the real problem.  One only has to submit the "Contact" form (assuming it works) or an email (assuming it doesn't) to let the website owner know:

1. Hey, there's a problem with your website.
2. Here is the specific error message (or bug).
3. This is how you reproduce the problem yourself.
4. (The biggie) This is likely the root cause.  Debug here first.

I realise that no one truly enjoys learning about a problem, even after accepting Dr. Demming and the doctrine of continuous improvement into her/his heart.   And certainly we live in a world where anecdote, opinion, and ideology carry too much weight in the face of data, experience, and even logic.  The person on the receiving end of that feedback has no way of knowing whether I'm Sir Tim Berners-Lee or whether I've just written my first "Hello, World" web page (if even that).  I get it.

But is a "Thanks for letting us know that you had a problem; we're looking into it" too much to ask?  You'd think not.  But then you'd be wrong.

Please don't think that I'm sulking.  This isn't the first time that this sort of thing has happened to me.  The feedback took less than five minutes of my day:  I don't begrudge that--particularly when it involves keeping my fellow web-mongers honest.  That's to the benefit of the entire guild, right?

Yet I had an actual reason for visiting the website in question--namely, following up on a conversation I had with someone earlier in the week.  (For the record, they're not a client or even a potential client.  That relationship is sacred, and thus off-limits for blogging.)

Now, I don't judge organisations (particularly those that operate on a proverbial shoestring) by website errors...although errors certainly raise some warning signals regarding the client review process.  But I think it's perfectly fair to judge organisations on how quickly they respond to negative (though hopefully constructive) feedback.  Lack of response is symptomatic of any number of organisational ills, including (but not limited to):

• Generic indifference
• Bureaucratic sclerosis
• Chronic under-staffing/under-training
• Lack of planning/budget for asset maintenance (and websites are assets, dagnabbit!)
• A culture that penalises mistakes

In my case, the experience turns out to be a silver lining.  It's a very quick-n-dirty way of learning, "These people are (probably) time-wasters."  Someone in another line of work might have to endure several meetings (or even worse) to arrive at the same conclusion.  If, in a couple of weeks, the problem still exists, I can scratch out the "probably."  Or if, in a few weeks more, I'm on the receiving end of their spam...Ooof.  In either case, that five minutes more than paid for itself.

Programmers have an unfortunate reputation of being too code-centric to be successful businesspeople.  But, boy howdy, this is one case when groking the bits definitely provides a leg up on other trades.  [pats self fatuously on head for making it through Programmer School]

A suggestion for lengthening the Provincial purse-string

This afternoon, the Rotary Club and the Chamber of Commerce in Shediac hosted a lunch headlined by New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant.

Disclaimer #1: I should note that I didn't vote for him in last year's election (because I legally couldn't), and he's so new to the job that I have no idea whether or not I'd regret any vote I might have made.

But I do give him credit for making a fair case for a program that would essentially pay the salary of a young person for the first six months on the job at a qualifying business.

Disclaimer #2:  I wouldn't qualify for the program either as employer or employee, so I don't have a proverbial horse in the race here either.

When I read about the idea, I wrote it off as yet another corporate giveaway.  But after today I'm willing to take a more nuanced view.  If the statistics from other provinces don't have too many asterisks, an ~80% success rate (of keeping the employee working at the same or related field) is more than acceptable.   (Bonus:  Telling those whining about not being able to find ready-made skills or fund the expense of training to put up or shut up would be awesome, IMO.)

As a taxpayer, however, I would hope that there would be penalties for abusing the program.  More importantly, I would insist on an additional and verrrrrrry long string attached to subsidising a half-year of someone's wage.  Namely, that the all data (employee's name excepted) be publicly available on the government's website.

It's not just a matter of accounting to the taxpayers.  The (much) more important public service would be an ongoing record of which employers have a track record of not keeping young employees beyond the six month free ride.  That tells not only potential employees, but also potential vendors which companies are run by people who expect to get something for nothing. 

Please understand that it's not that I think that New Brunswick is rife with that particular species of business owner.  It's just that even one of them can cause serious damage to a small contractor (like myself) or a supplier.  Sadly, this can happen even with signed contracts.  Assuming the aggrieved vendor is able to weather the setback, that cost is ultimately passed on to other, better-mannered clients.  So you'd better believe that checking the public records would be part of my routine due diligence on anyone I'm considering working with. 

Given appropriate penalties for abuse plus public record-keeping, I can, in principle anyway, get behind the proposal.  Because then, not only would it promote business growth, the business intelligence could prevent losses elsewhere in the economy.  Besides, weeding out inefficiencies (in which category I include deadbeats) is what free market capitalism is supposed to be about, riiiiiiiiiight??? 

Frivolous Friday, 2015.02.20: Unsolicited advice to Lenovo

My Gentle Reader and I both realise that history's best, most passive-aggressive form of one-sided "communication" reached its zenith when the 1980s spawned the "open letter."  Granted, once the Intertubes became more or less First-World-Ubiquitous, the open letter--like any luxury-item--became downwardly-mobile.  And thus boring.

But in the original spirit--and on the authority of having been "contractor scum" at a certain company whose initials sometimes stand for "I'm Being Micro-managed" (exceptions made for T.P., M.A., D.P., A.B, and B.W.:  You all know who you are)--here's my advice to the company that took over their PC/laptop product-line.

An Open Letter to Lenovo

It's been a tough week, I know.  Trending Twitter hashtags for two days and counting.  Even Facebook has stopped gawping at the Kardashians and 50 Shades of Domestic Abuse long enough to pay attention.  Bad times.

Bottom Line:  You sold out your users to spammers and left them open to malicious hackers.  All by the cheesy expedient of pre-installing malware and an easy-to-fake root certificate.  I'm sure somebody must have paid you something to go to all the trouble of pimping your (theoretical) customers to spammers.

But, let's face it.  You're not even bush-league when it comes to selling out the people who use your product.  You have to get in line far, far behind Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, and their ilk for that kind of thing.  I mean, you weren't even bothering to steal passwords, account numbers, or sensitive personal information yourself.  How is anyone supposed to take you seriously?

Your problem is that you're thinking just like a typical I/T company.  Parochial hayseeds!  So narrow-minded, focused on only the eyeballs of the average internet user.  Unlike them, however, you're in a position to monetise so, so much more of your client.  Well, at least until the whole self-driving car thing takes off and then who knows?  That's what should be keeping you up at nightT The possibility of Google having a whole (computing) commuter--or more!--at their mercy.

I tell you, now is the time to execute on your strengths.  You're in hardware:  You can always count on economies of scale.  The future will soon bring haptic keyboards so sensitive you can take fingerprints.  By then, webcams will be capable of emitting low-intensity light.  Either one of those should be worth a fortune when you can sell fingerprints and retina scans by the thousand to identity thieves.

And that's just what current technology could be tweaked to do.  Just imagine the future!  Surely you can (cough!) "partner" (cough!) with the NSA, GCHQ, CSIS, or any sufficiently internetted tin-pot dictatorship to take up the slack for whatever your underfunded, offshored R&D Department won't provide.   For the slight inconvenience of letting them snoop on every twitch your users make, they can reciprocate by opening their books to you.

Think of the possibilities!  Trackpads and touch-screens capable of scanning your customers to the DNA level.  Then it's a mere triviality to wire the button-mouse to deliver a lethal jolt of electricity to young, healthy customers.  Have "sharing economy" contractor already on standby to Uber the corpse to the nearest organ-harvesting facility, and it's like printing money!

And that's just one suggestion for a possible sideline business.  Doubtless, your C-suite has a much more panoramic vision for monetising your users.  Down to the last cell, if possible.  That's why the suits are paid the big bucks, after all.

It's time to pull up your big-kid pants and get to work.  You have a lot of ground to make up before you can go toe-to-toe with the dark-nets or the Russian Mob or anyone else who knows how to use a computer to make money.  Your customers are already paying you a premium for the privilege of being abused--it's time to step up your game.

XOXO,

Doreen

Spicing the truth

Over the past weekend, I finished Jack Turner's Spice: The History of a Temptation.   It's alternately hilarious and horrifying.  And, while he belabours his point a bit, it's hard to blame the author:  There's just So Much Stuff to write about in a tale that circumnavigates the globe and spans millennia.  You'll never look at your spice rack--particularly the pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg and clove jars--the same way ever again.

The repeated theme is how the notion of spice has, through the centuries, become conflated with the exotic, sensual, piquant, and even the erotic.  Yet after swooping back and forth in Turner's historical panopoly, it to me seems a shorthand for what human beings do in the face of ignorance.

European merchants (and their suppliers) who traded in spices had a vested interest in keeping the Orient--from whence the spice originated--mysterious, dangerous, and glamourous.  Just like marketing today, it goosed the price--in that day, enough to justify spices' multi-year journey* by ship and pack-animal.

But a generation after Marco Polo's relatively tame account of his trip the Far East, folks still gave their credence to the dragons and mountains of gold invented by the pseudonymous Sir John de Mandeville, who, at best, was reporting second-hand.  (Notable exception:  Christopher Columbus, whose own annotated copy of The Travels of Marco Polo still exists.)

It's no secret that the human mind, like nature, abhors a vacuum.  But the real mystery--to my mind, at least--is how our species prefers to pad that gap with the most phantastical stuffing available.  Occam's Razor is no match for the UNIX Beard of conspiracy theories, escapist fantasies, doomsday porn, organisational solopsism...or whatever pathology the "explanations" serve.

- - - - -

* The distances traveled would doubtless have dulled the taste, justifying the larger quantities that are sometimes observed in medieval recipes.  And, incidentally, putting the lie to the often-repeated myth that spices served to mask the foulness of rotting food.

"Future history" is not prescriptive

I'm probably more prone than most people to be overly-inspired by the latest book I've read.  Sometimes not even the latest.  Sherlock Holmes has taken over a slice of my brain, possibly to lodge there for the rest of my life.  Yet I've never been able to understand what kind of book makes a person cross over from wanting to model themselves after a character to wanting to model the world after the book.

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (for instance) are well-plotted, peopled by amazingly fleshed-out characters, chock-full of idealism, heroism, empathy, tear-jerking partings, laugh-out-loud funny dialogue, lyrical...all to a breathtaking backdrop straight out of Western European race-memory.  (Carl Jung ate this stuff for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a midnight snack, yo.)  Yet the closest the books have come to being brought to life as a form of government is the Society for Creative Anachronism.  And even that's not based on a hereditary monarchy spawned by cross-species mating (e.g. elves and mortals).

Maybe, when I have less pressing things to do with my synapses, I'll get around to reading Ayn Rand's works.  That'll happen sometime shortly after earning my PhD in Underwater Basket-weaving, given my current level of enthusiasm.

Robert Heinlein--the secondary light of today's libertarianism--is another matter.  The man knew how to pace a story, and could write snappy dialogue like nobody's business.  Wanting the fuller background of a delightful snippet quoted in the otherwise leaden prose of Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month, I put Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon on my Christmas wish-list...and the Book Fairy was gracious enough to comply.

Until this point, I was mainly familiar with a couple of short stories and his calling-card, Stranger in a Strange Land.  In the latter, the prime antagonist is the Fosterite Church--a cult that made the most lurid reporting on Scientology seem halfway sane.  No surprise there, I guess--Ayn Rand's contempt for religion was as profound as it is ignored by her modern posse  (looking at you, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-WI).

But after that similarity, I was shocked to find an almost 180-degree divergence between the Queen and King of Libertarian Fiction.  Rand's world is clearly divided into heroic industrialists, evil government bureaucracies (because you never, EVER find evil bureaucracies in business!) and the "moocher" proles.  (That latter would be us, by the bye.) 

The Man Who Sold the Moon is actually a collection of short stories in a fictional time-line that leads up to the title piece.   Self-made business mogul D.D. Harriman (who receives the most screen-time) is certainly cast from the mold of the heroic, visionary industrialist.  Thus far, Ayn Rand would have approved.   Except that the BigBads aren't the  satraps of government agencies.  Oh, no.

[Spoiler Alert]

• "Life-line" -  Insurance companies
• "Let There Be Light" - Energy companies
• "Blowups Happen" -  Energy companies (again)
• "The Man Who Sold the Moon" - A mostly unimaginative cabal of business tycoons
• "Requiem" - Greedy heirs

I suppose that if you wanted to stretch it enough, you could turn "The Roads Must Roll" into an anti-union screed.  Except that you'd be lying to yourself.  The vast majority of the workers are hard-working, diligent, and occasionally capable of heroic self-sacrifice.  Treason from within--based on self-serving delusions--is the culprit.

[End Spoiler  Alert]

If anything, government in Heinlein's "future history" is a tool to be used, and the public something to be manipulated--although those aren't always fool-proof.  Otherwise, they are just immovable obstacles to be avoided, rather than destroyed head-on.

And--whoa, Nellie--did I just see something like Open Source being proposed all the way back in May of 1939???

But one of the most un-Randian, and delicious, passages comes early (almost like the proverbial warning shot over the bow) in "Life-line," from the mouth of an anonymous judge :

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest.  This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law.  Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back for their private benefit."

Bazinga.

 Pity nothing's changed since this was penned over 75 years ago (April 1939).

Don't get me wrong--I'm not a huge Heinlein fan, although I am looking forward to what looks like Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" played out in a spaceship (Orphans of the Sky).  And The Moon is a Harsh Mistress comes highly recommended from a couple of people.  I've lost much of my taste for fiction, but I'm fairly sure I won't regret giving these a go.

In the meantime, I'm wryly amused at finding yet another "prophet"'s handiwork thoroughly cherry-picked by his/her acolytes. 

Frivolous Friday, 2015.02.13: My balanced, nuanced perspective on coding style

The I/T Lexicon: Responsive Design

Blogger's Note:  "The I/T Lexicon" is a recurring series on this blog.  Its intent is to break down an I/T buzz-word for folks who aren't in the industry, but who might need to understand it when buying the services of web-mongers like myself.


For various reasons, I'm in the market for a place where the bits and bites of my business website can hang their hats, kick off their boots, and drink beer in their underwear.  So to speak.

Bits and bytes are intangible things, but it's advantageous to me to keep them as close to hand (geographically speaking) as possible.  Not purely out of some "digital locavore" kind of ethos, mind.  In my experience, smaller, more regional outfits tend to be more responsive--particularly when the lights suddenly go off.  In other words, one has a better chance of dealing with actual system admins, rather than the harried script-readers of a GoDaddy Borg cube call centre. 

I left a message with a Moncton design firm whose website listed "Web hosting" as a service.  Plus, I'm always game for meeting folks who are better at the graphics/design part of web development.  What they do and what I do are kind of yin and yang.

Naturally, each design firm has its strengths, so I poked around the website a bit more, and noticed an emphasis on something called "Responsive Design."

Now, it's part of my job to know what that means.  But someone else--let's say a business owner or the administrator of a community organisation--may well not.  If anything, the phrase "responsive web design" all but begs the question, "Who would want an unresponsive website?"  (Amirite?)  And it surprises me that media-centric design shops aren't at more pains to make sure potential clients know that's not just another buzzword.  By which I mean being able not only to define it, but also to quantify its value.

Personally, I don't have a horse in this race.  I do data-crunching, not design.  But it's in absolutely no one's interest to have clients nodding and smiling because they're afraid of looking ignorant.  That just leaves people feeling cheated.  Particularly when selling services, it's not good for business.

So in the interest of a more knowledgeable clientele, here's what the term means to you.

First, some background history.

If you're above the age of 20, you might remember a time when computer monitors weren't flat, when they seemed to weigh as much a refrigerator, and they likely consumed as much electricity.  The bigger the screen size, the more they stuck out in the back, and the more desk real estate they chewed up, right?  That put definite limits on screen sizes.

Those hard limits and relatively primitive web browsers (and standards) vastly simplified things for the people who made software--particularly for the web.  The conventional wisdom was to design for a screen size of 640 pixels by 480 pixels--effectively, a 4:3 ratio of width to height.

Along came LCD technology.  And then its cost plummeted.  TV screens became huge.  Cellphone screens offered more than a postage stamp of dark grey on light gray.  Laptops could be monstrous "road warrior" slabs...or small enough to tuck into a man-bag.  And then the iPad landed...followed by half a bajillion knockoffs.  And then smartwatches.

Which brings us to 2015 and a Cambrian explosion of internet-connected devices with LCD screens.  Two factors in particular delivered the one-two TKO punch to the 1990s rules of designing for the web:

1. The sheer number of possible screen sizes
2. The fact that screen orientation can change between landscape and portrait on-the-fly

The upshot is that no single layout will work for all devices.   As Aesop pointed out sometime before 560 BCE, you can't (and won't) please everyone.  No news there.

For instance, we're pretty familiar by now with the home page formula of a logo & company name sitting on top of a menu sitting on top of the content, all sitting on top of a page footer, right?  That should work on a laptop or PC, with plenty of eye-pleasing padding to spare.

But open the site on your mobile phone's browser, and....ooof!  The text could be cramped, unreadably small, run off the screen, wrap around to the next line, etc.  Even browsing the site on something larger like an iPad could be a nasty surprise, particularly if you hold the iPad in "portrait" orientation.

Going the other route and optimising for small screens and portrait orientation will more than likely look ridiculously chunky back on the PC screen.

Maintaining multiple versions of the same material (a.k.a. "content" in the parlance of web designers & developers) is not the optimal solution.  For one thing, it's an unnecessary expense.  For another, web developers don't enjoy it any more than their clients.  Probably less, in fact.

That's where responsive design comes to the rescue.  Don't get me wrong--it's not magic pixie dust that developers sprinkle into their coffee every morning...or even on the web pages themselves.  It's planning and it's work and it generally requires compromise on top of basic empathy for the people who will ultimately use the website.

For the client, this has several ramifications.  Because whether or not they currently realise it, are part of the design team, too. For their sake, I include the following "do"s and "don't"s:

• Expect to do a lot of thinking and goal-setting and decision-making up front.  Good designers/developers should ask "Why?"  A lot.
• Respect the limits of each device.  Users don't want to thumb-type the equivalent of War and Peace to fill out a web form.  
• Prioritise your content from your user's perspective-of-the-moment.  What's relevant in the office (on a full-size screen) may not be relevant on a mobile screen during the bus-ride home.
• Be prepared to review multiple designs.  Yes, they'll probably all blur together after awhile.  That's okay.  Just focus on meeting the goals.
• Don't fall in love with any single layout if it means ugly compromises for others.
• Don't rely on Flash or .PDF to get your point across.  They won't work on all devices.

Understand that I'm coming at this from the perspective of a programmer who's worked alongside graphics folks long enough to pick up on some of their challenges.  They'd probably add to--and doubtless improve--the above list.  But I trust it breaks the concept of "responsive design" down to its component parts of understanding the user's needs and meeting them, regardless of which device they currently have at their (literal) fingertips.

So there, design-firm-in-Moncton-who-shall-remain-nameless:  I've done you a solid...even though you never asked for it.  Now would you please return my call?  I have bits and bytes to schlep.

Uncharitable ranting

Warning:  #firstworld grumbling ahead.

If any government--Canadian or U.S., provincial or state--truly wanted to see solopreneurs morph into the "job creators" worshiped by politicians, they'd forbid all non-registered (cough!) "charities" (cough!) from cold-calling anyone.  Let 'em set up an IndieGoGo campaign and hustle on social media if they don't even care enough about the cause to get out of the office and network.  Bonus points for fining anyone who donates to these "charities" by dinging them the same amount on their taxes.

Harsh?  Maybe.  (Of course, if I had my druthers, the government would also run sting operations to out anyone responding (positively) to spam.  It's the 21st century equivalent of putting miscreants in the stocks out in the public square.  A little humiliation would go a long way, particularly for the species of prat who expects the internet to deliver a Russian bride and a matching case of Cialis.  The market would eventually dry up and spammers would have to get real jobs.  Or so we can hope.)

I'm not going to mention any names of this morning's pitch.  I will say that my reaction--prefaced by something unprintable--was "...they have that scam going in Canada, too?!?!"  (And, yes, I did use the CRA's Registered Charities search; these folks are, naturally, nowhere in evidence.)

When you knock me out of The Zone--in which I actually move ahead on work instead of just keep up with the administrivia, I'm going to be owly.  When you give me cause to reflect that some scams can have a lifespan of 200+ years, it doesn't help.  But when, for one galling moment, you make me share Ayn Rand's contempt for charities, it's almost enough to hulk out over.  And then it takes me even longer to settle back into The Zone.

But it's not just my personal objections I'm here to blog about.  Cold-calling (or blasting out emails by the thousand at a time) for donations to a sketchy charity does not add value.  At best, it merely shuffles money straight between bank accounts.  At worst, it diverts potential funding from organisations that actually do provide value by serving the under-served, and/or funding research a private sector is too shareholder-centric venal to do.

I mean, not only do such professional fund-raisers thoroughly suck at charity, their business model itself is blatently lame and unimaginative--and, I posit to my Gentle Reader, not at all the point of capitalism and its vaunted processes of creative destruction.  Let's break down the model, shall we?

1. Pick a tug-at-the-heartstrings cause (e.g. The Sick Baby Unicorn Foundation).
2. Pack a call centre with min. wage employees to read from scripts.  (Bonus points for setting up where the law allows you to jank their pay around with "incentives.")
3. Skim off 95+% of the proceeds for "administrative" and "fundraising" expenses
4. Profit!

In short:  Nothing new has been created, no processes have been made more efficient (or less noxious), no ideas have been cross-pollinated, no significant skills have been acquired by employees, and everyone immediately involved in the transaction just wants it to end as soon as possible.  Capitalism #FAIL.

I mean, seriously, the Harper Government is perfectly happy to use the CRA as its goons.  Why is it wasting time on environmental groups when the threat to the tar sands is thousands of miles off an outside its control anyway?  Geeze, do tomorrow's job-creators a solid and get these time-wasting grifters off our backs.  The only thing they're "disrupting" is my concentration--and, by definition, my productivity. 

Frivolous Friday, 2015.02.06: For this I went to Programmer School*...

So I'm slated to give a technical presentation next month.  (No, you can't know what it's about just now.  Sorry--it's not even officially on the calendar yet.)

When I did this sort of thing last year, I was slagged (mercifully, in private) for making my slides too "dense."  In PowerPoint terms, that means loading a single slide with more than one digestible hunk of red meat.  Which, alas, is particularly easy to do with text.

(Grumble.) 

Fine.

This time we'll do pictures.  Lots and lots of pictures.

Happy now?

Mind you, my camera skills are mediocre at best, and Microsoft Paint marks the upper limit of my digital artistic abilities.  (In fairness to Microsoft Paint, I believe that Ally Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half artwork is done entirely in Paint, which makes it totes legit, amirite?  So there, Adobe...)

And so far, my only "logic" skills have been used to suss out the appropriate graphics from the Intertubes.  Including references to:

• Back to the Future
• Barbie
• Ghostbusters
• Ironman
• Sex and the City
• The Wizard of Oz
• Young Frankenstein

And I haven't finished the presentation outline yet, either.  Which means still more mischief to manage.  [rubs hands together chortling evilly]

That'll show'em.

- - - - - 

* All thin-skinned pouting aside, I am jazzed that the folks I consider my mentors consider me enough of a peer to lend me their ears and eyes for an hour or so every year.  Nothing forces you to learn something like having to explain it to other people.  It's even more true when you're only a few y-coordinates up on the learning curve yourself.

Coffee: A freelance programmer's drug of choice

But not for the reason you think (a.k.a. caffeine). 

Sometime in the last decade or so, the concept of the coffee-house has its 500th birthday.  The modern edition of the institution is relatively banal compared to the hothouses of political ferment and male exclusivity that used to be their hallmark.  And thank goodness for that.

In the last couple of decades, cafés have taken the place of the small meeting room (and sometimes even the office) for small businesses and freelancers.  As such that makes them (yet again) a challenge to the accepted order, but the Powers That Be--at least in Western culture--have had to grow up and get used to the idea.

Twice in the past two weeks, I've had the good fortune of meeting other freelancers for coffee.  These are folks in the same line of work as me, just in different facets.  Despite that, I've had at least one forehead-smack-why-didn't-I-think-of-that epiphany per meeting.  Not to mention a lot of enjoyable side-conversation.

My only regret in living out in Cottage Country (apart from the fact that I could almost swear they've been ploughing Highway 530 with a zamboni this week) is that there's considerably more driving and time involved than there would be with a home office in, say, Moncton.   Even so, the extra time (and the planning it requires) has always more than paid for itself.  Because there are awesome people in the area, and I'm grateful for the chance to learn from and be inspired by them.  Especially over a good cup of coffee.

Say Whaaaaaat?!?!?! (a rant)

Knowing that my latest nerdery is Marvel's "The Avengers" universe, Dennis humoured me by renting Iron Man 2 when he made a run for storm chips tonight.  I'm old enough to remember when movie ratings came in three flavours (G, PG, and R)...except that at that time I wasn't old enough to know that there was a fourth rating, if you know what I mean.

Yes, I realise that it's a good thing that PG-13/NC-17 movies itemise their unwholesomeness--e.g. violence, nudity--although I sometimes don't quite grok what's so "adult" about "adult situations" and "adult language."  After all, any profanity and sexuality worth bothering about require both timing and savoir-faire.  Neither are magically bestowed upon us on our 18th birthday.  Nor upon Hollywood, however sizeable the budget.

That being said...precisely since when does "Intense Sci-Fi"make a movie (or any other fiction, for that matter) unsuitable for a pre-teen audience?  And what in the smoky name of Grethor's Gates, constitutes "intense" science fiction anyway?  This nonsense, btw, lands within a few days of my receiving a two Heinlein novels as a gift.  Grrrrrrr....

NOW I'm brassed-off.

Bad enough that the anti-science goons are muzzling research here in Canada.  And putting Congress-critters who don't (and, far worse, refuse to) know the difference between photovoltaics and photosynthesis in positions of influence in Washington.

Sure, the petro-barons (among others) and professional God-bothers and any number of other snake-oil peddlers have plenty to fear from a scientifically-literate public.  (Even a public mathematically-literate enough for Statistics 101 and the concept of regression to the mean should scare The Powers That Be silly, for that matter.)

But...warning labels for science fiction?  Seriously?!?!

Though, in sobriety, I probably shouldn't be so surprised.  The American Library Association's list of regularly banned and challenged books (and the objections to the same) is a good demonstration of how intellectual wussification is clearly not being bred out of our species.  The usual suspects--sex, blasphemy (real or imagined), sex, vastly outdated gender/racial portrayals, sex, drug use, sex, profanity, sex, etc., and sex--are all represented.  (Bonus points for being burned by the Nazis for having a socialist message, btw.  #slowclap)  My Gentle Reader will of course note several of the sci-fi heavyweights on that list.

I suppose that if there's any proverbial silver lining, it's that slapping a warning--particularly one that says, "Run along, sport: You're too young for this"--pretty much guarantees the cachet of the forbidden.  Who knows?  Maybe the bright lights of Hollywood are doing us a backhanded favour by making "Intense Sci-Fi" badass.  Maybe the fact that Samuel Jackson's Nick Fury threads through much of the Avengers world isn't actually a coincidence.  (Bet'cha didn't think of that angle, huh?)

Frankly, I'm not counting on that.  But if Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson happens to be reading, maybe you, Doctor, should consider a PG-13 "Intense Science-Fact" rating for the upcoming season of Cosmos.  Just sayin'.  Co-opt Samuel Jackson if you have to. ;~)