A Rain of Frogs

I’m a closet environmentalist. I love “green” technologies. It makes me feel good when I do my bit to make the world a healthier, cleaner place. It’s one (but not the only) reason I have a sailboat and not a powerboat.

The reason I am a closet environmentalist is because I am embarrassed to be associated with the “activists” who claim to represent my environmentalist nature. In much the same way conscientious Americans proudly claimed that the government wasn’t acting in their interest when they invaded Iraq, I don’t feel that what amounts to ecoterrorism is indicative of my desire to protect the environment. Extremism, like fundamentalism, scares the hell out of me.

Extremism takes root in all forms of protest. The civil rights movements of the 1960’s were plagued with groups like the Black Panthers, which were prepared to use any means, including violence, to achieve their ends. Likewise the feminist movement is now being driven by extreme elements, diluting the message of equality and pushing an agenda many feminists do not support.

Environmental “activists” that are willing to to use violence to achieve a greener world are driving the environmental movement. I cannot support that. It is counter my belief that there is a peaceful way.

It is my belief that environmentally responsible change can be achieved by making it both easier and more cost effective to be green. North Americans don’t care about Global Warming. Hell, I live in Canada, our winters could definitely benefit from a few degrees of warmth. But we care about our money. And our time. Make it convenient for people to be environmentally responsible. Make it cheaper. And above all else, you HAVE to make it cooler.

Hit us in the wallet. It’s the only way we listen.

How’s that for extreme?

Are the good times back?

Mergers and acquisitions are heating up in the online arena again. Even more important, people are EXCITED about the web again.

New technologies and new adaptations of old technologies (Google’s GMail and Google Maps) have infused the ‘net community with new life, and it’s a welcome change.

After years of listening to uppity web designers intent on publishing vanity books bemoan the state of web standards on the net we’re finally getting something more than CSS tricks. Thank whatever gods you believe in.

Maybe we’re experiencing a renaissance of the Internet. Now that the initial hype, and subsequent explosion of profit-taking and bankruptcy has passed, those “techie” types who started it in the first place have come back, and are quietly innovating and making the ‘net a better place.

Which is a perfect segue to my next point.

I had a major breakthrough with the large community site over the weekend. I’d estimate 80% of the site is done, that being 90% of the functionality and 70 percent of the actual presentation side of things. The site is working REALLY well, and testing to this point has really gone better than expected.

You have no idea how excited I am about the net in general, and my community site in specific.

Let me tell you something. The Drive-Thru, like communism, is a BAD IDEA.

Why is it a bad idea, you ask?

I’ll tell you why it’s a bad idea. Stress. That’s why.

Look, the Drive-Thru was created to make people’s lives better. That’s right, it was designed to make the world a better place. What it actually does is the complete opposite.

Let’s take a typical scene here in Canada. You’re driving along in your car, and you pass a shrine of hockey and coffee – Tim Horton’s, for your foreigners. Mmm, you think to yourself. Coffee is good. Canada’s national passtime is not, in fact hockey. Neither is it lacrosse. It is coffee consumption.

So you pull into the Drive-Thru. There’s only two vehicles in front of you. It being a nice spring day, you decide to open your window. Ten seconds later, you roll it back up. Why? The 1978 Ford F-150 – driven by a guy with a mesh-back John Deere ball cap on – in front of your is missing on two cylinders and burning a quart of oil a week. The air is positively blue behind him. And he’s not even the guy at the little ordering speaker. The guy at the ordering speaker is driving a BMW, and you just know about BMW drivers. Before you managed to get your window back up, you’ve just had time to catch his order. It’s a sandwich. But not just any sandwich. A multigrain bagel – double toasted – with turkey and lettuce, but no mayo, and mustard on the side please, and margarine, not butter. And could you maybe not double-toast it as much as maybe just one and a half toasts?

Your heart rate goes up as your anger increases, pumping that soot from the truck in front of your all around your body where it can do maximum damage.

Finally the guy in the Bimmer drives up to the window, and Farmer John pulls up. He’ll have a….MEDIUM COFFEE – BLACK….and…..uh…....umm….......just a second. He turns to his wife, who was either a hippo or a trucker in her youth, and proceeds to get bickered at for a FULL 3 minutes. Make that TWO MEDIUM COFFEES…...err what’s that honey? Sorry. ONE LARGE BLACK COFFEE, ONE MEDIUM BLACK COFFEE. He finally drive up, leaving you at the speaker, finally ready to order. Down goes the window.

“One moment please.”

If you haven’t had a stress induced aneurism by this point, you’re a trooper. You can hear that guy in the BMW arguing about how his bagel is 12-grain, not multigrain. You can see the slack-jawed pimply Tim Horton’s guy leaning out the window. The truck in front of you is spewing out more filth than a recently industrialized third world nation. The car behind you is a riced out Honda Civic with Snoop Dogg blaring out the window and the THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD that accompanies Gin & Juice rattling the fillings out of your teeth.

This was supposed to be a nice relaxing cup of joe! Eventually, after the equivalent of three weeks worth of Hamilton air (Americans can think of, say, Detroit or Pittsburg), more stress than the average human was designed to withstand, and more hip-hop than you thought existed, you’ve got that cup of hot nectar you’ve been craving.

And do it all again tomorrow.

Never get between a Canadian and a Timmy’s.

Apparently one of the most frightening things about the U.S.S.R. at the height of its power was The Plan.

Yes, so frightening it deserves Capital Letters.

The Plan, so it is said, governed all things and protected the country from the dangers of short-term thinking. It stretched years into the future and allowances for technologies and ideologies not yet conceived of. Within reason, anyway. Obviously The Plan failed to take into account a successful military coupe, but that’s beyond the scope of this website.

The neat thing about The Plan was that it was constantly updated to reflect the realities of the times. I don’t know now if The Plan still exists within Russia, but it sure is an interesting thing to think about.

I haven’t begun work on a Plan, but it might be a good idea to have one. A Plan for my life, a Plan for my big old community website, a Plan for this website.

The first thing I’d be putting in a Plan is to create a Plan. Not really original, and possibly lacking in spontaneity.

I think I need something more flexible. A Guideline. Something that, in a very general way, suggests a course of action. The first thing I’m going to put in the Guideline is that I might in fact benefit from a Guideline.

A Guideline for this site. A Guideline for the other, bigger, community site. A Guideline for life.

Maybe it’ll even be fun. I know it seems like I am deviating from the general exploration of my fractured psychology, but I’m not. This is all a part of the whole sort of general mishmash that is my mind.

Seen Google’s homage to OS X? That a look here (apparently afraid of my mad xhtml skillz, they’ve removed their homely little javascripted page).

Pretty amazing stuff. I applaud the engineers at Google for their attention to detail. They did a really awesome job of simulating the dock.

But have you looked at the code? OMFG! What did they run that through to make it so awful. Almost no line breaks. I wonder if they were trying to obfuscate what they did, so that others wouldn’t copy it.

Sad part is that I could simulate 99% of that effect without using ANY javascript at all, and not only that, but I could make it standards compliant AND accessible. Maybe I will at some point. It’d make a cool empty gesture.