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Fashion

Nov 28th, 2014
by Craig.
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Boring. Boooooooring! That one word pretty much sums up my fashion sense, if you can even call it that.

I vaguely remember — in the seventies — having a “parachute jacket” that I thought was pretty cool. All I can remember now is that it was bright yellow (probably not quite as bright in reality as it is now in my memory, or maybe it was brighter!), had zips and press studs and the texture of the material out of which they make parachutes — hence the name. And I think I probably bought (or had bought for me by my parents) a few pairs of jeans that were probably fairly cool back in their day … flares, stovepipes, pockets galore with flaps and/or zips, etc.

But these days — and for most of my life from my teens onwards — my attire has been pretty utilitarian. Truth is, if the law and the weather permitted it and I had somewhere to put my wallet (a sporran perhaps?), I’d walk around buck naked all day. So my default attire in public is shorts (I mean real shorts, not those stupid “short trousers” that go all the way down to your knees, or further!) and T-shirts and slops in the summer, and jeans, T-shirts and shoes & socks in the winter. In the winter I’ll take a jacket if I’m driving somewhere (I’ll actually wear a lighter one if I’m walking), but it will likely stay in the car until my return home. (Friends are always asking me, as I leave their places after an evening, “Didn’t you bring a jacket?!”) My use (or lack thereof) of jackets is a topic unto itself for another time.

I do own khaki pants, golf shirts, plaid shirts and other long- and short-sleeved collared shirts, dressier black Oxford Brogues than my current, everyday, brown Derby-type shoes, a sports coat, suits (double- and single-breasted), about two dozen ties (ranging from plain black for funerals to far more ostentatious and whimsical ones) and half a dozen bow ties. However, the dressier things get the fewer the opportunities I have for wearing them, especially considering I work from home. Actually, I really do lament that as I do like to dress up (and I think I rock a well-fitting suit, even if I do say so myself), but I can’t make up events that don’t exist and I’m too practical to put on a suit just to go and visit friends for the evening.

I do care what I look like when I leave the house, but I don’t care enough to go to ridiculous ends and spend ridiculous amounts of money and time on my appearance. And I mostly will not wear what mainstream fashion tells me I should wear, so I’m a bloody-minded contrarian to boot.

The reason I bring this up is an article on “lumbersexuals” on The Daily Beast. One paragraph really spoke to me:

But the rough-looking, dependably butch lumbersexual, despite his honest-guy uniform, is a drag queen, just as we all are. On go our costumes every day, and so it especially is with those whose uniform is dedicated to looking like they care least of all what they look like. The lumbersexual is the biggest drag queen of them all.

Now, I have never until today heard the term “lumbersexual”; I own two plaid shirts that I rarely wear (and only one of them is flannel) and it is quite clear to me that the guys I have seen pictured in articles I have now read about them spent a lot more than “20 minutes of [their] morning[s] delicately trimming [their] beard[s] in the bathroom mirror“. I have also grown full beards, although I’m not that fond of them. But I squirmed uncomfortably at the thought that maybe the attire that results from my “studied disinterest” (to quote my father) in fashion is, in itself, a fashion statement.

If it is, I may as well pull out my wallet and head to the nearest trendy clothing shop and ask someone there to dress me properly in some hip new threads. (Irony intended.) The problem is, I just can’t stand waste, and I’ll still be wearing in five years what is trendy today. I can’t win!

“Comply or Die”

Aug 3rd, 2013
by Craig.
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Yet again we have Canadian police killing civilians, acting as judge, jury and — most importantly — executioner. While we wait for a thorough and impartial investigation — in our dreams — of the shooting of Sammy Yatim in Toronto, as with the killing of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver Airport in 2007 it’s certainly telling to note that the cops had apparently killed him within 39 seconds of arriving on the scene, even as he stood alone inside a tram car! Do the cops not learn anything from their past behaviour?!

Unlike the Dziekanski case though, this cop clearly shot to kill. You don’t fire nine shots into someone expecting that they’ll be providing fingerprints and a mug shot down at the cop shop later. Oh, and just for good measure (kind of a “fuck you, punk”), one of the 23 cops on the scene (because apparently all the thugs in town wanted a piece of the action) then tasered Yatim’s lifeless body, before ironic first aid was performed on him. (Actually, one can’t help but wonder if the taser was deployed only so that the cops could say that they tried to subdue Yatim with it. A little fudging of the time line in the cops’ notes would have been required of course, but that’s OK, as long as the bad guy dies.)

Part of the report on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The National on 28 July 2013 included an interview with a former Toronto cop who, while being critical of the speed with which Yatim was executed, used the term “Comply or die.” I’d never heard the term before, but it so poetically and succinctly seems to sum up what appears to be the motto of most police forces these days.

Rather than engage the population they’re supposed to protect in order to use “minimum force” and avoid violence — yes, even apparent bad guys with knives need to be engaged unless loss of life is imminent — cops these days seem to be on a rampage, killing, tasering or pepper-spraying anybody that even dares to look at them sideways. It doesn’t even matter that you’ve managed to live for a half century or more without so much as stealing a penny candy as a kid or getting a parking ticket, you too can find yourself on the wrong end of a weapon held by a mentally unstable cop who is miffed at you for not immediately getting down and kissing his jackboots the moment he (or she in the case of “Constable 728”, aka Stefanie Trudeau) barks a command in your direction, even when you hadn’t heretofore even had a reason to note the cop’s presence.

And that last point is important to note. All sorts of people come to the defence of the cops in cases like this for all sorts of reasons, many of whom probably fit into my penny candy / parking ticket description. Based on their life experiences, it’s obvious to them that anyone who incurs the wrath — or even just the attention — of the police is obviously guilty of something. It doesn’t really matter what that “something” is; for these people you’re guilty until proven innocent, and “you must have done something to deserve being shot, tasered or pepper-sprayed.” Or, in the case of completely blameless Buddy Tavares and his assailant RCMP Constable Geoff Mantler, you must have done something to deserve having said jackboot forcibly applied to your lips to assist you in planting the kiss.

That old adage about walking a mile in someone’s shoes comes to mind.

Related to this story but with reference to my previous post about the Canadian media, I found it odd how CBC television news showed pictures of Yatim looking like something of a gangster but had a former Toronto cop on who questioned the speed of the use of force, while Global television news showed pictures of a clean-cut young kid, but had on their own “expert” who said that cops had no choice but to shoot to kill.

BlackBerry/RIM. Going, going, gone?

Oct 13th, 2011
by Craig.
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A couple of years ago my company had a major server outage on a primary server that brought down websites and email for almost two and a half hours. Such outages are rare, but they happen, and they happen to small hosting companies like NinerNet as well as the giants. After that outage I wrote about the lessons learnt and, without trying to deflect attention or criticism away from us, I pointed out an extensive list of major service outages experienced by the likes of Google, Amazon, YouTube, Barclays Bank, MySpace, Facebook, PayPal, Microsoft, eBay, and so on.

Also in that list was BlackBerry/RIM, and this is what I wrote at the time on them in particular:

Have a Blackberry? Do you realise that all Blackberry emails in the whole world go through one data centre in central Canada, and if that data centre has a problem, you can still use your Blackberry for a paperweight? Nobody is immune; nobody gets away unscathed.

I’m under the impression that, since then, RIM expanded that single point of failure to create multiple points of failure (often under threat of sanctions by governments who want access to their citizens’ communications), and fail they have — worldwide — in the last few days. And for several days, not just a couple of hours.

Without wanting to gloat over a mortally-wounded about-to-be corpse, RIM’s problems weren’t that difficult to predict. Unfortunately for them they are, at this time, the victim of a perfect storm that includes (among other things) poor sales and share performance, product failures, the almost simultaneous (to their technical troubles) launch of a new messaging system on the iPhone to rival BlackBerry Messenger, and these latest technical troubles. But this perfect storm is of RIM’s own making, and their problems go deeper than that anyway; they go to the heart of their core philosophies.

Now, I’m no Apple fanboi (and in the wake of the death of Steve Jobs I commend to you What Everyone Is Too Polite to Say About Steve Jobs [archived]), but at least an iPhone more resembles a “proper” computer like the one you have on your desk than the toaster in your kitchen that can only do the one or two things its manufacturer decided in its infinite wisdom it needs to do. Mobile computers (aka “smartphones”) like the iPhone and those running on the Android operating system rely on open standards when it comes to things like email. In short, open standards and systems win. (That said, Apple is not the poster child for open standards and systems, and needs to change that.) There is no central super-server somewhere handling all email for all iPhone or Android users worldwide, just waiting to fail. With BlackBerry there is … or was. End of story.

If you swallowed RIM’s mantra about their system being de rigueur for business and the iPhone being “not for business”, you’re paying for that today.

Sorry for that.

Update, 30 May 2012: Seven months later and Roger Cheng at CNET finally comes to much the same conclusion (archived).

Only in Vancouver …

Feb 3rd, 2011
by Craig.
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… will you be approached outside a Starbucks by a guy plugged into an iPod begging — “pretty please” — for a dollar to buy a coffee.

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