The first time I saw you, sitting on the 99 B-line to UBC, you were dressed all in black from your dark hair down to your shoes. It might have made you look gothic or suicidal except for that little thread of white on your headphones, and you were smiling.

What he was doing I don’t remember, but you were smiling at the old asian man on the bench seats at the very back of the bus. Was it that he was laughing? Singing to himself? It made me smile to see him so happy, and to see you thinking the same.

Tonight, as it happened, I found myself sitting where you had been that day on the same bus, and there you were where the old man had been. Your hair and shoes were as dark as before but this time the white line from your headphones matched a white t-shirt beneath your jacket.

As I remembered having seen you before, you chuckled at something in the paper you were reading and suddenly looked up to see if anybody had noticed, still smiling. I’ve done it before too, where you loose yourself in something only to suddenly remember as you find yourself laughing that you’re still in a public place. Or perhaps it was an instinctive move to see if anybody else had enjoyed the joke as much as you. Don’t worry—I thought it was cute. You tore out the article and went back to reading it, but for a second time it had made me smile to see you smiling on that evening bus back home.

Thank you for that.

I just got my first MP3 player. The original promise was a free iPod mini from my sister as a birthday gift, but the package that was supposed to contain said iPod turned out to contain a note about why there was no iPod and a guilt cheque to make up for it.

This turned out to be fine because with that cheque I was able to go buy my own MP3 player which was decidedly not an iPod, although it might be described as iPod nano-ish—a sexy little Samsung K3, in red of course. Almost by virtue of being not an iPod it is better than an iPod—its cheaper, has an FM radio, and is not a symbol of conformity.

I’m disappointed, however, in its navigation. In the same manner as the iPod, you can browse through songs based on their ID3 tag, selecting artists, albums, or genres. What I don’t like is that this browsing to find a single song is the same as setting the playlist, whereas I think the two things should be separate.

If I want to listen to Jay Brannan’s Soda Shop, as I sometimes do, I can do it by finding Jay’s name in the artists list. However, Soda Shop is the only song by him that I have, so my playlist is that one song over and over. If I want to listen to the whole album (being the soundtrack from Shortbus) I have to have to foresight to navigate to it from Albums > Shortbus > Soda Shop instead of Artists > Jay Brannan > Soda Shop.

Similarly, if I’m playing all tracks on shuffle, hit upon Soda Shop, and decide I’d like to listen to the rest of the soundtrack, I have to backtrack to the main list, choose Albums, find Shortbus, and start the song again. There should be an option, while listening to a song, to change the playlist to other songs only by the same artist or from the same album, or even just to other playlists with that song on it, without having to stop the song.

The difficult part is putting in all the navigational tools you have at hand with a desktop music player like iTunes or Amarok while only using six or seven buttons. Amarok has a very nice way of queueing tracks (better than iTunes’s method) that I would love to see in a portable player. It would be nice as well to be able to add songs to playlists on the fly without necessarily playing them.

Most of these, if not all, are things that could be implemented on MP3 players today (and for all I know they might already be) rather simply. Just put an option to apply filters to the playlist according to album, artist, etc, another to queue the track, and another to add the track to some existing playlist. None of this qualifies as “future” features for navigation because there’s nothing that new and innovative about them.

The feature I would really like to see is one that requires a little more innovation and will be nice to see sometime down the road.

Have you ever been listening to a song and have it remind you of another one? That Jay Brannan song often brings to mind other songs from Shortbus just because they’re all from that same soundtrack. Sometimes, though, there’s a specific song that I want to listen to next, and it might not have anything to do with what I’m listening to. James Blunt’s Goodbye My Lover might conclude only to have me wanting to hear Boston and St. John’s by Great Big Sea, or Rip Slyme’s Joint might bring to mind something by HY. In these cases—even if my feature wishlist above is implemented—it’s a pain to go navigate through various menus or walk through the tracks to find it. What’s the solution?

The MP3 player should just know what I want to listen to.

Oh baby yeah.

If I start mentally humming the intro to A Moth is not a Butterfly after that Julie Delpy waltz from Before Sunset, the player should pick up on that and queue it up for me. Or maybe I’ll just keeping singing Butterfly to myself, in which case the player should realise I’d probably like to listen to it again. And, of course, if there wasn’t anything specific I wanted it would just default back to the standard playlist.

It wouldn’t even have to be that specific at first. There might be some way of just picking up on my mood, and the player could gauge what sorts of songs I might enjoy based on that. The software that came with my K3 already makes an attempt at classifying my music based on its style. Maybe if I’m feeling upbeat it would play an upbeat song for me, or if it saw I was drifting to sleep something more mellow. Hell, that’s 90% of the point right there anyway.

Does anybody have an old EEG machine we could modify and jury-rig onto some headphones? (For maximum brain proximity, of course.) If only I were an engineer/neuropsychologist I could whip something together, apply for a patent, and be making millions in no time.

Making a stranger smile

Taking the stairs

Getting a package from your mom

Giving a compliment

Writing a script that works the first time

Knowing the lyrics and singing along

Baking cookies and sharing them wtih friends

Spotting symbolism

Taking the bus

Cooking supper that looks and tastes as good as you imagined it would

Giving directions

Crepuscular rays

Long arpeggios without any flubs

And comments on my blog ;)

(For more, look for the song of the same title from “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown”.)

I’m having trouble with this whole cause and effect thing.

When I was young and got sick, there were a few things that my mom would feed me. I don’t think chicken soup was ever one of them. What I do remember is jello, toast, 7-up, and canned peaches.

It’s been years since I lived at home for any appreciable length of time, so now when I get sick I have to take care of myself, but those same things that my mom used to give me to make me feel better still work even though I have to get them for myself.

There have been a few times lately that I found myself craving those things even without being sick, and its always a bit odd. At least a few times I’ve found myself standing in the grocery store, looking at the rows of canned peach slices, knowing that I want to eat some despite also knowing that they’re not something you just go and eat when you’re feeling nice and healthy like this.

But I buy the peaches anyway, saying to myself, if I’m craving them I should buy some whether I’m sick or not. And every time I’ve done that, two days later I’m in bed with any combination of a headache, soar throat, and fever. I bought some peaches on sale last week and since yesterday I’ve been sneezing and grimacing every time I swallow.

So, either my body knows it’s coming down with something before my brain does and has been conditioned over years to know that when I get sick I should each peaches, as if that might ward it off, or else its the peaches that make me sick in the first place. Which is more likely?

The Clocky is a newly evolved and poorly understood creature. It is well known that they like to play with their owners in the mornings, and mine in particular likes to hide under the bed. However, it is exceedingly rare for them to reproduce in captivity. It seems, though, that given the right circumstances they can reach maturity just after a few months, and when left alone for a few weeks in a dark place (especially nestled between some towels inside a suitcase) will produce asexually. Sadly, the mother Clocky dies in childbirth.

I had a fantastic idea for a post that was clever and humorous and would get all sorts of comments, but my digital camera is broken in at least three ways and the whole thing really depended on this particular photo, so that idea’s dead.

And then I was going to write about chocolate bars, but I’ve been meaning to do that for at least a year so I might as well put it off a few more days.

I’ve noticed lately something interesting on facebook, and I’m going to try to turn it into an insightful blog entry. No promises, though.

Some time ago there was a little controversy about facebook privacy, in that there was an often overlooked thing that said all your information could be made available to third part applications. What exactly these were nobody knew. For a while this was enabled by default, though that changed after a fashion, likely due to complaints.

Now, these “applications” have been enabled on facebook, and people have been jumping all over them. Third parties can put together these programs that add extra functionality to facebook, often in a form analogous to widgets on your profile, but also in interactions with other users.

In a way this is great—just about any feature you could want can be programmed and implemented outside of facebook. Luckily not all bets are off, so as far as I’ve seen facebook profiles haven’t gone the way of myspace, where every website design faux-paux is committed a dozen times over on every other page. I’m also glad that though there exists an application to play music on your profile, few of my friends have adopted it.

It seems that people’s privacy concerns have gone out the window. Who cares who’s getting your information when you’re getting a little graphic to display your political leanings on your profile? Who cares whose servers it is that you’re storing this information about every vacation and business trip you’re taking in the next few years?

Actually, if you are concerned about that sort of thing, you probably shouldn’t be on facebook in the first place. People tend to forget, because its a social networking site and your profile is there for your friends, that the internet is still a public place. When you post on someone’s wall that you’re going to meet them tomorrow night at 11:00 at that bar downtown, that’s now public knowledge. With few restrictions on joining networks and so many people adding friends without ever meeting them, even if you have your privacy settings on the most stringent level information you put out there is still accessible.

Am I one to advocate privacy? Not at all—in fact I’m usually against it. But if I were, I would not have this website, but I still keep in mind that this is completely public. I don’t put anything on here that I don’t want someone to see. If you don’t want your mom or your boss seeing those pictures of you drunk off your ass, or smoking weed with your buds, don’t post them on facebook.

But I digress. The thing I’ve been noticing that I alluded too originally was that people seem to be dropping these applications just as soon as they’re picking them up. I’ve resisted adding any applications myself though just because they seem redundant (the “Top Friends” and “X Me” apps, for example), pointless (”Political Compass” comes to mind again), or like the very first fax machine.

A few that I find interesting or cute fall into the last category. I suspect in time things will begin to settle down as the truly useful and innovative applications come to the foreground like the few good television shows that everybody is watching despite the multitude of other options around. Half of what makes shows like that interesting is talking about them with other people the next day, in the same way that what makes the features of facebook fun to use is interactions with others.

So some time down the line I might find an application I want to try. Signing my profile away to those who run it probably isn’t much different from signing it away to facebook anyway. For now, though, I’m keeping it simple until all this superfluous stuff dies down.

said the coach to her newbie rowers.

After years of wanting to try (and one summer of being snubbed by a certain club, *cough* Kennebecasis Rowing *cough*) I’ve started a Learn-to-Row program at the Vancouver Rowing Club. Today was our first day out on the water and actually moving somewhere.

The thing is, you need to have your blade at the right angle and the right depth going into the water as you begin each stroke, but if you want to actually see that happen you have to turn your head to look behind you. The catch is that you also have to keep in time with the other rowers, which does not work if you turn to look at your oar. Curse you evolutionary history of mankind with the eyes ony on one side of my head! You could at least have given me one just above my left ear.

On top of that (or, more accurately, before all of that), keeping the boat balanced would also be nice. I’m actually surprised eight people trying to do all that at once for the first time in our lives were able to go as far as we did. But go we did, and we’ll do it again on Thursday.

As a side note, I was all set to post a link to the History of Rowing archives I helped put together when I worked for the Rothesay Living Museum, but it seems like it’s gone offline sometime in the last year. Maybe Industry Canada’s servers are having a bad day. The Internet Wayback Machine has archived most of it, but not the videos, which are the coolest thing since I was the one who filmed them. Take a look at the archive of Rowing: The Legacy of Renforth anyway, and pretend like you’re watching my beautiful cinematography. And oh, here’s a good chance to embarrass myself—looks like they’ve also archived the flash animations I had a hand in. Find them on the education page.

The buses in Vancouver don’t like me.

I think it’s because they found out that I think they look like crickets and they got insulted. So listen up Vancouver City Buses: I don’t mean it as a bad thing. I think you’re cute.

A lot of the buses around here are trolly type contraptions which run on electrical lines suspended above the street. The connection is made by two long bars which come out of the top of the bus and sweep backwards, much like a cricket’s antenna. Plus, the buses are blue, which makes the similarity to Mulan’s Cri-Kee that much more striking.

I guess the problem lies more with my not having a good feel for the system here yet. My first problem was that, though the same two buses go down the same street, they may not stop at the same places. It’s rather unfortunate when you’re forced to make a bet about whether the 99 or the 17 is going to arrive first, because the half block sprint to the other stop if you’re wrong isn’t that practical (and highly embarrassing). Then, there’s the additional problem that two buses with the same number may not actually go to the same place. It’s Nagasaki all over again — “So, you can take any #40 home, and most #20’s, but whatever you do do not get on the #20 with the boxy looking character next to the one that looks like a person standing next to a tree.”

Nonetheless, just when I think I know what’s going on, at least four times now I’ve been standing at my bus stop (with the correct route number on the sign) and watched the correct bus (with all the right words on the sign as well as the right number) go swooshing past without the tiniest hint of stopping to pick me up.

So lest you continue to snub me, Vancouver trolly buses, I would like to apologise once again for caling you crickets, though I hope you will realise that I meant it as a compliment. Please let all your other bus friends know that they can stop to pick me up again.

There’s nothing like spending a sunny afternoon sitting on a grassy knoll and reading up on some quantum theory. And I even think I mean that in the positive sense, although I might just be saying that because I like sunny afternoons in general.

Before heading out, I had to decide whether I would just carry the textbook alone or put it in my backpack. My first instinct was that I didn’t need my backpack for just one book, but then I realised that my backpack is a treasure-trove of fun stuff. There’s at least an 80% chance that at any time I’ll be carrying all of:

• A water bottle, though it may be empty
• A fan, left over from my days in Japan
• A deck of cards
• A pen
• A granola bar
• Sunscreen
• A calculator
• A compass
• My camera
• An English/Japanese translator
• A copy of the novel GO
• A flashlight
• Book darts
• and my lucky dragon scale

I’ve been carrying some of those things with me for years, others for not very long but still consistently. You never know when you’ll be lost in the woods at night, or in need of calculating the height of a large tree based on its shadow when sitting in the sun reading a book with the best bookmarks ever invented (properly protected with some sunscreen, of course).