First one had to be sent in for repair because wifi didn’t work and it started spontaneously rebooting about once per hour, among other issues.

Motorola sent it back with software issues fixed but physically damaged, so I sent it back for the hardware to be fixed. I was warned that the type of damage it had was not covered under warranty, but since it the damaged was caused by Motorola themselves I sent it back anyway.

They returned it without anything fixed and without comment. They didn’t even offer to fix it for a price. I had several heated calls with both Motorola and Telus about it at this point, and eventually sent it back again. (Telus had also been charging me handset replacement fees for using a loaner phone while my regular one was away from repair, even though it was under warranty.)

Received a new phone back. Probably refurbished? Worked fine for about 24 hours, then spontaneously shut down and would get stuck on the Motorola logo while booting up for as long as it had power. Sent away for repair for a fourth time. This is now a several months from when I originally went in.

Received phone back. Worked again for about a day. Went to a movie and turned off the phone. It wouldn’t turn back on again, even when plugged in, and would not charge. Sent away for a fifth time.

They returned another new phone back. Again, probably refurbished. This one seems to be working ok, but in the last few weeks (after having it less than two months) it has spontaneously rebooted about half a dozen times. One or two of those times I was using it pretty heavily so, fine, things crash. But most of the time I wasn’t doing much at all, and it’s always been different apps.

So I know this phone is a piece of crap. But I wonder how much of it is because of Android itself being unreliable and how much of it is the fault of Motorola. Have other people had similar issues with Android in general?

Regardless, my experience with this phone has been bad enough that I am not going to buy a Motorola product again. I will stick with Android, though, because I prefer the open model and as slick as iOS seems, Apple refuses to make a version of iTunes for Linux, so I couldn’t use it if I wanted to. I’m thinking Samsung next time. Both for phone and tablet.

I don’t need to drink or be loud and rowdy or laughing and shouting and all that to be having fun. That’s what tends to confuse extroverts. At a party I may be a wallflower, sitting to the side chatting with a friend or two, and it may not look like much but I am enjoying myself. In fact, I sometimes fall prey to the opposite assumption: I see extroverts as social butterflies, flitting from one person to the next, without ever actually getting to know anybody or experiencing any sort of conversation. But I digress.

It is to my detriment sometimes. I avoid house parties and other large gatherings in general, unless I know I have some friends to stick to. But when there’s nobody I know (or the people I do know are more extroverted types who run off and chat up the whole room), it tends to be awkward and boring. Even things I really want to do, I tend to shy away from. I don’t mean lectures or a spin class or something, but purely social events, where if I don’t know anybody it’s the extroverts and introverts who already know other people who run the show, and I’m hide on the sidelines.

It’s a classic, cliche picture, of standing outside in the cold, looking through the window and seeing people sitting around a table laughing and having a good time. Why don’t I go inside? Why do I just walk by, home to my comfort zone? It’s a terrible way to meet people, this. I’m worse than Marigold.

I had fun hacking together various parts of this site, but it made it very difficult to keep current. This was especially true when it came to moving more and more content to WordPress. I customized so much with my theme and various plugins that it became impossible to keep up to date. WordPress upgrades itself automatically quite wonderfully, but it doesn’t upgrade all my code. I began to get worried that my hacks would start to break as WordPress changed.

And besides all that, I was wondering what the point of it all was. Nobody comes to this site and browses around, so all the navigation tools and indices of content and whatnot were useless. I had things promoting content on other parts of the site. All this stuff is useless. When people come here, they typically do it for one article they found from Google and that’s it. And that’s fine, because I never actually intended this to be some kind of destination. There’s no social networking here. This isn’t a high traffic blog. I don’t have a dedicated audience or even a well defined subject.

And that’s fine for me. I’ve said all along, that this site is for me. It really is more like a personal journal that I come back to read once in a while than anything else. And if people find useful or interesting things written in here, then that’s great too, but I’m not going to try to dedicate this site to an audience that doesn’t exist. What I got by doing that was a half-breed kind of site. Something that was pretending to be something it wasn’t.

And so I’ve reworked the site’s design. Yes, writing my own theme doesn’t solve much of the first problem of keeping code up to standard, but at least I’ve written it in a more recent standard. In a couple years I’ll probably be ready for a change again anyway. The goal is, and will be, to keep it simple. One of the best sites I’ve ever seen was also the simplest. I’m aspiring to that. The content is still all there, but I’m not trying to throw it at every body who browses by. You get what you ask for: the one page you ask for, and nothing else, unless you really poke around.

It’s much more personal this way.

For now I am simply throwing this out there. I made a font using fontcapture.com and I think it’s pretty awesome.

I’ve called it Gregory Handwriting. It’s a pretty cool system fontcapture.com has worked out, but there are two main deficiencies.

One: It would be nice to have more characters in the font. Right now it seems focused to English and Spanish. You wouldn’t be able to use it to write much French, for example. It would be better to have more of the extended ASCII accent characters. And I’m in physical sciences so there’s always room for Greek and mathematical characters. Ideally fontcapture.com would offer additional character sets that could be added to a font in addition to the basic one it provides now. It would be a huge feature if I could print out and scan new sheets and add to an already existing ttf file.

Two: I need some additional tweaking of my characters, specifically where the character’s borders are. While the slightly askew letters can be cute, it would sometimes be nice to have letters tuck into one another the way some fonts do. Right now the font I made has some character spacing issues that wouldn’t exist in real handwriting. I might be able to fix this with 3rd party software though. I just haven’t looked into it yet.

So there you have it, a nifty little make your own font tool that works quite well as long as basic alphanumerics are all you need. I might be incorporating my version into this blog’s layout. It’s about time for a redesign, I think. It might encourage me to post more often.

Update (2010-01-16): The font made by fontcapture has a few other glaring omissions, like opening curly quotes but not closing ones. Luckily, there is a linux utility that easily fixes this called fontforge. You can open the TTF font and edit characters, including their boundaries, and then use File->Generate Font to export the updated TTF. In the case of the above, where a missing character is just a mirror image of another, it’s easy to open the existing character, copy, open the empty character, paste, and do a transformation to flip it. I also was able to create an em dash by stretching out the basic hyphen without any trouble. Fontforge detects lots of errors in the fontcapture font, but it seems like these can be ignored pretty safely.

As an astronomer, I was eager to find out what the night sky was like. There’s little hope for any observing in downtown Toronto to begin with, but I thought with this view away from the downtown core there might be a chance of seeing a thing or two with my very meager 2 inch refracter. Unfortunately, (1) after sunset the western sky remains quite bright, and (2), this is still downtown Toronto. I can barely make out the bowl of the Big Dipper.

On top of this, the northwest sky in the evening is about as boring as it gets right now. While I did make out the binary pair Mizar and Alcor, what I really want to see is either Saturn or Jupiter, but I have yet to even figure out when either of those may make an appearance in just the right direction.

What I really need is a rooftop penthouse and a nice big 12 incher.

That’s what she said.

I was struck immediately by the richness of language. Despite the fact that the music being played at the Starbucks I was reading it in clashed completely with the warm prose I was lost in it. It is obvious that this is a carefully crafted story. Not only do the main characters experience a non-linear timeline, the reader is introduced to their story in a different but still non-linear timeline. That any of this makes sense is astounding in itself. The only part I’m hesitant about so far is that the preliminaries pointing at the actual mechanism which will make the time travel premise possible are much more in the vein of hard sci-fi rather than the mystic sense we have so far, but I’m hoping this will play out in a way that fits well with the rest of the content.

I was particular enamored by a couple of the first scenes where the wife’s time traveler, Henry, meets himself at an earlier age. I am so used to depictions of a child’s wonderment being a setup for a fall that reading this particular episode in Henry’s life made me fall in love with him. Then not much later, in a different time and different pairing of ages, Niffenegger just as easily brings up every bit of loneliness I’ve ever felt right there in one page.

Maybe this is because I’ve always been fascinated by the idea not just of time travel but of visiting oneself in another time. I wonder quite regularly what my past self might have thought if he caught a glipse of what I was seeing at that moment. I remember reading a novel years ago that saw a boy get the ability to travel through time not entirely unlike this book. I wish now I could remember what it was called. Then of course there is Robert J. Sawyer’s Flashforward, which deals very explicitly with what might happen if we all saw a few moments of our own futures.

The Time Traveler’s Wife is already a very different creature from both of these. I only worry that I will read it too quickly and this so far enthralling story will be over too soon.

I’m flying home from a fantastic weekend in Chicago. The weather wasn’t quite as nice for the first couple days as the Weather Network had promised, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it threatened to be today, so it all worked out in the end. I was surprised, several times a day, at how windy that city really is. It was a schitzophrenic city weather-wise, with warm breezes one minute and chilly winds the next.

The really important stuff, however, happened indoors—the wedding of one of my best friends, Audrey. It was a great ceremony, great food, great company. We all went “aaawwww” during the bride’s vows and all laughed during the groom’s. The main of honour did the worm and I slow danced with the groom until his father split us up, so we had a threesome with Shelagh instead. Good times were had.

This makes the second summer in a row where one of my friends from undergrad have tied the knot. That makes three couples among my close friends in less than a year, with a fourth now engaged. Add to that what seems like a rash of pregnancies in my department and suddenly I want to get married and have babies too!

Well, okay, not so suddenly. I’ve always wanted these things. I’m very much a small town boy with small town values. I also have big city liberal values which would offend the sensibilities of many small town folk, but in the worst that’ll happen is they’ll make a movie about this small-town-cum-big-city-cum-small-town guy who shows up at the very conservative liberal arts college and starts stirring things up by questioning the natural order of things and supporting birth-control. No, wait—they made that movie and I was played by Julia Roberts. Damn. Now I need to come up with a plan B…