Domain name:           burrell.ca
Domain status:         EXIST
Approval date:         2005/02/02
Renewal date:          2012/02/02
Updated date:          2010/02/02

I’ve been watch­ing it for the past 3 or 4 years. Who­ever owns it doesn’t appear to be using it for a whole lot — prob­ably just email if any­thing — and it def­in­itely doesn’t seem to be a domain squat­ter. I was start­ing to think it was someone who registered the domain and for­got about it. When they for­got to renew the domain last month I figured it was finally going to be released.

Last night — the date the domain expired — I checked it and it was lis­ted by CIRA as SUSPD. I.e., it had entered the 30-​​day “sus­pen­ded” period where the owner has one final chance to renew before it’s released. I think CIRA charges a pen­alty for renew­ing a domain while it’s sus­pen­ded, so who­ever owns this domain appar­ently really wants it for some­thing. I guess I can’t be too upset about it. Oh well.

My novel is still going. I’m still only at about 7000 words — over 10% of the way there! — but I think it’s going pretty well. No mat­ter how stressed I am or how much work piles up I find it pretty relax­ing to go back to the novel, even if it’s only for half an hour a week or some­thing like that.

Also I hit a very major mile­stone today: my novel’s first inter­ro­b­ang. The premise of the novel, again, is that it’s an altern­ate real­ity where another spe­cies of homo has sur­vived, in addi­tion to humans. They’re incap­able of verbal speech, though, which makes oppor­tun­it­ies for inter­ro­b­angs a little less plen­ti­ful than you’d get oth­er­wise. Oh well.

I’ve real­ized I don’t really care for drama that much. I tend to favour non-​​fiction over fic­tion and even the fic­tion I do like I gen­er­ally tend to like for the descrip­tion of the world itself. Any plot hap­pen­ings should be dir­ectly attrib­uted and in enhance­ment of the descrip­tion of the world itself and not just for drama’s sake, or so it seems. Well I threw in a bit of a plot twist today, so we’ll see how it goes.

At this rate I may even fin­ish in time for the next NaNoWriMo!

I’ve always loved remote con­trolled cars. I think at one point in ele­ment­ary school I even lis­ted R/​C car driver as a future pro­fes­sion of mine. While I did have some actu­ally really nice cars as a kid, one dream of mine which never came to fruition was to put a video cam­era on the car. It would be like being trans­por­ted to a mini­ature world where everything is huge and cars go orders of mag­nitude faster than they should.

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Over Christ­mas break we stopped by a Win­ners and I picked up an amphi­bi­ous bat­tery con­trolled car. The box had some dra­matic pic­tures of it going from water to land, so I decided to try it out in my own kit­chen sink. Not great, but well worth the $2.25, I’d say!

Here’s the video.

Someone recently asked about Freenet, so I decided to try it out again. If you’re curi­ous about Freenet, the about page gives a good descrip­tion of it. It’s a WWW-​​like net­work — minus the dynamic con­tent and search engines — with the added bene­fit that it’s totally anonym­ous and uncensor­able. “Anonym­ous” is a bit of a mis­nomer: it’s actu­ally closer to pseud­onym­ous since, through cryp­to­graphic prim­it­ives, it’s designed around the idea of hav­ing iden­tit­ies not linked to real iden­tit­ies. The “WWW-​​like” is also a mis­nomer as it’s actu­ally a more gen­eral key-​​data sort of enorm­ous filesys­tem, but the WWW-​​like part of it is what most users see, espe­cially initially.

I played around with it years ago and I have to say it’s improved quite a bit since then. The biggest, and just about the only vis­ible, change is in per­form­ance. I haven’t dug into see­ing what they’ve done to help things, but most frees­ites load within a minute and there are very few “data not found“s. “Within a minute” may not sound very impress­ive com­pared to the WWW, but it’s really impress­ive con­sid­er­ing the nature of Freenet.

From a local resource con­sump­tion stand­point, per­form­ance is still quite ter­rible. I’ve been run­ning it for close to a day now and the load aver­age stays some­where around 0.3 even when not doing any­thing and can jump up above 3.0 when doing cas­ual brows­ing of frees­ites or Frost boards. This is unfor­tu­nate since you have to leave it run­ning 24/​7 for it to work well.

The same prob­lem is with Freenet that has always been there: con­tent. I agree with the gen­eral philo­sophies of Freenet: even “good” cen­sor­ship philo­soph­ic­ally has bad con­sequences and so it is nice to have a place like Freenet free from any sort of cen­sor­ship. Well, in prac­tice, that hasn’t really panned out. Freenet’s been around for close to 10 years now and still doesn’t have any com­pel­ling con­tent. I’ve poked around the major frees­ites (this link will not work if you aren’t on Freenet) and the Frost mes­sage boards and…nothing. There’s piles of con­tent, of course, but little of it of con­sequence, very little of it inter­est­ing, and none of it compelling.

The primary value of some­thing like Freenet in mostly-​​free coun­tries like Canada would be Wikileaks, I would think. Well there is some of that — for instance there’s a frees­ite devoted to the leaked Sarah Palin emails — but the fact of the mat­ter is that Wikileaks exists in the “real” cen­sor­able Inter­net and it hasn’t been cen­sored. Or at least not yet. There’s been pos­tur­ing that maybe it will be some day, we’ll see. But the fact that it hasn’t been yet takes away a niche mar­ket for Freenet.

What I see a lot of on the frees­ites is politically…disagreeable…writings. In this sense Freenet actu­ally does make sense. The Inter­net is becom­ing less and less anonym­ous. It used to be that you could set up a Geo­cit­ies sites and write about your love for Emma Gold­man, but these days ser­vice pro­viders (in the most gen­eral sense) are chomp­ing at the bit jump­ing all over them­selves at the oppor­tun­ity of passing on IP addresses and what­not. The polit­ical writ­ings on Freenet aren’t gen­er­ally illegal (well, maybe there might be one or two in a few coun­tries with severe hate speech laws, but those are the excep­tions), but they’re uncon­ven­tional enough that I can see people want­ing anonym­ity. It’s not so much about Freenet being uncensor­able as it is about Freenet offer­ing this very eleg­ant pseud­onym­ity. I sup­pose it’s nice to have a place where you can write and you know that it’s impossible for future employ­ers to track you down and find out that you secretly agree with Emma Goldman’s politics.

Well, I still agree with the the­ory of Freenet and I still acknow­ledge its prac­tical value in places like China, but…I still can’t see that it applies to me. I’d like to cre­ate a frees­ite to add more con­tent and get more people inter­ested in Freenet, but like most people, I can’t think of any­thing com­pel­ling to put there. I think I’ll just unin­stall it again and wish it well.

P.S. I’ve just learned that Frost has been obsol­esced by a new Freenet mes­sage board sys­tem called FMS. When I’d pre­vi­ously used Freenet many years ago, Frost was the big one, so I installed it out of habit. FMS looks actu­ally rather fant­astic (and it works with your exist­ing news­group reader like Thun­der­bird) and maybe I’ll keep Freenet around another couple hours to play with FMS, but I doubt the con­tent on there is going to be rad­ic­ally dif­fer­ent from the rest of Freenet.

I still have a few minutes before 2010 so I thought I’d write a little some­thing while Jasna and I are sit­ting on the couch watch­ing cel­eb­ra­tions on TV with her parents.

Well, first off I think I need to take more pic­tures, the evid­ence for that being that the above is my favour­ite pic­ture I took this year. It’s our fat­test cat, Pin­cho.
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Since I moved out east to Ontario I’ve never really done a proper Christ­mas here. I’ve either gone back out West to my par­ents’ or they’ve come out to Toronto and we’ve done Christ­mas some­where else.

This year Jasna wanted a Christ­mas. She grew up in Ser­bia where Christ­mas is a reli­gious hol­i­day and observed in Janu­ary. They do the tree/​Santa/​gift thing on New Year’s but I sup­pose it’s not quite the same, so this year we decided to do a real Christ­mas. We bought a proper (arti­fi­cial) tree, which you can see above and dec­or­a­tions and what­not. We bought stock­ings, too, though I some­how missed get­ting them in that picture.

We’ll still be doing Christ­mas proper some­where else, but at least we’ll have our own build-​​up to Christmas.

One thing that’s always fas­cin­ated me about organic brains — in con­trast to elec­tronic equip­ment — is that they never crash in the same way. Or per­haps they’re crash­ing all the time and there’s enough redund­ancy to hide it away: it’s hard to tell.

Most elec­tron­ics are stable and reli­able for a good while, but once they start to fail they gen­er­ally don’t fail out­right. A wire or sol­der­ing point will start to come a little bit loose. Sud­denly your device doesn’t work when it’s too hot (or too cold) or it’ll stop work­ing until you give it a good bang or blow out some dust, or some­times you have to try turn­ing it on mul­tiple times before it turns on for good. Machines often don’t reach a sud­den death like organic brains do, where one second they’re “alive” and the next second they’re “dead” and there’s no hope of them com­ing back again (ignor­ing the fact that there’s always ample oppor­tun­ity to repair them).

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I’m cur­rently hanging out at my gate in Pear­son air­port. In a couple hours I’ll be on my way to Paris and tomor­row morn­ing I’ll catch my con­nect­ing flight to Ams­ter­dam and then I take the train to Utrecht to see Jasna’s sis­ter, Ana, and her hus­band, Andre.

Jasna and I aren’t very good with sep­ar­a­tion, though I think this time went bet­ter than most. It could be that it’s a shorter sep­ar­a­tion this time — five days, in con­trast to Jasna’s recent two-​​month trip — or that we’re too tired from last night’s Hallowe’en party to get as worked up. Maybe we’re just get­ting bet­ter at it, though. It’s not like no tears were shed, but I think we did rel­at­ively well.

Unfor­tu­nately today my cam­era bat­tery decided to crap out on me. The upside to this is Jasna lent me her (very awe­some) DSLR cam­era for the trip. I’ll try to keep pic­tures of blondes down to a min­imum. Mostly I’m excited to see Ana and Andre, but I think they’ll be busy most of the time, so I’ll prob­ably ven­ture into Ams­ter­dam at least once to enter­tain myself. I brought the cam­era cable with me, so watch my photo gal­lery in the next day or two for pic­tures to start appearing.

The con­fer­ence — and my present­a­tion there — I haven’t thought a whole lot about yet. I’ll have to dis­ap­pear to Eind­hoven, which I think is only about half an hour from Utrecht — but then again maybe everything’s half an hour away from everything in the Neth­er­lands, who knows — and see what’s going on there. I’m fairly excited to see what FOPARA ends up being like since this is the first year the workshop’s being done. I’m espe­cially excited to see the Hume pro­ject people, like Kevin Ham­mond, since I’ve never met any.

I should say there’s still a lot of work that’s going on behind the scenes, work even on what I’m going to present to FOPARA. While I was in Cal­gary we decided to put in a new typ­ing sys­tem based on bunched logics which deals eleg­antly with a lot of the prob­lems with peeks that we’ve been sort­ing out in Pola, plus some new features.

I finally got per­suaded into doing a NaNoWriMo. For those who don’t speak Inter­net hip­ster, this is just a fancy way of say­ing I got per­suaded into writ­ing my own novel, spe­cific­ally a 50000-​​word novel within the month of November.

It may seem like a silly idea con­sid­er­ing I have a lot of work to do, not to men­tion a con­fer­ence to go to at the end of this week. Doing 1667 words a day isn’t really that bad, though, con­sid­er­ing writ­ing comes pretty eas­ily for me. I prob­ably write more than that each day just in emails. Whether I can write any­thing good seems to be entirely beside the point: NaNoWriMo is about noth­ing if not quant­ity over quality.

Any­way I’m sud­denly real­iz­ing how ser­i­ously people take this NaNoWriMo busi­ness. (more…)