There has been some discussion in These Very Pages about Christmas lights and the deployment thereof. Some people have asked if there is a similar “all-out assault” for other holidays, specifically Halloween. The answer would be “sorta” – while there is not a fortnight of lights and music, there is a dressing of the house on trick-or-treat night that gets some good reviews from the neighbourhood kids. It’s amazing that a few flickering lights, some pumpkins, and a couple of fog machines can still give kids the willies … here are some pics from last year’s setup.

Down at the end of the driveway there are tattered ribbons on the poles and lampstands and skeletons lurking about:

Up by the house is the pumpkin patch and strategic fog:

And finally, deep in the bowels of the garage, the Candy Shrine Of EVIL:

This year there will be some graves in the front yard and some more (and better quality) fog, which hopefully will creep the wee ones even more … stay tuned.

I have been watching Flock for a while now – it is Yet Another Mozilla Browser based on the not-entirely-ludicrous concept that some people are spending all of their online time engaged in “Web 2.0″ (cough cough gag retch) types of activities – sharing photos, sharing video, blogging, glued to Facebook, whatever. Up until now, however, the execution of said browser was somewhere between “lame” and “unusable” – it wasn’t the sort of thing you could use for more than three minutes at a time without getting frustrated.

Well, frustration be gone. Flock 1.0 is available in beta and it pretty much hits the target dead on. It is faster, tighter, more intuitive – it might just become your main browser, regardless of whether or not you use these “social” functions:

People: A pervasive sidebar will keep an eye on what your contacts and friends on Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter are up to

Media: New items and streams from said friends show up in a media bar, and you can add your own junk with a transparent drag-and-drop function

Feeds: Feeds get their own sidebar and are much easier to deal with than in the standard sort of browser window

Blogging: A built-in offline blog editor is robust enough to take the place of whatever you use now (in my case, Ecto) and make blogging – to your own host or one of the big services – insanely quick and easy

Add to that instant connections to your Diggs and Magnolias et al, the best web clipboard I have ever come across, and really awesome tab management and you have a potential winner here. There are a few caveats – there is no way to tell it to report as another type of browser, any images you post to your blog are hosted at a third-party service (this will apparently be fixed soon), and all those sidebars and media bars and whatever bars take up a lot of screen real estate – you won’t enjoy this on a 13″ laptop.

Those quibbles aside, you should try this if you blog, do photos, or are involved in any sort of online social networking. Just make sure you get the 1.0 beta, and not the 0.9 version that is offered on the main page.The 0.9 sucks large, but the 1.0 just might change the way you connect to the outside world …

Technorati Tags: browser, mac, blogging, flock

So no, for those that asked, I do not have the game yet – I am still agonizing about what platform to go with. Really, it rates up there with the great questions of our time. In the meantime, however, I hear nasty rumours that the new game is too easy, and that the avatars are really lame in both design and in the way they move. I really do not want this to be true …

I have been running Leopard since the developer seeds were first delivered in June, so I dont know why I never noticed this until now. Better late than never, I guess … the icon used to represent windows volumes and mounted shares in the new Mac OS is in fact a Blue Screen Of Death:

That rules.

Here is some fuel for the speculative fire – this brand new contest on Molson’s web site (oddly, there is no english version yet) purports to be giving away a “Rogers iPhone” in January. Note the eye-popping price of eight hundred fucking dollars:

Since we know that Apple has already said they will sell the iPhone in Canada for the same price as the states, that must be Rogers’ attempt at an obscene markup to recoup the money that they will no longer be able to extort from their customers. The plot thickens …

There is a mindset in our society that pirates – the kind that sailed around in wooden ships, not the kind that press bogus DVDs in Hong Kong – were a sort of merry band of gentlemen rogues, yo-ho-hoing their way across the Caribbean. They would swashbuckle up, liberate the gold and jewels, and sail away with a hearty laugh and wave of their hanky at the sputtering victims. We like pirates – they are a romanticized sort of anti-hero, outlaws with a heart of gold, brave men living their on their own terms, Robin Hoods of the high seas.

This, of course, is patent bullshit.

Pirates were a bloodthirsty bunch of sadistic assholes, reveling in torture and misery, and trading in pain, terror, and death. For centuries, people knew this and loathed pirates for the disgusting scum that they were. Virtually all of the literature that dates from the time of the pirates paints them in a realistic picture. It is only in the last 80 years or so – basically, since Errol Flynn redefined pirates as complete pieces of fiction in Captain Blood – that they have become romantic visions of a lost age. The movie pirate is now the “real” pirate in the minds of the masses, and the realistic pirate as depicted in four centuries of period literature is mostly forgotten.

Mostly, but not completely. Under The Black Flag is a fabulous examination of the pirates of yore as they really were – cutthroat sons of bitches with short miserable lives and nasty sorts of endings. Cordingly is a maritime historian of the first degree, and brings a heady mix of impeccable research and fascinating subject matter together here in a book that is well worth reading.

And, more importantly, well worth remembering next time “Talk Like A Pirate Day” rolls around.

Highly recommended.

It has been noted in These Very Pages that Rogers Communications is dragging their feet on the iPhone because they want Apple to disable the WiFi functions – Rogers doesn’t want their customers to have any options to access data outside of their ludicrously high-priced and glacially slow EDGE service. You might be interested to know that this is not the only sticking point. I found out yesterday that Rogers also wants Apple to disable the logging function that lets any iPhone user see exactly how much data they have moved during the current billing period. The idea that customers could watch their usage and not run up charges for data usage over and above their billing plan is one that fills the gang at Rogers with dread and horror.

An informed customer is apparently something to be avoided at all costs in the Land Of Ted …

There has been much in the way of speculation and wishful thinking over the “final encore” in Guitar Hero 3. If you aren’t familiar with the concept, the final encore was debuted in Guitar Hero 2 – the last song that would push you and your audience to the limit. That cut was “Freebird” … pretty cool because (a) the song is fucking hard, and (b) in the original Guitar Hero they kept referring to “Freebird” as an example of rock excess that you would be best to avoid. The whole thing was exciting, fun, and self-mocking at the same time – a fitting finish to the game.

In Guitar Hero 80s Edition some people felt that “Play With Me” was a bit of a letdown, and – while I personally liked the choice because I am a huge Bill & Ted geek – they may have been right. Despite having some serious musical and gameplay grapefruits, the song just doesn’t have the same sort of iconic presence in our musical psyche.

Which brings us back to GH3. Some people, buoyed by the presence of Led Zepplin in Rock Band, have nattered on about “Stairway To Heaven” as the super-secret final track. This shows a serious lack of imagination and fortunately – no matter what else their faults – the mopes at Activision have a little more vision and style than that. Some people might complain about the final decision, but I think that this is a really cool choice and I can’t wait to see how it plays out. No matter what, it definitely qualifies as “fucking hard”.

Give it a listen here. Iconic? Oh my yes ….

250,000: The number of iPhones that Apple estimates have been purchased to be unlocked and used on networks other than AT&T.

So here we are – into the fateful final week as we wait for Guitar Hero 3. If this sort of thing is not your cup of tea (or Jack Daniels, as the case may be) then come back next week. There will be a lot of rambling about the game on These Very Pages as we count off the last 4 days of delightful anticipation …

Four days, twelve hours, and counting …

A long time ago and in a former life I wrote a treatise on “cursing” and “swearing” and pointing out that the modern usage of profanity is neither of these things. Back in the day when you cursed someone you really cursed someone (”May a thousand soldiers know your daughter!”) and when you swore, you swore by something (”By Odin’s one good eye!”). While telling someone to “fuck off” or calling them a “piece of shit” is a useful tool at times, it doesn’t have the same sort of cachet and it quite honestly needs a new and workable term to describe the usage.

However, this post isn’t about that. It is about an excellent article over at the The New Republic on the value and use of modern profanity, and if you ignore the fact that he improperly refers to what is going on as “cursing” you might enjoy it immensely. I did.

WARNING: The link above takes you to an article that contains – among other things – the “c-word” so don’t be shocked when you get there.

16: The number of people who have been killed by police tasers in Canada since 2004.

My pal King Turd – who is a helluva guy in most other respects – can’t follow instructions to save his life and managed to brick his iPhone. In a nutshell, he botched the unlocking process and then when he went to restore it to start over from scratch he accidentally let it restore from the Apple servers (evil boxes of silicon packing their lethal load of version 1.1.1) instead of a local copy of the older 1.0.2 firmware. And – just like Apple warned us – updating an unlocked phone to 1.1.1 made it go boom.

However, as smart as the Apple guys are, they aren’t omniscient. Last night I unbricked the phone and put it back into full and unlocked working order – the trick is that a “restore” from iTunes does not re-flash the baseband code, you have to find a way to do that on your own. You can do it, however, meaning that any bricked phone can be brought back to life. Full instructions to be posted this weekend.

Human Cannonball by Webb Wilder. I have always been a huge Webb Wilder fan – which, sadly, makes me one of the chosen few. Webb rocks a little too hard for the country types, but has too much twang for the rockers to be comfy with. It’s too bad – this is really good stuff, especially in the car on a wide open road. Human Cannonball is more of less the pinnacle of this body or work – three parts southern rock, one part college alternative, and a big ol’ pinch of drive-in camp. Open your mind and give it a try. Trust me.

It’s really too bad that Rogers is refusing to sell the iPhone in Canada until Apple cripples it by removing the WiFi functions. The iPhone really is the best possible phone for any Rogers user – when a call is dropped or fails due to the legendary unreliability of the Rogers wireless network (something that happens at least half of the time, maybe more) the iPhone does two thoughtful things: One, it suppresses the insanely annoying “triple tone of death” that signals a wireless failure. Two, it immediately places a huge green “Try Again” button on the screen to make the reconnection process marginally less painful.

Just imagine the awesome marketing possibilities here. “We know our wireless network sucks ass, but this phone makes it slightly less sucky.” Or, “The iPhone from Rogers – get one and you might not hate our guts as much.”

These guys are totally missing the boat.

15: The number of #1 hits on the Billboard singles chart recorded by The Carpenters

I came across this article today and the photo just shakes me to the core. The story that goes with it fills me with both sadness and anger – heavy on the anger – but the picture has grabbed my mind and will just not let go. It definitely one of the most powerful images I have ever seen.

Here we are. Election day, and not a single one of the morons running in my riding bothered to get back to me. All one of them had to do was take five fucking minutes out of their day and they would have gained a free vote. They couldn’t even be bothered to get some drudge or peon to blast me off a canned reply, which is both pathetic and inexcusable. I realize I am only one vote and they may not give a rat’s ass about actual people, but it is the principle of the thing.

So, with no one willing to answer my questions I am left to try and evaluate the choices as best I can:

Liberal: I don’t care if my candidate is the smartest person alive and/or is willing to get naked and offer me a lap dance, I cannot with any shred of concience vote for a member of Dalton the Dog Killer’s party. Plus they are determined to destroy the environment by legislating the use of ethanol – they murder puppies and want to accelerate global warming. It would be like voting for Michael Vick, only worse.

Conservative: As much as I like John Tory, my local candidate is a complete dud. No personality, no positions, no nothing. Like an empty suit with a bad haircut.

NDP: Can’t do it. Can’t vote for the commies. Sorry.

Family Coalition: According to their campaign literature, they stand on a platform of fear, suspicion, intolerance, and the subjection of women. Not as offensive as Dalton, but damn close. No thanks.

Green: Once again, and mostly by default, the greens get my vote – if nothing else, I have no valid reason to loathe them.

It will probably all be an exercise in futility anyway. I live in a riding with a heavy population of steel workers, who are told to vote NDP by their union masters and – just as in every other election – will blindly do so, ensuring that once again my riding and city have absolutely no effective representation in either the provincial or federal government. Hamilton always votes NDP, and Hamilton always ends up getting screwed.

Thanks for coming out.

Time for a history lesson. It was exactly 10 years ago today that Michael Dell was asked what he would do if he were CEO of Apple instead of Dell, and he replied with this timeless comment:

“What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

Pretty funny, considering that in the 10 years since Apple’s market cap has risen to $140.4 billion, while Dell’s sits at a somewhat more modest $62.2 billion.

I never get tired of laughing at Michael Dell.

14: The percentage of adult Canadians who say they have skinny-dipped with a member of the opposite sex.

Less than a week before the election, and none of the candidates have bothered to reply to their email yet. While we bide our time and give them the long weekend to get caught up, here is the previously promised “first look” at each candidate and the associated contact process:

Bryan Adamczyk – NDP: Once again the NDP has gone with the “every candidate gets a page on the same website” setup. This has the advantage of being cheap and easy to maintain – and also allows the party absolute and utter control of their candidates, which has been a hallmark of the NDP for pretty much ever – but gives the local schmuck absolutely zero flexibility. At least it loads, and has the advantage of ensuring that each candidate has a web site that was actually laid out by a professional. Better yet, the email function was a proper MAILTO link and not some stupid web form. Note that I didn’t bother to include the union question in the list that I sent to ol’ Bryan – the NDP considers unions to be somewhere between a cure for cancer and chocolate chip cookies, and I can already guess the answer to that one.

Sophia Aggelonitis – Liberal: All of the Liberal candidates have their own domains, but those domains all host what appears to be the same “cookie cutter” web site as provided by the mothership. Sophia’s site has no real email link, and instead you have to fill out this bogus contact form, which then sends your questions / comments / wild ravings into the great beyond. It may or may not truncate what you type, I couldn’t tell … but either way, I am not holding my breath for a reply.

Bob Charters – Progressive Conservative: Bob has his own web site – no riding on party coattails or walking in digital lockstep here. The thing is functional enough, but has a really cheap feel that just screams “Frontpage”. That knee-jerk assessment that would seem to be confirmed by the fact that his buttons and banners look like shit – the text has those horrid scaling and stroke-weight problems that plague all Windoze fonts. The navigation is okay, I guess, but the ghetto visuals make it hard to get past the look and concentrate on the content. Plus he really needs to get rid of that haircut. At least he had a proper email link … small favours, I guess.

Mary Mann – Family Coalition Party: Ugh. This is just bad – it looks like a 12-year old did it with the HTML editing function of Netscape 1.4. I mean, Frontpage would be an improvement here … which is about the worst thing you can say about anything ever. Unbelievable. There was actually a proper email link, but any credit they gained there was immediately cancelled out by the presence of an animated GIF of a mailbox. Come on, lady, this isn’t 1992 here – get with the program.

None of the candidates’ web presences really filled me with confidence – they all managed to miss the mark one way or the other. And I have to come clean here – my admission that I will go strictly by the quality of the candidates’ answers and that I will completely disregard party affiliation is not 100% true. Bryan and Bob start out with a clean slate (surprising for me, given my general distaste for the commies NDP) but Mary Mann starts in a pretty deep hole because of her party’s anti-choice and anti-tolerance stance – and worse, there is that animated fucking GIF. She needs to really hit a home run with the answers to make up for that. And Sophia? Well, she shills for Dalton “Puppy Killer” McGuinty and his dog-hating party, so one of her answers had better include a proposal to lead a bloody coup against her leader, or she is going nowhere fast.

It was pointed out to me that – being in the midst of an election and all – there was a need for editorial balance in the media. Equal time for opposing points of view, and all like that. I agree wholeheartedly, and in that spirit we present an equally uplifting photo from one of the other events taking place last night:

You’re welcome.

There is a timeless sort of joy in the changing of the seasons …

King Turd dropped me a line to point out a news story about The Stupidest Woman On Earth.

Once again it is time to exercise our democratic franchise, this time to elect a new government in the province of Ontario. And because there are what I consider to be gigantic holes in both the party platforms and the credibility of the leaders thereof, I am falling back on my strategy of emailing a list of questions to each of my local candidates. The questions are all on issues that are important to me, and whichever candidate gives me the best answers – regardless of party affiliation* – gets my vote.

Before starting, however, it might be worth looking at the results from the last time I did this. In the most recent federal election, only four of the candidates in my riding provided email addresses to the public. The result of the exercise was as follows:

Liberal - Never bothered to get back to me

New Democratic - sent me an automated response

Green - had an invalid address on the official website, email bounced

Conservative - mailed me back with an actual personal reply

The PC candidate therefore got my vote by default, despite my personal feelings that Stephen Harper is about 8 degrees worse than Satan and Hitler combined. Now, you would think after that distasteful little result I would want to abandon this strategy forever. Hope springs eternal, though, and if nothing else there isn’t really a way to end up with a worse scenario this time around So here are the questions that I have fired off to the five candidates in my riding, all of whom have managed to provide email address this time around:

1- Do you have a realistic plan to reduce Ontario’s carbon emissions?

2 - What are you going to do about Bill 132?

3 - Do you think that Ontario should have a single publicly-funded education system or that every alternative school and school system should receive equal funding?

4 - Why are some Ontario residents allowed to blatantly disregard and willingly break the law simply because they happen to be from a certain ethnic group?

5 – Why do Ontario hospitals spend so much money on administration when that money could be spent on delivering health care?

6 - Why is the curriculum in Ontario schools so weak and out of date when it comes to math and science? Why aren’t our teachers held to a realistic standard of aptitude in these areas?

7 - What steps would you take to ensure that hard-working and tax-paying citizens of Ontario are not held hostage by unions in both the public and private sectors?

I’ll give some first impressions later, and update the tally as the answers – if any – come in. The game, as they say, is afoot.

If you are one of the really fucking stupid people who upgraded their previously unlocked iPhone and – despite being warned over and over by everyone from Steve Jobs through Phil Schiller and right down to the mope behind the counter at the Apple Store – now has a brick, you are probably wondering if there is a way to revert things and get your phone back to it’s original state.

However, if you just bought an iPhone and aren’t sure if you can unlock it because you are worried that you might have the newer firmware already, you are probably wondering if you can check it and get an earlier – and more unlock friendly – version.

And if you have an unlocked phone you might be vaguely bothered by the fact that you have no way to “restore” the phone to the factory settings if it ever has a hard crash or anything goes wrong – iTunes always goes and grabs the most current system and firmware from Apple’s servers to do a restore.

Fortunately, there is help for all of you – even the really fucking stupid people in group number one. There is a way (or ways, if you want to be entirely accurate about it) to downgrade from iPhone 1.1.1 to the much more consumer-friendly 1.0.2. Read on …

IF YOU JUST BOUGHT AN IPHONE AND ARENT SURE WHICH VERSION IT IS:

Do this: Turn on the phone, and move the slider at the bottom to allow for an “emergency call”. Dial *3001#12345#* and hit “Call”. Your test and diagnostics will come up – hit “Versions” and then match up your version number to this handy chart:

03.12.06_G = firmware version 1.0.0
03.14.08_G = firmware 1.0.1 or 1.0.2
04.01.13_G = firmware version 1.1.1

If you have version 1.1.1, your phone is not suitable for adding new applications or unlocking. To downgrade it, do this:

1 – Download the following items:

The 1.0.2 version of the iPhone firmware.

and either

iTunes 7.3.2 Macintosh version
or
iTunes 7.3.2 Windows version

Put the firmware file in a convenient spot on your hard drive – you will want to keep this file pretty much forever – but do not unstuff, unzip, rename, or do anything else to it. Install iTunes 7.3.2 – this is the silver bullet – onto your computer, either in place of your current version of (preferably) as a parallel install. Sadly, you probably cant get the iTunes software through Apple’s normal update channels so these links are precious. If they ever stop working, let me know and I will post local copies.

2 – Take your phone and press the Sleep and Home buttons together for exactly 10 seconds. You will need to be watching a clock, because you need to let go of the buttons as close to 10 seconds as possible. Your phone will now be in “restore” mode (the screen may or may not show the “restore mode / please connect to iTunes” message at this time). Plug you phone into your computer, start iTunes 7.3.2. OPTION-CLICK the “Restore” button on the iTunes screen. iTunes will ask you for the local restore file instead of connecting to the mothership and taking the latest version. Surf to the 1.0.2 firmware you downloaded earlier and let ‘er rip. After some suitable thought, you will have a genuine version 1.0.2 phone, suitable for unlocking. Enjoy.

IF YOU ALREADY HAVE AN UNLOCKED PHONE AND NOW WANT TO DO A RESTORE OR YOU ARE STUPID AND BRICKED YOUR PHONE BY UPDATING AFTER IT WAS UNLOCKED:

1 – Download the following items:

The 1.0.2 version of the iTunes firmware.

and either

iTunes 7.3.2 Macintosh version
or
iTunes 7.3.2 Windows version

Put the firmware file in a convenient spot on your hard drive – you will want to keep this file pretty much forever – but do not unstuff, unzip, rename, or do anything else to it. Install iTunes 7.3.2 – this is the silver bullet – onto your computer, either in place of your current version of (preferably) as a parallel install.

2 – Stare iTunes 7.3.2 and OPTION-CLICK the “Restore” button on the iPhone management screen. Surf to the local copy of the 1.0.2 firmware that you just downloaded. Done.

Really. It’s that easy – iTunes 7.3.2 is the silver bullet. If Apple decides to remove the 7.3.2 installers from their servers, let me know. I hoarded a couple of copies of the installers and will host them myself if need be. Enjoy.

Someone asked me for a good (but quick, for office break times) online word game the other day, and try as I might I can’t find anything better than Crossword. It remains as much fun – and as friendly for pick-up-and-go play – now as it did 11 months ago. I give it the same thumbs up now as I did back in the dark ages. If you have never tried it out, give it a poke now – you will be glad you did.

52: The percentage of people arrested for shoplifting that are under the age of 19.