Things They Should Invent: reconcile Vote Compass and Political Compass

When I took the Vote Compass quiz, I was surprised to see that the relative positions of the Green Party, Liberal Party and NDP were different from their relative positions on Political Compass.

I want to make it clear: I'm not complaining that one of the axes is inverted (although it is) or that the scales are different (although they are).  I'm saying that the positions of the parties relative to each other are different on the two tools.

On Vote Compass, the Green Party was the furthest left economically.  In other words, if you drew a line of best fit through the plot of all the parties, their order, from left to right, would be Green, NDP, Liberal and Conservative

On Political Compass, NDP was furthest left economically.  In other words, if you drew a line of best fit through the plot of all the parties, their order, from left to right, would be NDP, Green, Liberal and Conservative.

They can't both be right. Someone, somewhere, must be missing something.  And it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, for an ordinary voter to figure out who might be missing what.

I'd love to see the Vote Compass people and the Political Compass people get together, discuss their interpretations of the platforms, and arrive at a consensus about the relative positions of the parties.

Both tools are trying to achieve the same thing - trying to give voters objective information about which parties best align with their own political views. They could better achieve this, and appear more objective and more credible, by pooling their respective expertise and arriving at a consensus.

In which Google messes up and gives me a scare

I recently decided to try a face cream containing retinol.  Shortly after I applied it, I felt a funny taste in my mouth.

So I googled retinol taste in mouth.

Near the top of the results was the wikipedia entry for strychnine poisoning!

It turns out that this result came up because Google perceives "retinol" as a synonym for "Vitamin A".  The strychnine poisoning article has a "Poisonings, toxicities, and overdoses" category box at the bottom, which includes a link to Vitamin A.  And one of the symptoms of strychnine poisoning is a taste in the mouth.

So I didn't die, and the next time I tried the retinol cream there was no taste in my mouth, so it must have been unrelated.

I haven't noticed any difference in my skin using retinol though.

Today I learned you can add pages to archive.org!

If you look up an active web page on archive.org (aka the Wayback Machine) and they don't have it archived, you get a page saying:

If you click on the "Save the url in the Wayback Machine" link, the page will automatically be added to the archive!  (Unless, presumably, its robots.txt file prevents this.)

Fanfic drought

Another recent stressor has been that the In Death fansite has stopped posting fanfiction, and another reliable source has not yet materialized.

The In Death universe is my current fandom happy place, and a steady flow of fanfic is a vital part of maintaining that happy place.  Rereading isn't nearly as effective at giving me the same happy as a new story, and since there are only two novels and possibly one novella a year (I know this is a lot for an author to write, but it isn't a lot for a reader to read), I turned to fanfic.  When I worked in the office and I had to do an emotionally devastating translation, I'd take a break to walk to the nearest wifi hotspot and open up the day's fanfic updates on my ipod.  Then I'd maintain my equilibrium by taking breaks in the In Death universe throughout my workday. When I have a panic attack, I deal with the trigger, have a glass of wine, call a friend if I need to be talked down, and then read fanfic until I can't keep my eyes open any longer.  When, in the course of day to day life, I get a feeling that's best described as "I wanna go home!", there's an implicit "...and read fanfic!" to it.  If I go home and there isn't any fanfic to read, the "I wanna go home!" feeling isn't 100% assuaged.

My latest round of condo drama was in November, which is NaNoWriMo, and therefore a lean period for fanfic as our authors try to write their novels instead.  And I'm sure a good part of the reason why this condo drama was so stressful for me was that most days there wasn't any new fanfic for me to read, so I couldn't fully reboot my brain as much as I needed to.

At this point, some people will feel moved to recommend things for me to read instead.  While I always welcome reading recommendations, that is a solution to a different problem.  The problem here is not something to read, the problem here is something to make me feel a certain way.  I can't articulate this feeling apart from "fandom happy place" and "rebooting my brain", and only new, quality content from my current fandom happy place makes me feel that particular way.  This is a very rare phenomenon.  It has only happened before with Harry Potter and Eddie Izzard.  Harry Potter fanfic doesn't work any more because I got closure on the fandom with the final book.  Eddie Izzard doesn't have fanfic, what with being a real person rather than a fictional universe, but I got this same feeling from watching everything he's ever done.  However, I caught up on Eddie completely, and now new stuff arrives only sporadically.  The vast majority of my ongoing fandoms don't generate this happy feeling.  Even Star Trek and Monty Python never generated this happy feeling, even though they were my primary fandoms for well over a decade.  I never even had this feeling before Harry Potter.  It's quite rare, and not readily reproducible.

So not only do I have no new fanfic to reboot my brain and take me back to my happy place during the two weeks when I'll be without my computer, but I also have the looming spectre of no reliable source of new fanfic for the indefinite future. Even though I still have my other amusements and comforts, this casts a certain gloom over everything.

Analogy: the effect of In Death fanfiction in my brain is like the effect of cheese in salad.  You can make a salad without cheese, but it's yummier and somehow more complete with a wee sprinkling of cheese. The flavour of the cheese complements and enhances the flavour of everything else, and it just doesn't satisfy my needs quite as well without the cheese.  While I can handle a salad without cheese without too much complaint, the prospect of a future without a reliable source of cheese is terrifying!


I know that some people reading this will have thoughts about the appropriateness of fanfiction as a happy place and other things that would make more appropriate happy places. If you feel moved to share these thoughts, my upcoming post or two (haven't yet worked out if it will be one or two posts) on resilience and emotional management will be a more useful place for them.

Blogger is imposing captchas on me against my will

Recently, captchas appeared on my comments pages.  I didn't put them there, my comment settings have Word Verification set to "No", but they're still there.  I even see them when logged in with my own account as blog author!

And to add insult to injury, my spam comment queue is still full, with multiple spam comments a day.  This means the spammers are getting past the captchas, but the captchas are still there inconveniencing real people who might want to comment!

Not impressed, Blogger!

My latest Twitter win

@impstrump It was, initially, but I ended up writing the article in a direction that made the poll irrelevant.
— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) November 11, 2014

Typing is slow in Gmail

For the last couple of weeks, when I try to type a reply in Gmail, typing is really slow.  The letters are appearing at about half the speed at which I type, and every once in a while there's a "hiccup" so some of the letter I type don't appear.  I haven't changed anything about my browser (Firefox), and I've been using Gmail in this browser forever.

Googling around the idea, I see different people having the same problem with different browsers, which suggests it might be Gmail.

A workaround is to click on the "In new window" icon, which is a little arrow at the top right, next to the printer icon, above the "reply"  icon and the date".  Amateurish screenshot:

Nevertheless, this is less convenient, so I hope Gmail fixes this slow typing problem so we can once again reply on the same page.

Things They Should Invent: follow-up online reviews, with automatic reminder emails

Just over a year ago, I bought a paper shredder. (Brand name Rosewill, from Newegg.)  Just days after the one-year warranty expired, the shredder's motor died, in a rather terrifying puff of smoke and sparks.

When I was buying the shredder, there were online reviews from people who had problems, with follow-up comments from the manufacturer saying to contact them and they'd replace it under warranty, and there were reviews from people saying "I don't know what you're talking about, I didn't have problems."

But I wonder how many people had problems after the warranty period expired, but never thought to write a review because who goes back to the site you bought it from a year later to write a review?

Online review sites, including retailers, should fix this by standardizing the idea of follow-up reviews.  You write a review after you get the product, and then after a certain period of time you get an automatic email asking you to write a follow-up review.

The period of time for a follow-up review would depend on the product.  A week or two would be plenty for something like nail polish, but maybe six weeks would be good for moisturizers and stuff that are supposed to produce longer-term results.  I think 110% of the warranty period would be very informative for electronics.

This would be far more useful than one-time reviews of newly-purchased products, and would significantly increase traffic to the websites.  (At a minimum, you'll double the number of visits by people writing reviews, so you can show them recommended products etc.)

When and why did people start using backwards smilies?

I first learned about smilies in the early 90s, on BBSs.  I learned that a happy smiley is :) and a sad smiley is :( .

But in recent years, I've seen people doing their smilies backwards.  So if they want to make a happy smiley, instead of  :) they put (:  .You have to tilt your head to the right instead of tilting it to the left.

Having used smilies for 20 years, I don't tilt my head any more.  I just skim and quickly process a) the fact that a smiley is present, and b) the direction of the parenthesis.  So when I see a backwards happy face like (:  my first thought is that it's a sad face, because for the vast majority of my life a smiley with a left parenthesis has been a sad face like :(

How did these backwards smilies come about?  Why do people think they're superior to regular tilt-your-head-left smilies?

A new personal best on Twitter!

Once upon a time, Eddie Izzard retweeted me.  It was the best thing that had ever happened to me on Twitter and I danced around like an idiot and called up people on the actual telephone to tell them that this had happened and saved the screenshot under the file name "I win at twitter".

Today a new personal best happened:

@impstrump Should be available for download on http://t.co/VCaehm4wyk We are exploring options.  It seems nuts no one can buy it...
— Eric Idle (@EricIdle) April 27, 2014

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, that's Eric Idle. Of Monty Python fame.  Replying personally (and nearly-immediately!) to a question I asked.

Does Mozilla actually benefit from me using Firefox?

So there are calls to boycott Firefox because its CEO has made anti-gay political donations.

My question: does my using Firefox actually benefit Mozilla or its CEO in any way?  I didn't pay for it.  I'm not being shown any advertising.  Does it actually have any impact on them?

This question is not purely academic.  As I blogged about before, I don't want to use Chrome because I don't like Google's sneaky attempts to manipulate me into using it.   But if we should be boycotting Firefox too, what am I supposed to do?  Use a subpar browser?  (I've used IE and Opera, and find them both less useful than Firefox or Chrome.)

On one hand, it seems more important to choose not to use Chrome, because my reasons for doing so are directly related to the company's business practices as they affect me as a consumer.  They keep inconveniencing me in an attempt to get me to use their browser, so I shouldn't reward this by using their browser.

On the other hand, you can't let convenience overrule a political boycott, or that completely defeats the purpose of a political boycott.

On the other other hand, if Google so very badly wants me to use Chrome (which users don't pay for either), there must be some benefit to a company if people use their browser.  Although Google and Mozilla have different corporate structures. Google has shareholders and stuff, whereas Mozilla doesn't. The internet tells me that the Mozilla Corporation is not non-profit, but its profits support the Mozilla Foundation, which is.

Normally I'd go ahead with the boycott, but in this case the user-friendly alternative is something I'm already boycotting.  Not sure what to do here.

Any thoughts?

Update: Some info via @AmyRBrown on Twitter (you can see the full conversation here):

A primary revenue source for Mozilla is money paid to them by Google when people access Google via the Firefox search box.  (The FAQ of Mozilla's 2012 Annual Report confirms this, and adds that they also get search box revenue from "Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, eBay and others".)

So an effective economic boycott would be not to use Google or any other revenue-generating search function in the search box.

Changing the search engine to Duck Duck Go should generate the same results without Google involvement, and there are also unofficial Google toolbar add-ons for Firefox that don't pass through the search box and therefore generate revenues.

I haven't yet figured out if my own preference of Wikipedia in the search bar generates revenues, or if there are other benefits to my using Firefox even if I'm not generating revenues for them.

How to see the number of results with Google verbatim search

I previously blogged about how Google's Verbatim search function would be more useful if they showed the number of results.

I just figured out how to see the number of results.

First, a review of how to do a Verbatim search:

1. Do your search normally.
2. On the results page, click on Search Tools
3. Under All Results, choose Verbatim

To see the number of results, simply click on Search Tools again.  The results page won't change, but the menus that dropped down when you clicked on Search Tools will pull back up, revealing the number of results.

How Google is making me not want to use Chrome

When they cancelled Google Reader, I wrote:

Google Reader and iGoogle are my primary gateways to the internet, and now Google has cancelled both of them.  This makes me fear for the future of Gmail and Blogger.  (Or search, for that matter).

Google just cancelled another thing that I use: Gmail Notifier.  It's a tiny, harmless little program that runs in your tray and alerts you when you have an email.  And the other day, it just randomly stopped working, and googling around the problem told me that Google had discontinued it.


The internet tells me they apparently sent out a message telling people about this discontinuation, but I didn't receive anything!

However, the part that annoys me is:

If you want to continue to receive notifications, you can use any of the following alternatives to Google Notifier Beta, using the Chrome browser. To see the number of unread messages in your inbox at a glance, install the Gmail Checker Chrome app. To preview new messages on your desktop, go to Gmail's settings and enable Desktop Notifications.

So basically they killed Gmail Notifier in an attempt to force people to use Chrome if they want to be notified when they have new email.

Originally I started using Firefox instead of Chrome because at the time the Chrome interface looked kind of "wrong" to me.  No big attachment or anything, I just tried two and I found one a wee bit visually irksome, so I went with the other.  However, since then, Google has been killing off things I use in an attempt to get me to switch to Chrome.  They killed the Google Toolbar for Firefox in an attempt to make us use Chrome exclusively if we wanted that kind of toolbar interface.  They killed iGoogle and suggested a range of Chrome apps as a replacement.  And now they kill Gmail Notifier and suggest a Chrome app as a replacement.

And every time they do this, it makes me more determined not to use Chrome.  I don't want them win!   I've found Firefox add-ons and websites to replace everything Google has killed, and I'm determined not to let this strategy of theirs be successful.  Before they started doing this, I had no objection to Chrome, I just chose to use Firefox.  But every time they kill something to get me to switch to Chrome, I dig in even more so they won't win.

How Google can fix the internet in one easy step

There's an article circulating called The Year We Broke the Internet.  The way we "broke the internet" is by being so quick to share things via social media that ultimately turn out to be hoaxes.

Google can fix this problem in one easy step: introduce a reverse sort by date feature.

Google already allows you to search results by date, so you see the newest first.  Therefore, its databanks must already have the pages organized by date.  By adding a reverse sort by date feature, to simply reverse the order in which the results display so the oldest is first, Google will allow anyone to determine the original internet source and origin of anything in a single click.

This would be especially helpful for reverse image search. I find that if I'm doing a reverse image search of an image that has been heavily reblogged on tumblr, the first several pages of results are just tumblrs that have recently reblogged it without context.  A reverse sort by date would let us see the source quickly and easily without having to dig through pages and pages of tumblr purgatory.

If a computer system can sort, it has the ability to sort bidirectionally just as easily as it can sort unidirectionally. You can see this in any kind of table with headers that you can click to sort.  All Google has to do is give us an interface item that can activate this functionality, and it would be taking a huge step towards fulfilling its mission of organizing the world's information and making it accessible and useful.

How to tell if you've already read a particular library book

Sometimes I come across a book that seems vaguely familiar in concept, but I'm not sure if I've read it already or not.  I don't really care to waste my time rereading something that turned out to be forgettable, but I don't want to not read an interest-sounding or recommended book just because I might have once read something similar.

The library doesn't keep records of which books you've checked out in the past - which makes perfect sense from a privacy perspective, not to mention what a huge-ass database that would end up being.

But I've just worked out a way to figure out if you've checked out a particular book before.  And the solution is beautifully simple:

Search your email.

If you checked out the book by putting it on hold and having them send it to your local library branch, you'll have an email alert that it's ready to be picked up.  If you kept the book until nearly the due date, you'll have an email alert that it's due soon.  (Helpful hint for Toronto Public Library patrons: search your email for the call number rather than the book title, since the email notifications used to not contain the title.)

This won't work if you don't use email alerts, or if you delete your emails, or if your primary method of library use is to browse the shelves.  But if your library transactions habitually pass through your email, you can find a record of what you've taken out of the library in your email.

Google Blog Search doesn't do its job properly

Being the kind of fangirl I am, I have an RSS feed of Google News and Google Blog Search results for "Izzard" in my feed reader, so I get any new articles.

And, as you might have noticed, I also have a blog, where I've mentioned Eddie Izzard in a couple of different posts during the course of my current fandom high. (I really should start blogging about something else, shouldn't I?) But my own posts have never turned up in my feed reader!  (And my feed reader uses a completely separate log-in identity from my blog, so it would have no way to know not to feed me those because I wrote them.)

So I did some searching:

Here is a regular Google search for blogspot posts containing "Izzard" made within the past week, sorted by relevance.

Here is a Google Blog Search for posts containing "Izzard" made within the past week, sorted by relevance.

There are far more posts in the regular Google search than in the Google Blog Search, even though blogspot is just a subset of blogs!

So then I did a regular Google search for Wordpress posts within the past week, sorted by relevance, and it also contains some quality posts that didn't show up in the Google Blog Search.

Same with Typepad, LiveJournal and even Tumblr.  Most of the posts turned up aren't quality, but at the moment, there's at least one quality post (i.e. tour performance reviews or other things I'm interested in reading) in the first page of results for each of these blogging platforms that doesn't show up in Google Blog Search results!  Even if Google curates its blog search out of necessity, there are things in there that should have made it into the results.

I want to be clear, I'm not complaining because Google Blog Search isn't turning up my blog.  (Objectively, it's better if it doesn't turn up my Eddie Izzard posts because they're all fangirling rather than informative content.)  I'm complaining because Google Blog Search isn't turning up other people's blog posts that I would have liked to read.

How long has this being going on for?  And how many other, more important, searches does this also affect?

In my post speculating whether Web 2.0 makes information less accessible, I wrote:

When Eddie Izzard first started his last US tour in 2008, I could do a google blog search the day after each show and find multiple reviews of each gig, or at least what he was wearing and which wikipedia entry he looked up. By the time he got to Canada in 2010, internet trends had moved away from blogs more towards Facebook and Twitter, so you couldn't necessarily find comments on any given show. They were all buried in people's Facebook walls, ungoogleable to the outside world. Not the most important thing in the world, obviously, but it was information I was looking for and could no longer find.

What if, all this time, the blog reviews I'm looking for have in fact been out there, but Google has made them less searchable or less findable?

It's kind of scary, the extent to which Google can influence our concept of what does and doesn't actually exist.  But, at the same time, no other search engine finds stuff as well as Google.  I just don't know if we can trust it to confirm or refute existence...

Things They Should UNInvent: banners that overlap the body text section of a website (or web browsers that can't handle this)

Some websites (such as Twitter and Salon) have banner-style headers that overlap the body text area.

The problem with this is if you press the spacebar to page down one screen, the browser behaves as though the area covered by the banner is visible, which means you miss a line or two every time you page down, and then have to page back up with a mouse.  This is very irritating, and also bad ergonomically - pressing the spacebar to page down is basically the minimum amount of ergonomic strain, and having to mouse could cause problems for people who have or are prone to RSI.

Web design and browser design need to fix this.  Pressing the spacebar should show the next page of text, with no text missed (and, in fact, with the last line of the previous page visible at the top, just to reassure the reader that they haven't missed anything.)

Things Torrent Trackers Should Invent: let people with invitations search

My favourite torrent tracker recently closed, which sent people scrambling for an alternative. I was able to secure an invitation to one of the trackers touted as an alternative, so I accepted the invitation, created an account, visited the tracker...and discovered there was nothing there of interest to me.  None of the things I'm currently looking for are there, none of the things I got from the old tracker were there. Even though its description sounded like it would meet my needs, it didn't.

So my much sought-after invitation was wasted.  Other people were still after invitations to this tracker, but I couldn't give my account to them. 

Solution: set up torrent trackers so that people with invitations can conduct a limited number of searches before accepting their invitation.  You put in your invite code, then you're allowed to conduct maybe 3 to 5 searches, then you have to either accept or decline your invitation.  If you accept, you create an account and can start torrenting.  If you decline, the invitation reverts to the person who gave it to you, so they can pass it on to someone else.

Private trackers are private for two reasons: to limit themselves to quality users, and to protect themselves from parties who want to get people in trouble for torrenting.  Letting people with invitations search won't hinder these objectives.  People who turn out not to be as interested in the content of the tracker as they expected aren't going to be high quality users, because they have less of an incentive to participate and keep their ratio up, while taking up a space that could otherwise be occupied by a more enthusiastic user.  And people who want to get the users in trouble would simply accept the invitation and get in. 

I don't know how easy or difficult allowing searches to invitation-holders would be from a technical perspective, but it would create a better torrenting experience for everyone.

Why is Facebook crawling blogs?

Shortly after I post each blog post, I get a hit from something called Facebook Bot, which statcounter says is a bot crawling my site, presumably to index it.

Why does Facebook care about indexing my blog contents?  I know they have a web search function, but that's powered by Bing, so it would show up as a Bing crawlers.  I don't have any Facebook widgets or anything, my blog isn't connected to any Facebook profiles (unless I have an imposter out there), so why would Facebook care about my existence enough to index my every update?

Pictures of text

I recently clicked on a trending topic hashtag related to some drama or another in teen pop music fandom (#beliebersareherefordirectioners - I didn't bother to look into what exactly happened to trigger the creation of that hashtag), and I noticed an interesting phenomenon. A huge percentage of the people using this hashtag were writing out fairly long messages in the Notes function on their iphone, then tweeting a screenshot of the message.  Here's the first example that came up when I searched for it just now.

This is fascinating.  This fandom is so entrenched in a medium that only allows for short textual messages that they use images of text to convey longer messages rather than switching to a more conducive medium.

We've seen this before, with the "we are the 99%" signs.  At the time I saw it described as a faster and easier alternative to videos, but it's still longer to produce and no less easy to read than actual text. And some people seem to use it quite often on facebook, sharing images of text - even if it's just a brief saying - rather than typing out the text as a whole, which in most cases would totally fit in a facebook status.

The beliebers obviously chose this method so they could share longer-form messages while achieving their goal of trending on twitter.  And I suspect the sharing mechanisms of facebook and tumblr are more conducive to sharing photos than straight-out text.  I also suspect some of the 99%ers were deliberately trying to add a human face to their stories, although others chose to obscure their faces.  In any case, the goal of sharability within the technical limitations of the social network seems to be great enough that it leads people to engage in the objectively ridiculous act of posting a picture of text rather than just typing out the text.

This has me wondering if someday someone is going to invent a new social media network with robust sharing functions that positions its niche as allowing you to share long-form text.