Why is the percentage completed on my Bittorrent download going backwards?

I'm downloading something on Bittorrent. It said it was 65.2% complete. Then I looked at it later and it said it was 65.1% complete. WTF? I noticed that throughput was a bit slow and the status bar was saying "Online, maybe firewalled" instead of "Online, ports open" so I restarted the program. Then it was 64.8% complete. So I thought maybe I lost something when I closed the program so I let it go for a while. Then later it was 64.9% complete. But then later still it was 64.8% complete.

WTF? Help?

(I know, maybe I should be using another client, but I want to finish downloading this huge-ass torrent first.)

I hope virgins don't read penis enlargement spam

Seen in my spam folder: "Your powerful rod will rip her blouse off!"

Now, I'm am open-minded person, I understand that there is a wide variety of sexual practices out there (probably more than I'm even aware of), but I think I can say without fear of contradiction that that is the wrong way to remove a blouse. There are other options that will be far less damaging to both the blouse and your penis.

I get nervous in social situations, muthafucka!

(Language warning, in case you couldn't tell from the title.)

ipod synchronicity

Say what you will about Ricky Martin, but when you find yourself running down a busy street in the rain wearing brighter colours and higher heels than you can quite carry off, carrying a shopping bag of wine and a shopping bag of lingerie, there's no better soundtrack than Livin' La Vida Loca.

FreeRice

Does anyone find the words on FreeRice have gotten harder since it started? I mean sastruga and pith at level 40? They should be at level 44 at least!

Of course, I've also found this game is like IQ tests or Jeopardy. Once you've been playing for a while, you get good at guessing which one is likely to be right just because it's the sort of thing the people who design the game are likely to pick.

And while I was typing this I got "bilabial" at level 43. Bilabial (with its completely transparent etymology) is at 43 but sastruga is at 40?

"Hi, this is Teresa MacDonald calling from the Business Funding Centre..."

I just got a voicemail spam starting with "Hi, this is Teresa MacDonald calling from the Business Funding Centre" and trying to sell me information about federal and Ontario (yes, they actually said "Ontario") business grant programs. They left a 613 (Ottawa) number to call them back at.

Problem: according to my call display, this call originated in the 641 area code, which is Iowa.

New linking practice

I think I'm going to stop making my links automatically open in new windows. I started doing that years and years ago before the advent of tabbed browsing. Despite the fact that it's against good web design practices, I thought (and most people agreed with me) that it's more convenient for the users. But now that we have tabbed browers, some people want links to open in a new tab, some people want them to open in a new window, and some people might want them to open in the same window. So I'm making my links without any target, and you can open them however you want yourself.

If you think thi s is a terrible idea, I'm willing to be convinced.

Cool ads

I was going to post about what my local Starbucks did. They drew a bunch of chalk arrows on the sidewalk, and if you followed them you ended up in Starbucks. I know people don't like advertising intruding into public space, but I thought that was cool. Subtle, non-intrusive, piques people's interest. Although really the candy store up the street should have done it instead, because their target audience is children and children would totally drop everything and follow arrows drawn on the sidewalk.

But then I saw this ad which is so infinitely cooler it makes Starbucks's arrows not worth blogging about. (NSFW warning for the only very strictest workplaces: contains potentially sexy but non-sexualized transvestite imagery)

The reason why it's a particularly effective ad isn't even mentioned in the ad: speaking as the target audience of hair removal products, my first thought is that if it can make a bio-male look like a sexy woman, it can probably do the same on me. "The toughest part about looking like a woman is all my hair." Yes, that's my problem exactly!

If you're looking at a map, do you need help?

The Toronto Star sent people out into the city with maps to see if people would offer them directions.

Question: when you, personally, are looking at a map, do you need help? Because I don't. If I have a map, I'm fine. I just need to look at the map and orient myself. It's like when you walk into a strange mall and you look at one of those big board map things to find out where the foodcourt is. You don't need help, you just need to look at the big board map thing for a second. Holding a map isn't a sign that I need help any more than holding a newspaper is a sign that I need someone to tell me everything that happened in the world yesterday.

So because of this, it might not occur to me to help someone who's standing there with a map. If they ask me, sure. I'll point them, I'll highlight their map, I'll walk them there, I'll carry their stroller down the stairs, I'll help them in their own language and call someone up if I don't speak their language, I've even nagged and argued and debated someone who was utterly convinced that to get from 2000 Yonge to 3000 Yonge she had to walk south (the numbers go up northwards) until I got her walking in the right direction. But I might not help them if they're just looking at a map, because when I'm looking at a map I don't need help.

Do you need help when you're looking at a map?

Synergy opportunity

Toronto is looking to boost tourism.

The morning-after pill is going to be available off the shelf in Canada.

So leverage the morning-after pill thing to boost tourism!

I know no one is going to travel to Toronto JUST to pick up the morning after pill (unless perhaps they live close to the border and need it NOW.) But it could perhaps be the tipping point when trying to decide where to go if you don't have your heart set on any one particular place.

Americans living in rural areas, for example, might want to spend a weekend in a city to enjoy city stuff. Stay in a nice hotel, shop for more interesting stuff than is available at home, try some new restaurants, take in a concert or play or sporting event, and visit a tourist trap or two. You can do all these things in Toronto, plus you can (or will soon be able to) pick up a couple of doses of the morning after pill with no big drama, so you can take them home and keep them in your nighttable drawer just in case. For some people, that might be the tipping point in choosing between Toronto and, say, Chicago. It's not worth driving up here for the pill alone, but could be worth it if you're looking for a vacation anyway.

That could also work for other parts of Canada. Want to visit the Rockies? BC instead of Washington State. Want to go into the woods? Algonquin instead of Adirondacks. Atlantic Ocean? Nova Scotia instead of Maine. Some people already come up here for the lower drinking age, maybe some would also come up to pick up some morning-after pills, not for immediate use but to keep at home in case of emergency.

Open Letter to China

Dear China:

On behalf of the world, I have a proposal for you. You go have a chat with your friend Burmyanmar and let us help all their people who have been displaced in the cyclone, and then we'll also help you out with your little earthquake problem. Sound good?

Any opera singers out there looking for songs to cover?

I think someone should do an opera version of Led Zeppelin's Black Dog. Keep the instrumentation the same, but have the vocals be opera.

What does a helicopter crashing look like?

A helicopter crashed and killed a person on the ground, and now some people are blaming the fact that the guy on the ground was wearing headphones.

I'm wondering if it's possible that he didn't realize the helicopter was crashing. I've never seen a helicopter crash, but I can't picture at all what kind of arc or shape the fall would take. I can sort of visualize the aerodynamics of an airplance, but not a helicopter. Was it obvious to the untrained onlooker that it was crashing instead of just flying low? Was it going in a predictable arc so you could see where it was going to hit the ground? Could you tell even if it was coming right at you? Is it loud enough that if it's coming behind you, you can hear that something's clearly wrong rather than just that there's a low-flying helicopter? How much time does it take for a helicopter to crash? Would he have had time to run away and would it have been obvious from its trajectory where he should have run to/from?

As a person who knows nothing about helicopters (yes, I've translated plane crashes, but never helicopters) I haven't the slightest idea what the answers to these questions are, so maybe it's possible he just didn't recognize that a crashing helicopter was out of control rather than just flying low?

Young offenders

I noticed in passing in the newspaper that Omar Khadr is 21 years old. He was 15 when he went into Guantanamo, and now he's 21 and still there. He must be fucked up. There is no way a person could be in that kind of prison for that portion of their life and come out a functional adult. If he had spent those years in a healthy environment, he might have come out a non-fucked-up adult by virtue of exposure to what a healthy environment is liked. Even if he had spent those years with his family, he might have come out non-fucked-up - I'm sure personally know several cases where people from extremist families came out as moderates as part of their normal adolescent rebellion. Of course, he might have still turned out fucked up anyway, but you can see how the possibility of non-fucked-up would have been there. But by having spent those years in Guantanamo, there's no chance of him not being fucked up.

Then I turned the page and saw that they might start treating young offenders the same as adult offenders. This worries me. I'm worried that if the justice system is forced to treat young offenders the same as adults, then there won't be any room to fix people who can become un-fucked-up by growing up. I'm not saying that all young offenders are innocents who don't know what they're doing - I've been on the receiving end of enough adolescent cruelty to know that! And I'm not saying that they don't understand that stealing things or hurting people is bad, I'm quite certain they do. But you know in that awful stage of early adolescence where the hormones are flying and you just can't grok that this is temporary and that the world is bigger and kinder than the middle school cafeteria, and you're sort of hostile and defensive and ready to pounce because of that? And then as you get older you see that the world is bigger and there are other ways to live and in the real world everyone isn't judging you for the shade of blue of your jeans, and you sort of mellow out and are more able to calmly go about life and let things just roll off your back? I can see how in some cases the adolescent hostility might lead to criminality, and the mellowing out as you see the bigger world might eliminate it. And it would be a shame to eliminate this possibility in applicable cases by forcing the offenders to be sentenced to imprisonment pursuant to adult standards.

I know in some cases society needs to be protected from the offender, but in cases where they would become a better person just by being exposed to a bigger, less nitpicky world than the school cafeteria, prison (even in a juvenile institution) isn't going to un-fuck them up. I don't want to see those who can be un-fucked-up lose that chance just because of political will to further punish the permanently fucked-up ones.

Cheap consumer goods

From an article about the US economy, some but not all of which is relevant. I found this bit interesting:

Are people actually spending a higher percentage of their income on the necessities, like healthcare and housing, than they did even in the '70s?

Yes, and that's been a critical shift. Consumer spending is about the same now as it was in the '70s. But we're spending more on items that require regular monthly payments, things like childcare, healthcare, housing, things that we can't give up if money gets tighter, if someone loses a job, or gets a pay cut.

Whereas if we were spending more money on buying new suits, or new dining sets, or just lattes, it would be something we could give up. Obviously, you can't say: "OK, this month I'm not going to pay the childcare, or I'm not going to pay the mortgage."

What's confusing about this is that, thanks to globalization, consumer goods are now cheaper. So, you might be buying more clothes than you were in the '70s, but clothing costs, as a percentage of your income, could be the same.

That's true for clothes and toys and furniture. You can go to IKEA and get a whole dining set for what would have been comparably one chair in the '70s.

Now, I knew that major purchases cost a bigger proportion of your income than they did back in the day. I've gotten numbers from my grownups and played with the inflation calculator and worked out that, for example, my parents could work full-time over the summer for minimum wage and earn an amount equal to their university tuition, but I've never done the numbers for everyday consumer items. It does seem ture that they're relatively cheaper today. My mother used to make her own clothes to save money, but now I can buy a scarf for the same price as buying the yarn to make a similar scarf. That's interesting to me, because I was raised on the don't buy take-out coffee principle of frugality - don't buy little things and you'll save big significant amounts of money. Elders especially do seem to comment on how much Stuff I have as though that's a sign of decadence on my part, but it looks like it isn't as decadent as they think it is. I've always been thinking that the money I spend on clothes and toys and makeup simply doesn't feel like that much, even when I add it up over the course of a year. I guess this might be why.

I don't have on hand any prices of consumer goods from Back In The Day, but if anyone reading this does, try running them through the inflation calculator and see how they compare with the prices of similar goods today.

This reminds me of a recent Heather Mallick column deploring the fact that people buy cheap stuff that wears out quickly rather than more expensive stuff that will last a long time.

Now some people buy cheap stuff because they can't afford more expensive stuff, even if you look at it as an investment. And I do that sometimes. But sometimes, even if I could buy more expensive stuff, I buy cheap stuff because I'm not very good at shopping. I don't actually want the stuff to wear out (I'd be very happy if everything I bought lasted forever) but I don't always know how to tell if an expensive thing is actually of good quality (at this point people always tell me to look at the seams, but I don't know what I'm looking for), or whether it will meet my needs enough to be a long-term investment, or whether I'll keep liking it, or whether it will become obsolete or egregiously out of style. If a pair of boots costs $200, I'd better be certain they're comfortable and attractive and well-made and something I could wear every day for at least three years and constructed in such a way that my shoe guy can rebuild the heel (because no matter how well made they are, I still walk crooked). But if they only cost $20, then "Hey, they look like Eddie Izzard's and I can walk in them!" is a good enough reason. If they're a misfire, it's no big loss. I'd hate to have to research and comparison shop for every single thing, so (politically incorrect as it is to say) I'm very glad there is cheap stuff out there.

Things They Should Invent: voicemail that automatically deletes blank messages

Every day I come home to three or four blank voicemail messages from telemarketing machines gone amok. I wish my voicemail could just detect that the message is blank and delete it, so I don't have to go log into my voicemail and go through and delete the messages myself. Even though I know to press 33 to skip to the end, it's still an annoyance.

Chemo or death?

There's an 11-year-old who is being forced by CAS to have chemotherapy against his will. What surprises me about the reactions to this is that a lot of people seem to think that no one could make an informed decision about whether to let themselves die at the age of 11. Now the particular boy in this case has FAS, which might make a difference, I don't know enough about it, but people are saying no 11-year-old whatosever could possibly make this decision, which really surprises me.

Death is serious. It's the most permanent thing ever. You're gone, forever, never coming back. But because it's so serious and permanent, that actually makes this a less complex decision (and a decision more within the range of an 11-year-old's abilities) than some of the other decisions a person might have to make in life. You get survival statistics for the chemo treatment (which I have seen published but can't find ATM), you get a description from the doctor of what death without chemo would be like, then you go home and mull it over for a bit. In light of the foregoing, do you want to cease to exist? (y/n). It's not as complex as having to decide whether to save the life of a pregnant woman or her unborn baby. It's not as complex as house/apartment/condo/downtown/midtown/north york/what if i get married/what if i lose my job? It's not as complex as if you've been kidnapped by the Congolese army and they tell you to rape your child or they'll kill all your children. It's not even as complex as trying to figure out how far to drive to buy locally grown produce and what if it's not organic and what if it goes bad before you can eat it all? If you reduced chemo or death to an algorithm, you wouldn't even need a big chart to work it out, you could use an old-fashioned scales.

Thinking back to when I was 11, I did have some trouble with nuance. I knew I had to leave the church, but couldn't express why. I don't think I could have diplomatically suggested that someone wear something else. I couldn't have seduced someone even if I had wanted to. I probably wouldn't have been able to grok transgender. But I understood that death was permanent just as well as I do today. I haven't had any new information or enlightenment about the permanence of death since then. I don't know if I could have single-handedly made a decision about whether to get my pet put down at that age, but I could have decided whether to get myself put down just as well as I can now.

Actually, now that I think about it, earlier in childhood I tended to see it more in black and white: Death bad, life good. Then as I accumulated age and experience and maturity, I started to grok that sometimes mere survival is insufficient, in the words of Seven of Nine. It occurs to me that perhaps the fact that this boy thought of the idea of letting himself die may indicate that he is capable of grasping the nuances.

Open Letter to the lady on the subway

Dear lady in the red and black skirt and denim jacket, southbound on Yonge just after 6 pm:

Taking your shoes off and then putting your feet up to take up three seats is just not cool, especially not during rush hour when people are standing. Even if your feet are sore, even if you are injured, you just aren't three seats' worth of special. Not during rush hour. If it actually is absolutely strictly necessary to keep your legs horizontal, take a cab or wait until rush hour is over.

By the way, you are very fortunate that my stealth photography skills are not very good, because I did attempt to take a picture of you and fully intended to post it here. Others have since suggested that the stealth wasn't strictly necessary, so maybe next time you will get hollabacked.

Does laminate flooring cause holes in socks?

My previous apartment had parquet floors. My current apartment has laminate flooring. Ever since I moved here, I noticed my socks and slippers have been developing holes much faster. A quick google on the subject suggests that some commercial-grade laminate cause holes in socks because they are rough, but that isn't the case here. The floor could not be smoother, and the holes aren't snaggy holes, it's that the socks are wearing out under the ball of my foot, where most of my weight goes (and where my feet are most callusy). I'm no heavier now than I was in the previous apartment and I don't know of any change to my walking patterns. Could it be that something about laminate floors makes my socks feel the weight of my tread more?