the flying squirrel

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

I'd kind of dismissed the [[wiki:Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008 TV series)|Star Wars: Clone Wars]] animated series, because I didn't see a need for it what with the already pretty awesome [[wiki:Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003 TV series)|Clone Wars series by Genndy Tartakovsky]]. And also because, seriously, people, nobody likes the prequels. Why do we need to dwell on them?

But I think Clone Wars managed to redeem the prequel trilogy for me a little bit. Oh, it's still terrible, but they kind of help show how it might have been good if George had actually hired a real director or something.

The best part about Clone Wars, hands down, is [[wiki:Ahsoka Tano]], Anakin's padawan introduced by the series. She's feisty, brash and hot-headed, like the prequels were desperately trying to make Anakin, but she's also deeply moral and just and kind. She gives Anakin something to care about that's not his horribly dysfunctional relationship with Padme. And she's fun. Oh god, it's so refreshing to have a Star Wars that's fun again.

Her morality causes conflict. With the Jedi, with Anakin and with herself. But she comes through, mostly doing the right thing when she can, and doing her best when she can't.

The series does a bunch of other amazing things even when Ahsoka isn't on screen. The Clones become actual characters you care about. All the political machinations start making some semblence of sense. You see how things like trade embargoes (somewhat simplified) affect actual people. Jar-Jar is still a (mostly) useless buffoon, but everyone's in on it now and rolling their eyes along with you. I didn't hate the Jar-Jar episodes! They kept Assaj Ventress from the 2003 series and she's still awesome.

It's not perfect. The Jedi are still inexplicably dumb. The politics, while amazing for being coherent and relatable, are clearly simplified for the kids watching. [[wiki:Legend of the Galactic Heroes]], this ain't. And they almost completely avoid the mystical Jedi stuff, gloss over anything about what it means to fall to the Dark Side or how any of that stuff works, much like the prequels. With one notable (tho odd) exception. Which is a shame, because all that stuff is what I loved thinking about playing Knights of the Old Replublic or the West End Star Wars RPG.

None of that overshadows how great the characters are (even Anakin sometimes), or how much fun it is to watch.

I should also note that it gets pretty dark towards the end. Fair warning: characters die. Ones you care about. Not Game of Thrones dark, but surprising for a kids' show. Not that I don't think kids could handle it, and I thought it was great what they pulled off. But it surprised me.

I gotta say, I recommend it. Clone Wars made me love Star Wars again. And I'm really looking forward to [[wiki:Star Wars Rebels]].

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Up until a couple months ago, I've been pretty tied up with [[Kwartzlab]]. Kwartzlab is awesome and I loved serving on the board, but being an administrator was taking away from actually making or doing things.

Way back in February, the lab hosted Open Data Waterloo Region for Open Data Day. For a while, a coworker (Mark Sherry, @alfedenzo) and I had been kicking around the idea of using the Waterloo Region Food Inspection dataset and using it to figure out when a new restaurant opens in town. So when Open Data Day happened, that's what I worked on.

(Video by Bob Jonkman. For whatever reason, that ogv video sometimes doesn't work so great for me in GStreamer. But you can click on the little Internet Archive icon at the top and download to play in VLC or something. It's going to be me unpreparedly rambling regardless).

It was mostly done at the time and I uploaded the code to github. Mark pulled it down and pretty much rewrote it. And then I came along and added some twitter API stuff, figuring out the basics of OAUTH for no better reason than I wanted to figure out OAUTH (basic authentication would've worked just fine).

But it still languished for a while. Mark was running it every week and sending me updates about what restaurants it uncovered.

Then the Kwartzlab board elections came along and I decided not to run again. Not coincidentally, I decided I wanted to dust off old projects and actually ship some. NewEatsKW was the first one.

Last night it tweeted its first tweet all on its own.

NEW YORK CHEESESTEAK: 1-465 PHILLIP ST, WATERLOO

— KW New Restaurants (@NewEatsKW) August 18, 2014

It would've been sooner, but there haven't been any new restauarants in the dataset in weeks. I still need to do a bit of work to get it running in a cron job where it can download the data from the Region itself, but it works and I'm happy with it. Despite being a weird combination of being both horrendously slapdash and ridiculously overengineered.

And so far it's made something of a splash, picking up nearly 40 followers on its first day.

Coolest new local tweeter: @NewEatsKW Using Waterloo Region Open Data to tell you about new restaurants. @psywisdom

— Midtown KW (@MidtownKW) August 18, 2014

Hurray! I've got some ideas of things I can do to make it better, but for now I'm happy that a small, simple, useful thing finally made it out the door and into the world.

Sunday, August 3, 2014

This was my home for nearly 2 years.

WCRI is in the process of demolishing B-Division.

B-Div was always a bit of an odd duck in WCRI. One of the few options for one- and two-bedroom apartments near UW, you needed something like 13 terms seniority to get in when I was there.

So it was mostly grad students and alumni. I managed to get a summer sublet from a guy who'd graduated. That allowed me to stick around even though I only had about 11 terms.

So it was where I hid, secluding myself, finishing my degree and recovering from five unhappy years at university.

And now it's gone.