Well, it's been nearly seven years, which isn't exactly never. But I bought a smartphone.
Keen observers of culture and technology will be the first to tell you that things have changed a bit in the meantime.
Pretty much everyone I know has a smartphone. My sisters have smartphones.
Thing is, I have wanted access to email and IM ever since I held one of those LCD RIM email pager thingies back in 1998.
But the combination and hatred and distrust of cellphone providers, coupled with a distate for the direction
general purpose computing is being taken by device manufacturers has kept me out of the game.
This isn't something I wanted to rush into. I've been thinking about it for months, mulling over the various options and
trying to figure out what I'd be comfortable with.
The provider was a toss-up between Wind and Koodo. Koodo has the cheapest smartphone plan at $30/month with a sort of
pay-as-you-go thing for data. But they're tied to Telus, one of the Big Three cellphone providers in Canada (admittedly,
the least offensive one, not that that's saying much). Wind is a new entrant, and I have no small desire to help support
new entrants in the market. Being new, however, they don't have great coverage. Meaning I'd be without data service
whenever I went home to Belleville.
For the phone, I really wanted something with a keyboard, but I also wanted to get the newest Android version, Ice Cream
Sandwich. That, coupled with the recommendation of the awesome online comparison tool Sortable (
and local startup), I decided to get the Galaxy Nexus.
Koodo doesn't offer the Galaxy Nexus and it's $600 unsubsidized, which tipped the balance towards Wind. And, honestly,
not having to worry about data usage is pretty nice.
A few observations:
A smartphone makes eating out alone slightly less socially awkward, but walking down the street slightly more.
Twitter was made for smartphones, but I kinda knew that already.
Podcasts work better this way, but podcast client
software isn't nearly as good as I'd like it to be. It's better than my previous (mostly manual) process, and
frustrating close to what I want, which makes the gaps that much more noticeable.
Angry Birds Space! Woo!
I miss having a physical keyboard. I'm using Swype, and it's pretty cool, but auto-correct makes me sad.
Another drawback
of the Galaxy Nexus is the lack of an SD card and USB mass storage access. This probably isn't a big deal to most
people, but I like having access to file systems. And there are a whole bunch of apps that seem to expect you can
access an SD card directly for import or export.
Those are the only two faults I can find with the phone, really. I
don't have much to compare it to first hand, but it's a great little machine.
I'll probably post a round-up of apps I like once I've done some more exploring.
[[wiki:Larry Lessig]] is something of a hero of mine. He's a Harvard law professor who started out campaigning against
modern intellectual property extremism that is locking up our culture and making creativity and innovation more and more
difficult and more and more expensive. He created the Creative Commons to give artists a
way to contribute to a free culture that they benefit from, despite laws which make that increasingly difficult.
A few years ago, though, he stopped fighting the battle against copyright extremism.
He stopped because he realized that increasingly overreaching copyright laws were merely a symptom of a much larger
problem. It, along with inaction on climate change, pizza being classified as vegetables, ruinous deregulation and
subsequent bail-outs of the financial industry and hundreds of other dysfunctions in American government were going to
continue unless it is addressed.
The problem, as he sees it, is that people in government spend nearly as much time seeking campaign contributions as
anything else. That large contributions grant access to the political process that ordinary citizens can't hope to have.
And that cynicism about this is so widespread, no-one in America believes that government can solve any real problems
anymore.
I'd encourage you to watch the video above. He makes a very compelling argument.
And if we're feeling smug as Canadians, well, we do do at least some of this right. The Harper Government has already
erased some of the Crétien era campaign finance reform, however. And the US State Department exerts considerable sway in
Ottawa, enough to get US-style copyright legislation like Bill C-11 passed. We are not immune.
Even if SOPA and PIPA are defeated, it's inevitable that something like them will be passed eventually. Because Congress
will eventually obey their paymasters as soon as it politically expedient to do so. It'll happen unless the system is
changed. Unless we are persistent and vigilant.
Back to school (sort of): I sat in on the two UW
computer science compiler courses over the winter and spring terms. This has become rather useful at work, as I'm now
on OpenText's compiler team. I also helped recruit my CS444 instructor to help us out.
Speaking of work: it was
a happy change for me to move teams so that I no longer work with OScript and started working on OScript to make
it better for developers. OScript is OpenText's proprietary programming language--something of a twist of history that
was probably a great idea at the time is was conceived twenty-some yeas ago, but the developer experience of which has
been sadly neglected over the years. We're looking at rectifying that. The nice thing for me, is I'm doing fun and
interesting things with Eclipse and with the language design, and I'm looking forward to getting the beginnings of
that work in front of other developers in the next month or two.
Clutter: I gave my
first KWLUG talk in 2011
on Clutter. I gave it again
at Dev House Waterloo as well. I'll be giving my second
KWLUG presentation a week from Monday, this time on Unity.
#LRTAwesome: Following
on from 2010's involvement
in Northdale, I gave a delegation to the Waterloo Regional Council
in favour of the region's LRT project. It was gratifying to me to feel part of a community effort that, in spite of
opposition from the local media, was able to get that back on track. As it were.
Hail to the chief: Somewhat
unexpectedly, I became President
of [[Kwartzlab]]. It's been a great experience, really. We pulled off a pretty
amazing Hacky Halloween event, and brought in a
grant to buy an awesome new laser cutter. But it has meant
that I've had to prioritize my time a bit more than I'm used to. It has meant that I've had to pull back a little bit
on Ubuntu stuff.
Circle of friends: However, [[Ubuntu]] Canada hasn't suffered all that much from my being
distracted with Kwartzlab. In fact, we now have two monthly Ubuntu Hours hosted
by Charles and Bob on the first Friday and third Wednesday
of the month respectively. And we had the usual Global Jams and release parties. And I even finally got
my Ubuntu membership.
FSOSS: And, I went
to FSOSS in October to give a talk about Ubuntu Canada, the Ubuntu community and how people can get
involved.
I've been doing a lot of public speaking lately.
Ellen: Continues to be awesome. She really inspires
me by being able to remain positive in spite of everything. We got to spend a whole bunch of time together doing some
pretty amazing things: concerts, Perimeter lectures, Stratford plays, a trip to Montreal, her cousin's wedding... I'm
quite pleased with myself that I was able to get some of our friends down from Ottawa to jam with Ellen at her house
for her birthday. We made sweet music together. Literally!
A surfeit of blogs: One thing that really fell off
the map this year was this blog. With all the things I'm doing, it just hasn't been as much of a priority. You'd think
that would mean I'd have lots of things I'd be eager to talk about. And it does! But
with Twitter, a weekly coffee meetup with friends where I can just tell them
things, Ellen being very patient with me as I work out problems or tell stories on the phone where I might have
otherwise done that here, I don't feel the need to take the time to compose something. And I feel bad about that, but
I acknowledge that the blog has become an unfortunate victim of prioritization. One thing that I really do feel guilty
about is that I feel like I'm shirking my responsibilities and should be blogging more about Kwartzlab, Ubuntu Canada
and the Agile P2P (especially after I'd agreed to blog about sessions for Communitech. I only
did one of those; I'd have done more, but I've
had to miss nearly all the sessions since the summer). For Ubuntu Canada, I have actually done of few of those, more
than anything else this year.
Agile Book Club: Was a fantastic experience, but unfortunately now seems to be in
the past tense. The principle members have either gone off and started a consulting
company, Lean Intuit (I love the name), got themselves elected
moderators of Stack Overflow or they've been whizzing around the
world giving talks at Agile conferences. So the book club becomes another sad victim of prioritization. My one real
regret is I'd just brought Eric on board just before it faded. He always has great insights
and I'm sad he couldn't have been a part of the club as it was in 2010 and early 2011.
All in all, I think this was another pretty fantastic year in a whole bunch of areas. I'm looking forward to 2012, but (
hopefully, if I get my slides done for the KWLUG presentation), I'll talk about that later.
