I'll have photos and a whole post up soon on the blog and the Hammy Central page, but until then: 19:04, May 17, 2013 is all you need to know.
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May 12
The Hammy (Baby Photos) Broadcast System
In anywhere from a few hours to a couple of weeks, if all goes well, I will be adding a new member to the family. I know how annoying it can be to be inundated with friggin’ baby photos and posts about babies, so I am going to restrict my posting to a non-front page category of my blog.
I was resolving not to post very much at all, but certain friends and family members have told me that they want to be inundated with obnoxious amounts of photos and posts.
IF YOU ARE ONE OF THESE PEOPLE, there are two ways you can receive these updates.
1) If you use an RSS reader, subscribe to the feed: http://squeeze-box.ca/?cat=583&feed=rss2
2) If you do not, join Google+ and circle this page: https://plus.google.com/u/0/106979346208502654045/posts (Seriously, if you’re not on Google+, this is the time to join. It is a million times better than Facebook and is worth it for my BABY PHOTOS alone.)
I will only be posting very occasionally on Facebook about my offshoot.
If you do not want to do either of these, you will have to periodically visit the baby section of my blog here: http://squeeze-box.ca/?cat=583
May 10
PHPMailer Problem
Okay, here’s another tech problem I’m recording here so I can find the solution if it happens again.
I was having trouble receiving mail send from the phpmailer-based contact form on the YTG website.
The problem was that the yokohama-theatre.com domain didn’t have any MX records set up. This is because they are set up elsewhere, but mail sent from inside my webhost is using the webhost’s records, not the public MX records. By adding them in my host’s C-Panel, I solved the problem.
May 07
Hey Canada, WTF? Or: Wow, I Thought Getting My Passport Was a POTA!
I'm investigating registering my soon-to-be-born baby's birth with Canada so we can get the passport to visit Canada for Xmas.
Before I can do that, I need to get a certificate of citizenship (which apparently can take 6-12 months). The form that I need to fill out is… well, typical bureaucratic nonsense, but that's fine.
Here's the kicker, among the many items they require are two pieces of photo ID.
What? For a newborn? Okay, assuming I get the Japanese passport first (which I don't want to do, because we need the Canadian one to force them to use the correct Romaji), that's one piece. What the fuck other piece of ID is a newborn infant going to have? His tractor-trailer operator's license?
How would I do this if my wife wasn't Japanese and my child didn't have the potential of having a Japanese passport to travel under? Would we be stuck in Japan until Canada finished the paperwork? Am I just simply misunderstanding something?
Arg!
(This is all aggravated by the fact that I made myself a pizza tonight and then accidentally dropped it on the floor, upside down.)
Arg!
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Apr 02
An Open Letter
An open letter to the very old man who runs the Keikyu line and is always too cold.
Dear old man who runs the Keikyu line and is always too cold,
Just because your teeth chatter and you worry about catching a chill, does not mean that the train services you run need to be as hot and muggy as the Amazon basin. I am currently standing on one of your trains. It is rush hour on a rainy day, and nearly every surface is dripping with condensation and yet the air conditioning units in the ceiling of the train remain silent. I spent the better part of the ten minutes between Kamiooka and Yokohama blind as a mole rat because my glasses were fogged up. (It was too crowded for my to get a cloth from my pocket to wipe them off.)
My sense of smell was damaged a few months ago, but at the moment I'm glad, because I thankfully cannot smell the heady mix of morning breath and wet dog that surely permeates the soup that can only be called air in the loosest sense of the word.
The only brief respite comes when the doors open at a station and some fresh air blows in.
So I beg you, please consider that the rest of us, the people who ride your trains, many of us under the age of 150, are not adapted for a temperature of 32 degrees and 100 percent humidity. In fact, most of us are wearing jackets because we just came from outside, and the morning rush hour does not allow us the luxury of space in which to remove them for our 20 – 60 minute commute on your trains.
With sincerest heat stroke,
Andrew Woolner
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Mar 28
Bibs, Bibs, Everywhere
I've got some really generous friends. My friend +Kara MaruMaru gave me a stroller, a playpen, a changing pad, a baby backpack and more on Tuesday. Then, yesterday, my sister-in-law dropped off three enormous bags and one plastic box of baby clothes, including… wait for it… more than 15 bibs!
People with babies: you need to tell me, is it necessary to have more than two or three? (bibs, not babies)
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Mar 20
Fucking Facebook
So, as many of you know, I run a small Theatre company, an NPO, that also provides Theatre classes. We mostly have to rely on word-of-mouth and Google searches to find students to join our classes, but recently, after some success in the fall, we've been using Facebook's advertising options.
Initially, as I said, we had some small success with it, but there are some improvements I like to see (tied in with the way FB handles events), and there are some serious problems with it.
1) First major problem is targeting seems to be somewhat ineffective. When you create an advert on the system, you can specify a geographic area and interest keywords in order to narrow down who sees your advert. I have doubts as to whether this is working. We've recently been using FB to advertise events we've targeted to a geographic area and certain interests, and we've had people sign-up who pretty obviously don't even live in Japan, let alone the city we've specified.
2) Second major problem is that FB is crawling with what appear to be bots. They click on the advertising links and join the event, but it's pretty clear that they are not real people. Their profiles are empty and their photos are cartoons.
Which brings us to the main improvement that I want to suggest.
There should be an option that requires guests who want to say "yes" to attend an event to perform an action besides just clicking yes. Like paying a fee. It's easy to get people to click "yes" on an event invitation, but much harder to get them to follow through. An obvious solution would be to build payment into the FB event system (something similar to Meetup.com), but that isn't even necessary. There could just be a message to the user with a link to click to pay (like the event admin's website), and then the admin gets a notification to approve the guest, and can do so once he or she verifies the payment is completed. As it is right now, people can click yes, but not actually commit to coming.
The current system works relatively well if you're just setting up a small party, but if FB is going to accept money for adverts to promote your event, then they need to find a way of increasing quality. (If one wanted to be cynical, one might even suggest that it is FB itself that plants the bots/fake accounts. What other reason would the fakes have for signing up to an event than to drive up ad dollars?)
Of course, a solution would be to stop using FB adverts. Well, that may be the course I choose, but for a small company, FB's options are very cost-effective… provided they actually work. There aren't that many options out there that let me a) target well, and b) get them out quickly.
I was thinking that I'd go back to advertising a page on my website rather than an FB event, but that still leaves the problem with the faulty targeting and the bots… only now, the problem will be invisible. The bots obviously won't click through and pay, but by visiting my site at all, they still cost me money.
Those are my thoughts. Boo, Facebook.
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Mar 19
An Open Letter
I use NotScripts and NoScript in Chrome and Firefox, respectively, to block scripts on web pages. On that note, I would like to write an
OPEN LETTER TO THOSE SITES THAT MAKE ME AUTHORIZE A DOZEN OTHER SITES IN ORDER TO VIEW ANY CONTENT
Dear sites-that-make-me-authorize-a-dozen-other-sites-in-order-to-view-any-content,
Fuck you.
Sincerely,
Me
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Mar 02
Ugh, did a limited share of this when I originally posted it, but G+ won't let…
Ugh, did a limited share of this when I originally posted it, but G+ won't let me expand it, so I need to reshare it to make it public.
Reshared post from +Andrew Woolner
AeroFS – After Rough Start, It Rocks NadsI was really feeling the pain when Microsoft retired Windows Live Mesh on February 13. Suddenly, my main working directory was no longer synchronized between my various machines. With 35GB to sync, Cloud storage was too costly to consider. I needed Peer-to-Peer.
The promising alternatives had proven not-so-promising: Cubby made their P2P solution available only if users paid for 100GB of cloud space; GoodSync was licensed per-machine; Gbridge's sync was a hack that I didn't trust; and Bitorrent Labs' SyncApp is only in alpha.
That left #AeroFS, the free version of which is still invite-only (beta). Five days after Live Mesh had been shut down, all my machines were out of sync and it was driving me crazy. I could no longer work on a file on my desktop and then grab my laptop and hit the road, confident that I could pick up my work later.
Luckily, thanks to +Scott Mortimer, humanitarian, I managed to get an invite for AeroFS and got it installed.
Now, normally, when you're syncing a large number of files it makes sense to do what we call "seeding". That is, to have a set of the files to be sync'd already on each machine. Then the software compares the files (which are 99% identical in my case), saving time by not having to copy all 35GB to all the machines running the sync software.
Ah, but this was apparently a major AeroFS glitch. Weird for syncing software to not be able to deal with seeding, but there you have it. For almost two weeks, I left 5 of my 7 PCs turned on 24/7 just to complete the sync. During this time, it wasn't syncing any new files, it was just updating identical version of existing files with each other, and occasionally deleting random files in certain subdirectories for no reason I could figure out.
It would also restore deleted files (removed in a mistaken attempt to speed things up by reducing the number of files) on machines on which AeroFS hadn't enumerated those same files yet.
I won't bore you with further details, but it wrapped up earlier this week. Either because all the files had finally been enumerated and everything was finally in sync, or because AeroFS developers had fixed the problem (a thread about the issue wrapped up the morning my files came into full sync, so it's hard to say).
Now it works amazingly. And unlike Live Mesh, it tells me the instant a file has been updated, just like Dropbox. I am thrilled; this is exactly what I was looking for. My single complaint is that, like Dropbox, any sync'd files or folders must be stored under the AeroFS directory itself. I have a fair amount of software that points to config files or the like in my Sync directory. Currently, I've solved the problem with a junction point, but I hope in the future that AeroFS will allow us to sync whatever folders we like no matter where they are.
So anyway… a big hurrah for AeroFS. Hopefully when they finish their beta, they won't try to screw P2P users like Cubby did. Or if they do, maybe SyncApp will be ready by then…
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Feb 14
Wrong Resolution on Every Boot
Another blog entry that’s purely technical but exists in case the problem recurs.
Okay, so ever since I got back from Canada, my main machine, which has two dual 1680 x 1050 monitors has been defaulting to 1024×768 resolution on the primary every time it reboots. What’s weirdest is that when the login screen first comes up, it looks fine, and then seconds later it drops to low res.
A quick google search revealed that Microsoft Live Mesh Remote Desktop (a service that is actually being discontinued by Microsoft today) is the culprit. Buried in the registry (Local Machine –> Software –> Microsoft –> Live Mesh) is a key that sets the resolution for each monitor. By shutting down the Live Mesh Remote Desktop service and deleting both these keys and rebooting, I was able to fix the problem.
My conjecture is that because I was using Live Mesh desktop while in Canada with my X60s laptop (resolution 1024×768), I somehow jammed the display settings. I’ve done this before with no problems, but maybe the chances of this happening with repeated use are higher.
This shouldn’t be a problem in the future, since, as I mentioned above, Microsoft is shutting down this very useful service today.
Feb 14
Tech Problem: Bright Ideas Appreciated
Okay, so for the last few weeks I've been having this weird problem on my primary PC. Almost every time I wake it up from sleep, there's this crackling over the speakers, and it's been getting worse. It happens when the machine is idle, or when it is playing an audio/video file. The video is affected too, and it stutters.
After some troubleshooting, I tracked it down to one of my HDDs. When it is being accessed, that's when the crackling and video stutter happen. This is not my primary HDD, but a large 2TB drive that I use for things like video editing scratch files. There is a piece of backup software that uses it, though, and that tends to run after the machine has been in sleep mode, which explains why that was when I was noticing the problem the most. But any access to this disk (copying a large file, for instance) will cause the problem.
I am currently running a chkdsk in Windows. Interestingly, I had to unmount the drive to do this and despite the fact that the drive is thumping away as it is scanned, I am observing no problems in audio/video playback. This suggests to me that it is not an electrical (ground) problem.
Google is coming up blank on this (may not be using the right search terms), and I'm out of ideas.
Anyone?
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Feb 08
Thoughts on Fatherhood
So, the cat is out of the bag, and I can finally officially write about it: my first offspring is due (if all goes well) in mid-May. Sadly, my own father didn’t live long enough to meet his third grandchild.
The photo on the right is the first (and last) ultrasound photo of Hammy I’m going to post. Frankly, I think posting a whole bunch of blurry ultrasound photos is a very uninteresting thing to clutter people’s SN feeds with. I will try to remember the golden rule that other people find your children to be about 0.01% as interesting as you do, and post accordingly.
As you can see, my stagerabbit-junior-to-be is already sporting the devil’s horns that my family have had ground off at birth for the last 1000 years or so in order to avoid being burnt at the stake.
Hammy is the womb-name that we’re using, as I think it’s bad form to bestow a proper name before the wee thing is properly detached from its mother. I’ve expressed this as “not wanting to jinx it”, but it’s more of a hedge against last minute mind-changing. You never know what’s going to happen when you look at that baby; maybe you’ll decide that “Akuma” isn’t the best name after all.
I have so many conflicting thoughts about the whole fatherhood thing, particularly thoughts like “oh my dog, I’m going to totally ruin this kid!”. On the other hand, I’ve got the entirely delusional “I’m going to make unconventional choices for my child that are going to uniquely prepare Hammy to make his or her mark upon the world.” And then a bunch of other stuff swirling around, including the dark thoughts that we’re just a little over halfway through the pregnancy now and there is still so much that could go wrong.
I’m already doing a lot of planning: early toilet-training, hauling Hammy back and forth from rehearsals, discipline methods, etc. Of course, I understand that no battle plan survives contact with the… er… progeny, but is it not better to have a plan? I wonder if I have some kind of advantage because I’m coming into this later than a lot of people do. On the other hand, maybe being in my late thirties rather than my twenties will mean I will have less energy.
Also, I wonder about providing for a child. Many people I know have lectured me about the expense of having a child, but come on, really? Poor people have children all the time. Surely I don’t need to be a fucking account executive (baaaarrrrfffff) with a rising-star IT firm in order to give my family a good life? Maybe I’ll change my mind on this and eventually have to go back to having a “real” job, but I’m going to hang onto my ideals as long as I can. I think “follow your dreams; money isn’t everything” is a much better message to give your children than: “do well in school, get into a good university, get a good job, and then crank out kids of your own to do the same”. Am I totally fucking wrong?
My parents, particularly my father, worked hard so that I would be able to make choices like that. By following my dreams, no matter the financial cost, am I maybe going to achieve the opposite result and raise a little account executive (baaaaarrrrffff)? Is that how this works? Shit. I don’t know.
In absence of gnosis on the subject, I think my only choice it to do what I’ve been doing and be true to myself.
Right?
Fuck, this father thing is hard, and I haven’t even had to change a shitty diaper yet.
P.S. For friends and family reading this; those inclined to give gifts, allow me to sound ungrateful in advance and say that we have plenty of toys and clothes already (Hammy will be the 7th child born in our combined families). What we really need are English-language books for and about wee children. When I eventually have time to think about this, I will post an Amazon wish list for this here: http://www.amazon.co.jp/registry/wishlist/1U1J9Y7UOB2YP (For now it’s just a stub.)
Jan 24
Oh fuck
Just spent ~4 hours chasing down a discrepancy between YTG's general ledger and the final budget for the last semester of classes. Finally determined that I'd overcharged a student by 6000 Yen last term.
I called her, and she was happy enough to get the money back, but I felt like a total douche. I really wish I had someone else to handle the books for me. Every time I think I'm on top of them, I screw something new up.
So much for getting it all in order today… still have a pile of receipts and invoices to plow through. Will have to be tomorrow, I guess.
I wish arts administrators were as cheap as us artists. All this gobbledygook keeps me away from MAKING STUFF. GOD DAMN. I JUST WANT TO CREATE! NNNNNNNAAAARRRRRGGGGG!
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Jan 21
The Ballad of Aaron Swartz
On January 13th, I read about Aaron Swartz’s suicide in Brooklyn. I was deeply affected by it, and not just for the normal reasons.
If you don’t know who I’m talking about, you should, at the very least, read his Wikipedia page, and possibly do a bit of Googling. Long story short: among other things, he was an activist who was deeply involved in the protests against SOPA and other government and corporate actions that threatened the free flow of information on the internet, particularly public information or information that had been paid for by the public. There’s plenty of details out there, and I’m not going to write a wall of text explaining the issues—this post is about a song.
Yes. I was angry and I wrote a song. I modeled it on the protest/political action songs of the early 20th century that memorialized labour leaders, like Woody Guthrie’s “Two Good Men”, with a little bit of Billy Bragg’s anthemic “There is Power in Our Union” thrown in. Except less good.
I worked on it in my spare time in Toronto from January 13 – 15, and then recorded the version posted here on the 16th, after sending an earlier version out to friends to get feedback. This is actually very frightening for me, as I don’t tend to be very public with my non-comedic songs, and this is the first one I’ve written since probably 2003, but I felt that I really wanted this one to be out there. The sound quality isn’t great, the guitar playing isn’t great, and the vocals aren’t great, but what I’m worried most about is that the song itself isn’t very good. It usually takes me at least two or three months to figure out if something I’ve written is any good, but I don’t feel that I can wait this time.
I suppose that the worst case scenario is that people don’t like it and tell me so, I guess. Best case scenario is that someone with talent likes it enough to re-record it and make it sound good.
Ahem. The buildup is making this worse, so I’m just going to post it the youtube link. If you want the MP3 (why?), it’s linked below.
Ballad of Aaron Swartz v 1.2
MP3: http://aziraphale-public-folder-1.s3.amazonaws.com/Andrew_Woolner-Ballad_of_Aaron_Swartz_v1.2.mp3
Lyrics:
BALLAD OF AARON SWARTZ
Another one has gone:
another hero fallen.
He took things from the rich
like a modern Sherwood Robin
Why were our modern Nottingham
trying to tell us he was wrong?
when what he took on our behalf
was ours, all along
All along
He wasn’t very old
just twice twelve and two
but he risked his liberty
to liberate me and you
This can be a prison planet
on which everything’s a crime
and taking public documents
gets you 30 years of time
30 years of time
He fought for ideals
for a new enlightened age;
the freeflow of information
that would destroy our gilded cage
But those who walk the halls of power
or skulk the corridors of might
prize our state of ignorance
and won’t give up without a fight
without a fight
He had the glint of leadership
He was not a normal kid
He believed in direct action
So that’s exactly what he did
But prosecutor Stephen Heymann
and the vaunted FBI
strove to make him an example
and he was hounded ’til he died
until he died
He didn’t kill or rape
or drive families from their homes
or bet people’s life savings
on a bunch of sub-prime loans
But when the architects of misery
can dine with heads of state
then the defenders of our freedoms
suffer a very different fate
a different fate
Yes, they line the people’s heroes
up against the wall
while plutocrats and their sycophants
laugh about it all
Laugh about it all
He was only one of many
but there was only one of him
and my heart goes to his family
and to all his kith and kin
But he wasn’t the first to fall
nor will he be the last
his successors will be legion
and his enemies outclassed
But were the laws that were his downfall
made with our consent?
Do we need to blame ourselves
When we blame our government?
Another one has gone
another hero fallen…
Photo credit for top photo: Fred Benenson / www.fredbenenson.com
“The Ballad of Aaron Swartz” is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/. To ask for permissions not granted by this license, contact me via my copyright page: http://squeeze-box.ca/?page_id=159 (I will probably say “yes”)
Jan 18
ただいま！ Yokohama Bound
I type this aboard the bus from Narita to YCAT with the low-hanging sun shining directly in my eyes. I am back in Japan after more than six weeks in Canada to deal with the aftermath of my father's sudden death this past November.
I was so busy that it really hadn't hit me until a couple of days ago just how eager I was getting to be in my own home once again. The family farmstead in Kitchener is a home to me, but it's still my mother's home, and while I can feel welcome there, and was quite sad to leave it after spending nearly three weeks there, it's not the same as getting back to my house. And my wife, of course.
Despite being busy, what did I actually accomplish? Along with my mother, I wrapped up a bunch of paperwork related to my father. I also scanned thousands of pages of personal papers, which I will be curating over the next few years/decades. I wrote my first serious song in nearly 10 years– about Aaron Swartz's death, of all things. I'll be releasing a rough recording of that soon.
I also finally wrote and recorded and shot the video one of the five songs I need to make videos for to finally fulfill my obligations to people who contributed to the fall indiegogo campaign for YTG. Another song is written with a rough recording made, but I'm still waiting for some photos from the person who commissioned it.
Yikes. I think that might be it. I won't list the things I didn't do (which includes two scripts I was supposed to finish drafting), because that list is endless.
But no rest for the wicked: tonight I will be sending out personal emails to flog the YTG theatre classes that begin this Saturday.
And yet… happy to be back, even if it means a return to my obligations. (Among them, the obligation to lose the 4 kilograms I put on in Canada thanks to soft living.)
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Jan 17
Goodbye Canada
Getting ready to leave. 15 minutes until the taxi gets here. Not looking forward to being up for the next 24 or so hours (can't sleep on planes and then have to stay up when I get back to try to avoid jet-lag), but I'm ready to go. I'm super homesick and can't wait to get back to my rickety house and my wife and my Japanese family.
One day's rest, and then I will be teaching a Shakespeare class.
Masochist much?
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Jan 14
Joomla Language Switcher Stops Pointing at the Correct Page
[Note: I’m going to start writing about technical fixes here. This is less for my readers, and more just to note certain tricky or non-intuitive fixes for myself so that I can look back and reference them. Do not feel obliged to read this.]
Today the language-switcher module on the YTG site stopped working. It would send the user to an incorrect page. Either the home page, or a page I had visited recently. The last part was the crucial hint. After turning cloudflare caching off, I remembered that I’d recently enabled caching within the Global Settings menu in Joomla.
Turned it off. Problem solved.
Jan 14
No More Sentimentality
It is a sad day for me, but one that should have come last year.
I’ve been running my websites (this one and yokohama-theatre.com) on the same web host since about 2000. My old web host (let’s call them oldhost.com came highly recommended by a friend, and so I signed up. They were a titch more expensive than other options, but they were local (I was based in Toronto at that time), and super friendly. Even now, when I send a support email in, 9 times out of 10, I have a response within the hour from the company president.
Here is the problem that started putting the thought of changing into my mind: My sites are slow. Too slow. I initially thought that the problem was the lag—I’m accessing the sites from Japan. Setting up CloudFlare , which can cache the files in Tokyo didn’t help, though. It was suggested to me that perhaps my sites weren’t well-optimized. They weren’t, but there was little I could do about the YTG site without also changing the template, which I was not about to do. (CloudFlare actually does a lot of the optimization as well so that you don’t have to do it piecemeal on 
the back-end of your website.)
Just out of curiosity, I backed up the site and moved it over to a free domain host, this time in the U.S. It was faster, even without CloudFlare. No more waiting for the admin interface to slowly reload after applying a single change. No more waiting for my banner graphic across the top of the site to load. I quickly realized that I was paying for early 2000s performance at early 2000s prices.
Also, oldhost.com tends to lag behind on server software. They didn’t switch to PHP 5.3 until November 2012, even though 5.2 had been end-of-life since January 2011—I had website components complaining about this. There’s something to be said for caution, but this was a bit over-the-top. They offered no real support for common website software, like WordPress or Joomla, instead implying to me that these platforms were insecure or faulty in some way (not sure which platforms they expected me to use, then). They had many features considered standard by other hosts disabled for security reasons which they claimed was standard practice (and I discovered was not).
In addition, I had no access to any logs, so I always had to go back and forth with support to investigate issues that required me to check logs.
The main thing is the speed. In 2012, I shouldn’t be experiencing this level of speed from a website. And certainly not for the price I was paying. After realizing that it wasn’t only my site setup affecting the speed (I tested using a free host based in the U.S.), as I’d been told, it was pretty much just a matter of time until I researched an alternative and moved.
My current package:
- 10 GB web space
- 50 GB total space (including mail accounts, databases, etc.)
- 2 domains
- unlimited sub domains
- 40 email addresses (don’t use them—I use Google Apps for Domains instead)
- No SSL
- Email-based support (response time 1-4 hours)
For this, I pay $199.99 CAD per year. I mean, seriously—is this hosting package stuck in 2006 or what?
New package (on HostGator)
- Unlimited web space*
- Unlimited domains
- Shared SSL
- SFTP (and unlimited users! no more having to give collaborators my main password!)
- Support for JOOMLA
- A bunch of software installers (fully supported)
- cPanel and whole pile of great tools for database, file, and site management. (I can MOVE files from one directory to another by DRAGGING and DROPPING, FFS!)
- A bunch of checkout software packages (fully supported)
- Email, phone, and chat-based support (response time 1-4 minutes)
TANGENT: *You and I both know that “unlimited” anything in this industry never really unlimited. They have restrictions on what can be on your account and what can’t. For example, only one site backup can reside on the server. Which is honestly a bit impractical when I find myself backing up my site before each major change, and I’m not always in a location where a large download is possible (e.g. when I’m connected over phone tethering). However, for all practical purposes, I am not likely to run into an upper limit any time soon. The really sneaky part is that they limit your CPU usage. I don’t anticipate this being a problem, as I think it’s designed to catch people who abuse the service, but I will have to be careful nonetheless.
For this, I pay $228.96… for three years. 38% of my oldhost.com bill.
TANGENT: I’ve also been gearing up to move my domain registrations away from oldhost.com as well. The cost there is a flat $19.99 per year, with no multi-year discounts. For a dot com. Once I’ve finished testing the host gator platform, I will be redirecting the old domain and moving it to Moniker, which is not only cheaper, but easier to manage (better U.I).
I’m also migrating a bunch of my domains from doteasy. Doteasy was my very first host— a free one—I moved away from them because their free package had no php/mysql support back in the day. That’s how I originally ended up at oldhost.com. My volunteer web developer insisted on making a database-driven site. Which was a great idea—except what I got was a static site with php files instead of html files. I’d left some domains that I wasn’t using except for email on doteasy, but the $20/year renewal was starting to piss me off, so I moved them to Moniker and once the transfer is done, I will point them to hostgator as parked domains (with email).
One of the other annoying problems I will have fixed by moving to HostGator is a recurring file ownership issue I was having.
On oldhost.com, the default file and folder permissions were 644 and 755, respectively. While this is a best practice, security-wise, and one that I agree with, it caused a lot of problems because the FTP user was different than the web account user. If you’re not familiar with ACLs and UNIX file permissions, let me sum up: the FTP user couldn’t delete or modify files created by the website software and vice versa. Like a lot of people, I tend to use a combination of FTP and the built-in tools on my CMS platform (WordPress or Joomla) to get things done. So until I realized what was happening and made a bunch of support calls to change the owner on all my files (something I couldn’t do myself), I was constantly wondering why component upgrades were failing or why I didn’t have permissions over FTP to delete or change certain files.
On HostGator (yeah, going back and forth on the CamelCase, I know, but my editor doesn’t have a find/replace function), the main FTP user and the default web user are the same. RELIEF!
So: a few things to move and test still (as of today, this site has now been rebuilt and moved), but so far things are looking positive. My next hosting bill comes due in July, and I am planning to give my notice to close down the account in June at the latest. It’s going to be a bit sad, but in the end, oldhost.com simply didn’t keep up with changes in the industry over the last ten years and their service isn’t good enough to be paying a 62% premium (plus tax, because they are Canadian—and don’t get me started on having to pay HST when I’m not residing in Canada).
TL;DR Though sad to be leaving my webhost of many years, I felt they were not delivering value for money paid so I am reluctantly leaving them for another hosting company.
Jan 13
An Apology for Replication
Apologies to anyone who follows me on multiple social media feeds. I will now be cross-posting any long-winded G+ posts to my blog, which in turn (unless the recent site move has disabled it) will be auto-posted to Facebook.
I know that all my G+ posts are always available, but sometimes after posting, I would feel that they belonged with the kind of content I was writing for my blog, and I wanted to keep them together.
Also, there are still a lot of people who refuse to use G+, and giving my blog URL is just easier. So, yeah, that's what I'm doing.
So again, my deepest regrets to those of you who read what I post on here, my blog, and Facebook. Sorry.
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Jan 13
I knew of Aaron Swartz, but not by name
Here is another technologist and activist who deserves the kind of international mourning that Steve Jobs received, but outside of a relatively small niche, nobody knows who he is, or what his activism was trying to accomplish.
I believe in skirting or even breaking laws that are unjust and or silly. Before you frown at me: how many times have you J-walked? If J-walking was made into a felony with excessive penalties, do you really think people would stop doing it? (I believe that people would have an obligation to start doing it, in that case, in order to visibly assert their non-consent to that ridiculous law.)
One of the hallmarks of a police state is that it becomes impossible to live without breaking some law or another, giving the police ample pretext to silence dissent without actually having to have any laws forbidding dissent.
Enough of that…
Will Swartz's death do anything to stop the ridiculously harsh sentences demanded for certain types of cyber "crime"? What's the solution? No fucking idea.
In the meantime, I salute a fallen hero.
(The crime he was charged with involved the free distribution of JSTOR articles. JSTOR is involved with the the whole academic journal thing that +Jan Moren posts about occasionally.)
Embedded Link
Aaron Swartz – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aaron H. Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, writer, archivist, political organizer, and Internet activist. Swartz co-authored the “RSS 1.0″ specification…
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Dec 14
Post-Funeral Thoughts
I’m riding the TTC back from the airport after dropping my wife off there. Thanks to the generosity of her family, she was at least able to attend the memorial gathering. (Technically, you could say that that was the funeral– a memorial gathering at the family farmstead was all my father wanted.)
I’m still mostly blase about the whole thing. Whether that’s because it hasn’t sunk in yet, or whether the physical distance separating me from my parents has made it easier, or that I just don’t get worked up about death any more, I don’t know. Maybe something will break in the coming weeks in Canada, and maybe it won’t. I don’t know.
Interesting side note here: did you know that it is illegal to bury human ashes in Ontario anywhere other than a registered graveyard? Spreading them is okay, and you can even do it on Crown land and waterways, but burying ashes is not. I think this is because the laws were written before cremation was common, and when they were changed to allow the spreading of the ashes, the burying part kind of just fell through a loophole. You can bury the decaying remains of your St. Bernard in your back yard, but not the biologically inert ashes of your father. Nice one, Ontario.
Dec 08
Thoughts on a Memorial
It’s the morning of my Father’s memorial gathering and I’m asking myself why I pushed to have an active part in it. Today needs to run like clockwork, and I’m involved in taking cues and doing something at least twice. Maybe three times.
I think the cold and wet will probably protect me from getting too emotional, but I’m certain that my mind is going to be wandering. When I’m working on shows, the hardest parts are when I’m not doing anything active; if I don’t struggle to stay engaged, I can easily wander off mentally and miss a cue.
* * *
We’re also all silently pretending that today is going to bring closure to everything, which is a bit foolish.
* * *
The memorial gathering is taking place, as my father requested, on the farm by the rock on which we have all the heritage plaques. There were problems finding a venue, but at the last minute, the nearby elementary school offered their gym. The kids had come out and my father and shown them around the farm earlier this year, so my family thought it was appropriate. Despite the fact that it’s a Catholic school and there are crosses and Jesuses and Pope John Paul IIs everywhere, I’m really happy they offered. The marquee outside the school has “Goodbye, Mr. Woolner” on it, and the kids made poster boards in tribute to him with photos from their trip to the farm.
The principal announced that she had “prayer cards” that she was going to put at every place setting, and I cringed inwardly (my father was an atheist), but then she brought them out, and I read them, and they were really sweet. No mention of God or “the Lord” or anything. Just a nice little poem on the back.
* * *
Okay, I need to get kitted (kilted) up now and prep some other stuff. Many more thoughts, but time is ticking, and the family is swirling around me now.
Nov 30
In the Air
I guess that one hour and forty-five minutes isn’t so late in the grand scheme of things, but it’s hard looking down at my watch and thinking if we were on time, we would be landing in 30 minutes.
I can’t believe they still have the same movies that they had when I flew over a month ago. I thought they changed them every month! I watched a couple, but then got bored, so I’ve switched on my laptop (hooray for in-seat power outlets) and caught up on my email.
I guess it would be a good idea, I supposed, to write something for the blog.
Don’t really have anything to write about.
I really have no idea what is in store for me for the next 60 days. Father’s memorial, sure, mother’s birthday, yes, Xmas and New Years, check. But no real idea of where I’m going to be or what I’m going to be doing. I brought along my TASCAM US-800 USB mixer and two microphones just in case I decide to record some songs or something. Forgot the AC cable for the US-800, though.
One thing is clear is that my father’s death changes everything and moves my life schedule ahead about 10 years… despite the fact that my career schedule is about five years behind where I’d like it to be. My remaining family needs me, and I am going to have to make more frequent and longer trips to Canada. This jaunt, thought, will be my longest one until at least next fall: if everything goes well, my spring and summer are spoken for (papoose on the way). But starting from 2014, I think I need to find a way to spend at least three months a year in Canada.
That’s actually a hard mental shift for me. My identity is wrapped up quite tightly in Yokohama. I also have a sense of pride about being part of my community there. My long-range plan has always included spending a portion of my time in Canada, but my prior visions had all related to my professional life: touring a show, maybe. Just going there seems weird.
So everything’s up in the air right now. YTG ensemble rehearsals have been suspended while I’m gone; the winter semester of classes don’t have a venue yet (except for the voice class); my Canadian family is seriously changed, and the pieces haven’t stopped falling yet… probably more stuff I can’t think of at the moment.
Hmm. Lights are going from blue to pink. Food service probably starting soon. Better put away the laptop and get ready.
Nov 24
The Family Strong-Man
I just spoke to my father for what will probably be the last time. 
He didn’t answer; there was just the sound of the respirator. Or something.
My mother held the phone to his ear and I held my phone to mine. I didn’t realize at first that he couldn’t talk back.
When my father was born, talking to a dying relative from 10,000+ miles away would have been an impossibility. Now it’s so simple.
But that didn’t make it any easier.
My family keeps vigil over him in a Toronto hospital. I drink hot cocoa and have three empty cookie wrappers on my desk. I will soon go to sleep.
Will they wake me when he dies? I don’t sleep yet. I don’t cry. I don’t do the heavy-lifting of being there.
But I am now the family strong-man.
Nov 22
Up Shit Creek—Spare a Paddle?
I never got around to making the official announcement, I don’t think, but the Theatre company I run, YTG, became a registered NPO this past May. Yay!
My fiscal year starts September 1, which means that for the last few months I’ve been doing the taxes. I’ve had a neighbourhood friend helping me, without whom I would not have been able to meet the first deadline to file and pay taxes with/to three branches of government on October 30. I now have to November 30 to submit an annual report to the Yokohama City NPO office.
In some ways, this is easier than the tax stuff, and in some ways harder. There is a very specific format for this document and, of course, it has to be in Japanese, even if the group’s meetings take place and are documented in another language. I’m not saying that this doesn’t make sense, just that it’s hard.
Anyway, I’m at the point now where I have a pretty good idea of what I need to do, but what I could really use is some help from a fully bilingual friend. The line items for the budget and financial report portion are incomprehensible to me, and I need to turn around a quick translation on an activity report. Ideally, this would be someone who could come over and sit down with me to go through it all.
I can buy you lunch.
Nov 11
The Big “C” and the Big “D”
My parents have recently announced it to friends and family, and some of my own friends will know already the purpose behind my trip to Canada last month.
My father had been diagnosed with cancer.
When I went to Canada in October, it was clear that his condition was serious, but it was still unclear how serious. The doctors were taking (what appeared to us, anyway) their own sweet time in figuring out what was wrong with him. Now they are quite clear about what’s wrong, and the prognosis is quite grim. Grim enough that I’ve dropped everything for the months of December and January and, thanks to the generosity of my Japanese family, am heading back to Toronto. (All with the knowledge that I may have to push that trip up even earlier if things take a turn for the worse, of course.)
I’ll be spending my first winter holiday season in Canada since 2004, and I’m not too happy about the circumstances.
I’m actually hesitating to book the tickets, and I can’t even put my finger on why. Is something telling me I’m going to have to go sooner? I’ve budgeted for that, so what is stopping me from pulling the trigger on that booking?
We went to get my father’s watch fixed today. He bought it here a couple of years ago and it’s never worked properly outside of Japan. This year, it stopped running together (we hadn’t realized that it was a solar watch—nothing in the 100% Japanese instructions made that clear, I guess), and so he asked me to bring it back with me to get it repaired. Apparently, the shop in Canada was reluctant to work on it.
K and I took it in to the watch counter at Yodobashi Camera today, and they told us the repairs would be 12,500円—almost half the cost of the watch new! The guy at the shop recommended that we give it one more chance to recharge and leave it in the sun for a few days. After some quick research online, I found a blog that suggested leaving under a fluorescent lamp would be the most effective way to try to jumpstart it—with results in 12-24 hours rather than a week sitting in the sun filtered through glass. If it doesn’t charge, I’ll take it back again on Tuesday and bite the bullet. I don’t want to wait too long, because they said the repairs could take 3-4 weeks, and four weeks is all I have before I fly to Toronto again.
If you are, by chance, expecting some piecing insight into cancer, or into having a family member on borrowed time, you’re not going to get it here. I just wrote about a watch, for fuck’s sake.
I regret nothing, but I can no longer live my life at such a distance from the people I care about. I don’t mean physically: I’ve made Yokohama my home. But I’m going to need to reorganize my life so that I can play a more active role in the life of my Canadian family. I thought I had time, but I don’t.
So the closest thing to a useful thought comes through my head when I look over and see the button I made on tour in 2010 with my acting motto on it:
Aug 09
Unexpected Begging
I’ve been gearing up to start a crowd-funding campaign for a while for YTG, but my plan was to fund some rehearsal set pieces that we desperately need, or even one of our upcoming shows! Instead, I’m raising money to save a shed! What happened?!
The damage done to the shed.
Well, a couple of weeks ago, some idiot rammed a vehicle into the Yokohama Theatre Group’s storage shed and damaged one of the outer walls (see photo). The YCAC, on whose property our shed is located, removed that outer wall for safety reasons before contacting me.
Sadly, with the wall removed, it’s impossible to verify how the damage occurred or to evaluate whether the whole side needed to come off. In any case, what’s done is done. The YCAC is not interested in investigating further, and since we are essentially guests on their properly, I must defer to their judgement on the matter. That’s left YTG (read: me) holding the bag, financially. If you’ve been following me, you might have an inkling that I’ve been covering a lot of YTG expenses out of pocket for a while now, and even if I wanted to, I just don’t have deep enough pockets for this.
So, I’m reaching out to readers of this blog, particularly those who know me personally or through my Theatre work (those here because of the Wall of Shame may be slightly less interested) to go to the Indiegogo site, watch the amusing video I recorded yesterday (by myself, in the 37 degree heat with the cicadas chirping like mad in the background), see if you can pinpoint the moment when two pigeons start going at it, and, most importantly, give some money to help fund the shed repair.
Any amount over $10 will get you a perk, which is great, but the real point is to get this shed repaired so YTG doesn’t lose all the stuff we store inside it.
If you’re poor as a church mouse, that’s okay, just pass along this blog entry, or just this link: http://igg.me/p/198024?a=488241 <—that’s the link to the campaign. Please go there now and watch the video, which represents the “sweat” part of this campaign. The “blood” and “tears” are coming soon, no doubt…
Thanks!
May 16
Summer and a Long Time Coming
It’s been a while since I wrote a purely personal update, so I felt I ought to write at least a quick one. Of course, I’ll still throw a bit of Theatre stuff in because so much of my life is Theatre, but I’ll try to save the weightier content for other posts.
I’ve spent a lot of time waiting this month, which means a lot of time in my office in front of my main computer, so for this afternoon, I’ve decided to move up to the Tatami room on what may be one of the few days of the year it’s comfortable to do so. I’ve got my second hand iPhone (functioning as a music player using iSub client and Subsonic server) hooked up to the surround system playing (what else) Leonard Cohen. The sudare-filtered light and air is coming in. A large stuffed gorilla sits in the Golden Corner, and I’m working off my old X60s with the dead battery. Or hell, why don’t I just show you:
Damn, I love this rickety old house.
So, status: I’m moving closer on everything. There are lights at the ends of the various tunnels of current life, art, and work goals. I’ve got four or five things that I’m ready to launch into action on… but I can’t. I should just enjoy the limbo time, I guess, and play computer games or something, but with everything pending, I don’t feel like this is the time to switch off. What’s killing me is the waiting. And what’s killing me is that it’s all no one’s fault. There’s no one to push. The people who need pushing are at two to three removes away from me, and in one case, there’s no one to push at all. Unless its possible to push nature or the changing of the seasons, and frankly, if I was pushing the seasons, I’d be pushing the opposite way: today is the first day of summer by my method of reckoning.
How do I measure the beginning of summer? Well, it’s either the first day of the year that the air temperature goes over 25 degrees, or the first day I get a thick glaze of sweat from walking from the station to my house. As I said, that day is today. There is a nice cool wind, though, which is why I can work in the Tatami room.
Two other things I’m waiting on: a new cell phone and an air conditioner for said Tatami room, which should make the room usable for the entire year. At the moment, the Tatami room is usable during the two weeks of Yokohama “spring” and the maybe four weeks of Yokohama “autumn”, but during the long, sweaty summer and the nut-scrunching winter it becomes only usable for short periods or with enhancements (loads of blankets, several glasses of ice water, an expensive radiant heater, etc.).
The problem with summer is no matter how nice a breeze is blowing through the room (it is nice and breezy), I sweat profusely wherever my body comes into contact with anything (a table, the floor, my seat, my own hand, etc.). The problem with winter is that no matter how many blankets I pile on or no matter how many thousands of yen worth of electricity I spend heating myself, the air in the room ends up turning my fingers and toes numb. A proper A/C unit that actually cools or heats the air will make a huge difference in whether or not this room is usable on a more regular basis.
So yeah, everything’s moving, but at a glacial pace. I’ve had enough of being a dreamer for the time being: let me be a man of action for a while.
(Speaking of glacial movements and taking action, this is probably the final week or so, unless we hit another roadblock, to become a YTG “Founding Sponsor”. Take action and sponsor the long-time coming NPO incorporation by ::CLICKING HERE:: )
Apr 15
Week of YTG
It’s been a busy week for YTG. Lots of promising developments, but if I am completely honest, I have to admit that’s all they were: promising. Nothing is in ink yet, and we’ve got a bunch of deadlines on the horizon.
***
I had my first interview with our third international intern. That went quite well, and I’m really hoping everything works out. However, even if all goes well, the internship will occur during the three hottest months of the year, so I am a bit worried that our northern European friend will melt. If his school agrees, I should be getting the paperwork quite soon, and then we can discuss dates.
***
On Tuesday, Mayu and I went to see a possible studio space. It was like a massive airplane hanger, but modern, insulated, and really nice. However, it was more geared towards visual artists than it was to Theatre, although the fellow who interviewed us at least seemed interested in what we do. It’s a government building, so we need to be vetted first, before we can even decide if we want the space. There’s also a few things that are unclear: whether or not we can run the Ytheatre School out of there (restrictions on access to the space); if we can have access to a big enough space to rehearse in (we were told we could rent a small space as an HQ and use one or more of the bigger spaces in the building); or if we can continue our tradition of occasional open rehearsals (the access problem again).
Also, there’s some questions about electrical outlets and such, but I’m sure those questions will be answered before we have to make our decision. The studio space question has been a monkey on our backs for a while now, so I suspect that if we get through the vetting process and the use of a larger space is included, we’ll probably go for it. Yeah, IF we get through the vetting. We went into that interview having no idea of what they were looking for from applicants, so we’ll see.
***
Grants! Thanks to Arts Commission Yokohama having TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT WEBSITES, we didn’t find the updated grants forms until today (the Japanese version of the site linked from the English one is one year out-of-date). Deadline for the application is FRIDAY. I’m pretty sure that they’re going to require a full project budget as well as a performance date. This is going to be tight. Did I mention that all the forms are in Japanese? Whether this gets done or not is going to depend on the dedication of the Yokohama Theatre Ensemble members. Gambarou, everyone!
***
We’ve booked space for the final four weeks of the workshop (yay!), but only two of those weeks are currently set in stone (i.e. paperwork completed) (boo!). I was going to push Mayu to get the paperwork done this week (she’s our contact person for the Chojamachi space), but the grant stuff is going to have to take priority. So by the end of next week. Until this paperwork is done, though, I am going to be sweating bullets.
***
So there you have it. A lot of great things happening, a lot of promise, a bunch of deadlines, and nothing yet confirmed. That’s been my week.
Mar 17
Plumbing Update
Okay, so it’s all been sorted out. (I’m sure you were all holding your breath to find out what happened next with my plumbing.) The plumber showed up today at around 9:30. Despite the pouring rain, we were able to show him the leak.
Less than 30 minutes later, he’d used a hammer and chisel to knock a 30cm by 40cm hole in the concrete in front of our house and had dug down to locate the leak.
I snapped a photo of it (right). It doesn’t look like much, but this was taken after the main water valve was turned off and the pressure was dissipating. The leak itself was tiny, like an invisible hole pricked with a needle in a garden hose, but under much more pressure (remember, this pipe services the first floor toilet and all the upstairs facilities). When we first turned the water on with the pipe exposed, the force at which the water came out was frightening.
The plumber went off to get some specific tools, but by the mid-afternoon, he’d replaced the damaged section of pipe with some ABS he clamped on. Sadly, he buried the whole thing before I could get a snap of it. (And yes, we tested to make sure there were no other leaks.)
So it’s actually going to cost far less than we thought. Except… the question we need to ask ourselves is this: given the condition of this old pipe, should we not replace the whole length of it before something else happens, maybe with worse results? That will cost quite a bit more. Or, being rather depleted, do we simply content ourselves with the patchwork and hope that nothing else breaks for a while?
Decisions, decisions…
little birds