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The fact is that there’s a distortion in the idea that Linux can’t be given away. There’s something wrong in the idea the price difference between Windows and Linux is representative of the actual quality difference. There’s an elephant in the room that no one is talking about.

Windows is free.

I’m not talking about the fact that Windows comes pre-installed in most computers, with its price hidden in the cost of the hardware. That contributes to the idea of Windows being free, but that’s not the elephant in the room.

The elephant in the room that no one is talking about is cracked software.

- Via tlug.jp.

Confession

I had pirated copies of Windows 95, 98, 98se (this one was actually provided by a store who was later reported to the BBB), and ME. I went legal with Windows XP, but that’s because it was an OEM version.

These days, I use a lovely MacBook with a very legal version of Mac OS X – and I will pay for the update later this year. But that’s because I have a job now and can afford it. If I was still a student, or had a lousy job, I’d still be using my PC – probably with the latest version of Ubuntu installed. But that’s because I no longer have the patience/desire to deal with Windows and would be choosing between the two “free” operating systems – Windows and Linux.

UPDATE: It’s Saturday, August 15th, 2009, and I’ve just read this post after seeing it show up on a list of search engine terms. Maybe it’s age, maybe it’s being away from school, maybe it’s something else; but I don’t agree with most of what I’ve written here. I read jPod shortly after this and, while I was annoyed by some of the Coupland-isms I write about here, I finally “got” it. I went on a mad quest talking to former professors and reviewers of Coupland’s books trying to figure out what happened; but I didn’t get many satisfactory answers. Then I realized that it was my fault. I was reading these books the wrong way&mdashltrying to apply years of (mostly) useless literary theory and criticisms. I should have just read them.

Her time with the disease had, to her surprise, made her feel less lost.

Confession

I live in Vancouver, I work in publishing, and I don’t like Douglas Coupland’s novels. This usually causes a mildly angry discussion that requires an explanation as to WHY I don’t like them. Normally this leads to regionalism, which is great because THAT argument is only two words: “George Bowering“. Sometimes it leads to commentary on on modern life/culture, which is great because THAT argument is only three words: “Bret Easton Ellis“.

Time

Without a doubt, I spent more time thinking about why I didn’t like “Families” as I was reading it than I actually spent reading it. I tried to like it, I really did. The first 50 pages were incredibly enjoyable – unfortunately, the last 200+ pages were agonizing. I felt like I was wasting my time.

Janet

Janet is the matriarch of the story. She’s a 65 year old woman who has contracted HIV from her son, Wade, because HER EX-HUSBAND SHOT HER. What? Yes, her ex-husband – Ted – shot her, Wade intercepted the bullet, and the it went right through him into her sternum. Wade, the story’s lout son, contracted HIV the regular way – irresponsible sex (kudos for making him heterosexual).

I like Janet. She’s a bit absurd at the beginning – more of a caricature than a character – but she grew on me. She’s also the speaker of the quote up at the top. As a tangent, I read Coupland’s “Shampoo Planet” during a phase where I made A LOT of margin notes. By the time I’d finished it, there was ONE sentence underlined with a note saying “this is the only worthwhile sentence of the entire book”. I’ve since given my copy away, but it was the scene where the main character gave a guy a hug and made the comment that it was the hug he SHOULD have given someone he knew growing up. Poignant. Anyhow, Janet has some wonderful moments in the book and I’m glad to have met her.

The Ending

The ending is awful. The one hope I was clinging to was that everyone would end up dead. Wade’s HIV would turn into full blown AIDS and be stricken down by an infection, Ted’s liver cancer would spread to the rest of his body and live a deservedly crappy end-of-life, Sarah’s – the daughter/astronaut with one hand because of pre-natal, thalidomide-induced mutation (what happened to THAT storyline?) – space craft would blow up, and the rest of them – who really don’t even deserve to have individual names – would have something horrible happen to them. But no, no that didn’t happen. Janet becomes friends with Florian – a smuggler that Wade used to work for and also the owner of the largest pharmaceutical company in the world – who has recently met this Ugandan woman, Cissy, with an immunity to HIV; by holding their mutual open cuts to each other, Janet’s HIV is healed. Not only that, but so is Nickie’s (Ted’s new trophy wife, Wade slept with her – the reason Ted shot him – and gave her HIV), and Ted’s liver cancer. Then Janet heals Wade’s HIV by doing the same thing less than a day later!

But how does it ACTUALLY finish? Wade is going to find God and show Him to everyone. Sarah is (hopefully) going to conceive in space with her Captain, even though she is married to Howie who has cheated on her with at least two women – one of them being Cissy. Oh, and Janet has cut off her hair. So Wade is making a ridiculously uncharacteristic change, Sarah is continuing on her not-enough-personality-to-be-a-good-character way, and Janet is acting like she did at the beginning of the novel. The journey she took by dealing with her illness, accepting it, and living life the way she wanted to live it seems like a bit of a waste. So she’s lost again, and it’s because she’s not sick. She’s 65, disease-free, and yet she’s lost like she was in chapter one. Hyper sigh.

The Truth

In all frank honesty, I think Coupland is a weak writer and that’s why I don’t like his novels. I thoroughly enjoy his Souvenir of Canada books, and that really makes sense in regards to his life as a regionalist. It’s obvious that he knows his region, and he knows of ways to artistically present a unique vision of his surroundings. But can he write a novel? I’d argue against that. I think he got incredibly lucky with “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Generation” – a book I couldn’t read more than 4 chapters of before I put down – and tapped into a zeitgeist that my generation, and the one right before it, hasn’t forgotten about. The apathetic generation wasn’t going to criticize his writing, and were going to relate to the utter blanks that populated the book as characters.

Technicals

The entire book is awash with unnecessary metaphors and throwaway sentences. One of the concepts behind speed-reading is seeing groups of words as a single entity and removing the need to read each word. I found myself breezing my way through entire paragraphs and not missing a beat. When I read, I tend to scan the paragraph, determine if I’ve understood it, then decide if I need to actually READ the paragraph. This never really happened in “Families”. I re-read A LOT of paragraphs, but I never HAD to. Every re-read ended with an moment of “oh, I guess I didn’t miss anything” and some confusion as to why there is so much filler.

The Characters

I LOVE hating characters. I think it’s a show of great writing to make a completely despicable character that your readers end up rooting for and smiling about. With the exception of the post-beginning, pre-ending Janet, I really just wanted bad things to happen to everyone in this book. Not even because I didn’t like them, but because I nothing’d them. There’s a character named Shw, who’s an environmental terrorist – PERFECT fodder for my newest literary crush – but completely transparent outside of that short description. She is SELLING HER BABY FOR PROFIT, and was still one of the least interesting things I’ve encountered. The bumbling Ted and Bryan were bad Carl Hiaasen knock-offs (the fact that the story took place in Florida does not help this comparison), and the super villian-esque Florian, who IS actually a likable guy in the book, is simply a drug hallucination. Imagine every instance of a character being presented like that weird drugged up chapter near the end of Hannibal, but without the drugs and cannibalism. To be fair, “Families” DID have a lot of drugs, but they were mainly immuno-suppressants.

Done

So that’s it. I’m done with Douglas Coupland novels. The only reason I picked this one up was because 1) I felt it was time to give him another chance, and 2) it was in a box labeled “Free Books” and I didn’t want to read Ken Follett*. I think I’ve read enough of his work to validly say “I just don’t like him”.

* Funny story: I was in Chapters a few years ago when this girl told me that Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth was the best book in the world. By coincidence, I was able to grab MY favourite book off the shelf and say “no, THIS is the best book in the world. I ended up buying a used copy of Pillars the next month for a buck. A buck!

From Gawker:

Last night in the sweaty morass of Gleason’s Boxing Gym, a crowd of weird literary types gathered around a boxing ring. Famous pervert-alcoholic-author Jonathan Ames was set to fight Craig Davidson, Canadian author of pugilist novel “The Fighter.” At 43, more than a decade older than his opponent, Ames was technically the underdog. But the crowd was in his corner. His friend Mangina was there, with the fake leg, wearing a flesh colored unitard and a fake vagina. Sitting in the front row was none other than 90′s chanteuse Fiona Apple, looking anxious. Why was she here, we wondered to her face. “Because Jonathan is my boyfriend.” Oh? It looks like Ames won before he even started. But Fiona couldn’t help him when the bell rung for the first of three two-minute rounds. But maybe she helped him win!

- Via Charlotte Gill, author of the excellent Ladykiller.

I really have no excuse for not reading more Jonathan Ames. The Extra Man is one of the most entertaining things I’ve ever read. If you’re into books with eccentric and annoying-yet-endearing characters (also see Winsburg, Ohio, The Observatory Mansions, or the Canterbury Tales), you should pick up a copy.

Note: Pervert-alcoholic-author, unitard, Mangina, and Fiona Apple are all things that instantly make me happier.

Recently, an analyst said that the solar industry wouldn’t take off until they learned “to be more like Google or Salesforce.” Fine. But if Google had to go onto your roof for two days, erect a bunch of heavy equipment, and charge you $40,000 to get you to start searching, you’d probably stick with Yahoo.

- Via cnet.

Montreal’s largest school board has been ordered to rehire a teacher who had been fired for failing to disclose to the board that he had killed his wife in 1990.

Jean-Alix Miguel had pleaded guilty to the crime and was sentenced to seven years in prison.

An arbitrator later ruled that Miguel’s dismissal violated Quebec’s charter of rights, because his crime did not in any way relate to his work.

- Via cbc.ca.

- Via dalas verdugo

Nicknames

One of my nicknames for Travis is “Bitch Tits McGee” because, well, I don’t know. Anyway, I’m working on an online store for a corporate client and wanted to show off a very slick shopping cart implementation – so I sent my user name and password to Travis and let him poke around.

Obviously, he immediately changed my “customer”‘s name to “Bitch Tits McGee” so I was greeted by “Hello, Bitch Tits!” when I logged in myself. I changed my profile back to Matthew, it showed up as such on the Profile page, but it still greeted me with “Hello, Bitch Tits!” – I went to see what was wrong.

Those uninterested in programming should skip this paragraph

Turns out I had stuck the first name into a session variable when I started developing and had been using that the whole time – I hadn’t even planned on the greeting for the final product. Anyway, it was obviously a stupid idea to do things that way, so I changed it to make calls to the DB instead.

User Testing

The point of all this is the importance of user testing and how important it is to application development. Also, it’s HILARIOUS that I found a bug in my system thanks to the help of someone calling me Bitch Tits McGee.

This morning on the bus, I was reading Douglas Coupland’s All Families Are Psychotic.

The girl sitting next to me was reading Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.

Thanks, Coincidence, for reminding me that I’m wasting my time.

The head of a Chinese toy manufacturing company whose products were the target of a massive recall in the U.S. because they contained lead-tainted paint has committed suicide.

A supplier, Zhang’s best friend, sold Lee Der fake paint that was used in the toys, the Southern Metropolis Daily, a state-run newspaper, reported.

It is common for disgraced officials to commit suicide in China.

- Via cbc.ca.

Holy cow!

I’m always a bit wary of plugins – something about an independently designed application top work on someone else’s platform makes me nervous about things like universality and accessibility. That said, I decided to try out some WordPress plugins that are (hopefully) relatively innocuous.

New Plugins

All in One SEO Pack (Link)

I have a pretty bad habit of not optimizing my sites, professional and personal, for Search Engines. This doesn’t usually present a problem as I’ve been fortunate to have large enough professional projects that end up near the top of search engine anyway, and I don’t really care if anyone sees my personal sites. This DOES present a problem by way of it just being stupid NOT to optimize one’s site to search engines, so here we are.

In general, it’s a pretty simple plugin. It gives you a WYSIWYG way to add metadata to your page (which is easily accomplished by editing your page’s head section), and also sends information about individual posts (titles, categories, etc.) to the individual post’s head section. The latter part I really appreciate since I’ve implemented an identical system in the past, and it really does add a nice level of convenience.

One relatively annoying function is the Title Renaming option. I’ve turned it off (it’s on by default) – and I’m not going to bother figuring out what it actually does – but when on, it renames the titles of your posts to better conform to SEO. I don’t want a robot naming my posts, reduction in traffic or no.

I think I’ll end up using this for a while. Unless it ends up doing something I don’t like, I don’t see why I’d get rid of it since it makes my life easier, and my site easier to find.

Update: Uberdose was kind enough to leave a comment telling me what the Title Renaming does. I was wrong – it’s neither annoying, nor robotic.

That?s pretty simple. Your page title are your most precious thing on-page as far as search engines are concerned. The title of this post is ?Matthew Gruman >> Blog Archive >> Plugins?. Do you really want to rank well for ?blog archive?? I don?t think so. Just checking the box will rewrite it to ?Plugins | Matthew Gruman?, so the heart of your post comes out first. If you now give the post a title like ?wordpress plugins? you have a phrase you might want to rank for.

That’s pretty useful stuff – I’d never noticed that the titles of individual posts contained “Blog Archive”. I’ve gone ahead and edited the head information on my page manually (Stubborn? Me?), but this is definitely a very useful thing for people who don’t know how to do that. If/when I start actively promoting this site, I will definitely use the plugin to its full extent or replicate its functionality myself. Thanks, Uberdose!

WordPress.com Stats (Link)

This is just a statistics program – it essentially pimps out the stats already included on the Wrodpress Dashboard. I haven’t been running it long enough to actually collect stats, but I can’t see getting rid of something that gives me greater control over my work. A nice touch is that it doesn’t count administrator visits to the page – I do A LOT of page refreshing when working on applications so it’ll be nice to get rid of those traffic spikes on development days.

WP AJAX Edit Comments (Link)

I have to assume that this has the least chance of lasting more than a week. All it does is add some AJAX to the comments section so things can be done without page reloads. The one thing I really like is that it gives the user power over editing their own comments in case they make spelling mistakes, or sound like an idiot and want to make changes.

AJAX always makes me nervous. It can be pretty bad when it comes to accessibility, and the script used in this plugin isn’t making me too happy. When javascript is disabled, it simply disables the entire script – to the point where it removes the user’s ability to edit their post. Since editing isn’t available without the plugin, I’m not removing any functionality with this plugin, but I’d rather see some more responsible DOM techniques being used.

Already-used Plugins

Akismet (Link)

This comes included with the latest WordPress install and works very well. It compares any comments made to your blog against a database of known spammers/spam words and acts accordingly – non-spam is posted, spam is sent to moderation for human approval.

Audio Player (Link)

Customizable, embeddable mp3 player. Uses Flash and looks very slick.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Matthew Gruman – March 21.

pb-embedFlash (Link)

This allows me to embed Flash content (i.e. all the Vimeo videos) with regular (X)HTML – it works great.

runPHP (Link)

The Mac Daddy of all the plugins I use – it lets me run PHP code on this page. That’s my main programming language, and I’m a bit useless without it. Using this plugin makes my To Do List, and the Vimeo Midgets on the upper right hand side, possible.