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I've been taking a break from social media, and I am feeling the positive effects. But I do miss people. But I feel better...but I miss people...but I feel better. And so on. This is your brain on fibromyalgia I struggle with low concentration and intermittent brain fog. I believe it's from fibromyalgia, but whatever the cause, it's a minor disability or a weakness for which I must compensate. I have devised various coping mechanisms, and for the most part, they are integrated into my life, as are all my many coping mechanisms for all the bullshit life throws at me. (Not complaining, merely stating.) I recently went through a rough patch where my mental state was particularly frustrating. I had a really hard time chairing a small meeting. (When I apologized, people told me they didn't notice anything different. But were they just being kind?) I had to write an email with a lot of names and dates -- numbers are the biggest challenge when I'm mentally impaired -- and ...

Everywhere we look, every available space is filled with advertising. The Toronto skyline is a sea corporate logos. The due-date receipt from my library book features an ad on the back. I once tracked all the ads shown during a major league baseball game -- during play , not between innings -- and the results were startling, even to me. And, of course, our entire experience on the internet -- especially on our personal mobile devices -- is tracked and used by corporations with only our dimmest awareness and nominal consent. It wasn't always like this. How did we arrive at this current state? The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads  by Tim Wu answers this question. The answer is fascinating and entertaining, and -- if you dislike the constant and ever-increasing commodification of our lives, as I do -- more than a little frustrating. In the first part of the book, Wu presents a capsule history of the "attention capture industry" -- what this rev...

For my work with my library workers' union, I schedule a lot of meetings. Various people can or cannot attend various meetings. We all use different calendar/agenda/diary tools, so sending an Outlook appointment, like we do in our workplace, isn't an option. As meetings approach, I receive emails from team members, telling me they can or cannot attend, often changing from one to the other. I was having a hard time keeping track of who to expect at what meetings. I knew there had to be an online tool to help with this. I use Doodle all the time for scheduling, but that wasn't quite right. I didn't feel like asking on Facebook, because I wanted to get a sense of what was out there, not just what was popular at the moment. At first, Googling "online tool for meeting attendance" turned up attendance-management tools like this , or event registration tools like this . But after a few searches, I hit on "online tool to track rsvps", and found exactly what...

Last week, while enjoying a lovely lunch at a restaurant with my mom and my partner, an oily sauce jumped out of a bowl and splattered on my shirt. All right, it didn't actually jump out, truth is I can be a clumsy eater. But the sauce went on my shirt. Ugh. This wasn't one little dot, which can be annoying enough. This was an entire collection of splats, re-decorating the front of my shirt. Double ugh. Because I was busy with family and friends, I wasn't able to immediately soak or stain-treat the shirt. It ended up sitting for a couple of days before I washed it. When I got home a few days later, I stain-treated and washed the shirt several times. I used my preferred stain-removing spray, OxiClean , and also soaked the shirt in a solution of OxiClean powder, each time putting it in the washing machine on warmer water than I would normally use. The stains did get lighter, but they did not come out. Next I Googled "how to remove oil stains from clothing". I found ...

Sometime late on Thursday night into Friday morning, our internet went down. This is the worst possible time for such an event, as internet is our lifeline to baseball, and the Boston Red Sox are on their way (I hope) (I believe) to winning the World Series. From the sound of things, there were problems at some major internet hubs in the area, with massive outages affecting parts of Mississauga, Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, Hamilton, and so on. What was the problem? When could we expect service to resume? TekSavvy wasn't able to tell me... because Rogers wouldn't tell them. I have been Rogers-free since March of 2012 , and I have been extremely pleased with TekSavvy. TekSavvy's customer service is excellent, their tech support is excellent and local , and they deliver more internet for less money. I pay about 30% less for unlimited service at a higher speed; that is, I paid Rogers 30% more for capped usage at a slower speed. The only sticking point is that TekSavvy is a re-...

We all know the iconic cartoon the title of this post refers to. Boing Boing has republished a story about it, originally run in The Magazine , an ad-free, reader-supported magazine that looks really interesting. It's a wonderful little piece: the story behind the story, a glimpse into the life of people who try to earn a living from their own considerable talents, and a look back at the early days of the internet, and how things have changed, before tinfoil-hat predictions were proven to be not paranoia, but prescience. Go here to read the story (really, it's fun), and here to see the rest of this cartoon . Please click through. The talented people at Joy of Tech get paid by clicks. Then... And now...

It's been a while since I wrote about Freecycle - once as we were getting ready to move to Canada in 2005, then again when we moved from our first place in Port Credit to the Cooksville section of Mississauga. On this last move (Cooksville to Square One), I had no time to go through things and pare down. I hired some folks to pack us up, and now I've been combing through everything as I unpack. I thought that was completely backwards, but it's turned out to be efficient and logical. Once you're moved in, you have a better idea of what works and what doesn't, and also more time, since there's no looming deadline. To those ends, I've been giving away lots of things on Freecycle, and I've discovered yet again that many people haven't heard of it. Freecycle is a network of local groups, run entirely by volunteers, through which people give and get things for free. You find a Freecycle group in your own community , post items that you want to give away...

My adventures with VPNs, wireless VPNs, and other fun IP-address changes just keep getting better all the time. My new favourite addition is called HideMyAss  - a stupid name, but a terrific service. When I last updated you on our awesome wireless VPN + Roku experience , we were using two separate routers - one for wireless VPN, and one for everything else. This was necessary because MLB.TV - through which we watch baseball on our TV, via Roku - didn't get along with the wireless VPN router. The feed would continually stop for buffering, making it impossible to follow a game. To watch baseball, we would use our regular router, with our normal Canadian IP address. To watch US Netflix, we'd use the router with the non-Canadian IP address. Flipping routers, as we call it, was no big deal. But recently, anytime I was using the wireless VPN router, my internet connection would slow to a crawl. Plus the selection of IP addresses offered by Acevpn was getting less and less reliable. ...

The healthy slow-cooker recipe of the week - now running about every-other week - has hit a snag: lentil soup. I love lentil soup, but my own is turning out just OK, not really delicious. After the first try was too bland, Stephanie suggested using allspice and more bay leaves. Excellent idea! I upped the bay leaves from three to six, and added allspice. Result: big improvement, but still not great. If you make delicious lentil soup, can you share your secrets? (And if the secret is homemade stock, then I'm out of luck.) More below. * * * * I'm still using the hell out of my slow-cooker. I usually cook with it twice a week - once for food for the weekend, and once for my meals at work, one batch for the week. I'm still collecting meal ideas , if you have any favourites to share. I notice that recipes I find online tend to be exceedingly bland. With the exception of foods that are supposed to be hot-spicy (which I avoid), the recipes I see are shy of seasoning. Lentil soup, ...

Looking for rental houses on Craigslist, I've discovered a scam that I was previously unaware of. I replied to an ad for a place that sounded wonderful, with unusually low rent. I was keeping in mind the old maxim "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is," but at the same time, it's only an email. It can't hurt to ask. Everything I wanted to know about the property was answered in the affirmative. Then the supposed owner told me that I should fill out a rental application and, if approved, I could see the place. Hmm. It's been six years since we looked for a place to live, but I'm pretty sure you don't fill out an application before you even see a property, unless you're working with a real estate agent. That would be a colossal waste of time. And why would I send personal information to a person I haven't even met, for a house I might not even want? I tried to arrange a time to see the house, saying I would bring the completed applica...

I saw this: and thought: that doesn't sound like Orwell. I have read almost everything Orwell ever published, and will eventually read everything, including all the published letters. While no one could remember every line from every essay, this just doesn't sound like our man Eric Blair to me. Orwell wasn't given to aphorisms or one-liners. It doesn't fit in the theme of any book or essay. The essay that seems most relevant, "Politics and the English Language," does not contain this line. I was skeptical. I did several internet searches, hoping to find a source that attributed the quote to a specific book or essay. Nothing. The quote, attributed to Orwell, is all over the internet, but not one site ever indicates where it comes from. That seemed very significant. On this Wikiquote page , other people are asking the same question, and also not finding any attribution to specific work. I posted about it on Facebook, hoping someone might have an idea on how to r...

Google is losing a lot of friends lately. Their recent decisions to discontinue iGoogle and Reader are making many people unhappy . Today, to the great dismay of many Gmail users , Gmail's new compose interface - a small box in the corner of your screen - became the default. Google says the previous compose style - the more typical large box in the centre of your screen - will be discontinued. Why? Why not give us options? If some people like to compose an email in a small box in the corner of their screen, that's grand. They can. And if other people prefer to compose an email in as large a space as possible, in the centre of their screen... well, why can't we? I do not understand Google's continuing drive to dictate to its users how they should use Google products. The technology to allow for customer choice clearly exists. Why not let users decide how best to use a product? Why does Google care where and how we type our emails? Why not let us decide? This actually af...

Since blog comments are not a very useful way of sharing information, I'll post this again here. A list of alternatives to Google Reader can be found at ReplaceReader . I'm very interested in this, even though I stopped using Google Reader a long time ago. I tried several times, and each time found that using any feed service hugely exacerbated that feeling of drowning in too much information. Worse, using a feed reader triggered my anxiety about not having enough time, just about the last thing I need. Thus my own internet reading continues to be the only thing in my life that is purposely erratic, unmethodical, and disorganized - and that's the only way it works for me. Despite that, I hate that Google has discontinued Reader and iGoogle, and I hope another good feed reader service becomes hugely successful as a result.

A while back, I expressed my frustration with the current massive emphasis on mobile apps, and with organizations that use Facebook pages instead of web pages: the walled-off internet, or why facebook and mobile apps are good for them and bad for us . For a more complete view of this sad fact, you might want to read this 2010 article from Wired : The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff. It's old in internet terms, but more relevant than ever: If we’re moving away from the open Web, it’s at least in part because of the rising dominance of businesspeople more inclined to think in the all-or-nothing terms of traditional media than in the come-one-come-all collectivist utopianism of the Web. This is not just natural maturation but in many ways the result of a competing idea — one that rejects the Web’s ethic, technology, and business models. The control the Web took from the vertically integrated, top-down media world can, with a little rethinking o...

Robert Fisk has a good piece in The Independent about the incivility (to put it mildly!) that is endemic in the comment sections of online news stories: "Anonymous trolls are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate the gutless journalism of the New York Times, BBC, and CNN" . Fisk wonders why newspapers that will not publish an anonymous letter to the editor will allow anonymous lies and hateful screed in comments. Surely he knows the simple answer: money. Advertisers are paying for clicks, and the idiots in the comments section are increasing the clickage. Why should we help them by reading those comments? Consider this. We know that governments pay people to troll the comments section with disinformation and misinformation, just like they hire fake journalists and bribe working columnists to influence public opinion. We know that the number of comments in any one direction cannot be taken as a gauge of public opinion. When Common Dreams respond...

Progressive bloggers, check your stats. The Statcounter for wmtc shows "multiple visits spread out over several days" from an IP address in the House of Commons, and a separate visit from the Office of the Privy Council. This visitor or visitors spent time at several of my "greatest hits" posts, information about my new career, my bio at The Mark, various essays, and a good deal of time searching for "ndp cooksville east mississauga kaminker" and "kaminker member ndp", and the like. The entry post was this: july 1 2012: national stop harper day . I noticed this post was tweeted a lot yesterday by many anti-Harper Twitter accounts. No doubt government operatives are monitoring those tweets. Sorry for the small font. There were so many, I could barely fit it in one snip. Is the Harper Government TM trying to show a connection between National Stop Harper Day and the NDP? (I have no idea if there is a connection.) Do they think "Stop Harper...

The photo is real. The interpretation, unfortunately, was not. Police in Frankfurt, Germany, did indeed remove their helmets, and they were walking ahead of Occupy protesters. However, they were not escorting, they were using a blocking technique similar to kettling. They also arrested hundreds of people who were peacefully demonstrating, and bashed a few heads in the bargain. A discussion is here , with links to more info. Organizers in Germany are upset that the photo was misinterpreted as the police identifying with and demonstrating with the 99%, and I can understand that. But we were given a brief glimpse of a possible future.

One of the oldest and most well-respected bloggers has brought his online journal to a close. Since January of 2003 - 18 months before I began wmtc - I have been reading The Diary of Samuel Pepys online. Tomorrow night at about 9:00 UK time, the Diary will end. (The final entry is here .) Samuel Pepys (pronounced "peeps") wrote a daily diary from January 1, 1660 to May 30, 1669. In it, he recorded a life both public and private - everything from the political machinations of the King and Parliament, to his theatre attendance and what books he was reading, to his new gadgets, clothes, and other luxury purchases, to - famously - his sexual exploits and related marital woes. The Diary provides a rare, first-person view into the life of 17th Century London, including major events such as wars, the plague and the Great Fire of London. It's both a personal view of history, and a historical view of the person - truly a window into another world. It's also a fascinating les...

I interrupt my Marxism 2011 notes to share with you a frightening vision. No, it wasn't a vision. It was glimpse of horrifying reality. Last night I did a Twitter search for "Marxism". But in addition to looking for #Marxism, I also searched on the word, without the hashtag. Big mistake. USians were tweeting en masse that Obama's new slogan "has long ties to Marxism". A few added sarcasm like "big surprise" or "lookee here," but most just repeated the bizarre notion verbatim. As always, I am completely blocking out all US electoral politics. I don't know anything about the campaigns, because I already know everything about them, without knowing a single detail. If you've followed one US election campaign since 1980, you've followed them all. They only change by a matter of degree: they get worse and worse. But before the advent of this new technology, we couldn't actually see the hundreds of thousands, the millions of peo...

The US Congress and its corporate partners want the right of warrantless spying on every internet user, anywhere in the world. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) would give corporations the right to collect information on our online activities and share it with the US government, without notifying us that we're being spied on, and with total immunity to lawsuits. And it would all be perfectly legal. Lovely, isn't it, what the law can do for those who control it. Massive public outcry stopped SOPA. Massive public outcry stopped PIPA. Now it's time to do the same for CISPA. For those of us outside the US, Avaaz has become a leading mechanism for international protest. Click here to sign the Avaaz petition to stop CISPA. For more info on CISPA, see these stories: Digital Journal: Move over SOPA & PIPA: Here comes CISPA — Internet censorship Wired: Internet SOPA/PIPA Revolt: Don’t Declare Victory Yet