Wow, this new Google News is crap

I am using Blogger for this website, which is a free service, so it may be that my criticism of the new Google News service is a case of biting the hand that feeds me, but I had to say that I find the new redesign is total crap. Not a very episcopal expression, I know, but it summarizes the situation well.

I have had a special news feed that searched on the expression "Pope" or "church" or "catholic" or "God"... you get the picture. Every day I would load that feed so I could scan the headlines related to those search terms. Now... nope. It opens to a generic News page with all kinds of stuff that isn't what I'm looking for. Very strange for a service like Google, that built its product on giving you stuff that is relevant to what you actually searched for...

Additional tests show that the search engine simply gives bad responses. I searched for information on "Cardinal Müller", as there is news trending about him as I write this, and when I clicked on the link to "View full coverage", everything was about another Australian cardinal who has been in the news lately. Useless.

Sorry, Google, you screwed this one up. Time for a reversion to what, you know, actually worked.

Wonder Woman is all kinds of awesome

I saw the new Wonder Woman movie. I was thoroughly entertained. It is definitely in my top three favourite super-hero themed films of all time. I don't know it if will achieve the number 1 spot (I'd rather wait and see how I feel about it some time down the road, after the initial exhilaration has worn off), but it has definitely de-throned my previous #1 favourite, The Dark Knight.

You might be wondering, "If it de-throned your previous #1 favourite, how come you aren't willing to say this is your new #1 super-hero film?" The answer is because watching Wonder Woman made me realise that The Dark Knight was not really my favourite super-hero film, it was my favourite super-villain film. Batman was ok in that film, but the Joker was awesome, the greatest depiction of Nietzche's ubermann I have ever seen in any medium.

What I loved about Wonder Woman, on the other hand, is that finally we have a DC film with an actual unambiguous hero (or, in this case, heroine). To date we've had an angsty Superman, a vengeful Batman, and a very silly Suicide Squad. Blech. But in the case of Wonder Woman, she just shone.

As a matter of full disclosure, I should add that I am a geek. I have been for a long time. For example, I collected comic books as a teenager. Among those comic books was the reboot of Wonder Woman led by artist George Perez. The Wonder Woman character had gone through a few incarnations, including the campy 1970's show starring Linda Carter, but Perez brought the character back to her Greek roots. She was not defined by the name Wonder Woman -- that was what others called her. She was Diana, warrior Amazon princess, come to man's world to chew bubble gum and kick a** (and she was all out of bubble gum -- bonus points if you get the reference). As the character's story arc evolved, the god Ares emerged as her key adversary. This was one scary dude, the personification of war itself -- not a god of strategy and victory, but a god who revelled in conflict, bloodshed, and even bloodlust itself. Yikes.

Seeing this film brought me back to being a kid again. The Perez Wonder Woman was definitely front and centre, as Wonder Woman's origin story and key villain matched that arc, but I have to hand it to the creators of the movie: they somehow managed to get in references to other versions of Wonder Woman as well. By setting the film in WWI (actually, an original setting for the character) they were able to bring in the whole feminist angle (via the suffragettes) without beating us over the head with it. There is also at least one hommage to the Linda Carter Wonder Woman, although it is very subtle. The Linda Carter Wonder Woman used to spin in order to change her costume, which was just about as silly as it sounds. In the film, she doesn't spin, but there is a scene where the camera sort of spins around her, and suddenly she's ready to go in her battle dress. It even start with her letting down her hair à la Linda Carter. A small touch, but classic. (There are references to a later version of Wonder Woman as well, but I don't want to add too many spoilers.)

I've heard some complaints that the movie is too long, or that the final act is too convoluted. Nonsense. The plot and writing are generally pretty tight, with one exception (how can Zeus have created Diana if he was previously killed by Ares?), but more important is how Diana has to confront not only the specific evil she has come to fight, but also the evils created by the simple misuse of free will (which, the movie reveals, are considerable). She even needs to confront herself, in a way. In other words, the character grows. Wonder Woman is not just an origin story, it is a "hero's journey" story, only she is going from someone already heroic to a more mature hero. Not easy to pull off in a compelling way, but it happens. Kudos to the writers.

Ares does make his eventual appearance, showing himself to be a master of deceit and temptation more than just a bad guy who makes things go boom. Yes, there is a final battle, but this is literally a battle between figures from mythological Greece -- people should read some Homer and then see if they want to come back and complain about the final act. And we should also realise that the villain, while named Ares, is really a depiction of Satan -- there is even a scene where Ares and Wonder Woman are speaking in a garden paradise, with Ares trying to tempt her, meaning that Wonder Woman is actually an Eve-like figure. If you don't know the stories you might not pick up on details like that, because the film is subtle about it. I like that.

I am getting pretty tired of seeing films where the supposed catharsis comes through vengeance. In this film, while the main character initially believes, in her naiveté, that her problem can be solved by wrath, in the end it is love that gives her the strength she needs. That's powerful. I think the film could have been improved by a greater exploration of what love actually means (in our day, romantic love is often assumed to be the highest form, a falsehood which does nonetheless find an echo in the film). Still, I do recognize that in the end it's a super-hero movie that has an audience to please. For what it is, the film is well written, well acted, entertaining, and even meaningful. Definitely worth my time, and I'm sure I'll be seeing it again.

My rating: 9.5 / 10

This new computer is sweet

I bought a new computer a couple of days ago: an Acer Spin 5 laptop. I haven't bought a new computer for at least 10 years now, because up until now I've been taking old PC's and recycling them by installing Linux Mint. I love Linux, I really do, but with all the travelling I've been doing I really needed a better machine to actually get my work done.

The laptop arrived yesterday, and I had a chance to set it up today and take in for a... um... spin! The verdict: wow, this thing is fast! It boots fast, it runs software fast, and the connection speed is great (must be using a more advanced Wifi protocol than my current machine). Frankly, all of this makes it more fun to use.

My plan is to keep this laptop free of all kinds of downloaded crud. A clean software always feels great, like that fresh sensation after you've brushed your teeth (yes, I know I am a geek). I'm still going to keep my desktop as a backup development machine, but for now I'm enjoying this one.

The Swedish connection

By the time I got to college and university, the Commodore line of computers was hitting its limits. A new form of computing was emerging, using something called a GUI (Graphic User Interface). For Commodore machines, it was called GEOS. It was so different from the simple text based interfaces I knew, it was slooooowwwww, and I had no clue how to program in that environment. I felt like a fish out of water.

When I got to university I discovered a brand of computer -- the Apple Macintosh SE. It had a similar sort of GUI, and was great for writing papers and doing graphic design. Programming, however, was completely out of the question...it just wasn't designed for that. My parents eventually bought a 286 PC clone, but the only programming options were GW-BASIC (yech) and MS-DOS batch files (double-yech). Compilers could be had, but for a price, and I was faced with a steep learning curve. My studies and extra-curricular activities in college and university didn't really allow for me to start all over again from scratch, so programming took a back seat for several years.

I graduated from Concordia University in 1992 with a bachelor's degree in commerce (major: international business), and got a job at a company I had never heard of: Ericsson Research Canada, a local branch of what I would learn was a huge Swedish multinational. There was an awful recession happening at that time, so I took the first job I could to pay the rent. It was a very low-paying administrative job, but it turned out to be a time of providence in my life. In all honesty, I owe Ericsson a lot for who I am today, and I'm proud to say I'm still connected with friends I made way back when.

Now as it happened, the local branch of Ericsson I was working for was developing software for help run the cellular phone networks that were just starting to be constructed. At that time they were hiring engineers hand over fist, but not business types -- despite a degree in commerce, I was just a clerk. Still, this was one sector of the economy that was actually doing well, offering some job security, and Ericsson was big into training their people, offering some opportunity. I took one computer-based training course after another in my off-hours, learning about the principles behind cellular technology. As it turned out, cell phones were just fancy radios, and all that time I had spent with my dad learning about amateur radio made the learning curve that much easier. That's how providence works sometimes: I was a programming geek with a degree in international business and a background in radio, working for a global company writing software to run cellphone networks. It was perfect.

I can't say that everyone noticed this synchronicity at first, not even me. The real breakthrough came when I discovered something new, at least for me: the UNIX operating system. We were shifting to the use of SPARC workstations, and so the company sent me on a brief training course to become familiar with Unix. I wanted to learn more, so I downloaded an early version of a Unix "clone" called Linux and installed it on a computer at home (one of the first Slackware distributions). No one could imagine at the time that Linux would change the world, including mine.

At the time our branch of the company was preparing for our first ISO 9000 certification audit. By now I was working as a technical writer in one of our departments, and I was given the task of getting all the documentation for our department ready for the audit. Document control was a big part of the ISO 9000 standard, but we didn't have any reliable way to track our documents, their revisions, and whether or not they had been approved. To solve the problem, I wrote a database program called "TROLL" (from "document conTROL tool"). It was basically just a giant shell script that could be run from the command line of a Unix workstation, but the darned thing worked and got the job done. Everyone was surprised -- no one had thought that the administrative clerk / technical writer was also secretly a programmer. The software engineers were actually quite delighted, and my "geek cred" rose.

When the certification auditors eventually came around, our department (which was *way* behind just six months before) passed with flying colours. The effect on my career was dramatic: I became the Quality Coordinator for the department, and eventually I was promoted to manager of a unit called the Global Integration and Verification Organization. Our goal was to coordinate the process of software testing between several units throughout the world. I knew about software, I knew our processes, and I had training in cross-cultural management. At 24, it was a dream opportunity.

I did not remain in that job, of course. To many people's surprise (including my own in some ways) I handed in my resignation in June 1995 in order to enter the seminary and start my studies to become a priest. Being manager of the GIVO did allow me to leave with one other technological legacy, however. The task of coordinating between the business units involved in the GIVO required me to learn about something called the "Internet" (you may have heard of it), and particularly a new technology called the "World Wide Web" (you may have heard of that, too). Our web browser was called Mosaic, and there were very few web pages out there. Still, a whole new field was emerging. I learned how to code web pages in HTML, and in the few months prior to leaving Ericsson I actually became the first webmaster for the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, which itself became the first episcopal conference in the world to have a presence on the web. The CCCB gave me an ongoing contract, so I was able to buy a decent computer for use during my studies -- and of course, to keep learning to program. Only now, my focus was the World Wide Web.

My emergence as a computer geek

My father's interest in amateur radio opened me up to a fascination with electronics, as well as to the marvel of using that technology to be able to communicate with the wider world over great distances. My father also was the instigator of my interest in computers.

My dad started working for the Department of the environment of the federal government in 1965, doing computer programming. You read that right, 1965. Computers in those days were BIG. The idea of a "portable computer" was ludicrous, and something with far less computing power than a typical calculator today would fill up a large room. I know, because when I would visit my dad at the office I'd see them for myself. It was all so...esoteric. The computer rooms were temperature controlled, filled with spinning tape drives and computer cabinets with flashing lights, and hum and whoosh of spinning fans...a kid could even (playfully) try and hide in there. I had the feeling I was entering into a different world, one that I knew not a lot of people ever saw. It was my entering the wardrobe moment.

Programming computers in those days was a bit of a pain. Programmers would have to load their programs using punched cards. During one of my visits (I must have been less than 10 years old) I distinctly remember having a chance to sit at the machine that produced those cards. It was a bit like a manual typewriter, except that instead of feeding in a sheet of paper a punch card was used. The keys would click and you could hear the hole being punched in the card. Of course, what was written on the card made no sense to me, and it was explained that this was a special language that the computer could read to make it run. From my point of view it was like magic, only intead of saying "Abracadabra" you'd say it in assembly language.

To my wonder, I discovered that it was also possible to have a computer at home, or at least to have access to one. The computers would sometimes have to be monitored throughout the night, and one evening my father brought home a strange-looking suitcase. Upon opening it, we saw a keyboard similar to those on the card-punching machines, as well as a couple of rubber cups into which he could fit our telephone headset. (I don't remember what model it was, but it looked almost identitical to this old beauty, a TI Silent 700 terminal.) He explained that this terminal would let him "talk" to the (huge) machines back in his office using the computer language -- over the telephone! Good grief, that meant computers could even use the phone to talk to each other! Would wonders never cease...

A few years later, another visit to the office introduced me to new ways to interact with the computer. Assembly language was out, and dad was now programming in Fortran (as he explained, just like people had different languages different computers might use different languages). As well, no more punched cards -- terminals with green monochrome monitors were the latest thing. In the old days he would have sat me in front of a card-punch machine to keep me entertained, but now he had something even better: my very first experience with a computer game. After a bit of research I now know that the game in question was called Colossal Cave Adventure. It didn't have any of the bells and whistles of today's games (it was purely text based, with no graphics at all) but nonetheless it was quite extraordinary. Colossal Cave Adventure allowed a player to enter commands using regular (albeit simplified) English, i.e. the user didn't also have to be a programmer. Prior to discovering that game, I saw computers as giant calculators: you entered the data, and got a result. Suddenly, it was all about interaction, and even with the machine itself.

We eventually got a video game console called the Atari 2600. The games were generally fun, but you were limited to just plugging in cartridges someone else had made -- there was no possibility for creative input by the user. Then, in my first weeks of high school, I attended a book fair in the school library where I discovered a book for programming computer games. Let me be clear, this book did not teach programming: it gave actual listings of computer program code that a user could enter manually to then run the game. (This would be completely unthinkable today, but back there there were whole magazines like Compute! that would publish monthly program listings.) Even though I didn't own a computer myself I bought the book immediately and tried to figure out how this particular computer language (called BASIC) worked. Eventually I decided to try and write a program of my own, and the result was a simple text-based golf game. Without a computer to actually test it on, though, I did the next best thing to check if it would actually work: I showed it to my dad. I remember how surprised he was when he started reviewing the code, and how delighted he was when he was able to tell me that he couldn't find a single programming error.

I don't know if that simple program is what prompted it or not, but shortly after that we got the computer that would prove to be the instrument of my full immersion into geekdom: the Commodore 64. Yes, you could play games, but you could also program in BASIC (the language I had learned for my golf game). I hacked the heck out of that thing. I entered code, I wrote my own programs, and while I couldn't make that thing dance I could literally make it sing (or at least make pretty sounds -- it had a really good sound chip). It didn't have a lot of resources (only 64K of memory, of which only about 38K was really accessible), but thanks to all kinds of code optimization tricks people were able to make it do amazing things. For myself, when I found that the BASIC language interpreter was too slow for some applications I learned hexadecimal and started to code in machine language (the C-64 Programmers Reference Guide was my geek bible). Honestly, it was a major creative outlet for me, and years later, when I saw the slogan "Code is Art" written on a T-shirt, I felt a moment not just of agreement but of recognition.

Those old Commodore programs live on thanks to C-64 emulation software that can be downloaded for free, and my old Commodore 64 is still sitting in my parent's basement. Just the sight of it still brings up fond memories, like a painter looking at one of his old palettes that just felt right in his hand.

POSTSCRIPT: A traffic camera caught a picture of a snowy owl in flight, and the image went viral in January 2016. While I think snowy owls are lovely birds, I have to say that the photo made me smile for a different reason. If you look at the picture, you'll see a building in the top middle with satellite dishes on the roof. That was my dad's old office!

My dad the ham

For those of us who are so entranced with the modern means of communication, we should acknowledge that there are those who went before us with the same desire to reach out over great distances. While the hobby has been in decline in recent years, for decades amateur radio (a.k.a. "ham radio") was the Internet of its day. My dad was a ham operator, and so I guess I got the bug from him.

Our first family home was a small house in Pierrefonds, Quebec. My dad had a workroom with all kinds of electronic equipment and tools, with pride of place given to the amateur radio receiver and transmitter. I can still see him sitting in front of it saying "CQ, CQ", the code informing the world that there was a ham ready to talk. His call sign at the time was VE2CS (a.k.a. "Victor-Echo-Two-Charlie-Sierra"), and he would introduce himself as "Oscar-Whiskey-Echo-November" to anyone he contacted. Part of the amateur radio tradition is that operators would send each other QSL cards, and I remember stacks of these from all over the world filed in different nooks and crannies of his radio shack. Perhaps some ham operators out there will find one of his QSL cards in their archives...

My father would also tune in to radio stations all over the world on shortwave, and I distinctly remember listening to Voice of America, Radio Moscow, and even Radio Vaticana while sitting in his radio shack. So much for being stuck listening to a few local stations! I remember our listening sessions sparking all kinds of interesting discussions between us about how to exercise critical thinking in the face of "new media", and that was in the 1970's!

I later learned that my father had been a ham for a long, long time. Even to this day, an amateur radio operator needs to get a license to operate, and he was so proud of the fact that he had managed to pass his license exam when he was only 15, i.e. back in 1936! I remember thinking "Wow, even kids can do this."

One day, my father got out some components and, following a mysterious-looking diagram, built a small crystal radio. I didn't see how it could work, given it had no battery or external power, but wouldn't you know that when I put that earpiece in my ear I could hear the radio signal coming in from a station nearby. It was the radio waves themselves that were being converted to electricity to produce the sound. Amazing! So I was hooked. We started building electronics projects using the old Radio Shack electronic project kits, and later he taught me how to use a soldering iron and follow circuit diagrams (I remember being proud of knowing how to read the coloured bands on a resistor). Dad always had plenty of resistors, capacitors, diodes and whatnot in that workroom, so I never had to go far to find what I needed. I even remember hooking up light emitting diodes (LEDs) and wondering if they'd ever have enough power one day to serve as some sort of flashlight...who knew!

I remember one component in particular that caught my attention: the relay. This was a fascinating item, because (as my dad taught me) it could be used to create simple logic gates and implement Boolean algebra in a real system. (Sorry, did I geek out there?) Anyway, trust me, this is more interesting and important than you might think because these principles are still at the very root of modern digital electronics. Modern chips use transistors, not relays, but I remember reading a short story as a kid, in which Isaac Asimov described a massive supercomputer called Multivac working to the "clicking of relays".

This discovery of the principles of computing eventually led to my own interests diverging from those of my dad. Remember how I was building those electronic kits? Well, a new one caught my eye: the ZX81, which could be purchased in kit form and assembled at home. The only problem was that I didn't have the money to get one. So I started saving my pennies, which in the end I wound up using for something even better.

More to come!

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