The maths don't lie

 

The maths don't lie! 

oh....

Don't let your business burn down

Some folks who own a Dairy Queen in Calgary watched it burn to the ground from an electrical fire. To rebuild it, they submitted a development permit application to the city, who declined it, saying they instead wanted the owner to redevelop the space into a multi-story building with the Dairy Queen on the bottom floor (but no drive-in). The city said that because the building burned down, it's treated as "a new application in the evolving context of the location", an opportunity to build something better.

Aside from the fact that the owners likely don't have the money to build something bigger, I bet this news raises a few eyebrows in my neighbourhood about a certain eyesore that just won't go away because of greed.

Dramatic decrease in Israel

50% of Israel residents have received both doses of the vaccine.

Look at their curve.

I wrote a book!

I decided to write a book. It was quite an experience and I thought I would share some of what I went through with you, in case you ever consider writing a book yourself. In this particular case, I’m going to describe the option of self-publishing, where you do the writing, take care of the editing, and self-publish on the platforms of your choosing.

First you have to write the book. I really took my time on this step, finally coming up with about 130 letter sized pages over the course of a couple of years. The reason it took so long is because I wanted to interview friends for inspiration for the examples I would use, and because I kept going over the material and tweaking it. By the time I thought I was done, I expected that the manuscript was as polished as it could be. I was very naïve.

I wanted a great title. It didn’t take me long to come up with one. I asked a lot of people for their opinion and the feedback was extremely good, which bolstered my confidence. Time will tell if the title choice will help with sales.

You must get your material edited by a professional. Instead of hiring a full-blown editor, I chose a slightly less expensive option and hired a proofer. To keep it simple, a proofer is basically an editor in training. I was charged a very reasonable rate, $0.50 per 1000 words. My proofer went through my transcript with a fine-toothed comb and found a lot of things that needed tidying up. Sentences that were unclear or ambiguous. Grammar mistakes. Material that wasn’t clearly getting my intended message across. This is why getting edited is so important. The words make sense to you, but they may not make sense to the reader. I got feedback not only on a word by word, and sentence by sentence basis, but I also got a report detailing where the material was weak, or ambiguous, or needed references, or made use of the same words too repeatedly. For example, there were a lot of instances of the word ‘actually’, or ‘really’. I didn’t notice it myself until it was pointed out to me. Then I could see just how much I was using those words. I used the feedback to tighten up the writing even more, and then once I was happy, I used my spouse as a sounding board by reading the book to her. She had very useful feedback to offer as well, and even gave me a few more stories to use as anecdotes to support the material I had written.

Once I was happy with the manuscript, I had to decide how to publish. There are so many choices, but the biggest decision I had to make was whether I was going to enter into an exclusive relationship with one publisher or insist on the freedom to publish anywhere I wanted to. I wasn’t going to worry about hard copy publishing for now and just stick to e-book to get started. I chose to start with Amazon’s KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) service and chose a royalty plan that would still allow me to publish on other platforms. I made that choice partly because I had read that Kindle may have a good slice of the e-book market in North America, but other platforms had better reach in other parts of the world, such as Kobo.

For cover art, I knew a lot of creative people who could photograph, and I hired someone I was very familiar with to both shoot the candidate pictures and find willing models to pose. It’s good to have friends in the arts community, that is for sure. I came up with the idea for the photo’s theme based on something I saw online. I signed a contract that gave me the freedom to do anything I wanted with the resulting pictures. I had a couple dozen shots to pick from and one of them was selected for the book’s official cover. I did not get too serious with the cover art design, the title, etc. and that is one small regret. The cover art is passable, it’s fun to look at, but it’s definitely not high quality. But hey, it’s my first book and it’s a journey. 

I really struggled with using a pen name or not. I would have liked to use my real name for recognition, but the book’s subject matter was just too confidential to make me comfortable. So, I went with a pen name, which was a fun exercise just inventing one. I shopped it around and the people I trusted liked it, so the decision was made. When you go to self-publish and set up your account, you have to be careful because the platform assumes that the author name and publisher name are the same, which is not the case when using a pen name. 

Next comes the formatting of the transcript. I chose to use KDP’s built-in formatting tool, which wasn’t perfect, but it was easy. Once the formatting is done, you get to see a preview of what the material will look like in an e-reader. Once I was happy, I uploaded the cover art, typed up a description and submitted the book for publishing. The book was online in the Kindle store within 24 hours. I was pumped.

The task isn’t finished though. My past research indicated that for a self-published e-book to sell, you have to get the word out. You need a launch team. I hoped that if I shared the news with enough of my closest friends within a few hours of the book’s launch, it would help get the word out if they shared with their friends, and so on, and so on. Some of them were nice enough to even buy the book. But there wasn’t enough sharing of the news to make much of an impact. The book started out in the top 20 for its category, but quickly dropped off the rankings radar within days because of lack of buzz. I knew that the only ace I had left up my sleeve was to push my friends who had bought the book to make sure to rate  and review it as soon as possible, which over time, does help with the ranking. It hasn’t made an impact yet, but it’s only been on the market for a few months. The entire launch event was also somewhat dulled by the fact that I wasn’t using my real name. My advice is to form a large launch party group and use everyone you know. Be aggressive about getting the word out in the first 48 hours. I’m talking shark aggressive, not poodle aggressive. 

Within a few days I had friends asking if my book was available in hard copy. I wasn’t sure if I was going to bother, but now that the request had come up a few times, I decided to look into both self-publishing as an e-book on another platform and getting a hard copy book ready for sale. My second e-book platform of choice was Kobo. That satisfied the needs of my Kobo subscribing friends. For the hard copy, I went again with Amazon. Now I had to reformat my material and cover art to suit a standard sized soft cover book. I ordered a few author copies just to see how it would come out. Luckily, as the author they let you order author copies at cost. Again, the results were passable, but not the best design quality. The hard copies are made in the US and take about 2 weeks to be made and shipped.

Next, I had been reading that if you want to improve your reach, it helps to have an audiobook version. If you think there are a lot of options for getting an e-book to print, there are even more options surrounding putting an audiobook online. Again, there are a multitude of platforms available, but Amazon’s ACX platform is by far the widest reaching, including your title in Apple's and Audible’s library. In this case I decided to go exclusive with ACX to maximize the royalty returns.

One reason why it may be worth your time putting an audiobook out is that there is far less competition for readers, or in this case, listeners. So you have a better chance at finding your audience. But now you have your work cut out for you because you need to get all of that written material narrated.

There are many directions you can go here. ACX makes it possible for you to just provide the written transcript and audition and select a narrator to do the voice recording. Then you have to engineer the audio so that it meets ACX’s audio standards. Or you can hire that part out too. In fact, if you have a good voice, you can just join ACX to offer your services as a narrator. Or a sound engineer. As the author of a book, if you hire out any of those things, you lose a cut of the royalties. Since I had experience with audio editing and felt that my voice was good enough to narrate my own material, I made the decision to do everything myself. Now the work gets serious.

I’ve had serious quality issues when it comes to recording live audio, especially from webcams. Thankfully, I own a professional digital recorder made by Zoom with a high-quality microphone. I chose to record early in the morning at my desk in our basement. It’s quiet, and with the door closed you can’t hear the furnace. I had to remember to turn the fireplace off too, because the drone of the fan isn’t something you want to hear on the recording. I mounted the digital recorder on a small tripod so that the microphone is level with my face and placed it about 15-18 inches away from my mouth. I discovered the hard way that early-morning voice isn’t always the best but having a nice hot cup of coffee nearby can help. Once I hit ‘record’, I just started reading. I paused when I needed a breath, and when I made a mistake, or my voice got rough, or I just didn’t like how the last paragraph sounded, I stopped, and made an audible ‘boop’ sound to make it easy to find the mistakes during post production. At the end of each chapter, I ended the recording and that got saved as a separate file.

I tried as much as possible to animate my voice while reading, but you always think it could have turned out better. You always want another take. I didn’t want this to become a long drawn out process like the written book was, so I got firm about letting go and accepting the recordings as is, knowing that I could add pauses where they were needed, shorten pauses where they were too long, and surgically cut out mistakes. My goal was to get every chapter recorded in a reasonable amount of time. I managed to do it over the course of 2 weekends.

I knew from my research that the ACX audio standards were quite specific in terms of audio RMS and peak levels, noise floor and so on, but thankfully some experienced audiobook engineers wrote procedures on how to use Audacity (a free audio editing program) to engineer the recordings like a pro. The editing was indeed the hardest part, because you have to listen with laser focus, watching for mistakes, pauses, cadence, mouth noises, breathing noises, background noises, table thumps, etc. But after about the twelfth chapter, I got into a groove. You can even get a plug-in for Audacity that will analyze the final edits looking for all the ACX audio level prerequisites. You won’t know for sure if the audio does meet the ACX standard until you submit it online but being able to pass a preliminary check helps build confidence that you’re on the right track.

Then you need to reformat your cover art to meet the audiobook standard. The picture must be perfectly square and have a decently high resolution. The next step is to choose a sample of your audiobook to use as the retail sample, so that potential buyers have something to listen to before they decide to purchase the audiobook.

After that, you upload all the audio files and then the quality control process begins. I waited a bout a week before they sent me a message back saying that my spacing needed fixing. For every chapter, there must be no talking for the first 0.5 to 1.0 second of the file and 1-5 seconds at the tail end. So I made those tweaks and uploaded the new versions of the files. Fortunately, that was all it took. My audiobook went live on 13 April 2021.

I ended up liking my audiobook cover so much, I completely redesigned my e-book and paperback covers to match. Much better, since the templates KDP provides are kind of limited and not very customizable.

I'm on my second book now. This time, I'll be using my real name because the subject matter is less controversial. I'd say my writing is about half done.

Can has!

Only veterans of the interwebs will get this.

 

Small things 23 Apr

• Sure, you can order toilet paper from Amazon with your smart phone while sitting on the toilet. But do you know the list of ingredients on that can of Lysol?
• I wonder what a plant thinks when it sees it raining outside?
• If you attend a work meeting, make sure you don't accidentally turn your video on if: you're naked; you're toking; you're still in bed; you're sitting on the toilet; you have a beer or glass of wine in your hand. 
  
  
  
• Hopefully I'm not the only person who takes great pleasure at talking or making noises through an empty roll of paper towel.....
• If you eat the entire cake without cutting it, technically you only ate one piece. The math checks out...
• It would be fun if someone you work-Zoom with is selling their house and you go online to see pictures of the listing and use one of the interior shots as the Zoom background at your next meeting to see if they notice.
• How about we stop arguing over which straws are better for the environment and just drink from sippy cups like kids do?
• In school we used to learn how to explain stuff in many thousand word essays. Now people want the 10 second version of the story. Thanks school!
• We can send rovers to Mars but we can't make a shopping cart with wheels that will last a long time? Or not wobble? (I wonder how many more of these 'we can send rovers to Mars' things I'll come up with)

Forbidden knowledge?

 

iPhone tricks you may not know

Here are some iPhone tricks I stumbled across, many of which I didn't know, except for the magnifying glass, which is one of my favourite apps. Great for looking at small print on products at the store.

See where you’ve been

Having trouble remembering when you did something? Have no fear — your iPhone has been tracking your movements since you first activated the phone. If you need to pinpoint the day you went somewhere special or even remember the date of a trip to the hospital, this information can be useful. Go to Settings, then choose Privacy. Within the Privacy section, go to Location Settings. Scroll to the bottom, select System Services, and then find your Frequent Locations. Prepare to be amazed to see the list of all the places you have visited and how frequently you’ve been to them.

Make your iPhone keyboard function as a trackpad

If you’ve ever tried to move your cursor in a text only to find yourself stabbing at your phone’s screen with your finger, you need a trackpad on your phone. Here’s an iPhone trick that will come as a surprise to most people: You can turn your iPhone into a trackpad as long as it has iOS 12 or a more recent update. Just start typing in an email or text message, then press and hold a finger on the space bar on your iPhone’s keyboard. When you do this, the other keys will fade to gray, and you can use the area as a trackpad. [Man, I wished I had known this one a long time ago]

Flip a coin

Did you know that flipping a coin to make a decision can actually make you smarter? It can also, at the very least, help you wade through your pros and cons to get to the decision you truly want to make. “When we see the result of the coin toss and react with either pleasure or disappointment, we realize that we actually did have a preference for one option over another whether we knew it or not,” writes Hal McDonald, PhD, for Psychology Today. However, not everyone carries around cash and coins these days. Your iPhone can be a convenient substitute. Simply talk to your Apple virtual assistant, saying, “Hey, Siri, flip a coin!” She will then give you the result of the virtual coin toss.

Access a magnifying glass

Have you ever been reading a magazine only to find that certain passages were teeny-tiny and impossible to read? If that happens to you again, you don’t have to rummage through junk drawers to find an old magnifying glass. Your iPhone will act as a magnifying class with a few clicks on the screen. To access this iPhone trick, go to the main Settings of your iPhone, then click on Accessibility. Tap on Magnifier, then switch it to on. Now it will magnify anything you point the phone at. Open Magnifier on any screen by triple-clicking the side button if you have an iPhone 10 or later model. To adjust the magnification, move the slider that should then appear on the screen.

Set your phone to answer itself

You have the option of setting your iPhone to automatically answer itself. If you are often in a situation where you don’t have your hands free or can’t quickly grab your phone when it rings, having your phone automatically pick up can help ensure you don’t miss important calls. Go to the Accessibility option, then select Call Audio Routing. Toggle the Auto-Answer Calls option to the green “on” option. When you activate this feature, it will answer any call and let you speak with the caller automatically.

Sign documents

Electronic signatures are more often becoming the acceptable norm for business contracts and new-hire employee forms. You don’t have to buy expensive software to sign something electronically—you can do so easily within the Mail app using the markup option on your iPhone. Open the document from the Mail app on your iPhone. If it wasn’t sent to you via email, forward it so that you can easily access it from the Mail app.

Now, go to the email and tap on the attached document that you want to sign. If you haven’t downloaded it already, click to download it. Next, scroll through the document until you pull up the lines where you need to provide text. Tap on the lines and fill them out as directed. For the line with your signature, tap the mark-up symbol. (If you are unfamiliar with the mark-up option, it’s the small icon that looks likes a pen in the upper-right corner.) An assortment of pen options will appear along with a plus sign. Select the plus sign and then the signature option that will appear. A screen will open that allows you to use your finger on the screen to write your signature. When you finish writing your signature, click done. You can then place your signature precisely where you want it on the document.

Hide screenshots and photos from prying eyes

There are many reasons why you’d want to have your screenshots or photos protected from immediate access by anyone who uses your phone. Luckily, you’re just a few clicks away from being able to do so. Go to your Photos app and click on the pictures and screenshots that you want to hide. Then—and this may sound contradictory to your goals—select the Share option. That should pull up a list where you can choose the option to hide the selected photos or screenshots. Go back to the Photo Library to make sure that the photos are now private. They will be in the Hidden folder that was created automatically when you hid the photos. You can find this folder by clicking on your Photos app, then going to the Albums tab. If you change your mind and want to “unhide” the photos, simply select the photo and choose to move it back to the primary album of the Photos app.

Capitalism breeds innovation

Capitalism breeds innovation. 

Like ten brands of tap water in a bottle that kills aquatic life! 

Things I learned lately 23 Apr

• The French Dip (roast beef) sandwich was invented in Los Angeles. By accident. In 1918. Philippe the Original.
• 75% of the world's coffee is Arabica, so it's nothing special.
  
  
  
• On 1 Aug of this year (2021), MTV turns 40 years old. Thanks for the 14 years of music MTV.
• 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1968 science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C. Clarke, was developed concurrently with Stanley Kubrick's film and published after the release of the film. Clarke and Kubrick worked on the book together, but eventually only Clarke ended up as the official author.
• There were supposed to be aliens in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Kubrick didn't like any of the proposed manifestations of their form.
• Julia Davis Chandler published the first pb&j sandwich recipe in 1901 in the Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics. She wrote, "For variety, some day try making little sandwiches, or bread fingers, of three very thin layers of bread and two of filling, one of peanut paste, whatever brand you prefer, and currant or crab-apple jelly for the other. The combination is delicious, and, so far as I know, original."
• During WWI, mercy dogs were trained by national Red Cross societies to serve the country the society operated in. A typical mercy dog was equipped with a saddlebag containing water, alcohol, and first aid supplies, which a wounded soldier could use to tend to his wounds. The dogs were trained to move silently around no man’s land at night, sniffing out wounded soldiers, ignoring those belonging to the other side. The dogs could differentiate between slightly wounded men and soldiers who were beyond help. Their mission was to alert the troops back at the camp that a man who had a chance of survival was lying in the battlefield waiting for help.
• The California grizzly bear, depicted on California's flag, has been extinct since 1924.
• Amazon Web Services is responsible for 60% of Amazon's profits.

If brands were honest, what would their slogan be?

• IKEA. Visit for the meatballs, stay because you can't find the exit.
• Facebook. Making it easier to stalk people since 2004.
• Hot Pockets. Every bite is a different temperature.
• Coke. It's so sweet, we had to but acid in it so you won't vomit.
• DHL. If you want it bad enough, you'll pay the fees.
• Gillette Venus. Because no woman should have to use a blue razor.
• Bing. Take it slow finding things.
• Starbucks. Become a diabetic in small daily instalments.
• Target. You dress too nice for WalMart.
• The Gap. For kids, by kids.
• Payless Shoe Source. Who wants shoes that last more than one season?
• Taco Bell. We can make 32 things with 5 simple ingredients.
• Pepsi. Is Pepsi OK?
• McDonald's. What ice cream machine?
• Bud Light. For people who don't actually like beer.
• Skip the Dishes. We know just how lazy you are.
• Rogers. That's pronounced oligarchy.
• Nestle. We would bottle air if we could get away with it.
• Doordash. There's always room for another middleman.
• Ford. Pffft! Who needs cars?
• Tide. Because a horrible rash is better than smelly clothes.
• Volvo. Designed to fit your IKEA purchases.
• Maybelline. Maybe it's photoshopped.
• Old Spice. Smell like grandpa.
• WebMD. It's probably lupus.
• Gillette. We can just add more blades.
• LinkedIn. The soapbox that also helps you not get hired.
• Adobe. Serving updates daily.
• Best Buy. Where to try stuff out before buying it on Amazon.
• IKEA. The extra parts are just to mess with you.
• Fiji. The bottle shape makes it taste better.
• Butterball. The original food coma.
• Campbells. Mmm mmm salt.
• Ticketmaster. Scalpers got nuthin' on us.
• eBay. Christmas ruined by a late bidder.
• Sharpie. Teach them not to fall asleep in your house.

Party pooper!

 

Small things 16 Apr

• It won't be long now before bingo nights are standing room only.
  
  
  
• Research shows that Amish people have much lower rates of cyber-bullying.
• Do dogs understand elevators, or are they just like "OK it's time to get into the world changer..."
• Samsung's new fridge will ping your phone if you leave the fridge door open. Couldn't they have just made it close its own door?
• We can send a rover to Mars but we can't figure out how to prevent clothes from catching on door knobs and door handles.
• The best part of waking up is looking over at the clock and seeing that you still have 3 hours of sleep before you have to get up.
• When people say, "You don't LOOK sick." or, "He doesn't LOOK autistic."
• My mock Nike shirt would say "I can't even..."
• So we have cannabis infused beverages now. There will eventually come a day when they put cocaine back into Coke.

Q. If you could have dinner with a famous celebrity, alive or dead, which would it be?

A. Alive.

If your dog could text versus if your cat could text

 

Vanishing rail

Here's a look at how much the Via Rail passenger train network has shrunk since 1978 when it was formed.

Above, VIA Rail 1978.

A YouTube video following the history can be found here. 

Above, VIA Rail 2020.

Dan Price is the man

 

Things I learned lately 16 Apr

• Some QAnon followers believe that Ivanka Trump has been executed by her father after she posted a picture of herself being given a vaccine. Others say "She said she got 'the shot'. She never said the Covid-19 vaccine..."
  
  
  
• The US has 8 cities with over 5 million people. India has 7. Japan has 3. China has 14.
• Two thirds of all the high speed rail network in existence worldwide is in China, with 37,900 km of high speed rail. 1,700,000,000 passengers in 2019 alone. But it plans to DOUBLE the network's size in the next 15 years. By 2035, every city with more than 500,000 people will be connected by high speed rail.
• Vodka doesn't have to be made from potatoes. It can be made from anything that will ferment. It just needs to be clear and distilled to 190 proof.
• The Eiffel Tower leans away from the sun thanks to the heat of the sun expanding the sun-facing side. On a very warm and sunny day, it can lean up to 6 inches (15 centimeters).
• When bananas rot they secrete stuff that makes other fruit including bananas nearby rot faster. That's bananas.

Does it though?

 

Small things 9 Apr

• I wonder if someone will invent Uber for weed. They could call it Doober.
• I sometimes accidentally pronounce meme (meem) the way the word is pronounced in French, because I'm from Quebec, et c'est la même chose.
• I'm loving how some of my friends who have been vaccinated are saying things like, "[Insert name here], now with 5G!"
• The Covid vaccine does not contain a microchip, but it may contain U2's latest album.
• YYC residents complain about their taxes not realizing how comparatively low they are. Example: In YYC, a $430,000 home pays about $3,200 a year. In YOW, that same house would owe $5,100.
  
  
  
• Oh, you don't approve of Hawaiian pizza because you don't think fruit belongs on a pizza? Don't go to Sweden then. Banana curry pizza. I kid you not.
• Lasagna is just spaghetti flavoured cake.
• Onion rings are vegetable donuts.
• Beef jerky is just a cow raisin.
• Eye drops are blinker fluid.

The evolution of passwords

There was a time when you could use any password you wanted. But people were lazy and uninformed, so we used the easiest words to remember, which, as it turns out, were also the easiest words to guess.

So they made it necessary to capitalize at least one of the letters. Which we did. The first letter. Always the first letter. Yeah, that made our password so much harder to guess, eh?

So they made it necessary to also include a number. Which we did. We picked the number 1. And put it on the end.

So they got really mad at how guessable our passwords were and made us also include a special character. Which we all did. We used the exclamation mark, because !

And we put it at the end, after the '1'.

So if our original password used to be 'password', now it was Password1!

Furious at our stupidity, they made us use a password that was at least 12 characters long. What did we come up with?

Password123456!

"Totally not recommended for take out or delivery"

There's a Chinese food place in Montreal (Aunt Dai) where the owner likes to be honest about his dishes.

Make it go up to '8'

 

Foiled by pedantry

 

The perfect compliment to a great song

This isn't the first time I've posted about this song.

Did you know that there's an official music video for Brandy (You're a fine girl)?

Things I learned lately 9 Apr

• CKGM-FM, the precursor to CHOM-FM in Montreal, switched to album-oriented rock (AOR) on 28 October 1969. The new format opened with the song 'Here comes the sun' by the Beatles.
  
  
  
• A restaurant in Ontario sent a bill to the Premier of Ontario for the beer that would spoil because a new lockdown decision was made with no advanced notice. 
• Pelee Island Ontario Canada is further south than the northern border of California.
• Manhattan and Salt Lake City are at roughly the same latitude.
• In America there are a lot more Peeps flavours. They include chocolate pudding, cotton candy, root beer float, blue raspberry, orange crush, hot tamale spicy cinnamon, fruit loops, sour watermelon, fruit punch, party cake
• In Bermuda, the roof of each home is mandated by law, to catch and redirect rain into underground cisterns that serve as islanders' primary source of freshwater.
• The term 'coffee break' became popular through a Pan-American Coffee Bureau advertising campaign in 1952 which urged consumers, "Give yourself a Coffee-Break — and Get What Coffee Gives to You." John B. Watson, a behavioural psychologist who worked with Maxwell House later in his career, helped to popularize coffee breaks within the American culture.
• 8-track tapes have a loop-play function, where after the end the tape loops back and plays from the beginning again. The 8-track version of the Pink Floyd album "Animals" was slightly altered. A guitar solo connecting the first and the last song on the album was added.
• The plural of beef is beeves. I kid you not.

Who does this?

 

I wasn't aware that this type of bathroom behaviour was an issue.

Small things 2 Apr

• Seen on Boredpanda: "My dog wouldn't come in from the front garden so I rang the doorbell and she ran straight in so she could look out the window to see who was at the door."
• Biden to Obama: "Told you I could get the GOP to say my package was too big...."
  
  
  
• We can have gatherings of 5 people without issues. But I don't even know 3 people without issues....
• Whatever happens, at least you're not the guy who got his ship stuck sideways in the Suez Canal....
• The next time you're annoyed by a neighbour's instrument practise, don't get angry. Just slip a request under their door. Make sure to applaud if they play it.
• Even if the hand soap in the bathroom does smell great, it doesn't look good if you come out of the bathroom sniffing your hands.
• Tell me again about how you accept that we landed another rover on Mars but you're a little hesitant about the vaccine.
• We have one of those fancy giant coffee making machines at work now. One guy keeps trying to get people to select a triple espresso.

Play the whole album - The Black Keys - Brothers

If you have a Spotify or any other music streaming service that lets you listen to entire albums in one go, I've got some homework for you.

Usually when I do these reviews, I go through each song and tell you what I think about each one. I'm not going to do that.

Am I being lazy? Maybe. But what's really going on here is that for the first time in a long time, maybe a decade or more, I've come across an album that, unlike most albums these days, has more than one or two great songs. Heck, more than 5. Maybe more than 8.

The thing about this album is the style. The Black Keys don't try to play in every part of the music spectrum. They found their niche and they play it to death. But each song is a story. The feel, the vibe gives this album the kind of quality that, if you didn't know any better and someone told you that it came out in 1974, it wouldn't be hard to believe. This is a collection of music with the same iconic nature as The Allman Brothers or Derek and the Dominos.

The sound is raw and distorted. The drums are relentless. It's as if Gary Glitter went to rock school with the likes of The White Stripes.

This is what a Suez Canal marine traffic jam looks like

The growth Ponzi scheme

This is a really good explanation of how the modern economics of city growth (in North America especially) works and how unsustainable it is.

Let this be a warning to places like Calgary.

Careful with that video button...

 

Working from home and you accidentally hit video instead of audio... 2021

Things I learned lately 2 Apr

• 28% of Facebook content is now ads.
• A pack of cigarettes is $15 now!
  
  
  
• Pepsi made a special run of Peeps flavoured Pepsi. Yet they didn't have the foresight to label it Peepsi?
• Google tries to give you search results based on high values in 3 factors: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
• 5.4 million Google searches happen every minute.
• Google tweaks their search algorithm roughly 6 times every day.
• Google says that 15% of the search queries they get every day are queries they've never seen before.
• Spotify used to have a hard limit of 10,000 tracks that you could have in your collection. That limit is now gone. There is a catch though. Playlists (each) and offline tracks are limited to 10,000.
• Spotify HiFi is coming in 2021, with lossless audio (not compressed mp3). Price TBA.