With another poll coming out warning how indebted Canadian are, and the personal and national risks of carrying so much debt, I’m glad that I spent so much time (and money!) last year shedding my consumer debts. I’m not looking forward to increases to student loan carrying costs but they’re manageable and won’t risk my quality of life. But I was in a privileged situation: I really don’t know what society is going to have to do to help people who have accumulated far too much debt, though increasing the borrowing costs might at least disincentivized people from accumulating large quantities of new debt.
Category: Aside
I have a deep and abiding dislike of editors of academic journals who enrol me in their content management systems and then issue peer review requests without bothering to first send me a personal inquiry. I appreciate the ‘ease’ of automating the requests but doing so significantly diminishes the likelihood that I’ll ever review for them or suggest another peer to take on the assignment because I don’t like the idea of them being spammed, either. Further, the way these requests are issued raises security concerns: I don’t know the journal, there’s no reply-to-human contact, nor can I verify the legitimacy of the link by just glancing at it. The onus shouldn’t be put on me to sniff around and confirm the sender in order to do free labour for them.
One of the things that I enjoy about this space is sometimes writing short aside posts (like this one). They don’t tend to delve deeply into whatever’s going through my head nor do they typically include a link to elsewhere on the Web. But for some reason I don’t really like the idea of them being published without a title. So I’m going to try associating the date with each aside-type post and see whether, over time, I want to expand or shrink this title scheme or, instead, keep it to the data posted.
Addendum: While my current theme may not show the date, at least for my own backend (and RSS purposes) the title will be present. I guess that’ll just have to be enough.
Categories
But I Am Connected!
Despite my iPad showing that I’m using its built-in speakers, the top right bar indicates that I’m attached to my BeatsX headphones. And music is, in fact, being played through the headphones. But no matter what I do – connect, disconnect, turn off and on Bluetooth, etc -I can’t get this panel to recognize I’m connected to my headphones.
Apple design: it’s often great if Apple has recently given a damn about the area you’re dealing with.
Categories
2017.12.30
It really hurts being in a place that is spectacular to engage in photography but being unable to do so because it’s so cold that even weather sealed lenses and camera bodies would break down. Though the challenges of this trip have got me thinking of ways to spend my vacation days over the coming year to take short duration dedicated photo trips, when I know that the weather will be hospitable to my gear.
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2017.12.29
First time I’ve been in an AirBNB and the toilet stopped working (frozen pipes that the landlord wouldn’t look at) and then all water in the building stopped running (frozen pipes burst and so fire department shut off the water valve). At least the heat is working at the moment?
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2017.12.28
By booking my vacation over a month ago, I’ve accidentally transported myself to a place that is colder than Siberia. And yet I’m still (accidentally) walking almost 20km a day. Fitness win?
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2017.12.22
Honoured to be recognized by Access Now as a local champion for my work in safeguarding, protecting, and advancing digital civil liberties in Canada!
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2017.12.21
I saw Star Wars: The Last Jedi this afternoon and I’m still digesting what I think of it. On the whole I enjoyed it; Carrie Fisher really stole the show whereas I found Mark Hamill’s performance was sorta ‘meh’. It was also a strangely *small* movie, in terms of approximately how little time passes over the course of events. It definitely feels like an episode of something as opposed to a self-contained and ‘complete’ film in its own right.
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2017.12.19
There’s something…special…about being ‘covered’ by an organization that is the actual definition of fake news/Russian propaganda.
Excited Pixels 