Canada celebrates Thanksgiving several weeks before the US. This is because historically our growing season is shorter, though this may change due to a combination of improved plant breeds and global warming.

While most people do the Sunday dinner thing, we end up doing it Monday. Why? Because of the annual "It's Thanksgiving weekend so I'm gonna renovate something in the house" that my brother-in-law does. So I spent Saturday and Sunday helping with a wall and laying new flooring in the basement. And am I sore! But that's okay, this evening's Thanksgiving supper will make up for it.

One of my nephews is bringing his new girlfriend, and since everyone who will be in attendance insists on continuing to misgender me and call my by my old name even after all these years, it'll be amusing. I'll just explain the situation, how they can't seem to accept it but that they're family, so what the heck, and watch what happens.

And I'm sure that they'll be delighted* to find out I'm publishing my bio later this year, where I'll write frankly about growing up hiding what I was, the first murder and the resulting ptsd, the sexual assault which made it worse, what it was like transitioning and all the other fun stuff.

And I'll probably hear "why can't you just be gay" AGAIN! Family - gotta love 'em.

(to the tune "This Old Man")
I'm stuck with them,
they're stuck with me,
we're a dysfunctional fa-mi-ly ...
but that's okay 'cuz life is never dull,
so I'm gonna go and eat until I'm full.

Normal is SO over-rated nowadays.

(.*for values of "delighted" equivalent to "If you do that I'm going to change my name so nobody knows we're related")

I was looking back at my old "Gender Education" series. Can't believe it will be NINE YEARS in December. Wow.

It was good for its' time, but it's dated, and isn't the approach I would take today. The world has changed, I have changed, yadda yadda yadda. So, I'm going to revisit the topic, inserting it into my workflow before my other stuff. Should make a good free ebook.

Just in case this doesn't make it to the front page, I'm throwing my two cents in here.

Dana McCallum, having pled guilty, should be demoted, not just suspended. This is someone who has demonstrated a serious lack of the people skills necessary to be a senior anything - as someone who needs a period of reflection, and then supervision. As Reuters reports, this is a senior engineer who now needs to take a year's worth of domestic violence classes.

[sarcasm] Way to go, genius. [/sarcasm]

The rule is simple - if you're prominent, you will be held to a higher standard, if only because your screw-ups will cause more damage. And that's fair. After all, you're reaping the benefits of prominence, so you should also expect the responsibilities that go with it. We don't see that happen often enough (just look at Toronto mayor Rob Ford), but we're starting to see it in, of all places, the world of sports, where domestic violence (players) and bigotry (owners) have consequences far beyond the courtroom.

I am now officially registered with the government as a publisher, with my own ISBN publishers pefix. That's pretty fast (1-day) service. Gotta love Kanuckistan :-)

The idea of "one career for a lifetime" is getting more and more outdated. It's not just that change is now the only constant when it comes to jobs, but also because people are living longer.

When 80% of the population worked on farms, and people died at an average age of 47, the idea of a "lifelong career" was taken for granted. Then again, so was "lifelong marriage", and "following in your folks footsteps."

That last option is impossible for many, because the jobs their parents had just don't exist any more - and this means that the "work culture" they were exposed to second-hand at home also is no longer a useful reference.

Think of how many jobs the post-WW2 technological revolution has created and now is killing off. TV repairmen? Not too many left. VCR and DVD repairs? Forget it. When's the last time your car needed an "electronic tune-up?" Or, thanks to long-life, self-lubricating materials, to have a "chassis lube?" Points changed? Physical newspapers and books? Even Saturday morning cartoons can't compete with "teh innert00bs."

My situation - at a crossroads

After a couple of years away from the keyboard because of damage to my retinas, I was really relieved to find that I could program again. But something has changed. Me. I found myself asking "Do I really want to get back into *that* rat-race again? The crappy hours, impossible demands, sleazy management, and over-the-top hype, the much ado about nothing that seems to accompany everything in the software industry today?"

After I transitioned, I got to see how women are not treated equally first-hand. We'd be sitting in meetings and end up just rolling our eyes as the men went off on yet another pissing contest, totally ignoring our input, even though in many cases I was the programmer who had to fix the problems their virtual circle jerks caused. And people wonder why women drop out of tech after an average of 10 years in the field???

I loved creating software, so it became my career. Do what you enjoy doing, right? But more and more, I cringe at the thought of the poison that accompanies today's "development culture" - the bogus deadlines, the "ship it then (never) fix it" mentality, the juvenile "pissing contests". I have my development environment all set up, and I find myself doing anything but ...

I've been toying with an idea ...

Every few years, someone comes along and tells me I should write a book. Sure, I can write, and I've got lots I've always wanted to write, but "life gets in the way." I was thinking of going back into programming to pay the bills, and do the writing on the side, but that's not the entrepreneurial spirit that got me into starting my first business, or into programming. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I can either devote all my energies to one or another - or do a crappy job at both by trying to do both. It's true, just as you can only serve one master, you can only follow your own muse.

And I really should follow my muse.

So, I did my research, did some more thinking, and at this time, for me, changing careers is the right thing to do. I've registered with the government as a publisher, and will be receiving my first batch of ISBNs in the next little while. As you can see from a previous post, I'm not going to engage in the more and more lame "I have an idea for a book/game/software - everybody give me money and I'll create it" crowdsourcing model. It's time to let the internet work for me for a bit, and not vice versa.

Part of the problem with sites like Google Books is that there's no "it's free, unless you want to pay for it" option.

And putting two copies of the same book, one free and one with a price, will look like you're spamming the store.

However, after a bit of investigation, IF the publications have different ISBN numbers, and you add some extra content (I'm thinking cover art, photos, diagrams, etc., that don't result in the free edition being the book version of "crippleware"), it should meet Google's guidelines, because each ISBN number is treated as a separate entity, as opposed to books that don't have an ISBN.

Thoughts?

Diners Tend To Eat More If Their Companions Are Overweight this morning, and First Birth From Human Womb Transplant.

So Ben Bernanke tried to refinance his home for a 3rd time in 5 years, and got turned down. Guess what, Ben? You shouldn't be treating your home as an ATM.

I guess the 1%ers still think that absolutely none of the rules don't apply to them, and that banks should continue to make risky loans to them, just because of who they are.

The new acquirer, ncrowd, currently has an empty FAQ page, so former dealfind and teambuy customers need to rely on blogs and the press for information.

Sure, the conventional start menu is back, but the live tiles off to the side are going to present two problems for business, who will probably want to lock that feature down tight or remove it entirely. I can't picture employers wanting their employees to customize the menu so that they can see their facebook, twitter, or other social media feeds. And I don't think employers want every supplier of data to a live tile to know every time the user clicks the start menu.

Sure, you could set a time between refreshes (but that sort of defeats the whole concept of a "live" tile), but the suppliers of the data feeds are still going to have some idea of when the person starts work, etc.

Back when businesses first integrated Windows into their workspaces, there was a tremendous waste of time by employees playing solitaire and arranging the desktop the way they liked it, always fiddling around with the wallpaper and icons. And then the web came along, in many ways making things worse. And smartphones. Live tiles are going to be yet another distraction. Every time a user goes to start another application, they're going to be presented with several opportunities to look at something else instead. Distractions lead to mistakes and lower productivity, and businesses will be paying for this. So too will employees who find themselves out of a job because they get caught up in the "new shiny" to the point where their work suffers.

At least with Windows 8.1, you can disable showing the start menu by default and never see a live tile. Unless Microsoft provides a way to completely lock down or disable tiles in the start menu, I don't think Windows 10 is going to be classifiable as "business friendly".

and

Pretty good argument that not all users of Tor are doing it to hide acts of wrongdoing.

As Yuval Harari points out, "What is so special about us that allows for such cooperation? Unflatteringly, it is our talent for deluding ourselves. If you examine any large-scale human cooperation (or co-option), you will always find some imaginary story at its base. As long as many people believe in the same stories about gods, nations, money or human rights (memes and antitropes) - they follow the same laws and rules (of conduct)."

https://www.coursera.org/course/humankind

While looking around for a minecraft clone so I could see what the hype was about, I came across something called Dwarf Fortress. The New Yorker describes it as SimCity's evil twin.

This canard still persists today. I know it can be beaten - I did it, and it's simpler than I thought.

First - the background. Back when my retinas were getting lasered on a regular basis, I would fire up SK2k in an emulator under KNOPPIX. This gave me a chance to focus on large graphics on a large screen, instead of stuff like fonts. It worked too - my eyes would recover after a few days of intermittent gameplay.

So, since SC2K had always held a certain fascination for me, I determined to beat it. Without bothering with complications like variable tax rates for different industries, etc.

It turns out that the real limiting factor is good old H20. Starting with a flat world and enough water available in rows in the center, you never have to add any more water. Why in rows? Because your pumps benefit from having water on 6 of the 8 adjacent tiles, giving them the best space/capacity trade-off. Why in the center? Because you'll put your industries along the edge, so half (or more near a corner) of your pollution goes to your neighbors, instead of spoiling your water supply.

You do NOT need a seaport. Ever. Or a marina. And you can ignore most of those "Commerce needs new connections" messages.

The optimal grid is 9x9, surrounded by roads on all sides. Continue this pattern, even through the water area (a grid of 9x9 blocks of 9x9), surrounded by a ring of 9x9 blocks for commercial / sports development later in the game. Leave enough of a gap for a set of highways to go from one edge of the screen to the other (forming a huge # sign), by working from the edge to create more 9x9 blocks.

DON'T draw all the roads right away - just lay them out as you need them, otherwise you'll go broke.

If you build police departments, fire departments, schools, etc. as required, you will eventually "break the simulator" Turns out (it's in the docs) that there are only 150 "mini simulators" in the game. You'll know when you're broken this because the next launch arcology will fill up immediately. Do this a few times, and you can start eliminating public utitilies, schools, etc., to increase revenue even more.

Once you have built and populated enough launch arcologies, you'll get the "The exodus has begun" dialog. Game over.

It took me 24 hours, going from 1900 to 26-something. I took a load of screen-shots, to document progress, and saved the game almost every "year", just in case that last run hadn't worked, but it DID!

'The Cause Of Empire Leads To The Graveyard'

"This is a vision of the world in which might makes right - a world in which one nation's borders can be redrawn by another, and civilized people are not allowed to recover the remains of their loved ones because of the truth that might be revealed. America stands for something different. We believe that right makes might - that bigger nations should not be able to bully smaller ones; that people should be able to choose their own future...

America is and will continue to be a Pacific power, promoting peace, stability, and the free flow of commerce among nations. But we will insist that all nations abide by the rules of the road, and resolve their territorial disputes peacefully, consistent with international law. That's how the Asia-Pacific has grown. And that's the only way to protect this progress going forward."