Summertime television being what it is (which is mostly variations on The Bachelor), and having watched all the reruns of Food Jammers and No Reservations, I swapped out the digital channels on the cable box for a summer of The Movie Network. This affords us access not only to various and sundry movies, but also access to various HBO and Showtime series. No commercials (except for the annoying interstitials for The Movie Network itself). And some not-too-bad television for hot summer nights.

On the series side, I have decided that I am pro-John from Cincinnati (which seems to be a series that you either love or hate), neutral on Durham County (so far there’s too much “bashing in heads with large rocks” for my taste, but we’re only one episode in), and completely over the moon for the television version of This American Life (all other things being equal, I would marry Ira Glass in a heartbeat).

On the movie side, last night I stayed up late to watch Shut Up & Sing, a movie about the Dixie Chicks travails over recent years. It was a well-produced documentary that turned me into a Dixie Chicks fan. It also made me afraid to enter vast swaths of the USA.

A few nights back we watched This Film Is Not Yet Rated, a documentary about the MPAA and the film rating system in the USA. I left with a similar distaste in my mouth about America’s thin-skinned xenophobia. The film is also well-produced, with an interesting through-line centred around a private detective hired to out the identities of the secret panel of “concerned parents” that does all the rating. The heart of the movie, however, is an extended discussion of the implications of Maria Bello’s pubic hair.

I recommend both films.

I am spending the afternoon making my way through the wonderful tutorials that NASA has available to explain their SPICE system. Here’s my favourite slide so far, which serves to explain the meaning of the technical term “kernel” within the SPICE world:

From Fabrica, a link to Die Electric, a delightful exhibition of alternatives devices for plugging into electric sockets, including OFF, The Light Switch Hook:

OFF, the light switch hook, provides a hanging function when in the OFF position. It is a fully functional light switch. It was designed to persuade people to use less energy.

Permit me to offer this one observation on the meeting of The Right Honourable Stephen Harper and Honourable Robert Ghiz yesterday: our Premier wears a suit much, much better than our Prime Minister …

This is neither a political observation nor a personal attack, simply an observation of fashion sense. Fashion is, depending on your point of view, either everything or nothing. (Images are stills from last night’s [[Compass]]).

Anyone who knows how I actually work knows that I am a completely iterative learner. Which is to say that when faced with a new challenge in unfamiliar territory I simply dive in, see what works and what doesn’t, adjust, and repeat. Ad infinitum. Until I get where I’m going.

This is how I code astronomy applications in Perl, and it’s also how I find a vegetarian restaurant in Lisbon. If you’re along for the ride on an iteration that works it seems like magic; if I drag you along for the 25 iterations that came first it seems like I am insane.

I used to think that everyone worked this way, but apparently some people prefer to take the “get completely educated about the domain, then implement” route. Which is probably more efficient, but is much less fun and cuts out the opportunity for collateral learning.

In any case, this morning I watched [[Oliver]] engage in a classic case-study of iterative learning.

Oliver cannot type. Well, he can type, but as he cannot yet write words, his typing is limited to entering his Mac OS X password, and his first name. Because of this, he’s generally limited to visiting websites for which he has pre-established bookmarks (Treehouse, CBC, Croatian State Television, etc.) or websites that are linked to therefrom.

And let’s face it, no matter how much fun that Nana’s Helper game is to play, eventually everyone needs variety in their life.

I witnessed Oliver’s solution to seeking variety, given his inability to type new URLs or search for new content, this morning.

He’s figured out that if you drag a URL from your Firefox toolbar into the Firefox Google search, and then (and this is the important part) click on the “Images” tab in Google, you’ll see something like this collection of images. In other words, a visual list of related links. The rest is easy.

All of which explains how Oliver ended up at the Civil Rights Treasure Hunt website this morning without typing a single letter.

This solution, one that I could have never possibly imagined and thus would never have thought to teach him, was brilliant in a way that brought tears to my eyes. And it served to reconfirm my deeply-held belief that, at least for some sorts of kid learners, the best thing to do is to just get out of the way.

Remember good old Marine Atlantic? They used to run the ferry service from PEI to the mainland, and they still run the ferries to Newfoundland.

As [[Oliver]] and I are plotting travel plans for later in the month, I visited their website looking for information on possible sail-to-Newfoundland options. Being new at this, the first thing I wanted to know is exactly where they sail to.

While I can easily, find a page about their Gravol sales policy it took me 15 minutes of searching to find a bad map of their terminals in Newfoundland. Sigh.

Moo. Because of blog posts like this. Meanwhile, Oliver’s stickers have been dispatched. Shhh, don’t tell him.

Ironically, given my chosen vocation, I did a Google search for “Peter Rukavina” this morning for the first time in a long time. And so I came to learn that parts of this 5-year old blog post are being used to promote this DVD of Rough Science. It’s so exciting to see the blog up there in lights with publications like “2003 NAMTC/NMM Curriculum Media Reviews” and “School Library Journal”.

I’ve just released a new version of PresenceRouter (you remember, PresenceRouter…). Grab PresenceRouter.0.7.dmg, unpack and enjoy (OS X only, of course).

This version drops Facebook support, but adds support for Wamadu, Tumblr and Frazr. I’ve also added tentative support for sticking your current last.fm track into your status message.

The PresenceRouter Plazes Group is the gathering place for comments, feature requests and so on.

It’s amazing what you can do with AppleScript Studio.