Five London Years

It’s hard to believe that we moved from Ajax five years ago in March, but it has indeed been five years.

Kaylin was 18 months old when we moved here, half of Maks’ age.  It’s amazing to see pictures of her from back then, she was all curls and crazyness.  Now she’s six years old going on twelve, skinny as a rail and still constantly full of energy.

Now we’ve got a second monkey jumping around the house (quite literally, I constantly hear them thumping around from one room to another).

Our house has grown with the finished basement, but we’re still constantly tripping over toys (today I nearly rolled my ankle on a lightsaber on our stairs).

I’ve made some amazing friends in London, and I get to see my childhood buddies whenever I want.

While I occasionally miss Toronto, and wonder what I’m doing in the alternate universe where we stay in the GTA (maybe we move down to the beach to be closer to my hip downtown job?), I’m pretty ridiculously happy here in London.

My Grandma Moo

My Grandma Moo

Grandma was born December 3, 1920, but we grand kids wouldn’t get to meet her for another 50 years, until the 1970′s when we all came into the world.

The Muriel Thornton we all got to know was as warm as a fresh out of the oven cookie, caring, kind, and above all else, one of the most good natured souls I’ve ever known.

Sure, she could have a temper, and she could be stubborn as all get out…a trait that thankfully nobody in the family inherited, but by and large, Grandma Moo lived life with a smile on her face.

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My Favourite Comics of 2011

The best comics of 2011

I really cut back on comics this year, mostly because I simply don’t have room to store them, so only the best stuff makes its way into my house now. Then something wonderful happened. I got an iPad, and the ComiXology app really came into its own.

This led me to try a lot of new stuff. I’ve always liked indie movies, but I don’t necessarily want to own every one of them! The same with comics, and no surprise for the guy who’s favourite super hero is Starman, I dig some of the more obscure stuff.

Here’s the best stuff I read in 2011: Read more

My Favourite Books for 2011

This was the year that I bought, sold, and then re-bought a Kindle.  I have an iPad, which I really love, but the Kindle is absolutely the best way to read books.  I’d say this  year I’ve started to read more books than ever before, but when you’re only paying $.99 – $2.99, I find that you take more chances, and give up more easily.

With that said, there were a handful of books this year that I really loved, and that make my “Best of the year” list. Read more

This is My Next, Well What Exactly?

Yes, his name is really Al

2011 marked several significant milestones for me.

I turned 40, Charlene and I celebrated our 10th anniversary, December marks 5 years at Info-Tech for me, our basement, begun October 2009 will finally be fully finished

Also, my hands-on, day-to-day involvement with All New Comics ended.

It’s been six years since I joined up with Peter to form All New Comics, Canada’s Online Comics Superstore. In that time a ton has changed for me.

Char and I had two kids, moved from Ajax Ontario to London (where I’m 10 minutes away from two great comic shops,and a lunch time walk from two more), I have a new job with tons more responsibility, and I have less and less time for other stuff, all the while I’m trying to figure out what my next challenge will be.

Meanwhile the industry has changed, with stores closing, entire lines of comics being rebooted, and of course digital

We did some pretty super-cool things and I think it’s safe to say we changed the Canadian Comic Shop landscape in several ways, most significantly by servicing remote areas like Nunavut, where our lone customer there was 6 hours away from the nearest shop!

I am not gone, far from it. I’ve been transitioning with Pete since June, and he handles about 90% of stuff now. I will keep my hand in the marketing stuff (monthly updates, Facebook and Twitter stuff), and I’ll make sure the site’s code stays humming along, but the days of me responding to emails at 2am are likely over.

For our customers, nothing really changes, other than Pete responding to more emails than me. He’s handled most of the business for the last three years. You can expect the same quality of service, and the same awesome comics will still go out with the same attention to detail in the packing of orders.

What’s next for me? The New Ninjas and I are working on something cool that we hope to tell folks about soon, and I have an idea or two of my own up my sleeve, and of course Char says I should relax as well

I guess the best thing to say is stay tooned!

What Matters to Me at Work

This year I turned 40, and I looked at a lot of different things in my life.  One of them that I focused the most on was what was meaningful work to me.  I spend 8-12 hours a day working for someone who isn’t me, and in those 8-12 hours I need to do things that make me happy, otherwise I should probably go off and become an organic hybrid chioat (half chicken, half goat…egg bearing of course) farmer.

So I sat down and figured out what matters the most to me at work.

Don’t Do It Unless You Can Make It Awesome
I love Captain Pike’s line in the JJ Abrams Star Trek Movie. “You know, your father was Captain of a starship for 12 minutes, he saved the lives of 800 crew including your mother’s and yours. I dare you to do better.”

My goal is to make everything I touch better, no matter how small that improvement is. That should be your goal too. Everything you do should be better than it was before you touched it.

If you can’t do that, stop touching things.

What You Do Is More Important Than How You Do It!
The minute you have written that last line of code you will figure out a better way to do it. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve finished a project, looked back at a bunch of the CSS classes I declared, and said “Well whoever did that was obviously stupid.”, that whoever was me…and at this point…who cares? Get it done, refactor through iterations, and move on.

Just Get It Done!
Seriously, get it done. Don’t spend endless hours wondering what you could do, writing intricate specs, and trying to figure out exactly what user base will use exactly what feature.

Experience tells me that we’re wrong 90% of the time anyway.

Users don’t use your product the way you think they will. They’ll hack it into new configurations, and figure out new ways to ruin it. Just get it out there, refactor it through iterations, and move on.

Just Ship It Already!
It’s good enough. You have no idea what users are going to do to it anyway. Why are you optimizing the network code if you don’t even know that 5 people are going to use it? Get it out, and if 1000 people start using it, throw up a “Oops, you guys are kicking our asses” post and get busy refactoring it…then refactor it further through iterations, and move on.

Make sure you know who you’re coding for
This is where “As a (type of user) I need to (do something) so I can (gain a benefit).” comes into play, if you’re unsure of exactly what you’re doing, make sure you look hard a the user type, what they want to do, and what benefit they get out of it. If you’re missing any one of those you’re probably doing something that doesn’t need to be done.

A system is NOT a type of user
Don’t ever say “as a system I need to do something”, systems aren’t actors, and if you’ve identified a system level task, congratulations…you just discovered a task. Figure out who the person is who gains the benefit, and you’ve got a task.

Know when to throw out the rules
As a (type of user) I need to (do something) so I can (gain a benefit). It’s a great way to remember all of the actors and benefits, but frankly if “The publishing tool needs to PUBLISH A GORRAM BLOG POST WITHOUT BREAKING” gets the point across…WHO CARES (besides the Scrum Police ™).

My DIG 2011 Web Stream Overview

Jeffery Zeldman at DIG

The DIG (Digital Interactive Gaming) conference in London Ontario added a Web Development stream this year to compliment the gaming streams. With an opening keynote by Jeffery Zeldman’ and a closing one by Derek Featherstone, there was world class content being offered in my own home town. These are my slightly edited notes which I took during the talks. There’s some great insight in here, and some really cool links for reference later. Read more

A beautiful life – The passing of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs

Today the world is a little less beautiful, because yesterday, Steve Jobs died.

I have no profound story of how I met Mr. jobs, or how I’ve used his products for decades, the truth is I hated every experience with a Mac I’d ever had until a couple of years ago (except for editing…Macs always rocked at editing, and Final Cut Pro was a joy to work with).

I was a late convert, it took a long time, and it all started with an MP3 player.

We were all given iPod Mini’s at TSN as an annual gift, it was a nice little device, and I used the hell out of it, discovering podcasts, and remembering my love for non-mainstream talk radio.  Suddenly I could listen to two hours of tech news every week, or a weekly video games show.  I was given an iPod video, and loved seeing how video could suddenly be in your pocket (plus 30 gigs was enough to keep my entire music library with me).

My habits changed and soon I was no longer buying CD’s, why bother when in 3 minutes I could have excellent quality audio files on my iPod?

I strayed a little and experimented with a Microsoft Zune (still ahead of its time doing things like wireless sync and social media connections 3 years before anyone else) , but soon moved to an iPod touch and then an iPhone.

I haven’t looked back, the iPhone is the most amazing, ubiquitous device I’ve ever touched.  It is always with me, and is everything from my camera to my diary.

We bought a 27″ iMac at work, and I fell in love with it.  Editing was a breeze, and I had to admit that OSX had come a long way.  Shortly after, I bought my first Mac, a used white MacBook.  I’ve never looked back, and while I own a couple of PC’s in the house still, Apple has a prominent place in my home.

When the iPad came out, I immediately coveted it, but I swore to wait until the v2 came out. In the mean time I bought an Apple TV, and got Char an iPod touch.

In the spring I bought an aluminum 13″ Macbook Pro, I’m not one to “love” my computer, it’s a tool, but I actually love my MacBook Pro.  I had always heard Apple converts say “it just works”, and that’s the case for me.  Every now and then I have to log into a Windows box, and I dread it.  Things are slower for no reason, and you can tell that there’s always a ton of overhead going on.  When a window stops responding on my Mac for some reason it’s totally isolated and never takes down the system.

The iPad has been a revolution to me.  I answer 90% of my email on it, read all of my news on it, and consume most other media through it.  Plus I do weird things like take notes, manage my server, and do a little drawing.

It truly is magical, and what Mr. Jobs made his company understand was that technology is an enabler, and the best technology moves out of the user’s way.

Steve Jobs has made beautiful products, and he has challenged the rest of us to not settle for good enough.  I think it’s fair to say that a lot of my desire to deliver awesomeness and never settle for “okay” or “mediocre” is because of the inspiration of Steve Jobs.

Without a doubt Apple’s products command a premium, but they should, I sat for five hours with my laptop on battery power last night, and my iPad regularly gets 8-10 hours of solid use.  They don’t overheat, they don’t crash randomly, and the touch experience is so simple that Maks has been using an iOS device since he was one and a half! Both he and Kaylin can navigate around on an iPod, iPhone, or iPad easily.

The fact that he had the vision to create these products has allowed others to iterate on them and create new versions, which has inspired Apple to continue to be better. They were catalyst products that boosted us forward decades in innovation to the point where science fiction and science fact are the same.

He may not have hewn the brushed aluminum, or coded the interfaces that make everything Apple touches awesome, but all indications are that he micro-managed the CRAP out of the organization to get them to where they are. He built a company that will go on and do amazing things because of people like Jony Ive, and Tim Cook.

Apple will survive and thrive long after Steve is gone, and the world is better because of it.

How to Create an Online PVR

Amahi Media Server

About six months ago my MediaSmart Home Server started acting strangely.  I did quite a bit of research and my conclusion was that the new software I installed about a year ago (which gave it a ton more functionality) was kind of bloated for the underpowered hardware.

What to do?  I love my home server, I love the fact that it did backups and all kinds of nice little things, but honestly in the 4 years I’ve had it, I’ve only used the backup features twice (once to save a corrupt hard drive, once to save Char’s computer from a virus).  Other than that it worked as a NAS and a media collector.

As a NAS it was wonderful, until a hard drive failure made me lose a few files.  That was irritating.  As a media collector it was horrible, duplicating files and creating a labyrinthian file structure that hurt my face.

Plus my needs have changed.  I don’t like having a separate PVR in my house sucking up power, I have a Boxee and an Apple TV in my house now, and I’m sure there are wonderful things they can do as well.  Wouldn’t it be great if I could have a cheap secondary NAS to do all of my backups to (maybe 2TB of RAID1 duplication), and on top of that have a second NAS that could do media collection and PVR everything?  What would be extra cool is if it could do it with my extremely power conscious hardware and maybe take 2-3 computers out of our equation here in the homestead.  As an added benefit, if I can figure out how to do all of this via the internet, I can probably cut the cord.

The first part was to buy a DLink DNS-323, it’s a little NAS box that has 2 drive bays, is incredibly hackable, and has a bunch of different little features in it.  It’s Linux based, so in order to do cool things, I’d need to break out my long dormant bash skills, but I love a challenge.

I mounted the box, got a hard drive in there, and went out to find some of the features I’d need to make the box better.  I added the FireFly media server, a dynamic DNS server, and an update to create better SMB (regular networking) shares.  It was dead simple, and probably the best $100.00 I could have spent.  I moved my files over without much effort and then looked at my Home Server.

So now I have this beautiful piece of hardware that is essentially a brick.  What to do with it?  Enter Amahi.  I’ve been reading about it for a while, it’s a lightweight server based on Fedora Linux with a slick web interface.  It does regular NAS stuff, allows for automated scheduled backups of computers, and has some extra things like SickBeard (automated download of TV shows) integration.

I downloaded and installed it according to the instructions on How To Geek: Upgrade Your MediaSmart Home Server, and everything worked pretty much as advertised.  I then put the drive in my Home Server, and had it configured to do some cool things.

SickBeard

Up first, SickBeard, which schedules downloads of TV shows.

SABnzbd

Up next, SABnzbd, which goes out to (***some place special on the internet***) downloads the files, unpacks them, and stores them in a file.  The average TV show takes about 3 minutes to download.

So how does it work?  After the first week it’s recorded all of our TV shows, saved them to the network share, and we can watch them in the basement on the Boxee Box.

Where do we go from here?  Well first up, I’m getting a new internet connection.  While I have no problems with Rogers, from a technical point of view, I HATE doing the constant mental calculations about how close to my limit I am and whether I can download that ISO from Technet, or if I can download that game on the PSN.  I’m going with TechSavvy, and I’ll probably cut the cord once we get our HD Antennas working properly.

Comic Sales You’re Doing It Wrong

Action Comics #1

I still get my comics from All New Comics, but because I get quite a bit less than I used to they come at the end of the month.

There was quite a bit of press about Grant Morrison’s Action Comics #1 (buy it now at All New Comics), and after reading some of the reviews online, I decided that I wanted to check out some of the other new books.

So on a whim I went to a local comic shop on my lunch break. The store is by far London’s largest.  The bearded proprietor asked me what I was looking for. “The new DC books” said I. “Sorry man, I can’t sell them to you until I have pulled them all for my regular customers. Come back at 4pm.” said he.

Seriously. 4pm?

So let me get this straight. At lunch you see a customer come into your store. He’s not a regular who normally buys from you, but he’s wearing a dress shirt, dress pants, and dress shoes. Without stereotyping, he’s likely got some money. He’s offering to pay you money for comics. Specifically he’s offering to pay you money for the new comics which everyone has over-ordered SPECIFICALLY TO ADDRESS THIS AMAZING NEW MARKET WHICH WE ALL ASSUME WILL BE COMING INTO OUR STORES (online at All New Comics we have LITERALLY ordered twice our normal subscription numbers to sell to people who visit our site…normally if we sell 20 copies of a comic, we’ll sell 2 online, but we’re gambling that a bunch of new faces will be checking stuff out, and so far that’s paid off).

I went back to my office, turned on my iPad, and downloaded Action #1, Batgirl #1, and Swamp Thing #1. Later tonight I think I’m going to buy a few more new comics from the DC Comics App (even though it irritates me that I’m paying full price to basically rent a comic book).

Now let’s be honest, I COULD have pressed the issue.  I could have told him that I own an online shop and really just wanted to check some issues out, I COULD have told him I used to work in that very store years ago (and there’s a good chance he was a customer of mine at some point), I could have name dropped any one of a half dozen people who would have been able to help me out.  But that’s not the point.  The point is that this store failed the most basic principle of this new launch.  Sell to people you don’t normally sell to.  These guys should have been TRIPPING over themselves to help me out.

I’ve bought a few things in the shop from time to time.  I bring my kids in, and buy them stuff, I buy supplies like boxes, which indicates I have comics from SOME source, and am likely a good “mark” to try to convince to buy from them, and they can’t even make the effort for me.

I wish I could say this is an isolated incident, but this same treatment has happened to me at pretty much every single comic shop I’ve ever visited.  I’ve been irritated, overlooked, or otherwise ignored time and time again.

People have all sorts of excuses for what is killing comic shops, I’ll tell you right now that the problem with most comic shops is right behind the counter.