White’s of Henry Lane

Let me make sure you’re clear on two things before you read the rest of my post: I love trees and spring quite a bit? Got it? Okay.

Now, what I don’t like is allergy season and Poplar trees. I’ve always suffered from allergies. When I was a kid, pollen would literally hospitalize me. Midnight rushes to emergency to hook me up to a respirator wheren’t uncommon. I was what Victorian novelists would have called “a sickly and pale child”. Tracking my allergies in adulthood using the Claritin Pollen Report has confirmed that my spore-belching nemeses are the Poplar and the Birch trees.

Who can hate Birch trees? They’re singularly lovely. There is nothing like puttering along a Birch-lined shore in a canoe in cottage country. It feels like you’re in a Group of Seven painting.

The Poplar, however, has no redeeming qualities. It is a giant weed. Its arboreal Coffeemate, close enough to a tree that if you absolutely have to use one you can convince yourself it will do. Developers use the things to try and convince you that their McMansions have been around for more than a year. They’re the official flora of undifferentiated drab suburbia. They smell sickly and diseased on hot, humid summer days, and they drop these sticky red things. In short: Poplars suck. I hate ‘em.

This year, my lovely wife got me to start taking this homeopathic remedy early. Its called Pollinosan, and its very nearly dancing-in-Poplar-thatch effective. I take two little tabs under the tongue three times a day, and its kept me relatively functional during a season in which I historically pray for death.

If you’re at all prone to allergy attacks, I’d suggest you get to a health store and try Pollinosan out. Its not much more than a week’s supply of something like Claritin for a month’s worth, and I’m sure it takes fewer years off your life than these allergy nuclear weapons do.

A week ago today my beloved, aging iPod heaved its last. And I mean heaved. It was in my pocket at the time and the drive started knocking so hard I felt it thumping against my leg. I pulled it out of my pocket to see the dreaded folder/exclamation mark icon flash just before it shut down. I reset it again and again. No go.

On Saturday I scoured the boards for info, and it really looked like I had a dead iPod. I tried everything on the Apple site. Setting the thing to disk mode and plugging it in to a PC would hang the PC until the firewire cable was unplugged.

I could probably get this thing repaired, but its old enough that the the cost probably wouldn’t be worth it. As my wife says, it owes me nothing. Who knows? It may be reborn as an iPod Super …

In light of my discovery that I prefer to have less music on my iPod, I decided to go for the iPod Mini 4G which has been upgraded to have 18+ hours of battery life, and uses USB2 instead of firewire. So far I’m immensely happy with it, but not with my case. I bought a Marware SportSuit Sleeve, which was the only non-silicon option available. Its alright, except that putting the mini in this case often dislodges the headphone jack, pausing the iPod. Then you have to pull everything out and start again. Its annoying. I’m also worried that I’m going to put a lot of stress on the headphone jack. As soon as I find something better, I’m ditching this thing.

UPDATE: … and I did. The Innopocket Metal Deluxe Case. Its light weight, doesn’t add much bulk, and has a fully detachable post for the belt clip I’m never going to use. The iPod slides around a bit in it, particularly when attaching the dock connector, but I don’t think its going to cause any harm.

If you follow the greener side of the “blogosphere” (you may mock me for using that phrase), you’ll have seen a plethora of interesting alternative energy stories focusing on clever use of wind turbines. First off, someone’s planning on launching kites with turbines attached way up to where winds blow pretty steadily, and sending the resulting power back down to earth. Secondly, World Changing shows us this mini-turbine system intended to make a wall more attractive, but provide a side benefit of a trickle of power.

I’ve always wondered about Bay Street here in Toronto. Some trick of geography combined with the most imposing architecture in the downtown core causes Bay Street to funnel an incredibly powerful blast of wind that shoots air out over the harbour, much to the chagrin of pilots and sailors who’ve dubbed this the “Bay Street Blow”.

What is stopping someone from stringing eggbeater-style turbines up between buildings, harnessing all that nuisance wind and converting it into something more useful? Surely even low-efficiency turbines would be able to pull enough energy out of that blow to make it worthwhile. Any thoughts?

I work for a company that is really into Flash. And I mean really. They toss around phrases like “HTML is dead” and “freed from the ridiculous constraints of HTML” with complete abandon. They’re getting the shirts made. They say it in their sleep. Why? Flash looks pretty, and everyone has it.

I wonder how much longer this will be the case, though. First off: have you tried to install Flash recently? It comes with the Yahoo! toolbar which has dramatically increased the size of the thing. They’ve toned this down a little bit; if you have IE you can unbundle the toolbar, and I don’t think they include it in the Firefox download anymore. But this gave a lot of people pause. Its not too huge a leap from a toolbar you don’t want to GAIN.

Secondly, Flash is the tool of choice for people who really really really want to pop up ads. They’re pretty clever about figuring out if your pop up blocker is enabled, and using tiny flash movies to open pop ups instead of Javascript.

Thirdly, Flash ads are starting to stream video and audio to you without asking. Yeah, I have a broadband connection, and yeah, I can handle it, but I think its terribly impolite to push rich content on people who haven’t asked for it.

But finally: Flash can now track you, replacing those easy-to-nix doubleclick/adserve cookies. I have no doubt that the security sandbox settings will change in an upcoming version of the Flash player, but at this time all you can do is modify your security settings in such a way that legitimate Flash movies may break.

The net result of this is that the more savvy web surfers are using Flash blocking tools that require the user to specifically request a Flash movie rather than letting it autoplay. No doubt this technology will become more accessible, and thus more widespread, meaning Flash movies will be crippled in more and more browsers. What will happen the first time a client views their in-production site and instead sees an Adblock window? (Unfortunately, they’ll probably demand the developers find a way to circumvent it, and hopefully our account execs will sit down with them and explain the situation.) Will clients really want their sites built in such a way that users have to go through a number of deliberate steps to visit them? I hope that we’ll start to once again use Flash where it is appropriate instead of a catch-all for web-unfriendly design.

On an unrelated note: why are market wonks fighting with us to show us ads we don’t want? Do they really think eventually we’ll relent? “Okay, you’ve forced me to download 10M of stuff I don’t want to see, I’ll buy your car.” In contrast, last night I was reading up on Agile development. I clicked on about half-a-dozen well-targetted text ads for related projects, and even downloaded a demo of a tool I’d consider recommending for purchase. I’m not adverse to advertising; I object to being abused by advertisers.

UPDATE: There is now a tool in Firefox that lets you manage Local Shared Objects just as you would cookies. Go get Objection.