The Refined Geek

I wrote a post just last month that laid out the reasons why the banks would probably not be dropping rates independently of the RBA, even though the current funding climate could allow them to do so. Indeed current interest rates are comparable to when we were in the depths of the Global Financial Crisis however our, and the vast majority of others worldwide, economy is no longer struggling. These are things you don’t usually see going hand in hand because when times are good people like to borrow and spend which usually leads to a healthy credit market. It seems that punters are still wary of another GFC-esque situation as whilst the economy has vastly improve the desire for credit hasn’t which is quite odd, but nothing to be concerned about in the grand scheme of things (unless you’re a lender, of course).

It was for those reasons that many did not expect a rate cut from the Reserve Bank yesterday as all the pressures that prompted past cuts (decline in demand for Australian products, Eurozone Crisis, etc.) have run their course. It came as something of a shock then that they decided to cut another 25 basis points off the current cast rate bringing it to a record low 2.75%, dipping below even the lowest rate available during the height of the GFC. The rate decision release makes for some interesting reading as the reasons behind the decision aren’t the ones I was expecting.

The RBA acknowledges that the funding climate has improved dramatically with many of our larger trading partners undergoing periods of expansion. The Eurozone is still in recession although its effect on us is muted, largely thanks to the limited amount of trade with do with them. They also expect investment in the resources sector to reach its peak this year and so part of this rate cut could be a proactive move to encourage people to start investing in other areas before the resources boom starts to tail off. Inflation has remained within their target range being at 2.5% for the past year. However the major factor in cutting rates seems to come from the desire to encourage more spending and moving their savings into more productive asset classes.

It’s true that rate cuts take a while to work their way through the economy and the last year or so of cuts is still having an effect. Primarily this is due to relieving mortgage pressure which doesn’t yield benefits quickly but sustained periods of low rates will eventually lead to more consumer spending (as the RBA notes). This rate cut then appears to be more of a shock tactic rather than a long play, hoping to encourage people to either spend more or entice people into taking out mortgages at rates that will likely not be repeated for quite some time, boosting the credit industry. Additionally rate cuts always put a downward pressure on the Australian dollar which will help boost exports.

The ideas are sound as historically moving the cash rate downward does all the things that they’re expecting this current rate cut to do. However I’m a little sceptical as to whether it will have the desired effect this time around due to the circumstances we find ourselves in. The numerous cuts over the past 18 months, which were largely in reaction to the deteriorating conditions in the Eurozone, haven’t had the large impacts that they did during the GFC. Primarily this is because of how well insulated we are from said crisis but it also appears that Australian’s have lost their appetite for credit. Whilst its easy to lay the blame at the GFC for this I can’t help but feel there’s something else at play here, something which moving the cash rate won’t do much to alleviate.

This whole situation is a result of the weird financial climate we find ourselves in currently. Whilst I might not think the RBA is on the right track with this decision I don’t have any good solutions to the issues at hand because, as far as I can tell, what we have is a crisis of consumer sentiment, not a problem with the funding environment. It’s quite possible that this last dip will be the hair trigger for a major ramp up but I’ll remain sceptical for now as the previous cuts failed to bring that same idea to fruition, even if they were done for different reasons.

One of the peeves I had with the official Twitter client on Windows Phone 7, something I didn’t mention in my review of the platform, was that among the other things that its sub-par at (it really is the poor bastard child of its iOS/Android cousins) it couldn’t display images in-line. In order to actually see any image you have to tap the tweet then the thumbnail in order to get a look at it, which usually loads the entire large image which isn’t required on smaller screens. The official apps on other platforms were quite capable of loading appropriate sized images in the feed which was a far better experience, especially considering it worked for pretty much all of the image sharing services.

Everyone knows there’s no love lost between Instagram and I but that doesn’t mean I don’t follow people who use it. As far back as I can remember their integration in the mobile apps has left something to be desired, especially if you want to view the full sized image which usually redirected you to their atrocious web view. Testing it for this post showed that they’ve vastly improved that experience which is great, especially considering I’m still on Windows Phone 7 which was never able to preview Instagram anyway, but it seems that this improvement may have come as part of a bigger play from Instagram trying to claw back their users from Twitter.

Reports are coming in far that Instagram has disabled their Twitter card integration which stops Twitter from being able to display the images directly in the feed like they have been doing since day 1. Whilst I don’t seem to be experiencing the issue that everyone is reporting (as you can see from the devastatingly cute picture above) there are many people complaining about this and Instagram has stated that disabling this integration is part of their larger strategy to provide a better experience through their platform. Part of that was improve the mobile web experience which I mentioned earlier.

It’s an interesting move because for those of us who’ve been following both Twitter and Instagram for a while the similarities are startling. Twitter has been around for some 6 years and it spent the vast majority of that being a company that was extraordinarily open with its platform, encouraging developers far and wide to come in and develop on their platform. Instagram, whilst not being as wide open as Twitter was, did similar things making their product integrate tightly with Twitter’s ecosystem whilst encouraging others to develop on it. Withdrawing from Twitter in favour of their own platform is akin to what Twitter did to potential client app developers, essentially signalling to everyone that it’s our way or the highway.

The cycle is eerily similar, both companies started out as small time players that had a pretty dedicated fan base (although Instagram grew like a weed in comparison to Twitter’s slow ride to the hockey stick) and then after getting big they start withdrawing all the things that made them great. Arguably much of Instagram’s growth  came from its easy integration with Twitter where many of the early adopters already had large followings and without that I don’t believe they would’ve experienced the massive growth they did. Disabling this functionality seems like they’re shooting themselves in the foot with the intention of attempting some form of monetization eventually (that’s the only reason I can think of for trying to drive users back to the native platform) but I said the same thing about Twitter when they pulled that developer stunt, and they seem to be doing fine.

It probably shouldn’t be surprising that this is what happens when start ups hit the big time because at that point they have to start thinking seriously about where they’re going. For giant sites like Instagram that are still yet to turn a profit from the service they provide it’s inevitable that they’d have to start fundamentally changing the way they do business and this is most likely just the first step in wider sweeping changes. I’m still wondering how Facebook is going to turn a profit from this investment as they’re $1 billion in the hole and there’s no signs of them making that back any time soon.

It was only 2 weeks ago today that the world was captivated by our latest endeavour in space exploration: the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars. No doubt it was a great achievement and the science data that the rover will bring back to us will undoubtedly further our understanding of our red celestial sister in ways that we can’t possibly fathom yet. Still Curiosity achievement was only possible due to the great amount of work that came before it in the form of dozens of other space problems, numerous landers and of course other roving space craft. There is one craft in particular that has had so much to do with space exploration (and that just crossed a major milestone) that I feel it bears mentioning.

That craft is Voyager 1.

On August 20, 1977 NASA launched the first of two craft in the Voyager program. At the time the alignment of all the planets in our solar system was quite favourable, allowing a probe to be able to visit all of the outer gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) without having to use much propellant or having to spend a lot of time travelling between them thanks to the gravity assists it could get from each of the giants. Indeed the recently launched New Horizons craft that will be visiting Pluto sometime in 2015 will have a speed of roughly 15KM/s which is about 2KM/s slower than Voyager’s current speed showing you just how much those gravity assists helped.

Voyager 1′s primary mission was to study the planets of the outer solar system and it made quite a few interesting discoveries. On its approach to Jupiter Voyager 1 noticed that it actually had rings like Saturn’s although they were much to faint to see with any earth bound telescopes at the time. Voyager 1 also discovered that Io was volcanically active, something that the previous Pioneer probes and earth based observatories had failed to see. It’s encounter with Saturn provided some incredible insights into Titan however this precluded it from being able to visit any of the other planets in the grand tour due to it missing out on the potential gravitational boost and trajectory alignment that Saturn could have provided. Still this set it up for it’s ultimate mission: to study interstellar space.

Whilst Voyager’s list of scientific achievements is long and extremely admirable there are actually 2 non-scientific things that keep it stuck in my mind. The first is something that Voyager 1 (and its sister craft) carries on board with it: the Voyager Golden Record. Contained on the record that’s made from materials designed to withstand the harsh environment of space are recordings of various classical music, pictures of earth as well as pictograms that depict how the record should be used by anyone who finds it. Since Voyager 1 will be the first interstellar craft it is quite possible that one day another form of intelligent life will come across it and the record will serve as an introduction to the human species. It’s an absolutely beautiful idea and symbolizes the human desire to reach further and further beyond our limits, something that I believe is a driving force behind all of our space exploration.

The second was a picture and whilst I could go on about its significance I think there’s someone much better qualified than me to do so:

It’s sometimes hard to believe that we’ve managed to create something that’s lasted for 35 years in the harshest environment that we know of. The fact is though that we did, we designed it, built it and launched it into the great unknown and because of that we’ve been able to reap the rewards of undertaking such a challenging endeavour. I find projects like these incredibly inspiring; they show that through determination, hard work and good old fashioned science we can achieve things that we never thought possible. I am truly grateful to be alive in such times and I know that the future will only bring more like this.

Happy birthday Voyager 1.

There are some 250+ top level domains available for use on the Internet today and most of them can be had through your local friendly domain registrar. The list has grown steadily over the past couple decades as more and more countries look to cement their presence on the Internet with their very own TLD. The registry responsible for all this is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) who looks after all the domain names as well as handing out the IP blocks to ISPs and corporations that request them. Whilst it seemed that the TLD space was forever going to be the place of countries and specific industries ICANN recently decided that it would allow anyone who could pony up the requisite $200,000 could have their own TLD effectively opening the market up to custom domain suffixes.

For an individual such a price seems ludicrous so it’s unlikely you’ll see .johndoe type domain names popping up all over the place. For most companies though securing this new form of brand identity is worth far more than the asking price and so many have signed up to do so. ICANN has since released a list of all the requested gTLDs and having a look through it has lead me, and everyone else it seems, to make some interesting conclusions about the big players in this custom TLD space (I made an excel spreadsheet of it for easy sleuthing).

The biggest player, although it’s not terribly obvious unless you sort by applicant name, is the newly founded donuts.co registry which has snagged some 300+ new gTLDs in order to start up its business. Donuts has $100 million in seed capital with which to play with which about 60% will be tied up solely in these domain suffix acquisitions. They all seem like your run of the mill SEO-y type words, being a large grab bag of words that the general public is likely to be interested in but are of no value for specific companies. Every domain also has its own associated LLC which isn’t a requirement of the application process so I’m wondering why they’ve done it. Likely it’s for isolating losses in the less than successful domains but it seems like an awful lot of work to do when that could be done in other ways.

They’re not the only ones doing that either. A quick search of other companies who’ve bought multiple domains although none of them have bought the same number that Donuts has. There also seems to be a few companies that are handling the gTLD for other big name companies ostensibly because they have no interest in actually running the gTLD but are just doing it for their brand identity. The biggest player in this space seems to be CSC Global who strangely enough did all their applications from another domain under their control, CSCInfo. It’s probably nothing significant but for a company that apparently specializes in brand identity you’d wonder why they’d apply with a different domain than their own.

What’s really got everyone going though is the domains that Amazon and Google have gone after. Whilst their war chests of gTLDs aren’t anything compared to Donut’s they’re still quite sizable with Amazon grabbing about 80 and Google grabbing just over 100. Some are taking this as being indicative of their future plans as Amazon has put in for gTLDs like mobile but realistically I can just most of them being augments to their current services (got an app on AWS? Get your .mobile domain today!). There’s also a bit of overlap for most of the popular domains that both these companies have gone after as well and I’m not sure what the resolution process for that is going to be.

While the 2000 odd applications seems to show that there’s some interest in these top level domains the real question of their value, at least for us web oriented folks, is whether the search engines will like them as much as other TLDs. There’s been a lot of heavy investment in current sites that reside on the regular TLDs and apart from marketing campaigns and new websites that are looking for a good name (http://this.movie.sucks seems like it’ll be created in no time) I question how much value these TLDs will bring. Sure there will be the initial gold rush of people looking to secure all the domains they can on these new TLDs but after that will there really be anything in them? Will businesses actually migrate to these gTLDs as their primary or will they simply just redirect them to their current sites? I don’t have answers to these questions but I’m very interested to see how these gTLDs get used.

In the interests of full disclosure (and those who are new to the blog) it needs to be known that I’m a pretty big fan of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. So much so it managed to take out my nomination for Game of the Year for 2011, a pretty amazing feat considering the competition it was up against. Still even though my fan boy-ness might be at levels to rival that of my other passions I still couldn’t bring myself to spend the $15 on the Missing Link DLC that was available shortly after. No it would take a heavy discount to $5 in a recent Steam sale to bring me over to the DLC bandwagon but suffice to say, I’m glad I did.

The Missing Link takes place during part of the game where the main character, Adam Jensen, goes off the grid for 3 days. During Human Revolution Pritchard’s enquiries into what happened in the intervening 3 days are brushed off by Jensen and it was very easy to miss this gap in the original game. Indeed the experience would seem to be something he’d want to forget after being taken captive, having all of his augmentations reset to nothing and then having to fight his way out again. It’s a good premise for DLC as the experience plays like a short episode in the bigger Deus Ex world without having to rely too heavily on the original game.

As to be expected all the core aspects of the game: the graphics, gameplay and so on are identical between Human Revolution and The Missing Link. This works well for The Missing Link as all of these things were done extremely well in the original leaving little much room for improvement. That being said that also means the few quirks of the game like the ones I mentioned in the original review are still there. None of them are game breaking but you still need to be aware of them either to avoid getting trapped by them or to use them to make your life easier.

The Missing Link starts you off as a fairly advanced character except that all your mod points are unspent (except for the default ones). What this means is that you can craft your character anew, avoiding some mistakes you might have made. I’m on the fence about this as whilst it makes sense in the story I remember my character being a lot further ahead than the one in The Missing Link was. The choices you then make heavily impact what your experience of The Missing Link will be like (I.E. if you want to hack everything you’re going to have to spend most of your initial points to do that). With the total number of additional praxis points being relatively low you’ve got to make your choices wisely as every single aug can be used within The Missing Link’s short play time.

However The Missing Link heavily encourages you to play a certain way: mostly stealth. Now for most Deus Ex players this will be second nature as it’s pretty much the default play style and indeed Human Revolution heavily favoured this way of playing as well so it really should come as no surprise. It’s slightly disappointing as I attempted to make a run and gun character but ended up having to stealth most sections anyway, rendering those points I spent useless. It’s not a terribly huge deal, but I feel like my time with it would have been a lot better had I opted to spend my points differently.

I need to point out here that The Missing Link’s level design seems to be somewhat lazy compared to that of Human Revolution. Whilst I can understand that the setting doesn’t lend itself well to a large sprawling environment the running back and forward between sections, with the seemingly way too long scanner sections depicted in the screenshot above, doesn’t make for great game play. Indeed you’ll spend much of your time clearing sections you had already cleared previously. It’s a dreadful form of asset reuse and not something I had come to expect from the guys who had made Human Revolution.

Thankfully though the story (and the developer’s humour, as you can see above) is what makes The Missing Link worth playing. Whilst I can’t go too deep into it without spoiling everything for you suffice to say that in the short time you’ll spend with The Missing Link you’ll still be gripped by the story, one that has all the trademark elements that we’ve come to expect from a Deus Ex plot. One criticism I’ll level at it though is the incorporation of what is seemingly an arbitrary decision at one point that only seems to affect some dialogue between Jensen and another character. Had The Missing Link been integrated into the main Human Revolution game this could have been alleviated somewhat, but I can see why this didn’t happen.

For someone who usually avoids DLC like the plague Human Revolution stands out as one that I’ll heartily recommend to anyone who’s played through Deus Ex: Human Revolution and wants to dive back into it. Whilst it may not stand up to the high standards that Human Revolution set for it The Missing Link is still a great story accompanied by intricate and nuanced game play, aspects that many games struggle to pull off individually. Thinking back on it now I still stand by decision to wait though as whilst $15 is fair value (going on a $/hour of game play perspective) I’d still probably hold off on this until there’s another sale just because The Missing Link isn’t exactly required playing unless you’re a completionist.

Rating: 9.0/10

Deus Ex:Human Revolution The Missing Link DLC is available right now on PC, Xbox360 and PlayStation 3 right now for $15 (or equivalent points). Game was played entirely on the PC on hard difficult with around 5 hbours played and 30% of the achievements unlocked.

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I believe I’m not alone when I think I’m mostly immune to the effects of marketing. For the most part my purchasing decisions are based off research and my own personal requirements, not so much by seeing marketing materials. Of course I realise that I’m not totally immune to the effects of marketing as there have been several times when I’ve found myself purchasing one product over another simply because “I saw it advertised somewhere”, although I’m never happy admitting that. There is one type of marketing that I’ve found myself getting hopelessly influenced by and that’s alternate reality games (ARG).

ARGs aren’t exactly a new phenomenon being able to trace their roots back almost 14 years. Up until the last couple years however I was mostly unaware of the concept having never really participated in any of them. However back in early 2010 I got wind of an ARG that was starting up for one of the games that I was intensely excited about, Heavy Rain. It started off as just a curiosity, with a couple YouTube videos and a flash game to give you a bit of insight into the background of Heavy Rain’s story. Of course not all of it was revealed on the first day and I found myself coming back just to find out what the latest was. The ARG took on a whole new level when they set up a Twitter account and started tweeting responses out to people’s questions from a character in the game. Suddenly I found myself staying up until the wee hours just to find out any information that I could.

I knew I was hooked.

Soon after Valve released an update to Portal that added in some new achievements. Of course the community thought it was rather odd that Valve would update a game so long after its release. As it turns out the achievements were just the lure into an incredibly in depth ARG that had fans working through the details for weeks after the initial update. Whilst I lacked the capability to help push the ARG forward in any way I did follow the events unfold very closely, loving every theory that people would develop and revelling in the excitement when someone made a new discovery. Both of these ARGs drew me into the games immensely and subsequently my time with the final products was much more memorable.

You can then imagine my excitement when I came across the following trailer for the upcoming game Deus Ex: Human Revolution:

Like the main corporation of the previous games (UNATCO) Sarif Industries has their own, rather flashy site. Upon entering it you’ll find everything is normal for a while until eventually it appears to be taken over by the rebels mentioned the trailer above. After fooling around for a while you’ll find yourself in the midst of a small hacking game which upon finishing gives you some insight into the upcoming game. I lost a good hour or two fooling around on the site and with the hacking games and if I hadn’t already pre-ordered the game I would’ve done so immediately afterwards.

ARGs are probably the only bit of marketing that doesn’t break my rule of avoiding the hype for unreleased games. Since the majority of an ARG is back story and doesn’t contain spoilers or over the top marketing speak it adds to the experience rather than detracting from it. I’ve all too often found critical pieces of games ruined by online commentary since, even without knowing it, reveal key pieces of information that sculpt my game play in a certain way. ARGs, since they have to operate as stand alone narratives in their own right, avoid doing this quite well although there is still the possibility to go too far.

I think the reason I get so hooked on these ARGs is that they increase my level of immersion with the end game significantly. Instead of going into the game without any background I’ve already got a decent investment in the story and you get a much better feeling for the characters and their motivations. Since my level of immersion plays a very big part in how much I will enjoy a game then it follows that ones marketed with an ARG aspect are far more likely for me to find enjoyable. Indeed my reviews of games with ARG marketing are above average and I definitely remember them more clearly than the multitude of other games that I have played.

I was awake long before the alarm went off, an annoying trait I picked up many years ago when I was tinkering with my body clock. It always seems that whenever I set an alarm I’ll be awake at least 10~20 minutes before hand but should I try to wake without an alarm I’ll more than likely oversleep. Still I wasn’t as tired as I thought I would be and 30 minutes later I was ready to go and spending the last few moments in our hotel room watching the morning news whilst Rebecca got ready. We left the hotel 30 minutes later and caught a cab to JFK airport where we spent the next hour or so tracking down some breakfast before boarding our flight.

JFK to LA is one of the longest flights in the states and it was set to be about 5 hours to get to our destination. Thankfully this flight had Wifi and in a fit of forethought I had bought a monthly pass to the Delta in-flight system for only $7 more than the daily pass, granting me the ability to catch up on my tweets and Facebook posts. I didn’t use it much more than that though I was far too engrossed in the last 150 pages of Judas Unchained to care about much else, practically gulping down those last chapters without coming up for air. Knowing that I had 5 hours to kill and more than enough time to finish that book I had brought the sequel, Judas Unchained, along with me and started tucking into that immediately. I got about 100 pages into it before the call came on for us to land in LA. Our 5 hour flight had only lost us 3 hours putting the local time smack bang on midday.

After grabbing our luggage we made our way to the airport shuttle area to catch a bus to the hire car place. I had spent a lazy hour or so looking over the cars available the night before and settled on a Dodge Charger. Realistically it would be far too big for us, more suited to a small family, but I wanted something that would provide us a deal of comfort over some of the longer drives we were planning and the econoboxes weren’t really going to cut it. Arriving there we were told they were out of Chargers and the only one they had resembled a battered old Ford Falcon. A “mid sized” SUV was available for a similar price so we went ahead with that and got to pick our car. I picked a Jeep Grand Cherokee and got us on our way to the hotel with gusto.

After the initial excitement of seeing the city I realised that what I thought was clouds on the horizon was actually the thick blanket of smog. As we got closer it only got worse with the haze giving most of the buildings a particularly eery glow. Even in NYC the pollution wasn’t this bad as when we looked back at Manhattan from Liberty Island we could clearly see everything. From a similar distance in LA we were struggling to see the more distant buildings. Needless to say, I didn’t feel much like looking around town.

The hotel itself is in downtown LA, a fact I had failed to notice when booking it. Usually this wouldn’t be much of a concern but I knew this meant they’d be charging like a wounded bull for their parking. Indeed they were to the tune of $35 a night, as much as the car had cost to hire per day. Still the valets were nice and it meant we didn’t have to worry about parking but after the amount we paid for the hotel getting hit for extras feels a bit rich. I had the same feeling when I hooked up my laptop in the room only to be shown an sign-in page for internet access for $13 a day. I’d stayed in a $70/night hotel that gave me the fastest Internet connection I’ve had in the entire US for free so this was just the icing on the shit sandwich. Undeterred I started poking around to see if they were doing ARP poisoning like the DoubleTree was in NYC and found that they weren’t. 10 minutes of trying various MAC addresses later had me up and running with an Internet connection without having to shell out for something that I don’t believe should be a paid extra in a 4 star hotel.

We wanted to pick up some hotel room supplies so I tracked down the closet Walmart and punched the co-ordinates. About 10 minutes later we were passing through a pretty run down section of downtown LA. We past the supposed location twice and noticed that what was supposed to be a Walmart looked like a run down strip mall. Figuring that it was either a planned site (or more likely, one that was closed down) I found another and promptly got stuck in pre-rush hour traffic, seeing a 10 mile journey take almost 45 minutes. We got there though and secured out wants before heading back to the hotel for a workout before dinner. We hit a local pizza place that served amazing pizzas, leaving us both too full to finish and taking a box home to polish off later.

We’re hoping to hit up Disney World tomorrow as it’s something that Rebecca has really been looking forward to. After visiting Disney Land in Tokyo almost a decade ago and hating it (but then again I was an angsty little bastard) I’m keen to see if I’ll have a similar reaction the second time around. Plus it will hopefully get us away from the dreadful smog that seems to be unrelenting around here, making staying in the city very undesirable.

Our last day in Montreal began like any other with a tortured first hour spent in bed fighting off the morning daylight with pillows over our heads. We were determined to make the most of this day however and eventually dragged ourselves out a whole hour earlier than we usually manage. Instead of trying to find another place for breakfast we decided to hit up the hotel’s in house restaurant, a chain that was apparently started by Celine Dion. The food there was quite adequate considering the price and just under an hour later we were on our way to our first destination, Montreal’s Olympic park.

I was mostly interested in this thing as it was a marvel of engineering and architecture but also because it would provide a pretty nice view of the entire city of Montreal. The weather was predicted to clear up around midday but by the time we arrived it was still very overcast. Thankfully though there was no rain in sight so the olympic tower stood out like a sore thumb, a giant amongst the rather subdued surroundings.

It was almost impressive as the disrepair the building has fallen into over the 24 years. Any exposed steel was rusting considerably and much of the concrete was beginning to crumble away. Undaunted we bought a ticket to the observation deck and spent all of 30 seconds getting from the bottom to the top. The view from there was quite impressive as was how dated everything was in there. It was relatively untouched down to the pictures of the skyline that labelled everything you could see through the windows. We spent about half an hour there before being done with the place, along with a bunch of other tourists who’d only got there 10 minutes before us. We did take a quick look around the facilities and the olympic pool seemed to be a hive of activity, but the rest of the place was eerily deserted.

After returning to the warmth of our car we made our way to Mount Royal, one of the highest peaks in Montreal and home to a couple of local attractions. After driving around for a while and stopping at one lookout we realised that we had driven past the main area and quickly made our way back there. We first checked out a small house that had a cafe and a souvenir shop (where Rebecca picked up her new friend, Douglas the Moose) before hitting up one of the trails. That took us up to the the chateau that gave us one of the most beautiful views of downtown Montreal we had seen thus far. We weren’t finished though as Mount Royal is also home to a giant illuminated cross that we were both keen to have a gander at.

The site was currently undergoing some upgrades so I couldn’t get right up to it, but it’s basically just a giant radio tower covered in lights. The area it was surrounded by was quite picturesque though, almost completely unspoiled by the hive of human activity that went on around it. We spent another half an hour walking down the track to get back to our car figuring we had time for one more attraction before it was time to meet up for our last dinner with Laura. Really there was only one place to go: Saint Joseph’s Oratory, the largest church in Canada.

Now most of you will know my rather complicated stance on religion, identifying primarily as Atheist but having my own religion that I don’t talk about much since it seems to offend anyone who has even the slightest inclination towards a theistic belief¹. Still I love big buildings and churches are usually amongst the biggest and oldest buildings around. We made our way simply by looking for the top of the church as it towered over every other building that surrounded it, but even that didn’t prepare me for just how big this thing was.

Standing in front of this behemoth of a building I couldn’t help but marvel at how well maintained it was in comparison to so many of the other older buildings I had seen around Montreal. The gardens were perfectly landscaped with sandstone blocks encasing the pathways. The church itself was none too bad either with the exterior barely showing any signs of its age with several places undergoing renovations as we were walking through. Inside it was unlike any other church I’ve been in with long halls and one room with a roof that had to be over 30m high. We wandered around for a good hour and half just soaking in the almost unfathomable splendour that is this church.

Soon after we departed to meet up with Laura for our final dinner. We were to dine at a restaurant called Elixor, a slightly upper class place that had portions to rival its American counterparts. We foolishly ordered an appetizer and when the main course came both of the girls could barely touch their meals. I managed to down most of mine but was hesitant to go much further as Laura had mentioned they had fantastic cheesecake. Since I’m a bit of a sucker for cheesecake (especially a peanut butter one) I ordered up a slice that was quickly devoured by everyone at the table, despite them being “too full” to continue with their dinners. We said our goodbyes as we might not see her before our flight tomorrow and made our way back to our hotel.

Tomorrow we will be jetting off to New York, New York for a week high above Broadway in Times Square. I’ve been told that a week is the minimum required to see a good chunk of this giant metropolis and I’m very much looking forward to soaking up its culture. It will be sad to leave behind this town that I’ve just begun to get the hang of but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited for what awaits me in New York City.

¹I’ve considered writing about this a number of times but never felt like anyone would really be interested in a formalised version of what amounts to my belief system. If you are genuinely interested in hearing about it drop me a line, I might be persuaded to write about it

Ever since the social web revolution of the past few years the issue of privacy has been thrust into the limelight repeatedly with the same results every time: people whine and complain yet nothing really changes. Unfortunately the majority never end up realising that anything you put on the Internet can be considered private, just as anything you left out on your front lawn would be. Still people continue to use the service and put increasingly inappropriate information up causing sites like Fail-Book to materialize that exploit everyone’s misplaced trust in this service.

Don’t get me wrong though, I have a Facebook account with quite a lot of information on it. However for the most part the majority of it is locked out to the wider world, but I’m under no illusions that I’m a social engineering attack away from one (or more) of my friends being compromised and my full account being laid bare for whomever was after it. That doesn’t worry me however as the data I have on there is nothing a quick Google or thumb through the Whitepages wouldn’t pick up. I also have a damn good level of trust in my friends to not put anything stupid up there and three years of use of the service hasn’t seen this trust broken. It would seem however that I’m in the minority.

This still doesn’t detract from the fact that some of Facebook’s policies are a ass-backwards. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and CEO, has gone on record recently saying that privacy is no longer considered “normal”, something which I’m finding hard to swallow:

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Facebook has said that people no longer have an expectation of privacy thanks to increasing uptake of social networking.

Speaking at the Crunchie Awards in San Francisco this weekend, the 25 year-old web entrepreneur said: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people.”

Zuckerberg went on to add that the rise of social media reflects the changing attitudes among the general public, saying that this radical change has happened in the space of five years.

We have a term here in the IT and engineering industry called eating your own dogfood. When an organisation provides a service it speaks volumes when they use the service themselves. Zuckerberg, to his credit, does use Facebook however it would seem that he has a different expectation of privacy to the one he preaches. I say this because recently Facebook enforced all users to update their privacy settings, with them oriented towards exposing more information to the wider world. It was a valid move for them from a business perspective (more public data = more visibility) however when their own CEO ends up blowing his profile wide open you have to question how the normal user will fair. Zuckerberg stated that it was deliberate, but his actions say otherwise (I.E. it’s now back the way it was). You can see why I don’t swallow the tripe that Zuckerberg is peddling, he’s saying one thing and doing another.

For some reason the social web has made us incresingly trusting of large organisations providing us something for free. In fact it’s the norm and any organisation attempting something on the web that dare charges for it is only months away from being usurped by some young upstart in a garage who does the same thing for gratis. This means now that most of the free applications on the web don’t seek revenue directly from their consumers, they get it from the data that their application harvests. The price you pay for free services is that organisation knowing some very intimate details about you.

You might not think there’s much value in knowing that you loved that book you read last week or that you and a couple friends are all fans of the same celebrity but to marketers and product researchers this stuff is a drug. Facebook’s advertising system is so detailed that you can narrow the demographic you target by age, gender, location and even sexual preferences. It doesn’t stop there either, with them tracking basically every activity on Facebook:

The Rumpus: On your servers, do you save everything ever entered into Facebook at any time, whether or not it’s been deleted, untagged, and so forth?

Facebook Employee: That is essentially correct at this moment. The only reason we’re changing that is for performance reasons. When you make any sort of interaction on Facebook — upload a photo, click on somebody’s profile, update your status, change your profile information —

If you have a product with a known demographic your advertising budget will go a lot further if you can just target them, rather than say posting a billboard on a highway. Facebook isn’t the only one doing this, our friendly search giant Google’s advertising network has been using such demographic capturing technology for years now to better target their Adsense and Adwords programs.

So while I won’t go on a crusade and say that everyone should stop using these services I will say this: manage your expectations appropriately. Facebook et al are great tools for staying in touch with friends (and finding long lost old ones) but if you wouldn’t put it on your front lawn you shouldn’t put it on Facebook. If you can’t trust your friends not to put something on there then it would be best not to be on there in the first place. Whilst I would lament the death of such humourous sites like Fail Book it would be a small price to pay for the populace at large wising up to the fact that there’s no such thing as a free lunch in this world.

But then again I’m probably asking too much. (Seems I’m getting more and more cynical in my old age )