Ntuple Indemnity

For a new dawn?

In place of saying anything profound enough to break a champagne bottle or two, I am going to proceed directly to a few technical notes.

After much deliberation on the matter of selectivity, I have imported all of the posts from the original Nick’s Café. The majority of the links in the older posts are horribly broken and beyond repair, and the links to my own posts still point to the old location. I may eventually fix the latter.

The HaloScan comments have not been carried over, and none of them were ever so profound as to be worth preserving for posterity. To improve readability, I will probably make liberal use of post breaks for new posts where it is appropriate, but it is unlikely I will go back and do it for older posts, in part because many of them cover multifarious topics at which the opening paragraph cannot begin to hint.

Not every post has been properly sorted into all of the right categories, and there are many that will remain uncategorized.

The bells and whistles of the old site—the CSS style switcher, the U of A weather report, the post index at the top of every page—may or may not arrive at some point, depending on how much I feel like implementing them.

I am still tweaking the present design, and I would appreciate feedback on things that don’t work or could be improved.

I am eminently aware that the right-hand column of the site does not display properly in Internet Explorer 6 for Windows. I made a very conscious design decision to not bother accommodating browsers that do not adhere to longstanding web standards.

The new RSS feed is here.

I was going to entitle this post “Radio silence something something,” but it sounded terribly familiar – reminiscent, perhaps, of a post I wrote a year ago under nearly identical circumstances.

Now that the hockey season is over (as is, unrelatedly, the examination season), one would think that I would have time aplenty to return to decorating my modest home on the digital range with flighty paper thoughts dangling from the ceiling in precariously threaded mobiles of Idea or Essence or whatever it is that existence precedes. Not so. As is becoming incredibly typical, I have in front of me a plate of noodly grey matter piled higher than a “small” order at Buca di Beppo, waiting the impossible wait to be digested and subsequently inscribed with what one might term a “flushing motion.” There’s simply too much to process.

For instance, after roughly forty hours of play, I had developed a few critical entry points into the connection between Super Paper Mario and the labour theory of value, but there’s just this inescapable feeling that the time spent writing it down would be better spent elsewhere. And there is no shortage of this glutinous, unspecified “elsewhere” ahead of me in the weeks to come – what, with a new Michael Chabon novel arriving on Tuesday, coupled with a second attempt to spin a 50,000-word fiction in the span of a month that will hopefully be a tad more successful than the last short-lived foray.

In short, the dry spell of data here is likely to extend to a full-on drought, one not wholly dissimilar to the sort you can’t easily put away without the assistance of an exiled prophet in a Technicolor dreamcoat. Wriggle, ye writhing wordsmith, wriggle.

Well, this is interesting. Today I discovered that someone has, on two separate occasions, attempted to create a Wikipedia entry under “Nicholas Tam”, which is an esteemed name that I would prefer remained unsullied. Both times, it was deleted. The second time, it was protected; now nobody can write a Wikipedia entry under that name without first obtaining administrative approval. Naturally, I would never do this myself: I’m keenly observant of Wikipedian etiquette, and well aware that autobiographical masturbation is best conducted in the privacy of a user page.

At first I thought the culprit was my kid brother, who occasionally spams my referrer logs with frivolous queries like “Nick the ugly canadien who goes to café”. In fact, the date of the entry’s first attempted creation coincided with my brother’s birthday, which is, if anything, circumstantial. Alas, it was but an alignment of the stars. Upon an examination of the entry’s edit history, it seems that there was indeed an individual who assumed my fine and noble name and wrote about himself, no doubt miffed that it is I, not he, who represents at least the first twenty Nicholas Tams in the World According to Google.

The deleted entry reads:

Nicholas Tam is a distinguished student, sportsman and debater in Victoria, Australia.

Wrong! Nicholas Tam is a distinguished student, sportsman and debater in Alberta, Canada (pick a city – there are only two that count, and I’m not sure about the northern one). For the sake of argument, we’ll consider Scrabble a sport.

But that’s not all, no sirree. Not only does he create a vanity article, when it is (properly) tagged with a notice for speedy deletion, he removes the notice. When a passing volunteer leaves him a message on his talk page expressing the nature of the problem, he removes the message. We have here a genuine troll, it seems – and thanks to him, there’s one more hoop to jump through if you are to write a well-earned article about me once I’ve achieved something sufficiently prominent, which is bound to happen sooner or later. Vandal! Charlatan! Fie upon him!

You’re on, Nicholas George Park Wing So-Called Tam from Victoria, Australia – if that’s your real name. The gloves are coming off. I will find you. I will get you.

But soft! What’s this I see on my talk page?

Looks like I’m not the only Nicholas Tam on the planet. So, is my Canadian counterpart also Eurasian? Tamazoid 10:40, 1 December 2006 (UTC)Nicholas Tam (of Australia)

Ha! You don’t know the half of it, kid. I have always been at war with Eurasia.

Every day, The Calgary Herald digs up and prints a piece from a century ago in their editorial page. In light of recent flirtations with the matter of art (more matter, less art?) I thought I would share today’s selection, dated 28 December, 1905.

Art in the East and West

When a man can paint a sunset, he gets the notion into his head that all men who can’t paint sunsets, or who can’t paint at all, are of no use on earth. A well known Montreal artist was given an order to do some decorative painting of a pioneer scene for a western town. He did the work in Montreal where there is supposed to be a true artistic atmosphere, and the east went wild over the painting. They said it was as good as anything ever done.

People in the west have learned to scrape away the ideal and demand the real thing, whether in art or cooking. When the canvas was sent west the committee found that the neck yoke in the picture was a new fangled bolted affair, not the curved yoke of the olden days, and that the driver walked on the “off” side of the team.

According to one of the committee, if a right handed driver should walk on the right side of the team he was driving in the picture, his whip would have to pass clean through his body and the body of the “off” ox to reach the ox on the “near” side. Then the committee discovered that the beasts the pioneer was driving were sleek fat shorthorns instead of the angular longhorns. The work was refused.

Evidently, the hyperinflation of society’s premium on réalisme is nothing specific to our own recent times.

I’ve caught up with six theatrical releases in the past three weeks, with more on their way, and I don’t have time to chat about them with the individual specificity they merit. I will say, however, that preliminary verdict comprises two interdependent clauses: that those who think 2005 was a slump year for movies need to tumble off their high horse and smell the poo-poo, and that Steven Spielberg’s Munich is probably the film I will champion for the Best Picture Oscar. It’s a breath of fresh air in a cloud of smoke that already isn’t nearly as thick as a lot of people would have you believe.

Until sometime this afternoon, I was convinced that the Liberal minority government had lasted entirely too long and deserved a swift kick in the nuts to send it hobbling out the door – preferably this Thursday over the budget vote, when I would be too busy watching Revenge of the Sith to give a hoot.

After a number of disconnected events up to and including this, I came to realize the error of my thinking. I am now fine with the way things are, for this is the most thoroughly hilarious government under which I’ve ever had the masochistic pleasure to live, and I want to treasure every moment with it. Besides, I’m already going to see a government of considerably greater influence crumble underneath the machinations of a less dithersome ruler coupled with a cataclysmic betrayal in just over a day now.

Not much in politics beats a defection, though it’s probably a lot less fun if it happens to you, yet a lot more fun if spaceships are involved. You can’t read stuff this good on LiveJournal (though it often comes close).

Out of apathy more than tact, the snide retrospective comments about how the PC-Alliance merger was a horrible idea from the get-go can wait.