Jay just reposted a list of things that a "real tory" party would implement. Some of them make sense, like getting rid of the CHRC. Others, like abolishing the CBC, are the usual conservative claptrap spouted by people who've never lived in the boonies where the CBC is the only local link to the outside world - the CBC goes where it's not profitable to go, as a service to Canadians, and provides actual Canadian content in the highly USicized world.

Some of the points I agreed with - doing away with tax-free status for churches, for example. Others are bewildering - stopping immigration from non-democratic states? Like, say, Vietnam? China? Russia (technical a kleptocracy)? Pakistan (it's only democrat...ish)? Oh! Does Iran count? They used to be a democracy until the US installed the Shah... How about democracies like Malaysia and Singapore who aren't secular or don't believe in freedom of anything but the vote? How about all the places in Africa where people get elected mainly because their opponents keep disappearing?

What I really think the point meant was "Only allow immigration from white, western-European states, because we can't trust those darkies with their weird religions and alien ways." Please, correct me if I'm wrong.

Him: Conservatives are socialist, just about rich people.

While I was digging around preparing for a presentation about eLearning, I stumbled across this awesome activity. It's a build-your-own-comic-strip. It lets you choose from a bunch of characters, then select emotion that you want them to portray, then add word balloons... very fun. Yes, I'm 12, so what?

Question of the day: Toe cleavage. Gross, inappropriate, don't care, just fine, awesome? VOTE BELOW.

A JW was at the door this morning, and he was very surprised when Damian said "Sorry, we're atheists." And the JW said "Er... would you like to take a copy of the Watchtower?" and Damian said "No, thank you. I disagree with its very tenets and premises," and the guy said, "Er, oh. Ok."

In other news, this is awesome. It's a campaign spearheaded by Richard Dawkins (who has just announced his retirement from Oxford) to purchase bus ads in England that say:

There is no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

I couldn't agree more.

I found this website through some convoluted internet maundering and spent like an hour looking at all his cool extreme weather photographs. Very neat stuff.

In other news, two birds are in nests. Success!

Ahem. I should explain. I have four finches, and little did I know when I got them that finches are MEAN. Well, not all the time, just when they're horny. Which is often. They chase each other around, pull out tail feathers, and generally act like little jerks to one another to establish mates and territory. You've got to let them mate every so often or they go a bit crazy. LIKE PEOPLE. Er, anyway, to do this, you put nests in the cage to ... encourage them... to breed.

About a hundred THOUSAND times a day male finches sing and dance, you see, and this song and dance is unique for each bird (although it's passed down from father to son with little variation, teenaged birds muck around with it until they start to develop testosterone, at which point it "freezes" and becomes theirs.) What they're saying when they sing and dance is "Have sex with me! Have sex with me! Have sex with me!" Not unlike at a nightclub. And we get woken up regularly at dawn by the lovely little sounds of finches in love, singing their tiny little hearts out in an everlasting attempt to ... get laid.

What was unusual was that a few weeks ago, one of the female birds started "displaying." Usually the male sings and sings, and occasionally his mate will decide to, um, capitulate, at which point she flares her tail feathers and chatters her beak in a finchian equivalent of putting on red lingerie, which the male finds absolutely irresistible. Two seconds later, and then two seconds more, and, well, Bob's your uncle.

But she started displaying CONSTANTLY, for no reason, and her mate, he wasn't enthralled at all! Which is very rare. But it's also rare for the female to attempt to initiate The Sex. And she was going NUTS.

Some finches will reject their mate if they're not seeing any babies, you see. And we hadn't put a nest in there to trigger any baby-making, but obviously the little lady didn't care, she wanted to make babies and social security be damned. But her mate was steadfastedly ignoring her desperate flirting - I told her not to come on too strong, guys hate that, but who listens to me? But it was getting to the point where we might have had to replace him, because he was just having none of it, and what could we do? Finches come in pairs and, some casual adultery aside, tend to stay mated, so she was destined to live a life of not-so-quiet desperation if her mate didn't want to, er, mate anymore.

Anyway, after all of the finches started losing their tails and getting tufts of feathers from anywhere she could grab as she chased them around, I went out and bought two nests and put them in there, hoping it would encourage some fornication. The things we do for our pets.

And after several terrible fights about who got what nests and whether to paint the insides seashell green or peach-pit blue, they got down to lining the nests with cotton balls and then, FINALLY, well, you know.

Now everything is back to normal. Well, as normal as it ever was.

Several interesting things have been happening in the past week. First, I've been getting amazing feedback about the new Career Services website, even if it's only half finished. And by amazing I don't mean heaps of praise, I mean constructive suggestions that have made it so much better.

Why is this interesting? Because as a freelancer, unless you charge a shitload of money, you don't tend to do a lot of user surveying and you tend to work in the dark - after presenting clients with wireframes and getting feedback, you go ahead and design it, program it, and leave, cheque in hand. And in my last job, well, nobody cared about it except me, so I pretty much did what I wanted and it turned out OK. But I've never worked for a design firm where multiple people are involved in a project and where collaborative design happens, so I've never had the experience of having other people to bounce ideas off.

But here, well, everybody cares. Everybody is very interested and invested, and they have a lot to offer the process. That is wonderful, but surprising - why is it surprising that people actually give a crap about my work and want to contribute? That shouldn't be surprising at all!

I think I was made a bit cynical after my last job, where the vast majority of the feedback I got was from strangers, not co-workers, and where I had to fight to keep other people from taking over and dictating platform and design (people whose idea of "content management" was to use Adobe Contribute and whose idea of "design" was using TABLES fer gossake). I tried collaboration with those people, but it turns out that "collaboration" meant "do it their way," and "compromise" meant "do it their way," and wait! That's not collaboration! Also, IT IS NOT 1999 ANYMORE.

Where was I? Yes, users. I have had lots of really astute comments and extremely helpful suggestions and IT IS SO AWESOME. PEOPLE CARE.

The other thing is that somebody left a romance novel in the lunch room and I accidentally started reading it and it's disturbingly well-written and entertaining. I am growing increasingly alarmed. And yet... I can't... put it... down.

How can I call myself a blogger? One post in two weeks? SUCH A THING HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE. It's eerie, this unnatural silence.

I am in what is colloquially referred to as the Home Stretch, the time when all the stress and worry either pay off or they don't. For the most part, they're paying off.

Also, I read this in a research review and it made me chuckle:

Researchers discovered several decades ago that when learners are given a choice to short-circuit retrieval to get to feedback, they’ll do it. If the answer is on the next page, they’ll peek. If it’s a click away, they’ll click. Learners don’t seem to know that retrieval practice is critical to support long-term retrieval.

Just thought I'd share.

Feedbacks, I needs them! Help, Internets, uncover the egregious UI errors I've likely made! (Most of the pages are there in Students / Employers, but I haven't done the front page yet - it's not going to be incredibly different from the Students page, just ... more frontpagey. The subsection is good enough for a demo.)

What that is, of course, that web thing there, is the website I've been working on since September. Gak. I'm fairly certain that my prescription dropped two diopters from all the late-night squinting. Before I started, I had no idea that Career Services had so much content. There's, like, ten times as much on my desk as there is on the site right now, including videos and all sorts of workshop content. Designing the back-end was a lot more challenging then any other project I've worked on so far, because of the sheer diversity of the content they've got and the need for something that would basically accommodate it all in a way that would be vaguely sustainable for future years.

Also, I'm not sure about the orange.

One other thing: the "branding" of the site is Queen's branding. It's is something I stuck with on purpose, so that if you compare it with http://library.queensu.ca or http://www.queensu.ca you'll notice that the background, footer, and top-bar are shared, and the header is very similar. I'm not totally crazy about it, to be honest, but them's the breaks. Damn you, teamwork.

PS: Don't click on the "Job Postings" button, I haven't gotten my paws on that system's templates yet. But soon. Soooon.

PPS: Why yes, it IS Drupal! Also, SPOT THE COWS!