See original article: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2008-11-19-facebook-applications_N.htm

This is a new process planned by Facebook to verify Facebook applications.  The verification process costs $375/year or $175 for each application if you’re a non-profit.

“The process is meant to increase users’ trust of applications that are posted on the site and to help developers wanting to build a serious business get more visibility with users.”

So what does verification really do?  I’m willing to be proven wrong here, but it seems to me that it’s rather impossible to verify exactly what goes on in the Facebook application’s server.  If there is some serious data-mining occurring behind the scenes of a seemingly benign application, how can Facebook verify this?  How is Facebook able to use this verification process to protect users?  At best, this seems like a poor attempt to protect users.  At worst, it seems like a money-grab by Facebook who knows the extreme limitations of the verification process yet hopes to give users a false sense of security.

What does verifying really do? How does it help or protect users? What separates it from just paying Facebook to ‘feature’ your app? If they want to have a pay-to-feature option – then okay, but verifying makes it sound like the app is trustworthy, reliable, etc. and I don’t see how they can do this. In fact, businesses doing data mining and selling information collected from the apps would be happy to pay a fee to make their app seem trustworthy.

The Internet itself is a horde of countless sites, most of them terrible; some of the terrible sites are popular, some of the good sites are popular, and many qualities sites totally unnoticed because they can’t afford to pay for advertising and a SEO specialist. Facebook is like a microcosm of the Internet (with a focus on community and interaction) – with messaging between people, countless applications, groups with discussion forums, etc. Except unlike the Internet it’s proprietary, controlled by the few, difficult to ensure privacy, and a completely uneven playing field. Facebook displays their own adds, promotes their own interests over and above any other content. That’s their prerogative; they run a very successful business and have a right to do so. But this app verification distorts the playing field, giving the advantage to people who can afford it (not to mention the censorship that will happen during this verification process). With all the privacy concerns over Facebook, I’m worried that this verification process with further uneducate users, giving them a false sense of security under the guise of ‘verification’.

Okay, some ideological bias is obviously coming out here :). Maybe my unease over this verification process comes down to my distaste for Facebook in general. To me, it’s become like cell phones and Skype, a socially mandated necessity that compromises privacy and puts information and significant elements of people’s lives into corporate control.

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what is the sound of the voice that i hear in my head
what is the sound of the voice that i hear in my head

it’s not what you hear

what is the sound of the voice that you hear in your head
what is the sound of the voice that you hear in your head

it’s not what i hear

what is the sound of the song that you sing next to me

it’s… different from here.

(fuck)

i was out walking when i saw a ruffed grouse crossing my path like a sleek paranoid chicken.  if he didn’t move fast enough, he imagined i couldn’t see him. so i picked up my pace and he scampered off (but first he gave me a look).  don’t blame him.

Place a very dry clump of brown sugar into a hot, fresh cup of coffee.  Watch the bubbly fish eyes that result.  I like them very much.

I wonder if everyone has a favourite mug.  Maybe they don’t realize it, but when they look sleepily inside that cupboard they are hoping to see one in particular.  Maybe because it’s the largest mug and they are in desperate need of caffeine, or maybe it’s the feel of the mug when they hold it, the shape of the handle, and the effect of gravity on the mug and its contents.  Does texture play a part, or just the feel of the mug against their lips slurping some warm brown liquid… smooth, comforting, renewing hope that their day will be productive and rewarding.

I have a couple favourite mugs with me, here in Fox Lake.  One is the ‘monkey mug’ that I got from my mom, sort of but not really replacing the one she got me previously, the one that broke when dropped on carpeted floor, causing me to cry.  This new mug depicts “see no evil, speak not evil, hear no evil”, and it’s settled at least one casual question of discussion.  Where did that saying come from?  Ask the bottom of the mug.  My other favourite mug has no sentimental value, but I love the way it feels.   The rim is thick and the sides narrow to the base just slightly.  The ultimate everyday supplier of coffee.

Both my favourite mugs are of the largest in the cupboard.

Our spirits high from the Alpine Bakery, we continue on our downtown Whitehorse café crawl.  A short walk away, we find The Chocolate Claim sitting in a rectangular building amongst other shops.  A glass door entranceway displays posters of cultural interest, and immediately the style of this café is recognized.  While the northern, log-cabin style Alpine Bakery emits a warm, rustic, natural beauty, The Chocolate Claim contains art and culture against modern decor.  This feels a little uppity and artificial, but had we visited The Chocolate Claim first, I would be excited to see such cultural sophistication in Whitehorse.  There are quite a few people here, with only a couple tables free.   This place is a café hangout, a place to stay and work with a coffee, or relax between errands.  It’s a usual, pleasant, artsy café, and often exactly what I’m looking for.

The only thing unusual (and severely lacking) is the bathrooms, the discovery of which involves leaving the café and walking around the entire rectangular building to a set of industrial double-doors at the back of the building, left open a crack.  Through these doors I enter a dimly lit, white-painted hallway, and notice the door with a haphazardly hand-written sign, “Public Washroom”.  The washroom itself, though otherwise acceptable, has about as much charm as the hallway.  It probably shouldn’t bother me, but I really appreciate when the style and artistic detail found in the café makes its way to washrooms which don’t involve a hike to the building’s loading zone.

I cannot speak one way or another about the food here.  Already satisfied by my coffee and scone from the Alpine Bakery, I opt for only an apple juice and ginger cookie.  The apple juice comes in a bottle, though I assume the cookies are made on-site.  I expect the ginger cookie to be soft with rich flavour, but instead discover that it is only a crumbly ginger cookie, the kind you would make in your own oven then pack away in a cookie tin.  It’s nothing special, especially given the price (which I don’t exactly recall).

This is not a fair review of The Chocolate Claim, apparently known for their chocolates (and not ginger cookies).  And how can you review a café without even trying the coffee?  Next time I am craving the usual artsy café atmosphere in Whitehorse, I will give their coffee and chocolate a chance.

You pay more at The Chocolate Claim, but maybe it’s worth it.  Come here for a modern, clean and sleek feeling café, a cozy section in the back, and perilously inaccessible washrooms.

The pub crawl in Whitehorse the previous night was very unsuccessful – Whitehorse having little to no nightlife worth speaking about. (What nightlife it did have was crammed into an altogether uninteresting room filled with a wide variety of altogether uninteresting people.) The next morning we try something different in our investigation of Whitehorse: a café crawl.

We begin our morning at the Alpine Bakery, a good place to start, we think, remembering the small ad at the hostel promising a mug of coffee and scone or muffin for three dollars. Not that three dollars for a coffee and muffin is particularly inexpensive, but it seems about the right price for the kind of café I have craved since I left Peterborough, Ontario (where the café culture and nightlife are hard to beat for a city of under 100,000 people). A pleasant walk in the sunny morning cold to the northern side of the downtown core bring us to the Alpine Bakery sandwich board ad, pointing us to the bakery and café itself.

The Alpine Bakery is housed on the main floor of a log building beneath a large room upstairs which is used for yoga, among other things. The atmosphere inside looks just as promising. In two-thirds of the room there is a lively kitchen space, the remaining one-third left as a café sitting area. A display counter with baked goods separates the two spaces just enough to invite connection with food, yet section off a sitting area quiet enough for café contemplation. Colourful woven baskets hang from the ceiling and small round tables line the side wall along windows. The final table is tucked into a cozy corner where red brick and wooden walls meet. It is here we decide to sit. Behind us, a slow food movement poster from 2002 hangs with its message as relevant as ever, and New Internationalist magazines and cookbooks are piled on a small corner shelf. Their presence feels oddly unpretentious, even unintentional. The top of this pile features a copy of Zoe’s Windy Day by Barbara Reid and I start thinking about kids, and settling down. I forget about the uninspired nightlife and am now overwhelmed with a cozy feeling of home.

Sipping on the coffee brings me back to my own green beans and coffee roaster, still in Fox Lake where a good cup of coffee is otherwise a fading memory. The cranberry-grapefruit scone I had ordered is something different and delightful. The familiar and the novel dance and mingle in warm, creative conversation, as I speak to Curtis about how nice it would be to settle in Whitehorse. He is less impressed with his bagel, but as I review its hard crust and chewy texture, I try to explain to him that it, in fact, is a good bagel, and everything bagel-like he had tried prior was merely doughnut-shaped bread.

I leave the Alpine Bakery with my expectations high, but also with the certainty that it doesn’t get better than this.

$3.50 for a bagel and coffee. Visit the Alpine Bakery for a cozy and quiet atmosphere, quality organic food, and positive social change.

I recently travelled to the Northwest Territories, Northern BC, and the Yukon with my friend Curtis.  We drove from Edmonton up to Fox Lake for a weekend, managed to get out of Fox Lake, then travelled north to Hay River and Enterprise, NWT.  From there we drove west along the Mackenzie and Liard Highways, eventually reaching Fort Nelson, BC.  Travelling north again we visited the Liard Hot Springs, Watson Lake, and eventually Whitehorse.  A day was dedicated to Whitehorse before heading west to Haines Junction and Kluane National Park (nearly reaching Destruction Bay).

My hope is to write a rather incomplete, selective, and opinionated travel guide based on our trip.  It will be incomplete in that we missed some rather crucial destinations (like Yellowknife and Dawson City), selective in that I can only write about things that seemed interesting to investigate at all, and opinionated in that I in no way hope to provide an objective overview, instead focusing on my own thoughts and feelings throughout the trip.  In this way, it will be part travel guide, part journal, perhaps interesting yet generally useless.  If you’re exactly like me, it will be the best possible guide to Northern Canada.  But as dissimilarities between us grow, the usefulness of this guide will diminish, until, rather quickly, it will be of no use to you whatsoever.

I will write this guide out of order and post unrefined segments to this blog.  Feedback you provide may or may not influence the final version of this guide, which will likely be posted online in PDF format.

To have peace of mind and contentment is easier when things are going well.  But when things are tough, we can feel pushed around violently by our situation.  The deeper and more entrenched our peace of mind, the less we are affected by our situation and the troubles in the world.  When I say affected, though, I don’t mean that we don’t care; in fact, when bad things happen, we care very deeply.  It’s just that we’re able to maintain our peace of mind and contentment through these times — and in such a state, we are best able to contribute positively to this world.

In university I used to go swimming at Burleigh Falls, a set of rapids near Peterborough, ON, and a popular swimming spot.  The current was incredibly strong at times, but if you swam deep enough, the current would just pass over you.  You could look up and see bubbles and debris swiftly passing above you, while being completely unaffected by the current yourself — a very cool feeling.

Sometimes a chaotic situation around me is very disruptive. But in the case that it is not disruptive at all, I am reminded of the feeling of being beneath the current.

Something to strive for, I guess.  Though please be careful when literally or figuratively swimming in rapids.