The final pair of 2024 Tour Alberta for Cancer socks. Another rainbow yarn but this time with a simple wavy motif and some cables I threw in for fun.
I’ve posted about these a lot so apologies if you’ve seen them before. FO post number two for the Tour socks, this time some colourwork!
Finally some FO posts from my Tour Alberta for Cancer sock knitting projects. For this first pair I worked up an old familiar pattern in a lovely purple.
Review: Inverted World
Review of Inverted World by Christopher Priest (9781590177051)★★★★
Lately I’ve been struggling to find a book that could really pull me in, and certainly Inverted World did that! It’s a shame it had to end with such a fizzle because the journey was great!
The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city's engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the "optimum" into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death.
The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crèches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping...The set up is just so incredibly tantalizing. A moving city. A twisted reality. A gradual reveal as our protagonist, who was raised in ignorance, slowly learns the truth of his world. It really is gripping stuff and pulled me right in, which was a welcome change from my recent grinding re-read of The Sprawl series.
What follows is, I hope, a relatively spoiler free review of the book. However, if you really want no hints–and given the book is a bit of a mystery box, with the joy in opening it and revealing its contents–it might be best to read the book before proceeding further!
Though I will say: I don’t understand why the ending is praised. Be ready for a fairly dull, exposition-laden finish and a very sudden ending that at first made me wonder if there was something wrong with my copy of the book.
Continue reading...Second pair of Tour socks delivered, and thank goodness, they fit!
Another Tour raffle prize done! Well, assuming they end up fitting the winner, anyway…
Failing
As I continue the process of learning to drive, and now need to start hunting for a new job, some thoughts on failure.
I never learned to drive.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve thought off and on about this, about how I managed to skip such a typically formative step in life. Looking back I can’t claim I made a specific decision not to get my license. It really was a combination of avoidance, lack of need or desire, and circumstance that led me to never learn.
The lack of need was born of the fact that, living in a city, through a combination of cycling and public transit, it was easy enough to get around, and I had little desire to go further afield. My passions were in school, in front of the computer, or on the basketball court, and all those were close enough that driving wasn’t really necessary. And as I got older, I had a girlfriend and eventually wife who not only could drive, but loved it and was happy to do it.
As for circumstance, I grew up a latchkey kid. My mom, who I now realize was a bit insane, typically worked two or three jobs to ensure we had a roof over our head, food on the table, and to my astonishment in hindsight, a computer to keep her nerdy kids occupied. Simply getting time behind the wheel back then was not easy, and we certainly couldn’t afford to pay for lessons.
As for avoidance, looking back it’s now obvious that as early as my late teens I had some issues with anxiety. I think I was genuinely afraid to get behind the wheel, recognizing the risks and responsibilities that driving entails.
But let’s not forget the greatest anxiety of all: the fear of failure.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but that fear of failure often ruled my life well into my mid-twenties. I chose my education not only because it was something I was already interested in, but also because it was something I was already very good at. I chose my career for the same reason, and stayed there, doing the same basic things, for quite a while before I found the will to shift my career into something new. I even delayed proposing to my now wife because I was afraid I’d get it wrong.
But over time I gradually became more comfortable with the prospect of failure and, oddly enough, in part I think I have knitting to thank for it.
Continue reading...Man it was a whole journey to get to sock number one in this pair. I copied the motif from some photos, then improvised the slip stitch sole and striped gusset, all while re-learning Fair Isle knitting. Turns out, when you make something up as you go, you make a lot of mistakes and find as many design choices that don’t work as ones that do! But I took lots of notes so the second one should be much smoother sailing! I hope…
Man, 30 years later and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is still a banger. While I remembered the game having amazing level design, when you consider the context at the time, what they did in that game was really remarkable. And damn that soundtrack is great!
And it played great on the Miyoo A30 I picked up in a lark. For the price it’s a great little device to carry around!
One Year
Somehow, despite running a blog (sometimes quite intermittently) for the past twenty years, I never knew August 31st was World Blog Day. So it seemed as good a day as any to finally write a long-overdue post looking back on this break I’ve been on, and looking forward to what comes next.
Folks who know me, or who have been following my posts here or on social media, know that, after a lot of years of hard work, good planning, and truly monumental luck, last year I found myself in a position to take an extended break from my career. As a decision it was probably one of the most significant ones I’ve ever made, and it was far from an easy one, as I knew I’d be walking away from a lucrative career working with some of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met. But after twenty years at the same company, and a lot of soul searching, I knew that it was time for a change, and rather than immediately jump into a new opportunity, I decided it was better to take some personal time to unwind, reflect, and eventually re-enter the work force with more purpose and intention.
Now, well over a year in, it feels like I made that decision only yesterday. Certainly, fairly early on I noticed just how quickly time can fly, but even then I don’t think I appreciated how short this break would feel fourteen months in. And while, yes, I went in with a lofty list of goals and only achieved a few, I can honestly say there’s little I would do differently.
At the beginning I genuinely assumed I’d eventually get so bored that going back to work would feel like a relief. Certainly, during past extended periods of time off (e.g. over Christmas), that was my experience.
And yet, rather than boredom, I discovered how freeing it is to spend time doing things both meaningful and yet outside any traditional definition of work, and how our western sense of self as being inherently tied to the work we do prevents us from seeing the many other ways that we can build and create and have a positive impact on others outside that narrow perspective.
Continue reading...First few jars of Haskap (and a bit of blueberry) jam! I’m a bit concerned it’ll end up too stuff (the candy thermometer read 220 but… I dunno…) but we shall see. It sure looks pretty, though!
First batch of fermented pickles are done (well, almost, left one jar on for a bit longer)! These are 10% vinegar and a 3% brine, fermented for 10 days, and they came out just perfect.
They’ll now go into the fridge for long term storage, but will not be heat processed as that kills off all those lovely lactobacilli that I worked so hard to cultivate!
First pair of Tour socks completed, shipped, and received, and the second pair is started! I haven’t done colour work in a long time and you can tell (or, at least, I can)…
On Sonic 2 Compression
Over twenty years ago, now, I played a small role in the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 hacking community by reverse engineering the level data compression algorithm used in the game. I figured it was about time I wrote my side of that story, so, here it is!
Obviously I do a Google search for my own name from time to time because, admit it, everyone does it. Yeah, you too. Don’t give me that look. We both know it’s true.
So it was that a while back I was perusing those search results, and I came across something that honestly left me incredibly chagrined: a page about something called “Kosinski” compression. Clicking the link, I realized the page was about a project I worked on way back in the early aughts to reverse engineer the algorithm used to compress level data in the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ROM.
And somewhere along the way, apparently that format got named after me.
Now I want to be extremely clear about something: I did not invent this algorithm or the in-ROM data storage layout, and I certainly didn’t name it after myself. All I did was uncover what was already there and write it down in my own weird way. But, once you put something out in the world, it can take on a life of it’s own, and so now this algorithm has my name on it. Oops!
So naturally I shared this little factoid with some friends, and we all had a laugh. And that was that.
But then, in 2022, a gentleman by the name of Damian Grove reached out. Way back in the day, Damian created a site called the Sonic Hacking Community (SHaC), where he collected a whole raft of information about the Sonic 2 ROM layout in a site he called the Sonic 2 Hacking Guide. In reaching out, Damian was hoping I might answer some questions about the reverse engineering work I did, and so I did what I often do: forgot to reply until months later. Meanwhile, Damian himself didn’t see that reply when it was eventually sent, and so we never connected.
Fast forward, finally, to 2024 and Damian finally spots my email and a) responds with a couple of questions, while also b) including a link to a video from the 2023 Retro World Expo of a panel discussion of the history of Sonic 2 hacking. A video in which I come up as a bit of a topic of conversation.
Now, just to get this out of the way: while I was certainly a bit bemused by the conversation in that video, it was nothing but curious and respectful and I had absolutely no issues being talked about. But I gotta admit, it was more than a little weird to see people speculating about me on stage!
In that conversation I noticed a few misapprehensions about my own background and history and the approach I took to reverse engineer the algorithm, so I figured I’d set the record straight and provide my own vague recollections about how it all went down!
Continue reading...