Blessed by the Potato

We have something living under the front porch of our house. I don’t know what it is… originally I was thinking some small burrowing animal, since the hole was pretty small through the winter and early spring. But recently there’s been a lot of extra activity around that hole that makes me wonder. A few days ago, the extension cord we have plugged into the outdoor socket near the hole was dragged in, and rather forcefully at that: the cord had been pulled partly out of the socket, and it’s a pretty tight socket. I couldn’t think of any animal that would be very interested in taking an extension cord into their burrow: it’s not a very cozy object, it doesn’t shred into bedding well, it’s not edible, and it’s not even very good for lining the walls or blocking the door. Then, the hole was widened. Significantly. The dirt was cleared clean down to the concrete underneath the porch, and the 2×4 pieces of wood used to help hold the porch up were pushed out, all together making the hole nearly 10X the size it was just a few weeks ago. That could be due to whatever creature lives under there being big, or it could be that something else has tried to go after it down there…

Right now, the leading theory is that a large rabbit is living under there, with a raccoon or groundhog as a close second & third theory. In a distant fourth place is the thought that we have gnomes living under our deck. It explains the need for power, and the clean swept concrete. If I start seeing piles of copper bolts piling up outside the burrow, then I’ll know it’s gnomes (and also that they’re skilling up engineering, possibly to make a mechanostrider).

I woke up this morning (and here, I use the word morning very loosely, since it was actually 6 pm — a great night; I managed to get nearly 15 hours of sleep) and had a very peculiar realization. I’ve gone through the last few years of my life without any more Star Wars movies to anticipate. I knew that somehow, life had… changed… in the past few years, and that the future seemed just a little less bright. But never before had I quite been able to put my finger on it. Of course, I lived through similar times before (the 80’s and early 90’s), but back then we didn’t really know that more Star Wars movies were possible. The slow, measured release of prequels and alternative cuts had simply become a way of life for so long, that it’s tough to find the groove in life afterwards. There’s always the remote hope that the often-rumoured follow-up trilogy will be made (and in fact, considering the franchise is basically a money mint, and that there’s already enough source material in the books and video games to throw together a few movies, I’m surprised they aren’t already in production), but really, this is the shape of things to come.

I also realized that I now have pretty bad spring allergies. I’ve had bad ragweed/fall allergies for a long time, but this spring runny nose thing is pretty recent. I’m also amazed at Reactine. It’s such a tiny pill, yet it completely dries me out for a day. It really makes one respect the power of chemicals.

The Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform has finished its deliberations and decided that Ontario needs an updated, fairer, more proportional electoral system. To keep the options simple, they’ve also deliberated on the alternatives and settled on Mixed Member Proportional. This fall, on October 10th, as part of the general provincial election, we will have a referendum on whether or not to change to this new system. The bar has been set high: rather than a simple majority, the Premier has stipulated that to change the electoral system, the vote must be at least 60% in favour provincewide, and at least 50% of the ridings must be in favour (that is, over half the people in over half the ridings). I’m hoping this will go through; while MMP wasn’t my preferred voting system, it’s still a big step up from first-past-the-post. Although party lists give me the heebie jeebies sometimes, at least the “proportional” part is kept to 30% of the seats. Of course, BC had a similar referrendum not too long ago, and despite being supported by a majority of the people, the motion died just short of the 60% threshold.

While there has been some media coverage of this long, slow process, it certainly isn’t at the forefront. I don’t even know if it will gain much (or at least, enough) ground in the collective consciousness for people to really know what the referendum is about when it falls upon them. So, I hope you all will learn about it, and start working it into your conversations at work and elsewhere… get people around you thinking about this sort of issue, and, hopefully, preparing to vote yes in the upcoming referendum!

Other news today out of the federal government is that they’re also planning on banning incandescent lightbulbs…

Finally, I’d just like to say that over at XKCD the algorithm constantly finds Jesus. The algorithm fears velociraptors, yet constantly finds them.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had to deal with rush-hour, weekday Toronto traffic, so when I faced that grim spectre yesterday I wasn’t really prepared for it. Of course, it was a particularly bad day, with several accidents on the 401, and an accident in the TTC shutting down the subway. Plus the nice spring weather meant construction popped up everywhere.

Nonetheless, I was really amazed at some of the crazy driving I saw. In particular, on Sheppard right at Doris a car was abandoned in the left lane (westbound), and that caused a major blockage all the way back to Bayview. Who just abandons a car like that, especially right at an intersection. It couldn’t have at least been pushed onto the less busy side street?

Then, a bit further on, there was a police car trying to make it through an intersection behind me. It took him about 10 seconds to clear the intersection because people just weren’t stopping or pulling over. I pulled over as soon as I saw the lights in my rear-view mirror (just over a block from the intersection — a few seconds of driving if he finally got a chance to get up to speed) and 3 cars passed me for it (this was on a single-lane, too)!

Well, I’m fast approaching the end of my first year in PhD studies. So far, it seems to be going a lot better than my Master’s ever did. I never got a scholarship for my MSc (aside from tuition support), and there was even some disagreement about whether or not I was eligible for one. The applications take a long time to write (think days), especially if it’s your first one and you don’t have anything writen to work off of, no choice quotes to incorporate. So I checked and asked to make sure I had the minimum 80% average (despite how well I did in some of my classes, my overall average was just scraping 80). I checked to see if my 2nd year organic chem or 3rd year biochemistry (taken in my 3rd and 4th years of undergraduate respectively, the years that count for calculating scholarship averages) would count against me, and if my 1st year anthropology would count for me. I was told the 1st and 2nd year classes wouldn’t count (which was good: orgo hurt me far more than anthro helped), and was especially bouyed by the 90% I had in my graduate level stats class. Needless to say, I was shocked to receive a letter after submitting my applications that I had basically wasted my time and wasn’t even eligible for a scholarship — apparently it wasn’t the average of my 3rd and 4th year classes like they said, but rather the courses I took in my 3rd and 4th years (so 2nd year orgo did count), and what’s much crazier, is that the MSc course I completed didn’t count, because they don’t start counting graduate courses until your second year (due to a preculiarity of starting in January, I was pretty much the only first-year MSc student with a graduate class).

So, in case you haven’t already heard, I’ve been offered 3 Ontario Graduate Scholarship awards already for my PhD (only one of which I was able to accept — it’s a neat trick of chronology and starting in May that let me apply twice for my first year :) and was just recently awarded an even more prestigious NSERC scholarship. Not only is it worth a fair bit more than the OGS, but it’s also a 3-year scholarship that’ll take me right to the end of my PhD. No more wasting a week in the fall just writing the application essays!

The first year of my MSc was neat, I learned a lot and got some neat prototypes built for another project… but had made no progress on my own research (just wasted some time trying one technique that didn’t work). In fact, a lot of the PhD comics cut a little too close to the bone for my MSc. By contrast, now I’m using clinical equipment (harder to schedule time, but it also has a much more comprehensive support plan — we can’t afford to have it go off-line) and there’s a lot more expertise within the group so I have resources to draw on. Already we’re running subjects and collecting data, which is really exciting! (Beyond the fact that I’m actually running subjects though, I can’t tell you what the data is, because that would be premature disclosure). In fact, one of the biggest obstacles I’m facing now is just getting people to come in late in the evenings or on the weekend as volunteers. It’s tough now that some of the first year students are minors, so we can’t just force them to volunteer to get marks in first year psych :(

I’ve even got some teaching experience now (as painful as that was at times)

Oh, and I now issue a public shaming for Joce & Steve. They were going to come to London and be our first visitors. We cleaned the house, got the guest bed set up, and even ordered in some nice weather… but they inexplicably cancelled on Thursday. For further background, Joce lives outside of Toronto, and Steve outside of Windsor. London is of course halfway between the two, so it wasn’t even hugely out of their way. The reason I got was “Also, by the time Sunday rolls around I just want to drive straight home and sleep in my own bed.” That’s pretty weak Joce, and for that: shame. I mean, here we’ve got this really cute house closer to Toronto than most of cottage country, halfway to Windsor and Detroit, and no one’s seen it. I just want to show it off (especially before summer sets in and we might have to face the prospect of bugs) and see my friends :( I mean, am I being unreasonable here? We’ve got friends who moved across the country to Vancouver, Ft. McMurray, Halifax and Thunder Bay, and they’ve all had more visitors than we’ve had in London. Would it help if I said that London has an airport, so you can fly if you’d rather not drive?

All kidding aside though, I can’t really blame you for not coming in, Joce. I mean, my own parents haven’t come in to see the place yet, and I’m the only one of my siblings who’s moved out so far. In the 4 years I lived in the apartment, I had 3 visits from each of my parents, and one of those was the move in! So if my parents, who regularly drive the same distance to the cottage (often going there and back the same day) haven’t come to visit, I can’t very well hold anyone else to task for not visiting. Like we say around here “London’s a great place to live, but I’d hate to visit there.”

I wrote a short rant not too long about about the ban of indandescents in Nunavut. I think that reducing the use of incandescents would be a step in the right direction, and taxing incandescents (or subsidizing CFLs) so that it becomes easier for consumers to choose the “right” one without having to do a long-term cost-benefit analysis is a good thing. Banning them, though, is not such a bright idea, since there are a small number of situations where fluorescents are not ideal (see previous rant or below for details).

After writing that rant up, I rewrote it as a letter to my MPP, kicking myself after I sent it since there was no way Ontario would actually follow Nunavut’s lead and ban incandescent lighting…

Whoops.

I was happy at least to see this paragraph in the CBC report (the other news sources I skimmed didn’t have it — the Toronto Star even said that Ontario was “the first… jurisdiction in North America to commit to such a ban” — perhaps technically true, since the legislation hasn’t passed in Nunavut yet, but a somewhat disingenuous statement):

The ban, part of a wider energy conservation program, would allow for exceptions, such as the use of incandescent bulbs in fields like medicine.

This is the letter I sent my MPP last month. I never got a response (at least the last time I went crazy-go-nuts on my MPP, she sent me an acknowledgement!).

Dr. Matthews, I recently saw the news that Nunavut was planning on banning the sale of incandescent light bulbs in the territory to save power and reduce emissions. (story: http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2007/03/22/nu-lightbulb.html)

I am writing you to encourage the province of Ontario to not follow Nunavut’s lead in this matter — a ban on incandescents is not the way to go.

Taxing them however is, in my opinion, an excellent idea: make some money for the government, and make the initial purchase price of an incandescent the same as a fluorescent — even those with a short-term focus can then make better decisions about which to get, rather than having to try to weigh the initial costs against the long-term energy savings. That should help dramatically shift the usage away from the incandescents. Compact fluorescents are a good thing, and I’ve been putting them in nearly every room in the house here. However, they do have a few short-comings, and for these reasons it’s important to have incandescents as an option:

* CFLs can not be used in completely enclosed light fixtures, such as some pot lights.
* Many CFLs can not be put on dimmer switches (though some specific models can be).
* Some types of CFLs (I do not know if this applies to all of them) do not handle extremes in temperature well, and may not be suited to use in stoves, range hoods, or outdoor lighting.
* Almost all CFLs have a delay between turning on the switch and lighting up. There is a further delay between the first spark and full brightness. While this is not a problem for most applications, it is slightly less than ideal for some uses such as motion-detector-triggered security lights (compounded by further delays in cold environments).
* A small minority of people find that the flicker from fluorescent lighting (though CFLs don’t seem quite as bad) gives them headaches.
* CFLs have less-than-perfect colour fidelity. While it’s good enough for almost all uses, some specialized cases (certain science experiments, artists) may find that they prefer to use incandescents for their broad-spectrum output.
* Some sensitive electronics can experience interference from some types of CFLs (I believe the kind with magnetic ballast) due to proximity or being on the same circuit.

For the majority of cases, CFLs are great ways to save tonnes of energy, but for these situations, we should aim to have incandescents as an option (even if it is an expensive one).

Now, it looks like while you won’t be able to buy an incandescent in Ontario under the current plan, you could go to the States or Quebec and bring one over without any trouble, if you had to (so they’ll be unavailable, but not illegal).

At first, I vigorously opposed Windows XP as an operating system. It just moved so many things around, buried settings in the control panels behind a number of extra layers of opacity that one simply didn’t have to bother with in 98/ME. It wasn’t just something else to get used to — it was a pain providing long-distance support for relatives, and even to this day I still sometimes wonder why it is that after finding my way down to the network connections page (and not internet options), then clicking properties on the connection whose IP I want to change, I still need to go through another level of clicking “properties” when having to change IP settings is a pretty common task…

However, over time, it really grew on me. In particular, its stability. I always used to have to plan on when I would have to shut everything down and reset the system; could I safely leave it until morning? If I pushed it, then I might lose a bunch of open work, or at least suffer through a lot of slowdowns until I did… with XP, a lot of those concerns went away. I can pretty reliably leave it going for weeks at a time now (though sometimes I’m limited by the automatic updates that install themselves and then want to reset the computer right then, user input to the contrary or not). In fact, I’ve gotten a little too cocky sometimes in terms of forgetting to save my work frequently.

Tonight, though, all that good will went down the toilet as I faced several old school Blue Screens of Death. I wasn’t even doing anything to get them. I was running BrainVoyager, and with the program idle, walked away for something, and when I turned back there it was.

BSOD.

Of course Brain Voyager is likely to blame since it is limited-production scientific software, but nonetheless, XP generally handles errors better than completely seizing up and crashing. Ordinarily, I might have just thanked whatever minor office deities were around at the time that I had saved my work just before getting up, but tonight I got really mad at the computer. What right did it have to force me to hard boot it and start from scratch? Even saved, it takes time to load all the brain images back into memory, and time just for the system to come back to life. Time to click on the annoying “your system recovered from a serious error, tell MS about it!” message. What’s with that message, anyway? I wish there was a way to turn it off, because I never send my error reports to MS. It’s not like they’re going to up and try to fix XP now, or try to make 3rd party software cooperate better. It’s just more time before I can recover from the error and get back about my business. I am, of course, lamenting all this lost time because I’m still at work and it’s closing in on 3 am.

A lot of the bitterness, though, I suspect comes from the Animal Crackers. It has been my experience that Animal Crackers are an angry food (though this is a realization I’ve only come to tonight). Almost every time I eat them, I find I get excessively annoyed at almost everything. It’s strange, because they sort of start out as comfort food, and they’re just so cute. They’re also somewhat bland and easy to just keep popping in your mouth in an unthinking way. But before long you’ve got this whole cookie menangerie in your insides, seething with hate and rage.

(Part of that, I suspect, may come from the fact that I really only ever eat them when I’ve got all-nighters… but nonetheless, I’m not impressed with the BSOD tonight.)

With the coming of spring came the biannual changing of the smoke detector batteries. This lead us to actually try to find our smoke detectors, since this is the first time we’ve had to do it since moving in. It turns out they were in less than ideal locations: the one for the centre part of the house is behind a drop ceiling concealing the bay windows, and the one for the back half is in the back closet. Not just any closet, of course: to it’s credit it doesn’t have a door we never close the door, so at least the airflow — and smoke detecting properties — aren’t completely inhibited; but it’s also a sloped-roof room, and the detector was right up at the top, in the dead space that the smoke detector manuals say never to place one. The basement, which was just recently renovated to be livable, had none (which is against the firecode, the part of the lease saying there were sufficient detectors notwithstanding).

So, having just got some coupons in the mail for rebates on smoke detectors, I went out to supplement our arsenal. First off, I picked up a photoelectric detector, which is good for placing in or near the kitchen (the two we had were ionization). I should back off a second to elaborate: there are two basic types of detectors: photoelectric and ionization. Different types of fires are detected more efficiently by the different types. The fast-burning fires that occur in most homes, especially bedrooms, (my smoke detector literature says 70% of home fires) are best detected by ionization type detectors, and recommends one of those outside the bedrooms. Slow, smouldering fires are better detected by a photoelectric type; the photoelectric types are also less likely to go off from steam and regular cooking particles (fewer kitchen false positives), so they’re recommended for use near the kitchen.

Anyhow, I bought this detector for the kitchen, and had this rebate form for spending $25 or more on a detector; of course, it came in at $24.99. Which was a bit of a bummer, but even moreso was the realization that the detectors we already had required two batteries each to refresh. So after changing the batteries and putting in the new detector, we decided that the one in the back closet really wasn’t ideally located, so it would have to be moved to someplace that wouldn’t be the absolute last part of the house to fill with smoke. I got up on the ladder, and started to unscrew the base. And unscrewed…. and just kept unscrewing. The thing was held in by 3″ wood screws! I just couldn’t understand why they would go and use screws like that, especially since the detector itself should have come with a pair of much more reasonably sized screws.

In fact, the entire house seems to be constructed from comically large screws. They’re not even all the same length, so it’s not like they bought a bulk case of 3″ screws and just started using them everywhere. The cabinets in the kitchen all have screws coming out the sides and bottoms, the legs for the laundry tub in the basement are maybe a quarter-inch thick, and are held together with 1.5″ screws. Even the picture hangars have nails and/or screws holding them up that are far larger than the task requires.

On the other end of the spectrum is the bed frame we just assembled for the guest bed (and it’s a comfy bed: if we don’t have anyone out to visit soon, I may swap it with my own) and the bolts for it were only about 1/4″ longer than the minimum length needed to get the nuts on…