Blessed by the Potato

Wayfare and I woke up with a start this morning when there was what sounded like a loud, rapid knock at the door just before 5 am. It’s hard to judge the exact nature, number of beats, and source of a sound that wakes you (or at least me, since I tend to sleep pretty deeply) because the first part of the sound you don’t really listen to or process in the usual way, it just gets the attention of your brain to wake you up. Still, I think it sounded like 5 quick knocks on the door. I’m a little slow getting out of bed, but I went as fast as I could, yet when I got to the front door and peeked out the windows (I don’t care how safe I think my neighbourhood is, I’m not blindly opening the door at 5 am) there was nothing there. That’s a little freaky, and I don’t know if it was just one of the neighbourhood students being a nuisance, sort of like ringing the doorbell and running (though we don’t have a doorbell), or if it was just an animal, or what…

Well, I’m awake now!

Well, one of the busiest highways in the world has a new name (at least for a section of it). It’s a name befitting a hair metal band.

I don’t really care for the name change, after all, we already have several Veteran’s Highways (the former Airport Rd. in London, and the 416 near Ottawa). And it’s a pretty cheesy name, I don’t know how much it really honours our soldiers (and other domestic heroes). The quotes in the article make little sense to me:

Capt. Mark Bossi, who served in Afghanistan, fought back tears as he rode along the stretch with CTV Toronto.

“That’s amazing — it really is,” Bossi said when he saw one of the signs. “It’s on (Highway) 401 — people are going to see them everyday.”

The signs are in response to an online petition in support of renaming the highway that was overwhelmed with responses.

Bossi understands why the grassroots movement to dedicate the stretch grew so quickly.

“If you think about it, every soldier has a mom and dad,” he said, his voice trembling.

“A lot of guys have wives and children. I think that’s one of the reasons Canadians wanted the highway renamed.”

So seeing the highway renamed made this captain so emotional he had to fight back tears? That makes little sense to me, the highway would probably have to be named after me personally to get that involved in it, and even then… of course, I haven’t suffered unknown amounts of PTSD. The last part of his quote makes even less sense. Every grad student has a mom and dad, and many have wives and children, but that really doesn’t make any sense for a reason to rename a highway. In fact, he seems to imply that the highway was renamed to appease/coddle the survivors of soldiers killed rather than to actually honour the soldiers themselves.

At least it’s not something that’s really going to affect me. For brevity’s sake alone, I think most people will still call it the 401 in everyday usage, similar to how nearly everyone still calls that stadium beneath the CN Tower “Skydome”.

I didn’t mention it when I first heard about it, but I figure now enough time has passed that I can slip in another (boring) post on hybrid cars. Toyota has decided to drop the price of the Prius in Canada, and increase the standard features list (notably, to include side airbags, something that was standard in the States last year, but part of a very pricey everything-including-the-kitchen-sink option package here). This is essentially to make buying a Prius for Canada in Canada a more appealing option. Last year, one could save nearly $10k (Canadian) by buying a Prius in the States and importing it, and that was after paying the import duties, etc. I haven’t run through a detailed comparison, but it looks like that savings is now about $4k with the lower price, and the word that the federal rebate will not be applied to imported cars. Worth looking into, still, but not quite as much of a no-brainer (how much would you pay to not have to deal with miles and Fahrenheit? Over the life of the car? The speedometer changes to metric, but nothing else does. At what point is the effort of flying down and driving back worth the savings?).

This will, of course, hurt the value of the cars on the used market a little bit, but that’s going to be coming for all cars in the Canadian market, as the stronger dollar makes getting a car in the States more appealing (especially a used one that’s run out its warranty, since the manufacturers can’t put up artificial trade barriers such as not honouring a cross-border warranty).

The Globe article mentions that the Prius’ success is due to the fact that it’s a “unique” hybrid — it stands out as a hybrid because there’s no gas-only Prius (whereas every other hybrid, such as the Civic, Accord, Highlander, Camry, Vue, and Escape share a body style with a conventional car). That may be part of it, but I really have to doubt that “image” plays anywhere near as much of a role as the media seems to be giving it. Instead, I think that the Prius is by far the most successful hybrid for its practical qualities. The Civic, Accord, and Camry are sedan bodies with the battery packs taking up 1/3 of the normal trunk space; they’re nicely sized cars in the passenger compartments, but have tiny, subcompact sized trunks, with no versatility (the Camry has a pass-through, but their seats don’t go down, which some people find handy) and I think that turns a lot of people off (I know it was the major deciding factor for me). The Escape isn’t selling much, but they’re still selling them as fast as they can make them — they just can’t make them very fast (and because the production is slow, they’re not available at all Ford dealerships). The Vue, simply, sucks. The Accord was schizophrenic, and never really marketed for its strengths (really, marketing it as a powerful Accord that gets the same mileage as the 4-cyl model really just makes me want to get the cheaper, bigger-trunked 4-cyl). The Civic and the Camry, while not making Prius numbers, aren’t doing all that badly, and I think that’s because they’re also reasonably practical in terms of fuel economy, price, and performance. The Prius, on the other hand, has the best fuel economy (though its margin over the Civic isn’t huge), and has the most storage of the cars (sure, it gets beaten by the SUVs, but then, they’re SUVs and don’t get the mileage of the Prius).

We went Halloween shopping this weekend, getting ideas for costumes and decorations (it’s actually a bit of a late start for us, but don’t worry, we’re still going to throw a rocking Halloween party — if you read the blog and want an invite, just send me an email, and don’t be too weirdo internet-stalky. Also, come in costume). Then, we brought the 7 boxes of Halloween decorations out of the basement (see picture with the cat for scale) and started decorating.

Towards the end of the day, I went back to the kitchen to start on dinner while Wayfare continued to decorate. I hear “do you think the table is sturdy enough to stand on?” Without thinking, I say something along the lines of “it’s a pretty sturdy table.” A few minutes later, there’s a giant crash from the front of the house, and I walk back to find the table on its side and Wayfare holding her hand yelling “get me something to stop the bleeding!” Turns out it was a pretty sturdy table, just not a particularly well balanced one. She grabbed the chandelier going down, smashing a lightbulb with her hand.

She’s got this nasty gash up her hand that’s a good 3 cm long, and there’s all kinds of skin missing so you can see different layers of tissue, and that is just not going to heal pretty. In addition to that are two other cuts on her hand that would be noteworthy all on their own. So I got her patched up, finished dinner, cleaned up the glass, and then we took a little trip up to urgent care to have it checked out (we threw the gauze on pretty quickly without really checking for any leftover shards of glass). The doctor there was young (I’d guess just about my age or younger), and she missed the fact that Wayfare had a cut on the palm of her hand when she did the inspection of the big wound, so I wasn’t having a huge deal of confidence in her. She didn’t seem to do too rough a job on the sutures though, and I’m especially glad we went after I saw how many stitches she got: 15, including 3 in the smaller, but deeper, cut in her hand.

The chandelier has seen better days. I was afraid the one arm that she broke the bulb out of would never take another bulb, but apart from cracking the decorative plastic, it doesn’t look to be too bad. Of course, the screw-in base of the bulb was torn right out, so something had to have been warped for that to happen (perhaps the impact deformed the bulb to yank it out?). The top of the chandelier where it attaches to the chain has also been warped, and she thinks that’s where she grabbed it with her good hand. I’m glad the whole thing stayed attached to the ceiling: as bad as her hand is, things could have gone even worse if she landed with a hundred-pound chandelier on her chest.

Just a quick note to the Rogers users out there: Rogers will begin charging for going over your monthly download cap (60 GB for Express, 100 GB for Extreme) soon. Of course, knowing Rogers, they’d never tell you that until you actually got a bill from them for it. The usage monitor tool (when it works) now shows the charge amount as well as your usage to date. At the moment the overage charge is $1.25/GB (which seems a little steep already), but that will be going up to $2/GB for Express (each tier is anticipated to have its own overage charge amount, Extreme at $1.50/GB, and Ultra-Lite at $2.75/GB), and the cap will be coming down (down?!) to 50 GB for Express. It is believed that the charges will go into effect in September, but will be waived until December (so if you just look at the bottom line of your bill, you might not notice until December, but if you look at the service breakdown, you may see a funny charge/refund set of lines starting this month… assuming you go over your cap). The maximum overage charge is anticipated to be $50 (though if you’re a 300 GB/mo downloader, Rogers may drop you).

Personally, this probably won’t affect me. When I had Extreme, the most I ever downloaded in a month was 62 GB, and that was when torrents worked and I was connected to a WoW server for half the day. My usage now is typically in the 20-40 GB range, but that’s just a little too close for comfort if the cap becomes 50 GB (especially if I get back into online gaming). It comes off as pretty scuzzy, especially with throttling being used as another measure to limit bandwidth use, and so many price increases seen in the past few years. If I thought the phone lines in this house could handle DSL, I’d probably switch to Teksavvy. (Unfortunately, half the phones in the house have a lot of audible static, which just can’t be good for DSL — and I still haven’t found the phone demark box in the basement).