Blessed by the Potato

So, shortly after Netbug’s hot water heater woes, my own has decided to give up for the winter. I went to wash my hands for bed and found no hot water forthcoming. In the midst of coming down with a cold, I took some ny quil in the hopes of waking up healthy tomorrow (note to self: shingles + karaoke to 3 am is not a sound health plan). I thought for a few minutes that the ny quil had broken my brain and that there had to be hot water coming out of the tap, and that I was quite possibly burning myself with my hand under the freezing cold water. Then I went out to the kitchen and heard this eerie wailing sound, like a cross between a tea kettle and two raccoons “fighting”.

It was coming from the basement. I went down there with a creeping, knowing feeling washing over me. Yep, the hot water heater was busted, wailing and dribbling water all down itself from the cold water intake at the top, all over the floor… and flooding the basement up to a depth of just over a centimeter. I then went to wake up Wayfare (who was not happy to be woken up suddenly in the middle of the night) before cutting the water and power (I didn’t want to step into the flood without someone else awake in case I electrocuted myself). Unlike Netbug, I have a cutoff for just the hot water heater, so I’ll still have at least cold water in the morning, but this is still going to suck. It also showcased how the foundation/basement tiles of old homes like this can be laid wrong or shift over time: the water pooled like crazy in the laundry room, but the only floor drain is in the furnace room, and there was at least one hump in the floor keeping the water from flowing out into the drain. It instead decided to move under the walls dividing the rooms and flood our storage area and the bathroom (and having the walls/gypsum drywall soaked through is going to suck come mould season). Even what water did meander its way over to the furnace room drain didn’t go in smoothly, instead choosing to overshoot around one side flooding our old window air conditioners before circling back around to the drain.

Oddly enough, the worst of the flooding went away all on its own as we started to shovel. Without the water continuing to flow to top it up it just seemed to seep away somewhere. Which, while saving me some of the effort of cleanup, just can’t be a good thing.

Of course, my landlord is in New Zealand for 3 weeks (I think this is the last of the 3 weeks), so this is going to be a nightmare to fix. The water heater has a big (recent-looking) sticker on it that says its the property of Union Gas… but calling them lead us no where. They couldn’t find a record of who owned the water heater, and unless they knew it was theirs, they weren’t sending anyone out to help us. I know I don’t pay a rental fee on my bill, and after putting me on hold a few times (though the lady on the phone was quite nice, as was their other 24-hour service person I had to call a few weeks ago), finally determined that my landlord had bought out the water heater, so it was up to us to get our landlord to fix it. Ugh.

I managed to get my hands on an advance copy of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, so I might as well use the opportunity to give it a quick review here. It makes me kind of feel like some big-shot member of the media to have something like this in my hands, but it was actually given to Wayfare in her role as a potential big-shot librarian collection-builder. I’ll try not to include any spoilers that aren’t already on the back cover.

It’s a (very) near-future story about a teenager dealing with the consequences of a country gone security-mad. In the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco, the department of homeland security goes bananas, and everyone driving through a toll gate or taking the bus starts to feel the pain of the airline traveller, where you are always under suspicion, and no proof is needed to detain you. After being arrested for nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, getting thrown in a decrepit prison for days without a lawyer, hearing, or phone call to his parents, after being accused of being called a terrorist, and then upon release finding that he’s still considered to be under suspicion, our protagonist decides to take on the department of homeland security. He sets out to expose the illegal heavy-handedness of the department of homeland security, and to show the american people that giving up their freedoms for the illusion of security and to live constantly in fear is just as terrorizing as the terrorist attacks themselves were.

It’s a young adult book, but I didn’t find that out until after I read it. Like a lot of YA scifi out there these days, it’s of very high quality and doesn’t really talk down to the reader or anything that would preclude this book from making the reading list of “less young” adults. It’s a touch on the short side, but at no point does the story feel rushed or simplified. I quite enjoyed the book, finishing it off in a single night (insomnia strikes again!). It was definitely a book with a message, but since it happened to be one I agreed with it never felt preachy to me (YMMV).

There were a few points through the book where the text became really familiar, giving me a sense of deja vu. In fact, these were the parts where the action seemed to take a slight break for a bit of exposition about cryptography, security, privacy, politics, or the science of networking. It seemed like Cory had cut & pasted a blog post or rant or speech from somewhere else right into the story; I was half expecting to see the fonts change for some of these bits they had such a strong “I’ve read this part somewhere else” vibe to them — and as Wayfare says, since it was an advance, uncorrected proof, that could be quite possible! Even then, it wasn’t like that was entirely a bad thing, as those parts did go with the story, it was just strange, like “breaking the fourth wall.” However, that’s because I’ve read a lot of Cory’s stuff out on the internet (via BoingBoing or other columns/speeches), so a normal person who hasn’t already read so much of his stuff wouldn’t notice or be bothered by it at all.

I haven’t had the time to properly read and write/rant about BC’s upcoming carbon tax, but I have to say that the idea sounds good to me: it’s a not-too-oppressive, revenue-neutral, slowly-incrementing carbon tax. Sounds like it could become the model for the other provinces (and possibly even the states!).

I’ve been fiddling with all the settings I can find, and I can’t for the life of me properly adjust volume on YouTube videos. There’s the little slider in the player that I can use to turn the sound down, but for the most part they’re far quieter than anything else on my computer. So of course, I turn the volume control on my speakers way up to compensate, just to get blown away by the intensely loud sound of an incoming email or MSN message. Does anyone have any ideas of what to do? I’m tempted to just keep my speakers turned up, and try to turn all the other sound settings down, but then there’s always some damn thing that won’t get turned down with the wave control and something else might come blasting out… plus things usually sound better when the hardware (speakers) don’t over-amplify noise…

Dawn is a funny, unreal sort of time. The sun comes over the horizon, and on warm summer mornings, you can sometimes watch the terminator race across the fields, or see the light slowly change colour as the sun, somewhere hidden and close to the unseen horizon, begins to shine in the winter. It’s a quiet time, a still time — nearly supernaturally so. Everyone is usually still asleep, or at least still in their own homes, while the night owls are finally off to bed. No matter what the weather seems to be doing through the night, or planning for the day, it always seems to take pause at dawn.

The dawn often brings feelings of peace, tranquility, of sharing in something special and quiet and private. For me though, I often find two other strong emotions at day break. Anger, for one, is easy to explain: I’m often up all through the night, whether it be frantically working, or losing myself in another world through books or video games. Dawn is the undeniable signal that I’ve been ignoring my watch for too long, and it’s really getting to be time for bed (or, time to finish my work). I feel angry and cheated by the sun, that the night is not long enough, that I’m not finished yet. Sadness too sometimes takes me at dawn, though I seldom know why. Whether a lament for the lack of sleep that finds me awake for the sun (often, in this case, when the lack of sleep is less voluntary), or a nostalgic longing for those times when seeing the sun rise was truly a fun event: playing poker all night at Shubh’s, or goofing off at the cottage. Or perhaps the odd, unpleasant memories of past stumblings through insomnia, like the time I couldn’t sleep when high school ended. The night before exams were released I stayed awake. There was a thunderstorm in the wee hours of the morning, and I went for a walk in the rain, and just kept walking. Dawn broke through the clouds, and by the time I was done walking it was shaping up to be a hot, muggy June day. I stopped by the school on my way home, looking silly with my rain jacket in hand since it had been bright and sunny for nearly 3 hours. I did well on the exams that I collected, but for some reason the memory of that day always makes me sad.

Westjet says in a Globe & Mail article that it’s considering moving away from Air Miles and starting its own reward program. This seems to me to be a pretty rough move from the customer’s point of view. Air Miles is handy because it can be collected from so many places and redeemed for so many things. Air Canada’s Aeroplan has sucked monkey balls for years, and while recently it’s become possible to collect Aeroplan points in other stores (such as Futureshop, some gas stations, etc), there’s no reason to think that WestJet’s own plan would do the same, so it might be a very inconvenient, useless plan indeed, unless you fly a lot. If they were to go it alone, I think I’d prefer instead that they just cut the price a bit, since airline reward systems are generally just quagmires waiting to happen.

Borrowing a page from Shoppers’ playbook, Mr. Durfy said WestJet envisages stimulating travel demand by issuing bonus points to passengers who fly on slower days, notably Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

“There’s some neat stuff that you can do if you have control of your own loyalty program. The sky’s the limit,” he said.

Ok, that is not a reason to leave Air Miles. You can already offer double Air Miles or bonus 100 Air Miles for features — other retailers such as A&P do all the time. Buy 4 pineapples, get 3 Air Miles; buy a carton of milk and a box of cereal, get 10 Air Miles; Sunday double bonus Air Miles day!

And finally, a quick comparison of Air Miles vs. Aeroplan:

Air Miles are worth approx 14 cents each (based on getting a $20 gift certificate to A&P). Aeroplan miles are worth approx 0.74 cents each (based on redeeming for a $100 gift card). For a direct flight to Victoria for a conference this summer, both Air Canada and West Jet are having a seat sale so it’s $264 each way, total of $528. Air Canada will give me 176 Aeroplan Miles, or a kickback of $1.30 (it’s actually better to take their offer to knock $3 off the price of the flight and not collect any!). West Jet will give 26 Air Miles, or a loyalty value of $3.64. That’s about a 0.7% loyalty kickback, which is pretty typical for many loyalty programs (Shoppers Optimum, RBC Rewards, etc). When it’s Air Miles they’re giving me, that can add up and I can use it somewhere. If they switch to their own flight rewards system, then it’s likely I won’t be able to redeem for anything until I’ve collected hundreds of dollars worth of points, which even flying a few times per year would never happen within my lifetime.

I generally do like taking advantage of loyalty points programs — who doesn’t like getting something for nearly nothing — however, I start getting really pissed off and uninterested when each and every individual store has their own, separate points game. At that point, unless it’s somewhere I shop a lot, I’d just rather they just cut the prices or improved the product/service and stuff their loyalty programs. West Jet certainly fits here: West Jet has slightly better service than Air Canada, as long as the prices are close, I’m going to pick West Jet. The few dollars worth of points in Air Miles are not swaying my choice, and a more restrictive West Jet exclusive program would have no influence.

For a week I had bad headaches, that were made much worse by moving my head, looking down, etc. On Monday (the first day), I felt like throwing up, then Tuesday through Thursday were relatively normal, aside from the pain. I tried to hold still and not do much and it was actually quite manageable that way. On Friday, things took a turn for the worse. I was sick to my stomach, spiked a fever of 39°C, and was just ruddy awful. On Saturday, I had a rash start on my chest, and continued to feel nauseous and had no desire for food. Reading up on the internet, I found that I had the whole grocery list of symptoms associated with meningitis, just none that were quite severe enough to really worry me enough to go get checked out. On Sunday, nothing had changed, but this was starting to worry me, so I went to the hospital.

As the title may have spoiled it already, I won’t try to draw out the suspense: I don’t have meningitis. I do have shingles though, which I always thought was one of those made-up old people diseases my grandfather used to get. It’s basically childhood chickenpox, which has remained dormant somewhere inside some of my nerve cells, rearing its ugly head. So it’s been a pretty miserable few days here. The shingles manifests as a rash on my chest: basically a concentrated collection of a few dozen chicken pox spots all merging together — and it’s exactly as itchy and painful as that sounds. It burns. On top of that are the systematic effects: the headache, nausea, and what I still don’t quite understand: the fatigue. I seem to wake up from a sleep feeling pretty good, energy wise. As long as I don’t move my head or touch my shingles rash, I figure I can do something normal, and I can (witness: blogging!) for a short while. But after a few hours I have trouble concentrating, and after about 5-6 hours of being awake, I just crash, and have to go back to bed. Then I sleep for 7-8 hours, and repeat. It’s a very strange schedule to be on, and unfortunately doesn’t mesh well with a standard 24-hour day.

I’ve lost 4 pounds in as many days, and while that weight won’t be missed in the slightest (bye now, don’t write!), it’s not a healthy rate. Fortunately, that seems to have leveled off today and yesterday, now that I’m back up to two decent-sized meals a day.

Oh, and calamine lotion is amazing. I wish they had invented it when I was a kid and had the chicken pox.

For the new year, I don’t think they’re keeping the PC-Cillin name: now it’s just Trend Internet Security 2008. There are a number of changes from the 2007 version. First up, the UWO site license/student version isn’t good for unlimited installs. One copy, one install. Granted, it’s still cheaper than buying a retail copy with 3 installs, but combined with the price increase per disc, it has driven the cost of antivirus software up by a factor of 11 for my family (from a bargain basement $12/year to $135/year). They (and here I’m not sure if “they” are the university, trend micro, or a combination thereof) used to be of the opinion that giving cheap-as-free antivirus to students protected the network as a whole from virus outbreaks and security threats, and was a good loss-leader to boot. I don’t know why what was good in 2003*, 2005, 2006, and 2007 is suddenly not profitable enough, especially since you could only renew those student licenses through the campus computer store, so any and all graduates (and lazy distant family members) would be prompted to pay full retail price if trying to renew over the internet. (* - 2003 was good for 2 years)

Internet Security 2008 is a lot quieter than 2007 was: no more nag messages for everything — 2007 used to nag about windows update trying to access the internet, and for each update that tried to install. It would nag about firefox and thunderbird, twice, every time one of them had an update. Now I’ve had windows updates and a firefox update, and still no peep from 2008. It also doesn’t pull up the updating progress window on top of whatever you’re actually working on whenever it wants to update, it just animates the taskbar icon. However, it does still manage to steal focus when updating or starting a scan — if I’m in the middle of typing something and it decides to do something, even though I don’t get the giant pop-up covering my work as in 2007 (which was, admittedly, turn-off-able for some cases) my cursor still magically disappears and my keystrokes stop registering in that window. In some ways, that may be worse, because it takes longer to register what happens, and I still get just as angry.

One real annoyance for me is that the icon in the taskbar will change to a yellow hazard symbol (yellow triangle with a !) indicating that there’s a problem. This last week, the “problem” was that Internet Security 2008 was “out of date”. Well, it wasn’t: I had automatic updates on, and tried to manually update a few times. I was using the latest version. The problem was, the stupid thing is set up to flash that warning if it hasn’t been updated in 3 days (and Trend usually pushes updates something like every 12 hours), but for some reason the script kiddies were taking the week off and there hadn’t been an update available in weeks. I haven’t found yet if that’s user-configurable. If the default is 3 days to a warning though, then Trend should consider releasing “empty” updates every 2 days just to keep the program happy and to keep people from freaking out.

It’s been said so many times that so many people are just way too aggressive in winter driving conditions. Last night’s storm was particularly nasty: dropping a thick layer of ice on everything, followed by heavy snow. So this article in the London Free Press (I know, I said I’d stop reading it!) about a man caught going 127 km/h and flashing his high beams at slower traffic, and then even after getting his ticket and being warned by police ending up spinning off the road in the slippery conditions. Thankfully, he didn’t take anyone else with him, though from the sounds of it he and his car escaped pretty much unscathed. I think true poetic justice might have required the car to be totalled and him to be found at-fault by his insurance :)

Speaking as a visitor from another planet, contagious human behaviours can be really interesting to watch. Everyone already knows that yawns can spread, but I was surprised to see how contagious fear can be.

I can be a little high-strung sometimes. I can also zone out and go into complete introspection (or a visit to my nothing box). I can be both at once, and then someone can come up and snap me out of it, and I won’t expect in the slightest. To me, it’s like they snuck up on me out of nowhere, and I startle. Now, my startle response is towards the “extremely surprised” end of the spectrum. This isn’t a little hand on my chest, an intake of breath and a hushed “oh my, you startled me.” No, this is a hands in the air, jump halfway off the ground “BWAAAAAAA!!!!” In fact, I can startle people who sneak up on me with my startle response.

It was funny at curling the other night. I was watching the rock go down the ice, lost in my own thoughts, and our lead comes up from behind to stand beside me, hitting my broom as she did. I think it was the combination of popping up from behind into my peripheral vision along with the unexpected tactile feedback of someone hitting my broom that made my startle particularly bad. “BWAAA!!” I yelped. “Ah!!” She exclaimed, startled by my startle. Then she hit me. “What are you doing that for? You are surprised when you’re in an arena full of people and someone comes up beside you? What’s wrong with you?!”

I could get deep at this point and draw parallels to stock market psychology and sell-offs, but I think I’ll get some sleep instead and let the obvious remarks write themselves in your minds.