Blessed by the Potato

I can’t believe the move by the TTC union last night. The matter was settled, as far as I was aware: a deal having been struck between the union and the TTC, the deal recommended by the union leadership, and the only remaining thing a vote by the union members, which after the union leadership strikes a deal is often a rubber stamp. Not this time, as the union rejected the deal and went on strike.

It’s the “went on strike” part that really burns my balls. I think the TTC borders on an “essential service” as it is, and that the union would risk losing a lot of goodwill with their original strike plan of providing notice. At least with notice, the TTC can become non-essential as people can plan to not go to work, take trips, arrange rides, reorganize their schedules, etc. This is barely made practical by the fact that the TTC contracts come up in the spring — in the middle of a “don’t go outside” heat wave/smog day in the summer or intense cold in the winter, then there would be much worse consequences to a TTC strike.

However, this wasn’t a planned strike with notice. They just walked off the job immediately after the vote, stranding thousands of people. They weren’t even stranded during the day when there might be the chance to wait out the rush for cabs in a restaurant or mall, or to walk in the warmth of the springtime sun. Instead, people were abandoned late at night, not even knowing that a strike that night was a possibility.

I watched a bit of the news as they caught people coming out of bars and clubs downtown, many of them making the responsible choice to not drink and drive and take the Better Way. Only to find, after getting there with everything hunky-dory, that suddenly the subways were closed and there were long queues for cabs… if you could even afford to take one. One guy interviewed (and I’m sure there were many more in that situation) spent all his money except the $3 he knew he’d need to get on the subway — how far would a cab take him for $3?

This also happened late enough at night that anyone who had to work on Saturday morning might not have had time to catch the news and adjust their plans. How many people will show up seriously late for work because of this insane move? A nurse called into CP24 to highlight another group of people caught off-guard by the sudden strike action: any shift-worker who had to start that night (e.g.: at midnight) found with zero notice that their route to work suddenly wasn’t there. Hospital workers were forced to work unexpected overtime as they weren’t allowed to leave until their replacement showed up.

The provincial government is going to introduce back-to-work legislation tomorrow, and even that I think is too long. They should have had that out today, but at least they’ll get together and have this fixed by monday. I’m going to write my MPP right now and encourage her to make the TTC an essential service.

This move by the union is doubly damaging because the SURPISE! factor is going to hurt the reputation of the TTC and transit as a reliable way to get around. So many people in and out of government are trying to get more and more people to give up their cars and take transit more often for congestion and environmental reasons. The price of gas skyrocking lately has really been helping with that message… and then the TTC Union goes and screws it all up by telling people who might be on the fence about giving up their cars “Hey, fuck you, we don’t care about you, and you can’t rely on us for shit.”

The stated reason for the sudden walkout was fears of violence against drivers. Hey, I’ve got news for you, when you dick around with this union strike bullshit when you’re an essential service that people need to get to work and go about their lives, they’re going to be really pissed off when you take it away from them, and there is a risk of some of the more unstable members of society getting a bit violent. It’s the risk you run as a union, and you’ve got to take steps to deal with that (have your “brothers” double up — let one guy ride shotgun unpaid until the issue blows over, get extra help from the police, etc). But when you really fuck people over by abandoning them with no notice, you are going to turn a couple of unstable and potentially violent people into all out homicidal nutbags. In fact, with next to no facilities to handle all the people stranded by the TTC last night I’m surprised there wasn’t a riot, or at least more violence as people fought for cabs. When you’re a union for something nonessential, like a car maker, or a retail chain, you can go on strike and you really only hurt the company (which may indirectly hurt yourself, the union, in the long run). It’s a bargaining tool that can be effective in some situations, without much chance of violence. However, if your strike takes away things that people really need: food, healthcare, transportation, power; then you are putting your lives into your own hands by striking. Violence is a real possibility. So what I don’t understand is why the TTC didn’t decide on some other form of job action that wouldn’t fuck quite so much with people’s lives. Anything to make their point but not cripple the city. Why not decide to stick to the “holiday” schedule until a new deal was reached? At least then people could still get around, especially those who really don’t have any other choice, but it would be slow, crowded, and inconvenient. Or stop all buses, streetcars, and subways for a minute at a time every 10 minutes? For the buses and streetcars, you’d even get to hold up motorist traffic. Or better yet, run the transit infrastructure, but don’t collect any fares. That hurts the TTC corporation/management and will actually get the public to have some goodwill for the union.

Finally, there were two very valuable reasons to have a nice window of notice for the people of Toronto prior to a strike. The first was to be nice and fair and give people a chance to cope with the strike. The second was to let the union threaten a strike and flex their union muscle to show management that they’re really serious this time without actually having to carry through with the strike. A strike is damaging for pretty much everyone involved: it’s bad for the city, and it runs the serious risk of getting bitch-slapped with back-to-work legislation for the union (which is exactly what happened) while they lose any support they might have had from loyal TTC riders. The TTC management is not totally retarded.

This will likely be a multipart post since I’m probably going to want to cover a lot of ground and dig up a lot of figures, but just don’t have time right now. For now, a quick point to make:

“Switching to ethanol [to fuel cars] was a big thing, until they realized they are starving people.”

[clarification for context mine]

This is just one representative quote (from an off-hand comment on Preet’s site) of a sentiment that I’ve been seeing a lot lately. There is some sort of food crisis happening right now, and it’s snowballing astonishingly quickly. There are food riots in poorer countries, and even in the States there are the beginnings of rationing on rice.

I’ve got my doubts about the ultimate utility of ethanol production, but I also think that it’s far too easy to blame biofuel production for the current food price spike. From what I can find, about 20% of the US corn crop went into biofuels last year, and it’s pretty much the only food crop that gets diverted to that stream. 20% of the crop looks to be within the normal range of crop yield variances, and last year was a record crop to boot. It may be a factor, but I have to say that something else is leading to food price inflation and starving the world…

The spring weather here has been fantastic this weekend — bordering on summer weather, even. I went out to sit on the porch and read today, and was surprised to find that a nest was blocking the door (which I partially destroyed going outside). It wasn’t much of a nest yet, but it was mighty impressive given that it was built in just a day! I thought though that it must be the world’s hardest working, dumbest bird though, to build a ground-level nest where it did. Then I noticed that above the door was more nest material, so it was possible that all the stuff on the ground was just what fell down from the area above the door. That would then make it an incredibly hard-working, sloppy bird (or perhaps it was a tandem system, with one bird bringing material in and dropping it on the ground near the door with the other to fly it to the top of the door and weave it?), although even the stuff piled outside the door was way more of a nest than the stupid pigeons ever built.

It’s been a while since I was an active cyclist. In high school I used to bike all over the place, even with snow on the ground, although even then I wasn’t much of one for running off road through the mud. In university, I really gave up on biking and became a car/subway/walking kind of guy. In London, that went double, despite all the attractive bike paths this city has to offer.

A few years ago, I tried to get back into it and bought the cheapest bike I could (a blue supercycle from Canadian Tire), but that bike was heavy, and didn’t shift smoothly, and it was a pain to take down the elevator in the apartment, and, and, and… so I very quickly stopped riding everywhere. When winter came, the only place to keep my bike at the apartment was out on the balcony, where it of course rusted up and I haven’t biked since.

Now, I think I’m going to give it another go. I’ve got a decent “tax return” (actually, I saved up anticipating that I would have to pay since I didn’t have any withholding this year, but I saved more than I owe) so I can use that money to buy a bike! I’m not going to try to get the minimum cheap bike like last time: I’m willing to spend a bit of money to make sure I get something decent (I’d like to stay in the $400 region, but can spend up to $600) because, if I do this right, I shouldn’t need to buy another bike for decades.

I’ve got three things working in my favour to keep up biking this time around: my friends (both in Toronto and in London) are all getting focused on staying in shape, and many of them bike. I live in a very bikeable area with paths and reasonably wide sidestreets (or, reasonably empty sidewalks and cops who never stop cyclists on the sidewalks). And finally, gas is getting really expensive and I’m trying to save wear and tear on my car if I can. Working against that though is the fact that I live a 10 minute walk from work at the bottom of a very large hill. Most likely, I will continue to walk to work rather than bike, and if I’m not biking every day I might not stick to it as much (as a kid, a big help was that I biked to school on a fairly flat route every day, and my friends’ houses were also a reasonable bike ride away). And, as I mentioned, I live at the bottom of a very large hill. Half my potential biking destinations involve going (insanely) uphill, which may influence my stay-at-home-itude.

Anyhow, I’m going to go to the Cyclepath in the morning and see what they have, so if anyone has any suggestions about what I should get, I’m all ears! (And if you have a recommendation for a specific shop, I’m also open to that: Cyclepath was mostly chosen because it’s walking distance from here). I don’t really know what I should be looking for. I think I’ll be looking for a “hybrid” bike because I’ve never really been keen on road/racing bikes, but I don’t really plan on doing much off-roading. Since I won’t be straying from the path, I don’t think I need suspension. But, I do want something that will let me climb hills relatively effortlessly, something that is light. I’m not sure what type of seat I want, which may be one of the most important considerations. I have what is medically termed a “large sexy man-booty”, or “fat ass” as the kids would say. But I don’t know if that necessarily means that I want a wide seat. My high school-era bike had a fairly narrow seat and I actually found it fairly comfortable, but I was like 80 lbs lighter in high school. My Canadian Tire bike had a medium width seat, and while it was ok to ride on for about 20 minutes, after that it would give me searing ass pain and I’d have to bike standing up. But that may be due more to cheap build rather than strictly size… I’m hoping that if I choose poorly, it’s something that’s fairly easy to change out later.

So far, I’ve spoken very briefly to Baum, who’s a bit of a bike expert. He recommended I look at a Trek, or a Rocky Mountain brand, but didn’t suggest any particular model. He also recommended SRAM components over Shimano (although Shimano is about the only brand name I recognized there). Any other recommendations are more than welcome (either in comments, or email me — see the image on the right for the address).

After my dad got his USB thumbdrive/memory stick and synchronization software, it worked quite well for about 6 months. It wasn’t the “cruzersync” software, which as mentioned previously was useless for synchronizing two computers. He ended up buying a program called “Carry It Easy Plus” which worked quite well and intuitively for him, even though I thought $25 was a little steep for a program that basically automated copying & pasting.

Of course, it only worked quite well for about 6 months. Last week for no reason at all, it started misbehaving in a particularly nasty way. Instead of faithfully copying his Quicken files to the stick, and then from the stick to his other computer, it deleted his Quicken program and data files. I shouldn’t say deleted, since technically that’s not what happened (and a delete might have landed something in the recycle bin to restore). It actually decided to overwrite his data with files of 0 size. So first his Quicken program wouldn’t even open, and then after I got the program up and running, we found that his data was gone. This is, I can not say it enough, not the expected behaviour of a commercial product.

Miraculously, he still had mostly up-to-date unsynchronized Quicken files on one computer, so we were able to recover. He suspected that it was the fault of the stick writing/transferring data improperly, so I ran out to buy him another U3-capable USB drive. We reinstalled the Carry It Easy Plus program, and did a test synchronization. It worked pretty good on one computer. I left it with him, and he synchronized again on Friday with his home computer, then went up to the cottage and synchronized with his cottage computer. That’s when all hell broke loose again. The Quicken program files were overwitten, the data was erased, and it looked like his weekend at the cottage wasn’t going to be very productive. My mom, who was heading up a day after him, brought up his home computer… and the data on it was gone too. This is the part where it goes from nasty bug to simply inexcusable: how on earth did the stick, copying the obviously most recent data from his home computer, manage to erase it in the copying process?

So now I’m walking him through the process of restoring the backup I made for him last week, which is quite painful (”ok, now paste that in” “we just did this… but how do I paste again?” “go to edit, dad…”), and for the next while we’re going to avoid Carry It Easy Plus like the plague and get him to synchronize the old-fashioned way, as painful as that is.

I was looking up the contact information to get some support or at least vent a nasty letter their way, but my dad said not to bother: after deleting his most valuable data, there’s really nothing they can do to make it right, and as handy as the program was for the last 6 months or so, he’s lost all faith in it and won’t try it again after this…

Rogers is having a contest for a Prius. If you’re a Rogers customer, all you have to do is switch your billing method over to ebilling to be entered in the draw. Since I’m a little Prius-happy of late I really wanted to enter the contest… except I already get my bills electronically. (Also: since I’m a little Prius-happy, I was tempted to not include a link above in order to improve my odds, but I hope that if any loyal BbtP readers out there did happen to win, they’d share :). Fortunately, the good laws of this country forbid a company like Rogers from running a lottery, so they cannot require a purchase for entry into their draw (and, if selected, the answering of a skill-testing question). This is the first time that I’ve actually taken advantage of those rules and I sent in a letter with a 100-word essay on why ebilling is “good for the environment.” Of course, that still costs me something (postage), so to me it is a bit like entering into a lottery. I figure my odds are 1 in 500,000 or better (how many of the ~10 million Rogers customers will really switch to ebilling or send in a letter?), so ~50 cents to enter is not too bad, as far as lotteries go.

I find this whole thing deliciously ironic, and really hope that I win for that value alone (…ok, not for that value alone, I really want to win for the new car!). First off, I’m entering by a mailed-in paper submission for a contest that is all about the merits of ebilling. And this whole charade in saving paper is being put on by Rogers, who first off have ridiculously long bills (4 pages on 2 sheets just for one service!) simply so that they can throw in ads for the Jays or their magazines in your bill, and who secondly are one of the most egregious users of dead tree admail there is (at least in the London market). I get, minimum, 4 pieces of full-colour junk mail from Rogers a month. Most of it is for their phone service, which they’re pimping lately like the dirty little bitch it is, so maybe that’ll settle down in the next decade when every household in Canada has received their quota of 480 Rogers Home Phone ads and someone in management asks just how effective the 481st unaddressed bulk admailer is really going to be. But even for their long-term developed products like TV, wireless, and internet I get an ad every other month (at least one of them each month), which also makes me wonder: how many people don’t know that Rogers is an option for their TV-viewing habits? Or that the internet now comes in “high speed” (wait, there’s something faster than dial-up AOL? Gasp!).

This contest somewhat reminds me of all the annoying promotions Rogers puts out for new customers, such as 3 free months if you buy a computer, but which just screws over (ignores) the current customer. There was no kick-back money from the computer manufacturer for the current customers? At least with this contest, even though I already get electronic bills and can’t enter the conventional way, I can still find some way to participate. But stuff like this makes me wonder if I should ever upgrade anything with Rogers, since at some point down the road they’ll very likely have a promotion or contest that I won’t be able to take advantage of if I, heaven forbid, happen to actually want what they’re offering.

I know I should just drink water right from the tap for both environmental and frugal reasons, but then once or twice a year this happens, and I go right back to the bottle or Brita…

My parents bought the PS3 essentially to serve as a non-user-friendly BluRay player, so it’s not a total let-down that it’s a fairly lousy game system. Don’t get me wrong: guitar hero is fun, but it’s better on the Xbox.

Until now, I hadn’t bothered connecting the thing to the internet, partly because I figured if I ever want to play a multiplayer game, that’s what the PC is for (I don’t have any experience of using a console to connect to the internet), and partly because I was just too lazy to dig up the password for the wireless network. But today we were playing Rock Band over at Netbug’s, and it was neat that we were able to include Ryan in the game by having him play from his house over the Live service (though why he didn’t just come over and play in person since he wasn’t all that far away is a mystery). Plus, Netbug had downloaded content for his games, which made me wonder what might be out there for the PS3.

So I go and set the stupid thing up on the wireless, and of course the first thing it tells me is that there’s a system update available, so I get it. I don’t know what that lump of shiny black plastic was trying to do with my network, but it managed to crash my wireless router and not only disconnect itself, but disconnect every other computer in the house. After fixing that, it got the update just fine. Except now I need to update Guitar Hero before I can play it… and it won’t update! First, it downloaded about 16%, then crashed the wireless router again. After that, I gave me “an error occurred” message, which was ever so descriptive about what the problem is. It’s really infuriating to have this kind of thing happen on a PC, but at least there it’s sort of expected that users will troubleshoot things and all the various non-compatible software, hardware, and drivers will occasionally lead to a conflict… but this is a closed system! This shouldn’t happen at all! And if there is some random error, it should still let me rock out to the old version of guitar hero and just get the stupid update later. I want to play, and that’s about all the system is good for!

Edit: Oops, not a total disaster: there is a way to get in and play, it’s just not obvious. (The only option when presented with download is “Ok” with “cancel” at the bottom — cancelling actually goes into the game instead of back to the menu).

One neat thing with the online connectivity is that the PS3’s processing power can be put towards the Folding@Home project if you want to leave it on and unused.

“It’s a good patient money buy. It’s a great company that isn’t going anywhere. If I was setting up a portfolio for a widow, GE would be at the top of my list of picks… but I think it might be too conservative for you.”

This was the gist of what my dad had to say when I called him this morning to talk about GE, which just reported some disappointing first-quarter results. I’ve been keeping an eye on GE for a while, figuring that I would buy in around $32 (of course, the few days when it was that low the market was hiccuping so bad I was scared away, even though I shouldn’t have let fear affect my buying), which is where I decided that there was very little downside. At the moment, GE has gone down over 10% on the earnings news to trade at just a hair below $33 (US), which is close enough that I’m seriously thinking about it again.

For one thing, it neatly patches a hole in my diversification. Since I am young* and open to taking risks, a lot of my non-index portfolio is in some risky stocks (such as Q, QSR.UN, and banks — which shouldn’t be this risky!) in hopes of getting higher returns. But I’m still not willing to suffer too much of my portfolio in high-risk things, so I also have some safer stuff (FCE.UN, YLO.UN), but my portfolio is nonetheless really poorly diversified as I mentioned in a previous post about index funds. There looks to be a place at the table for GE, though perhaps my biggest argument against that is that any patient money I could put in GE I could equally put into an index such as the DJIA. Of course, some that patient money is sitting in my high-interest savings account at the moment making a lousy 3.35% (why does that slide down more every week I check it PCF?!), while GE is offering a famously stable dividend of 3.8%. I also think that it might outperform the index for a while.

There are two reasons I might think that. The first is that it might be oversold today after this report. There are some worrying signs in it: GE missed forecasts, and more importantly, profit was down while revenue was up, so something troubling happened to their profit margins/efficiency there. However, a part of the let-down was certainly related to the financial sector/credit markets lately, and I think that’s going to be a temporary issue, offering them a big chance to rebound (note that when discussing my patient money, temporary could be up to 2 years). GE, being a massive conglomerate with its fingers in just about all the pies, also has a wind turbine and nuclear generator division, which I think could be big winners in the decades to come. Of course, being a massive conglomerate it’s hard to say if those winners will be enough to raise this massive company to outperform the indexes, but my hopes are high.

* - or so I continue to believe, in spite of grey hairs and bald spots.

Update: I haven’t even posted this yet, but GE dipped more into the $32.50 range, so I bought some at $32.53. The exchange rate fee (2%, ouch!) makes me think I may have been better off with that index fund after all.

It was not so very long ago that we were having a conversation with Ryan about lactose intolerance, or “lactardation”. Many people in his family are lactarded, and he was ordering essentially a cheese-covered dish of baked cheese with a coffee and cream on the side. He waxed on about how much he loved cheese, and that if he ever became lactarded like the rest of his family, to just put him out of his misery because life just wasn’t worth living without cheese. So it would be fitting that at that very meal I ordered a chocolate milkshake, and about an hour later found myself with terrible gas and cramping. The realization set in:

I was lactarded.

Oddly enough, I seem to be fine with regular milk and cheese — in fact, as a vegetarian cheese is one of my primary protein sources, and it never seems to bother me. It is somehow the combination of chocolate and ice cream that seems to set my stomach off. Not wanting to blame chocolate ice cream for anything (that stain? it’s… umm… blood), I resisted seeing the connection between my intestinal issues and ice cream consumption. After all, I couldn’t actually be lactose intolerant, because of all the other dairy I eat without a problem! Perhaps there was some other reaction with ice cream and chocolate that could explain the issue… but I couldn’t find any. Not even made-up ones on the internet.

The big test came this weekend when we went out to the marble slab and I packed one of my sister’s lactaid pills. Lactaid pill + chocolate ice cream = no tummy issues. That to me suggests some sort of lactose issue, even if I can’t explain why I’m fine with cheese. Of course, coming out fine after a single test isn’t really definitive, so I suppose that, in the name of science, I will have to go out and eat more ice cream. Just to be sure. It’s that or go to the doctor for a proper test, and between you and me, I’ll take the ice cream.