Blessed by the Potato

Wow, so suddenly it’s August.

The summer, like many before it, feels different in August. I don’t know whether I just get used to the heat, or if the weather really does change along with all the subtle changes in the plant life, but it feels practically like a different season than June and July. The days are usually hot and baking, but not often as swealtering or deadly as those early summer heat waves. I’m usually driven indoors from the heat and solar radiation for most of the summer, and it’s right around this time of year that I start feeling like going outside and sweating again.

And of course with August comes the knowledge that Halloween is coming up. And this year is going to be a good year, I can just feel it. Yes, Halloween will fall on a Wednesday this year, which usually doesn’t go well. The weekend before often suffers because people can’t quite get in the spirit since it’s just a bit too soon, and people still have work the next day on the day of, and even though it’s only two days later, there’s never anything fun happening in the first weekend of November (of course, Thursday Halloweens suffer the most from this). But this year should be good. I mean, I’ve got a house, with a porch, and hardwood (hopefully) fog-juice-resistance flooring! I’ve got Wayfare and her 8 boxes of Halloween miscellany. It’s going to be on, so book that week off work, buy your plane/train tickets (if needed), and plan to be in London!

…There’s just one problem: I don’t have a bloody clue what my costume is going to be. I mean, half the time I leave the actual costume making/acquision until the very last minute, but usually I at least have a clue by the time late August rolls around (after all, if it’s necessary to knit 2100 linear feet of galvanized steel together, then one wants to get an early start on that sort of thing). Any suggestions?

Gifts for a couple at their wedding is a cute tradition: stock them up on all the things they’ll need for their new lives together… and to avoid ending up with 5 breadmakers and a baker’s dozen fondue kits, or to get a matching set of china or silverwear one piece at a time, gift registries evolved. These days, it gets harder as a lot of people getting married already have the stuff they need to start their lives together, because they’ve already been living on their own (and, since there are two of them, may in fact have two of everything they need to start their lives).

But that’s a rant for another time.

What I want to complain about today is the HBC (the Bay, Zellers, Home Outfitters) gift registry. A friend of ours is going to get married later this month and registered there, and I can’t believe the very basic features that are missing. First, the upside: my understanding is that they get to visit the stores (the Bay and Home Outfitters) and just go crazy-go-nuts in the store with a bar code reader as though they were on a shopping spree (which, essentially, they are), and it all gets added to the list. Guests can access the list online and buy things right off the website. However, there is no mechanism that I can find to cross gifts off the list except by actually buying them from the registry. If you get the same item at another store (for example, Caynes), you’d be hard pressed to get someone at the Bay to take it off their list. Heck, even if you got the item at the Bay and forget to tell the cashier that at the time, I don’t know if they would let you go back and cross it off the list unless you did a full return and rebuy (or at least that’s the vibe I’m getting, I haven’t tried it). That’s pretty stupid in my opinion. Yes, it helps force guests to buy at the store where the registry is kept, which gets more business for them, but I think the increased probability to shop there should be enough incentive for a company to host a registry, and as a courtesy should make it easy to scratch off items bought elsewhere (after all, if the couple gets two of a particular item, they may very well assume that the store didn’t properly maintain the list, and not recommend them…).

What’s even weirder is that even though Home Outfitters and the Bay are all part of HBC, they maintain separate lists for the couple. Even though (some) of the same items are available from both stores, if an item appears on the Home Outfitters list, we can’t buy it at the Bay. Furthermore, when Wayfare did buy an item in store, the saleslady seemed to have real trouble comprehending the concept of taking it with her and wrapping it. She was all keen on pushing the service where they can ship it to the store nearest them where they registered, and they can pick all the gifts up together (granted, it’s probably more convenient than trying to get one of the groomsmen to stay sober enough to be responsible for trucking the gifts after the reception, but it’s a lot less personal).

I’m sure somewhere out there (and I haven’t looked, not even a quick Google search) there’s a decent web service that will let you register for an arbitrary number of items at as many competing stores as you like, and guests can knock items off the list at their leisure (perhaps even before leaving to pick them up)… or at the very least a PHP/SQL script… Actually, something like that might come in handy come next Potatomas…

Back from Vacation! I wrote this entry on the second leg (after leaving Ottawa and arriving at my parents’ cottage), but didn’t post it at the time. I think “today” refers to last Thursday.

It hasn’t been a great vacation so far. Ottawa was ok, but we were both so busy with work that we just weren’t having a great time there, and left a night early. The cottage was better, fairly relaxing, though again we each had at least a full day of work to do after we got here. Today was going to be our first day of sleeping in and not checking email or anything… when the cleaning lady (who my parents hired to come on Monday and clean the place up *before* we got here) decided to show up at 8 in the morning and ruin our lay-in. Ugh. Especially disappointing as we were actually awake early on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday (when she was 4 days late, we wrote her off as a no-show… ugh).

The dial-up has been fairly painful, especially when trying to send email attachments. I know having high speed for about a decade now has ruined me to dial-up, but it isn’t helped by all the “content-rich” websites out there that are useless if you turn the graphics off. Which is actually one thing that’s been bugging me about Firefox 2 – I can turn picture loading off to save on bandwidth (and then surfing is slow but not excruciating), but when I do so I just get the alt-text (if any is coded) and no option to load individual images that I can find – old Internet Exploder and Netscrape used to put an empty frame in as a placeholder for an image and then let me click on it (or right-click and select load) to get the image…

The drive to Ottawa was relatively smooth. There were, of course, a few construction slow downs, and a couple of insane drivers (one guy was zooming around lanes and passed me on the shoulder — I almost called 911 on him). The residence room here is pretty sweet. For less than the conference rate at the hotel, we’ve got two separate bedrooms, air conditioning, two desks, and a fridge and microwave. I knew it had a kitchenette, but I thought that would be fridge and stove, so I brought pots in pans so we could save more money and cook here… oops. Anyway, the full-sized fridge and freezer will let us stock up on drinks and soup and doggie bags from restaurants. We’ve got the dial-up working (as you can see by my access), but I forgot to bring a network cable to give the in-room high speed a try (it’s wired up, but they told me on the phone it wasn’t working).

There are really only two downsides to the place. The biggest is that the windows face east (right into the rising sun in the morning), and have crappy panel blinds, and both rooms have at least two panels missing, so it’s really bright when the sun comes up. If we’re gonna be here a week, I’m thinking some masking tape and tinfoil might be in order… :) The other minor thing is that the only light in the rooms are two lamps, and they took the light bulbs out of the desk lamps!

The conference doesn’t start until Monday, but I’ve got a full load of work to do here to prepare my presentations today. Hopefully we’ll get to do some touristy things afterwards.

The budget woes of Canada’s largest city have been in the news a lot lately, culminating in Mayor Miller’s defeat in council to increase revenues. Since I don’t really live in Toronto any more, I haven’t been paying too much attention to the whole situation, and have some mixed feelings on the whole idea. On the one hand, Toronto needs money, and some of the ideas were pretty good ones, in particular the vehicle registration surcharges. Property taxes are one of the only other routes open, but at this point I think (even as a non-property owner) that they’re starting to get excessive — high property taxes encourage sprawl, which is already pretty far out of hand. A casino is neither here nor there for me — but I think with casinos in Orillia and Niagara and slots in many closer locations, Toronto’s gambling needs are pretty well serviced; on the other hand, Montreal, Ottawa, and Halifax seem to live with their casinos without turning into hotbeds of sin. I’m particularly pissed that the other levels of government haven’t been able to help Toronto out, particularly the Federal government which has found billions of dollars for almost everything else under the sun (perhaps if Toronto elected a separatist party, we’d get appeasement money too).

After city council voted to delay any funding increases until after the results of the provincial election in the fall, they had to start looking for ways to cut. The CBC has an article on the planned TTC cuts that made me do a double take:

Cancelling about 20 low-ridership bus routes, including the Dupont, Pharmacy and Calvington lines, as soon as October.

Abandoning plans to put 100 new buses into service this fall, instead using them to replace old vehicles.

Closing the Sheppard subway line at the beginning of 2008.

Cancelling all planned service improvements.

Hiking fares by 10 to 25 cents.

In the immortal words of Kyle’s mom: What-what-WHAAAT??!! They’re going to close the brand-new Sheppard subway line? I haven’t ridden that line yet, even for novelty’s sake, but I imagine the ridership is low (especially if they’re planning on closing it). But realistically, how much can it cost to run a line that’s already built, compared with the busses they’d need? Electricity is cheap (especially compared to gas prices lately), a train only needs two employees (and it would take more than two busses to replace a train, unless they’re really empty), and maintenance/wear-and-tear on an electric train is way lower than a bus. Plus since installing the line, the condo developers have set up shop all along Sheppard. In just a year or two there’s going to be a metric shit-tonne of people trying to commute along that corridor. I just can’t see the sense in closing it (especially after the billion dollars needed to build it has already been sunk).

And more fare hikes? It’s already gone up over 75 cents in less than 10 years.

$130 million is what the TTC is looking to cut, according the the article. Pennies compared to the billions in extra spending the “conservative” government brought in (and a sad farewell to the concept of paying down our debt). One thought: if I were in charge of a major political party, perhaps one with millions of dollars at its disposal to launch unending attack ads outside of any election call, I’d consider (though the legalities may be tricky) just throwing that ad money at public transit to build goodwill and make much better use of the resources. How many voters are actually swayed by ads anyway?

So, here’s what I consider to be a very good question: should transit be a municipal issue? All our levels of government are interested in pissing down the chain lately: provincial and federal levels passing responsibilities down to municipalities; municipalities running out of money, cutting programs, and telling people to deal with issues themselves. But perhaps with transit, we should buck it up to a provincial or federal responsibility. That might also make transit more equal between cities: Toronto, for instance, has pretty darned good transit with the TTC. The 905, by and large, has decent transit options for getting to Toronto, but not getting around their own municipalities. London has a decent bus system, especially for a city of its size, but lacks some amenities such as late night busses (in Toronto you can take the subway home from a bar if you leave just a little bit before closing, and the vomit comet after that; London shuts down bus service to Richmond Row at midnight). A province-wide transit authority (with a lot more money) would be able to give every reasonably-sized municipality decent bus service, and would be able to integrate the services between cities: perhaps making it possible to take a bus from Sheppard to John St. along Yonge without having to pay two fares; also synchronizing the schedules between different services.

I’m drafting letters to my MP & MPP while the image analysis computer here chugs away (as useless as I know that will be, what with the provincial government in hibernation until the election, and the federal government under the thrall of the insane fuck-wads conservatives, while my MPP is Liberal; as is my parents’). I’ll post them soonish.

Update: Of course, Wayfare is probably right “They won’t close the subway, it’s just a political move.” Political grandstanding of this sort is quite common, and the TTC probably wouldn’t close the Sheppard line just as it gets into the design stage for the Spadina subway extension…