Blessed by the Potato

For years now, my normally previously good memory has been absolutely terrible. Today was extra bad: I had something important I didn’t want to forget, so I grabbed a pen & a post-it note… and had no idea what it was I was going to write down. Rather disturbing.

I’m up stupidly late at the moment watching TV at my parents’ house, and despite having something like eight times as many channels as I do, there really isn’t anything on their TV I want to watch… until I hopped over to the usually lame Rogers community channel. They were showing a curling game, and it’s great! I have no idea what it’s for: some sort of national, but the teams are young & mixed, and they haven’t mentioned it at all yet. Curling is, as you all probably know, my sport of choice. I don’t usually watch it on TV because I don’t usually watch any sports on TV: I’d rather play than watch. But I’ve got to say that I’m surprised curling isn’t a more popular spectator sport, since the pacing and action seem better suited to TV. Football and baseball involve long stretches of standing and scratching, and hockey has a tonne of faceoff flurries where you can’t really see what’s going on at all (or maybe I’m just defective that way, as a real Canadian is supposed to be able to follow the puck on the radio). But curling has a fairly decent pace of stones moving, and you get to listen to the strategy discussions in-between rather than the announcers trying to guess at what the coach is calling for the next play.

It’s also nice because since it’s on Rogers’ “no one watches and no one buys advertising” channel, there’s hardly any commercials. This game is also neat because one of the skips is a 27-year-old research assistant at McGill, so I’m thinking the whole time “that could be me!” (except for the part where I think I’m a much better curler than I actually am). This Quebec team is really interesting: they’re completely bilingual, so one’ll ask a question in French, and the answer will come in English. It was a fun game to watch with a lot of good shots, but also a few mistakes to keep things interesting. New Brunswick was dominating through the beginning, then Quebec started coming back to make it interesting (but never quite took the lead back).

While we’re on the subject of curling, I got a new broom last week: an Olson Reactor2 Carbon Fibre with swivelly head. It’s pretty keen and very light, and actually very similar to what the people on TV are using now. I can’t really say for sure yet if it helps the rock move any further, but being able to sweep with the head perpendicular to the rock does help us get our sweepers in tighter. The really light broom seems to use a completely different set of muscles than my old one. It used to be that I’d go home at the end of the night with aching pecs, but now it seems to be more in the tricep area. I have no idea why that would be, though. I got it at the London Curling Club, which has a very small proshop run out of the closet, essentially. Nobody works it full-time, so you have to find the bartender or one of the volunteers to buy things; however, the costs were very reasonable. I got that broom for $125 including tax, while most other places were charging $160 plus tax plus shipping. However, they don’t have very good selection: if you didn’t want a top-of-the-line broom like that, then there was only one or two basic ones to pick from [originally, I was going to get a keen swivelly head broom that had a traditional fibreglass handle which would have run closer to $80, but was lured by the convenience of getting it at the LCC and the prospect of more broom for not quite as much money as I thought]. While the broom is in good mechanical shape, it does have a lot of large scratches on the handle, taking off the paint in various places. I wouldn’t be too surprised if it was a factory second (those prices are very low!), but I think it was probably worth it. Oh, and something to ponder if, like me, you get yourself a fancy new broom: consider getting a replacement head or two, as there’s no guarantee the manufacturers will have compatible heads in even a year or two.

Finally, as my glasses are getting more and more fine scratches on them with use, I’m finding that the usual winter/curling issue of fogging is getting to ridiculous extremes. I’m going to try to find some anti-fog cleaner tomorrow (I know I used to see the stuff everywhere, but since I’ve been looking the last few weeks, I haven’t seen any). I’d appreciate any advice as to which, if any, are actually effective.

I’ve been watching a lot more TV now that it’s fall again, and along with that comes watching more commercials. Recently, I saw one announcing that Saab is introducing an SUV, and I was overcome with complete disbelief.

Disbelief because they’re doing this now, when the SUV market is finally starting to turn back down and honest-to-goodness cars are coming on strong. When climate change and foreign oil dependency are on the minds of many Americans.

Disbelief because I can’t believe how stupid GM is. GM has become essentially a truck company in the last decade or so, since that seems to be the only division capable of turning a profit there. Despite being the largest automaker in the world with the resources to do some good research into efficiency (and actually managing to produce and sell an electric car at one point), they left it to Honda and Toyota to actually produce working, production hybrids (and from the look of their concept cars, fuel cell vehicles as well). With the exception of a few models, most GM cars are not seen in a very good light, and only massive sales promotions have manged to move any. So one would think that when they bought Saab, it was to produce cars, specifically cars designed in a different way than the GM standard (cars designed by people who make jets, or so I’ve heard). Yet when the brand faces sagging sales, rather than trying to keep it as a low-volume identity, or making different (smaller?) cars, GM goes to it’s old stand-by formula: more towing capacity = more sales. It’s so short-sighted and unimaginative that it makes me mad; worse yet is that it might actually work for them. Of course, it also puts GM into even more of an eggs-in-one-basket situation: if SUV backlash gets much worse and sales slump even more (and they could be primed to, as I’ve heard reports that the resale value of SUVs is taking a nose-dive: the people who want to drive SUVs tend not to be the same people who want to save money on used cars) then GM could be in for a whole world of hurt.

Also The Departed and The Return are playing on adjacent screens at the movie theatres here. It really makes them seem like they go together.

Finally, this is an absolute must-see. I first saw it on a clip of the Ellen show that Wayfare taped for me, and it’s so impressive that the dog not only rides the skateboard, but steers it, and stops before crashing into the curb and turns around. On the clip from TV, we also see the dog’s owner introducing the bit while holding the skateboard, and the dog just flips out with excitement waiting for him to put it down so it can ride.

Most of the time, I try to avoid politics since it’s a very cynical area of expertise, and I’m already plenty cynical as it is. However, I can’t help but think that a group of people making laws and budgetary decisions that affect all of us is, in some strange way, important, so I do tune into it from time to time.

There has been some noise made for quite some time now that Canada needs a new copyright act, and two sucessive heritage ministers have been pretty weasely about it: taking money from (largely American) companies in dubious fundraising events. First Sam Bulte lost her riding for lashing out against “pro-user zealots” who just wanted to prevent her from being so deep in the RIAA’s pocket that she couldn’t breathe. [in all honesty, it’s difficult to pin an election loss on any one item; it could be that the opponent was just that much better — but this really felt like the big issue in that riding]. Now Bev Oda has been caught at the trough.

I absolutely love the response from the NDP heritage critic. These guys are so on the ball sometimes:

I have done what I could to have a three point plan to maintain the ethical sobriety of the heritage minister: first, reveal the list of those she is putting the tap for money on so we know which lobbyists are rewriting government policy on copyright and deregulation; second, institute a remedial plan so she can learn how to listen to the groups and artists that she is supposed to be representing; and third, ask the House of Commons carpentry staff to head over to the heritage minister’s office and paint over the big for sale sign on her door.

[emphasis mine]

(First seen on Michael Geist’s site; original source)

In other political news, the municipal election for London is on Monday, and I find it really hard to care much at all. I’ve looked into a few candidates and will be voting for those who I think will be at least decent, but I think it’s almost dangerous to be voting with so little research done. I console myself by thinking that many voters don’t do any… What’s really interesting is just how nasty this really insignificant race is. There’s been an “organized campaign” of tearing down certain candidate’s ads, death threats, blackmail, and other such foolishness.

And in a little bit more time, we’ve got a federal by-election coming up to replace our MP (who’s now running for Mayor of London). It’s very interesting, because at the moment the race looks to be between the Green party and the NDP: those are the only street signs I’ve noticed, and I couldn’t even tell you the name of the new Liberal candidate. I like the Green’s new campaigning strategy: the guy came to the door and told Wayfare “don’t worry, there’s no chance of a Conservative getting the seat in this riding, so you can safely vote Green if you like.” At least they’re acknowledging that strategic tactical voting is killing them.

And speaking of strategic voting, I still haven’t written my letter for the Citizen’s Assembly. I wanted to read the other submissions first, and there are a ton of them there. I can tell you that I’m in favour of any system that focuses on electing individual members and not simply throwing your vote towards a party or party list: it’s all too easy in those systems to get party cronies elected who don’t really represent the people. It’s important to have the power to exclude individual members without necessarily rejecting the party outright (cf. Sam Bulte, and the Tories throwing in unelected members for the cabinet). So right now it looks like the type of system I’d like to see is a single transferrable vote type arrangement.

The problem is that some ridings in Ontario (particularly those that are far north) are so big that to merge them or add multi-district “proportional” representatives would be slightly ridiculous. Only slightly, because even though it would make the ridings huge, they would still be somewhat homogeneous since many issues tend to fall along GTA-vs-country type axes. I’ve got a lot more reading to do, but I’ll post a draft of my letter here before I submit anything.

So for a while I’ve been using the caldendar extension for Mozilla, but for some bizzarre reason the folks over there split it off into a stand-alone product called Sunbird (you can still get a plugin for Thunderbird, the mail client that goes along with Firefox, but the latest version of the calendar just outright sucks in Thunderbird now. It’s got something to do with the way they tried to make it fit in a pane instead of open in its own window).

I got Sunbird, and as a calendar client it’s not bad at all (though I do miss the days when email, web browser, and calendar were all a single icon on my quicklaunch bar). One of the features I really liked about it was the ability to push your calendar file to a webserver so you could sync up your client on different computers (work & home, in my case). That saved me from emailing myself reminders to put up on both separate calendars a bunch. The service I used was over at www.icalx.com which has a few neat features in addition to using their server to sync your calendar: you can also publish a public version of your calendar so anyone with a compatable program can see what important events are going to occupy your time. Their servers will even convert your .ics file into a HTML-viewable calendar for when you (or your stalker) don’t have access to a proper calendar reader. All very keen.

So this has been going along nicely for about a month now, and then today somehow I fucked it up. I don’t know exactly what happened, but basically I added a new event to my calendar, pushed it to the server, and then refreshed my calendar to make sure it was there… and everything was gone. The only event left was the one I just added. Fortunately, I had a slightly older version that I had printed out (no electronic backups, which was stupid of me), so I entered in November’s entries again, and published it… and again, the only entry I was left with was the last one I had entered.

Given that I consider myself reasonably tech-savvy, and completely messed this up so easily, I don’t know if I can in good conscience recommend any of these tools.

Update: Upon searching my hard drive for .ics files, I found that Sunbird had made a backup a few days ago for me, so I reloaded that and got almost all my entries back (everything except what had been entered today). When you go to publish, don’t use the file->publish command, as that seems to be what’s screwing me up and only publishing the selected entry. Instead, go to the calendars tab and select the calendar, right-click, then use “publish entire calendar”. Hopefully they’ll add that to the menu under file, otherwise that could get pretty damned annoying (especially if you accidentally kill your calendar, as I did). One further annoyance I found is that it won’t always remember the address you want to publish to (though it does remember it to grab the calendar in the first place).

Update 2: I thought it was easier than when I ran into the trouble: I was still using an old version at home. At work (where I have to deal with my calendar the most), it does remember the address for me when uploading (current version as of Nov ’06).

So about 2 years ago or so, I bought a case of caffeine-free Coke, though I have no idea why. I drank about half the case, and really noticed the taste difference. The rest ended up under the sink for a very long time. One or two exploded (or so I thought) quite some time ago. I cleaned up the mess, and for reasons that escape me now, put the intact cans back under the sink.

Now that we’re moving, we’re poking around under there again, and two more cans have leaked. The weird thing is, they didn’t explode, and they didn’t have any punctures in them. They just… leaked… a little. The cans were still mostly full, but some sticky, nasty caffeine-free Coke escaped its aluminum prison and made a mess of the cupboards (it dissolved the paint!). It really disturbs me how it was able to apparantly leech through the can over time like that. It’s all the more unsettling that most of the Coke still stayed in the can.

So from now on I’m going to stick to the old-fashioned stuff with proper caffeine.

I also played some more MechCommander 2 this weekend. It’s a fun (old) game, and there are some decent user-created maps and extensions out there. I think I’m done with it now, and uninstalled it. I haven’t had much time for gaming, and probably won’t with the move coming up, but I’m still trying to think of what I want to get next. I still haven’t played through Civ IV: Warlords much, but I think that’s largely because it’s the sort of game that needs a whole weekend devoted to it. I’m pretty sure I’ll hit that pretty hard around Christmas though, if anyone else wants to try some multiplayer. In the meantime, someone at work pointed me to Star Trek: Legacy which won’t be released for a few more weeks yet… One thing I know is that I won’t be spending my free time trying to partake in NaNoWriMo, no sir.