Blessed by the Potato

I can’t believe I forgot to mention the latest perils of my poor car.

After being stolen, the window that cost over $300 to fix so that it would go up and down no longer works. I don’t care enough to fix it again. I rolled past the 200, 000 km mark last week, but was on the road back from Toronto, so I forgot to get a picture of the event, as it were. And of course, the aforementioned grinding/harsh resonance noise at certain speeds that could be the beginnings of a transmission failure.

On the home front, I’m looking for something semi-productive to do with my time during the summer. Voluntarily working out hasn’t exactly… happened, and my weekends have been spent in Toronto, so I haven’t gone off exploring the paths like I had planned.

I’m a little bit afraid that it’s going to lead to an over-compensation come fall: I’m going to have Halloween, which is a production all on its own (especially since this year the party has to be super-fantastic so people will come down to London to actually attend). Then there’s curling, and since I’m going to have to pay a ton of money to play at a real club now that the University stopped the business with the intramural league, I’m planning on playing at least twice a week (possibly even competitively!). Finally, I’ve wanted to study a martial art (Aikido or Karate or something) for some time, and I think I might join up when classes start this September, which could eat up another two nights a week.

Madness!

Anyhow, I finished reading the Sabriel trilogy by Garth Nix, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. They’re easy books to get into and read, the characters are quite enjoyable, and they prominently feature smiting the hated undead. Those who know me know of my great disdain — nay, loathing — of the undead; the only two characters I played through the end game of WoW were those with undead-specific abilities, and it’s only now, as they release a new undead dungeon that I’m tempted to return to save the terrified citizens of Azeroth (insects? what were they thinking).

Speaking of books, I haven’t yet mentioned one of my graduation presents: autographed copies of Far-Seer by Robert J. Sawyer, and a book by Scott MacKay (The Meek), who happened to be sitting beside RJS at Word on the Street and made puppy dog eyes at Wayfare and had a book half signed before she could break his little heart by telling him she had never heard of him before. I plan on spending at least part of my upcoming long weekend sitting in a lawn chair and giving the Meek a fair shake, now that Nix’s books are done with. (Aside: it’s shaping up to be a busy weekend: I’ve got to hang with the guys, take the cat back and get her settled, read a book, see Superman, go for a swim, maybe catch some fireworks, and continue to throw time and effort into a gaping chasm from which escape is not even theoretically possible).

As for Far-Seer, well, it turns out I now have two. Wayfare, in her funny parallel dimension where time is decidedly non-linear, claims that I went ahead and bought my copy after she got the one for me signed. However, that clearly can’t be true, as I didn’t take a vacation last summer and subsequently got very little reading done on the whole. Last Potatomas, I got the 3rd book in the Quntaglio series as a gift, so it is very likely that I got the first book over a year ago. What’s incredible is not only did she get this signed book ready for my graduation nearly a year before the actual event, but she refused to ruin the surprise by getting me to return the second copy of the same book when I bought it (assuming, of course, that I actually did buy it after… which I didn’t). It depicts a level of Craftiness that not only demands capitalization, but also italics. Er, that is to say, she’s an extremely Crafty girl. It’s actually quite frightening to be around her: she must possess an alien or pathological detachment from reality (and, I suspect, the flow of time itself) in order to so coldly pursue gifts with such malevolent forethought and patience. Any normal human, faced with keeping a gift a surprise for that long (and the time must have seemed longer yet, as for a long time there was no concrete date for my graduation), would have simply cracked and told the receiver all about it; or at the very least dropped some rather significant hints. Wayfare revealed nothing of her devious plan. She even bewitched poor Mr. Sawyer, who can’t help but blurt out choice quotations from his upcoming book (Rollback, for those who aren’t on the mailing list) — but who made no mention of signing a book for me, nor even a casual mention about anyone on the verge of getting a master’s. So powerful is her Craft that there lies in the dark recesses of her closet, behind the unopened copy of Kiss: Psycho Circus for the PC, underneath the box with her treasured merit badged from Brownies, just to the left of that pair of boots that she’ll never ever wear but just can’t quite bring herself to throw out: there, sheltered from the harsh rays of our yellow sun, lies a present — the perfect present — for someone she hasn’t even met yet. And it’s already wrapped.

My point, dear reader — and I have not forgotten it — is that I have two copies of Far Seer now, both in excellent condition. I am willing to part with one should anyone wish to buy, borrow, or gently smell it. You will, however, have to fetch it yourself, as I no longer trust my car to carry such loads.

I had this thought ages ago, and started to write this article/post back on the Potatomas break. Unfortunately, a change in government and apathy made it more or less pointless to bother finishing & posting it. However, Netbug’s recent post reminded me of this, so I decided to ressurect it.

My thoughts on the matter are quite simply that Crown corporations can be put to a lot of good if the government would use them as such. CN & Bell laid transcontinental networks when it was economically unattractive to do so publically; the CBC gave us an ostensibly independent broadcaster; the LCBO prevents a company from being tempted by profit to sell alcohol to minors (and also brings more than beer to the North). In this line-up, PetroCanada stands out a bit, having only been started after foreign companies already had a decent gas distribution system in Canada. Perhaps that’s why it was privatized so quickly.

But, it has a big capacity to do important things if the government would turn it towards those uses:

• A government-controlled oil company can help control pump prices, relieving the fears many Canadians have that oil company collusion is robbing them blind. Perhaps not the best thing for the big picture, since high gas prices might help more than they hurt (vis-a-vis curbing demand for SUVs, making people actually walk down the block, etc.).
• Use the already present retail distribution system to introduce alternative fuels such as E85, hydrogen, or battery charges. This could be huge, since it can break the viscious new technology cycle: oil companies don’t want to offer alternative fuels because they don’t sell, since no one has the cars; the car makers don’t want to build and market the cars because no one will buy them; and no one will buy them because they can’t take them anywhere and expect a fill-up. It’s why we’re pretty much stuck with hybrid technology as the only alternative to gas/diesel (it’s good, don’t get me wrong, but we could perhaps do better).

I find it an exciting prospect, really, to leverage a Crown corporation’s ability to bring about uneconomical transformation on the taxpayer’s bill. It’s something that could become really big: once the government has a decent distribution system out, it can make the car makers sell a certain percentage of cars taking advantage of that (and knowing Canadians, a decent number would buy anyway, once it’s even remotely feasible). If research needs to be done, well a few well-directed NSERC grants could plug that hole. Then, the manufacturing & product design could be done here in Canada, providing jobs when the technology eventually starts to spread south of the border.

Now, let’s move on to talking about electric cars.

They are a very strange beast: they produce zero emissions (though you will need the generating capacity somewhere, so at worst we might just say that they take the emissions that would clog a downtown area and shift them to the location of the power plant… which can also conceivably scrub them better), get great acceleration and decent cruising efficiency, yet are barely produced at all currenly. The reason, of course, is that electrical storage in chemical batteries has terrible energy-to-weight ratios (after all, you have to carry around all that battery, rather than burning it up completely as you go), so their range is often limited.

Range is, in fact, probably the biggest reason electric cars haven’t taken off: you simply can’t recharge them quickly, like you can with a quick stop at the gas station for a hybrid or traditional combustion engine car — so once you run out your battery, you’re stuck there for 8 hours while you charge up the slow way. And the range just barely covers relatively routine treks (such as to the cottage, or driving downtown and back to the 905 five times in a day), which makes many people nervous.

However, it doesn’t have to be this way: tons of devices around us have replaceable/rechargeable batteries, and that is perhaps a model for electric cars that the car companies haven’t looked at closely enough. When my camera runs out of juice, I simply go to any convenience store and pick up a pair of AA’s, plug them in, and off I go. We could make cars the same way: pick a decent-sized battery and make it standard across all cars. A small car might have 6, say, and a large electric SUV might sport 18 in an array, but the point is that you can then drive across the country and swap out your batteries as they dry out. All you need is a distribution system that keeps a decent number of them charged up and in stock.

Which brings us back to PetroCanada.

Of course, this concept is not without its challenges. In addition to having someone decide on the battery standard, and having someone set up a distribution system of chargers before the first car is actually sold, there are engineering challenges to solve. Electric cars that currently exist (or, for the EV-1, I should say, formerly existed) are engineered tight, with all kinds of innovations made to save on weight and extend range. If batteries were broken down into smaller standardized subunits, it would make them heavier and bulkier since more space would be wasted on the plastic casing and less spent on actually charge capacity. It might also make placement in the car more difficult, since you’d need to get access to the batteries somehow (whether from beneath the car, the trunk, hood, or from panels in the side), so they couldn’t be squeezed in between other parts wherever space could be found. The bigger the battery is, the faster a changeover could take place, and the more efficient the design would be. However, batteries are heavy, so it doesn’t take much before it’s infeasible to expect even a relatively healthy, in-shape person to change them manually, let alone an elderly, injured, or out-of-shape driver. Planning on simple hand-pumped cranes to help might work, but even the most simple tools foil some people (there are people out there who can’t pump their own gas as it is). At first, providing full-service might work, especially since even self-only stations still have at least a cashier on hand, and the electric fleet will likely be small enough at first that that person could afford to run out on the rare occasions he or she was needed.

An interesting social dilemma is also raised: who owns the batteries? Who is responsible for replacing them when they no longer hold a charge or are otherwise damaged? With permanent batteries, it comes down to either the car owner or manufacturer (depending on the warranty) owning up. But with batteries changing hands every time someone takes a trip of more than 250 km, it becomes more complicated. At first, PetroCanada could own the batteries, but that would raise all sorts of problems once other distribution lines opened up (whether say, Shell also got in on the recharging station game, or if an all-new company started up like an Ontario Solar & Windmill Recharged Green Electric Car Coop). Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer for this one. Even if the batteries were insured by a government agency (perhaps funded by a portion of each new electric car’s purchase price), that would leave open the problem of American cars coming across the border to change out their faulty cells.

Completely new technology, such as capacitor banks, flywheels, or superconductors might allow permanently installed storage devices and bypass these legal issues, while still allowing for quick-charge stations to extend range… but none of these, AFAIK, store electricity well over the long term.

Finally, one very clever method to extend the range of electric cars is the Genset trailer. I’ve never personally seen one of these, but they look absolutely brilliant. They basically consist of a small gas or diesel generator that provides the electricity needed to run the car (or, if you prefer to think of it this way, the electricity needed to constantly charge up the batteries as you drive). I don’t know why they don’t sell electric cars along with one of these right now (or with a roof-rack or trunk-mounted version, since a generator + fuel tank doesn’t have to be huge). It’s basically like having a plug-in electric car with the option of switching to a hybrid mode for long-distance travel.

Footnote: the transmission on my car has been making unhappy noises since I got it back from the police. I think I might go and give the Civic Hybrid and the Prius a test drive while the weather’s nice, and start thinking about retiring the Accord (though that’s probably still a few years down the road).

What a goddamned fucking mess these bills are from the Gran Melia are: do not stay there, especially if you need receipts to get reimbursed.

In addition to the general shittiness that we knew about when checking out (not honouring the quoted conference rate, charging for 3 people after 1 had checked out, weird, non-translatable spanish only), we’ve uncovered a new wrinkle: they charged us twice. Not double, not quite that bad. No, what they did is they charged our credit cards for $168 US before we even got there.

A week before we got there.

What $168 US is, we have no idea: the student rate on the room was $115, the supervisor rate was $150, and the hotel’s regular rates weren’t actually too far off from that, with rooms starting as low as $109 (which is why it was a double piss-off to not honour the conference rate: we got like 25% off at the other place, but this place the conference rate was quite close to their normal rates). So, what they did is they put in a credit for our accounts for $168 US (in Pesos, so we probably got screwed on the double exchange) as soon as we checked in, then racked up the charges on top of that. It means a few things that really screw with our heads: first, is that the grand total I signed off on was *not* the grand total charged to my credit card, since there was that extra at the beginning ($1,481.50 was the bill I approved at check-out, but I was actually charged $1,669.66). Next, the receipt is only for $1,481.50, so I have to somehow explain to the hospital’s accounting department that they need to look at the first line of a 3-page bill and see the credit there as something else they need to pay me. I have my credit card statement, and hope that will help me, but they’re notorious for not accepting statements on the same footing as receipts (especially when it’s dated a week before the conference you were ostensibly travelling to attend!).

It’s also strange that we had this charge since they never told us that there was an advance charge/deposit (and, in fact, had a seperate deposit charged upon check-in). It was also charged well before their published no-fee cancellation date, so it’s not like we were being locked in at that point.

Talking with others now that I’m back in Canada has added new dimensions to this affair as well: they knew very well that early check-outs from rooms with 3 people checked out, despite continuing the charges, since they got in a fight before they let them go. In order to prevent one person from a room fleeing and sticking the charge on the other person, or leaving without paying by claiming that someone else was still there when you were really the last to leave, they require you to present a check-out pass before the bellboys at the front door will let you off the property. If you’re just doing a partial check-out, and sticking the bill with someone else, they need to call that person and get their permission. I was out of touch, so they almost didn’t let my roommate catch his bus back to the airport… I’ve got to call shenanigans when they claim they don’t have a record of him checking out.

The bills of other students are even more pockmarked, where not only were the conference rates not honoured, but they changed every day they were there. Correcting entries (“traspaso cuentas”) were made on various days, adding hundreds of dollars to the bill, then taking almost all of it back off.

All of this is on top of the general non-communication from the hotel: no 1-800 number to call, getting put on hold when calling regular day-time long distance, not answering a single email of ours, and not telling us any of this billing stuff until we find, with a shock, that VISA wants the money from us. I can’t do much about it: arguing with them for 20 minutes in person didn’t do much, so calling them long-distance is probably just throwing good money after bad. Hopefully work will sort all this out and I won’t get stuck with it (my Accountant is better than my Spanish). In the meantime, I’ll just do my best to pan them here and on other travel review sites.

We didn’t get a chance to stay there since they were destroyed by the Hurricane, but the Marriott was much better about at least responding to emails and phone calls while we were setting up our booking in the first place (even if they, er… lied about their ability to open on time and host the conference at all).

I work with an Evil Genius, it’s clear now. Look at what they did to the desk of the girl who won the best speaker prize while we were away. Just marvel at it! I couldn’t stop laughing the whole time I was at work today, and it’s just going to be awesome to watch her take her revenge on these guys.

Note the attention to detail: they individually wrapped all the levers on the desk chair. The lightswitches were wrapped in such a way as to still be functional. The nozzle on the hand cream pump was very elegantly wrapped; the airconditioner and its cord were wrapped, as were the coat hangars. Everything inside the desk drawer (including the interior of the drawer) was wrapped. There’s even a circle you can see where an elastic band had been covered. What I love most is the Kleenex box on her shelf, with the newspaper coming out the top, it’s so artistic I well up a little just thinking about it.

I’m totally hiring these guys to wrap my Potatomas presents.

This prank also made me realize how very terrible my digital camera is. Even with a well-lit room and standing remarkably still, I got motion blur with most of the pictures I took.

As Cancun nears I find I’m increasingly terrified of the prospect of heading down there. Everything is just such a fuck-up with this conference that I have to wonder if the organizers were getting serious kick-backs from the demolished hotels there to try to con some scientists into filling space when all the half-way sensible tourists were staying the hell away. It’s the middle of June, so Ontario is already getting plenty hot (though it’s looking like it’s going to be very pleasantly mild while I’m gone), so it makes no sense to hit the tropics now. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. It makes me feel like Casandra again — not because of the emasculating feeling of getting pulled along against my will out of the country, but because all of the problems we’re having now we foresaw back in January when the conference details were announed: the hotel had been all but destroyed in the fall, and in January were predicting a reopening date just a month before the conference was scheduled, and hardly anything is that on time. In early March — still plenty of time to reorganize — the hotel announced that renovations were late and pushed the reopening date to just two weeks before the conference. Still, the organizers insisted it would be fine… ugh. Even with all this craziness, the conference rate we got wasn’t much better than the one we got in Ireland. So it’s not even going to be cheap…

Sure, work will pay for most of my way, so people ask me why I’m so dead-set against a “free vacation”. Unfortunately, a conference is neither: while my room and flight will be paid for, there are numerous other expenses that make the week there significantly more expensive than just staying home… and it’s certainly no vacation. We’ll be crammed into our rooms to save on space (it looks like at least one person from each room will be on the floor), and we’ll be going to boring lectures all day long for 5 straight days, with “social” events all night long where we continue to talk shop: it’s more intensive than a normal week at the lab, and that’s not including having to sit on a plane and deal with the airport at each end. I’ll have one and a half days at the end to try to unwind, but those will be on my own coin (damn you, Joce!) and with my luck someone from the conference will be staying late and shadowing me to pick my brain the whole time.

I’m visibly grumpy (or worse) about the whole affair, and people try to cheer me up in bizzare ways: “It’ll be great, you can sit on the beach and drink Coronas…” Hello, pale enough that I still burn even with SPF45 on (though at least then it takes more than an hour), and I think beer is vile. “I’ll be so exciting, getting to see new places…” That’s encouragement I just don’t understand. What’s so exciting about new places? I think people like this are deeply disturbed: they take a terrifying experience and it morphs over into something exciting. It’s like people who just don’t feel thrilled unless they place their lives in mortal danger. It’s something others have commented on a lot: are “extreme” forms of entertainment a sign of the impending doom of civilization? Has modern living made people so numb and jaded that they can’t be reached in any vaguely normal way? Are our lives so worthless that we’re ready to risk them for a cheap thrill?

I don’t understand the trend for travel for its own sake. It increasingly seems like people go on trips just to say they went there, even if the place they went didn’t really have any redeeming characteristics of its own. Everyone seems to want to visit Europe at least once (and only once :) but very few seem to know why other than the fact that it’s there, and because their kid brother did it last year.

Case in point: a friend of mine, let’s call her “Dimple” went to Peru recently. Why Peru? I’m not even sure she knew. Perhaps a game of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiago brought back some fond memories, who knows. Anyhow, while there she had just a horrible, rotten time, and had to come back early. She bruised some ligaments falling down the stairs at her hotel (depending on who you ask, she was either so drunk that she fell down them in a stupor, or the hotel was such a dive that there weren’t any lights in the stairwell). Her travelling companion caught one of those diseases that used to kill my settlers in Oregon Trail, like dysentary or cholera or something like that. I’m not actually sure if she survived or not, since I haven’t seen her since (and there hasn’t been a glorious “Peru slideshow” emailed around, not even one of the inside of the bathroom, or of the yellow-green drinking water).

Yet, the surviving member of that expedition is all keen to hop back on a plane next vacation and go somewhere else. Do people never learn? Maybe it’s my advanced degree talking here (Master of Science for those who haven’t been keeping up with the posts :) but I’m more than ready to not only learn from experience, but to learn from their experience so I don’t have to go through that: I’m not going to Peru. And if I do, I’ll be going somewhere with clean water and lights in the stairwells, which would probably make the trip too expensive to be feasible, so the same net effect results (“Dimple” makes a metric shit tonne of money at her job, so if that was all the vacation she could afford, then what chances do I have?). Humanity is unique in our capacity to learn from the mistakes of others, and our incredible disinclination to actually do so.

I also don’t understand the high cost of going away on vacation. I’ve gone on a number of vacations on my own dime, and they were fairly expensive to me, blowing about a month’s salary for a week away. But some people just go crazy with it, blowing away several months’ worth of earnings for a few days away somewhere; some people even take out sizable bank loans to go globetrotting. Man, I had trouble going into debt for my education; Wayfare took time off before her master’s to work and build up some savings. To rack up debt just to go somewhere else and snap a few photos seems deeply irresponsible to me.

Moreover, I don’t get the appeal of big cities. Sure, most of us live in cities: they’re where the jobs, houses, and grocery stores are. When the mood strikes, they also have stadiums, museums, and lasertag/opera (actually, that would make an awesome mashup). But once you live in a city, there’s really very little point in seeing another one: it will simply be jam packed full of buildings, people, and very subtly different museums, galleries, and stadiums. Their streets might be laid out a little differently, some of the buildings might be a little more decrepit, and the river they’re built on might be a bit different. But really, big cities are very similar to one another, and make for very expensive vacations that are not very restful. I really don’t see the appeal, particularly for New York. I single it out because recently Wayfare had wanted to go until I pointed out why it was an incredibly bad idea, and for the first time ever she actually listened to me instead of singing baby elephant walk in her head, and changed her mind. It’s pretty bad off in terms of crime and dreary buildings, and doesn’t have a whole lot in the way of interesting history. Sure, it has lots of professional sports… but that includes the Yankees. But most of all, it’s featured on TV all the bloody time. Half the shows on TV take place in New York (it won’t be long until even Lost has a scene set there), so you get to see a lot of it right from your own living room. What isn’t there is available on your friends’ photoreels and their own horror stories of going there (I’m not sure whether the scariest one was about the creepy guy trying to lure young girls into back alleys, or the one about the smelly homeless guy who tried to come into the conference hotel, and harrassed the scientists because they were the only ones who could stop the government from screwing with his memory… and his bladder control. I think my conferences draw a “certain element” — another reason to dread Cancun). Plus, it was recently the scene of a major terrorist attack. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Who needs that shit on their vacation?

Above all, I find it odd how people just don’t get where I’m coming from with all this. “What do you mean you don’t like to travel?” “Are you afraid of airplanes?”

No, I’m agoraphobic.

“But think of all the new people and exciting places and different foods…”

Seriously, not helping.

“So, you’re like afraid of open spaces?”

We had an interesting conversation about agoraphobia at work as we were discussing this nightmare of a conference. No, agoraphobia is not a fear of open spaces. It is instead a fear of uncontrollable situations, and in particular of crowds. Agoraphobics simply tend to be more vigilant people who are more conscious of the terrors and perils of daily life. They’re also people who require less stimulation to get the adrenaline flowing.

It can be somewhat crippling at times, particularly when other stresses or depressive episodes are already screwing with your brain chemistry. At those times, many thanks are given for the internet. But it can be managed; by preparing for the stresses and anticipating problems, one can make the fear managable (this of course is what leads to over-packing). Of course, for a big trip like this, I’m going to spend the next week sleepless as I go through nearly every eventuality and try to prepare for it. There are limits though: there is no way in hell I’m going to Japan next year, the quadruple whammy of a giant flight over the ocean, a completely different culture (with different ways of greeting each other, dressing, laying out rooms, committing ritualistic honour killings/duels, and even weird toilets!), a completely different menu (featuring smelly, smelly fish everywhere) and a very severe language barrier (at least Spanish uses a few of the same words and letters) is just simply too much.

As was earlier intimated, I had a lot of trouble with my agoraphobia while I was writing my thesis. The added stress and late nights and general depression made leaving my place rather difficult for a while. Thankfully, the internet was there. And World of Warcraft (but, and this one is going to kill you, but I never explored the new Silithus, because it was too alien and scary). Right now, I’ve got a battle ahead of me to get through the next few weeks with this stupid trip looming. I spent almost three hours yesterday compulsively going over my insurance and plane tickets. The important parts are highlighted and circled, so the whole affair is starting to look like a biologist’s undergrad text book…

I’ve heard of people accidentally getting on the no-fly list (or simply having a name similar to someone on it) and being delayed and/or grounded completely for that… I wonder if I should look into getting on it. Accidentally, of course (if I ever do need to go to the states, I’d have to be able to get my name off of it)…

“So,” the conversation continued, “why don’t you like travelling then?”

The hairs standing up on the back of my neck, the sleeplessness, the worry, the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, the dry sweats, leaving my place, leaving my kitty all alone, spending a week away from my friends (really, really away)… in short: everything.

“That’s so weird.”

On a related note, here’s an article from the Onion not too long ago that I liked.