Blessed by the Potato

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.