Blessed by the Potato

“Anything that doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” As a Paladin, pretty much nothing kills you, so…

On a more serious note, playing a Paladin in WoW (even though I haven’t touched the game in almost two years) gave me the incredible ability to read a book 30 seconds at a time. (Seal, autoattack, read; look up, repeat). That ability is quite useful at the moment as I’m doing image analysis. Set up brain. Select fiducials, let computer chug for 30-60 s. Look up, pick next option, repeat.

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…

I’m here late in the lab doing some data analysis to get ready for my presentations in Ottawa next week. It’s been pretty crazy, two 14-hour nights back to back now, leaving long after the sun has come up. And I’m still only a little more than halfway done, with just one day left to go.

During all these all nighters, I like to snack. And since everything is closed, I have to plan my snacks ahead a bit, and tend to go on the “safe” side and bring extra junk, which is of course not good for the diet. The last two nights I’ve brought some sugar-free gum to keep my mouth busy without ruining my diet or my teeth (good, especially since I just found out I cracked another tooth and am in line for porcelain crown #3). I usually avoid gum because it does stick a bit to my extensive dental work, and also because I usually have a strong desire to swallow it. Fortunately, that is not nearly as strong for mint gum (when I do chew gum, it tends to be yummy — not mint). I had two regular sized (12 packs?) last night of whatever free samples came in the mail yesterday afternoon (Trident? Dentyne?), and a whopping 60 pack of Excel that I picked up at the store tonight. After all this gum, I can share with you several observations. The first is that Excel does stay flavourful a lot longer than the Trident (Dentyne?), but that the excel gets so tough and unpleasant to chew before the flavour is gone that I spit it out not much after I would have spat out the Trident anyway. The second is that those new-fangled push-through pill-type packs for gum have essentially eliminated the gum wrapper, giving me no natural way to wrap up my discarded chew. Thirdly, my breath is very minty.

I need birthday present ideas for my mom. Please leave any ideas you may have for me in the comments section (or email them to me).

So with the trip to Ottawa and the cottage coming up, we thought it was best to secure some online access with a dial-up account. It was a surprisingly difficult ordeal. Many websites for ISPs would forward us around due to acquisitions and mergers before we found what the new ISP name was, and then many of them made it difficult to find the access numbers needed for all the cities we would (or might) visit. Oddly enough, many also made it difficult to actually order an account.

Take Bell Sympatico for instance. We tried calling them first because we knew that they had access all across the country. We even have most of the access numbers already since my dad uses Sympatico at the cottage (I was tempted to just use my dad’s account and hope that they wouldn’t notice the simultaneous connection). But it took a lot of navigating around their website before we finally found which number to call. Wayfare called to order, and after 20 minutes was pulling her hair out and swearing never to use Bell again for anything.

First, she tried the online chat feature (which sounds like a good idea — the internet support people should know about the internet services). That… didn’t go so well, and she was directed to call the number (310-SURF). She had to go through the frustrating automated menu, then was transferred around 3 times until she finally got a representative who told her that the line was only for high-speed DSL subscriptions and would have to transfer her for dial-up [I may get some of the details wrong here, she’s got them all somewhere and may correct me in the comments]. That transfer lead to her being on hold for something like 5 minutes [after something like 20 minutes had already elapsed], then she was told to call a different number (310-SURF) where she could find someone who could help her. Now, that’s just criminal: a customer should never have to call back to a company to get help, especially when all they’re trying to do is something completely ordinary: order a service and give the company money. And a customer should never, ever have to call the same number back. She pointed this out, and the rep told her that she would have to call back, and then told her which specific menu options to pick to get someone. He turned out to be completely, flabbergastingly wrong. So, going through another chain of reps and hold periods, including being transferred to India (possibly Pakistan, definitely a weak international connection either way), she got someone who was going to try to sell her some dial-up internet access. She was asked for the number she would connect from. She explained that she wanted roaming access while we were on vacation, that we’d be connecting from all over Ontario (and possibly Quebec)… and the rep told her that wasn’t possible. Now, that’s just plain wrong. I know it’s wrong, since the whole purpose of my dad having a Sympatico account is because we can use it while roaming, with access numbers everywhere. So all in all, an hour of Wayfare’s time wasted (more in fact, since the service was so bad she’s going to have to write them a letter to complain).

So we tried really hard to go with Bell, to give them our money and stick with the familiar, but they wanted no part of it. Back to surfing the internet for recommendations for other ISPs. We found a few really cheap ones local to Ottawa and the cottage area, and considered getting one account for each place if we couldn’t find an ISP with access to both. Eventually, I found out that Teksavvy has a dial-up plan (in addition to their DSL service) at a pretty reasonable rate, with access in Barrie, Ottawa, and pretty much anywhere in Quebec we might care to go. Whether or not Barrie was a local call to the cottage was still up in the air, but Teksavvy has such an excellent reputation that I figured we’d go with them for Ottawa/Quebec access at least, and possibly figure out the cottage later [though it turns out Barrie is local]. The toll free number to call was in pretty small print, so I wasn’t hugely impressed by that (what happened to the giant “order now! Call:” banners that used to plague ISP websites?), but the guy who answered the phone was great. He:

Of course, these shouldn’t necessarily be shining examples of outstanding customer service, but simply par for the course. The fact that it’s not is just simply a shame upon the other call centres. Anyhow, now I think Teksavvy will be our ISP for every summer where we need roaming dial-up access.

One thing I’m surprised I haven’t seen is advertisements for short-term contract dial-up access for vacationers. I believe I saw one once, nearly 10 years ago, for one of the PEI ISPs…

Other than dial-up, we did briefly look into the possibility of the high-speed wireless modems from Rogers and Bell. However, we weren’t sure of how well they’d perform (cell coverage at the cottage can be spotty), and how cost effective they’d be (Rogers only mentions a purchase option for the modem, as well as setup fees, and they can be a real pain to negotiate with for short periods of time, e.g.: charging for two months if you just want to use it for the last week of July and the first week of August; Bell’s service was excessively expensive and they only listed their “pricing with 2 year contract” — no idea how much it would cost to only use for a month).