Blessed by the Potato

So I just finished telling someone that I was going to stick with Bell rather than Rogers for my phone service because there just wasn’t any price advantage with Rogers for a basic line, and that I had excellent service/sales reps with Bell the last 4 or 5 times I had to call.

The process of moving my line however, is making me reconsider that.

For those that don’t know, I’m going to be moving out of my halfway-to-res (including food fights in the hallways and monthly fire drills!) apartment into a very nice looking house that’s closer to the hospital. That’ll happen around the end of November. I had heard rumours that you could get stuck with last-minute hassles if you don’t give the phone/cable/hydro companies at least 30 days notice of your move, so last week sometime I called and let them know.

The first call went smoothly enough: “Sure thing, November 27, we’ll move that line over for you and it’ll be operating at the new address around 8 am, guaranteed by 5 pm. Would you like wiring insurance for the new place?”

Then, they call back a few days later and were very rude to Wayfare (her summary “hey bitch, you called me!”), and demanded that I call them back without really saying why. When I called back I got a pleasant person who explained that there was a problem with my move order because there was a line already in use there without a move-out order. I said “Hey, it’s a month away, but trust me, they’re moving.” Then I kinda put my foot in my mouth just a little bit by giving them more information than their tiny brains can handle “They should be moving out on the 18th, and I’ll move in the 27th or so.” “Ok sir, I’ve changed your order to move the 18th now.” “Whoa! No! Bad phone monkey! Keep it the 27th of November [at this point I still wasn’t sure of the date we’d move, and figured later was better than early, since we’d probably have to spend a fair bit of time cleaning/painting/repairing the old place after we moved]” “Ok, November 27th it is…”

Sure enough, today, October 27th rolls around aaaaaaaand my phone’s been cut off. The message when I pick up says the phone can only be used to call Bell at 310-BELL, so I do. After dealing with “Emily” I get a tech who speaks very little english with a heavy Indian accent and a fuzzy phone connection. She says that it shows on her screen that my order to move is for November 27th, and also that my line’s been cut off. No idea why that might be, but she can’t do anything about it… I need to call back in the morning for the day staff.

Grr… what happened to leaving a few people on the phones at night with the power to actually do something?

Update: I phoned in this morning, and got a decent person. Turns out the move is November 27, but the cut-off date had been mistakenly entered as October 27. To turn it back on, all they have to do is flip a switch in the central office, which I’m told will happen today… but Wayfare’s having conniption fits because she’s got an important teleconference at 1…

I love Halloween, and I don’t think anyone doubts that (though I’m a little troubled myself that I didn’t bother to make a new Halloween page layout… though my current theme is black all year long… :)

Anyhow, Halloween’s just a great time of year to be a kid, and I get kind of jealous of ones who are real kids (and not just pretend like me), and also feel like I’ve got to help the kids I see have a great Halloween. So it was so incredibly cute when Wayfare & I went to the Shriner’s Haunted Mansion this year and it was full of little ones.

The Shriners do a great job: lots of cool effects, including the ghost effects with split mirrors, an indoor waterfall with a projector, singing skeletons, a swami, a rotating tunnel, a tilted room, and lots of professional touches throughout. While most of the stuff is cool and freaky, not very much is actually scary, so it’s a good place for kids. This year they stepped it up a bit to make it a little scary, but still tolerable for families. At one point they had a long, cave-like tunnel with bats hung around. Then…

Spoiler warning!

… then, a screen came on at the far end and showed a movie of thousands of bats flying across the full moon. The room then went completely dark, and a stick with dangly bits of fabric flew over our heads, got to the other end and came back over us. It was really cool, and while I’ve been to many scarier haunted houses, I haven’t seen that effect before.

So just before we get to that part, two kids come running backwards through the place, telling us about the fright ahead, and that it might be too scary. “Bats! They fly in your hair!” “They might eat your ears!” When we went to go in, they came through with us. What was so cute was that the boy grabbed Wayfare’s hand to go through, and then the little girl sort of got a lock on her elbow… and we’re complete strangers! Wayfare’s just simply that kid & Halloween-friendly :)

So I had a nice weekend in Niagara Falls. It was a little chilly, and a little rainy, but we never got soaked, and it was never so cold that we needed a scarf or hats. And, for the first time, I actually won money at the casino! I hit a $100 payout on one of the slot machines, and it rang the bell and everything.

The casinos are looking a little sad over there. Fallsview is brand new and all, but really all they have going for them is the slot machines: the tables are so expensive that I just simply can’t play them. We were hoping that a cool weekend in October, late at night and early Sunday morning would be quiet enough that they might try a $5 table, but the cheapest we saw was $15 roulette. There were lots of empty tables, so I don’t quite see why they didn’t bother to put someone there to take my money. They can easily get a few hundred an hour even from a $1 table, so the economics seem to be there. And if all there is to do are slot machines, then why go all the way out there? London has slot machines; Woodbine has slot machines… And speaking of slots, they’ve gotten more ridiculous since I was last in a casino. There were some that were so complicated that we just couldn’t figure out why we were or weren’t winning, and we had no idea what to hope would show up. Some had up to 20 different “lines” which is just getting ridiculous. I really didn’t find them fun at all.

I’d recommend the Hilton Garden Inn again: it was a bit out of the way, just about equidistant from St. Catherine’s, Niagara Falls, and Niagara-on-the-Lake. It was no problem to drive into Niagara Falls, park for free at the casino, and walk around from there. Plus, the hotel restaurant was actually great for breakfast, which is a pretty rare thing in a hotel restaurant. I had a waffle with fruit topping and whipped cream, and Wayfare got pancakes, bacon, and hash browns (lots of each), and our total bill came to under $10. Usually, I find hotel restaurants are really over priced because of the “convenience factor”, so this was a really nice surprise. Especially since we ate at the Golden Griddle the day before for twice as much, and it really sucked.

I also had a costume idea: dress up as a ghost and follow people when they turn their back, then look away when they turn to look at me.

I was just reading an article the other night about how random celebrity walk-ons usually signal the impending doom of a TV show, particularly when said celebrities aren’t even guest characters, but merely faces in the background, or themselves. Usually, I agree with that point of view: when you get down to throwing random people into scenes just to try to maintain interest, you’ve probably jumped the shark.

Corner Gas however, seems to be an exception to that, since it’s had random, self-conscious inserts of Canadians pretty much all along. Not an hour after I read that article, Adrienne Clarkson popped on the show to help tear down a barn. After all, what self-respecting Canadian wouldn’t want to help wreck a barn? Anyhow, it just really worked for me, in a way celebrity cameos never really have before. I laughed and laughed, and had just barely stopped laughing by the time they cut back to the former Governor General with a sledgehammer in hand…

I ran into this logic puzzle the other day, and have been thinking about it a lot between Nyquil comas. I will try to explain it as best I can here, but be warned that there are pages of discussion and argument on this as people try to wrap their brains around it. If you want to think about it on your own for a while, then stop reading here.

So, to start with, I’m going to drop the numbers down from what is presented on the xkcd page: let’s say there are 20 people in this weird tribe of logicians, and 5 of them have blue eyes. This better matches the forum discussion, and makes the numbers easier to follow.

A group of people with assorted eye colors live on an island. They are all perfect logicians — if a conclusion can be logically deduced, they will do it instantly. No one knows the color of their eyes. Every night at midnight, a ferry stops at the island. If anyone has figured out the color of their own eyes, they [must] leave the island that midnight. Everyone can see everyone else at all times and keeps a count of the number of people they see with each eye color (excluding themselves), but they cannot otherwise communicate. Everyone on the island knows all the rules in this paragraph.

On this island there are 5 blue-eyed people, 15 brown-eyed people, and the Guru (she happens to have green eyes). So any given blue-eyed person can see 15 people with brown eyes and 4 people with blue eyes (and one with green), but that does not tell him his own eye color; it could be 16 brown and 4 blue. Or 15 brown, 4 blue, and he could have red eyes.

The Guru is allowed to speak once (let’s say at noon), on one day in all their endless years on the island. Standing before the islanders, she says the following:

“I can see someone who has blue eyes.”

Who leaves the island, and on what night?

The answer, [Spoilers!] to start with, is that the blue eyed people would all leave the island together on the 5th night.

The logic looks inductive: if there was one person with blue eyes, they would see a sea of brown eyes, and the gurus words would speak to him, and him alone: he does not see anyone with blue eyes, so therefore he must be the one with blue eyes the guru was speaking about; he would leave the first night. If no one leaves the first night, then everyone knows that everyone else saw at least one other person with blue eyes, so they could not conclude that they were the only one and leave. If there is anyone who only sees one person with blue eyes, then they know that they must also have blue eyes, because otherwise that lone blue eyed person would have left (i.e.: the blue eyed person must have seen someone else with blue eyes, namely them). For every extra blue eyed person, the departure date is delayed one day. If no one left the second night, then there must be three blue eyed people, so anyone who only saw two blued eyed people would leave on the third night.

There are then a few more questions. The first: what information did the guru really add? The guru made it so that not only did everyone see people with blue eyes, she made it so everyone knew everyone knew that there were blue eyes.

The logic proceeds thusly: A person with blue eyes (say #5) sees 4 other people with blue eyes, but may assume that they have brown eyes. So #5 thinks that #4 sees 3 other people with blue eyes, and thinks that #4 thinks #3 sees 2 others; #5 thinks that #4 thinks that #3 thinks that #2 only sees one other, and thus #5 thinks that #4 thinks that #3 thinks that #2 thinks that #1 sees only brown eyed logicians.

The chain of logic is absolutely insane, since #5 knows, directly, that each of #’s 1-4 must see at least 3 others, because he can see all 4 of them. But nonetheless, he knows that each makes those assumptions down the chain. The trick is that at the end of the chain, someone thinks that someone only sees brown, which doesn’t help them guess their eye colour, since they don’t necessarily know that there is at least one blue present [or rather, they don’t think that someone else thinks that they think that they know… ok, it’s making my head hurt follow those chains of reasoning]. Once the guru speaks up, everyone knows that everyone at the bottom of their chains of reasoning knows that blue exists, and thus would deduce their eye colour if the twisted logic played out. It starts the countdown so that by day five, the 5 blue eyed people up and board the ferry.

It really makes my head spin to try to follow all that, especially since I sometimes have problem with the “a pencil” problems to begin with. But here’s the thing that I wonder: following the chain of logic, you know that if no one leaves the first night, it means that the blue eyed people all saw at least one other blue eyed person. Following the chain of guessing what you think the next guy thinks the next guy thinks, you get to the point where the last person hanging in that chain might think they were the only ones and actually leave the first night. So if no one does, that’s new information to act on. But, you also know, in addition to the crazy deduction, that everyone else sees at least one other blue. So no one expects anyone to leave that first night; in that case, is the fact that no one does leave actually new information? Does the chain of reason really continue night after night until they call all leave on the fifth? In fact, with 5 blues there are enough that you can know that not only does everyone else see at least one other blue, but you can know that they know everyone else can see at least one other. Can you move to the next step of waiting for someone to leave on day 4 if you knew nothing would ever happen on day 1?