Just in case

This video is making the rounds on the internet. It's called "The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See", but that's a bit strong. It's about global climate change (GCC) and what, if anything, we need to do about it. It's strange in that the author doesn't try to convince you that GCC is actually occurring, but that we need to do something about it anyway.

The logic is hardly groundbreaking — either GCC is occurring or it isn't, and either we do something about it or we don't. If it is occurring and we take action, we're good, and if it is not occurring and we do nothing, we're good. The two risks are the crux of the argument, and he describes the two extreme cases. If GCC is occurring and we don't take action, ocean levels will rise, wiping out entire cities or possibly countries, millions of people will die and millions more will be homeless, there's worldwide economic, political, and social chaos, and life generally will suck. If it is not occurring and we do take action, we could be spending billions of dollars solving a problem that doesn't exist and we cause a worldwide economic depression. The latter is certainly the lesser of the two evils, so we need to take action against GCC, "just in case". I have no real problem with that logic, and am happy to do my share to help.

Am I going to become a vegan or vegetarian because the more meat we eat, the more cows there are, and the more cows there are, the more gas they release, thereby contributing to global warming? No, because I don't think that cow farts are really that big of a problem. I have actually seen this reasoning in defence of veganism, by the way.

Anyway, the logic he used reminded me of religion. I think a large number of people believe in God "just in case". They figure that if God exists and I don't believe, then I get to sleep in on Sundays, but I'm going to hell. If God does not exist, and I do believe, then I've wasted** my Sunday mornings and not much else. Going to hell is obviously worse, so I'll go to church. I know that there are a much larger number of faithful church-goers who believe wholeheartedly in God, and this is not something they think about — God not existing is not an option in their mind. But I think the number of "just-in-case"ers is not insignificant.

Personally, I am as "devout" an atheist as the aforementioned "faithful" are devout Christians (or Jews or Muslims or...), so the option of "God exists but I don't believe so I'm going to hell" doesn't exist in my mind. In fact, I used to be a just-in-case'er myself, back before I "came out" as an atheist. It seems that some consider "atheist" one of the worst insults you could use, like "anti-American" (or its equivalent, "terrorist") seems to be these days. Once I decided that the word "atheist" was not an insult and accurately described me, I dropped the whole "just-in-case" thing.

But the just-in-case'ers seem to be missing one crucial point. If God does exist, then he knows you're a just-in-case'er, that you don't really believe with all your heart, so you're going to hell anyway. In that case, you've wasted your Sunday mornings and you're going to hell. Worst of both worlds.

** - I also realize that people do more at church than simply pray. They learn valuable life lessons during sermons, meet people and make friends, perhaps get advice or counselling, etc. I talked with someone once who said that her mother was "the biggest atheist around", but still went to church on Sundays because she simply enjoyed it. I'm sure a lot of the just-in-case'ers really enjoy their church-going time, and from that point of view it's certainly not "wasted time". But you know what I mean.

Google just makes life better

We're heading north this weekend for my sister's birthday. We thought maybe we'd stop at Swiss Chalet on the way up for dinner, so I went to my dear friend the Internet to find a restaurant in Mississauga. I went to swisschalet.ca and found their restaurant locator. I selected Ontario from the pulldown, then selected "Mississauga" from the list of cities, and it gave me a list of locations. Each one had a "map" link, which linked to a separate page containing a little mapquest map of that location. Not too painful, and fairly quick. However, I then had to go through each restaurant listed and figure out where it is, and if it's near to where I'm going to be driving. I'm fairly familiar with Mississauga, but it took me a minute to figure out how far out of my way "Burnhamthorpe and Creditview" is. And there are nine restaurants listed.

Then I went to to maps.google.com, clicked "Find businesses", then entered "Swiss Chalet" in the first box and "Mississauga, Ontario" in the second. I was immediately given a map of Mississauga with every Swiss Chalet restaurant flagged. Faster and way more useful. I can plan out my route and instantly see where the restaurants are near the roads I'll be on.

As my buddy Kurt frequently says, if there's a better use for the internet, I don't know what it is.

NLL labour trouble... again

Here we go again. For the third time since 2004, the NLL is trying to negotiate a new CBA with its players. The first time, talks broke down but they decided to extend the existing contract by a year. The next year, just before the 2005 season, the league gave a deadline of October 1 and said that if an agreement wasn't reached by then, the season would be cancelled. They reached an agreement on a new 3-year contract a few hours after the deadline passed, and the season went on.

That contract expired at the end of last season, and now we're down to the wire yet again, with today being the deadline. According to the NLL website, talks broke off early this morning with no more scheduled.

I know that the owners have offered about a 3% pay increase, and the players want more, but I'm sure there's a lot more to it than that. I don't know any more details, so I don't have enough information to have an opinion on which side is right or wrong. But I think the players are in a tough bargaining position here. Many of the NLL franchise owners also own NHL teams, and they lost an entire season a couple of years ago. The NLL has even said that those owners would "not think twice about losing a lacrosse season". If they're that willing to lose a season, the players have no strength. What can they threaten the owners with?

At the same time, the owners have got to know that losing an NLL season likely means the end of the league, and whatever investment they've made would be gone. Lacrosse is still too much of a fringe sport at this point, and the NLL simply cannot afford to lose an entire season. If it vanished because of a labour dispute, many people would leave and not bother coming back. MLB is still recovering from the baseball strike, and that was thirteen years ago. Blue Jays attendance isn't anywhere near what it was before the strike, though the team won the two World Series immediately before the strike, and has been mediocre at best since then, so I'm sure that's part of it. Sure there are the die-hard lacrosse fans, but a lot of the fans enjoy watching the games, but if the league vanished, they'd just think "Oh well, that was fun while it lasted" and move on, more than likely not looking back.

Knowing the NLL's tendency to completely ignore deadlines (especially the ones they set themselves), it wouldn't surprise me for the deadline to come and go, and the season not get cancelled, or even get cancelled and then get "un-cancelled" a couple of days later, once an agreement is reached. If it really does get cancelled though, bye bye NLL.

Update: According to both Sportsnet and TSN, the season has officially been cancelled. No word from nll.com.

Another update: It's official.

My little chickadee

We went to the RBG in Hamilton yesterday for a "Geo-Quest", which was a mini-course on geocaching — what it is, how to use the GPS, stuff like that. They set up a treasure box somewhere on the RBG grounds, and then gave us co-ordinates for three signs around the grounds, and we had to find the signs, get some clues from the signs, and the clues gave us the co-ordinates of the treasure box. Each of the four of us got a GPS unit to use, so the boys had fun watching how close they were getting and what direction to walk and stuff like that. Nicholas, however, seemed to have missed something that the instructor pointed out: "The GPS doesn't tell you things like 'There's a tree in your way', so you need to keep your eyes open!". More than once, Nicky would be staring so intently at the GPS to make sure he was going in the right direction that he walked into a tree or bush or person.

The boys each did a week of summer camp at the RBG this past summer, and told us about "feeding the chickadees", which they did every day at camp. After the course, we each grabbed a handful of birdseed from the desk and walked down a path a little ways to try that. I had assumed that the boys meant that they spread some birdseed on the ground and the chickadees came up to them to grab it, but it was much better than that. We held our hands out in front of us, and the chickadees were so tame that they would actually land on our hands and eat the seeds (or grab them to take back to their nests). There were also some blue jays and nuthatches around, but the blue jays never came near us, and the nuthatches wouldn't land on you, they'd just take the seeds that dropped on the ground. Standing there with a little chickadee sitting on your hand eating was just the coolest thing.

The Ratio

Wow...three postings in one day? AND one yesterday? AND two on Sunday? Just call me Mr. Prolific.

Back when I was in university in the late '80s (twenty years ago! Holy crap I'm old), I did a three co-op work terms at IBM in Toronto. In the third one, I shared an office with Suki (short for Sukhminder), another co-op. He happened to live in the same town I did (Pickering), so we carpooled to work a lot. I drove my dad's old 1979 Caprice Classic, while Suki drove a brand new 1989 Honda Prelude, complete with 4-wheel steering. After lots of conversations about cars, we came up with a theory that I still believe in. The theory was that the ratio of how cool a car is to how cool the owner of the car thinks it is must always be less than one. In other words, no car is ever as cool as its owner thinks it is.

We'd see cars and their drivers, and give our estimate of what the ratio was — the lower the ratio, the more out-of-touch with reality the owner was. The lowest ratios were held by the posers who'd buy an old Honda Civic (they're nice cars now, but they used to be small and junky) and add a big three-foot-tall spoiler on the back, paint it yellow, tint the windows, and then think they're driving some sort of hot rod — until they pulled away from a light and their car made a high-pitched "Wheeeeeeee" sound, rather than the more powerful VROOOM of a Mustang or Camaro. That was something like 0.2. We'd see a Corolla drive by with the driver-side window down and the driver with one arm hanging out the window and sporting a pair of $120 Ray-Bans, and say "0.4". Note that the same driver driving a much-cooler Porsche might also get a 0.4, or even less, because the car might be twice as cool (doubling the numerator), but the driver may think it's more than twice as cool (more than doubling the denominator). A beat-up old wooden-paneled station wagon with a family of five inside might rate something like 0.85.

We tried to think of the highest possible ratio. The 78-year-old grandmother who borrows her rich son's BMW to run over to the grocery store, and really has no idea about cars (so she doesn't know how cool the car really is) would be pretty high (though it could be argued that it doesn't count, since she doesn't own the car), as would be the guy driving the old 1974 Lada that he picked up at an auction for $150. But somewhere in the back of that grandmother's mind, she is thinking "this is quite a nice little car", and the guy with the Lada is thinking that he got the car for almost nothing, and that's pretty cool. Even in those cases, the ratio is still less than one.

Suki freely admitted that the ratio for his Prelude was pretty low, between 0.3 and 0.4, but then it was quite the nice car. My dad's old Caprice was a gas-guzzler that was about 100 feet long and had broken air conditioning and an analog clock that had been stuck on 3:00 for years. However, it had a powerful V8 and I once had nine adults in that car — with nobody in the trunk (though one was lying across the laps of the people packed into the back seat), so it was probably a 0.75. My first car was a candy-apple red 1988 Cavalier Z24 (that I bought in 1992). It was a standard and had a spoiler and a sunroof, and it was all mine. We're talking 0.35 tops.

Now that I think about it, a friend of mine once had a 5L Mustang with a pretty low ratio, but before that, she drove a baby blue mid-80's Reliant K car that her parents helped her buy. That ratio was pretty damned close to one.

Yes, we really did put a lot of thought into this.

Windows reminder app

Does anyone know of a good Windows-based calendar / reminder application? I'm currently using the Lightning plug-in for Thunderbird. Lightning is basically a plug-in version of Sunbird, which is a Mozilla calendar application. It has the advantage of being able to read events from my Google calendar plus add events of its own, and it can give you reminders, but the reminders seem to be flaky.

My company uses Lotus Notes for email, but after using it for a few years, I now flatly refuse to install it. I switched to Outlook for the next few years, and Outlook has a pretty nice calendar built-in. I'd set up reminders for my meetings, and a message box would pop up 10 minutes beforehand. I switched to Thunderbird for email a year or so ago, but Thunderbird doesn't have a calendar built-in, so I've been without one ever since. I discovered Sunbird a little while ago and set that up, but soon discovered Lightning — it's the same thing as Sunbird but since it's a Thunderbird plug-in, it's one less application to run. However, I have been late for a number of meetings lately because my reminders never fired. Sometimes they fire the next time I stop and start Thunderbird, and sometimes they simply fire an hour or two later. The reminder for the meeting I was late for this morning fired an hour after the meeting ended.

I'm thinking of re-installing Outlook just for the calendar, but that seems like overkill. Considering how happy I've been with Firefox and Thunderbird (for the most part), I'm quite disappointed with Sunbird. Anyone have any other suggestions?

Super-size

You know today I was only asked one question, and one question only, you know what that was?
"Do you want the super size?"
You know, come to think of it, I want the whole fuckin' world super-sized.
Super-sized guns
Super-sized planes
Super-sized satellites — think about how many more channels you could get with super-sized satellites
Super-sized sales — how do you super-size a sale?
How 'bout we super-size third-world debt relief?
Super-size love
Super-size honesty
Super-size government — come to think of it, actually nah, let's not super-size the government
I'd like to super-size death
"Can I have a super-size of death?"
"I'd like a super-size of death with a Coke"
...
Let's super-size this song
Really, that's the goal, isn't it?
If we can super-size the record, we'll sell more records
It's a super-sized record
That is after all, our ambition
...
Ambition, ambition's a tricky thing
It's like riding a unicycle over a dental-floss tightrope over a wilderness of razor blades
Ambition can backfire
Ambition means more, ambition means faster, ambition means better
What if you could super — can you super-size ambition?
Does it make you ambitious if you super-size ambition?
Around here, our ambition hurts more than it helps
Around here, our ambition throws a non-perishable item in the donation bin at Christmas, and then pats itself on the fuckin' back because it thinks it's done something decent
Yeah, we're super-sizing ambition, make no mistake about it
Ambition will televise the revolution
And it'll sell more fuckin' commercial spots than the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the World Series, and the tragedy-du-jour combined
We're super-sizing, we're super-sizing the record
'Cause we're ambitious

Matthew Good
"Twenty-first Century Living"

Tory the Tory and MMP

So we go to the polls on Wednesday, this time casting two ballots instead of the usual one. I think I've figured out who I'm voting for in my riding, and I think I've also figured out how I'm voting on the MMP issue. I see the appeal of MMP, particularly for the smaller parties. For example, there is no Green Party candidate in my riding, and if I were a Green Party supporter (I'm not), then I would have no way to actually vote for the party. With MMP, I could still support that party. Similarly, say I happen to support Party X but for whatever reason I don't like Party X's candidate in my riding. Under an MMP system, I could vote for the candidate (not party) that I think will best serve my riding, while still supporting Party X.

The fatal flaw of MMP in my mind is that 40 of 130 MPPs (that's over 30%) will be unelected and will represent no constituents. They are guaranteed to vote along party lines. Most MPPs will, to be sure, but there is always the chance that they will not if whatever they are voting on may be especially helpful or detrimental to their constituents. Voting along party lines is not necessarily a problem, but if there's something to be voted on, and Joe Party Leader says "my party is against this", he knows that those extra unelected MPPs will vote with him, so he could have 25% of the vote before anyone even considers about how the people of the province feel about it. Because there are more MPPs, it also means that the person voting on my behalf (i.e. my MPP) has less power than under the current system, in the sense that his vote will count for less. Everyone I've talked to on this issue (which, admittedly, isn't many) is also voting no.

I generally don't align myself with a particular party, mainly because I don't trust many politicians, and the ones I have trusted in the past have come from various parties. If I found that I trusted, say, the Librerals more often than the Tories, then I might call myself a Liberal, but I've noticed no such pattern. In particular, I've found in the past that I like the federal leader of a party while not liking the provincial leader of that same party, or vice versa. I did not watch the recent debate on TV, but I've heard interviews with both McGuinty and Tory, and I liked what each of them had to say (though it's probably easy to spin your agenda to sound positive when there's nobody arguing against you). Plus, my political knowledge is minimal enough that if some political leader explained an idea to me, I wouldn't necessarily be able to see any flaws in it anyway. Having said that, I have yet to see a John Tory ad that explains why he would be a good leader; all of his ads seem to just talk about why McGuinty is not a good leader. It's not "Vote for us!", it's "Don't vote for them!", which implies to me that either (a) Tory isn't confident enough in his own agenda to actually talk about it, or (b) he doesn't think there are any really good candidates, including himself, so he considers himself the "least bad" candidate. Either way, this is hardly someone I want leading the province for the next however-many years.

As an aside, obviously a politician named "Tory" would be a Conservative. But what if he wasn't? Would the Liberal Party elect a leader named "Tory"?

Look at this, more political commentary on my blog. Somewhere, John Wayne Gacy and Joseph Stalin are putting on parkas.

Music meme

I copied this from CaHwyGuy. The idea is to put your entire music collection on shuffle, and list the first ten songs that come up. Here they are (song name, with artist and album in brackets):

1. Erotomania (Dream Theater, Awake)
2. Rooster (Alice In Chains, Dirt)
3. Masquerade (The Phantom of the Opera soundtrack — I'm pretty sure this is the Toronto cast)
4. Just Good Friends (Close) (Fish, Internal Exile)
5. If Dirt Were Dollars (Don Henley, The End of the Innocence)
6. Do What You Gotta Do (Garth Brooks, Sevens)
7. West Virginia (Big Wreck, The Pleasure and the Greed)
8. Prelude: The Waking Dream (Triumph, Surveillance)
9. This Suffering (Billy Talent, Billy Talent II)
10. Listen (Collective Soul, Disiplined Breakdown)

Interesting how two of them (#1 and #8) are instrumental. All in all, a pretty good overview of my musical tastes, though I don't actually listen to Garth Brooks all that often.

Ripping complete!

I finished ripping my CDs today. The final total: 14 genres, 210 artists, 572 albums, 6903 songs, 20.8 days, 41.72 GB. The genres break down like this:

• Alternative & Punk: 22 artists, 61 albums
• Blues: 12 artists, 18 albums
• Country: 6 artists, 17 albums (8 of which are Blue Rodeo)
• Folk: 1 artist, 1 album (Patricia Murray, mentioned before)
• Grunge: 3 artists, 5 albums (Nirvana, Silverchair, Soundgarden)
• Holiday: 3 artists, 7 albums
• Jazz: 2 artists, 2 albums (Donald Fagan and Harry Connick, Jr.)
• Metal: 15 artists, 53 albums
• Pop: 19 artists, 43 albums
• Progressive Rock: 2 artists, 5 albums (Liquid Tension Experiment and Saga)
• Punk Rock: 2 artists, 3 albums (Green Day and the Offspring)
• Rock: 133 artists, 345 albums
• Soundtrack: 5 artists, 18 albums
• World: 1 artist, 1 album (Leahy, also mentioned in the above-linked post)

The ripping of all the CDs came with a cost (excluding time) — my old CD-ROM drive (and DVD writer) decided that this was simply too much for it to handle, and gave up the ghost on Friday. A few times last week, it occasionally stopped recognizing disks until I ejected them and put them back in a couple of times, until on Friday, it finally wouldn't recognize any disks at all. Didn't give me any errors, just didn't recognize that there was any media in the drive. I went out to Factory Direct on Saturday and bought a new DVD writer for $50, installed it in two minutes, and was ripping again. Even better, the new drive is faster than the old one, and recognizes DVDs that the old one had trouble with.

Audiobooks and a milestone

I signed up the other day with audible.com, which is like the amazon.com of audiobooks. Don't know if I'll continue the subscription, but just for signing up, I got a free audiobook. The one I chose was "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking, which is a book I've been meaning to get for a long time. I listened to the first 20 minutes or so of it on the drive home yesterday (it's over 5 hours long), and was instantly hooked. It's fascinating stuff. Right now he's talking about the history of people's beliefs and discoveries about the solar system, like how people assumed that the Sun, moon, and planets all revolved around the Earth, and that the Earth was a cylindrical disk. Then he not only explains that people changed their beliefs as new information became available, but he describes what that new information was and how it conflicted with the existing "body of knowledege". He does all this in a writing style that is not only interesting, but done in a way that the average layperson can understand it without feeling talked down to.

Hawking, obviously, does not read the book himself. It's read by a guy named Michael Jackson (no, not that one), who has an English accent. This kind of threw me off; I always assumed that Hawking was American because of his speaking computer, which speaks with an American accent. Hawking is indeed British, so it makes sense to get someone British to read the book.

The book so enthralled me during the drive home that I completely forgot about an imminent milestone, which must have passed on the 401 somewhere between Hwy 8 and the service station between Cambridge and Guelph. The milestone was the rolling over of the odometer (100,000 km) on my car. The car is a 2004 Sunfire, which I picked up in early July of 2004. 100,000 km in 3 years 3 months comes out to about 2564 km / month, 592 km / week. Assuming 8 trips to work per week (I work at home on Fridays), this comes out to about 74 km / trip. Of course, this doesn't take non-work trips or vacations into account, but it's still eerily accurate, since the trip is about 65 km each way.

Dump and chase

Why oh why do they do this? Why do the Leafs (and probably other teams too) dump the puck into the offensive zone, and then chase after it? If they've got possession, why wouldn't they keep possession, rather than voluntarily give it up and then try to fight to get it back? I just watched the last five minutes of the Leafs-Senators game, and the Leafs, despite being a goal down and desperate to score, kept doing this. I don't get it. They pulled their goalie, so they're up 6-on-5. A defenceman races forward with the puck, his forwards are waiting at the blue line, but instead of crossing the blue line with the forwards right behind him and trying to make a play, he dumps it into the corner from the neutral zone, then everyone skates in to try and get it back from the Ottawa defenders. This almost always failed, and the Sens dumped the puck back out. This was repeated a number of times before time ran out and the Sens won the game.

Maybe it's because I've watched a lot more lacrosse than hockey in the past few years, and possession in lacrosse is everything. In hockey, it's easier to dump the puck in and try to get it back, whereas in lacrosse you don't give up possession for anything. But I still don't get it.

Going green - what's the point?

I heard an interview today on the Quirks and Quarks podcast with an environment economist named Dr. Mark Jaccard who was talking about how we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He was talking about how critical it is to do this, and how governments need to do much more to make it happen. The Canadian government set some unrealistic goals with respect to the Kyoto protocol (the goal was to reduce total emissions in 2010 to 6% less than the 1990 totals — we are currently at 25-30% above), and then did nothing to help achieve those goals except some advertising, misguided things like rebates (if you give someone a subsidy for buying a new energy efficient fridge, and then they put the old fridge in the basement and continue using it, what have you accomplished?) and simply asking people to cut down. There have been no additional penalties for homes or businesses that contribute excessively to greenhouse emissions. Quebec has imposed a "carbon tax", but decided that the homeowners themselves wouldn't pay any extra, only the energy companies, which does nothing to make homeowners want to reduce usage, and isn't that really your ultimate goal?

He also said something that struck me as very unusual for an environmentalist. The host said that many people think that if they can be efficient and reduce their consumption and such, then that "should be enough", but Dr. Jaccard says in his book that efficiency and reducing consumption is not the answer. He said they are "a significant part of the answer", but that it would be a mistake to focus solely on that. I understand that it's not the whole solution, but the implication to me was that reducing personal consumption is such a drop in the bucket that it's almost not worth the effort. For an environmentalist to even imply this was very surprising to me.

I remember a trip to Canada's Wonderland last year where I was watching one of the rides, called Cliffhanger, which takes a huge platform with about 50 seats and lifts it up, spins it around, and drops it repeatedly. Then we went to another ride called Psyclone that had a huge circle of seats and swings the whole platform while spinning it, and the one next to Psyclone called Sledge Hammer which has six huge "arms" with seats on the end of them, and spins the seats while lifting and dropping the arms. These rides run 10 hours a day, every day, from May until September. I looked at these rides and considered the amount of energy they must consume and thought "...and replacing the light bulbs in my house with the spirally ones is supposed to help?"

Similarly, I remember getting a Drive Clean test on my Grand Prix, which was about six years old at the time. I looked at the test results, and the car passed with flying colours — one of the tests said that a certain level had to be below 1500, and my car's level was something like 12. Then while driving home, I passed a bus or a dump truck or something that was belching thick black smoke into the air, dumping more pollution into the air in an hour than my car did in a year. And I have to pay $40 for a Drive Clean test?

We have a test lab at work with hundreds of machines running 24/7. We do run a lot of stress tests so it's not unlikely that a large number of them are actually in use for much of that time, but I am sure that on any given weekend, there are at least a handful of machines that are on and running the entire time but doing nothing at all. After the big blackout of a couple of years ago, it seemed that everyone went green for a short time and tried to come up with ways to reduce consumption. I remember that some of us talked about ways to automatically power off idle machines and then power them back on again when they were needed, but nothing ever came of it. Then there were no more power outages, and many people forgot and went back to their old ways. I won't pretend that I am not one of those to some extent, though I'm definitely more conscious of it than I used to be.

We have not see the Al Gore movie "An Inconvenient Truth" though it's on our "should probably rent" list. Gail saw some snippets of it somewhere recently and the bit about the polar icecaps melting which is causing polar bears to drown (i.e. this is not one of these "If we're not careful, this could happen" things, it is happening) really struck a nerve with her. She went out the next day and bought some of the fluorescent ("spirally") light bulbs to use in some of our most-often-used lights. One of our problems is that many of our light fixtures use unusual-sized light bulbs, which are not yet available in fluorescent models. I've read about people who install solar panels on their roof or build wind turbines in their backyard and use those to power their houses. Some are even able to remove themselves from the power grid completely. However, the initial cost of buying the necessary hardware is very cost-prohibitive. From what I've read, it costs thousands to install this stuff, and then takes upwards of 20 years before the initial costs are recovered in savings due to lower energy bills. I'd love to do this for the good of the environment, but I just don't have an extra few thousand dollars sitting around, and therefore I cannot justify it.

I'm willing to do my part, and I certainly understand the logic of "one person doesn't make much of a difference but if everyone does a little bit, the cumulative change can be significant". But it sounds to me that unless government steps up and forces the worst offenders to clean themselves up (or at least makes it economically advantageous to do so), I kind of feel like any changes I make in my home are meaningless.

Status update

CD ripping status: I'm just over halfway through the alphabet now — just finished the M's (Malibu Stacey, Marillion, Matchbox Twenty, Max Webster, Megadeth, Sue Medley, Metallica, Midnight Oil, Steve Miller Band, Mr. Big, Kim Mitchell, Molly Hatchet, The Moody Blues, Alanis Morrisette, Mötley Crüe, Alannah Myles). iTunes tells me that I have 16 genres, 153 artists, 391 albums, 4640 songs, 14 days, and 25.10 GB on my iPod. (Note that one double album counts as two, so it's not really 391 albums, but 391 actual discs. I also have a couple of episodes of Battlestar Galactica from last season that I have not yet watched on there. Interesting facts about the CDs I've burned so far:

• I have more songs by Billy's (Dean, Idol, Squire, Talent) than David's (Gilmour, Usher)
• I have fourteen Led Zeppelin albums (including Physical Graffiti as two and the box set as four)
• I have eleven John (Cougar) Mellencamp albums, all single albums. I never would have guessed there were so many, and I don't even have them all.
• I have an album by Helix? One by Heart? Two by Haywire? Four (including a double live CD) by AC/DC? I bet I haven't listened to any of these in fifteen years.
• There are at least four genres of which I have exactly one album:
  • jazz — Kamikiriad by Donald Fagan (lead singer for Steely Dan). Never really though of it as jazz, but I suppose that fits as well as any other category. I guess Steely Dan was kind of jazzy too, so once I get to the S's we'll see what they are.
  • punk — Dookie by Green Day. No argument there.
  • folk — <something unpronounceable> by a PEI singer named Patricia Murray. I think it's entirely sung in Gaelic. Someone gave it to me as a gift, I guess figuring that I'm of Scottish descent and my name is Gaelic (Graeme means "of the gray house"), so I must speak Gaelic.
  • world — the debut album by Leahy. More Celtic music from Canada's east coast. (Update: they're actually from Ontario) A whole family of fiddle players, piano players, guitar players, and singers. I saw two of them play live once, and one of the fiddle players, Donnell Leahy, was just incredible.
• Nirvana's Nevermind album, which spawned the whole grunge scene in the early 90's and is not only a classic in the grunge genre but was basically the first real grunge album, is categorized not as grunge but as rock.

Everyone wants their cut

I ordered an iPod from Apple a few weeks ago. I think I might have written about it already. Because I bought it through apple.ca, they added GST to the price. Apple didn't charge for shipping, and I didn't have to pay FedEx for anything when it arrived. Then last week I ordered a dock for the iPod, so I can plug the dock into my stereo and TV, and then when I plug the iPod into the dock, I can get sound through the stereo and watch videos on the TV. The dock shipped from North Carolina, but when it hit the border, the Canadian government decided that I should pay them GST on this item even though I bought it from a company in the US. I suppose the idea is that I could have bought the thing in Canada, in which case I would have paid GST on it. Being able to order something from the US and not pay GST on it would be a loophole, so I need to pay the GST as if I bought it here. However, that GST (in this case, $21.77) is due the moment it crosses into Canada, so since I wasn't there to pay it, UPS had to pay it on my behalf. Thanks UPS, very sporting of you. Well, no, not really — UPS charged me $39.10 (plus GST, so $41.45) for this service, or almost double the amount that they had to pay. When they deliver the dock tomorrow, I will have to reimburse them for the GST they paid, plus pay this extra service charge, so I'll have to give the driver $63.22. The dock itself only cost about $150, so this extra charge is almost half of the original cost of the thing.

I suppose the GST goes towards things like health care, but it's still frustrating. Actually, I'm not sure which is frustrating me more — having to pay the GST or the fact that UPS is charging me a service charge of almost 200%.

Geocaching

On Monday, we went on our first geocaching expedition. Geocaching is a combination hike and treasure hunt — you get the latitude and longitude co-ordinates of a "cache" from the geocaching web site, plug them into your GPS, and then go find it. The GPS is only so accurate, however, so it's not like once you get to the co-ordinates, you look down and there it is. You need to look under rocks or piles of leaves or in tree stumps, stuff like that. You can find some in the city as well, though I suspect those ones are harder to find — you can't just leave one on the sidewalk.

The web site has thousands of caches listed, and each one has an indication of how hard the cache is to find, and how difficult the terrain is. You can put a cache halfway down a cliff wall, but then only rock climbers are going to be able to find it. There are also caches hidden underwater for scuba divers to find.

The cache itself is generally a tupperware-type box or ammo container that has a log book in it, and sometimes some little "prizes". The idea is that if you take something, you leave something as well. The one we found wasn't in great condition though, there were some rusty coins in it, two pens that didn't work, and a plastic toy. We signed the log book and then took the broken pens and left a good one.

Sometimes, the cache owner makes a game of it, and creates several caches, each of which contains a "clue". Once you find all the caches and put all the clues together, that gives you the location of the final cache. Some caches also contain a trackable item, which is something that has a code you can enter on the web site. The idea with those is to take the item from that cache, leave it in another one somewhere else, and then update the web site. Then you can follow the item's progress around the world.

I borrowed a GPS from a guy at work, just to see if this is something that the kids would enjoy, and sure enough they liked searching in the bushes once we found the general location. According to the web site, there are numerous caches around our area, and there are some up north near where our parents live. We've even found a bunch in France, so we might try a few of those when we're over there next summer (bought our tickets last week!). We've signed up for a geocaching "class" at the Royal Botanical Gardens in October, so that should be fun as well.

ProgNOTsticator

I am in a football pool with some guys at work, run through ESPN.com. In week 1, I got 11 picks right out of 16, and was tied for second place. I lost the tie-breaker, so I didn't win anything. This past week, I tied for third place with 10 correct picks, so I didn't win anything there either. Currently, I'm leading our pool overall, I'm ranked 816th out of the hundreds of thousands of people in the ESPN pool, which is the 99.3rd percentile. This sucks.

It sucks because I know jack about football — I've just gotten lucky two weeks in a row. If I come in second or third every week all season, I have an excellent shot at winning the whole thing, but the odds of that are infinitesimal. My best shot of making any money in this pool was to get lucky and win a week or maybe two. I'm ranked near the top of the list right now, but in the long run, it'll mean nothing. Part of me thinks that I've burned up all the luck I had, while the other part of me that doesn't believe in luck thinks that I have as good a shot as anyone else. We'll see...

Update: Turns out I came in second in week two, not third, so I actually won $10. Also, I joined a similar pool at the local Boston Pizza and used the same picks for that pool, and I won the week and a $25 gift certificate!

More fun with the English language

While ripping CDs onto my iPod, I've noticed at least one and possibly two songs that have grammatical errors in the titles. This seems unbelievable to me. It's not unbelievable that the original songwriters got it wrong, but that they and everyone else who read the song's title before the album was released got it wrong.

Interestingly, the errors are similar in both cases. The songs in question are "Given The Dog A Bone" by AC/DC (should be "Givin'...") and "Taken The Pain" by Haywire (should be "Takin'..."). Errors in the lyrics themselves I can understand, and I'm sure sometimes they're put there intentionally, but I think these are just plain ol' mistakes. I haven't confirmed the lyrics of the second one, but it sounds like "You're takin' the pain from my heart...". However, it could be "You've taken the pain from my heart...", in which case it's not an error.

At one point, I thought there was some serious redundancy in the Paul McCartney song "Live And Let Die". The lyrics sound like "But in this ever-changing world in which we live in...", but it's actually "But if this ever-changing world in which we're livin'", which makes more sense. There's "A Horse With No Name" by America, which contains the mind-boggling "In the desert you can remember your name 'cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain". I've completely given up trying to analyze lyrics by some bands; Matthew Good (he has songs called "While We Were Hunting Rabbits", "Advertising on Police Cars", "Ex-Pats of the Blue Mountain Symphony Orchestra" and "Girl Wedged Under The Front Of A Firebird") and The Tragically Hip ("There's a cannon shooting coconut cream, forty gallons in a steady stream" ) are good examples.

Of course, in the original cases, it could easily be that whoever was responsible for the liner notes was solely responsible for the error. Tool's album "Lateralus" has a song called "Lateralis", but that is apparently a typo on some pressings of the CD. But if it's just a typo, the story's not that interesting.

On a radio show from Friday (which I listened to today via podcast), they were briefly talking about the English language — the difference between "further" and "farther" (I have no idea what the difference is), and how you don't "revert back", you just "revert". One that always bugs me is "rate of speed", as in "the car was moving at a high rate of speed". Speed is a rate, so there's no need to say "rate of"; just saying "...moving at a high speed" is perfectly correct, and "moving very quickly" is even better. Another one of those examples of people who try to sound more intelligent by using big words but end up sounding dumber because they use the big words wrong. I have heard people talk about others being "ignorant" when they really mean "rude", but "ignorant" sounds better. They, of course, are ignorant of what ignorant really means. The classic line from The Princess Bride comes to mind: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Ironically, earlier in the same show, one of the guys had used the term "literally" incorrectly. He talked about someone who "literally took the bull by the horns". Unless the guy was a cowboy or bullfighter, I don't think so.

David Gilmour

I went to see the David Gilmour concert movie today. It was recorded at the Royal Albert Hall during his "On An Island" tour last year, and will be released on DVD in a couple of days. A bunch of theatres across North America and in the UK showed some of the DVD, which was followed by a live half-hour Q&A session with QGilmour, and then a 10-minute live jam session. The whole show was unbelievably cool. Gilmour is an amazing guitar player — he can play fast but doesn't always feel the need to (unlike others), his note-bending is amazing, and he puts so much emotion into the music it's unreal. For this tour, he also surrounded himself with other amazing musicians, including Pink Floyd bandmate Rick Wright on keyboards, Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera on rhythm guitar, and Graham Nash and David Crosby on backing vocals, and David Bowie also makes a cameo appearance. The concert was amazing — as a guitar player myself, I love to watch close-up video of great guitar players, and Gilmour is a master. If the entire thing had been two hours of footage of just his fret hand, that would have been fine with me. The Q&A afterwards was a bit disappointing, since Gilmour managed to avoid answering many of the questions. Still, I may pick this DVD up once it's released next week.

Interesting but useless fact: while browsing the Wikipedia entries on Gilmour, Wright, and other members of Pink Floyd, I came across this: Floyd drummer Nick Mason owns a house that used to be owned by Camilla Parker-Bowles, the current wife of Prince Charles. David Gilmour used to own a house in London that he sold to Earl Spencer, brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, the late wife of Prince Charles.

Blake ain't no Gretzky

Leaf coach Paul Maurice said in an interview this morning that this year's Leaf team is "the most talented team I've ever coached". This is a guy that coached Carolina to the Stanley Cup final in 2001/02. Are Jason Blake and Vesa Toskala really that good? They are really the only changes to the team since last year, and last year, the Leafs didn't make the playoffs.

I realize he doesn't want to come out and say "this team won't suck quite as much as last year", but let's not stretch things too far.

Interesting note: I originally spelled Gretzky wrong in the title, and Firefox flagged it as a misspelling. Then I corrected it, and the flag went away. This tells me that the word "Gretzky" is in Firefox's dictionary.

classmates vs. facebook

I can't remember who I was talking to about this the other day but we decided that the people at classmates.com are probably really P.O.'ed about this whole facebook thing. If you've never seen classmates.com, it's a place where you can register yourself and all the schools you went to and when, and it can hook you up with classmates from those schools. It allows you to set up a profile, list your likes and dislikes and such, send and receive messages, all that kind of stuff. Very similar to facebook, but the difference is that classmates.com is not free. You can sign up for free, and people can see your entry, but if they want to actually contact you or read anything you've entered, they have to be a paid member. Similarly, if they send you a message, you have to be a paid member to read it.

I signed up with clasmates.com a bunch of years ago, just in case those people that teased me in high school were dying to look me up and apologize. I signed up with a free account, since it was not something that was important enough to me to warrant paying for. But everywhere you look, there are upgrade messages, and a bunch of things that you can't do unless you upgrade. I just checked now, and two people have apparently viewed my profile and signed my guestbook, but it won't let me see their names unless I upgrade for $39/year. Bite me.

Then along comes facebook.com, and does roughly the same thing but better and free. Now facebook is one of the most popular sites anywhere, while classmates.com continues to ask me for money. See that boat floating away from you, classmates.com? That's facebook.com riding on a ship called "Opportunity". Looks like you missed it.

9/11

I'm late with this one — I meant to do this yesterday, for obvious reasons. Yesterday was the 6th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and I have to say I'm a little surprised how little was made of it. I expected to have memorials all over the place and articles written about it all over all the newswires, but I didn't see much. What I did see written was not so much about the event itself or even the commemoration events, but the politics surrounding them.

Anyway, I'm sure that in years to come, it will be one of those "Do you remember where you were when..." moments. For me, some other such moments were the explosion of the Space Shuttle, the assassination attempt on President Reagan, and both times the Blue Jays won the World Series. On September 11, 2001 I was working from home because of a doctor's appointment (allergist) in the afternoon. I was sitting in the kitchen when I got an email from a friend which said, in its entirety, "Check out cnn.com! Holy shit!" I tried to go to cnn.com, but the site was so bogged down that I couldn't get there. On my news headlines home page, I saw the headline "Plane crashes into World Trade Center", and I remember thinking that some idiot in an ultralight plane had been flying over Manhattan and clipped one of the towers. Maybe he's dead and a couple of windows got broken. Jenny must have sent me the link because there's some footage of the crash or something. Ten minutes or so later I tried cnn.com again, and still didn't get anywhere, but that's when I saw another headline: "Second plane hits World Trade Center", and I distinctly remember the first thought that went through my head then: "Oh shit. One plane hitting the tower might be an accident, but there's no way two is an accident." I didn't know at the time that it was passenger jets we were talking about, not little Cessna's or anything, otherwise I wouldn't have considered the possibility of an accident at all.

I ran and put the TV on, and sat with my computer in my lap for the rest of the morning. I remember that I was working on a new memory management system for SQL Anywhere clients, and that the project was eventually shelved. I remember calling my mother, who worked in an office building in Toronto, and she told me they were already sending everyone home. I remember hearing about the Pentagon attack and the fact that a fourth plane had gone down in a field, and thinking that the fourth one must have been bound for the White House. I remember going to the doctor's appointment and everything seeming surreal, like now that this has happened, who cares what I'm allergic to? That evening, I went to get the tires rotated on my car, and I remember the guy at the counter writing the date on the bill: "September 11th. That's a date we're going to remember for a long time." and all I could think to say was "Yeah."

I don't pretend to have followed all the politics afterwards. Everyone seems to be down on President Bush for going to war with Iraq under the guise of a "war on terror" when Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. It seems fairly obvious to me what happened. Bush looked for Osama for a while and got nowhere, and got antsy about not making any progress, so he figured "Saddam is a bad dude, he hates us, he probably had a hand in this", a belief that turned out to be wrong. But Saddam was a bad dude, and he did hate the US, so you can't really fault W for believing it at the time. The problem was that he acted on that belief before confirming it. By the time they figured out that Iraq wasn't involved and had no WMDs and such, it was too late to get out without admitting he was wrong, something that politicians in general and W in particular don't seem all that good at. I heard the other day that a survey of civilians in Iraq shows that many of them are less happy now than they were when Saddam was in power. Considering the nasty things Saddam did, that's saying something.

Oh crap — political content on my blog! Quick, must scramble to find something more in line with my blog's usual content... Ummmm.... New iPod! It's cool! Got lots of songs on it!

More names from the past

After thinking about Bob Layfield for the last few days, I thought about other people I used to work with, and googled a couple of them. Most of them I either couldn't find, or found minimal information, but one turned up in a number of places: Alykhan Jetha (known as AJ) is the CEO of a company called Marketcircle, based in Toronto, which makes Mac software.

I don't remember much about AJ. I worked with him at Comnetix for about a year, maybe a little longer, before he left. One thing I do remember — he was an Amway rep, and tried to get me into it as well. He invited me to lunch one day, saying he had a "business opportunity" for me. I had no idea what Amway was, but he gave me the whole dog-and-pony show. He told me that software development was what he enjoyed doing, and it paid the bills, but the Amway thing was going to make him rich. "In ten years," he said, "I won't need to work anymore." Don't know how well that worked out, AJ, since you're still working. Then again, he's CEO of a company that looks pretty successful, so I'd say he made a good decision or two somewhere along the line. Congratulations AJ!

I have been given the Amway spiel three times now, including once by a guy I didn't know while in line at Harvey's. My logic for saying no was that I did not go to university for 6 years, obtaining two degrees in computer science, to get rich selling toilet paper to my friends. That sounds snooty, and I suppose it is, but the real reason is that selling toilet paper and whatever other products they sell will not make you rich. The way you get rich with Amway is by selling the concept of Amway itself, and recruit people to be below you in the pyramid heirarchy. Then when they sell toilet paper to their friends, you get a cut. Do that enough times, and have some good sellers (or even better, more recruiters) below you, and you can make a bundle. Of course, I don't actually believe in the concept of Amway (it's just a legalized pyramid scheme that sells products to generate the income, rather than just having people "send $x to the person at the top of the list and then add your name to the end of the list"), so it would be hard for me to sell it, and I would make a lousy salesman anyway.

AJ is actually the second person I used to know who is an executive of a tech company. I first knew Cameron Ferroni through my buddy Jeff, since they were both engineers at UW. I remember thinking his girlfriend Gail was really cute, but way out of my league. Gail and I eventually became friends, and then she and Cameron broke up a couple of years later. A year or two after that, in 1992, she asked me out, we started dating, got married in 1995, had two kids, and are still happy together. After graduating, Cameron started working at Microsoft, where he worked on Windows for a while (writing some Winsock specifications that I've actually happened upon at work), and then basically invented the freakin' Xbox and was General Manager of the entire Xbox software team. Now he's also happily married and is CTO of a company called Marchex. Hey Cam, if you're looking for your RAMPage rugby shirt, you left it at Gail's place, and she gave it to me. I think I might still have it somewhere. Oh, and congratulations to you too!

Update: Forgot a couple: Crispin Cowan was a Ph.D. student at Western when I was there doing my Master's. He was CTO of a company called Immunix until they were acquired by Novell. Don't know if he's still employed by Novell. I remember him describing hockey as a very stupid game, which was as exciting to watch as a packing peanut bouncing around in an air duct. Bastard.

Also forgot Brad Siim, another friend of Jeff's from engineering. He was one of the founders of PixStream, a Waterloo company that was eventually bought by Cisco for many millions of dollars, making Brad very rich. He was also bored, apparently, since he left Cisco and went on to co-found another company called Sandvine, where he is now COO.

Mobilizers baseball

Our baseball season ended today. (We all call it "baseball", but it's really softball, or even more accurately, 3-pitch.) This past year, I was the captain of the iAnywhere Mobilizers, one of our company's two teams. We play in the "B" division of the league, whereas the other team (the "Sybase Sluggers") play in the "A" division. We usually refer to the Sluggers as "The A Team", and after playing in this league for two years, it's only recently that I don't giggle every time I say that, thinking of Mr. T in a baseball cap and glove, yelling "C'mon, guys, force play at second, let's get this one".

The "B" division is for those teams that aren't good enough to play in the "A" division, but don't completely suck — those guys are in the "C" division. Well, for most of this season, I suspected that they'd move us down to "C" next year because we more or less completely sucked. We started the season 0-10, including scores like 24-3, 19-4, 33-11, 11-2, and 24-1. The week after the 24-1 loss, I went away on vacation and someone else made the lineups, and we won 13-12. Then I came back and we lost the next 6. I like to think that was coincidence.

In late July, we lost a game 20-15, but the 15 runs was our highest run total to date, and we played pretty well, and I started to realize that we were actually playing better as a team. In August, we won another game, this time in convincing fashion, 26-20. I was actually at the helm for that game, so that broke my personal losing streak at about 18 (including the 0-3 showing at last year's September tournament). We ended the season in last place at 3-18, two games worse than the second-last place team. Doesn't sound like there was much reason for confidence going into The Tournament, but we actually had some guarded optimism, since we played much better in the last month, and two of our three wins came in the last four games.

The tournament was played yesterday and today, and rather than one or two games per week, we suddenly had to play four in one day, and up to three more the next day. Our first game was 8am, and we played pretty well. We lost by one run, but because the score differential matters in the tie-breakers, we played the bottom of the ninth even though the home team was winning. They scored one more, so it goes in the books as a two-run loss. 0-1 and -2 in the run differential column after one game. Not great, but considering we were 0-3 and -30 in last year's tournament (the max run differential in any one game is -10), this was an improvement. The second game was pretty good too, and we were losing by 1 when the umpires called the game because of time constraints. I went and argued that the time limit had not yet been reached (we were two minutes shy), and we wanted to keep playing. They agreed that the game should continue, and we proceeded to not score any runs and allow 5, so we ended up down by 6. After two games, we were 0-2 and -8. Still better'n last year, but not great.

The third game never happened. Someone on our team had heard from someone else (who heard from someone else who... ) that the team we were playing in the third game did not have enough eligible girls — the rules say that you must have at least three girls who have each played at least nine games during the regular season, or you forfeit the game. I asked the umpires and the other team's captain, and he confirmed that they had three girls available, but one had not played the requisite number of games. The umps called the game a forfeit, and we were considered the winners (by a 10-0 score), but said we could play anyway if we wanted. We declined, saying that we didn't want anyone getting hurt in a meaningless game, but in reality, I think we were just hot and tired and wanted a break. So we were now 1-2 with a +2 differential.

The fourth game was great, except for the part of the game that really sucked, but I'll get to that in a second. We hit well, played defence well, and won the game by 8 runs. I don't think I made any errors on the field during that game, and I missed turning a 5-3 double play by this much. Runners on first and second, I'm playing third base, and the ball is grounded in my direction, just to my right. I run forward, grab the ball, step on third, and heave a throw to the first baseman, who catches it just after the runner hit the base. Normally, that's the kind of play where I'd (a) miss the ball completely, forcing the left fielder to come in and get it (probably allowing a run to score), (b) boot the ball, loading the bases, or (c) make the play at third and then blow the throw to first, so I was very pleased with the fact that I made both ends of the play.

The part of the game that really sucked was during the bottom of the third inning. I was playing left field, and the batter grounded the ball to the second baseman. I didn't see what happened, but some of our players were yelling "Throw it to first!", and I didn't understand why it was taking so long to do so. Eventually, the ball made it to first, the first baseman stepped on the bag, and then everyone walked towards the plate. I had no idea what was going on, until I saw that the batter had never left the batter's box. He swung, hit the ball, and then must have dislocated his knee when taking off towards first base. Someone called 911, and an ambulance showed up 10 minutes later and took him to the hospital. The whole thing caused a delay of about a half hour, and since the games were a max of an hour and fifteen minutes long, that was almost half the game right there. Eventually, we got back onto the field, but I think the whole game lasted five innings. I haven't heard since about how the guy is doing, but I can't imagine he'll be walking much in the next couple of weeks.

So at the end of the day, we were 2-2 and +10, a tournament record with which I was completely thrilled. As I said, the only experience I'd had in the tournament was the previous year, in which we got smoked three games in a row. Both teams that we beat won against (since we didn't actually beat anyone in the third game) ended up going 0-3 on the day, with one game left to play this morning, while the other two teams in our grouping were 3-0 yesterday with one game this morning. So regardless of the outcomes from today's games, we ended up third in the grouping, which meant that we played a quarter-final game today at 11:30 against the team that finished third in the other B-division grouping.

Yesterday, the weather was great for baseball. Sunny and hot. Today, the exact opposite — rainy and cold. It just flat-out rained for the first three innings or so, though after that it was just drizzly. We had one guy show up to play that I didn't expect, since he said the day before that he couldn't make it. I don't want to put any blame on him at all, since the team is certainly better with him in the lineup than without, but the defensive lineup I had was done assuming he wasn't going to be there, so I spent most of the first inning tinkering with it to make sure that he was included, but that nobody was sitting too often or in consecutive innings, that we didn't have people playing in positions they weren't comfortable with, and we didn't our best defensive players all sitting at the same time. I didn't do that great a job, though, since we ended up with too many or too few fielders in at least half the innings, and I had to make last-minute "You sit! You play right! You play third!" decisions on the fly. I think I ended up sitting out about four times just because I didn't have time to figure it out properly. And to cap it all off, the hitting that came along so well in the last month of the season and all day Saturday completely vanished, and we ended up scoring all of two runs. We lost by about 12, and so ended the Mobilizers' dream "worst-to-first" playoff run. The A Team (heh) got spanked in their game today as well, so both Sybase teams were eliminated.

Despite the win-loss record, I really enjoyed playing ball this year. It was much more work than in previous years because being the captain, I couldn't just show up to games and play wherever someone else told me; I had to be the one to tell others where to play. One thing that I told everyone at the beginning of the season was that being the team captain does not mean that I'm the best player on the team, and it does not mean that I'm a good coach. I know the game itself as well as anyone, but I'm generally a crappy teacher, and I tend to forget that not everyone knows the intricacies of the game as well as I do. We had plays during the season where a fielder caught the ball while stepping on the base, but the runner was called safe because it wasn't a force play. I knew it wasn't a force play, but it didn't occur to me to yell "Tag him!" because everyone knows that, right? Well, no, as it turns out. Anyway, due to complicated reasons that I'm not going to bother posting here, the league may not even exist next year, which means I may be looking for a new league. I remember looking into a league in Waterdown a while ago, but it was only for men 35 and older, and I didn't qualify at the time. Now I do. Sigh.

It occurred to me earlier this year that if I played golf once a week during the summer instead of baseball, I'd become a much better golfer than I am now, and that concept certainly has some appeal. But can you imagine life without baseball? I can't. I've played in a baseball league of some kind every summer since university, and I played pick-up baseball with friends every summer before that since I learned to walk, so until I get to the point where I am physically unable to play, I'm playin'.

Bob Layfield

I've posted before about my old company, Comnetix. The head salescritter was a retired RCMP officer named Bob Layfield, who passed away last week after a long battle with cancer. Here are some of my memories of Bob, as a sort of online memorial.

First of all, let me say that I always used the term "salescritter" in a sort of endearing way with Bob, as a number of us did. We even used that term when talking to him, as well as about him, and he always took it in the joking manner in which it was always intended.

Bob was very proud of his RCMP career (and justifiably so). He retired as a Staff Sergeant, and was a part of the Musical Ride for a while. He was posted in numerous places all over Canada in his years as a Mountie. He had two daughters and when I knew him, one grandson, all of whom he talked about frequently. His family was always the most important thing in Bob's life.

Bob was the consummate salesman. He knew the products inside and out, and could spin just about anything to his advantage. Occasionally, he sold our customers on features that hadn't been written yet. Sometimes he gave them a specific date by which the feature would be ready, and then came and told us what he had promised. This, of course, annoyed us to no end. He even sold customers on features that we had no intention of implementing — he told people our application was ODBC-compliant, and that we could use any database product that supported ODBC, when in reality, none of us knew what ODBC was, and our back-end stuff was completely Oracle-specific. He had no CS education and often told us that he didn't understand the technical stuff that well but could fake it well enough, but occasionally he would surprise us with how much he did understand.

Bob grew up in, I believe, northern Alberta, and one story he used to tell was about when he lived in a log cabin as a boy. In the middle of winter, the walls of the cabin would be covered with ice a couple of inches thick — on the inside. They'd light a fire in the middle of the cabin first thing in the morning and keep it going all day, and by the time they went to bed at night, the ice was gone and the cabin was warm and cozy. Overnight, the fire would go out, and by the time they woke up in the morning, the walls were covered in ice again.

When we first delivered the Boston Police system, all the developers spent a lot of time in Boston, and Bob was there as well. I'm sure he was down there for the better part of several months. He had a suite at the hotel, and his room eventually became the storeroom for spare parts. He had a stash of keyboards, mice, workstations or fingerprint scanners yet to be installed, platens for the fingerprint scanners, and cables galore. In addition to the hardware, Bob always had a large bottle of rum in his room as well (he was a rum-and-coke man), a couple cartons of smokes, and sometimes a few bottles of Sam Adams chilling in the snow on his balcony.

I took the GO Train into work every day, since I lived within walking distance of the Burlington station, and the office was within walking distance of the Port Credit station. One day while I was on my way into work, Gail called the office to say that she had gone home but had locked herself out, and asked Denise the receptionist (who is still working at Comnetix and is a freakin' director now - way to go Denise!) to ask me to return home to let her in. Bob was there when Denise gave me the message, and without a moment's hesitation, tossed me his car keys.

Bob was doing a demo for some company at some very expensive hotel in Naples, Florida, and I was going to go with him to set up the hardware and such. Since I was going to be in Florida for a couple of days, Gail took some vacation and came with me. The company that was bringing us down would only pay for one room, so Bob insisted that Gail and I take the room, and he would get a room at a nearby Howard Johnson's or something, rent a car, and drive into the hotel every day. We offered to take the room for half the trip and then switch hotels with him (seeing as it was him the company was paying to see, not me), but he refused.

Bob could be a PITA sometimes, and we had many disagreements in the three years I worked with him, but he was a stand-up guy, a loyal friend, and I truly liked and respected him. I regret not having kept in touch with him since I left Comnetix. My condolences go out to his family.

The iTunes Store and new Linkin Park

My first purchase from the iTunes store was Linkin Park's new album, Minutes to Midnight. First of all, more kudos to Apple — buying the album was brain-dead easy. Since my credit card number was already saved from my iPod purchase, I selected the album, clicked "Buy now", it confirmed my password, and began downloading the songs, which were automatically saved in the right place and added to my iTunes library. The next time I sync'ed, the album was on my iPod. Couldn't have been easier.

Anyway, the album is a little weird. Not Primus-weird, but just quite different from the first two Linkin Park albums. I'm not a big fan of rap or hip-hop music in general (though there are a few songs that I don't mind; Eminem's "Lose Yourself" is flat-out a great song), nor the whole "electronica" genre. However, I do like the way Linkin Park "fused" their hard rock music with both rap and electronic music on their first two albums. The weird thing about this album is that the band couldn't seem to decide what kind of music to make. There are a couple of Linkin Park-esque songs, but there are a couple of rock songs with no rap at all, a pop song or two ("Shadow of the Day" could be on any Matchbox Twenty album), a couple of much more mellow songs, and "Given Up" is arguably thrash metal, complete with "Cookie Monster vocals". There was a lot more guitar and less keyboards on this album, which I'm certainly OK with, but it is quite a departure for Linkin Park. I'll have to listen to it a few more times to be sure, but so far, I like the new sound.

The one thing I don't like about buying online music is this: no liner notes! I love reading the liner notes of any album I buy, mainly for the band information, guest musicians, and stuff like that. There is almost no rapping on this album, and there were a couple of songs where the vocals sounded so drastically different from other Linkin Park songs, that I wondered if they had gotten a new "rapper"/vocalist, but because of the lack of liner notes, I had no idea. According to the band's Wikipedia page, they simply went in a new direction, and the guy who does the rapping also sings on this album (for the first time), which is why I didn't recognize the singing voice. If there is one thing I'd change about the iTunes store, it would be the ability to get liner notes for downloaded albums. Lyrics I'm not so concerned about because (a) I don't often read them anymore, and (b) there are lyrics web sites all over the internet; I'm sure all the lyrics to this album are available online somewhere.

Even newer toys

Apple just introduced the new 160 GB iPod, and dropped the price for the 80 GB ones by $120. I think 80GB is just fine for my needs, so I just called Apple to tell them I wanted a refund of the price difference. After 40 minutes on hold (thank you speakerphone), a very friendly guy answered and told me he would refund the $120 on my credit card! Thanks to cahwyguy for giving me the idea to call, and kudos to Apple for top-notch customer service!

IvanAnywhere

And I thought I had a tough commute... A guy (Ivan) on the query processing team lives just outside of Halifax, Nova Scotia. He's been living out there for a few years now, and has been telecommuting. His ability to interact with the rest of us was greatly improved a couple of months ago when IvanAnywhere was introduced. IvanAnywhere is a "telepresence" robot, built by another guy in our department, Ian. One of Ian's hobbies for many years has been flying RC airplanes, and after Glenn (Ivan's boss) semi-jokingly asked him to build a flying RC blimp with a webcam that Ivan could control, Ian thought about it and decided it was possible, though with a robot, not a blimp. He took an RC truck and mounted a tablet PC and webcam on it as a proof of concept, and once that worked, he built a robot that Ivan can control. It has a webcam as well as a digital camera, microphone, speakers, proximity sensors so it won't run into walls and such, and works over our internal wireless network. Now when Ivan wants to talk to someone, he can just go on down to their office, and he can attend meetings and even give presentations. The robot has a monstrous battery, but can run all day without being recharged.

Ivan can't do everything himself, though. The robot can't turn and move forward at the same time, so to go around a corner, it had to go forward, then spin 90°, then go forward again. Update: Yes it can! For tight manoeuvring, Ivan has to point the webcam down so he can see what he's doing, so it's easier to stop first. He can't open doors, and manoeuvring around chairs and stuff in meeting rooms can be challenging. In one meeting, Ivan misjudged how far away a chair was, and the robot crashed into it (ironically, it was Ian's chair). Also, someone here has to plug the thing in at night to recharge the battery.

Regardless of how cool this technology is, it's almost no big deal anymore. We're all so used to seeing Ivan (well, the robot, who we generally refer to simply as Ivan) roaming around, we don't think much about it. One big difference is that our area is now pretty much mandatory on all building tours, so when customers or other partners visit, they are always brought through this area to see Ivan. Thankfully they haven't changed our dress code (i.e. given us one) because of this.

As someone who telecommutes on a regular basis, I can certainly see the appeal of this for Ivan. For me, talking to co-workers via email, IM, or telephone is almost always sufficient, but I'm only at home one day a week (though it's more if the weather is bad or I'm not feeling well or whatever). If I was at home every day and it was pretty much impossible to get into the office, I'm sure I'd miss the face-to-face interaction, and I find attending meetings over speakerphone (when everyone else is in the same room) difficult. Unfortunately, I think I live too close for the company to consider creating GraemeAnywhere.

Cool — just found out that we've been slashdotted!

Update: Ian informs me that IvanAnywhere can move forward and turn at the same time, so I updated the paragraph above. Also in the comments I say that it's running a 9.0.2 server, but it's actually running 10.0.1, and it stores status and monitoring information, which is used for diagnosing problems.

Can I see your receipt, please?

Here is a story about a guy who bought something at Circuit City, refused to show the receipt when leaving, and was physically detained by the security thug at the door and the store manager. He called the police, who showed up, and arrested him for not showing his driver's license. Obviously the cop was wrong for arresting him, and personally, I would have complied with the cop, but I applaud the guy for having the stones to assert his rights and not show his receipt. I don't like the store's policy of assuming all of their customers are thieves and forcing them to prove otherwise in order to leave. If the store wants to inspect your receipt before you leave, fine, but this cannot be a condition of purchase unless they tell you this up front. None of this even addresses the fact that showing your receipt doesn't prove you didn't steal anything unless they strip search you at the same time.

The only store I shop at that requires this is Costco, but it's possible that the agreement that you have to sign when you become a member includes the right to examine your receipt when you leave. I've never questioned this — when asked, I simply hand over the receipt and wait to be allowed out. I don't like this practice, but I simply don't have the aforementioned stones. If we had Circuit City in Canada, I'd boycott them, but we don't. We do have "The Source by Circuit City", but according to their web site, they're owned by a company called "InterTAN", and not by Circuit City. Perhaps they've just licensed the name, or Circuit City owns InterTAN, or something. Anyway, I won't be shopping there, nor do I shop at Best Buy, because of the numerous stories I've heard about how badly they treat their customers, including one I blogged about last March. I'm not generally one for boycotts, as they rarely accomplish the change they are supposedly trying to bring about, but even if the store never changes their policies, I feel a little better not shopping there.

Then again, in Canada, Future Shop and Best Buy are owned by the same company, and I have no problem shopping at Future Shop. I'm not sure if that makes me a hypocrite or just naïve.

Word to the Wise

When ripping your entire CD collection, sync up your iPod every now and again. Don't wait until you've ripped 100 CDs and then try to sync. Who knew that syncing 1000 songs would take over two hours?

I've ripped a bunch of my latest CD purchases (which were sitting on top of the CD cabinet), and a few other odds and ends (some Christmas CDs and such), and then I started on the alphabetized collection. The scary thing is that I'm only in the B's right now (Blue Rodeo), and I've got 115 CDs (1609 songs, 4.7 days, 8.67 GB) already ripped.

Toy review

I did eventually get my iPod the other day. Actually, within about 20 minutes of posting this entry, I noticed a car in my neighbour's driveway, and wandered over to get my package, which was no longer hypothetical. I ran home and opened the box like a kid on Christmas morning. Is niiiiiiice. But holy crap, is that thing ever small. My wife has a little 512MB MP3 player that she uses for early morning walks, and it holds lots of songs, but she still has to refill it occasionally because she's bored of the music on it. The iPod, which is not much bigger (and when it's strapped to your arm is probably insignificantly bigger), holds 160 times as much stuff.

I'd ripped a bunch of my CDs to MP3 because of the MP3 player in my car, but they used various ripping programs (some of which are better quality than others), and use different (probably fairly low) bitrates and such, so I decided to start from scratch and just rip everything with iTunes. I've only done maybe 10 albums so far, so there's not much on there yet. I found a cable that I can use to attach to my car stereo, and this morning on my way to work, I listened to a podcast of yesterday's Prime Time Sports, "the nation's most listened-to sports talk presentation". I generally like listening to this show (live) on my way home, but because it's over AM radio (ugh), the reception isn't always the clearest, and I can't listen to AM radio and charge my cell phone in the car at the same time because of all the interference from the charger. Now I'll be listening a day behind, but the sound is crystal clear, there's no interference, I can skip bits if they start talking about football or something else I'm not interested in, I don't miss anything if I stop to get gas or if I get home right in the middle of an interesting topic, it's awesome. This is not even mentioning the fact that now I'll be able to listen to programs from radio stations that I can't even get, or (gasp) actual podcasts that are not simply recordings of radio programs. And soon (well, probably several weeks from now once I get everything ripped), I'll have my entire music collection with me as well.

I haven't even had the thing a week and already I'm wondering how I lived without it.

The Thinking Man's Spam

While checking my spam filter today looking for false positives (which are becoming more and more rare), I happened across one with a very intriguing subject line. The message itself was a stock tip, but the subject line was "It's possible of course that only similar processes to that which arise in a human brain can give rise to conscious thoughts."

It's probably rare that a spam message makes you think philosophically.

Vick is sorry he did it. And I'm the King of Siam.

Michael Vick pled guilty to federal dogfighting charges the other day, and I think there were gambling charges as well. He also apologized to a bunch of people, and said that his actions were "immature". I heard a reporter comment that a cynic might think that his comments were scripted and didn't come from the heart. Call me a cynic.

First off, what he did was not immature. He put two dogs in a ring and watched them attempt to kill each other. If the loser of the fight survived, he'd kill it himself by drowning or strangling. This is not immature, it's simply evil.

I think the only thing that Vick is sorry for is that he got caught and that his NFL career is probably over. If you go to a dogfight once and get caught, you can say you made a mistake and that you now realize that it's a bad thing. But you don't finance a dogfighting ring for years and kill at least eight dogs yourself and suddenly decide when you get caught that it's a bad thing. The weird thing is that I think the apology could have been scripted better. The first people he apologized to were the NFL commissioner and the owners of the Atlanta Falcons, who basically hold Vick's NFL career in their hands. He didn't get to the fans and kids out there who look at Vick as a role model until later.

Having said all that, I'm a little surprised at the extent of the public outrage over this issue. While what Vick did is reprehensible, and I hope he gets serious jail time for it, there have been NFL players and other sports figures that have been convicted of rape and murder with less public outcry. My guess is that it will eventually blow over. Vick will serve 3 years in prison, the NFL will quietly end his indefinite suspension, and then some NFL GM will sign him, saying that he's all better now, he's done his time, paid his debt to society, and is ready to resume being a productive member of society. Celebrity justice at its finest.

Responsibility

This entry is about responsibility. When you have a job to do, it is critical that you make every effort to make sure that job is done to the best of your ability, even if that means making sacrifices. By way of example, let's just say, hypothetically, that I was expecting a package today, coming by FedEx from, oh let's say Shanghai via Anchorage and Indianapolis. Let's also say, hypothetically, that I was at work when this hypothetical package was delivered and the FedEx guy brought it over to my neighbour's house, and he signed for it. Now the hypothetical package is in his hands, so he has taken on the responsibility of getting it to me, since I was the intended recipient. If you have this reponsibility, do you go out for the evening? NO! You stay at home and make sure that the intended recipient gets his hypothetical package as soon as humanly possible.

As I said, you may have to make sacrifices. You can go grocery shopping tomorrow. There will be other soccer tournaments that your kids can play in. You had an anniversary last year, you'll have another one next year. I'm sure she'll get married again.

So, Mr. Harrison, get the hell home, and get me my frackin' iPod hypothetical package!

New Toys!

Somewhere out there, there's an iPod with my name on it. And I mean that literally. I ordered an 80 GB iPod from apple.ca yesterday (with free engraving), and got an email this morning saying that it had shipped. I feel like rushing home and checking the mailbox every, oh, fifteen seconds or so. Maybe I'll just bring my laptop and sit next to the mailbox. OK, I'll have to cool the jets just a bit — I just checked the FedEx site, and the package left the point of origin in Shanghai, China a few hours ago, so perhaps sitting by the mailbox today would not prove useful. Tomorrow maybe.

The one I bought is priced at $349 US at apple.com, but $399 Cdn at apple.ca. Since apple.com won't let you ship to a Canadian address, I had to buy from the Canadian site, which is a total scam — the Canadian dollar is so high right now that $349 US would only cost $378 Cdn, plus the sales tax would be less. I suppose I could have bought it through apple.com and had it shipped to my friend in California, and then paid him to ship it to me, but then you have extra customs stuff to worry about, and extra shipping costs, not to mention the hassle, so I guess I'll just eat the $20 or so and complain about it in my blog. There, that's done.

I am really looking forward to getting this new toy piece of equipment. My buddy Kurt has one, and he can't stop raving about how great it is. Once I've ripped all of my CDs (450+) and put them on the iPod, I can store the actual CDs in the basement, freeing up space in the CD/DVD rack for more DVDs, which are starting to get piled in various places since we're out of room. If I wanted, I could also remove the CD player from the stereo cabinet and replace it with the iPod dock I intend to buy. My car stereo already has an iPod input jack so I'm OK there, but I might need to buy one for the van. Kurt says that you can even rip DVDs to the iPod, so if I can hook it into the DVD player in the van, that would be even better.

Update: I saw 80 GB iPods at Costco yesterday for $369. Crap.
Friday update: It went through Anchorage yesterday, and is in Indianapolis today! Estimated delivery is Monday!

Fern 2007

Last week was our (seventh?) annual trip to Fern Resort, and I think it was our best ever. I think I gained about 50 pounds, or at least it feels like it. I haven't weighed myself yet, but I'm not optimistic. The diet starts... soon.

I won't give a day-by-day summary or anything, but here are some of the highlights and (one) lowlight:

Good Stuff

• The kids were awesome. They didn't sit still when eating most of the time, and Ryan had a little bit of a tantrum once but that was short-lived, and the rest of the time they were great.
• Four-way beach volleyball. I look forward to this all year
• Golf with Ryan on Fern's 5-hole course. Ryan hit pretty well, I shot two pars and missed an eagle putt by an inch
• Golf with Jeff, Mike, and Jerry at Hawk Ridge. I came in last, but not by much, and I played reasonably well
• The food was phenomenal, as always
• I was the co-winner of the men's singles tennis tournament! Well, this was only because I was one of only three people who showed up, and it started to rain just as we got there, so the tennis pro cancelled it and gave us each points for showing up
• I won at bingo twice - $5 once time and a t-shirt the other time
• Nicky got on stage during the magic show. The magician "pulled" lots of coins out of his ear, his nose, from under his arms, etc. Nicky told us later that the magician was just hiding the coins in his hand and then dropping them in the bucket, but he played along the whole time and was hilarious
• Rachel and Sarah won the "Fern's Got Talent" competition with their routine from High School Musical
• Ryan and I saw a blue heron while riding pedal carts through the woods

Bad Stuff

• Walking with Nicky across the volleyball court, I bent down to duck under the net, while he thought it would be fun to jump and brush his head on the net, and our heads collided. He rubbed his head and said "Ow" and that was it, while I fell to the ground ("you dropped like you'd been shot" said the guy walking behind me) and ended up with a black eye and a nasty abrasion right below my eyebrow

We started our second week of "vacation" on Saturday (though we're working this week), when we dropped Ryan off at Gail's dad's place and Nicky off at my parents' place and came home alone. I love my kids more than anything, and I will certainly miss them this week, but I'll also enjoy not making lunches, not dropping anyone off in the morning or picking anyone up in the evening, not worrying about whether they'll eat what we make for dinner, going to see movies without arranging for (or paying for) babysitters, etc. We went to the CNE yesterday, saw Harry Potter (again) on Saturday and Stardust yesterday, and we might try to see The Bourne Ultimatum on Wednesday. Thursday night we're going to Canada's Wonderland (where we won't even go near Kidsville), and Friday we're going for dinner and then to see We Will Rock You in Toronto. We pick the boys up on Saturday.

Don't flash flash flash those things at me

While driving into Waterdown tonight, I was driving 60 (in a 60 zone) in the right lane, next to a car doing about the same speed in the left lane. A tow truck came up behind me doing about 80 and flashed its lights at me — but not its headlights, the flashing lights on top of the truck. He had the lights off as he was driving, but as he approached me, he flashed them on for a second and then off again. I did nothing, partially because I was in the right lane and there was a car beside me, and partially because the right lane was ending in about a kilometre anyways. When the right lane ended I moved over, and the tow truck moved over behind me (there was time to continue in the right lane and pass me before the lane ended, but he didn't).

This is something that has bugged me about tow trucks for the longest time — why do they have flashing lights on them? Police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks I understand; they sometimes have to get somewhere in a hurry, so they put the lights on and people move out of their way. But tow trucks? Who moves out of the way for a tow truck with its lights on? I certainly don't. I can understand that if they are in the process of hooking up to a vehicle in a lane or at the side of a busy road, they might want to put the lights on to alert drivers that something is happening there, but while driving? What's the point? Get over yourself, Mr. Tow Truck Driver. You're performing a service that is valuable to society, but the flashing lights are a bit much.

Homers and homers

Alex Rodriguez is one homer away from 500 on his career. When he hits it, he'll be the youngest player ever to hit 500 home runs. Everyone is going nuts over Barry Bonds's pursuit of Hank Aaron's 755, but I think A-Rod's achievement is even more impressive, especially given the fact that Bonds was on the juice for the last few years, and A-Rod (probably) is not.

Bonds's story is kind of too bad — he would have been known as one of the all-time greatest players even if he hadn't juiced himself up but because he did, now he's a joke. He has over 500 career stolen bases, and is the only member of both the 400-400 club and the 500-500 club, but will people remember him as a base stealer? Not likely, because of the home run records, the juice, and the fact that he's only averaged 5 steals a year over the last 6 years. Sure he's got the single-season homer record and he'll soon have the career record, but everyone knows what he did to achieve those records, so even if there isn't an asterisk next to the numbers in the record books, there is in most people's minds.

Even Bonds, however, has acknowledged that assuming he does break Aaron's record, the most likely player to break his record would be Rodriguez and barring injuries, I think A-Rod is a lock to do just that. Bonds is probably done after this year, so let's say he ends up with 765, and say Rodriguez ends up with 515 by the end of the season. Rodriguez would then be behind by 250 at the age of 32. Five years of fifty homers each might be a stretch, but can A-Rod average over 35 a year for 7 years, or 25 a year for 10? Sure he can.

There's a report today that a group of local businesspeople in Nashville is close to a deal that would see the Predators stay in Nashville. They would buy the team for something like $190 million, which is something like $30 million less than what was offered by Jim Balsillie. I see this as proof that Gary Bettman does not want any more NHL teams in Canada. What owner who is actively trying to sell his team would take $30 million less than what he was offered? If he's considering bids that were almost the same amount, he might decide to go with the one that keeps the team in Nashville, but no owner is going to say no to an extra $30 million out of the goodness of his heart. The big question is what has Gary Bettman promised him in order to keep the Preds from coming north of the border?

Patent Pending

I've got an idea for the automotive industry. It's hardly groundbreaking, nor will it revolutionize anything, but I still think it's a good idea. A number of times in the past, I've been driving along in the centre lane and I see someone in the right lane with his left indicator on, so I slow down to let him in, and he doesn't go. I give him enough time to see that someone is letting him in, and then I say "screw it" and speed up again, only to notice that he was not signalling left at all, he had his four-way flashers on. I couldn't see the right-hand light because of a trailer, or other cars, or because the light was broken or burned out, or whatever. Other times, I'll be driving in the right lane and see a car driving on the shoulder, signalling left, so I move over to clear the right lane. Again, it turns out that he was not signalling but had his hazard lights on. Since the hazards and the turn indicators flash at the same rate, there's no way to tell the difference if you can only see one of the lights, or one is not functional. It occurred to me that there should be a way to distinguish between them, and the simplest way would be to double the flash rate of the hazard lights. This way, regardless of whether you saw one light or two, you could tell by the flash rate whether it was a turn signal or hazards.