I want to be terrible too

Here is a great article by a self-confessed "terrible programmer" who points out his own "failings" as a programmer and how he covers them up, so that nobody will find out the truth. Of course, he is not a terrible programmer; quite the contrary. He is obviously an experienced programmer who is very good at what he does. (Note that I have no idea who this guy is.) The methods he uses to cover up his incompetence are time-honoured ways of ensuring that the code you release is as correct and robust as possible: do code reviews, use assertions liberally, test the snot out of your code, and use the right tool for the job.

As for me, I do use assertions all over the place, and I'm usually pretty good at writing tests for the modules I write. I am part of the core engine team for SQL Anywhere, a relational database management system from Sybase iAnywhere. When I add features to the database engine, I make sure I test boundary conditions, confirm the syntax of any SQL statements I add, and try to make sure that whatever changes I've made work in multiple types of databases, and on multiple platforms. However, I work on a lot of security-related features (encryption, authentication, database permissions, auditing), so I have to do more than just write tests — I have to think about how hackers could break into our systems, or otherwise gain access to data that they should not have access to. If someone was watching packets go by, could they use that information to break into the database? Could someone write a man-in-the-middle program that makes itself look like a server so that clients will connect to it instead of a real server? Can we eliminate the possibility of brute-force attacks, or at least slow the process down enough to negate the effectiveness of the attack? Can we give the DBA the ability to detect when intrusion attempts are happening, and determine where they are coming from?

Anyway, I occasionally make the same mistakes the author does — bugs in code, not initializing variables (ran across one of those this past Friday, actually), making assumptions that aren't true (and not backing up those assumptions with assertions), stuff like that. I use some of the same methods of covering up my own incompetence as he does, so perhaps I'm as terrible a programmer as he is. I can aspire, anyway.

Just remembered that my boss sometimes reads my blog, so maybe admitting my own incompetence here is a bad idea...

Catch-22 for Ferguson

John Ferguson Jr. is in a tough spot. As the GM of the Leafs, it's his job to build the Leafs into a successful team. In my opinion, he's done a lousy job of this, and the fact that the Leafs are playing really badly, losing yesterday to the worst team in the league, is evidence of this. The right thing to do now, as I've believed for a couple of years, is to blow the team up and start over with young kids and draft picks. One problem with this idea is that lots of the Leafs have long expensive contracts with no-trade clauses. These will be hard to get rid of, since nobody wants to take on that big a contract unless it's for an exceptional player, of which the Leafs have none.

And then there's Mats Sundin. He's been the face of the Leafs for over ten years, is a fan favourite, and is still an impact player. He has stated numerous times that he wants to remain in Toronto, but he's by far the most tradeable player on the team, in that he'd get the most interest and the Leafs would get more for him than the rest of the team combined. The buzz around Toronto is whether or not the Leafs will trade Sundin, who's an unrestricted free agent after this season. If they do, it's basically an admission that they're not going to make the playoffs this year, and that they're trying to rebuild. As much as I love Sundin, this is the right thing to do.

I heard some hockey analysts (far more knowledgable about hockey than myself) on the radio yesterday talking about this, and they said that Philly got a couple of current players (one great, one good) and two draft picks for an injured Peter Forsberg, and that Sundin would fetch even more than that. One suggestion was that Sundin would fit in nicely on the Ottawa Senators with his good friend and fellow Swede Daniel Alfredsson. How painful would it be for Torontonians, many of whom (though not me) hate the Senators with a passion, to watch Mats Sundin hoist the Stanley Cup wearing a Sens jersey? Ouch.

But here's Ferguson's real problem. The Leafs' ownership, MLSE, have not renewed his contract for next year, and Richard Peddie has gone so far as to say that hiring Ferguson was a "mistake". The Leafs have missed the playoffs for two straight years, and are looking at a third, and it would seem that Ferguson's only chance to not get fired would be to make the playoffs this year. So what should Ferguson do? If he trades away Sundin for prospects and draft picks, which is sacrificing this season for the future, he's putting the Leafs in a better position going forward but all but guaranteeing that the Leafs will miss the playoffs and so he'll probably lose his job. If he keeps Sundin, the Leafs might squeak into the playoffs but will get devastated by Ottawa (likely to finish first in the East) in the first round. He may keep his job for another year because they made the playoffs (seemingly, this milestone indicates to MLSE that the season was a complete success), but the situation next year and in future years won't be any better. So in a nutshell, if he tries to make the team better, he gets fired. But if he keeps things the same or does nothing to prevent them from getting worse, he might just keep his job.

Or possibly MLSE will realize that trading Sundin is good for the Leafs' future, and as long as he doesn't get raked over the coals in the deal, maybe give Ferguson another year with these new kids — even if they do miss the playoffs this year. Sundin is also an unrestricted free agent this summer, so even if they do trade him, it's possible that they could resign him then, and have the best of both worlds. Then again, even if they trade Sundin for Sidney Crosby and a draft pick (an arguably good deal for the Leafs, and one likely to get the Pittsburgh GM fired or, more likely, shot), they've still got Kubina, McCabe, Raycroft, Stajan, and bunch of other half-decent-at-best or overpaid (or both!) players. Even Crosby couldn't carry these guys by himself.

Look at me, hoping that MLSE makes some smart decisions when it comes to the Leafs. Talk about blind optimism. Here's what will happen: the Leafs will hold onto Sundin until he retires, and will not get noticably better in that timeframe. Then with Sundin gone, they'll get worse.

Football pool winner! Who'da thunk?

I've blogged a couple of times now (here and here) about this football pool I'm in, and how I don't know anything about football but was doing well anyway. I am stunned beyond belief to announce that I won the whole damn thing. I finished 6 points ahead of second place, and 68th overall in all of ESPN.

Financially, I came in second in week 2 ($10), then I won week 16 ($30), and then I won $260 for first place overall, for a total of $300. I'm still deciding what to do with that money. Do I just put it toward the credit cards, or do I treat the family to something, or do I say "screw 'em all" and buy myself a new Rock jersey?

National Delurking Week

Happy National Delurking Week! For anyone who doesn't know what that means, "lurking" is what you do when you read a blog but never post any comments. This week, you are encouraged to post a comment, just to let me know that you're out there.

For anyone who reads this blog (or its equivalent on facebook), feel free to post something profound, something not very profound, or just "hi"! And remember...

I continue to rock

I got Guitar Hero III for the Wii for Christmas, and as I found with Guitar Hero II, I rock. I played a bunch of different songs on easy mode and I must say, I kicked serious ass. During Alice Cooper's "School's Out", I blew the very first note, than hit the next 170 in a row, then messed up two more in the solo, than nailed the rest of the song. I missed three notes out of about 275. I was over 90% on every song, and over 95% on most. I might just be the world's greatest Guitar Hero III player.

On easy mode, anyway.

After getting all cocky, I played one song on the medium difficulty level, and my inflated ego started to deflate back down to it's normal size. I think I was still over 90% on that song (but only just), but it was significantly more difficult than easy mode, and I had to work a lot harder. I'll have to play a few more songs on that mode, but someone at work did confirm that the jump from easy mode to medium mode is pretty big. I haven't tried hard or expert modes yet, but I should probably at least try those before I crown myself king.

The game is seriously cool. Not only is there a whammy bar (which I use far more often than the on on my real guitar), but you can do hammer-ons and pull-offs, and even play chords. No sliding though. The graphics are cool — if you have time to look at anything other than the streams of notes coming at you, you can see the guitar player playing the song (i.e. strumming at the right time and such — haven't checked to see if the fingering is correct), and the singer's mouth is even sync'ed to the lyrics.

I read an article once where the author wondered if the next generation of guitar players might be starting out now with Guitar Hero, and I don't think it's all that far off. Obviously you will not learn how to play the actual guitar or read music or anything like that by playing this game, but it's pretty good for teaching rhythm and it's good as a finger exercise as well.

We also got Mario Galaxy and Lego Star Wars for the Wii, and I haven't quite finished Super Paper Mario yet, but I'm not sure how much playing of anything other than GHIII I'll be doing in the next while...

Great Wolf Lodge

We spent last weekend at Great Wolf Lodge in Niagara Falls with our friends the Scanlons and the Wadsworths. It's only been open a year or two, and none of us had ever been there before, so we weren't completely sure what to expect. Bottom line: it's not the cheapest place around, but we had a lot of fun. It's expensive for a reason though — there's a ton to do, and they've spent a fair amount of time thinking about the convenience of their guests, which it seems not a lot of places have done. I don't think there was a single time over the weekend when I wondered "why did they do it this way?" Of course, part of that is the fact that it's brand new — they haven't had "backwards compatibility" issues yet. By this I mean that they haven't yet had to upgrade things or add new things overtop of existing things. I'm sure the people at Canada's Wonderland or other parks would love to rearrange ride locations and stuff, but you can't shut down four or five rides for several months to move them around just to make things more convenient.

OK, there's one thing I did wonder about — the Lodge is built in a fairly run-down area of Niagara Falls. To get there, you take the 420 from the QEW but instead of turning right to go towards the falls and the touristy section of town, you turn left and drive for a few kilometers. A minute or two after you think "this can't be right, I must have missed it", there it is. Literally across the street from the lodge, there are some pretty old beat-up houses. I remember thinking that some of the people who got the expensive rooms with balconies paid upwards of $400 a night, and their view from the balcony includes houses that cost less than that per month in rent. However, given the size of the lodge and the amount of land they needed to build it, it makes sense. The cost of that much land closer to the middle of town would be unreal, so it was probably much cheaper to build out where they did. It's only about a ten minute drive to Clifton Hill anyway, so it's not like you're all that far away, really.

Great Wolf Lodge, in case you've never heard of it, is an indoor waterpark and hotel. It does look inside and out like a lodge rather than a standard hotel, as if it were entirely made of logs. The rooms were pretty nice — we had the "Kid Cabin" style of room, which was basically a suite. The kids had their own little room with single bunk beds and a third single bed, a TV, and a wall mural covering the entire room that made it look like a little log cabin, complete with windows and friendly-looking animals peeking in. The rest of the room was a fairly standard hotel room with a fridge, microwave, coffee maker, fireplace, hair dryer, and safe. The waterpark area is huge, with a number of water slides (some using inner tubes, some not), a family slide (where up to four people could fit into one raft), a "roller coaster slide", the "vortex" (which is like a water slide into a big toilet bowl), wave pool, hot tubs, and a big play structure with lots of water-spraying devices. The "roller coaster slide" was cool — three people sit one behind the other in a raft, and after each drop there is a conveyer belt that brings you back up again (fast!) to drop again. I only rode that one twice because (a) there was always a long line-up for it, and (b) Nicky was too small to go on it, so I had to find someone to look after him while Ryan and I went on it. This was because Gail was away for almost all of Saturday, but more on that later.

The thing that impressed me the most were the wristbands. Maybe they have these at other hotels or parks or whatever, but I've never seen them, and I thought they were the coolest thing ever. Each guest gets a wristband which you wear from the moment you check in. The wristband contains a little RFID (I'm guessing) tag that acts as a room key (hold your wrist up to the lock and it opens), locker key, and even credit card — you can use it at the snack bar or restaurants to charge stuff to your room (though you still have to give your name and sign a receipt). You can also get tokens at the arcade with your wristband, and if you forget which locker you locked, you can scan it at a little booth and it will tell you. We could also set up the kids' wristbands so that they could unlock the doors and be used with lockers but they couldn't be used to charge stuff to the room (I'm sure they call this feature "teenager protection"). The wristbands are (obviously) waterproof, so when you go to the waterpark area, you don't need to bring anything. You automatically have your room key with you, and if you want lunch or snacks or drinks or anything, you don't need to run back to the room to get cash, or worry about hiding your wallet under your towels while you swim. If they could only build a 10 MP digital camera in the wristband, we'd be all set.

The rest of the weekend in a nutshell:

• "Cub Club" was a club for kids where they could make crafts, play, and watch TV, and they also had "story time" every evening, where a story teller came out and read a couple of books (the night we went, it was "Green Eggs and Ham" and Robert Munsch's "Mortimer"). The kids really enjoyed that.
• The food was good and not overpriced for the most part. The food at the snack bar was pretty good, and the dinner buffet was excellent. The breakfast buffet was also very good but expensive, so I wouldn't do that again, especially considering that there were more reasonably priced alternatives. There were a couple of little cafés in the hotel that had muffins and doughnuts and even bowls of cereal.
• There was an arcade as well, with both standard video games as well as games where you win tickets which can be cashed in for prizes. The tokens were not as expensive as at other arcades I've been to. Of course, we paid $60 in tokens all told, and ended up with maybe $15 worth of prizes, but that's to be expected.
• One night, Ryan wandered into the arcade accidentally (we asked him to go find one of our friends in front of the arcade, but he misunderstood). He saw a light flashing on a game, hit a button, and won 150 tickets. Another time, he put a token in a "Wheel of Fortune" type game, hit the button at exactly the right time, and won 250 tickets. Those two wins constituted about one third of the whole family's total winnings all weekend.
• We had dinner at the Rainforest Cafe right at the base of Clifton Hill on Saturday night. Afterwards, we went for a ride on the Niagara Skywheel further up the hill, where we had a great view of the falls and the rest of the city, though I spent half the time fumbling with the new camera, trying to take a picture that actually looked good. Because it was at night, the camera wanted to use the flash and it ended up bouncing off the glass. Turning the flash off didn't help either, because it then kept the shutter open longer, and so everything was blurry. I'm quite sure the real problem was user error, but I'll figure it out, eventually.
• After the giant wheel, we drove out to see the Winter Festival of Lights, which was very cool, as always. We try to get out there every year.
• In the waterpark, chlorine smell was surprisingly minimal, considering the amount of water and the fact that it was indoors. By Sunday afternoon, however, it was starting to get to me. By the time we left, I was coughing almost uncontrollably, but the coughing stopped minutes after we left the water park area.

Gail had to miss Saturday entirely because of a funeral. Her great uncle James passed away on New Years Day, and the funeral was on Saturday in Ingersoll, so she had to drive two hours each way. This was the second vacation in the last year that was interrupted by a death in the family — our trip north last July was cut short after Gail's aunt passed away unexpectedly. You hate to say this about any death, but Uncle James's passing wasn't quite as tragic as Aunt Barbie's — she was only 57 and her death was unexpected, while Uncle James was 85 and hadn't been in great health for a while. Over Christmas, we had discussed the idea of having a little "reunion" some time soon, as James and his sister Helen (Gail's grandfather's brother and sister) and their spouses (Gail's dad jokingly refers to the four of them as the Matthews "elders") were getting up there in age. Unfortunately the idea came too late.

I've put some pictures from the weekend up at my family web site.

Next we're getting rid of the rotary dial phone

We joined the 21st century today, as I took advantage of the Boxing day sale at Future Shop and bought a digital SLR camera. Up until Christmas, we had no digital cameras at all — not a little cheap point-and-shoot, not even one in our cell phones. (This is actually not true, but I'll describe the exception below.) When Ryan was very young, we bought a Canon Rebel SLR camera, and a year later we got a big zoom lens. The pictures we get out of the camera are fantastic, and the zoom lens is awesome. However, it's not digital. I've been thinking about going digital for a couple of years, but Gail never wanted to, because she was not convinced that the pictures that you'd get from a digital camera (other than the seriously expensive professional quality ones) were as good as the ones we were getting from our SLR, and she might have been right. However, in the last year or so, prices have come down while camera quality has gone up, and we're now to the point where you can get 5 MP cameras for under $100, and the good SLRs are over 10 MP (and the really good ones are over 20). There is no way, short of blowing a picture up to wall mural size, that a picture from a 10 MP digital camera is distinguishable from a picture from a standard SLR camera. When we decided to go to France this coming summer, we realized that we might take 15-20 rolls of pictures while there. We'd come home to several hundred dollars of processing costs, and only then would we find out if the pictures we took even turned out. People's eyes may be closed, or the lighting was such that the picture was unusable, or whatever. This pushed Gail over the edge, and we started shopping for digital cameras.

For Christmas, we bought the boys (each) a little 5 MP digital camera, which they've been going crazy with (Nicholas has gone through three sets of batteries and has taken over 250 pictures in a little over a week). When we went north for Christmas, we managed to bring our camera without extra film (duh), so when we wanted to take pictures of anything, Gail borrowed one of the boys' cameras, and I think that helped. She found (like the majority of people who have had digital cameras for years) that the way you take pictures is different with digital — you don't always have to wait for just the right moment. You can take 20 pictures and if only one turns out, that's fine. You don't feel like you're wasting film taking more than one of the same thing.

Because we have this great zoom lens and didn't want to give it up, we were excited when we found out that as long as we bought a Canon digital SLR, we could still use the same lens. We started looking at Canon SLRs and narrowed it down quickly. The 30D was about $1200 for the body only, and we didn't want to spend that much. The Rebel XT (8MP) and XTi (10.1MP) are cheaper ($480 and $620 respectively), but still very nice cameras. I believe the XTi is the newer version of the XT, so I went with the XTi. It has nine-point autofocus (our old camera had three), can take up to three pictures per second, and can take a picture within 0.2 seconds of powering the thing on. I'll post a more detailed "review" once I've had a chance to play with it a little more. I put "review" in quotes there because I'm not camera-savvy enough to post an actual review (the Dioptric Adjustment Correction is -3.0 to +1.0 diopters — I don't have any idea what that means, but the word "dioptric" is pretty cool), so like everything else in this blog, it'll just be my uninformed opinions — things I like about it, things that I don't like, things that could be improved, etc.

The exception I mentioned above was about six or seven years ago, when I bought a small digital camera at an online auction site for $40. I knew it was a pretty low quality camera, but I figured it would be fine for taking pictures for our web site or stuff like that, and for $40, it wasn't a bad deal. When I received it, I found that calling it "low quality" was a compliment, and that I would have been ripped off if I'd only paid $4. It was no bigger than a credit card and about an inch thick, but the images it took were tiny. I took a couple of pictures of our office, then uploaded them to the computer. The pictures came out slightly bigger than icons on the Windows background, and were completely unrecognizable. I don't remember the specs (which I obviously never looked at before buying it), but I think it must have been measured in kilopixels — and not many of 'em. Caveat emptor in a big bad way.

Meme: What Privileges Did You Have?

Copied from cahwyguy. Bold means the statement is true, italics means I don't know or it's complicated:

• Father went to college
• Father finished college
• Mother went to college — my mom took some university level courses when I was in high school, but they were just for interest, not towards a degree
• Mother finished college
• Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
• Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers — To me, upper class is the extremely wealthy, lower class is the extremely poor, and middle class is the other 95% of us. Rather a meaningless comparison.
• Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
• Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
• Were read children's books by a parent
• Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18 — piano
• Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
• The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively — Bob and Doug McKenzie notwithstanding
• Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
• Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs — My parents paid for residence (and tuition as well, I think) in first year, and I paid for the rest. However, I lived at home for 5 of my 6 work terms and paid no rent during those terms, thus allowing me to save up for the next term's tuition, rent, and beer
• Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
• Went to a private high school
• Went to summer camp
• Had a private tutor before you turned 18
• Family vacations involved staying at hotels — sometimes, usually camping though
• Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
• Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
• Had a phone in your room before you turned 18 — not my own phone number though
• You and your family lived in a single family house for a few years
• Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
• You had your own room as a child
• Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course — not applicable, as we don't have SATs in Canada
• Had your own TV in your room in High School
• Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
• Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16 — Scotland when I was four and again when I was 15, Florida when I was 10
• Went on a cruise with your family
• Went on more than one cruise with your family
• Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
• You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

From What Privileges Do You Have?, based on an exercise about class and privilege developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you participate in this blog game, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.

Merry Christmas!

To all my regular readers (and even the semi-regular readers) (and the every once-in-a-while readers) (ah heck, even the "google search brought me here and I don't know who the hell you are" readers), I hope you have a very happy holiday! For those of you who celebrate Christmas, have a very merry one, and for those who don't, I hope you enjoy the movie. :-)

The Scare

Gail and I had probably the worst scare of our parenting lives yesterday. We went to the Ontario Science Centre with Gail's mom, Carol. The kids love it, and right now there's a special exhibition on the Titanic which only goes until early January, so we wanted to see it while we had the chance. The exhibition was really interesting — there are lots of pictures and stories as well as actual artifacts from the Titanic itself; everything from third class toilets to pieces of the engines to dinnerware and pots from the kitchen, even passenger's items like eyeglasses and jewellery. Anyway, the Science Centre is in a valley, and one of the things I remember from going there as a kid are the long escalators that take you from the main entrance down into the valley where the exhibits are.

After buying our tickets, we got to the first escalator. I got on first, then Gail and Nicholas, then Ryan and Carol. Part of the way down, I heard Gail asking Nicky to stop doing something. I did't know what he was doing, and I don't really remember what happened next, but the next thing I remember is turning around and seeing Gail kneeling in front of Nicky and pulling on his leg. He had been dragging his boot along the side of the escalator and it had become lodged between the escalator stair and the side. Ryan yelled "Stop the elevator!" and then Gail also started yelling for the escalator to be stopped. By this point, we were about 3/4 of the way down, and I ran on ahead to the bottom and started frantically looking for the emergency stop button.

My parents once told me that when I was a kid and they took my sister and I to the mall, they were surprised at the fact that every time we were there, the escalators were not working. They started to get suspicious, so one time they watched me and sure enough, as soon as we got near the escalator, I'd run over and press the button. You'd think that after my extensive training, I'd be able to find and press the button in no time flat. Not this time. I found the button easily enough, but it had a little plastic cover over it — probably to make it more difficult for kids like me to press it for fun. I tried to lift it, but found that I couldn't get my fingers underneath it. I tried every angle I could to get the cover to lift, but I couldn't move it. There was another man standing next to me by this point, and he didn't know how to open it either. Finally, when the escalator stairs were no more than a foot or two from starting to collapse at the end, the man next to me hit the button assembly hard with the heel of his hand. Not only did this stop the escalator, thankfully, but it also pushed the entire button assembly in and down a little, so there will need to be some repairs done on it. Once the escalator stopped, Gail was finally able to yank Nicky's foot out of his boot and she carried him off the escalator, both of them in tears. Carol was holding on to Ryan, who was also crying, and once I knew that Nicholas was not injured, I tried to pull the remains of the boot free of the escalator. Even before I got to it, the boot was damaged beyond repair. It took me over a minute to get it dislodged, and I had to rip it in half to get it out.

Within a minute, two or three Science Centre employees appeared out of nowhere. One seemed to be a nurse or EMT or something, and immediately examined Nicky's foot. There were no cuts or scrapes and he said it didn't hurt, and he could move it around. She decided that he was fine, though she said he might have some bruising or swelling later. Another employee had a cold pack, so we put that on his foot for a while. We realized then that he couldn't wear his boots for the rest of the day, since one of them was in piceces, so we took the liners out and he just wore those. At the end of the day, I had to piggyback him to the van.

I wandered back over to the escalator to see if I could determine how the button was supposed to open. It turned out there was a red spot next to the button, with a little message saying "Push HERE to open cover". I didn't see this when trying to open it the first time. I don't know whether this was my mistake or if it was a usability problem with the escalator design. I have a feeling it's the former, but I don't know if this is because of my feelings of guilt over the fact that someone else (who I never even got to thank) was able to stop the escalator to save my son when I couldn't.

The rest of the day proceeded without incident, though Ryan was much quieter than normal (and had trouble falling asleep last night). This whole thing affected Ryan even more than Nicholas. I think it'll be a long time before he agrees to go near an escalator again (we took elevators the rest of the day at the Science Centre). A couple of times later in the day, Nicholas was very quiet and almost seemed introspective, and I'd ask him if anything was wrong, and he would just say "I'm bad". We tried to convince him that he was not a bad kid, that it was an accident. At the same time, we tried to gently let him know that he did do something dangerous, and that this is why we always tell them not to goof around on escalators. There hasn't been any pain in his foot, but he has been complaining about his waist hurting; Gail thinks she might have elbowed him pretty good while trying to pull him free. Gail also has a nasty scrape on her leg that she thinks she got when she dropped to try to pull Nicky free. She, of course, has no memory of this; she was trying to save her child and was running on adrenaline so she wouldn't have felt any pain if she'd been shot with a .44 Magnum.

To the Science Centre employees who helped, other people who stopped to ask if we were all right, and especially to the man who managed to stop the escalator, thank you.

The things you miss when you're a kid

I found out something a little while ago that was a little bit disturbing. When I was a kid, I used to watch the TV show Laverne and Shirley — this would have been in the late '70's. I have since found out that one of the recurring jokes in the show was that Shirley and her boyfriend Carmine never had sex — Shirley refused. I had no idea about this (since I was only 8-10 at the time), so who knows how many jokes I just didn't get while watching this show in my youth. That made me wonder what other things happened in TV shows at the time that I was not privy to because of my age and relative inexperience in the ways of the world.

Maybe Captain Stubing had a coke problem. Or maybe Steve Austin got addicted to painkillers after his surgery. Did Mr. Roarke want to make other people's fantasies come true because he was abused as a child? Maybe Arnold and Willis got to live with rich Mr. Drummond as a reward for being confidential informants into gang-related activities in Harlem. We already know that Gilligan's Island was a mystery drama masquerading as a comedy. Were Charlie's Angels really hookers who solve crimes? Was Jack Tripper really gay?!?! The possibilities are endless.

Movie Review: Enchanted

We took the boys out to see Enchanted the other night. Originally, it looked to me like a movie the kids would enjoy and a movie that Gail would enjoy, but me, not so much. It did look kind of funny, and a clever idea, but I wasn't too excited about seeing it. But the reviews I've seen online have been overwhelmingly positive, including a number of people who said that they didn't expect to like this movie but did. So when Gail mentioned the idea of going to see it, I agreed. Bottom line: I loved it. The boys liked it, but I think Gail and I liked it even more. It was very funny, it was sweet, it had the beautiful Amy Adams for the guys and Patrick Dempsey for the girls, it had biting social commentary (well, not really), and best of all, the Disney people had fun making fun of themselves, and I like when big companies do that.

The story, in case you haven't seen the commercials, is pretty clever — Giselle is an animated girl in an animated forest who lives with little animated forest creatures that talk to her and clean up her house and such, very Cinderella-like, while she waits for her prince to come and whisk her away to the castle to live happily ever after. The prince indeed comes, but his evil step-mother throws her down a pit, and she ends up in modern-day New York City. At this point the movie switches over to live-action, but the actors playing the formerly-animated characters keep their animated personalities, so it's basically a fish-out-of-water kind of thing. Giselle talks about "love's first kiss" and living happily ever after while Robert, the jaded divorce lawyer that she meets, tries to convince her that "happily ever after" doesn't exist. At one point Giselle, while walking with Robert in public, attempts to break into song (as characters in Disney movies are wont to do), but an embarrassed Robert asks her to stop because in the real world, people just don't do that. When she tries to clean up a messy apartment, she calls for the forest creatures to help her, as she did in her own place in the animated world, but of course in New York City, you don't get sparrows and cute little mice, you get cockroaches and rats instead.

Adams does a fantastic job of playing an amalgam of Belle, Ariel, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella, basically all the "Disney princesses" rolled up into one. All the songs she sings could have come from any Disney musical, except that the lyrics are much funnier than those in The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast.

This movie might convince you that "happily ever after" may not only happen in the fantasy world. But even if it doesn't, it's certainly a couple of hours worth of entertainment.

The Mitchell Report

The Mitchell report came out last week, naming a bunch of players that took steroids or human growth hormone (HGH) over the past ten years or so. Nobody was mentioned in the report more than Barry Bonds (to nobody's surprise), but Roger Clemens was a close second. This was a bit of a surprise to me, though I don't know why. He is also a player whose career started to wane a little bit and then he had a great resurgence and is still excelling well into his 40's. Maybe it's because when you think of steroids, you think of a bulky hitter smashing 500-foot home runs, not a pitcher. Part of me thinks that you have to wonder about a power pitcher who can still hit 95 mph when he's 45, but if that's the case, you also have to wonder about Nolan Ryan, who was also able to throw in the high 90's well into his 40's. Was he juiced? My immediate reaction is "No, he wasn't on the juice! He's Nolan freakin' Ryan!", but why couldn't he have been? Say it ain't so, Nolan! (Note that I'm not saying that Ryan was using steroids, just that the assumption that he wasn't might be naïve.)

Roger's good friend and teammate Andy Pettitte was also mentioned in the report, but his situation is very different from Roger's:

• Clemens used steroids and HGH for at least three years. He has since denied the allegations despite the bucketloads of evidence in the Mitchell report.
• Pettitte took HGH (no steroids) for two days in 2002 while recovering from an injury. He has since admitted his usage and apologized.

In Pettitte's press release, he admitted to using the HGH, but only twice over two days, and only because he was trying to recover from tendonitis in his elbow. He was so uncomfortable about using it (despite the fact that it was legal and not even banned by MLB at the time) that he stopped.

While I think that what Pettitte did was wrong, he's admitted what he did and apologized for it, and you have to respect him for that. Clemens, who would have to work pretty hard to earn my respect based on history, continues to deny everything, perhaps hoping that people will just forget about it. I think he might find that at Hall of Fame voting time, people won't forget.

It seems ironic that if you go purely by statistics, the three players currently not in the Hall of Fame who most deserve to be there are Pete Rose, Roger Clemens, and Barry Bonds. But the HoF is more than just statistics and if you include everything else, none of the three of them deserves to be there.

Daytime running lights are a bad idea

Since 1990, all cars made in Canada are required to have daytime running lights. I think this was done as a safety measure, since vehicles with lights on even during daylight are easier to see, but in reality it was a big mistake.

The idea is sound, because it's true that cars with lights on are easier to see, especially around here where it's overcast for 75% of the winter months. The problem is that many people think that having daytime running lights on is the same as having your full headlighting system on, and when it starts to get dark in the evening, they don't think to actually turn their headlights on. This is a problem for two reasons: (1) daytime running lights are generally not as bright as full headlights, and more importantly, (2) when you only have daytime running lights on, you have no rear lights on, so people behind you cannot see you. Because the driver sees lights in front of him, he thinks his headlights are on and doesn't think to actually check the switch. Some cars solve this problem by keeping the dashboard lights off unless the headlights are actually turned on, so when it starts to get dark, you can't see anything on the dashboard. Other cars, however, seem to turn these lights on as well, so there is no indication to the driver that he should be turning his headlights on.

I can't count the number of people I've seen driving in the dark with just their daytime running lights on. They're called daytime running lights for a reason, people! In the past I've flashed my lights at them, but almost invariably, they think I want them to move over or something, so I rarely bother anymore. On a well-lit highway like the 401 through Toronto, it's not that big a deal, but if you're on a rural road, it can be very dangerous.

When I bought my first car in 1992, I got into the habit of driving with my headlights on all the time. Turning the headlights on when I started the card was just as automatic as putting my seat belt on. When I bought my Grand Prix in 1996, I got out of the habit because the car had a light sensor that would detect that it was dark enough outside, and turned the headlights on automatically. The only time I ever had to manually turn the headlights on was when it was very overcast and dark enough or foggy that I thought the headlights should be on, but the sensor did not. All three of our mini-vans have had this feature as well, so when I got my Sunfire three years ago, I was not used to having to turn the headlights on manually. Luckily, I do notice the lack of dashboard lights when it starts to get dark, so if I have forgotten to turn the lights on, I do it then.

I think that going forward, headlights on all cars should be on at all times when the car is in gear. The downside is negligible — the headlights are powered by the battery, which it itself recharged as long as the engine is running, so this is as close to free power as you're going to get. You might have to replace your headlight or taillight bulbs more often, but in the 15 years that I've owned cars, the number of headlight or taillight bulbs I've had to replace is definitely in the single digits.

To my knowledge, no car on the road today has the headlights on all the time, so perhaps there's a good reason not to do this. If that's the case, I see no reason not to disable all dashboard lights unless the headlights are switched on, so that as I said above, the driver is indirectly informed when it gets dark that he needs to turn his headlights on.

New domain!

I've registered the domain cutthechatter.com for my blog. The blogspot URL will redirect to www.cutthechatter.com, so there's no immediate need to change any bookmarks or anything. Right now, you need to specify the www. prefix, but I'm trying to fix that. Update: This is done now, so just cutthechatter.com should redirect you to the blog as well.

The hosting is still done through blogger for now, and I have no immediate plans to change that, but someday I might.

I'm a pint low

As part of our holiday "celebrations" at work, someone decided to organize a blood donor drive. This was a fantastic idea. I had never donated blood before, but I've been meaning to for years, so Matt's event was the kick the ass I needed to get out and do it. About 10 of us went over to the blood donation clinic this afternoon, about half of those for the first time. I have had a couple of issues with dizziness in the past during examinations and such (including during my laser eye surgery), so I was a little nervous about doing it, but I'm glad I did. My father-in-law has donated many times, and is such a good "bleeder" that he's only hooked up for 5 minutes before he's filled the bag. I mentioned this event to my boss, and he said that he would have gone too, but just went a couple of weeks ago. He also said that he goes every 56 days, stating precisely how often you are allowed to give blood. Good on ya, Mark.

Because it was my first time, I had to fill out a whole bunch of forms (strangest question: "In your current or previous jobs, have you worked with monkeys or their bodily fluids?"), and then they hooked me up. It took about 15 minutes to do the donation (half a litre, or one pint), during which time I felt completely fine. When it was over, I was supposed to rest in the chair for a few minutes before going to have a snack. That's when the problems started.

It started with a little dizziness, and I told one of the nurses. She immediately jumped over to me, put my chair back so that I was basically lying down, and started putting cold cloths on my forehead, neck, and arms, which she replaced every couple of minutes. Within a few minutes, my stomach was a little tingly, though I was never really nauseous, and my hands started to get tingly as well. Over the next few minutes, my stomach seemed to settle a little, but my hands got steadily worse (or maybe my stomach stayed the same but my hands got bad enough that I didn't notice my stomach anymore). Pretty soon my hands were almost white and starting to curl up, and I couldn't move them easily, so one of the nurses started to rub them. After what felt like several weeks of this (ok, maybe 10 minutes), I started to get some feeling back in my hands, and a few minutes after that, I felt much better.

During this unpleasant period of time, I thought to myself "OK, that's it, I'm not doing this again", and was somewhat surprised to hear myself think "Suck it up, princess. You'll feel crappy for a while and then you'll be fine. But with the blood you gave, up to three people might not die. Isn't that worth 15 minutes of discomfort?" As crappy as I felt at that moment, I had to agree with myself.

As far as I know, I never came close to passing out — though one of the other guys I went with almost did. He had to lie down in the chair with the cold cloths as well, but about the time I felt better, he was OK too. One of the other guys got a little dizzy though not to the same extent, but I think everyone else was fine. The nurse said that my reaction was probably due to being dehydrated — since they took some of my blood away and I wasn't sufficiently hydrated, my body started sucking blood (and therefore oxygen) out of my extremities until it realized that I was not in fact about to die, and calmed the hell down. I had a large tea on my way to work this morning (bad move — caffeine is dehydrating, which I already knew <slaps self in head>), and then I had two 500mL bottles of water in the morning, so I figured that would be enough. Evidently not.

After I recovered and was sitting in the next room eating a donut, one of the nurses came over to me and said that it would probably be better if I didn't donate again, for my own safety. I just said OK, but was a little disappointed. I went over to her a few minutes later and asked if that was based on the results of any blood tests they had done, or just based on my reaction. She said it was just based on the reaction, but that she had spoken to the other nurse that I dealt with, and they figured that it was my lack of hydration that was the real problem. She said that if I wanted to try again I could, but it would be better to wait a long time, like a year or two, before coming back. I intend to do just that, though next time I will be drinking water like it's going out of style — and not just that day either, for at least a couple of days beforehand.

Football pool redux

Remember a while ago, I mentioned I was in a football pool? No? C'mon, you remember — I had won some money in week two, and I figured I'd never win anything again because I know zilch about football? You remember now? No? Uh.... ok.

So anyway, I'm in this football pool....

So it's week 14 now, and I have not come in first or second in any weeks since week 2. But dammit all if I'm not tied for first freakin' place overall! After thirteen weeks, I have correctly guessed predicted 9 games or more (out of 16) seven times. I have only gotten less than seven right once, that was 5 in week 5. I'm still in the 99th percentile, and I'm ranked even higher than I was before - 724th overall. In total, I have gotten 110 right out of 208, or a success rate of 52.9%. It seems odd to me that being slightly over 50-50 gives you first place. I also find my success in this pool rather odd, considering all I'm going by is (a) the ESPN game preview (though they never make predictions, they just say what's happened in the last few meetings between the two teams and/or any winning or losing streaks the teams are on), and (b) the tiny bits of football information that I don't fast-forward over when listing to my Prime Time Sports podcast. Note that the ESPN preview is right there on the page where you make your picks, so it's exactly the same information that everyone else in the pool has access to. For a while, I also had a general rule of never betting against the Patriots or Colts, though I had to break that rule when they played each other (and I got it right). I have since gone against both in a few cases, but only betting that they won't cover the spread, and I've almost always been right about those too.

I should have been buying lottery tickets...

Happy birthday dad!

My mom and dad were in Toronto for a doctor's appointment last Thursday, and my dad's 70th birthday was on the Friday, so my sister told them to stay an extra day and she'd make dinner for them. Unbeknownst to my dad, we had arranged a session at an indoor golf simulator for him and me him and I he and I the two of us for that afternoon, and also for Gail and the boys to come into the city (ooooh, the city) to join us for dinner. I took a vacation day and planned on taking the train in but managed to miss it, so I had to drive down (turns out that caused a lot more problems than I originally thought — more on that later). Dad and I played 18 holes (well, 17 — we ran out of time and didn't want to pay for another 15 minutes just to play one more hole) at Spyglass. We both shot in double digits on the first hole, but then we kind of figured out what we needed to do, and did much better the rest of the way. I even had two pars.

I think there was something wrong with the simulator, though. At one point the display got so slow that I asked the guy about it, and he said he'd never seen it like that, so he moved us over to another machine. (When he rebooted it, I saw that the computer running the booth was running Windows XP Home.) The other booth was a little better, but still not great, and there was still something wrong with the ball sensor as well — sometimes. While playing the back nine, I don't think I had a drive (i.e. with the driver, off the tee) go further than about 170 yards. I'm no John Daly, but if I hit my driver properly, I can hit the ball over 200 yards. I had some drives where I felt like I hit it pretty well, and the ball went 160 yards. I can hit my 6-iron 160 yards pretty consistently, so there was definitely something wrong. We still had fun though.

After golf, we walked back to my sister's place where she and my mom were getting dinner ready. Trudy had bought a bunch of Scottish food for the party — several different types of meat pies, mushy peas, British crisps (marmite (?) and prawn cocktail flavours), and even some haggis. She's a vegetarian, but she said she had more meat in her fridge for this party than ever before. Gail and the boys were a little late because Gail was on a long-running conference call at work, but they got there just in time for Trudy's "70 Years of George Perrow" video show, containing lots of pictures of dad, many of which I had never seen before. She did a great job with that, but eventually it was time to get the kids home to bed.

Gail and I were both going to leave at the same time (since we both drove down, we had to drive home seperately), but we had a problem. Gail was parked in Trudy's reserved spot in the parking lot, but I was on the road. When we got to my car, I found that some idiot had parked behind me, partially blocking a driveway, and not even two inches off my rear bumper. There was a little more space in front of me, but not enough to get out, so I was trapped. Gail took the boys home while I stayed to figure out what to do.

I called the police and talked to the parking enforcement guy, who said there was nothing they could do, since there was no way to prove who got there first. I thought about calling a towing company to get them to move the guy enough that I could get out and then putting his car back, but since it wasn't my car they were moving (and therefore there was nobody to sign a waiver) I doubt any towing company would do it. I waited for half an hour and the guy didn't move, so I put a nice note on his windshield (where I skillfully avoided use of the word "asshole", though that was the first word that came to mind), asking him to give me a call when he left so that I could also leave. After another half an hour, we figured he wasn't going to call (or at least wasn't going to leave), so I crashed on Trudy's couch.

The next morning, he still hadn't left, but with my dad guiding me, I managed to get out anyway. This made me feel a little silly, since I could have left the night before, but I guess it was no big deal really. When I left, my dad took the note off of the other guy's windshield, so he doesn't have any idea that his lousy parking job caused any problems at all. So, Mr. red two-door Sunfire with Ontario licence plate ARJS 015, the best I can do now is to call you a jerk on my blog. Not exactly satisfying, but it'll have to do.

Some reward

Sunoco recently cancelled their partnership with CAA — you could swipe your CAA card at Sunoco stations and you'd save 1% of your gas purchase on your CAA membership the next year. Last year, this saved me about $30. Not huge, but nothing to sneeze at. Now Sunoco has their own reward program called "Performance Points". I got 1000 points for joining, and I figured over the years, I'll eventually build up enough points to get free stuff (I'm still trying to figure out what to do with my 180,000 Petro Canada points). I recently looked at a receipt I got from buying gas at Sunoco, and noticed the following:

Points before transaction: 1000
Points this transaction: 0
Points after transaction: 1000

I went to the web site to check on the rules to see why I got no points for that transaction, and found that they don't give points on regular grade gas, only on the premium grades, as well as stuff you buy in the store (i.e. snacks and stuff). Since I don't buy the premium grades, and almost never buy stuff at a gas station other than gas (I pay at the pump almost all the time anyway, so I never go in the store), this program is useless to me. I suspect this is true of a great many people. At least this way, it's one less card in my wallet, and I will now actively avoid buying gas at Sunoco stations. Why wouldn't I? I get Air Miles at Esso, Petro Points at Petro Canada, Bonus Bucks at Pioneer, and jack at Sunoco.

Another example of a company that is so desperate to make more money that they alienate their customers, and will probably end up making less.

Pioneer Days

The boys were having a conversation this morning over breakfast about loonies and toonies. I came into the conversation in the middle, so I asked Ryan what he was talking about, and he came up with this gem:

I was telling Nicky that there used to be two-dollar bills, back in the pioneer days.

I must own this

A guitar that tunes itself by measuring the pitch of each string as you play it.

Also in that story, another automatic tuning product that has a library of different tunings, and allows you to switch between them on the fly — even in the middle of a song.

Now, how do I convince Gail that I need this?

Daddy, what's erectile dysfunction?

It's Saturday morning around 7:45. My kids (8 and 5) are watching Popular Mechanics for Kids, their favourite show. I'm not watching with them, but I'm sitting in the kitchen reading the newspaper, and I can hear the TV, and I have been in a couple of times to see what they wanted for breakfast, and stuff like that. During this show, there have been commercials that featured scantily-clad models (for an HD TV), feminine hygiene products, and even one for Viagra. I'm no prude, but there is no way that a Viagra commercial should be aired during a show that contains "For Kids" in the title.

I sent an email to the National Geographic Channel telling them that someone needs to revisit the types of commercials that are aired during kids programming. Not only are these completely inappropriate for kids, but totally pointless from a marketing perspective. Their sponsors pay them for a certain amount of air time or a certain number of commercials played — would they be happy that their commercials are being played to an audience that has no chance of buying their product? It's not even that kids have little money are so aren't likely to go out and buy these products — that's true for many toys that are advertised as well. But the kids aren't going to ask for these things for Christmas or birthdays, which is pretty much the sole purpose of toy commercials. Do the manufacturers think that the kids are going to think "Hey, maybe for Christmas I'll buy mommy some of these Always with Wings, since the women in the commercial seem pretty happy about them"?

I'm not one of those parents who wants to shield their kids from the "evils" of the world so much that the kids grow up in a bubble. (If I were, I'd be pointing them at Conservapedia.) But at the same time, some things are simply inappropriate for kids. The Viagra commercials may not be explicit (they're entirely innuendo, which my kids don't get, though I think most of them are quite funny), but I still think they fall into this category.

24 in '94

If you're a fan of the TV show 24, and you know anything about computers, you have to watch this video, which places the show in 1994, rather than 2007. Not only does it capture Jack and the gang pretty well ("dammit!"), but the computer references are hilarious.

"He's hacking into the mainframe"
"We just installed Windows 3.1, there's no way!"

OK, so Windows 3.1 was about three years old in 1994, but still.

Conservapedia -- Wikipedia for the hard of thinking

Well, folks, here it is — the encyclopedia you've been waiting for if you're afraid of the truth and want to live in your own little everything-is-wonderful world. It's called Conservapedia.com, "The Trustworthy Encyclopedia". I don't even know where to start with this one. It's wikipedia except they abandoned the Neutral Point of View concept, and decide to write everything from a conservative Christian point of view (which is fine), but then treat that point of view as fact (which is not). Its criticisms of Wikipedia are funny — a Wikipedia article can present all kinds of facts about something like homosexuality, but because it doesn't explicitly say "Homosexuality is immoral" or "wrong" or "an abomination", they view this as an endorsement and therefore Wikipedia has a liberal bias. Because you are allowed to describe years and time periods using BCE/CE in place of BC/AD, Wikipedia has an anti-religious bias. Because you are allowed to use British English rather than American English on pages about British topics, Wikipedia has an anti-American bias.

The articles use all kinds of faulty logic — how can evolution be true if smart people like Archimedes, Aristotle, and Isaac Newton didn't propose such a theory? Plus, Hitler believed in evolution. A quote even hints that Hitler's evolutionary beliefs caused him to believe that Germans were superior to other races, and that Jews were to be segregated. Ergo, if you believe in evolution, you are evil. Also, atheism is obviously evil because Stalin, Lenin, and Karl Marx were atheists. And of course, the old standby, "If science cannot currently conclusively prove something, it must be false" (eg. evolution, the Big Bang, a genetic basis for homosexuality). Yup, definitely trustworthy.

Here are some "trustworthy" "facts" that I learned from Conservapedia:

• The opening paragraph of the article on homosexuality says "homosexuality has a variety of negative effects on individuals and society at large"
• homosexuals are more likely than heterosexuals to be engage in promiscuity, violent behaviour towards their partners, homicide, pedophilia, cigarette smoking, and illegal drugs
• most hate crimes against gay people are not actually hate crimes, and hate crimes committed by gay people against heterosexuals are vastly underreported
• abortions cause breast cancer
• the theory of evolution is evil — "a vast majority of the most prominent and vocal defenders of the evolutionary position since World War II have been atheists"
• "a virgin is a person of either sex who has not married"

Obviously there are going to be articles that have incorrect facts on them; I'm sure you could go through Wikipedia and find plenty of incorrect information. However, the article on homosexuality has thirty-five sections, 290 references, and at least two thousand edits. It's not like someone added some incorrect or misleading information — many people have. The virginity page doesn't even mention sex, but to give an accurate description of what virginity is would require actually discussing sex, and we can't have that, now can we? In order to "protect" people from a description of sex (and come on people, this can be done without an explicit description of how it is performed), they choose to publish something that is patently untrue. And I'm supposed to take this site seriously?

The Conservapedia article on Wikipedia is also particularly "trustworthy". The following quotes all take place within the opening two paragraphs of the article:

• "Despite its official "neutrality policy", Wikipedia has a strong liberal bias"
• "It has millions of entries on topics ranging from an explanation for "duh" to singles by obscure rock bands to arcane British royalty."
• "Initially, Wikipedia was hosted on servers operated by Bomis, Inc., a company that also sold pornographic pictures."

There's even a page on how Conservapedia differs from Wikipedia. One of the 16 listed reasons is: "We do not allow liberal censorship of conservative facts. Wikipedia editors who are far more liberal than the American public frequently censor factual information. Conservapedia does not censor any facts that comport with the basic rules." This is laughable, since Conservapedia not only allows but encourages conservative censorship of liberal facts, though I suppose they are up-front about it. Also, they treat the Bible and biblical scholars as a source of "facts" and conveniently ignore scientists whose findings don't agree with their agenda.

Do I want my kids perusing Wikipedia? To be honest, no. There are indeed explicit and disturbing pictures on some pages, as well as explicit descriptions of things that an 8-year-old and a 5-year-old really do not need to have described to them. However, Conservapedia, while family-friendly, presents opinions as facts, and tries to spin homophobia, general intolerance, and anything that disagrees with their beliefs (however misguided) as "faith". Faith has as much to do with hating gay people as Islam has to do with murdering Americans. A few extremist crackpots ruin it for the vast majority of peace-loving Muslims, and similarly, the people who created this site are simply Christian extremists teaching hate and masquerading it as faith. I won't let my kids anywhere near this site until they are old enough to be able to distinguish facts from bullshit presented as facts.

Green Tea

Another example of how trying to do your part to save the environment doesn't seem to help.

A week or two ago, Gail bought one of those new Tim Horton's reusable mugs. She figured that she gets at least one (decaf) tea a day when she goes to work, so this would cut down on cups that get thrown away. Sure they get recycled and not just thrown away, but reducing and reusing are still preferred over recycling. Plus Tim's charges 10 cents less for the tea when you put it in one of these mugs.

When she stopped at Tim Horton's this morning for her morning tea, she watched what the (attendant? waitress? I refuse to use the idiotic made-up term "barista") lady was doing. First, she misunderstood the order, so she made a decaf coffee rather than tea. The thing is, she made it in a paper cup, then poured it into the reusable mug, then threw the cup away. When Gail told her that it was supposed to be decaf tea, she apologized, poured the coffee out, and made the tea in another paper cup. Then she poured the tea into the reusable mug and threw the second cup away. Even if we ignore the ordering mistake (which could have been avoided if Tim Horton's were to use my brilliant idea), she's using a paper cup, which completely defeats the purpose of having the reusable mug in the first place. When Gail asked about this, she explained that she's not allowed to put the spoon she uses to stir the tea into the reusable mug, so she mixes the tea, milk, and sugar in a paper cup, then pours it all into the reusable mug once it's mixed. (I would think that using a disposable wooden stir stick to stir the tea in the reusable mug would be less waste than the cup.) I understand the logic, but if that's the case, why bother introducing the reusable mugs at all? I suppose if you don't take anything in your coffee or tea, then there's no need for stirring and no extra cups would be used. But what percentage of Tim's customers don't take any milk or sugar? Just listening to people ahead of me in lines, it seems to me that "double-double" is by far the most popular order.

I also get a tea on my way to work almost every morning, so I was considering getting a reusable mug too. When I heard Gail's story, my first thought was that I shouldn't bother, since a cup is getting thrown away for each tea I buy anyway. Then I remembered that I always ask for a second cup, since the tea is too hot for me to hold when I get it, and the second cup insulates it. If I get the reusable mug, it's insulated anyway, so only one cup gets thrown away instead of two. There. That should put an end to this global warming stuff once and for all. You're welcome.

iPod Meme

iTunes Survey copied from cahwyguy:

How many total songs?
6919 songs, 20.9 days, 41.79GB

Sort by song title - first and last
First: A by Barenaked Ladies
Last: 99% Of Us Is Failure by Matthew Good

Sort by time - shortest and longest
Shortest: You to Me (0:04) by Bystander (entire lyrics: "Everybody says '<bleep> you' to me" — the <bleep> is an actual bleep in the song)
Longest: Octavarium (24:00) by Dream Theater (second longest is "A Change of Seasons" (23:08), also by Dream Theater)

Sort by Album - first and last
First: "Abacab" by Genesis
Last: "90125" by Yes

Sort by Artist - first and last
First: AC/DC
Last: 54-40

Sort by Album Artist - first and last
I'm not sure what this means - why is "album artist" different from "artist"?

Top five played songs:
The top song is In Between by Linkin Park with 4, and then the next 20 (the rest of Linkin Park's Minutes to Midnight album, all of Saga's debut album, and a Robben Ford song I was trying to learn on guitar) are all tied at 3. Not a very useful stat thus far. Ask me again in a couple of years.

Find the following words. How many songs show up?
Sex: 6
Death: 4
Love: 239
You: 535
Home: 42
Boy: 34
Girl: 60

First five songs that come up on Party Shuffle
1. Extra Pale by Goo Goo Dolls
2. 5 Days in May [Live] by Blue Rodeo
3. Naked Sunday by Stone Temple Pilots
4. The Journey by Joe Satriani
5. The Master & Margarita by The Tea Party

Scaramouche! Scaramouche! Will you do the fandango?

We went to see We Will Rock You in Toronto again last night. Gail and I saw it back in August, and we loved it, and since my dad's 70th birthday is coming up, we decide to take my parents and my sister to see it. They all loved it, as did we, although the crowd didn't seem to get into it as much this time as the first time. The guy singing the lead role ("Galileo Figaro") was the usual guy, and he was very good, but when we saw it in August, the guy playing Galileo was not even the understudy, he was the second understudy, and he was simply amazing. He had easily as strong a voice as the regular lead, and I found his speaking easier to understand, since he didn't have the slight French accent that the regular lead does. The female lead, Scaramouche, was played by a Toronto girl named Erica Peck in her professional stage debut. The fact that it's her debut is unbelievable to me, since she was simply outstanding. Her acting was great, her singing voice is incredible, and she just looked really comfortable on stage. The entire cast was really good, but Scaramouche was my favourite character, and Gail's too.

While looking through the program before the show started, I noticed a vaguely familiar name in the band — the drummer was a guy named Sean Kilbride, and it took me a few seconds to place the name. He was the drummer for Haywire, a PEI-based pop-rock band in the 80's that I was a fan of. This is the second time I've noticed something like that at a musical theatre performance — when we went to see The Lion King a few years ago, I found that the musical director was a guy named Rob Preuss, who was the keyboardist for both Spoons and Honeymoon Suite back in the 80's.

Slate quotes little ol' me

I just found out that a blog entry I wrote last year about circumcision was quoted in an article on Slate magazine:

At Cut the Chatter, anti-snip Graeme Perrow retracts some of his criticism of the practice in light of these findings. "These results are certainly interesting, and if I lived in sub-Saharan Africa, I would have to seriously reconsider having it done to my kids. However, incidence of HIV among heterosexual non-drug-using men is far lower here than it is there. … I must take back my (implicit) assertion that it's pointless and has no benefits."

Leafs, books, quirks, and Adam's fall

A few scattered things...

In the past couple of years, I've actually hoped that the Leafs wouldn't make the playoffs, so that this would send a clear signal to the Leafs' management that serious changes needed to be made, not just little tweaks here and there. They've missed the playoffs two years running now, but nothing really significant has been done, so this year, I'm hoping the Leafs miss the playoffs again so that management is replaced. Ferguson has done a lousy job of building this team, so he needs to be sent packing. I'm hoping that Tannenbaum et al have noticed the dramatic changes in the Raptors after they went out and got Bryan Colangelo (last year's NBA Executive of the Year); maybe that will force them to rethink the Leafs' situation. Rather than just getting some guy to run the Leafs, they need to go out and get the guy — someone with a proven track record who is not afraid to blow the team up and rebuild. I have no idea who the guy is (would Lou Lamoriello ever leave New Jersey?), but Ferguson just ain't getting the job done.

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Wil Wheaton has a new book out called "The Happiest Days of our Lives", which is a collection of some of his best blog entries, and talking about the best blog entries on Wil's blog is really saying something. I ordered the book a few weeks ago, and shortly after, Wil (I call him "Wil" like he's a friend of mine) complained that the Canadian orders had to be processed by hand, and he was doing it himself (Monolith Press, who's publishing the book, is Wil's own publishing company). Lo and behold, my book arrived last week, and the envelope had a customs sticker on it signed by Wil himself. It's not an autographed book, but pretty close...

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When I first got my iPod, I spent a month putting all my music on it, and as an afterthought, I subscribed to a couple of podcasts. Since then, I've found that my main use for the iPod is listening to these podcasts on my way to and from work every day. I don't know how I'd manage this if I didn't have a 45-minute-each-way commute. Since you asked (lookin' at you, CaHwyGuy), here are my podcasts:

• Prime Time Sports, the FAN 590's afternoon show with the legendary Bob McCown, recently voted North American sports radio's "Air Talent of the Year".
• Bob McKenzie - the TSN hockey analyst's five-minute podcast, once or twice a week.
• Quirks and Quarks - CBC's science show, which has been around since the mid-70's (though not in podcast form).
• Scientific American's 60-Second Science - a daily 60-second science report, usually a brief summary of a recent scientific discovery.
• This Week in Tech (TWiT) - a discussion of recent news in the world of technology.

I have also downloaded, listened to, and enjoyed a couple of audiobooks from audible.com. So far, I have only listened to audiobooks from guys named Stephen: Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" and Colbert's "I Am America (And So Can You)". Just the title of that second one is enough to make me giggle, and the rest of the book is also very funny; I literally laughed out loud on numerous occasions while listening to it.

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I found this on Boing Boing, and could not stop laughing. Author John Scalzi has written a review of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, which is a museum that promotes "young Earth" creationism, i.e. the Bible is literally true, and the Earth was created in 6 24-hour days about 6000 years ago. The other things that these young Earth creationists also believe are mind-boggling:

• dinosaurs walked the Earth with humans, possibly as late as when the Egyptians were building the pyramids
• there was nothing bad in the world until Adam ate that damned apple — there was no disease, no pain, every animal was a vegetarian, snake's venom was harmless, and there were no weeds. Yes, there's a sign in the museum specifically talking about weeds, and how they didn't exist before "Adam's fall". (They didn't explain why a vegetarian T. Rex would have had such huge teeth and claws — maybe they quickly grew after Adam's fall turned this gentle giant into a vicious carnivore.) Man, you make one mistake, and everyone pays for it for the rest of eternity. God may be merciful and kind, but don't piss Him off.
• Cain's wife was also his sister. This must have been true, since Adam and Eve were the only other people around, so it's not like he could have married someone from next door. However, before Adam ate the apple, incest was OK and wouldn't cause genetic problems. Ew.

The whole creationist thing seems to come from the dizzying logic that "the Bible must be true because it's the word of God. How do we know it's the word of God? It says so in the Bible." It's best explained by this.

And so it begins.

I put the cover on the air conditioner on Sunday. The leaves are all raked up, mostly. I've had to scrape the windshield of my car a few times already. The kids have been wearing hats to school for a week. We all wore hats and mitts at the pumpkin patch just before Halloween. I will be putting the bikes and summer toys in the shed or basement over the next week or so, so that I can get the car in the garage. And summer's coup de grâce, It was snowing a little bit this morning as I got to work. Winter is coming.

Bring it on.

Eric Clapton vs. Elton John

Here are ten reasons why the guitar is a more difficult instrument to play than the piano:

1. Once you tune a piano, it's tuned, and can stay in tune for years. A guitar that's perfectly in tune at the beginning of a song can be out of tune halfway through that song. Plus, the piano is always tuned the same way. The key that plays a C note on one piano will always play a C note on any other piano. Guitars can be tuned in any number of different configurations — the open top string is usually E, but it might be D, or F, or something else; it depends on the tuning.
2. On the piano, the right hand and left hand are doing essentially the same thing. They play different notes and such, but basically the same thing. On the guitar, the left hand is fretting notes while the right hand is picking or strumming them. Fundamentally different actions.
3. A chord on a piano is usually three notes, sometimes four. On a guitar, you frequently have to play six-note chords with only four fingers (the thumb on the fret hand is almost never used).
4. On the piano, there is one set of keys in strictly ascending order. You always know whether one note is higher or lower than another based on whether it's to the left or right of the other note. On the guitar, there are essentially six different sets of notes which overlap. Is the 3rd string, 6th fret higher or lower than the fourth string, 12th fret? Answer: lower, but unless you play the guitar or have one in front of you, it's not obvious.
5. Unless you press the sustain pedal on the piano, as soon as you remove your finger from the key, the note stops. On the guitar, you can remove your hands entirely and the open strings will ring unless you deaden them.
6. If someone has never played a piano in their life, you can teach them a C major scale in about 10 seconds: Black keys are grouped in either 2 or 3. Look for the 2 black keys together, and the white key immediately to the left of that is C. Hit that key, then each white key next to it (to the right) until you get to the next C. That's it. Teach someone that, and if they find themselves at a piano a month later, they could probably repeat it. On the guitar, it would be 2nd string from the top, 4th fret, then 2nd string 6th fret, then 3rd string 3rd fret, 3rd string 4th fret, 3rd string 6th fret, 4th string 3rd fret, 4th string 5th fret, and 4th string 6th fret. Or instead of 3rd string 3rd fret, you could do 2nd string 8th fret. Or numerous other ways. I've been playing guitar for 20 years and I had to do little air-guitar fretting motions in order to figure out how write it down here. Someone who had never played a guitar before would have no chance of remembering the notes a month later. (On the other hand, playing a C-sharp major scale on the guitar is easy once you know the C major - just move everything up one fret. On the piano, I'd have to think for a minute to figure it out.)
7. If you don't play the guitar often, playing for more than a couple of minutes causes the tips of your fingers to hurt. Piano — no pain.
8. You've got grands, baby grands, uprights, and other types of pianos, and they all look different, but excluding quality differences, they play pretty much the same way. Playing an electric guitar and an acoustic guitar are very different. 6-strings and 12-strings are also very different.
9. With a piano, you play a note or you don't, though you can play it louder or softer. Same with a guitar, but you can also play the note and then bend it, or hit the note below and bend up, or hit the note and slide up or down, or hit the note above and slide down, or hit the note below and slide up. You can bend strings behind the nut in some cases, and if you have a tremolo bar (aka whammy bar) or a slide, you have even more options. Plus there are natural and artificial harmonics, which are impossible on a piano.
10. The location of a note in relation to position of the black keys tells you immediately what note it is. I haven't taken a piano lesson in over 25 years, and I can't read music anymore, but if you asked me to fine a G on a piano keyboard, I could find it right away. On a guitar, you just have to know, or remember the notes that the open strings play and figure it out from there.

Note to piano players — don't get all bent out of shape. This list was made tongue-in-cheek.

Am I a music thief, or not?

I understand the idea about why music sharing is wrong. If I want to listen to a CD as much as I want whenever I want, I should have to buy it, and the artist and record company should get some financial benefit from that. If my buddy buys a CD and I rip it, then both of us are listening to it as much as we want whenever we want, then the record company has only received payment for one CD. When I rip it, the record company and artist each lose some potential income so in a sense, I've stolen it. I get that.

Recently, I went to the local library and borrowed a CD by Liquid Tension Experiment. I listened to it for a while, and then returned it. Since then, every time I've been to the library and I look on the CD shelves, the one I borrowed is there on the shelf. In theory, every one of those times I could have borrowed the CD for another two weeks. I live in a small town, so the odds are high that I can get this album pretty much any time. I called the library (holy crap, look at me doing research for a blog entry!) and asked them if I was allowed to borrow a CD as many times as I want, and they said that as long as I return the CD to the library now and again (I can renew it without returning it, but only twice), there is no limit. This means that I can listen to this CD pretty much as much as I want whenever I want, and it's perfectly legal, even though I didn't pay to borrow it, the library doesn't pay anyone each time I borrow it, and I didn't pay to get the library card in the first place.

Here's the kicker — when I borrowed the CD, I ripped it to MP3s. It's now on my iPod. This means that I can still listen to it as much as I want whenever I want, just I could before, but I don't have the inconvenience of having to go to the library to get it out or return it. The record company is still not getting any money, nor is the artist, but they wouldn't have anyway. Was ripping this CD wrong, and if so, why? Who loses when I do this?

NLL season - back from the dead

So there will be pro indoor lacrosse this winter. As I mentioned before, the CBA expired during the off-season, and the league set a deadline date of October 15, by which time a new CBA would have to be reached in order to avoid complete cancellation of the season. The players called the owners' bluff, and it turned out that it was no bluff, and the season was officially cancelled. That's when the players union collectively said "oh shit, they weren't kidding", and the real negotiations started. A week later, the league announced that they had reached agreement with the PLPA on a new seven-year contract, and that the season was saved. Good thing too — I'm not sure the league could have survived a complete year-long shutdown.

After the original cancellation, the press asked NLL commissioner Jim Jennings if the season could be salvaged if an agreement was reached, and he said no. He said that the arena dates had been released, and he actually used the word "impossibility". Apparently the Boston Blazers' management took him seriously, because shortly before the agreement was reached, they told the league that they would not be playing in 2008 even if a deal was reached. There's been no official announcement on this yet, but it's been mentioned in a couple of interviews with people in the know. I'm not entirely sure what Boston could have done in the week between the cancellation and the agreement that couldn't be undone — the season doesn't start for another two months — but in so doing, the Blazers will lose all the players they drafted in the dispersal and expansion drafts, and will have to start again from scratch next year, if the team doesn't fold completely.

When the season was reinstated, my first thoughts were words to the effect of "Woo hoo!". Right after that, I started to wonder how we can ever trust Mr. Jennings again, after he said it was impossible to restart the season, and yet he did a week later. Jennings is known for missing his own deadlines for announcements; the league will say that there will be an announcement on league expansion (usually a team moving or an expansion franchise being awarded) on whatever date, and a few days or even weeks will go by before the announcement is made, with no explanation for the delay. Given that history, plus the season cancellation / reinstatement thing, my respect for Jennings started to drop. But then Jennings did something very few people in leadership positions generally do — he said he was wrong. He said the cancellation of the season wasn't a negotiation ploy, he really believed the season was done, and that he's happy to have been wrong. Perhaps it was a ploy and perhaps it wasn't (though if it was a ploy, he probably should have notified the Blazers of that), but it took stones for him to admit he was wrong. Jennings has done great things for the NLL, and this admission increased my respect for him.

My respect for the PLPA, however, didn't fare so well. It's not because the players were asking for outrageous salaries — I don't know the details of the CBA well enough to have an opinion on that. I know they don't make a ton of money compared to the other pro sports — the highest salaries in the league are about $25k/year — and that they weren't asking for huge increases. But after years of telling people "lacrosse players aren't in it for the money, they truly play for the love of the game", having the season cancelled because of a labour dispute (the third such dispute in the last four years) made me feel like a liar. If they were truly playing for the love of the game, there would be no need for the PLPA at all. I don't like unions at the best of times, so maybe my judgement is a little clouded here. Note that I have no problems with the players themselves, it's just the union I don't like.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that there will be lacrosse this year, and so, dear reader, you can look forward to game highlights and lacrosse commentary from yours truly throughout the season, which will begin in late December or early January. If you're not into lacrosse but are looking for something just as insightful as my commentary will likely be, here you go.

Aside: Yes, the title of this post is a small Halloween reference.

Red Sox give Leafs fans hope

After watching the last out of the World Series, I thought "So Boston won the World Series... again", and then realized that nobody has been able to say those words for almost ninety years. On the radio this morning, Damien Cox said that this should be great news for all Leafs fans, because the Red Sox were under the thumb of greedy and/or stupid ownership for a long time, and have now won two championships in four years, so Leafs fans can be reassured that their time may come as well. All we need to do is wait forty or fifty more years...

A-Rod has opted out of his contract with the Yankees, who have also lost Joe Torre. I have hated the Yankees all my life, especially during the last 10 years when they've been a juggernaut, but I have nothing but respect for Joe Torre. Without those two, the Yankees are instantly a worse team, and it's possible they'll also lose Pettitte and Posada, and Roger Clemens might finally retire for good. This brings the Yankees back down to Earth, and thereby gives the Jays a better chance. Now all they need to do is make sure Vernon Wells and Troy Glaus remember how to hit.

They mentioned during the game last night that Curt Schilling probably would not be back in the Boston lineup next year. Don't know if he's retiring or just moving on, but that leaves the Red Sox with a starting rotation of Josh Beckett, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Jon Lester, Clay Buchholz (who threw a no-hitter this past season), and possibly Tim Wakefield. That's one powerful rotation, and with Okajima, Timlin (who might retire), Gagne (who will probably not suck so much next year), and Papelbon in the bullpen, <WARNING: Extreme Understatement Alert> I think the Sox will be OK next year, even without Schilling.

A fun weekend, and baseball's over

I'm sitting in the family room watching game 4 of the World Series; lovin' that wireless internet. We had a bit of a busy weekend; Gail and Nicholas were at a Beaver camp on Saturday, so Ryan and I had a day to ourselves. We checked out the brand new Canadian Tire store that just opened in Waterdown; that'll take some getting used to. It's not set up like other Canadian Tire stores, all the car stuff is to the right while everything else is off to the left, and there's a big Mark's Work Wearhouse right in the middle of the store. I was kind of expecting one of those huge "superstores", like the one in Waterloo, but it's not nearly that big. Anyway, we bought Ryan and me each a new pair of skates and I got some new windshield wipers for the car. We then started painting a bookshelf that I've been building for Nicholas for about three years. Just before we started that, I got a big ego boost when a friend of Ryan's from down the street came to ask if Ryan wanted to come out and play. I told him it was entirely up to him and after thinking for a minute, he told the kid that he was going to stay in and paint with me.

After painting we had lunch, then went grocery shopping, played on the Wii for a while, played some game that Ryan learned at school called "fumble", which involved throwing a tennis ball against a wall, and then went out for dinner. After dinner, we came back and I continued reading Harry Potter to him (we're into Goblet of Fire now) until bedtime. We had an amazing day.

Today, the boys had swimming lessons in the morning, then we all went out to Dyment's Farm, where we froze had lots of fun. The boys played in an inflatable train, a big ball pit, a straw fort, and on a trike track (though Ryan was a little too big for the trikes), we went on a wagon ride around the farm and right along the edge of the Niagara Escarpment, and enjoyed a nice lunch of very expensive hamburgers, a hot dog for Nicky, and some really good fries. All in all, we had a good time, though it was pretty expensive. It cost about $25 for all of us to get in, and lunch was pretty pricey as well (three burgers and a large fries was $17.50, and a small cup of apple cider was $1.50). The pumpkins were only $2 each, and were pretty small, though we've been told that because of the dry summer we had, the pumpkins are small everywhere this year. We usually go to Parkside Farms in Waterdown each year for our pumpkins, but decided to give Dyment's a try this year. Parkside is smaller, but just as much fun, no entrance fee, and cheaper food, so I think we'll be heading back there next year.

I have a presentation to give on security in SQL Anywhere tomorrow morning, so I should probably not stay up too late. However, the Red Sox are an inning away from winning their second World Series in four years (and as one of the commentators said, also its second World Series in eighty-nine years), so I think I'll stay up just a little longer and watch the end of baseball for another year. Despite the fact that they're in the same division as the Jays, the Red Sox have become my second favourite baseball team. I think that happened when they came back from three games down to beat the hated Yankees in the ALCS three years ago. I also spent a lot of time in Boston during my three-year stint at my previous company, so that's probably part of it as well. Plus, you can't help but like David Ortiz. Manny Ramirez, not so much, but hey.

I'd like to write some stuff about the NLL season being cancelled (bad) and then reinstated (good), but I'm too tired tonight.

Don't tell me why you want to know

I use mybloglog.com, which gives me stats on how people find my blog, i.e. of all the people who find my blog, where do they come from? Some of the searches that people have done to lead here are kind of interesting:

Google Search: eric lindros uncircumcised
Google Search: weird thing about linkin park
http://search.sweetim.com/search.asp?ln=en&q=OLD FILM TALKS ABOUT TWO PERSONS HAVE CANCER ONE OF THEM PLAY SKI
Google Search: which arm did anakin lose to darth tyrannus
Google Search: there is a song i heard on q107 making fun out of bryan mccabe who sings that song 2007
Google Search: 2 player can 7up vs diet coke football game

I'm frightened to ask why someone cares whether Eric Lindros is circumcised.

Incidentally, the vast majority are from Google searches. I see the occasional Yahoo search and other searches (sweetim.com I've never heard of), but easily 95% are from Google.