Jays, potholes, and a long journey ahead

The first weekend of summer! And how do I celebrate it? By getting a sunburn, of course. I went with my dad to the Jays game on Saturday, and we sat down the third base line. The roof was open, since it was a glorious warm (but not hot) sunny day, and I forgot to put sunscreen on. Since I wore shorts, the tops of my legs got burnt, though the rest of me was fine. It was a great game — the Jays won 11-6, and Matt Stairs and Frank Thomas each had four hits including a home run. One of Thomas' hits should have been a long single, but he tried to stretch it into a double and was thrown out at second by about five steps. The second baseman actually had to wait for Thomas to get there before tagging him.

After the game, we met up with my mother and sister and had dinner at a nice restaurant on King St. called N'Awlins, where I had alligator as an appetizer, followed by some amazing blackened catfish.

Sunday, we went to Rockwood Conservation Area east of Guelph for the Sybase company picnic, which was a lot of fun. There was a beach, paddleboats and canoes for rent, and of course a BBQ lunch was served, but we spent most of our time there hiking through the woods with the help of one of my friends on the doc team. She has been to the park many times before, and acted as our guide and photographer (since we both surprisingly forgot our camera). We visited the ruins of an old factory and some pretty cool caves and potholes carved out of the rock. In this context, a pothole, for those of you as geologically-challeged as myself, is basically a cylindrical vertical cave, as if someone had taken a 10-foot-wide drill and drilled straight down, anywhere from two to twenty feet. We were amazed at how smooth the edges of these potholes were, and almost perfectly round. All in all, we probably hiked for about 5 miles, so the kids were good and tired when it came to bedtime last night. Gail and I were pretty tuckered out as well — Gail fell asleep on the couch around 10:00, and I woke her up around 11:00 when I went to bed. She said she'd be up in a minute, but fell asleep again, and I don't think she actually made her way upstairs until around 3:30.

This weekend, we're going up north to visit Gail's dad's wife's son Rolly (Gail's stepbrother, I guess, though she never really uses that term for him). Rolly is a police officer up in Manitouwadge, which is a little town about half-way between Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie. We're driving up to Gail's dad's place on Thursday night (about 3 1/2 hours), then from there to the Sault on Friday (about 6-7 hours), and then up to Manitouwadge on Saturday (another 3-4 hours). According to Google Maps, it's about a 1200 kilometre trip from home each way. Rolly is apparently lining up all kinds of things for us to do, including sailing and probably some canoeing (I know Rolly loves canoeing and has even built his own canoes in the past), and I'm sure there will be lots of hiking as well. I'm really looking forward to this trip — I've never been this far north in Ontario.

We'll be up there for a week, returning home around the 8th of July, so blogging will likely be light (i.e. nonexistent) during that time. I'm sure, faithful readers, that you can find something productive to do during my absence.

Who would have thought... it figures

Alanis Morissette has a song called "Ironic", in which she sings about a bunch of supposed examples of irony: "rain on your wedding day", "a black fly in your Chardonnay", "a death row pardon two minutes too late", "ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife", the story of a man afraid to fly who finally gets on a plane that ends up crashing, etc. The funny thing is that none of the things she sings about are actually examples of irony. Rain on your wedding day isn't ironic, it's just a drag. Ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife might be ironic if you're a knife salesman, but otherwise it's not. The bit about the plane crash might be ironic if the man is travelling to a visit a doctor or therapist who is going to help him get over his phobia.

So we have a song entitled "Ironic", which contains no examples of irony. That's pretty ironic. Don't you think?

Proud papa moment

Ryan was given a special award yesterday at school. From last fall until late January, he was part of a four-student team working on a project called Exploravision. It's an international science competition, where students have to research current technology and then use their imaginations to design some kind of future technology, outlining things like what it will do, why it's better than the current technology, what other sorts of technology need to be invented / expanded in order for this to work, that kind of thing. A parent of one of Ryan's classmates wanted to enter both of his daughters in the contest, and decided to be the team's coach. He recruited a family friend to be on the team, and then asked his daughter's teacher (who's also Ryan's teacher) for a suggestion on a fourth person, and she recommended Ryan. The team met after school and on weekends, and the idea they came up with was a system to more efficiently apply sunscreen using nanotechnology. They researched the history of sunscreen, skin cancer, the light spectrum, nanotechnology, and other related topics on the web, and even visited McMaster University to visit with some nanotechnology researchers. They got to visit a clean room and laboratory, and use one of the most powerful electron microscopes in the world. It was an amazing experience for all the kids — the whole project, not just the visit to Mac.

Ryan and the team had a lot of fun with this project, and out of thousands of entries from across the US and Canada, their team placed in the top 10% and was given an honourable mention. They each got a framed certificate and a prize (a pair of compact binoculars) from Toshiba, who sponsors the event. Ryan was very excited about the award (we wanted it to be a surprise, so didn't tell him about it, though I'm sure he was wondering why we were at an assembly at his school), and Gail and I are beyond proud (I'm even misting up a little writing this entry, but don't tell anyone). Many thanks to the team's coach Greg Hodgins and Ryan's teacher Barb MacLeod for all their hard work.

Vindication

Steve Simmons from the Toronto Sun wrote an article today on the same thing I wrote about last week — how the Leafs ownership is all about profit, and not about winning the Stanley Cup. Sometimes it sucks to be right.

Happy Father's Day!

Happy Father's Day to all the father's out there! I, for one, had a great Father's Day; actually, it was a great Father's Day weekend. On Saturday, I took Nicky to his soccer game in the morning, while Gail did some basement cleanup with Ryan. After soccer, we did some more cleanup while the boys entertained themselves with the Wii for a while and playing outside for a while. After lunch, Gail and I decided to "divide and conquer", so Nicky and I went to do something fun and Gail and Ryan went to do something fun. Nicky's choice was bowling, so we went to a 5-pin place in Waterdown and played a couple of games. After that, we met Ryan and Gail at a bookstore in Burlington, and swapped kids. Ryan decided that he wanted to go bowling as well, but he wanted 10-pin, so we went to a 10-pin place in Burlington. When using the ramp, Ryan did pretty well — at one point, he hit two strikes in a row and then knocked 9 out of 10 down on the next shot. My second game was easily the best game of my life — I bowled a 183, and left a grand total of 2 pins standing the whole game. I shot 5 spares in a row, then a strike, then 9, then two more spares, then a strike, and I got 9 on the last two throws. Could be that Wii bowling has improved my real bowling game! Guess I should be playing Wii baseball more often, considering how I'm hitting in my baseball league this year...

Anyway, on Sunday, we went to see Shrek the Third, which I enjoyed, as did the boys. After, we went for dinner to a place in Burlington called Tony Roma's, where I enjoyed some very fine back ribs. Tomorrow I'm home with Nicky, since his babysitter is on vacation, then I have baseball tomorrow night, Ryan is getting a special award at an assembly Tuesday afternoon, my parents are coming on Wednesday for Grandparent's Day in Nicky's kindergarten class, then they're staying to babysit Nicky on Thursday, and I'm going to a Jays game with my dad next Saturday. Oh, and Ryan has soccer on Monday and Wednesday nights. And Gail's going to the grade 8 graduation on Thursday night to present an award to some graduating students (she's chair of the school council). And the cable guy is coming on Thursday to fix our cable which has been flaky for a couple of days. And I have another baseball game on Wednesday which I can't make it to, and I'll have to cancel my guitar lesson on Thursday night too. All in all, not far from a fairly normal week at our house.

Apparently, I Rock

Someone at work brought in an XBox the other day, and we played Guitar Hero II at lunch time. I had heard a lot about this game, but had never played it. It's kind of like Dance Dance Revolution, except that instead of stepping on a particular part of the floor pad, you hit buttons on a "guitar". Holy crap, was that a lot of fun. I did three songs: You Really Got Me (Van Halen's version), Message in a Bottle by the Police, and finished off with a tougher one, Iron Maiden's The Trooper. After every song, it came up and said "You Rock!", though I'm not sure if that's a rating of my performance, or just what it says when you're done. A couple of people were watching, and they said I did really well — I hit over 90% of the notes on all three songs, got 100% in numerous passages (though I only did about 75% during the solo in The Trooper), hit 160 notes in a row in Message, and ended up with over 100,000 points in The Trooper, which, apparently, is very good.

I don't have an XBox, and I doubt I'll buy one just for this, but if this game comes out for the Wii, I'm there.

The Big Decision

I am at a crossroads, considering making one of the most critical decisions of my life. Do I stay the course, continuing something I've done for many years and that I'm comfortable with, or have I had enough of the status quo? Am I ready to make the life-altering decision that will have lifelong consequences for me and my children?

I'm talking, of course, about my allegiance with the Toronto Maple Leafs and my position of "lifelong fan". I've been a Leafs fan as long as I can remember, having been brought up in Toronto. I remember watching Leaf games as a kid with my dad and saying dumb things like "Wow, if that guy was a Maple Leaf, we would have scored!" when the opposing goalie passed the puck to one of his defensemen. I weathered the storm in the 70's when the team sucked, though I don't remember most of it. I was there in the 80's when the team sucked; I even coloured my hair blue during the playoffs one year (when all my friends said they were going to do it too and then chickened out — not that I'm still bitter about that). I was there in the 90's and 2000's when the team didn't suck as bad most of the time, and I've been there the last two years when the team sucked. But over the last couple of years, as I pay more and more attention to the team (thanks to listening to sports radio during my commute every day), I grow more and more frustrated with the way the team is run:

• John Ferguson has done a lousy job of building the team into a winner, and they just resigned him to a long-term contract.
• Nik Antropov was supposed to be a top prospect, but has been a total bust. After six full seasons and part of another, he's certainly had enough time to make the most of his supposed potential, but simply hasn't, and yet they just resigned him as well.
• They signed Bryan McCabe to an insanely large contract, with a no-trade clause — he's a good offensive defenseman, but is not that great defensively, and certainly doesn't deserve to be paid as if he is among the upper echelon of defenseman.
• For years, the Leafs would sign past-their-prime players and pay them as if they were still in their prime. (One notable exception is Eric Lindros, who was definitely past his prime, but they didn't pay him a ton.) The only reason they don't still do this is the salary cap. Even if they didn't pay them big bucks, they'd trade away prospects and draft picks to get them. They are still doing this (see Yanic Perreault last year).

MLSE is making money hand over fist on the Leafs, and it has been projected in the media a number of times that if the Leafs ever did win the Stanley Cup, public interest in the team might actually drop in subsequent years (I've heard the same thing about the Chicago Cubs, though it didn't seem to happen when the Boston Red Sox finally won the World Series). So MLSE has no real incentive to put in the effort to win the Cup, and it's been painfully obvious that they have no particular interest in doing so. Hence the hiring of a inexperienced (i.e. cheap) GM that they can control. This would explain the signing of popular players to rich contracts, rather than trying to sign players that might actually help the team win. Tie Domi and the aforementioned McCabe come immediately to mind. (Though the Antropov signing puzzles me, since he's neither useful nor popular.)

They just resigned the very popular Mats Sundin to a one-year deal, which I don't have a huge problem with. I wouldn't have been too disappointed, however, if they had decided not to resign him, as long as they used that money to sign young players with some upside, rather than doing something stupid like signing Alexei Yashin. I've heard rumours on the radio that the Leafs are interested in signing Yashin, and I cannot imagine a dumber move for the Leafs than signing him, unless they get him for some bargain-basement price and have the ability to trade him or send him to the minors at any time.

Anyway, back to MLSE, which also owns the Toronto Raptors. However, the way they handle that team is vastly different than the way they handle the Leafs. MLSE paid big bucks to hire a stud GM for the Raptors, and make that team into a winner. This makes sense — the Raptors have been around for less than 15 years and to a large extent, they're still trying to create a long-term fan base. If the Raps suck for years and years, it's logical to think that interest will decrease, so they want to make that team into a winner to keep the fans interested. MLSE is a business, attempting to make a profit, nothing more. If winning a Stanley Cup will significantly increase that profit, then that's what they'll try to do, but it won't. But Toronto fans have shown for 40 years that they will pay to watch the Leafs and buy jerseys and stuff even if the team doesn't win, so why bother paying for a stud GM or putting in any significant work to help the team win when there's no significant financial advantage to doing so?

I lived in Ottawa in 1993 when Ottawa was awarded an expansion franchise, and I've had a soft spot for the Senators ever since. But Senators coverage on the local TV and radio stations is minimal unless they're playing the Leafs (or in the Cup finals), so I'd have to work pretty hard at being a die-hard Sens fan. Now, along comes Jim Balsillie, attempting to be my saviour.

If Balsillie moves the Nashville Predators to Hamilton or Kitchener-Waterloo, my prayers are answered. Balsillie isn't buying the team to make money — he's a hockey fan, so he (presumably) wants to win a Cup, which means he might be willing to do whatever is necessary to accomplish that goal, which MLSE is not. I'll have a local team to cheer for that might actually be interested in winning, and actually has the talent to do so. Tickets for games might be easier (i.e. possible) to get, and I won't have to take out a second mortgage to go to a couple of games. Copps Coliseum is less than 15km from my house, so if they play there for a year or two while they build an arena in Waterloo (where I work), that would be perfect.

I'm sure I will always be a Leaf fan to some extent, especially if the Predators don't move to southern Ontario. But until Leaf ownership changes their tune and actually tries to put a winning team on the ice, my passion for the Leafs will wane.

Update: Just thought of a cool song lyric that I should have used as the title of this post: "We said our love would last forever, so how did it come to this bitter end?" from "Kayleigh" by Marillion.

Stanley Cup Champion Ducks

...boy does that sounds weird. So I ended up 11 for 15 in my NHL playoff picks. As I said before, I wouldn't call Ottawa's defeat "choking" - in previous years, they've had great regular seasons and then lost to inferior teams in the playoffs, while this year, they beat the inferior teams (and you could even argue that Buffalo wasn't) and then simply lost to a better team. Can't fault them too much for that, though the fact that Jason Spezza and Dany Heatley are now appearing on milk cartons all over the National Capital Region certainly didn't help them.

We did the Walk for Miracles this morning. It was indeed 5km, same as the Run for the Cure, but was a little more leisurely, and seemed less hectic. However, the main reason for that was the fact that there were way less people there. I don't remember the actual numbers, but I think the Run for the Cure has something like thirty thousand people walking through the closed streets of downtown Burlington. Today, there were a maybe a couple of thousand walking along sidewalks through downtown London. No streets were closed; actually, I don't think the path they chose even crossed any streets. Anyway, both boys walked the whole way (no wagon!), so I was pretty impressed with that. We had lots of fun, and will probably do it again next year.

Edited to add: Here are a couple of pictures from last year's Walk for Miracles. There are three pictures from London — the little girl cutting the ribbon is Sarah, and her mom Cindy is helping.

Wal-Mart Walk for Miracles

This coming weekend, the four of us are walking in the Wal-Mart Walk for Miracles in London, Ontario. The walk will raise money for the Children's Hospital in London. As some of you may know, our friend Sarah had multi-organ transplant surgery there in August of 1997 at the age of six months, and is now a happy and healthy ten-year-old. We are walking with Sarah, her mother, and a bunch of other friends and family. We would like to help the Children's Hospital continue the wonderful work that they do.

If you would like to sponsor us, please go to the team page. Any donations are very much appreciated. To be honest, I have no idea how long of a walk it is - 2km, 5km, 10km, ... but however long it is, that's how long we're walking. The next step is to convince the kids to walk, and not ride in the wagon like the Run for the Cure last year.

Books you will not see on amazon.com anytime soon

1. "Hockey - A Gentleman's Game" by Todd Bertuzzi
2. "A Comprehensive Analysis of U.S. Foreign Policy in the 20th Century" by Paris Hilton
3. "How I Made Millions Playing Professional Lacrosse" by anyone
4. "Feeding Your Family on only $17 Million a Year" by Latrell Sprewell
5. "My Favorite Hanukkah Traditions" by Mel Gibson
6. "An Actor's Guide to Avoiding Typecasting" by Joe Pesci
7. "Burying the Hatchet: How to Resolve Personal Differences And Just Get Along" by Roger Clemens and Mike Piazza
8. "Building a Successful Long-term Career in the Entertainment Industry" by that kid who played "Webster" on TV (foreword by Leif Garrett)
9. "High on Life: Why You Don't Need Alcohol To Have Fun" by Lindsay Lohan
10. "Being a Sports Celebrity Without Becoming a Jerk" by Kobe Bryant, Barry Bonds, Latrell Sprewell, Roger Clemens, and numerous others

Honourary mention: "George Foreman's Big Book of Baby Names" (I saw that on some web site somewhere and got a good laugh)

Enough ripping already

One of the TV shows Gail and I have liked to watch for years is Law & Order. In more recent years, we've also enjoyed its cousins, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. For those of you who don't watch them, each of these shows occasionally has an episode they describe as being "Ripped from the headlines", where they take a real-life high-profile news story, and write an episode about it. Of course, they change the names and some details and stuff, but it's usually pretty obvious what story they're talking about. For example, a few years ago, they did one about a man who was arrested and tried for several murders, including that of his wife's sister. Later on, it was revealed that his wife was directly involved in the killings, and was just as evil as he was, if not more. This was the story of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. There was another one about a six-year-old beauty pageant winner who was murdered. For the most part, the stories had some obvious connections to the real-life stories, but diverged in some way as the story went on.

I think these "ripped from the headlines" episodes were fairly popular, since they began becoming more and more frequent, and then I think the writers just started getting lazy. In the last month or so, there was a L&O story about a female astronaut who suffered a mental breakdown, and drove across several states (wearing adult-sized diapers to avoid having to stop) to confront her lover and his wife. The other day, we started watching one (this was L&O:CI) involving a pudgy bleach-blonde former stripper who had become famous by marrying a 90-year-old billionaire and inheriting his estate on his death. Her 20-something son died of a drug overdose shortly after the birth of her daughter, and then she died mysteriously shortly after that. When the story started to deal with paternity issues, we got bored and turned it off.

Note to the L&O writers: enough of the "ripped from the headlines" stuff already. It's been done. To death. Drop it. It's one thing to write a story that vaguely resembles a news item, but when you take the news item, modify the names of the people involved, and that's it, well, that's hardly even worthy of the term "writing", is it?

Stanley Cup Final pick

OK, after going 4-for-4 in the second round, I went 0-for-2 in the third round. What's more, I predicted Buffalo would beat Ottawa in 6 or 7, and Ottawa took out Buffalo in 5 — couldn't get much more wrong. Oh well, I'm still 11-for-14 overall. Only one pick left!

This one is tough. So far, I've tried to keep emotions out of it, picking teams that I thought would win, rather than teams I hoped would win. But now that the Senators (my second favourite team) are in the finals, I'm finding it hard not to root for them. I'm really hoping they can pull this off. A friend of mine grew up near Toronto but now lives near Ottawa, and he's abandoned the blue-and-white to become a die-hard Sens fan. He told me last year that in Ottawa, the regular season almost doesn't matter anymore, all that matters is what happens in the playoffs. Obviously no Leaf fan would think that way, because (a) it's never a guarantee that the Leafs will even get to the playoffs (they didn't this year or last), and (b) it seems that for some Leafs fans (not me), any season where they do make the playoffs can be considered a success, regardless of when they get knocked out.

Any (non-Leafs) team might be a serious contender for a couple of years, maybe more, and then they usually start to suck. Edmonton was great in the early-mid 80's, and sucked in the early 90's. The Islanders were great in the early 80's, then have pretty much sucked ever since. Calgary, Montreal, the Rangers, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Dallas, they've all had periods of time where they were serious contenders, and then a few years later they were at the bottom of the heap. A few teams like Detroit and New Jersey may not be contenders every year, but rarely seem to have really crappy teams. Anyway, near the beginning of this season, when the Sens were losing (and the Leafs were winning), I started to wonder if this was the end of the Sens run, if their window of opportunity was closing. Then they turned their season around and began winning, and suddenly, making the playoffs wasn't an issue, the question was (as usual over the past several seasons), how far would they go. I think their reputation as playoff chokers is now gone. Alfredsson seems to be the leader in Ottawa that Mats Sundin has never quite become in Toronto, he, Heatley and Spezza are firing on all cylinders, and I think this is the year.

Ottawa over Anaheim in 6.

You hit a what?

Heard on the traffic report on a Toronto radio station this morning:

...and if you're north of the city, on Highway 10 just south of Highway 89, there's a dead kangaroo in the left lane...

I just hope that whoever hit the animal didn't have any car damage:

Insurance company: You hit a what?
Driver: A kangaroo.
Insurance company: Rrrrrriiiiiight. Let me just check your policy...

Third Round Picks

Just call me Mr. Prognisticator. I'm now 11 for 12 in my NHL playoff picks, after a perfect second round. I expected the Ottawa series to go longer, but I did get the winner right. Now for my third round picks...

• Buffalo over Ottawa — this is a hard one. I am a closet Senators fan (Shhhhh.... I don't think you're allowed to be both a Leafs fan and a Sens fan, so don't tell anyone), so I'd love to be wrong here, but I think Buffalo is just too strong. However, I fully expect this series to go at least six games.
• Detroit over Anaheim — this is a hard one as well, but I think Hasek will come up big for Detroit. I suspect that the winner of this series will take the Cup.

By the way, didn't I break your heart?

I am a big fan of Marillion's first four albums — the ones they recorded with Fish as their lead singer. In the late '80's, (right about the time I got into the band), Fish left and was replaced by a guy named Steve Hogarth, and for whatever reason, I never picked up any new Marillion albums after that. Last week, I was buying the new Rush album from amazon.ca, and decided to pick up the first Marillion album with the "new" (almost 20 years ago) singer, "Season's End", as well as another newer one, "Afraid of Sunlight". I listened to them for the first time today at work, and, well, I'm not sure yet. The music is unmistakeably Marillion (moreso with Season's End), but it really sounds weird with someone other than Fish singing.

Changing lead singers is far more significant a change than any other band member, and this is magnified when the singer has as distinctive a voice as Fish. This was evident when David Lee Roth left Van Halen, but Van Halen's music wasn't terribly different from other hard rock bands at the time, so Van Halen's first album with Sammy Hagar just sounded like another new band with a great guitar player. In this case, Marillion's musical sound is so distinctive, changing singers is even more significant, possibly similar to AC/DC replacing Bon Scott with Brian Johnson, though that happened before I really paid much attention to popular music. In that case, both Scott and Johnson had distinctive voices — Johnson's is similar to Scott's, but different enough that it was obvious that he was a good fit with the band without being a Bon Scott clone. When I Mother Earth replaced Edwin with, um, whoever they replaced him with, the result was a pretty good band with a fairly average lead singer. The newer stuff is still great musically, but I'm not as thrilled with the vocals, and that's what I've found so far with the "new" Marillion. Steve Hogarth's voice is not very distinctive, and I'm not sure it fits with the band as well as Fish's voice did. In fact, every now and again Hogarth sounds like he's doing a bad Fish imitation.

I've learned in the past that immediately writing off an album after a single listen is frequently a bad idea — I didn't like Dream Theater's Scenes From A Memory when I first heard it, but it grew on me, and is now one of my favourite Dream Theater albums; same with The Tragically Hip's Trouble at the Henhouse. I'm very glad to be listening to new Marillion music, for the first time in almost twenty years, and I hope I really start to get into it, because they have eight more albums that I don't have, plus a new one coming next year. I get very excited about new music!

Note: The title of this post is a lyric from "Kayleigh", a song from Marillion's amazing 1985 concept album "Misplaced Childhood". According to Wikipedia, the success of this song has significantly increased the number of girls given the name Kayleigh in the UK. I know a woman (here in Canada) who would have named a daughter Kayleigh because of that song. She ended up having two sons, neither of which, thankfully, is named Kayleigh.

Gas Boycott

I read an article from MSNBC today about a proposed "gas boycott" on May 15. The organizers want people to refrain from buying gas on that day to "stick it to Big Oil" — they think that if enough people don't buy gas that day, the oil companies will lose millions and will be forced to reduce gas prices. Yeah, right.

The article explains why a "gas boycott" will will have exactly no impact on long-term gas prices. I've been saying this for years; I even had a letter to the editor published in the local paper a few years ago when one of their columnists suggested it. I didn't do all the math that the author of the article did, but it seemed obvious to me that it was hogwash. First off, if you didn't need gas on the 15th anyway, then your refusal to buy gas that day is meaningless, so only the participation of those who would have filled up that day will have any effect. For those who do need gas on the 15th, refusing to buy gas that day just means that you'd fill up on the 14th or the 16th instead, so the total revenue of the gas companies would be even over that three day period. Gas prices would fall on the 15th, but would come back up again on the 16th as demand returned to normal — they might even go higher.

The only way to permanently reduce gas prices is to permanently reduce demand for gas, which means permanently reducing consumption. Making gas guzzlers more expensive and hybrids cheaper would be a good step — when I bought my Sunfire a couple of years ago, I would love to have bought a hybrid, but even given the lower gas costs over the life of the car, I couldn't afford the initial cost. My Sunfire was about $21,000 including all taxes and fees and such; hybrids started around $32-35,000 (they might be a little cheaper now, but I don't think they've come down all that much). If you assume that the car uses $40 of gas per week, and the hybrid uses half, or $20 a week, then it would take eleven years before the cheaper gas offsets the $11,000 extra cost. Now, I don't know exactly what kind of mileage a hybrid gets compared to a standard car (is it half? More? Less?), but until the prices come down significantly, or I get a big bonus at work, I won't be looking hybrid.

Aside: I know this is an unfair comparison because my car is pretty cheap, and they don't make hybrid Sunfires, so I'd have to upgrade to a Camry or something like that, which is more expensive to begin with. I'm comparing apples to oranges, but the fact remains that I would like to have bought a hybrid but couldn't afford one.

Mysteries of Modern Life

Here are a few things to ponder over your first glass of frozen concentrated substitute for artificial morning breakfast beverage (with or without pulp-like substances added):

Why is is that people will not shut off a car's engine if the windshield wipers are part-way through a cycle? I do it myself, and I've seen others do it as well — they either turn off the wipers first, or if they are on an intermittent setting, simply wait until the wipers have stopped before shutting the car off. Why do we do this?

Why do Americans talk about ice hockey? As opposed to what? Sure, there's field hockey, but very few people play it or talk about it. If I just say "hockey", what are the odds that I'm actually talking about field hockey? Couldn't you just assume I mean ice hockey? If I talk about "bowling" and I don't specifically say the word "lawn", you can assume I mean "standard" bowling — I don't need to add an adjective.

And why do they talk about hot tea? If I wanted iced tea, I'd have said iced tea, but if I didn't say "iced", can you not assume I meant hot? This even penetrated the American-made show Star Trek: The Next Generation, where Captain Picard's favourite drink order was "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot". I've never heard of iced Earl Grey tea, so it should be obvious he meant hot. They did address this in the final episode "All Good Things...", where an elderly Picard (in the future) was asked by a British woman if he wanted tea, and he answered "Tea? Earl Grey. Hot", to which she replied "Of course it's 'ot!"

Why do smokers (many of which wouldn't otherwise think of tossing garbage out the window of their car) not think twice about tossing cigarette butts out the window? Why not use the ashtray in the car?

Why do North American cars with power windows have an "express-down" feature (i.e. press the down button once and release it, and the window goes all the way down) on the driver's window but not the others? European and Japanese cars have it on all the windows. And why isn't there an "express-up" feature?

Deterministic non-determinism

A colleague pointed me to a blog entry on a blog by the VP of VMWare. It talks about a new "replay" feature in the next version of VMWare — you can record the execution of your VM to a file, and then replay that file later. This will reproduce the VM's execution exactly as it happened the first time. This is an unbelievably cool feature for debugging things like memory stomps and race conditions.

When trying to find a bug, the easiest way is to run it in the debugger, put breakpoints near where you think the problem is happening, and then run it, hoping that it fails the same way that it did before. If it doesn't, well, try again, or tweak some part of the test case to try to cause it to be more reproducible. If it's a race condition, it's highly possible that attaching the debugger or tweaking the test changes the timing enough that the problem never shows up. With this thing, once you've reproduced a problem, you could then replay it (in the debugger!) and step through the code, knowing that the problem will reproduce. You can step "back in time" to just before the problem occurred, and then step through the problem as it happens. According to the web site, the recording process has no effect on the speed of the VM. This is not possible according to the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle, which, strangely, is specifically referenced in the article. Ah, what did he know, anyway?

Apparently it doesn't have SMP support, so if your problem is SMP-related, this won't help you. But it looks like a very nice piece of software engineering, so kudos to the VMWare people!

Thunderbird

I made the big email switch this week, going from Outlook to the brand-spankin' new Thunderbird 2.0. My company actually uses Lotus Notes as the "standard" email client, but after a few years of using that, I found that it sucked rocks, so I took a week and switched to Outlook. First I politely asked IT to set me up with an IMAP account, which let me access my network-stored email folders from Outlook. They did that, and I used that to suck down all my archived mail. Then I abandonded IMAP and went to straight POP, and life was good... for a while.

I think it was when I upgraded to Office 2003 that things started to go bad again. Every now and again, I'd go for several hours without receiving any email, and discover that Outlook simply stopped checking, or something. I would shut down Outlook and start it up again, and then it would download all kinds of stuff from the previous few hours. It also took forever to start up Outlook (as much as several minutes sometimes), and the search capabilities were terrible, although I found a tool called LookOut that solved that problem. However, Microsoft bought the company that made Lookout, and changed the product into something called "Windows Desktop Search". Apparently Lookout itself is no longer available. I still have an install though - email me if you want it.

I started using Firefox as my default browser several years ago, and I love it, so when I found out that the same team made an email client called Thunderbird, I immediately downloaded it. I tried using it for a couple of days, but I could never get the LDAP stuff working, so searching the company address book for a name would not work. This was a big pain, so I decided to wait until that bug was fixed, and I went back to Outlook. A year or two later, I tried it again, and ran into the same problem. I asked another guy in my department how he got his to work, and he had no idea, it just did. Then we looked at mine, and it just didn't. We even went so far as to use a packet sniffer and point Thunderbird at a perl script that my boss wrote that acted as a proxy to the real LDAP server, and got nowhere with that either. After more searching, I found that this was a known bug in Thunderbird — the LDAP stuff did not work if IPv6 was installed on the machine. Since I was working on IPv6 for SQL Anywhere, I had it installed, which explained why it didn't work for me. I followed the progress of the bug for a while, and found that it was not going to be fixed until Thunderbird 2.0, so I had to shelve my plans to switch to Thunderbird yet again, though I did switch to using it as my newsreader at that time, and have been pretty happy with it in that capacity.

When I heard last week that Thunderbird 2.0 was being released, I got all excited, and downloaded it immediately. I tested the LDAP support and it worked, and it (relatively) seamlessly imported all my Outlook contacts and mail, and I've been using it for a week now. Honestly though, other than being faster than Outlook, I can't say I'm noticing much of a difference. It's better at dealing with junk mail, but I prefer Outlook's addressing — the To and CC lists consist of a single (expanding) text box where you can enter names separated by semicolons. The names are then expanded, and if more than one match is found, Outlook underlines it and you can right-click to choose the correct one. With Thunderbird, each address is listed on a separate line (so if you're sending an email to 20 people, you have this huge list of names, rather than one text box). When you enter a short form, it searches your address books until it finds one that matches, and then replaces the name with that address and stops searching. If I type "Kurt" to send an email to the guy in my department named Kurt (who wasn't in my personal address book), it searched the company directory, found someone named Kurt (probably the first one alphabetically), and used that address. There is no indication that the name wasn't unique. However, you can click "Contacts", which opens up a little sidebar that gives you similar functionality. I'm sure I'll get used to it and it'll be good enough — I'm just used to the way Outlook did it, not requiring the extra sidebar.

I should probably have waited until 2.0.1, or at least until a patch or two was released, since it crashes now and again, and I've even seen the same behaviour that I saw with Outlook — no email downloaded for a long time, but no error messages to say why, or even to indicate that there was a problem. But updates to Outlook were few and far between, while I'm sure there will be fairly regular updates to Thunderbird, so I'm going to continue with Thunderbird on the assumption that these irritations are a bit of short term pain that will eventually result in long-term gain. At least I'm supporting the open source community! That's good, right?

Open Source

Maybe I'm naïve, but I just don't get the big deal with open source software. I think it's great that people are willing to put their time and effort into writing it, documenting it, and supporting it, but there are people out there that believe that all software should be open source, and that commercial closed source software is generally a Bad Thing. While I can certainly see the advantages of open source software, I make my living writing closed source software. It's fairly simple: if Sybase didn't make revenue selling SQL Anywhere, I'd be out of a job.

Thinking about it a little more, I'm quite sure that I am naïve when it comes to open source, because I don't think I understand how it works. The extent of my knowledge about the process is this: there is a code repository somewhere on the web, and anyone can sync up to it and make changes to the code. But are there regular code reviews? Are there people checking every code submission to see if someone is adding bad code or trojans or anything like that? Who checks all the different platforms? Who runs regression tests to make sure that new features aren't breaking old features, or that performance isn't being affected? Who decides which new features go in and which ones don't? Surely there must be a full-time team of developers and managers that oversee all of these things, but how do they get paid? Who can afford to take on a full-time job that pays nothing? Is the open source world entirely populated by rich developers who don't need an income? I doubt it. Is it enough to have advertising on the web site and a "Please donate" button with a link to PayPal?

I just checked the OpenSSL web site, and it says specifically that the project is volunteer-driven. The Apache Software Foundation is a non-profit charitable organization, and their annual reports (complete with financial information) are listed on their website. However, according to the 2006 report, every officer of the company received $0 compensation, and the total revenue of the entire organization was under $150,000. Total compensation, wages, and benefits were $0. Again, are they all rich and don't need incomes? How do you squeeze in being a director or VP of such an organization if you already have a full-time job elsewhere?

I've been a professional software developer for over 15 years, so I probably should know the answers to these questions, and I'm feeling rather stupid that I don't. If you do, please leave a comment and let me know how this works. Maybe I should stick to blogging about my kids or sports.