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.

Second round picks

Well, I was 7 for 8 with my first round picks in the NHL playoffs. Let's see how well I do in the second round:

• Buffalo over the Rangers
• Ottawa over New Jersey -- have to say I'm not sure about this one. Ottawa won their first round series in 4, so they've been sitting and waiting for a week, while New Jersey had a hard-fought series against Tampa Bay, and might be riding some momentum. Maybe I should just predict that this series will go 6 or 7 and not actually pick a winner.
• Detroit over San Jose
• Anaheim over Vancouver

Nicky's job

Part of a conversation Gail and I had with Ryan and Nicholas the other day:

Gail: We're the parents. It's our job to keep you guys safe, to protect you. It's also our job to teach you to be nice, polite, helpful, to help you learn, give you food and clothes, a place to sleep....
Ryan: Drive us to school?
Gail: Yes, that's another one. All of those things are part of our job as parents. Nicholas, what do you think your job is?

(Nicholas then rolled his eyes and gave a big sigh, as though he's given this same answer a hundred times before)

Nicholas: Remember my shoes.

No spare tire, thanks very much

One year ago today, I started my weight loss program (blogged about it last year). I'm basically following the Weight Watchers program, without actually joining Weight Watchers. So far, it's been a big success. When I started (April 19, 2006), I weighed 175.5 pounds, and by August 9, I was down to 160 even. Since then, I've hovered between 160 and 165 (maxing out at 165.5 twice) &mdash this morning I weighed in (for the third consecutive week) at 163.5.

I'm still following the program, but I've upped my points to 28 per day, and I don't count points on weekends, though I try not to go too crazy. I've been doing that for about six months, and I've been maintaining pretty well.

I was never concerned about my weight until about 10 years ago. We were looking at some pictures of a recent trip to Collingwood with some friends. One of the friends was quite pregnant with her second child, and she joked about how her first child kept running up to her, pointing to her expanding tummy, and saying "baby". While looking at the pictures, we came across one of me in a particularly unflattering pose. Gail jokingly pointed at my tummy and said "baby". Now that I think about it, it would be really unlike Gail to say something like that, so perhaps it was someone else. Might even have been me. In any case, that's when I resolved (it was December at the time) to get into better shape. Shortly after Christmas that year, we bought a treadmill, and I started cutting out snacks and stuff. I went from my high of 188 pounds down to 163 in four months. In the next few months I went up to around 170, and then stayed around there for a few years, though it kept slowly creeping up until I hit 175 again, and then Easter happened last year.

My ultimate goal is to never hit 180 pounds again. Right now, I would consider even getting to 170 as failure. I realize that I am almost for... for... f... well, I'm in my late thirties, and things will likely change, but for now I'm still eating pretty well most of the time, working out two or three times a week, and playing baseball again this summer. I think I look OK, and I feel great, so my short-term goal is not to hit 170 pounds before I turn for... for... f... oh, you know.

Doyle vs. Benesch

The Rock have now gone a full season without Colin Doyle. Are they a better team without him? Well, no, but that may not be all his doing; they also lost Brad MacDonald and Brian Biesel, and then traded away Rusty Kruger and Phil Sanderson halfway through the season, and they also had a rookie coach. Benesch, Fines, and Thompson tallied more points in total than Doyle did, but does that mean the Rock really won the trade? Hard to say. Doyle played very well with San Jose, who kind of pulled a Raptors — they were really bad last year (5-11 and a distant 5th in the west), and worse the year before, but this year they're 9-7 and they made the playoffs for the first time in 3 years — and they didn't just squeak into the playoffs like the Rock did.

Ryan Benesch looks like the "real deal", winning Rookie of the Month for February, Rookie of the Week a couple of times, and is a serious contender for Rookie of the Year. He will be a great player in the NLL for years to come. But then again so will Doyle, who already is a great player in the NLL, and has been for years. Josh Sanderson's point total dropped by about 15 this year — he seemed to enjoy passing to Doyle who would just power through the middle of the defense. Blaine Manning doesn't do that as much (Manning is still a very good player, but he's just not the player he was a couple of years ago), and Benesch doesn't either, but man, does that kid have some moves. Aaron Wilson also continues to improve, and no longer just waits around the left side of the net for someone to pass it to him; he can score from anywhere.

So with all of these kids doing well, plus veterans like Veltman and Driscoll (one of the best all-round players on the team, IMHO) around, and the ultimate clutch goalie Bob Watson in net, do the Rock stand a chance against the 14-2 Rochester Knighthawks this weekend? Nope. I really hope I'm wrong, but I think they're gonna get smoked.

Philadelphia is in a rebuilding phase right now — just look at the kids they have on their roster: Athan Ianucci, Geoff Snider (holy crap, is he ever good at faceoffs), Kyle Wailes, Ian Llord, Sean Greenhalgh, and Rob Van Beek — and their goalie Matt Roik is almost 10 years younger than Watson. They might have sucked just as much as Toronto this year (they ended up with the same record of 6-10), but let's see how the Wings are doing, say, two or three years from now, once all those kids have a few years under their belt. Compare that to the aging Rock, who will have to deal with the inevitable retirement (or at least decline) of Veltman, Watson, Ladouceur, and Driscoll. Wilson and Benesch have many great years ahead of them, and I believe the Rock got a first rounder for Phil Sanderson, but that's a lot of people (and talent) to replace.

First Round Picks

I looked at the hockey scores this morning and found that the winners of all four games last night were who I picked to win their respective series. Then I realized that nobody knew this because I hadn't posted my picks! So here I go:

• Buffalo over the Islanders
• New Jersey over Tampa Bay
• The Rangers over Atlanta
• Ottawa over Pittsburgh -- though I don't think I'd want to play Pittsburgh in next year's playoffs.
• Dallas Detroit over Calgary
• Anaheim over Minnesota
• Vancouver over Dallas
• Nashville over San Jose

I'll make my second round picks once the first round is done, but right now, I'm picking Buffalo over Detroit in the Cup final.

Wii!

I have been looking for a Wii for several Wiiks (everyone reading this is thinking "Oh, please don't start with the Wii jokes, they are Wii-lly annoying") months now, and have had no luck. I've called numerous stores numerous times, and they're always sold out, and nobody knows when they're getting any more. The other day, a guy at work, aListair (he always capitalizes the L) emailed me that the EB Games near him had a couple of consoles, and would I like for him to grab me one. Rather than asking where it was and getting off my lazy ass and going there myself, I just said sure and let him do my legwork for me. He went on his way to work, and came by my office yesterday morning with a Wii console. You da man aListair!

I set it up last night (no internet yet, maybe this weekend), and played a few games after the kids went to bed (by the time I got it set up, it was bedtime; it's not like I waited until they were in bed). I bought Wii Play on the way home, which is $59, but comes with a free controller! Well, it turns out that a more accurate description would be that it's a $49 controller that comes with a $10 game. The game itself is pretty good for practicing using the remote, but not much else. Wii Sports is much better — it turns out that I'm a bowling expert. Who knew? I figured out quickly that because of the way I throw it, the ball always spins to the left, so I managed to compensate for that, and did pretty well. I didn't manage to figure out why it goes to the left in the first place, but as long as you can compensate for it, it doesn't much matter. Hey, that's the same as my golf game!

We also rented some games from Blockbuster — Cars and Super Paper Mario. I never managed to figure Cars out, but I thought about it later, and I think you have to turn the remote sideways. I looked at Super Paper Mario as well, but the opening sequence (telling you the story) is, as aListair put it "very very very very very very verbose", so after a while I just went back to Wii Sports.

This morning, I read an article on how the Wii shortage "could last months". Thanks again aListair!

Speling - its important

I'm an English pedant. It annoys me when I read stuff that contains spelling, grammatical, or even punctuation mistakes. Here is an article about proper punctuation, and here is one about grammatical mistakes. The second one contains all kinds of things that annoy me: "would of" instead of "would have", "your" instead of "you're", and "it's instead of its" ("it's" is short for "it is" &mdash it's as simple as that).

A former boss of mine, Ed, used to say "irre-dis-regardless" instead of "regardless". He was a very clever and funny guy, so I am quite sure he was kidding around, and didn't actually believe that was a real word. We had a tool called "FIST", which was short for "FIle STorage", and one of my co-workers joked about the fact that "fist" sounded similar to the Polish word for (I think) potato. Ed, who was of Spanish descent, thought for a second and then told us that the closest you'd get in Spanish is "There was a bug but I fist it". (Say that quote with a strong Speedy Gonzalez accent to get the full effect.)

Now that I think about it, the FIST tool was the source of another joke. FIST had both a client component ("front-end") and a server component ("back-end"). One of our co-workers was in charge of the server component, and one day when he was working from home, someone asked where he was; the answer was that he was at home, doing the back-end FIST thing. Purely unintentional, but we all laughed for hours.

Mean people suck

Every now and again, you hear stories about people that give you a good feeling about people in general. You can call it faith in the goodness of mankind. My wife calls it a "warm fuzzy". You know, the people who find a bag full of money and find out where it came from and return it untouched, or donate a kidney to someone they barely know. Last Christmas, my wife went through the Tim Horton's drive-thru one morning and when she got to the window, she told the cashier that she wanted to pay for the person behind her (who she didn't know). It only cost her a couple of bucks, but she felt great for days.

And then there are these losers.

There's a guy in the office whose teenage son has cerebal palsy, and is confined to a wheelchair. As a way for his son, who cannot hold a regular job, to make a little bit of money, his father has a snack tray in the kitchen, with chocolate bars and chips and such for a buck each, and a little tin to collect the money. The snack tray has been there for a number of years. In the last week or so, he's had to move the tray to a table outside his office, because things are being stolen from the tray. He's now got a sign in the kitchen where the tray used to be saying "If you want to steal from me, come to my office and pick my pocket, and leave my son alone." I was hoping that it was someone who wanted a snack but didn't have the money at the time, and they figured they'd pay for it the next day — I have done this in the past (though I always leave a little signed IOU note), but apparently this was not an isolated incident, it's happened a number of times.

I put a case of chocolate bars and boxes of chocolate pieces in the kitchen the other day as part of a fundraiser for my kids' school, along with an envelope for the money. I dropped by the kitchen just a couple of hours later, and found that a box has been opened. What kind of person would just help themself? (Note: I also found at the end of the day that there was one dollar more in the envelope than I was expecting based on what was sold. Could be that the guilty party figured that they ate 1/3 of the box, so they left 1/3 of the cost. However, I did not list that as an option on the envelope — a box is $3, either you buy it or you don't.)

My kids' school held a silent auction in February to raise money for the science programs in the school. Local businesses donated items, gift certificates, etc. that were then auctioned off, and all the money raised went to the school. The minimum bid for each item was 1/3 of the item's value, and obviously the highest bid at the end of the night won the item. My wife is the chair of the school council, which ran the event, and she told me about some of the goings-on:

• Several people scratched out the minimum bid and bid something less. In at least one case, nobody else bid on the item, and the bidder expected to get the item for less than the minimum. When told she'd have to pay the minimum, she refused (though her father was standing right there and he offered to pay the minimum).
• One person (might have been the same person as in the first point) bid on a bunch of things and won several of them. When told what items she had won, she said that she didn't expect to win that many, and that she didn't want them all.
• One item wasn't being bid on, so the principal of the school announced over the PA that she was lowering the minimum bid. I might add here that the school is benefitting from the event, but it was being run by the school council, and so the principal had no authority to do this.
• There were two people (I'll call them A and B) bidding for one item, and they almost came to blows. Each accused the other of "cheating" - A said that B essentially hip-checked her out of the way to get to the bid sheet, and B said that she couldn't get to the bid sheet because A's husband physically blocked her. This did not get solved until several days after the event. Person B left us a very long voicemail message describing her view, and threatened to not attend anymore school fundraisers (effectively punishing the school) unless she got the item. Person A, who had ended up with the item after the auction, decided that it wasn't worth the fight and gave it to B. Strangely, the item was a gift certificate for the place where person A worked.

Mean people suck.

More separated at birth

Toronto Rock forward Josh Sanderson	Tobey Maguire, aka Spiderman

Baseball season and the Rock thump the Wings

Baseball season began yesterday! The Jays start their season today against the Tigers, and I'm pretty excited. The Jays had a pretty good season last year, finishing second in the AL East, and big things are expected this year as well. Well, hopefully, anyway. They added Frank Thomas and Matt Stairs to the lineup, increasing the offensive potency of an already-potent lineup. I think that having Vernon Wells sign a multi-year million billion gazillion dollar contract helped to convince them that the Jays were serious. Adding Royce Clayton at short won't make a huge difference, but it certainly won't hurt. I was kind of hoping that J.P. Ricciardi would add a stud arm to the pitching rotation during the off-season, or at least someone to replace Ted Lilly. He didn't, but Josh Towers looked more in spring training like the pretty good Josh Towers from two years ago than the woefully sucky Josh Towers who went something like 2-10 last year, and free agents Victor Zambrano and Tomo Okha look like pretty good signings. Last year, A.J. Burnett occasionally looked unhittable, but sometimes was quite hittable, so if he has more outings in the former category and less in the latter, he'll be fine, and if Gustavo Chacin can get over last year's injuries (though he had a lousy spring), the pitching staff should be no worse than last year, and possibly better.

In lacrosse news, the Rock have been playing downright lousy for most of this year, losing games to both New York and Edmonton, who are a combined 8-18. They are not only in danger of missing the playoffs for the first time in history (they missed the playoffs in their first season as the Ontario Raiders, but haven't since they moved to Toronto in 1999), but are also in danger, at 6-7, of finishing below .500 for the first time in history (they were 8-8 last year). However, when they played Philadelphia last Friday night, you'd never have known any of that. They kept the Wings scoreless in the entire first half (unheard of in lacrosse), and went on to win 15-6. Watson was very good in the first half, and amazing in the second, the defense was solid, and the offense was clicking. Ryan Benesch scored four goals for the third straight game, and is starting to make people forget Colin Doyle, though it's probably too early to say that. Doyle was not only a scoring machine, but he made the players he played with better as well -- look at Josh Sanderson and Blaine Manning. Sanderson has been fine this year, but Manning has been remarkably average, and is on pace to end up with less points than last year, which was down from the previous year. I can't imagine a player as good as he is (was?) has peaked at the age of 26, but he hasn't been injured or anything, so I can't explain it.

The Leafs are close to backing their way into the playoffs and I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, once they're in the playoffs, who knows what could happen (see Edmonton last year), but on the other hand, reality hits — the Leafs are simply not going to win the Cup this year (not that I didn't know that months ago). I remember thinking last year that if the Leafs don't make the playoffs, that'll send a message to management, who might make some serious changes to the team, rebuilding for the future. In that sense, not making the playoffs would be the best thing that could happen. They didn't make the playoffs last year, but management didn't do the necessary dump-and-rebuild, so we're in the same boat this year. If they don't make the playoffs this year, I have no confidence that the necessary changes will be made (i.e. trade all the big names, load up on draft picks and young kids, etc.), so we'll be in the same boat again next year, and the year after that, and the year after that... Given that, may as well squeak into the playoffs this year and hope for the best.

Trouble with the mixtlflap?

My car's in the shop right now — it started hesitating and even stalling every now and again (while driving) last weekend, and yesterday morning, I couldn't keep the engine running for more than a few seconds. Earlier this week, I had it into Canadian Tire three times — the first time, they guessed at something and replaced it ($90), this has no effect. The second time it sat in the parking lot all day because their scope wasn't working, and the third time they tried to hook it up to their newly-fixed scope, but it still wasn't working. On Thursday when I couldn't start it, I had it towed to the garage across the street (Al's Auto Service).

At the end of the day, I still hadn't heard back from Al, so I called to check on the status. He said that he had had it out earlier, and it ran fine, so he didn't yet know. I had to come into work today for a conference call, and Gail's away, so I had to rent a car (more on that later). I didn't know when I would be able to return the rental, so I asked Al if they were open on Saturday, and he actually laughed out loud at the thought of coming in to work on my car on a Saturday.

When I got home from work today, I finally heard back. They have no idea what the problem was, but it seems to be fixed now. He said they unplugged a bunch of things and plugged them back in, so it's possible that one of those connections was loose and is now OK. It's also possible that the problem has simply gone away temporarily, and it will stall on the way to work on Monday. Time will tell.

This is when I hate the fact that I know jack about cars. I can change my own air filter and windshield wipers, but that's about it. I have a vague idea on how the things work, but there are so many parts that I don't understand that I am always afraid I'm going to get taken to the cleaners when I go to the garage. I'm worried that I'll hear "We found the problem — your mixtlflap is burnt out. It'll be $850 to replace, plus two hours of labour. Replacing the mixtlflap is a serious thing, since you have to remove the flurbnarg first, and you know how hard that is." Sure I do, that's the thing that's right next to the flux capacitor, isn't it?

The car I rented is a Kia Rio. I'm actually more impressed with it than I thought I'd be. It's reasonably comfortable (at least as comfortable as my Sunfire), handles pretty well (it's quite small), and goes pretty fast. I looked at the speedometer at one point today and was surprised to find that I was doing 130 — I normally keep it around 110-115. It doesn't accelerate as fast as my Sunfire (which isn't all that fast itself), and acceleration is very loud, but once you're at cruising speed (or above!), it's very quiet. I haven't even looked at the trunk, but I suspect it doesn't hold very much, and the space in the back is fine for the kids, but I think that adults would find it rather cramped back there. But it has heated seats (or as I told Gail yesterday "seated heats"), a CD/MP3 player, power locks and windows, and remote keyless entry. Not bad for a car that starts at only $13,595.

Music quiz

Here's a little music quiz. See if you can name the band:

• They were very big in the 70's and early 80's
• Many of their songs are staples on classic rock radio
• Three-piece band, based in the UK
• The lead singer quit the band in the 80's and went on to a solo career
• Originally his music was fairly similar to that of the band, but he gradually went more and more towards soft rock (to the point where classic rock stations that play the band's music won't play his solo stuff)
• He worked on at least one movie soundtrack
• One other member of the band had some success on his own, the third one vanished
• The band recently reformed, and is now touring again

Obviously the answer is The Police, right? Wrong. Well, they fit all the criteria above, but the answer is Genesis. Phil Collins and Sting both went soft and started making some pretty lame music, Mike Rutherford of Genesis had some success with Mike and the Mechanics, and Stewart Copeland did quite well doing music for numerous movies and TV shows. Tony Banks and Andy Summers did nothing that I know of.

Weird how two completely different bands have so many similarities. I'd love to see the Police (though I'm not willing to pay the insane prices for tickets), though seeing Genesis doesn't really have that much appeal for me.

I was going to make a joke at the end of this posting, something like "Man, if only <band> would reform, that would be great!" where <band> was some band that was big in the 70's or 80's but then broke up, but I can't make such a joke, because I think all of the bands from that era already have reformed. Max Webster? April Wine? The Doobie Brothers? Styx? The Eagles? Yup, all within the last few years. REO Speedwagon? The Police? Genesis? Yup, they're touring now. Journey? Duran Duran? The Bay City Rollers? KC and the Sunshine Band? The Village People? Yup, according to Wikipedia, they're all touring now. Hmmmmmm... running out of bands.... hey, I know one!

Man, if only the Beatles would reform, that would be great!

Weirdest spam ever

I just got the weirdest spam message ever:

Subject: anti-spammers are lamers
From: Marilyn Rice [weirdingdweller's@iguanalover.com]

subj

regards, spammer.

The hell?

Belak and Janssen

So the Leafs have been saying for days that they were not looking for revenge against Cam Janssen for his late cheap-shot hit against Tomas Kaberle a couple of weeks ago. I heard interviews with numerous players, including Kaberle (who got a concussion on the hit and hasn't played since), and they all said the same thing - they're not thinking about revenge at all, they just want to worry about winning — the two points are more important than getting back at Cam Janssen. So what happens? Less than ten minutes into the game, Wade Belak goes after Janssen and fights him, and then all the players congratulate him after the fight, and after the game, they talk about what a great thing he did. What happened to "we're not thinking about revenge?"

And they wonder why people who don't follow hockey all that closely think that hockey players are a bunch of thugs, and that hockey is a violent game.

NetWare hell

Novell announced the other day that their next version of SuSE Linux (called Open Enterprise Server) will be able to run NetWare 6.5 as, essentially, a virtual machine. It also says that "This release of OES also spells the end of NetWare as a separate operating system", so that you will only be able to run NetWare as a VM.

SQL Anywhere has been supported on NetWare since the beginning, and I have been the sole NetWare developer on the engine team for most of the last ten years. With this change, I don't know if it makes sense to continue supporting NetWare, so it's possible that management will consider dropping NetWare as a supported platform. This would be fine with me, since NetWare is a difficult operating system to work with — the compiler is old and unsupported, the debugger is flaky and slow, and there are lots of idiosyncrasies specific to NetWare that I have to deal with.

The title of the above linked article is "Good-bye NetWare, hello, OES 2", so when viewing that page in Firefox, that's what the title bar says. When I minimized the Firefox window, I got this, which I thought was kind of appropriate:

Perl vs. Python

I'm not one to generally get involved in technical "religious" wars — vi vs. emacs, perl vs. python, Windows vs. Mac, etc. Each one has its advantages and disadvantages, and I have my preferences, but arguing about them is rarely productive. Having said that, there were a few comments on my previous (and completely unrelated) entry that raised the perl vs. python argument. I don't think perl is inherently unreadable, and it's certainly possible to write easy-to-read, coherent perl code, but in general, I tend to agree with Tom.

I am a professional software developer, and have been since my first co-op work term in 1988. (Aside: so is MC, and he's been doing this longer than I have.) I have written code in many different languages, including C, C++, Objective-C, perl, python, Java, REXX, Basic, PHP, Tcl, Lua, plus a few at university that I barely remember: Fortran, COBOL, Ada, Lisp, Prolog. Of these, the ones I use regularly in my job are C, C++, perl, and python. I know C and C++ inside out and backwards, but when I am writing any significant code in perl (i.e. more than a handful of lines), I almost always have the perl online documentation open in another window — that's not always true for python, and I've been writing perl code years longer than I've been writing python. I don't think that the perl code that I write is more complex than the python code, but the python syntax just seems more intuitive.

Say I have a list of filenames to process. In python:

files = [ 'file1', 'file2', 'file3', 'file4' ]
for i in files:
    # do something with i

Fairly straightforward. In perl:

my @files = qw( file1 file2 file3 file4 );
my $i;
for $i ( @files ) {
    # do something with $i
}

A little weird (what the heck does "qw" mean?), but not too bad. You could also use

my @files = ( 'file1', 'file2', 'file3', 'file4' );

which is a little more intuitive, though I had to check the perl docs to see whether to use parens or curly brackets.

A note before I go any further — in perl, there are a zillion ways of doing anything, so the code examples I'm listing here may not be the simplest way to do things. This, in itself, is part of my problem with perl — after ten years of writing perl, I should know how to do a lot of these relatively basic things, but without checking the documentation or an existing perl script, I frequently find that I don't. I've only been writing python for about 5 years, and I seem to remember its syntax and the majority of the language weirdnesses a lot more easily than perl.

OK, now, what if you want to add something to the list later? Python:

files.append( 'file5' )

Obviously, if you want to add to the end of a list, you "append" to it. Very intuitive. In perl? Well, I'm not sure. I'm currently looking through the perl documentation, and it's not obvious how to add an element to a list. I'm sure there's a way — maybe $foo += 'file5'; or $foo .= 'file5';. Maybe it's a documentation issue and not a language issue, but whatever way it is, it ain't obvious.

Another thing that confuses me about perl is there are a number of different "types" (scalars, arrays, and hashes), and you can seemingly convert one to the other whenever you want, and sometimes when you don't want. First of all, is a "list" the same as an array, or is it a special type of scalar? I don't know. Here's how to set up an array in perl:

@foo = ( 'a', 'b', 'c' );

Now, given that @foo = ( 'a', 'b', 'c' );, it would seem logical to me that the following two lines do the same thing:

$foo = ( 'a', 'b', 'c' );
$foo = @foo;

However, they don't. The first one takes the last element of the array and assigns it to $foo. (What happens to the rest of the array? And why would you do this?). The second, incredibly, assigns the length of @foo to $foo. If I want the length of an array, wouldn't it be more logical to say something like "foo = length( array )" (which, coincidentally, is the proper python syntax)?

This posting was not meant as a "perl sucks, python rules" rant. In fact, I don't think that at all. Perl is an exceptionally powerful language, and I do enjoy writing perl code. In particular, if I'm doing anything involving regular expressions or string manipulation, perl kicks python's ass all over the place. However, perl does not have the most intuitive syntax, and you can write completely unintelligible "Martian code" very easily in perl. There's even an online contest called Perl Golf to see who can write the smallest possible perl program to do a particular task — entries to this contest sometimes contain less than 50 bytes. Good luck writing anything remotely useful in python in less than 50 bytes. In addition, python requires correct use of whitespace to control program flow. Now, when I first learned this, my initial thought was "How stupid is that?", but I've since found that as long as you have a python-aware editor (emacs works nicely for me), this is not a big deal. The only drawback is that if you want to remove an entire section of code, you can't just put if( 0 ) { at the top and } at the bottom like you can in perl, C, or C++. Well, you can add if 0: at the top, but then you have to re-indent the entire block you want to remove. Again, with the right editor, this isn't a huge deal.

Bottom line: perl and python are both great languages, but I have found that the perl syntax is less intuitive and therefore harder to remember than python. Thus, I have more trouble reading old perl code than old python code.

Note: I'm going away on vacation tomorrow for a week, so if you add a comment to this post and I don't respond, I'm not ignoring you. I won't be back online until at least next Sunday (the 18th).

Channelling Andy Rooney

Have you ever noticed that when you make a phone call to a local number but dial a 1 first (as if it were a long-distance call), you get a message saying that you don't need to dial the 1, but then you have to hang up and dial again? Similarly, if you dial a number without a 1 that is long distance, you get a message saying that it's long distance and you need to dial a 1. But in both cases, your call does not go through. Why the hell not? If they want to give me a nastygram telling me what I should or should not have done, fine, but then put the damn call through. The technology exists. It's not rocket science. That's what happens on a cell phone, so why can't they do it on a land line?

The other day, I was making some phone calls at work to local businesses in the K-W area. Since I don't live in K-W, I don't know where I can call locally and where is long-distance, so in a few cases, I added a 1 when I didn't need to. Every time, I got the "You don't need to dial a 1" message, so I had to hang up and re-dial the number without the 1. Very frustrating.

When I call home with my cell phone, the call display stores the number with a 1 for some reason. If I then display the number, click the "dial" button, and then pick up the receiver, it dials "1-905-...", and then I get the message saying I didn't need to dial the 1. At that point, I need to hang up and dial the number manually. For our cell phone numbers, that's no big deal, but if it was a different number that I don't have memorized, I have to write the number down on a piece of paper and then pick up the phone and dial it. So much for modern technology.

This posting is yet another example of the hard-hitting hold-no-punches journablogalism that you'll find on Cut The Chatter. See, Whimsley, I can invent words too! Though yours kind of rolls off the tongue better than mine does.

Aside: Can you "channel" someone who's not dead?

Update: Just to prove that I invented this word myself:

"Best Buy" may not be

Best Buy has admitted having an intranet web site that is identical to the public web site, except that the prices aren't always the same. Apparently the idea is that customers would come into the store asking about an item at a certain price, and the employees would then check the "web site", showing the customer that the price has gone up. I have heard numerous complaints about Best Buy — not just that their salespeople are pushy (that's true at a lot of places), but that they try to cheat customers and dupe them into paying higher prices. I've only been in Best Buy once, looking for something specific (don't even remember what it was), and I didn't buy whatever it was there, but because of all these stories I've heard in the past, I have been hesitant to shop there. After this latest one, they're on my "boycott" list. Not that I really had a boycott list before (I can't think of any other stores that I absolutely refuse to go to), but I have one now, and Best Buy's on it. This is a little unfortunate, since I'm in the market for a Wii, and they're rather hard to find. Removing one store from my list of possibilities will make it even harder to find, but, you know, standing up for your principles and all that.

Yappa Ding Ding wrote the other day about problems she had recently with Dell's website. This is unfortunate, since we're considering buying a new computer in the near future, and I was going to check out dell.ca. I probably still will, but I will be much more defensive if I end up having to speak with a salescritter.

The Observer Effect

We had a "parent observation day" in Nicholas' kindergarten class today. This is when a few parents sit in on the class for a while (90 minutes), and just observe (a) how the class runs, and (b) how their child behaves while in class. We were not supposed to assist him at all, we were just supposed to sit and watch. Of course, Nicky was an angel while we were there. We sat and watched him sit and read with two other kids with minimal incident — one of the kids wouldn't let Nicky hold the book, and rather than yelling and hitting (which he would do with Ryan), he calmly told the teacher what was happening. Nicky loves to throw stuff — I doubt he could go an hour and a half at home without throwing something, unless he's asleep or watching Scooby-Doo on TV, but he didn't throw anything the entire time we were there. Just before we left, his teacher came over and told us that Nicky was having "a stellar day".

This would seem to me to be a prime example of the Observer Effect, where the act of observing something changes it. (I have referred to this in the past as the "Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle", but according to Wikipedia, this is incorrect.) Nicky knew we were in the corner watching, so he behaved better than he might have otherwise. The only way around this would be to install a video camera somewhere where the kids wouldn't see it, don't tell them about it, and watch the whole thing from another room. But then some parents would go all "civil rights" and "Big Brother" on us and sue the school for mental anguish or some bullshit like that.

Of course, it's possible that I'm not giving Nicky enough credit — we all have our good and bad days, and perhaps he's just having a good day. He did get a lot of sleep last night, and ate a fair-sized breakfast, and we did get to watch in the morning before he gets tired, so maybe our presence didn't have that much of an effect.

Trade Deadline

Today is the trade deadline in the NHL, so teams have until 3:00 this afternoon to decide whether they are going to make a run at the playoffs, or trade away players that will become free agents at the end of the season, thereby getting something for them, instead of getting zilch later. This, traditionally, is the most frustrating day of the season for Leafs fans. This is the day when the Leafs management decides that they are going to take a run at the playoffs, so they need some kind of veteran help, and they trade away prospects and/or draft picks for someone past his prime. This year, there have been rumours of Gary Roberts returning to Toronto, and I love Roberts as a player, but the Leafs need to realize that they have no chance of winning the Cup this year, so adding someone like Roberts would serve no purpose.

There are also rumours about the Leafs getting Bill Guerin, but to do that, they'd have to give up — guess what? — prospects and draft picks. Once again, if this happens, the Leafs will be trading away their future for a hopeless shot at winning the Cup this year. All that giving up the prospects and picks will do is guarantee that the Leafs will be in the same situation next year, and the year after that, and the year after that...

I've said it before and I'll say it again — the Leafs need to blow up the team and start over. Signing the formerly somewhat-overrated and now vastly overpaid Bryan McCabe was a mistake. I like Kaberle, so I don't have a big problem with signing him long-term (especially since he's not getting McCabe-type money), and they just re-signed Darcy Tucker, but for only $3 million a year, so that's not bad at all. I love Sundin, but I think they need to trade him now, while they can still get something for him, and start stocking up on the aforementioned prospects and draft picks, rather than trading them away.

Heard on the radio this morning — the Leafs would like to trade Pavel Kubina back to Tampa. They don't want anything back for him; they'd just send him back to Tampa, with a note saying "My bad". :-)

I've only been really following basketball for a year or two, but it seems that Raptors GM Bryan Colangelo is very well respected in the league, and with good reason — in less than a year, he's turned the Raptors from a laughing stock into a conference-contending team. They're not likely to win a championship this year, but they could be a serious contender within the next few years. Whenever I hear him being interviewed, he gives an air of not just confidence, but control. He is in complete control of the team, and has a plan for it. When I hear the GM of the Blue Jays, J.P. Ricciardi, talk, he gives me the same impression. The Leafs GM, John Ferguson, however, always gives me the impression that he's doing whatever he can to just stop the bleeding. He's not trying to make the team tangibly better, he's just trying to keep it from getting too much worse. Unless the Leafs turn it around in a big way this season (i.e. make the playoffs and win at least one round), they really need to get rid of Ferguson.

Update: The Leafs made one deal today — trading away 23-year-old prospect Brendan Bell and a draft pick for 35-year-old veteran Yanic Perreault. Same ol' same ol'. Sigh.

Science vs. Faith

Click.

The calliope crashed to the ground

I just bought The Essential Bruce Springsteen from amazon.ca — $20 for a triple CD! There's a lot of great stuff on here, though I get the impression that I'm going to listen to disk one a lot more than the other two. The first song is 1973's "Blinded by the Light", which was covered by Manfred Mann's Earth Band in 1977. The Springsteen version is very upbeat, almost dance-able, but the lyrics are frequently indecipherable. The Manfred Mann version is much better known, and is a little more "interesting", in that there are more speed changes, guitar licks, and keyboard fills. The lyrics are obviously the same, but I can understand them a little better (in that I can hear the words - I have no idea what the song actually means). I've always loved the Manfred Mann version — this is one of the fairly rare times that I prefer the remake of a song to the original.

I've always been impressed with people who are creative, like songwriters and artists and such. I can't draw worth a damn, but I'd love to be able to. Gail says that writing software is creative, and I suppose it is (you could even consider it an "art" if you try), but it's not the same thing. I can play the guitar, but creating music rather than playing something that someone else wrote seems much harder. Just as difficult, I would think, is the ability to take a song that someone else wrote and re-work it, as Manfred Mann did on this song, or as Joe Cocker did on his version of the Beatles' "With A Little Help From My Friends". It's kind of hard to believe that this is the same guy that wrote recorded the bubblegum "Doo Wah Diddy Diddy" twelve years before (according to Wikipedia, Manfred Mann didn't write that song either).

You Suck

Went to the third Toronto Rock home game of the season tonight. They played pretty sloppy, and Watson was kind of shaky in the first half. They were down 8-3 at one point and went into halftime losing 8-4, but rookie coach Glenn Clark must have given them some kind of pep talk at halftime. They didn't exactly come out in the 3rd quarter guns-a-blazin', but they did score 4 goals in the third to tie it up. Whipper, and the defense in general, was much better in the second half, only allowing two goals, and the Rock won it 11-10. I love those Rock comeback wins — they had a couple of games last year, both against Philadelphia if I'm not mistaken, where they came back from 8-goal deficits to win the game.

One thing you see (well, hear) at lacrosse games that you don't hear anywhere else (at least, I never have) is the "Sucks" cheer. When the opposing goalie allows a goal, a bunch of people stand up, point to the goalie, chant his name three times, and then yell "YOU SUCK!". The Chicago goalie was Brandon Miller, so tonight's chant went "MILL-er, MILL-er, MILL-er, YOU SUCK!" I suppose it's a little juvenile, but it's all in good fun (otherwise you wouldn't yell it when a goalie allows his fourth goal while your own team's goalie has already allowed eight).

The fans in Philadelphia go one better — in Philly, everyone on the opposing team sucks. Before the game starts, they announce the starting line-ups for each team (don't know why they don't announce the starting lineup for the opponents in Toronto), and after every opposing player's name, the fans yell "SUCKS!" Some players, notably Portland goaltender Dallas Eliuk who played 15 seasons in Philadelphia, hear the "SUCKS!" cheer following their name, immediately followed by applause.

Note: I created all of the Wikipedia pages I linked to above.

The CENSORED Monologues

The popular play "The Vagina Monologues" ran into some trouble recently (I think this was in Florida somewhere, but I can't find the link), when a woman driving her niece by the theater was "offended" when the young girl (don't know how old she was) read the marquee and asked what a vagina was. She complained to the theatre, and they changed the marquee to read The "Hoohaa" Monologues (including the quotation marks). How stupid is this? It's not like "vagina" is some vulgar or dirty or even slang word. I know that if my son read a marquee that said The Vagina Monologues, he would probably just ignore it. If, however, he read The "Hoohaa" Monologues, he'd laugh at it and make a big fuss, and ask what a "Hoohaa" is. He already knows what a vagina is (well, I'm not sure he knows what one is, but he knows that girls have one and boys don't, and he doesn't consider the word dirty or taboo or anything), but I know that he'd never let go of the word "hoohaa", and we'd be hearing it all the time. In any case, any child old enough to read the word vagina is old enough to be told what it is and that it's not a dirty word.

This reminds me of one of my favourite "my kid is so cute" stories, from when Ryan was just two years old. Gail and I were going out, and we got a babysitter for Ryan (Nicky wasn't even born yet, so Ryan was definitely two). He was sitting at the table finishing his dinner, and Lindsay the babysitter came in and sat down next to him. She said hi, and he put down his fork, looked at her silently for a couple of seconds, and then said matter-of-factly, "You don't have a penis." Lindsay, to her credit, didn't even flinch, but confirmed his suspicion. He nodded and went back to his dinner, apparently satisfied with her response.

Daddy, what's public key cryptography?

I was working on an HTTPS issue today, and Ryan came to talk to me. While he was watching, I figured out what was causing the problem, which was related to the SSL handshake. Ryan asked about the handshake, and I tried to give him a laymans-terms overview of what it was. Before I started, I started to picture in my head what the conversation might be like:

Me: When an SSL connection is made...
Ryan: What's SSL?
Me: When you want a connection to be encrypted...
Ryan: What's "encrypted" mean?
Me: When two processes are talking...
Ryan: What's a "process"?
Me: <sigh>.

Here's how I described it:

Me: If I want to send a message to another computer, I write the message on a kind of postcard, with the address of the other computer on it, and then I send it. The postcard goes out, sometimes on a wire, in this case through the air –
Ryan: Like radio waves?
Me: Exactly. Then the other computer receives the postcard, checks the address, and figures that the postcard is for him. Then he reads the message. But, if there's another computer nearby, it can look at the postcard too, even though it's got someone else's address on it. So if I want to send a secret message to a computer that's my friend, I don't want that other computer to be able to read it. So, I take the data on the postcard, and mush^* it all up, and change it, and make it look funny. My friend knows that it's mushed up, and it un-mushes it and gets the original secret message out. But the other computer doesn't know this, so it looks at the message and says "Huh? What's that mean?"
Ryan: <giggle>
Me: When we first start talking, I tell my friend "Hey, I'm going to mush up this data, and here's how I'm going to do it." and I give him some stuff that allows him to un-mush the message — that's called the "handshake".
Ryan: Like this? <shakes my hand>
Me: Yes, just like that. It's a way that two computers say "hello, I'm going to send you some mushed data, here's how to un-mush it".
Ryan: That's cool.

^* – Important note: Note that "mush" as used here rhymes with "bush" or "push", not "hush".

Then I gave him some examples of why you'd want to do this — when I order a book from amazon.com (I thought of this because I pre-ordered the 7th Harry Potter book today), I give them my credit card number. I don't want someone else to figure out my credit card number, or they might go to amazon.com and say "Hi amazon.com, it's me, Graeme. I'd like to buy 500 books and charge it to this credit card", and he gets the books, and I have to pay for it. Ryan has a fairly limited sense of the value of money, but he gasped at this, obviously realizing that this would be a Bad Thing. Either that, or I just gave him a brilliant idea for how to get free stuff, and started him on his way to being a career criminal. Heh heh heh... oops.

This shouldn't be happening yet!

Ryan was working on some homework the other day, and asked for some help. (He's in Grade 2.) He was doing some logic puzzles, which I used to love as a kid. The first one was: There are four birds sitting on a fence. Colour each of them according to these rules:

1. The blue bird is not last
2. The yellow bird is between the green bird and the blue bird
3. The red bird is first

"OK, this is easy", I thought. Yellow is between green and blue, so we have GYB somewhere. Since blue is not last, it must be GYBR. But the last clue says that red is first, so it must be RGYB. But that makes blue last, so that's wrong too. I must have looked at this for a couple of minutes before telling Ryan that there must have been a typo somewhere, since the puzzle is not solvable. He skipped it and went on to the next one.

Later, I was going to show it to Gail, and make some kind of joke about the fact that they gave Ryan an impossible question to answer, when I noticed that the birds had all been coloured in. I looked at the colours, and smacked myself in the head for being so stupid. Of course the question was not impossible. When it said yellow is between green and blue, I assumed that meant GYB in that order — it actually meant BYG. Putting red first (as clue 3 dictates) gives you RBYG, which fits all the clues. Boy, did I feel like a moron.

I knew there would come a time when I would not be able to help Ryan with his homework. I just figured I had a couple more years....