Scaramouche! Scaramouche! Will you do the fandango?

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

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

Slate quotes little ol' me

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

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

Leafs, books, quirks, and Adam's fall

A few scattered things...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so it begins.

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

Bring it on.

Eric Clapton vs. Elton John

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

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

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

Am I a music thief, or not?

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

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

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

NLL season - back from the dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red Sox give Leafs fans hope

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

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

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

A fun weekend, and baseball's over

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

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

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

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

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

Don't tell me why you want to know

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

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

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

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

Just in case

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google just makes life better

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

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

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

NLL labour trouble... again

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another update: It's official.

My little chickadee

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

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

The Ratio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Windows reminder app

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

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

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

Super-size

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

Matthew Good
"Twenty-first Century Living"

Tory the Tory and MMP

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

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

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

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

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

Music meme

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

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

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

Ripping complete!

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

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

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

Audiobooks and a milestone

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

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

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

Dump and chase

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

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

Going green - what's the point?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Status update

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

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

Everyone wants their cut

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

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

Geocaching

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

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

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

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

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

ProgNOTsticator

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

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

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

More fun with the English language

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Gilmour

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

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

Blake ain't no Gretzky

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

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

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

classmates vs. facebook

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

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

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

9/11

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

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

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

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

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

More names from the past

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mobilizers baseball

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Layfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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