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Michael L. Davenport

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Organizational systems for movies[Mar. 14th, 2010|05:28 am]
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I was in GenX renting movies yesterday afternoon. For those outside the city, GenX is a local independent movie rental place. They're great for having obscure stuff and having actual variety (as opposed to Blockbuster or Rogers, which will dedicate an entire wall to one movie.)

Those big block stores arrange movies by genres, and then arrange movies within genres by title. That means with those two bits of information, you can find whatever movie you're looking for.

Every time I visit GenX, I try to figure out more about their system. This is because my preference would be to find the movies I want entirely without help.

(Side note: I hate asking for help finding things in stores. This has nothing to do with shyness or "men can't ask for help" or anything like that. It's because I used to work in customer service, and I hated getting asked questions when it's clear the customer put zero effort into finding the information themselves. Want to know where the Marshmallow Fluff is? Okay, that's fair — it's an obscure product in a strange location. I'm happy to get an interesting question, and happy to help you. Want to know where the mustard is? It's in the isle with the giant, giant sign that says "condiments". It's sitting next to all the ketchup, relish, and salad dressing. You didn't even try to look, did you? I hate you.)

I talked to the girl working there to get her to explain the system to me. I knew new releases were on the top shelf, but I thought the whole store was organised by director besides that. Turns out that it's organised by genre and director, depending on how obscure the movie is.

Me: So that means I have to know how obscure a movie is before I can go look for it?
Girl: ... well, you could always ask one of us to find it for you.

I tried to find a movie on my own. Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I was so prepared for GenX, I had even looked up the director before I left for GenX. But I couldn't find it.

Me: I can't find John Hughes. There's nothing between Ron Howard or Peter Jackson.
Girl: Oh! He has his own section in the back, under "Teen movies." And indeed he did.

The signs posted in the store say something along the lines of, "it really does make sense, once you get used to it." And I believe them. Standing in GenX and thinking about it, I came to the following conclusion:
Systems that make sense for geeks aren't the same as systems that make sense for normal people.

Thinking about it for a moment, the GenX system offers advantages over the typical organisation system. First off, grouping movies by director makes it easier to find movies of a similar tone and style. Instead of traipsing all over a big store fetching Big Fish, Edward Scissorhands, and Nightmare Before Christmas, I can just head to Tim Burton. Which is the sort of thing these people do.

Also, the genres used to sort movies in GenX are more specific, which also cuts down hunting time. The genres cast a wider net, too. I doubt Blockbuster has a "Queer film" section. Nor will they ever get one.

The only cost to the GenX system is you have to know a lot more about movies to use it. Which the people there do.

In any case, even though I still don't really know the GenX system, I appreciate it. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get on tinkering with my Linux.

Movie geek reaction to this post: "You had to look up that Ferris Bueller's Day Off was directed by John Hughes? Pfft."
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Ubuntu 9.10 still not ready for the masses[Mar. 10th, 2010|12:35 pm]
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It's a long story (and a half-written post), but I am now running Ubuntu 9.10. And I just had a disappointing experience.

I have two computer screens. It's common enough nowdays. I've never had much trouble with the two screens in Windows, but it's always a PITA in Linux.

When I was in Ubuntu a couple of days ago, I managed to set everything up as such: one big virtual desktop, with the taskbar and launchbar on the left screen (the LCD, and the screen closer to my face.) When I just rebooted into Ubuntu, both screens had nothing but the wallpaper (and an identically placed mouse pointer) on them.

"Oh no," I thought to myself. "Ubuntu thinks both of these monitors should be displaying the right side of the screen." A quick test with the mouse pointer confirmed my hypothesis. So I hit ctrl+shift+F1 to get to the command line interface. I logged in, opened /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and changed the size of my virtual display from "2560 x 1024" to "1280 x 1024". I rebooted and all was well.

It took me five minutes. But it struck me: the average person couldn't do that in five minutes. From diagnoses to resolution, there are several steps in there that would send the average computer user running to the help forums. If that happened to my father, he'd send me a text message saying his computer isn't working. And even though I was able to fix the problem, I shouldn't have to deal with this crap anymore.

Conclusion: 2010 is not going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
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Zero energy, linux problems[Mar. 7th, 2010|09:25 am]
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Ugh.

I'm not sick, I just feel like I have no energy to do anything. I spent pretty much the entirety of yesterday in bed, with a massive headache. Again, I don't think I'm sick — I think that's a combination of caffeine withdrawal and not eating enough.

Even so, I have lofty goals for today. I want to post twice. I also want to fix my Ubuntu partition, which has been broken since last summer. The particular error is really, really annoying: it won't let me log in. Every time I enter my username and password, I just get dumped back at the login screen.

We'll see if I can fix that today. I'd like to be running Linux locally so I can work on my EIC transition report.
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Streetlight under repair - UPDATE[Mar. 2nd, 2010|07:02 pm]
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The wavering streetlight I blogged about last Thursday is now missing. I suppose there was something wrong with it after all.

Streetlight under repair
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Stupid olympic commercials[Feb. 28th, 2010|02:20 pm]
There's this one commercial which really irritates me. It shows a bunch of kids on horses, and them the camera goes out of focus. "Instead of making an expensive coffee commercial, we gave 21 disables kids riding lessons." The camera pans over and the product (I forget which brand of coffee) is rolled on screen on a rickety cart. It's supposed to be cute.

And the commercial angers me, because it's being so disingenuous.

Do you know what the most expensive part of a commercial is? I guarantee for a commercial like that, the most expensive part is buying the airtime. They still spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, they just happened to also spend tens of thousands on riding lessons for kids.

They could have given riding lessons to hundreds of kids, but then you wouldn't know about it, would you?

Moral posturing bothers me. Just make a real commercial already.
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A million kinds of everything[Feb. 26th, 2010|02:21 pm]
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I was out with my father on Sunday. He usually takes me out for groceries on the way home (I am still living like a student) so I picked up a bag of potatoes. But instead of getting the Yukon gold potatoes as I have been, I decided on a bag of red potatoes.

Tuesday night I boiled one of each, and can confirm that the Yukon gold potatoes are indeed better than the reds when boiled. But the recommendations on the potato bags indicate that red potatoes are better for home fries, so I'm going to try that next.

Despite not spending a lot of time in my kitchen, having a bit of income means I can experiment and explore the varieties of everything. For example, when I was unemployed, I defaulted to red onions for all recipes. Red onions are fairly inexpensive, and all-around delicious. But I've found that if I'm going to be frying a mess o' onion to pile onto a hamburger, sweet white onions work much better.

Also, true to [info]ink_13's suggestion a while ago, I found I enjoy gala apples more than either red delicious or granny smith.

My mother cooks, so as a child I was vaguely aware of the different kinds of onions. But I don't believe I ever thought the differences between different potatoes to be more than skin-deep. Same for apples. And children aren't exactly taught about the different kinds of everything, either. I suppose it makes sense to make everything too complicated for a child still learning to tell apples from oranges, but still it's a shame. Some of my friends (nominally all adults) are still unaware that there are different kinds of apples, potatoes, onions, everything. That's what spending zero time in the kitchen does to a person.

To be fair, I'm still exploring that world myself. Does anyone have any suggestions for varieties of anything I should try?
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Streetlight blowing in the wind[Feb. 25th, 2010|09:24 pm]
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I was waiting to take the #13 home from campus when I saw this. Is it just me, or is does the streetlight have a little too much "give"?



I called the 24 hour plant-ops line as soon as I got home. I was told that someone would look into it.
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The Art and Science of Good Spending at the Black Hole Bistro[Feb. 24th, 2010|11:50 am]
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I am catching up on my email, getting back to my "float" of 79 unread messages.

I decided to read one email titled "The Art and Science of Good Eating at the Black Hole Bistro". Sometimes I just archive the Perimeter Institute emails without reading them, but I like food (as you'll see from my post later today) so I decided to read it.

Chef Frank Dodd, Hillebrand Winery

March 26, 2010 @ 6:30 pm
Gastronomy
Groan. "Gastronomy" is a real word, but there's no way the person who wrote the email doesn't realize it's also a terrible pun.
Chef Frank Dodd is the former Head chef at Langdon Hall - he will be bringing with him expertise in the 'Sous-vide' cooking method as well as foods from the Niagara Peninsula and wines crafted at Hillebrand Winery. Read More »

$125/Ticket (includes 4 course dinner, wine pairings, tax, and gratuity)

$85/Ticket (includes 4 course dinner, non-alcoholic beverages, tax, and gratuity)

$125 a ticket? I heard from [info]timmyson that the black hole bistro was expensive, but that's pretty rich. Has anyone ever been there? Can someone tell me whether it's worth it?

I mean, that's per person. Imagine you'd want to (I know this is crazy talk) bring a date or something. That's $250 for a two-person outing! For that money, you might as well go to real fancy places.

Yes, I realize one could save $40 by not getting the wine. But, I'd get the wine. I like wine. And in general, if I'm going to set out to have "an experience", I try and avoid the "lite" version. To me, that price tag says it's $125, or I'm better off not going at all.

I feel like I should have been drinking a glass of wine just to read the email, so I could do a good spit-take all over my computer screen.

The Wikipedia entry for spit-take represents one of the few times I've been disappointed with the site. These are not good examples of spit-takes.

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More security questions[Feb. 20th, 2010|05:53 pm]

To get the agenda for this year's Imprint AGM printed, I created an account on the Staples copy centre website. Aside from the usual (name, email address, etc.) I was faced with a list of security questions.

I hate security questions.

Unlike my bank, Staples wouldn't even let me write my own question — I had to pick one from the list. Here is the complete palette of security questions I had to choose from:

  • What was your childhood nickname?
  • What was the name of your favorite childhood friend?
  • What street did you live on in third grade?
  • What school did you attend for sixth grade?
  • What was first pet's name?
  • What are the last 5 digits of your driver's license number?
  • What is the name of your elementary / primary school?
  • What is your mother's maiden name?
  • In what town was your first job?
  • What is your spouse's mother's maiden name?
  • What is the country of your ultimate dream vacation?
  • In what country were you born?
  • What time of day were you born?
  • What is your favorite book?
  • In what year was your mother born?
  • What is your father's middle name?
  • What is your grandmother's first name?
  • What was the model of your first car?
  • What is the name of the High School you graduated from?
  • What year did you graduate from High School?
My problem is most of those are matters of public record, easy to find out. My high school, parents names, and town of residence are documented. Those that aren't strictly part of the public record are bits of trivia. Anybody who knows me reasonably well could answer almost all of those questions.

The evil part of me wants to take all these stupid, stupid security questions, and put them in some pointless online meme.Then when the results get sent back to me, I'll spend an afternoon out phishing.

"Gone fishin'": 112,000 Google image results. "Gone phishin'": 773 Google image results.

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Carnie's Christmas 2009[Feb. 15th, 2010|04:07 pm]
Happy Family day, everybody.

So, here is a video of family from last Christmas. I've been meaning to post it for a while. I don't know if anyone else will get any entertainment value out of it whatsoever, but it makes me smile.



Mother, I apologize for putting a video containing you in pyjamas on the internet.

Edit: Year changed to be correct. Christmas 2010 hasn't happened yet.
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Role of the Feds President[Feb. 13th, 2010|11:01 pm]
[Current Location|Canada, Toronto -- Internet cafe on College and Oslington]

I've been thinking a bit about Allan Babor's failure to get re-elected, and the role of the Feds president on the UW campus.

The president of Feds has to have a foot in two worlds: the realm of UW administrators, and the realm of students. The president needs to ensure communication between these two groups of people, via all the committees and bodies the president sits on, and via interaction with the students. It's necessary for the president to relate to both groups of people — A diplomat is useless if (s)he only speaks one language.

Babor had a perception of being in bed with the administrators. The real problem, and the thing that cost him the election: he was.

The best visual of this was at the UW branding town hall he organized and held. It was basically a presentation being held by Meg Beckel, and Allan was relegated to being the person to advance her slides. "Next slide, Allan," and Babor poked at a laptop, advancing Beckel's slideshow. He was the admin's monkey.

I believe that Babor thinks he was just acting in the best interest of the students by being so cozy with admin. But it's clear from the complaints that arose during the election, and from his failure to get re-elected, and that he mentions the names of administrators so often (while rarely mentioning the names of students) that he didn't really listen to the students at large. Andrey (IIRC) accused him of merely being the UW admin's salesman, selling their ideas to students. I think there's some truth to that accusation.

The Feds president can't go in the opposite direction, either. If the Feds prez is all, "Fuck da police! David Johnston is the man!" then that's just as bad. Admin won't listen to the president, and by extension won't listen to students. The Feds president should be talking and listening to David Johnston, and Meg Beckel, and all the UW admin...but not only them. Students count too.

I hope the next Feds president, Brad Moggach, can do a better job of finding balance, and having one foot in both worlds.

This could have been an Imprint editorial, but I've spent enough editorial time talking about the characters involved in the drama that is Feds. Something else next time.




I apologize for the hasty writing, and any errors you might see. I'm in an internet cafe with two minutes remaining. Going to a club with UW friends after a long day at the auto show with other UW friends. Among all the Feds and Imprint craziness, I must find time for a life.
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The recipient of generosity[Feb. 12th, 2010|05:39 pm]
[Current Music|Rammstein - Sonne]

Usually, I see February as a month of hell. I do not look forward to it.

But as I sit here eating food given to me by a friend, listening to music on headphones given to me by another friend, I can't help but think that people have been really, really kind to me lately. Unprecedented levels of kind.

Thank you all.
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403'd![Feb. 10th, 2010|11:53 am]
I just updated my Facebook status and twitter to reflect the contents of this post.

I browsed to vote.feds.ca from home. I entered no credentials. Apparently, I'm not allowed to view the page.


Feds 2010 ballot lockout
Feds 2010 ballot lockout
Taken the morning of Wednesday, February 10, 2010

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Business card design[Feb. 10th, 2010|11:40 am]
Today the Daily Bulletin posted UW's new business card designs. Here they are.

Waterloo



Waterloo


The first design there is the actual "new" design, while the second design is the "old" design. If I'm reading the bulletin correctly, the "old" design will be phased out. Business cards featuring that design are limited, and will eventually be depleted. That means everyone will be stuck with the new design.

And the new design is bad.

Oh, it looks slick. That swooping black area, the electric lines. The card is very pretty to look at. But it's not pretty to read.

What's the most important part of the business card? The name. But even with the name bolded, I feel like it'll get lost among all of that text. The name feels boxed in by the "Waterloo" wordmark. I like UW's old cards a lot more in that respect — the logo is still to the left, but the actual name has only whitespace on that border. The name juts out. Functional.

Here for comparison are the more traditional-looking Imprint business cards I designed.

Imprint card


I think these are superior: the name can be found easily by scanning along the left hand side. It's bolded and separated from the other text. Also the cards have our faces on them, which is very useful for people remembering us from conferences — but I don't expect UW to go that far.

I note with amusement the vertical text in Waterloo's new cards. It seems to be a growing trend both in UW's branding and in Imprint, incidentally. Today's youth will learn to read sideways.

Here's the most basic principle in design philosophy: Form follows function. Form follows function. That means function comes first, got it? Let me say it again. Form follows function.

Perhaps fewer people would be confused by that design philosophy if "function" was the first word in the sentence.
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2010 FASS involvement[Feb. 8th, 2010|12:01 am]
I wasn't involved with FASS this year, except that I wrote most of 1-1, and that I was a cameo.

Thursday night, I walked to Hagey Hall from the Imprint office. I met people there in the loud room. Once it had been established what I would do, I had a few free minutes. Mostly, I stood there and smiled.

Here is what was going through my head: for once, I was in a busy environment in the middle of production, but if something goes wrong it's not my problem. If anything, anything goes wrong at Imprint, it becomes my problem. But at FASS, I am not in charge of anything. If something goes wrong, the most I have to do is not get in anybody's way.

I didn't know the weight of responsibility was so omnipresent until I was at FASS, and it was gone. It was cause for smiling.

After my cameo, I walked back to Imprint. Back to the world of responsibility.

I still haven't figured out my short term plans after April 1. But, I think my next job will be one where I don't have to be so responsible. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy being EIC, but I do need a break. I look forward to being a student again, just for a little while.
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The Start of Surreal[Feb. 1st, 2010|12:05 pm]
It's only been February for 12 hours, and already it's bloody surreal. There are people trying to sell gum in the SLC. Ping pong and (fake) pretty girls in miniskirts, trying to push gum on people. "Trendy" music is playing. It's the sort of thing that's generic university, thus it feels out of place on our campus.

And ten metres away from that, there are girls trying to raise money for Haiti.

And then there was a basket of free apples at Turnkey. Random.

There's more to my morning than that, but that's all I can talk about here.
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The last Media Forum[Jan. 30th, 2010|12:02 pm]
I was asking questions on behalf of the media at the Feds media forum yesterday afternoon.

It was the third time I had done so; I was also asking questions for Imprint in 2008 and 2007. I was a candidate in 2006. And 2005...let's just say I had more important places to be in 2005.

I was asked after the media forum how it went by quite a few young politicians. I told them, "It was a media forum." Me and other old codgers (in student politics terms) agreed that there was nothing outstanding about it.

Side note: it does interest me how the technical details of the forum change from year to year. Some years candidate responses are timed (2006, 2010) and other years they are not. Personally, I am a fan of time-limited responses. Anyone else remember the 2008 VPI race? Falcao vs Hayle? They were both ramblers.

But details like that aside, it is the same every year. I try to get executive candidates to talk about specifics, they either answer or dodge. There were some specific answers which satisfied me, but also a lot of dodging. But truthfully, it's not the candidate's fault.

When I ran for VPI in 2006, Lawrence Lam asked all of us if we were ready for the job, and explicitly stated it was a yes/no question. Of course, we all said yes. I should have gone with my gut instinct and refused to answer, because that is the dumbest question you can ask a candidate. Of course they'll say yes, and of course the actual answer is no. (Hey Lawrence: have you stopped beating your wife? Yes or no.)

You can't know what it's like until you've done it. That a truth that applies to being a Feds executive as well as being Imprint editor-in-chief. It's easy to come in with all these great ideas which (you believe) will effect change. But the real question is who will implement those ideas. You might think you will, but it's easy to underestimate the amount of effort it takes to put out fires, maintaining the status-quo, and doing mundane but necessary things. With all the time you'll spend writing reports, answering email, attending meetings, and talking to people (sane or crazy) who want your attention, implementing that big idea is ten times harder than you think it'll be.

And big changes take forever, too. The Aussie's / Federation Xpress move was actually started by Feds President John Andersen. The big unveiling wouldn't happen until two executive later. But promising baby steps towards a change that'll see completion in three years isn't sexy campaigning, and no Feds executive knows at the outset it'll be that hard, anyway.

This is why I put the question to the presidents: who will do it? What specific individual will be in charge of these ideas you want to implement? Hint: not only do you need someone in charge, but you need good help.

On that note: I am proud of the Imprint team. Several of us were at the media forum, and I was not the only one asking questions. I won't be at the 2011 media forum, but my successors certainly will be. And they won't be making things easy for the candidates.




I think I'm getting sick. Not sure if it's a lack of food / sleep thing, or an actual virus. Feds election. Bloody hell, it's not a good time to be sick.


Fun fact: This is the first time I have tweeted about a post. Web 2.0, meet Web 1.0
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Sour creamy mashed potatoes[Jan. 27th, 2010|02:00 am]
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I'm kicking myself that I didn't think of it earlier.

I've put a lot of things into mashed potatoes: butter, flavoured cream cheese, Cracker Barrel old cheddar (it blends in quite nicely), onions, garlic, freshly ground pepper. But until late last week, it never occurred to me to throw in sour cream.

And I love sour cream.

I'm still on campus all the time, so I seldom get the chance to cook, and that's a shame. But tonight, I had the chance to throw a large dollop of sour cream into my mashed potatoes, along with chives, cheddar, black pepper, margarine, herb and garlic cream cheese, and red onion.

It was glorious.

I was in line at the grocery store on Monday night when I realized I forgot gravy. I didn't really grow up liking gravy, but last time Lulie was in Canada I made mashed potatoes a lot, and I bought a can of gravy to go along because it was her preference. The gravy was not too bad, and I had recently found myself in the mood for gravy again. Gravy, along with the mashed potatoes and an all-beef hot-dog or two.

I didn't want to get out of line, because if I did I would almost certainly miss the bus home. But I had picked up some cans of cream of mushroom soup because it was on sale. I figured I could stir some beef broth powder into the mushroom soup and get something approximating gravy.

It was good. But a very coarse approximation. And (as I expected) very salty. It might work better with higher quality (lower sodium) powder beef base.

So yes. Tonight, I finally dined on awesome mashed potatoes, beef hot dogs, and beef-infused-mushroom-soup sauce. The meal was quite filling. However, it also felt manly — not in a good way. Like one of those large high-sodium microwave dinners. Meat. Potato. ... More meat. Salt. I had to drink a glass of water and a glass of fruit juice just to get the feeling of salt out. The versions I packed myself for Imprint have less "gravy" and also some leftover broccoli, which should help a little with the heaviness feeling.

Even so, the potatoes alone were very good. And I'm happy I made it into the kitchen for experimentation tonight.
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I need a mountaintop[Jan. 26th, 2010|09:38 am]
Yesterday, I took some advice from CUP and journeyed down to the Kitchener courthouse. At CUP we were told that we should go to the local courthouse, and see if there were any lawsuits against our university. Which I did.

Here's the rub: they'll only give you the case numbers for free, and tell you who the plantiff and defendant are. To know anything else about the case, you'll need to request that they pull the case file — which costs $10.

It's just them walking over to a filing cabinet, physically retrieving the folder, and delivering it to you. $10. Need a page photocopied? That's $1 a page.

It might sound stupid because this is ostensibly public information, one might think it should be gratis. But I know why things are this way. For a moment, allow me to tell you about my email account.

At the beginning of yesterday, I had 1033 unread messages. Today, I have 88 unread messages. I was helped greatly by my efforts the last time I tried to get out of email debt. Since then I have mostly kept on top of email I care about, so getting the number down was a matter of deleting unwanted crap. (I nuked 500 just by marking everything from Facebook as "read")

Let me tell you about the remaining 88 emails: most of them are asking me to do something. The majority of them are emails asking for photos. I haven't responded to them, and they're sitting there nagging me. Why is it so?

It doesn't cost people anything to ask me for something. And there, my email inbox reveals a truth of human nature: If asking for something costs nothing, then people will ask all the time. If the courts didn't charge $10 for court documents, then there would be hundreds of people waiting to get access to documents. And crazy people with axes to grind at the front, reading court documents all day, never moving, never allowing someone else to take their place in the queue.

In other words, there's a good reason why masters of knowledge live on mountaintops. It's the only way to ensure they don't get pestered hourly, and ensure only the really determined come and talk to them.
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Drinking in Alberta[Jan. 20th, 2010|01:08 am]
For the past few days, I'd been in Alberta. I'd only returned to Ontario the previous night.

In my head, I was promised the land of lax drinking laws, and was looking forward to whatever that land had to offer. It's not that I'm a big partier, I just don't like the heavy regulation in Ontario. When I was working night shift at RIM, it was a pain in the ass to keep my fridge stocked with beer, since the LCBO would always be closed when I was going home from work.

I asked at the airport what time the bars open in Alberta. The answer was 11 a.m., same as Ontario.* Disappointing. And then the bars also close at 2 a.m., sometimes earlier. Also disappointing.

It's true that no one store has a monopoly on liquor. But, in practice, I didn't find that extended the hours of alcohol service very much. The liquor store close to the hotel closed at 10 p.m., another farther away closed at 11 p.m. I heard of a legendary store that was open later ("Liquor Barn"), but never found it. It certainly wasn't the situation that I observed in the states: beer being sold in run-of-the-mill convenience stores.

But there is one difference.

When I was out at the pub, I used the washroom a few times. There I was at the urinal, when I saw another guy come in. He sets his beer on the urinal, does his business, takes his beer, and leaves.

And I thought to myself, "How did he slip that past the security?"

But upon my subsequent visits to the washroom, I saw it happen again and again. "Wait a minute," I thought to myself, "you can do that in Alberta?"

It's a little thing, but that's one freedom they have that I'd like. It's annoying to have to gulp down the remainder of a drink just because you have to take a piss.

* The exception is inside the secure area of the airport; there the alcohol service is 24 hours — at least in Calgary.
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