ant farm or acreage

June 16 2010:  House bought, moving begins friday.  Blogging has been nearly non-existant of late as I pack the fourth dimension house into too few boxes.  Amazing how much cr*p the family has accumulated in a few short years.

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Apr 13 2010:  Agent selected, listing begins soon and then let the circus begin.   Over the past several days I have received conflicting advice about how best to work with a real estate agent – maybe it’s the company I keep, but there does seem to be a high degree of suspicion regarding agents motives and their willingness to obtain the best price for you.  As one colleague commented, “if they can convince you to drop your price by $10k, all that is to them is $500 bucks”; the inference from this being that your agent only tries as hard as is necessary to sell the property, not necessarily obtaining the best price for you.  We’ll see.

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Apr 07 2010:  And now the adventure begins – selecting a listing agent (throw darts at the wall – or go for a ‘name’), decluttering and tidying, chivvying the two fierce creatures into cleaning their rooms on a regular basis (if nothing else this might actually have the effect of establishing a habit – ha!) and devoting the evening hours of the coming weeks to tramping through countless houses until the magic ‘one’ is discovered.

——————-

Feb 27 2010:  Lately Herself has been bitten by the ‘it’s time to move’ bug and it seems that Junior has become far more familiar with the real estate listings than he might otherwise care to be.  Having arrived more or less at a figure sufficiently large enough to consider a range of neighbourhoods, the next step seems to be, well which neighbourhood?

We seem to agree on most everything we want in a new  (to us) house – bedrooms, kitchen amenities and so on -  but get rather tangled up when trying to determine whether living cheek by jowl beside other folks, or removing ourselves to some acreage surrounding the city is preferable.  Personally I would love to settle onto a little country property and hang the commuting expense, but then reality intrudes.  Things like getting to work, getting the heir and the spare to their various recreational pursuits impose themselves upon my desires.  Meanwhile, Herself wants the ‘perfect’ house situated in the kind of neighbourhood which will retain lasting appeal. 

At any rate, all of this agonizing has brought me to think about my own neighbourhood, its charms and drawbacks.  Undoubtedly there are features unique to each Kingston ‘village’; what do you like most about yours?  What does your area possess that others don’t?   Why do you live where you live?

the beautiful game (fc bayern munich)

May 8 2010 HEY HEY BAYERN!

http://www.goal.com/en/news/15/germany/2010/05/08/1913699/bayern-munich-win-bundesliga-2009-10

Now, on to the UEFA final!

_________________________

Update:  19 March 2010:  EUFA Final 8 Draw, FCB vs ManU.   On balance, and it pains me to do so, I might have to give the edge to Rooney’s crowd.

“Thieves, Thieves, Thieves“, shout Fiorentina fans, and they may well be right especially with the controversial offside non-call in round one of the group of 16 – but who cares;  Bayern is through 4-4 aggregate on away goals to the UEFA quarter finals and at home has earned top spot in the Bundesliga standings.  Looking ahead to match day 32 which conveniently coincides with my next trip…..

It’s safe to say…

…that Iceland has used up all its carbon credits….

Freedom

Every socialist / ’big L’ liberal policy is at heart collectivist and anti individual freedom, requiring the coercive power of the state to enforce compliance from the citizenry.   Sadly, too many Canadians are ‘content’ with this and surrender their freedoms bit by bit….. 

Ghost of a Flea has more…

When Freedom Isn’t Free In Britain, compulsory virtue stifles individual liberty. 14 April 2010 

Liberal reformers, who might once have wished to extend the realm of liberty, now wish to restrict it in the name of compulsory political virtue. 

There was a perfect recent illustration of this in Britain. An evangelical Christian couple, the Wilkinsons, ran a bed-and-breakfast business in a place called Cookham. They refused a middle-aged homosexual couple, Michael Black and John Morgan, accommodation because they believed that homosexuality was wrong; it is condemned in the Bible. 

The spurned couple said that they felt like lepers; moreover, they felt that their legal rights, enshrined in the Equality Act of 2006, which makes it illegal to discriminate in the provision of services on the grounds of “sexual orientation,” had been infringed, and they complained to the police. As yet, no prosecution has followed. But shortly afterward a senior politician, Christopher Grayling, who might be a minister in the next government if David Cameron wins the forthcoming election, said that he thought that the owners of bed-and-breakfasts ought to be allowed to refuse homosexual couples if they so wished. 

From the furious denunciation that Grayling’s remarks attracted, you might have thought that he had advocated medieval punishments for homosexuals. Instead, he was merely pointing out that the law as it stands is tyrannical, and that in a free society not everyone will make the same moral judgments.  It is a necessary condition of freedom that private citizens should be allowed to treat with, or to refuse to treat with, whomever they choose, on any grounds that they choose, including those that strike others as repellent.  Freedom is freedom, not the means by which everyone comes to precisely the same conclusion and conducts himself in precisely the same way. 

  

RTWT

We know who you are. We know were you live….

May I recommend some reading for Mr ‘Gene from Greenpeace’?  Do pick up Arthur Koestler’s ‘Darkness at Noon’, not so much out of sympathy for fictional victim, rather it will very nicely demonstrate to you how to run show trials…..

Dear GreenPeace,

The true sign of a failed belief system is when its adherents, having failed to persuade the populace by reasoned debate, resort instead to violence. It matters not if we are speaking of the millions who died under Communism’s jackboot while their economy disintegrated, or of those murdered by Fascists determined to establish order through racial superiority, or of the brutal repression of the Dark Ages or of Islamic extremists raising their children to become suicide bombers.

Odd, when I donated to MSF they didn’t have to resort to threats to convince me……

Off to the dustbins of history with you my little apparatchiks….

Is there some contest to see how silly a complaint Canada’s human-rights commissions will try to take seriously, asks the Montreal Gazette.    But hey, when all of the world’s problems can be distilled down to whether the state can enforce comedy, or whether restaurants must simultaneously comply with sanitation codes yet reserve the ‘right’ for  employees to decide as they see fit to wash their hands, how much sillier can it get?   Quite a bit more apparently.   The problem, of course is that for the victim – and I mean the poor sap dragged through the process – it isn’t silly.  It is often downright Kafkaesque; arbitrary, vicious and entirely an affront to common law. 

Time to see off these cheerless, soulless, fun crushing taxpayer-funded parasitical ‘offices’.  Write to your MP (and MLA’s for the provincial counterparts) and demand that Canada’s Human Rights Commission be shuttered and their commissars put out to pasture.

Big Numbers

In light of our ‘fiscally responsible’ ‘onservative government shovelling money out the door for various infrastructure projects, the failure of McGinty’s ehealth ontario initiative, and of course the impending cornucopia of largess known as Obamacare being offered up in the USA, it is worth re-reading Guns, Fraud, and Big Numbers in Canada to remind ourselves of just how often our political masters screw up basic math:

 The following essay won the Letter of the Week award on 2004-02-24 at Mark Steyn’s web site, http://www.marksteyn.com . In honour thereof, Mr. Steyn graciously sent me a copy of his “The Face of the Tiger”, autographed: “Congratulations. A Great Letter.” ]

My Fellow Canadian ~

I once read an excellent Isaac Asimov non-fiction essay on really big numbers. Humans are in general really bad at understanding big numbers. Because of my math / science / engineering background, I’m maybe a bit better than average, but I’m no Asimov. I have though learned a few ways to help me better understand big numbers, so that I can better deal with them when I need to. This essay shows how some of those methods work.

The initial Government of Canada estimate for the gun registry database system was $1 million. Technically, I think that’s probably a bit low. Based on my on three decades of work in the field of distributed multi-user database transaction processing systems like the registry, and on some systems I’m currently working on which are of that type, I think $3 million would have been a better estimate.

If someone from the Government of Canada can provide me with a simple accounting showing some component of the system that I’ve missed, I’d be more than happy to adjust my analysis of the situation to take that data into account. My current analysis is based on the numbers I have collected from the public media over the last few years.

Given how important it is for state monopolies to serve citizens to the highest possible ethical standard, let’s throw in a factor of three-ish over my base estimate and call it $10 million, to be as careful as possible.

Now, say you had such a $10 million contract with some customers. And then, say you spent three times that: $30 million. Does it occur to you that your customers (in this case, we citizens) might be, oh, shall we say, somewhat angry? Ok, let’s say it’s another factor of three: $90 million. How are your customers doing now? Fine. Let’s throw in another factor of three, so we’re now up to $270 million. How angry are your customers now? In more primitive times than we live in, would you still be alive? But wait, there’s more. How much would we pay for another factor of three? Oh, about $810 million. Say, that’s interesting, the gun registry database system has, according to the CBC, cost $750 million.

It didn’t cost 3 times as much. Or 3 times 3 times as much. Or 3 times 3 times 3 times as much. It cost 3 times 3 times 3 times 3 times as much.

celebrating human achievement hour

…by leaving the lights on.

Flip the bird to self loathing anti-achievement bedwetters….

comrades, clearly the re-education camps….

…are not working.   

Exhort the cadres to struggle more vigorously against the climate change deniers!

around the world – part 43.3 (dodging waves)

in which the most junior but arguably fiercest creature discovers oceans, beaches and florida!

happy st patrick’s day!

around the world – part 43.1 (driving to florida)

Anna Maria Island - Tortuga Inn

Every year, after months of cold and darkness, and just prior to the first signs of spring, thousands of Canadians suddenly abandon their homes and head south to the Caribbean, Florida, Mexico and so on.  And this year,  Junior was no exception.  Even with what has been a mild winter by any measure, Junior and family found themselves joining the mass migration of Canucks south at Spring Break. 

In some moment of sheer lunacy, I determined that it would be a good idea to drive.  Perhaps it was the mild shock of air fares, or some crazy idea that it would be ‘fun’, but at any rate by 6am early friday we departed our house and began our two-day journey. 

For those of you contemplating the drive, I can attest that the advice of my colleagues and friends has turned out to be quite accurate.  You should budget two long days of driving – planning a minimum of twelve hours on the road, factoring in another two or more hours of stretches, meals and pee breaks    A couple of colleagues, real pros at this, strongly advised going hard the first day – up to 18 hours(!) such that the second day is easier.  No doubt they all have teenage kids who can entertain themselves.  Anyone travelling with two small children must invest in a portable CD player.   This wonderful invention, I am sure has prevented the untimely demise of an untold number of children.   

In the end we opted for a more or less balanced two days of about 12 hours driving each – although due to somewhat inclement weather on the first day, we actually did not accomplish half the distance, stopping just past Roanoke Virginia.   Mind you once we joined I77 in North Carolina, we managed to progress at a much faster rate and had we not encountered a traffic accident on I75 near ocala,  would probably have made it in to our destination before 715pm.  As it was we arrived at 8pm, and collapsed into our beds.

cheerfully incompetent

VIA Rail

My few readers will have noted by now that Junior travels a wee bit – perhaps more than is strictly necessary.  In my roamings, I have had on occasion the pleasure opportunity to travel on Canada’s own VIA Rail.  For uninitiated, VIA Rail is a passenger rail service wholly owned by the taxpayers of Canada, known in the parlance as a Crown Corporation.  In this regard it is not unlike AMTRAK (USA), or any of a dozen or more European state-owned passenger rail services.  Thus it is run largely for the benefit of its employees and where passengers are noticed at all, it is with at best diffidence and more often with sufferance.

In comparing modes of transport it is often difficult to find true comparisons of merit, since the modes differ significantly enough as to pose problems finding commonalities.  Except where it comes to service.  Leaving aside private automobiles, where the service offered to the passengers is diffident at best and downright awful at times  (particularly in Junior’s chariot), passengers in Canada have two options – fly or ride the Iron Horse.   Edward the Corgi  has heard my theory before – but for those who have never heard it – thus.   On the whole and with evidence of my own eyes, Air Canada is miserably incompetent, whilst VIA Rail is cheerfully incompetent. 

around canada – part 5 (montreal)

09 March 2010: 

weinsteins and gavinos pasta bar factory

 

Back in Montreal for the first time in many years (notwithstanding transiting through Dorval) and it seems to me on first glance as though that while the city structure is clearly a little distressed, what with the potholes and dodgy sidewalks (mind you, KTown can offer craters as awful as the best of them), there is much more excitement now then when I last called it home.   Maybe I am wrong, but I didn’t see too many storefronts for let, I did see plenty of sharply dressed folks and everyone seems fairly cheerful.   Despite my shocking neglect of the place, Montreal still remains my favourite Canadian city. At Wednesday night dinner comfortably ensconced in the window and indulging in a bit of people watching, I did notice that an inordinate number of vehicles flowing south on Stanley were of the Mercedes, Audi, Land Rover, BMW variety – perhaps indicative of a local economic confidence which seems to be ignored in the rest of Canada.  I suppose it is easy to overlook Montreal especially in afterglow of the Olympics and the ‘me first’ attitude of Tranna.   Thursday night off to Weinsteins and Gavinos for a meal, and then down the block to Three Brasseurs for a couple of beer, before heading back to the hotel. 

How to get there: 

• VIA RAIL:  I am more and more convinced that this is the best way to travel to Montreal – no headaches with traffic, no time wasted looking for or paying extortionate rates for parking etc. 
• By Car:  If you must insist on taking your vehicle, then of course Montreal is well serviced by several major highways leading into the city.  The roads are a bit rough in places – comes from overbuilding the infrastructure and then neglecting it for decades I suppose.   Please note that there isn’t actually much of a bypass around the city – especially to the south.

teh interwebs is complete