Sunday Stranding

Posted on October 4, 2010 by aphoenix

On Sunday, the CIBC Walk for the Cure in Guelph raised $300,000 or more. It's a great idea for an event; a significant number of people from all over the city of Guelph get together and walk through Guelph while raising money to support cancer research. There is nothing better than a community coming together like this; it showcase the best things about Guelph and I'm proud to say that I donated some money to the cause this year. I have never actually taken part in the walk itself, but it always goes by the end of my street. Here, let me give you an idea:


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I live on Hamel Avenue. The Walk for the Cure always goes down London Road. And, in case you didn't know, Guelph has been torn apart for Guelph Remastered where the city is (thankfully) doing about 5 years worth of road maintenance and upgrading in 4 months. One of the roads that is currently closed is Westmound Road. If you look at the map, you'll see that if both Westmount and London are closed, I cannot drive anywhere from my house, and this is indeed what happened on Sunday morning. It was not possible for me to legally drive away from my place of residence and get anywhere.

That morning a lot of "What ifs" ran through my head before I tried to lodge a complaint. What if one of my elderly neighbours (or my pregnant wife!) required a trip to the hospital? What if the people on my street wanted to head out for 9am Mass? What if I had a contractor coming in to do work on my home?

I got answers to at least two of these three questions. If you wanted to go to church on Sunday morning, you were out of luck. If you had a contractor coming in that morning to work on something, you were similarly out of luck. There was no detour or workaround to get to my home. I'm thankful that we didn't need to find out what would have happened if a trip to the hospital was required.

Trying to lodge a complaint with the organizers was not particularly productive. Each person that I talked to made me feel as if I were being unreasonable. I admit that this is subjective, but I was made to feel that it was unreasonable to complain about an event to raise money to fight cancer. Then came the rub; one of the gentlemen that I spoke with told me that they had already had to change the course of the event to account for some of the construction. This means that someone looked at the route and reviewed it, and changed the route because of construction but they didn't consider the two streets that were cut off from the rest of Guelph.

Nothing really bad happened. Some of my neighbours had to stay home from church and the work that I'd scheduled to start early in the day started later. Couldn't we move events such as this into some of Guelphs amazingly well maintained parks or through the downtown core? Residential areas don't need to have this kind of event blocking them off from the rest of the city. As frustrating as it was for me, it must have been even more frustrating for those who lived on London and couldn't even leave their driveways. 10 minutes of playing with Google Maps and it's easy enough to devise a route that brings people through the downtown core instead of through residential areas.


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Posted in Confluence, In Review, Right Brain | 4 Comments

A Month of Android

Posted on September 2, 2010 by aphoenix

A while ago I purchased a samsung galaxy vibrant (the first day they were available here in canada actually) and I thought o would give a but of a review of my thoughts on the phone and the OS after having used it for almost a month.

The phone is beautiful. The screen makes iPhone 3 screens look pretty bad and in my opinion, it beats the iPhone 4 in a side by side comparison. The Samsung is slick and gorgeous, responsive and vibrant; from a purely aesthetic standpoint, the phone is downright sexy. The call quality matches that of my previous phone (which was a real phone, not a handheld with a phone added on like many smart phones seem to be). I do not experience reception loss from holding the phone in a particular way. Using this device as a phone is easy and pleasurable.

The place where the device really starts to shine is when you start to dive into Android. There are a ton of apps and many of them are free, or under $1. Some of them suck; I have deleted 15 or 20 apps that I just didn't enjoy using, but there's no real downside to downloading paid apps because you can get a refund. Android market is pretty awesome. There are a ton of apps, some more useful than others; the barcode scanner is pretty cool and a Blizzard authenticator for WoW, I use just about every day. The google maps app works really well as a GPS which is beneficial since someone broke into my wife's car and style ours. There's a good selection of decent educational games for kids and, of course, a pretty decent app for wordpress which I am using right now.

I'm a big fan of how intuitive things are. The other day for example, my four year old daughter managed to record new ringtones and set them for events on the phone ("ooo your phones ringing. Blah blah" is now what I hear when someone calls me). The fact my kid can do that without any help from me is pretty impressive. It is true that she is a little geek in training, but it is still great to see how easy it is for her to manage fairly complex tasks.

Swype is impressive. This lets you glide your hand over the on screen keyboard and "draw" the words that you are writing. It does make for some interesting automatic corrections [Edit: Like version one of this article, for example], but significantly increases my (mostly) understandable wpm count. Look for a video of it on youtube and have a look, if you are unfamiliar with it; swype is certainly worth checking out.

Overall I would give this new phone high marks across the board. I have never seen a phone that I like as much. The iPhone 4 comes close, especially the overall aesthetic, but the responsiveness of this little machine and the slightly larger screen along with Android help it win out as far as I am concerned.

[Edit: I've got Hello World done in an Android App, and it took almost no time to do so. App Development is easy and fun.]

Posted in In Review, Techgnostics | 4 Comments

What Twitter and YouTube are for

Posted on July 14, 2010 by aphoenix

I started to follow @OldSpice today, and I have learned what Twitter and YouTube were put on the planet for.

Twitter and YouTube were created so that @OldSpice on a horse man would have a place, nay, a kingdom. It's his internet, I just live in it.

In all seriousness, I have never seen an ad campaign as effective as this one. I now have 3 bars of Denali at home. Two of them are open, so I can do both sides at once.

Posted in Confluence | Comments Off

The Inalienable Right to Protest

Posted on June 30, 2010 by aphoenix

I got some Facebook traction on this topic, and I'll address it here.

Michael said: "I think this post talks more about protesting effectively, more than criticizing the act of the protest." That's exactly what I was going for. I'm not saying that there's no place for protest, but thinking that any of the protests at the #G20 would be effective is naive. Direct protest to your MP or MPP is an effective thing to do, because MPs and MPPs have a vested interest in keeping the populace happy. This is the level at which protesters need to focus if they want to have an effect on politics.

Having worked in and around the University of Guelph for 10 years, I see a lot of what I would term "stupid" protests. People get together and make signs protesting for the rights of some people in a country on the other side of the world, and they take those signs up and parade around Branion Plaza. This is a misunderstanding of many things, not least of which is potential audience. While it is admirable to feel bad for those in these terrible situations around the world, it is stupid to protest against terrible things in this way because it displays a clear lack of understanding of your potential scope. Nothing good will come from a protest like this. Those who are perpetrating that which is being protested don't care that an affluent kid from Ontario thinks that they suck. Those who are the victims get no help from your protest. It's worse than just being ineffective though; it actually robs any of your good points of their legitimacy. The problems in Darfur are horrible but having a demonstration to protest them is not going to anyone involved a lick of good.

Things that are effective to protest happen on a local level. Protest the fact that there's going to be an extension to Walmart. Protest the fact that the buses don't run full schedules in the summer. Protest the increasing amount of destitution in downtown Guelph. Do it in the area that these things are happening in. Demonstrate. Be effective. These are all admirable things to organize and do.

The #G20 protests were nothing like this. I'm not saying that people didn't have the right to protest; I'm just saying that those who exercised their right on those days did not make an intelligent or effective choice in doing so. I fear that they misunderstand what protest is for, and how it can be effectively used as a political tool. They also don't understand that most people are either apathetic about their cause, or will look on extreme civil disobedience as a mark against them. If you get arrested, then in the estimation of most people you lose a significant portion of your credibility.

Leanne said that she had written several letters and not felt that her voice was being heard. I've written several letters to my MP (most recently regarding Bill C-32, to which I am opposed). Maybe I'm just lucky (I think we in Guelph have a great MP, Mr. Frank Valeriote) because each time I got a response that was at least ostensibly from Mr. Valeriote, which directly addressed the concerns that I had. While I don't necessarily agree with what he wants to do in all cases, I feel like he is effectively representing me and the constituency to the best of his abilities.

As for it taking money to get into politics - I have several friends who have done so, some to greater effect than others. None of them are well off; they were just willing to put in some time to ensure that their voice was heard. Getting into politics at any level will immediately get you more involved and will immediately grant you more clout in all issues political - you don't even have to be a politician! Start of as an aide to someone. Volunteer. Get involved.

I'm not saying that I am a paragon of political involvement. I write letters (yes, by hand letters). I've attended town meetings, but I've never risen my hand and taken part. I have not gotten truly involved in local politics. But if I felt as passionate about some issues as those who went to the #G20 protest purported to bed, then I would get more involved.

And I'll bet I wouldn't get arrested while doing so.

Posted in Confluence | 2 Comments

On The Futility of Protests in Canada

Posted on June 28, 2010 by aphoenix

I fully believe that the G20 protests were a waste of everybody's time and money. The actions taken by police were unnecessary, but it is the acts of the protesters that I think were truly disgusting and stupid.

The problem is that there were many people who had legitimate things to protest at the G20 and now, because of their association with what has happened, they have had their points of view robbed of legitimacy. You were downtown to protest the fact that an elite cadre of capitalists is deciding the general fate of the world? You must be a nut, because you burned a cop car! You think sweatshops are bad? You are a felon; how reasonable can your point of view be?

What makes me really angry is that Canada is actually a pretty remarkable place to get your voice heard. There's access to many different media outlets - it isn't particularly hard to get your opinions onto local television, for instance. It's also pretty easy to get into political sessions in your town or city, and to stand up and be heard. For those who are more than just flash-in-the-pan, need to be heard, instant gratification seekers, it isn't even that hard to get into local politics and become one of the people directly responsible for making decisions. The problem is, it'll take you twenty or thirty years to get into a position where you would have any clout at a place like the G20.

I think this is the root of the problem. We have a group of people who have spent twenty, thirty, forty years in politics to get to the places that they are, so that they have the power to make the decisions that they do for the world. And you have a bunch of twenty year old berks who have a sense of entitlement and want the decision makers at the G20 to listen to them rightnow rightnow rightnow because my ideas are soooo good ill save the world just listenman listen to meeeee. Everyone who looked at the situation objectively knew that this was not the correct time or place to get your opinions out there. We knew about the billion dollar security budget. We knew that there were many more police officers than normal. We knew that all of what happened would probably happen as it did. Those of us who were intelligent stayed away and did not get arrested for no reason. And mark my words, the protests fell on deaf ears - if anything, showing up was impressively detrimental to your cause.

I'm not even going to talk about the anarchists who were there. Anarchists hold a point of view that I can, in no way, have respect for.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying that protesting doesn't have an appropriate time and appropriate place. I have protested things before. In high school, we had a protest about something. I forget what it was, but I sure was angry. And we knew the policy makers personally. We attended the protest, we explained ourselves reasonably. End of the story, we got whatever it was that we wanted (I think it was something to do with fund raising for a school trip to Scotland, but I'm fuzzy on the details). This model worked, because we were one interaction layer from those we were protesting (students <==> teachers). At that level, protest is effective. Strikes are on the same level (workers <==> employers). On this level, each side has something that the other side wants, so effective communication opens / can open and changes can be made.

Next time there is a G8/G20, do everyone a favour: Instead of going out, stay home, and think about how you can get involved in a meaningful way. Write your speech for when you run for city councillor instead of going out and getting arrested. It'll be much better way to serve your time.

Posted in Confluence | 2 Comments