Still in training?

Small things 25 Oct

• The year is 2192. The British Prime Minister visits Brussels to ask for an extension of the Brexit deadline.  No one remembers where the tradition originated but every year it attracts tourists from all over the world.
• Maybe some birds are secretly drones that recharge by sitting on power lines........
• A Canadian veteran is someone who at some point in their life wrote a blank cheque made payable to Canada, for an amount of up to and including their life.
• "That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don't notice that the time passes." ~Einstein
• I've decided to give up sarcasm and become a mime.
• Time is better than money.
• I scream;  you scream; the police come. It's awkward.

Things I learned lately 25 Oct

• In the 14th century, “hound” was used to refer to almost all domestic canines and “dog” was reserved for breeds like the precursors to modern bulldogs and mastiffs. By the 16th century, the meaning had shifted and dog was the general term and hound was used for hunting breeds.
• Electrocution means you died from the electric shock. If you live, it's just a shock.
• Both Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis are honorary members of the Harlem Globetrotters.
• Tug of war was contested as a team event in the Summer Olympics at every Olympiad from 1900 to 1920. Originally the competition was entered by groups called clubs. A country could enter more than one club in the competition, making it possible for one country to earn multiple medals.
• There are 119 legal land-based border crossing points between the U.S. and Canada. All of them are two-way except for the points at Churubusco, New York (travellers may only enter the U.S.) and Four Falls, New Brunswick (travellers may only enter Canada).

Matching avocados

What I’ve learned about traffic politics

I’ve been a bit of a transportation and planning nerd ever since I discovered the game SimCity. Which is a bit odd, as my work has nothing to do with transportation and planning. I’m not even educated in this field. I just enjoy reading about it, simulating it, discussing it, etc. I usually attend every open house the city organizes to do with streets and I do not waste any time getting involved in discussions, as well as analyzing and critiquing the plans they put on display.

A member of my community association recognized this interest and as a result, invited me to join a newly formed traffic safety committee for our neighbourhood. Needless to say, I agreed to join. One of the reasons I was so eager to participate, but definitely not the main reason, was that I have witnessed a problem first hand. In this case it was the dangers of a rather odd intersection in front of our house that the city deployed a solution for, which didn’t solve (in my unprofessional opinion) the root cause of the danger and in fact, possibly coincidentally, caused an impaired driver to lose control and crash into my next door neighbour’s front yard.

It took awhile for the committee to find its rhythm, but we had to sift through the many observations brought forth both by the residents at large and the committee members themselves. As you can imagine, not everyone on the committee agreed which problems were actual problems and which actual problems were solvable, and the ones that were, it was a challenge to rank them in order of priority.

This work was made a lot more difficult due to the following factors:

• Some residents perceive traffic problems where evidence contradicts their perceptions. For example, some people think vehicles drive at excessive speed on their street, but the measurements suggest the speeds are legal.
• Both residents and committee members expected that problems would be identified and solved in months. But the reality, as we learned, is that it takes years to go through this process. That created a lot of disillusionment.
• A lot of people who have identified issues come to the table with their own solutions, rather than just reporting the facts or even stopping their analysis at the root cause.
• A culture seems to have developed that groups residents into 3 camps. Those who think vehicles should get priority over bikes and pedestrians in both infrastructure and rules; the opposite - those who think bikes and pedestrians should get priority over motor vehicles; and those with a balanced approach to both.
• City traffic staff move very slowly (a common problem when dealing with government departments).
• City traffic staff don’t insist on a lot of engagement in the right situations. For example, while the problematic intersection solution mentioned earlier proceeded without the involvement of a lot of affected parties, a study on the future of a major roadway interchange took many months, had at least 6 open houses and workshops, only for participants to learn at the process’s end that the collaborative plan was 30 years from being realized.
• Budget cuts have eliminated funds that could have been used to try and solve some of the problems we’ve identified.
• Residents and committee members sense a bit of hypocrisy when they see the very solutions they want used in our community having been already rolled out in other communities. For example, there are plenty of communities with speed bumps and humps to help reduce speeds on certain streets, but traffic staff seem unwilling to consider them to solve some of our own issues.
• There does exist some publicly available processes to request improvements to traffic safety, but they suffer from a “been there, done that” issue. In the case of the web site where residents can request pedestrian crossing signals be installed, you can check first to see if the intersection in question has already had a request submitted and its status. A few of the ones we are interested in had already been reviewed and denied. This tends to stop people in their tracks from proceeding further, even though conditions may now merit a change.
• Where speed is a real issue, the process for proving it seems to involve getting law enforcement to be at the right place at the right time to measure incidents and if the numbers don’t meet a certain (unknowable) threshold, it’s not a real problem.
• Residents are told that they should bring their concerns to 311 so that at the very least data is created to represent the numbers of people experiencing the problem. Unfortunately, their 311 experiences vary in resident satisfaction, from being unable to navigate the web site, to phone operators telling them that they should be calling the police instead.

Now that we have identified some candidate issues in our community, one of the things we were recommended as a community, was to request a traffic study. As luck would have it, all traffic studies are on hold until city council finishes their study of a proposed reduction in residential street speed limits, the results of which are at least 6 months out, if not more.

Speaking of which, there is going to be a lot of public discussion about the proposed speed limit reduction options, which include a blanket reduction (of residential streets only) to 30 km/h, a blanket reduction to 40 km/h, a reduction of non-collector roads only to 30 km/h, or status quo. Here is where the 3 camps come into play. The ‘vehicles get priority’ camp consider any reduction at all as an infringement on their rights. The ‘people get priority’ camp would likely choose the 30 km/h speed limit if they couldn’t get away with an almost outright ban on cars altogether. As much as I think a reduced speed would be safer for pedestrians and cyclists (and cars for that matter), the lack of enforcement isn’t going to motivate many people to actually follow any new limit. As has been mentioned by those who know about roads, a wide street is an invitation to speed. Even city bureaucrats warn that changing the speed limit is a half measure if streets physically remain as they are.

Now we get to the politics of the issue. The councillor that proposed the speed limit reduction is a resident and represents an inner city neighbourhood separated for the most part from the downtown core by only a river and a few bridges. The part of this community closest to downtown is very walk-able, and is biased much more to cyclists and pedestrians than to cars. So the support for a reduction among the residents in this community is likely to be high. But Calgary is still a city built for cars. Many of its inhabitants still believe that bike lanes are not only a waste of time, but impinge on their right to drive and have somewhere to park with the least amount of obstacles. So considering that councillors usually want to get elected again, they are more likely to side with the majority of their constituents, who probably oppose a reduction. The only hope of the reduction getting traction is if parents who feel unsafe for their kids on their own streets rise up and take over the conversation.

Time will tell if this comes to pass.

Bees knees

Things I learned lately 18 Oct

• Some bars in Italy are using pasta straws to reduce waste.
• In a video posted online, an eight-year-old girl clambers up a replica of the border wall that U.S. President Donald Trump has called "virtually impenetrable."
• French businessman Bernard Arnault just made $5.1 billion within 48 hours after a surge in share prices of his conglomerate, LVMH.
• Contrary to what some Canadians think, immigrants coming from North Africa and the Middle east do not make up 64% of all entries, but in fact only 12%.
• Only 15% of Canadian immigrants are refugees.

New word: peppier

Would you like to upgrade for a small fortune?

Westjet is the latest airline to jump on the 'plusgrade' bandwagon.

The deal is that after you buy your flight, but about a week before you fly, they offer you a chance to bid on an upgrade to the front of the plane (only 4 seats per row, no middle passenger).

But you can't bid what you want. You have to choose from a sliding range of bids. For a flight to San Diego from Calgary, they want at least $275CAD extra, per person, each way. The 'better' bid is $425CAD per person, extra, each way. On top of what you already paid! They're nuts.

If you just paid for a premium seat up front, you'd only pay ~$450. Period.

Waterfront property

Small things 18 Oct

• I believe it says more that people in Alberta were willing to counter-protest and talk smack about Greta Thunberg than just ignore her.
• If my life were a TV series, I've been renewed for a 6th season and I haven't yet jumped the shark.
• New car feature idea: If you don't use your turn signal, you can't actually turn.
• Cauliflower. Also known as ghost broccoli.
• When you use the web cam on your computer or laptop, do you clean up the visible area behind you?
• If plan 'A' doesn't work, there's still 25 more letters.
• "The aim of argument or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress." ~Joseph Joubert

Things I learned lately 11 Oct

• A dog’s nose is equipped with a complex maze of 300 million scent receptors, compared to our measly 5 million.
• Google One sells 200GB cloud storage space for CAD$28 per year.
• You can eat impossible meat raw. It's perfectly safe.
• The greeting 'hello' only came into common use with the telephone. It was a suggested way to answer the phone by Thomas Edison. It was also suggested in the first phone books' tips on how to use the phone. Although we usually say goodbye at the end of a call, the first suggested call ending phrase was 'that is all'.
• The old Shell app does not find any Shell gas stations. [slow clap]

The soup of the day is uhhh..... curried cashier?

Robin Zander can still sing

Cheap Trick and Daryl Hall rocking it out live from Daryl's House.

I checked

Small things 11 Oct

• Don't worry if you drop ice cubes and they roll under your refrigerator. After a while, it's just water under the fridge.
• Bread is like the sun. It rises in the yeast and sets in the waist.
• Dental X-rays. Or as some might call them - tooth pics.
• Q. Why won't the flight attendants allow me to change seats to get away from screaming kids?A. Because you're their father.
• If you give a 'get better soon' card to someone who isn't even sick, they might not take it too well.
• Who is more easily entertained? The dog chasing its tail or the person watching?
• There's no reason to tailgate someone in the slow lane, especially when I'm going 35 over the limit. And those flashing lights on top of your car look ridiculous...
• Why would you lick a battery to test it? Do you know where that things been? Also, that's sexual assault on a battery.... Also, it only works with 9V batteries. Just sayin'...
• For most people, when you "lose your khakis", you've lost your pants. In Boston, if you "lose your khakis", you can't start your car.

Isle of dogs sequel?

When can you start?

Locavor

Got the spider!

Stop making fun of Uranus

My ancestry story

At some point a couple of years ago, Darlene and I talked about getting a DNA test through one of the genealogy services. I went with the Canadian Ancestry site as I had heard mostly good things about it. Well, let's rewind this story a bit first.

My sister had already gotten her DNA tested through Ancestry. She had always been curious (as was I for that matter) where our father had come from. As far as we knew, he had been adopted by our Oma and Opa (now deceased). But you know how it is with adoptions in the early 20th century - shrouded in secrecy. So my sister figured that the best and pretty much only way to determine where he came from was to get her DNA analyzed. The results pointed to a particular family in eastern Quebec. To respect their privacy, they shall remain nameless.

My sister also figured that since sometimes the data are a little off, especially when only dealing with one data point, a good way to lend validity to the results would be if I got my DNA checked too. Well, wouldn't you know it, same results.

Now for me, it was enough to know that we finally got to the bottom of the mystery. We now knew our blood heritage (Quebecois, not German or Slovenian) and family lineage. But my sister wanted to know more. So she began researching through Ancestry and met some cousins online. Then she went to visit the family graves and arranged a meet with living family members. They were surprised, but happy to be meeting some of the newly discovered family. I believe some of them got the test too and confirmed the link. My sister and her husband were surprised to discover that one cousin looked and had mannerisms shockingly similar to mine. We face timed while she was visiting them and they all agreed that I looked a lot like their male family members, especially the older generation.

There's a chance I will get to meet them the next time I go home to Quebec.

Meanwhile, Darlene finally decided to get her DNA analyzed as well. There were some questions about possible family connections that were never proven and lo and behold, the tests proved them once and for all.

She has been spending a lot of time researching her lineage and has traced it a long way back. She has found a lot of confirmed cousins who are now friends.

Ummmmm.... isn't that just ice?

Small things 5 Oct

• I actually witnessed the ice cream truck music being completely ignored by the local kids because they had no idea what it was.
• I am convinced that the official food of kids today is chicken fingers / nuggets and fries.
• Camouflage leg cast. You can hide but you can't run.....
• When a teen comes to your door this Halloween, the proper greeting is not "Aren't you a bit old for this?", it's "Make sure you share this with your parents...."
• A knife resting on the edge of the sink is the international symbol for "Maybe I'll make two sandwiches, I'm not sure yet."
• Never judge a book by its movie.
• You can't trade shoes with a barefoot monkey.
• Our society is more offended by swear words and rude gestures than it is by war, famine, and the destruction of the environment.
• Canadians: There's a grocery chain in the US called Trader Joe's. Just so you know, they do not let you pay with furs or Bay blankets or rum or live birds. Talk about false advertising.
• "Askhole": Someone who always asks for advice but does the opposite every time.

Deep dog thoughts