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  • Captive audience indeed. Para Transpo hits bottom…hard.

    written by

    james

    It’s no secret that I’m rather less than a fan of the Para Transpo system run by the city of Ottawa. You might say if someone paid me to use the service, they’d still be paying and I’d still not be using. But even if I wouldn’t touch them for fear of catching something, I still expected them to do a halfway decent job of taking care of the people who didn’t have that option. Not so much.

    A Para Transpo customer wants the city to provide more training to a bus operator who she says hurled insensitive statements at her and damaged her special mobility equipment. The incident began Aug. 1 at around 8 p.m., as Ruth Hurst waited for her scheduled Para Transpo ride home after her weekly handcycle class at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum. Hurst, a quadriplegic, has limited use of her legs and arms. She can walk short distances and stand briefly, however she still uses a wheelchair, which she had that evening along with her $13,000 handcycle. The ordeal began when the driver arrived, she said. “He came out of the bus and he said, ‘I don’t even want to deal with you,’ ” Hurst said. “And he snatches up the bike by the cables, and with that he shoved the bike at this other lady who was standing beside her van.” The manhandling of the tricycle-like vehicle damaged the front wheel’s fork and some cables, Hurst said. The driver subsequently refused to help her load the handcycle and strap it down in the bus, she said. It was ultimately another member of her handcycle club that volunteered to help her load the trike and her wheelchair onto the bus.

    And this from a guy who’s supposed to be getting paid to do the things he’s insisting that someone else do for him instead. Now, if it were anyone else the solution would be simple enough–just don’t use Para Transpo. But this is one of those cases, and I wondered if this would happen, where she doesn’t have a whole lot of choice and the driver knows it. Ruth is exactly the type of customer Para Transpo should be working to take care of. Instead, she would almost have been better off going solo–and as it turned out, she pretty much was.

    Once on-board and en route to her home in Kanata, Hurst said, the driver was relatively calm and quiet until he dropped off the only other passenger on board. “As soon as the bus driver dropped the man off, he started up again, saying, ‘You’re the worst person I’ve ever had to deal with. I hope I never have to pick you up again,’ ” Hurst said. “I’ve only seen him twice in my life and both times he was ranting and raving,” she added, referring to a brief experience she’d had with him a few weeks prior. “When we got to the house, he didn’t open the door to let me out. He just paced up and down, yelling for quite a while, which was disturbing,” Hurst said. “I told him to be quiet and to call his supervisor if there was an issue — clearly there was an issue — and he stomps to the front of the bus, snatches the phone off the cradle and he yells at the person, ‘She told me to shut up!’ ” The operator didn’t lower the bus or untie her handcycle and wheelchair from their safety straps, Hurst said. “He didn’t do his job, basically.” Eventually, he lowered the ramp but still refused to help unload Hurst’s equipment, she said. “I had to struggle to untie everything myself and to unload everything, and I got the wheelchair unloaded, came back, got the handcycle unloaded and the guy was sitting at the back of the bus doing crossword puzzles from the newspaper. And I thought, ‘This is just wrong.’ ”

    So, let me just summarize here for the hell of it. She calls Para Transpo because she needs help getting her from A to B. Clearly she does, as she’s in a freaking wheelchair. Clearly, being in a wheelchair means she’s going to need help with the extra gear she’s come with. It’s not rocket science, here. Instead, the service who’s primary function is to help people who can’t be completely independent forces her to give being completely independent her best effort–and let’s just not give too much attention to that whole safety thing.

    When your customers don’t have a choice, you pretty much have the room to do exactly what you please exactly when you please and exactly how you please. And this driver took full advantage of that and then some. For the and then some, we go straight back to the article.

    After getting inside her home, Hurst said the operator remained parked outside for more than an hour, sitting in the driver’s seat and looking into her house. “That was disturbing.”

    So, to recap, customer who can’t get from A to B independently calls the service who’s supposed to be there to help people who can’t get from A to B independently. Service figures she’s perfectly capable of getting herself from A to B independently. Service is not entirely receptive to hearing that, duh, she can’t get from A to B independently. Service doesn’t much feel up to giving a damn. And that’s what you get to do when your audience is captive. Maybe possibly next time, though, go a little easier on the crosswords. I hear they’re bad for you.

    Para Transpo has found rock bottom. Here’s a pro tip, folks. You’re supposed to be making yourselves look like a something that the people you’re hoping to expand the service to include will actually want to use. I’m no expert on, you know, playing nice and junk–I fix computers and let other people fix the people who run them, but if I’m sitting where you are, I’m maybe taking a look at the too many levels of wrong this is. And then I’m running like hell in the opposite direction. Quickly. Could we maybe give that a try?

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  • So how did you spend your summer vacation?

    written by

    james

    I’ve managed some kind of personal best–three months or so without having done more than respond to a few comments over here. Well, that and do the usual updating for security reasons and, um, malware prevention reasons. So why have I been quiet? Simply put, I need a vacation from my vacation.

    College kicked my ass. so much so that I’ve lined up to do it again in a week and change. so I thought I’d take the summer off and let my brain recharge. apparently, if you’re me, that means you get a poke from a long-time friend a week or so after the dust settles who asks if you happen to by any chance know Linux. I tell her I may have heard of it, and she lets me in on a possible something I might be interested in. This possible something, as it happens, involves setting up an Asterisk phone system for a small startup based in the US. That project ended up branching off into a few other areas of Linux administration, primarily for the same company, and it’s kept me largely out of trouble. Needless to say I’ve had my hands full, and every minute of it has been essentially exactly what I just finished doing the month before I started. And now they’re talking about the possibility of developing a system based on exactly what I just set up that they can potentially sell to businesses who could use a halfway decent system without being whacked over the head by a price in the millions and a contract with Microsoft. So that’s apparently a thing.

    When I haven’t been busy with that, which hasn’t been very often, I’ve been busy catching up on all the things I couldn’t catch up on because I pretty much lived at the college. Things like, say, a social life. I’ve been to see the family a handful of times, been actually managing to meet up with some folks I’ve been meaning to do that with for a while, and started sort of reconnecting with one or two people I’ve had to let go of for life reasons. And in and around all of that, I’ve gotten myself mixed up with a completely different sort of project locally–you can sort of see what it looks like over here. That project’s still very much in the initial stages, but the brains behind the operation has plans, so this has the potential to be either incredibly amazing or wickedly embarrassing–and I’m having just a wee bit of difficulty figuring out if I care which. So basically when college does start up again I may just be looking slightly forward to the break.

    I had plans for this summer. They mostly involved being lazy. Instead I’ve been up and all over the place. and this is why I just about never make plans. It’s been fun, and I’d do every minute of it over again in a heartbeat, but now I need a vacation. So how was your summer?

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  • I read the comments. I have no shame.

    written by

    james

    So. Comments all over the place used to be all the rage. Still are, if you’re in to posting pictures of the not quite so fancy dinner you’ve thrown together in 5 minutes and figure someone might take half a minute to complement you on how amazing the arrangement is or something. But actual, constructive and worthwhile comments are going out of style in a hurry.

    Take a lot of news/current events sites as an example. On its face, with the exception of your various opinion columns, if you’ve read a newes story somewhere you probably won’t find anything new or interesting reading the same story somewhere else. For the Canadians who trip and land on this thing by accident, the crack Ford story comes to mind as a perfect example. In case you’ve forgotten, either because you’ve been busy or what’s the point, the Toronto Star was the first actual news place (insert snarky comment about the Toronto Star and news not belonging in the same sentence here) to actually come up with the story of Toronto’s crack-smoking mayor. Everyone else, regardless of their opinion on the topic–or the man at the center of the topic–was basicly reporting on the Star’s having reported on the story. The differences, and they were minor, had to do with the particular tilt that additional reporting took–oh, they might have found one or two people who were willing to talk to them and not the Star (see previous snarky comment), but the meat of the story stays the same. The major differences came when you got to people’s reactions to the story.

    Sometimes, largely depending on the story being written, the most interesting and often times informative part of the article I’m reading wasn’t actually the article, but the comments that went with. Sure, there were the usual trolls, but more often than not they were either ignored or backed into a corner courtesy people who have even less of a tolerance for BS than I do. Which again, made for interesting reading at the end of the day (I can already hear at least one person who much prefers books to current events snickering in the corner… and I know where said person lives).

    For the sake of being honest, I’m about as lazy as they come. If there’s a way that I can accomplish a task while having one less window open, I’ll find that way. I also follow a lot of these news sites by way of RSS feeds–multiple websites, one interface, easy scrolling. Which makes it either really freaking easy or really freaking annoying to stay relatively on top of things. And if the sites I’m following do what a lot of sites are starting to do now and put the full content of their various articles into the RSS feed itself, that’s even better for a lazy geek who is lazy. Of course the down side to doing that, then, is you’ll need to give the lazy geek a reason to click over to the site and see what else you’re holding out on me for. Hence, comments.

    All that having been said, there are still some news sites (I’m looking at you, CBC and CTV), who decide nah, let’s require people drop by to have a read of the same article they’ll probably find somewhere else because hey, we got it from the Associated Press. which meant that, sure I’d click, and I’d even read the article if I hadn’t seen it posted somewhere else first, but then I’d stick around to see if I was the only person who thought braindead politician of the week could use a gag until he finds his filter. And that’s how I’d spend an hour or two–more, if I was bored and otherwise behind because life can be cruel that way.

    At some point recently, the CTV in particular decided to say nope to comments. I’m not sure if that also means they’ve scrubbed previous comments, but that would just about be standard operating procedure. The reasons are usually just as standard–trolling, people are using Twitter and Facebook more, etc–but usually boil down to the sites would rather not have to deal with people who disagree with the news story they posted, so here, go vent your everything on Twitter for people who haven’t even read the story to see.

    Again, from a strictly content-related perspective it makes no nevermind one way or the other to me. Whatever they’re posting I’ll probably read in the National Post, or the Ottawa Citizen, or any number of places who actually want their content to be read and don’t much care how they do it. But every time I see an article about this or that site shutting down comments, especially when they immediately throw out the usual reasons listed above, my first thought is usually along the lines of why would you give people a reason not to read your particular version of that article?

    Yes, comment spam is a problem. In just the short time since this site’s been with its new host there were over 100000 spam comments attempted. Yes, okay, trolling can be a problem–one of my most popular posts, now over three years old, has had its share of trolling. It’s what you do about it that matters–very often, ignoring and/or deleting it is enough, since the offending trolls probably won’t come back after they’ve vomited in your shoe. slamming the door shut and bolting it until the bad people go away just seems like a not entirely thought-through reaction based more in the mindset of people aren’t agreeing and we don’t want to interact with them.

    This site has always had comments. They’ve rarely been used, but that doesn’t necessarily mean tomorrow I’m going to decide hey, that was fun, but see ya later. Why? Because sometimes, even the ranblings of an internet nobody who does this thing less and less often lately are worth an opinion–and people are full of them. Also, because probably against the advice of just about everyone on the internet, even if I don’t actually respond to a comment I read every single one–probably easy to do given I don’t exactly get that many. Because as much as I started this thing for me, if I wanted it to be for me and me alone I’d hardly have started it on a public-facing platform. Most of what gets posted here is probably useful to perhaps 1 other person. That one other person may drop a comment saying so. On the other hand, the extremely technical post that took me two hours to write–if we include testing, because I probably hadn’t done it before until just before I wrote the post–might catch the interest of a surprising number of people who don’t comment directly on the post, but who’ve read it, probably posted the link elsewhere, and therefore started a discussion–and probably brought more eyeballs to the post itself. Either way, I–and the people doing the discussing–win. I’m not going to close off one possible avenue of discussion because you decided instead of dropping a comment you took the link and circulated it to your mailing list, or posted it to Facebook, or whatever.

    Do I think it’s awesome when people show up and call me out because I dared to question their favourite politician’s intelligence? Damn right. And if they do it in a way that doesn’t scream troll, or “please institutionalize me before I hurt myself”, they might even earn themselves a response that’s slightly more than mocking the nutters. Because that’s how things get done, even in 2016.

    If you don’t want to be criticised, then don’t do something worth criticising. Or at least, if you’re going to, don’t do it in public. And if you write an article that people disagree with, show up and explain why you wrote the way you did–provide backing evidence if you need to. What you don’t do is stick your head in the sand until it blows over, then decide okay, that’ll be enough of that whole people having opinions thing. Because people are still going to have opinions. the difference is if they want you to see them, they’ll email you (I’ve done this). And if they want other people to know your facts are fiction, there are more than a few ways for them to do so–and most of those ways, to the surprise of no one, you’ll have even less control over (also to the surprise of no one, I’ve done this). Being part of the conversation is great, but you’re not part of the conversation if you kick the conversation off your lawn. And hey, maybe if the people behind the articles would spend more time reading and engaging with their audience, comment sections might not suck as bad as some of them do. There’s nothing wrong with reading the comments. I’ve done it for years, on this site and others, and for that I have no shame. The shame is reserved for the folks who instead decide to flip the off switch. They can do a whole lot better.

  • So this is what free time looks like…

    written by

    james

    It’s amazing what happens when you’re having to do all the things. Like, for instance, you’re undoubtedly going to realize you’re running out of room for things. That is my academic life. So when the end of April hit and another semester ended up falling away behind me, this meant all the things that were put off because lack of time during the school year… well… now get to show up front and center and in a big way. so while the time off school’s been nice, today is the actual first day in which I’ve been able to say–and mean–I’m on vacation.

    The thing about academia is even when you’re done, you’re not really done. I had exams the last week of April–which clearly did not hurt nearly as bad as I thought they would, but even while that was underway I was fielding questions about my next steps. Would I be coming back for the spring semester? How about the fall? If I’m coming back in the fall, what services will I need access to–hint: exactly the same as I just got finished using. And now that I’ve had time to catch up on all the non-academic things, I’ve geared up to start that whole process all over again. Why? Because clearly, I am insane.

    The official last bit of final semester (*) paperwork was submitted this afternoon, in the form of the application to have the government continue to pay for said final semester. That officially signified that the vacation, if you’re me, now has clearance to actually do something useful. Oh, there’ll still be trips back and forth to the college over the next few months I’m sure–it may be 2016, but folks still have this thing with doing as little possible online–but the actual work part of all of this can now sit and spin until I’m good and ready to care about it. And that will be… ahem… a while.

    While I’ve got the time, this means some overdue personal projects can finally get some attention. Like the overhauling and updating of a resume that hasn’t seen much of an update in a few years. And the casing out of places that might could possibly want to hire me. And somewhere in there, because I have been informed that failure to do so may result in my head becoming detached from my shoulders, there will be trips to see people–mostly because I was informed either they’d pay for my way down there or they’d come and get me, and you don’t generally back away from choices like that if you like breathing. Since I’m rather fond of breathing, as soon as paperwork and other people’s loose ends are squared away, I have travel plans. Considering the year I’ve had, they’re not entirely unwelcome.

    Between that, and the fact I’ve still got a fair bit of unpacking to get done post-move, I fully expect I’ll still be far too busy for my own good. But, this is the kind of busy I can live with. And in the meantime, I can maybe possibly become aquainted again with what free time looks like.

    Not entirely unrelated: If you know anyone who needs a geek and will pay well, I’m available…

    (*): Yes, it took me long enough, but September of this year marks the start of my fourth and final semester in this program. There’s an optional cybersecurity extension program I can go for if I qualify, but I will be finished the program I was aiming for–and therefore significantly more marketable than I was even 10 years ago, and I was pretty freaking marketable 10 years ago. Now there’s just the matter of the upside down economy, but, you know, small progress and all that.

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  • Why you could not pay me enough to use Ottawa’s Para Transpo.

    written by

    james

    Having at one time been responsible for helping someone who essentially depended on Para Transpo if conditions were severe enough that she couldn’t get around on her own, I had more than enough reason to become far too familiar with the system’s inner workings–which had the added benefit of being supported by information I’d obtained from other people with first or second hand experience before me. What it largely comes down to, then, is how in this or any other parallel universe are people expected to function with something that broken?

    A little background, for the curious. Ottawa’s bus company, OC Transpo, does its best to make the majority of its mainline bus routes accessible. And more often than not, barring a driver who’s had the misfortune of being born dead from the neck up, they get it right. But even they can’t always help road/sidewalk conditions. So if it’s been a particularly nasty winter, which living in Ottawa we see an aweful lot of, people who are a lot less mobile than me have one of two choices. They can fight with Para Transpo, which OC Transpo also runs when they think of it, or they can stay home. And if you’re being paid not to stay home, your only real option then is that first one. Which makes stories like this one always the fun sort to read.

    A disabled woman whose scheduled Para Transpo rides have been suspended for a week says the service should allow more flexibility for riders.

    Ginette Bastien is a public servant who relies daily on the service to get to work. Para Transpo suspended her scheduled daily trips because, Bastien says, the service feels she cancelled her pickups at the last minute too many times.

    During the suspension she must call each day to request a ride, and hope one is available. Unlike regularly scheduled trips, she will not be guaranteed a ride.

    Now, in theory I can sort of see where Para Transpo’s coming from. In theory. However, also in theory, I can sort of see where communism’s coming from as well–and, well, we know how well that worked out. People get sick. It’s kind of a fact of life. And if you happen to be a disabled people, you’re probably going to be sick a little more often than most. That’s the way of life, sucky as it is. And sure, it would probably be absolutely wonderful if you could plan for such a thing in advance. But anyone who’s ever woken up in the morning and felt like something the dog dragged inn, chewed on for 5 minutes then left hanging knows better. Except, apparently, the folks at Para Transpo.

    Now, I will say this much. On the occasions where the system works, the system works relatively well. However, to make the system work, you essentially have a minimal amount of room for actually having an honest to goodness something that vaguely resembles a life. From the article:

    Scrimgeour added those suspended from regular bookings can book Para Transpo’s services a day before or use Para Transpo’s Taxi Coupon Program. Regular OC Transpo’s buses are also accessible to Para Transpo customers who can travel independently, he said.

    Which is true, provided the stars align in such a way that:

    • you call early enough the day before, the definition of which changes depending on how many other people need to be doing exactly the same thing you’re doing,
    • they can find room in the next day’s on-demand schedule to slide you in in such a way that you can get where you’re going and back without being required to be out for 6 hours for a one-hour appointment,
    • the driver you get assigned to knows 1: where he’s picking you up from and 2: where he’s dropping you off (you’d be surprised how many drivers don’t actually know their way around the city),

      • and

    • you don’t mind your ride potentially getting you there late for your appointment and, assuming you’re not waiting 6 hours for your return trip, showing up early to pick you up–then potentially leaving because you weren’t ready.

    Most of this I’ve either seen or experienced or, in some cases, had relayed to me. Plus fun things like dropping a person in a wheelchair at entirely the wrong building, while the attendant meeting said person is waiting at the correct one with no idea what’s up (this was before everyone and their cat had a cell phone). In short, you’re probably slightly less likely to develop a migraine if you schedule all your trips on a regular basis, usually several weeks in advance, and almost never have to cancel for any reason beyond things like weather. However, to do that, you’d pretty much have to give up on ever deciding to do something like, for instance, have any kind of actual social life outside of your job, or medical appointments, or what have you. Where someone can call up John Q. Person at half past after-hours and see about meeting him somewhere for coffee, unless Jane Q. Wheely’s having a day where she can actually do something on her own, that same conversation’s going to involve picking a hopefully not entirely too obscure time for the day after tomorrow, then hoping she’s on the phone early enough (they still haven’t figured out online booking) that the time she said she’d meet said friend for coffee isn’t already occupied by someone who forgot to schedule the doctor’s appointment he knew about for 6 months. I can’t imagine there are a lot of Para Transpo users who are overly enthusiastic about that system. Which is precisely why I need to resist the urge to snark on the occasions someone’s been surprised by the fact I both don’t and won’t use it.

    In fairness, it’s entirely possible they’d accept someone like me if I bothered to apply. And a few years ago, not knowing then what I know now, I considered applying. But seeing how they work in practice and the criteria they base that practice on (PDF), I have a very strong suspicion that one of two things would happen. Either I wouldn’t be accepted on account of I’m what they’d consider too independent–which, for the record, would be the first time that’s ever worked against me–or they’d accept me, but I’d end up giving up on them because my daily routine–particularly when I can manage to afford to do more than sit at home–can’t be appropriately pigeon-holed into some kind of narrow scheduling margin they can work with. Very likely, however, it would be that first one.

    “Persons with a disability would generally be considered eligible for Para Transpo if by
    attempting to use OC Transpo’s regular fixed-route transit service, their health would be
    severely endangered or the attempt would likely lead to bodily harm”.

    While I may not always do things the supposedly safe way, I would probably rule myself out of this part of their criteria in approximately 10 seconds, provided they didn’t catch me on an off day wherein I’ve been drinking for a day and a half already. I’ve been told I can handle myself better in some ways than a fully able-bodied sighted person, though I’m not entirely sure how much stock I’d necessarily put in that. Still, it would be more than enough that they wouldn’t touch me. The second part of that criteria, however, is a maybe.

    It goes on to say
    “A person with a disability, who does not qualify for Para Transpo’s door-to-door service
    in the summer months, may still be eligible for service during the winter”. An example
    of a person who would be eligible for Para Transpo on a winter-only basis may be a
    person who is visually impaired who can navigate the regular fixed-route service except
    when there is ice and snow on the ground.

    A case could probably be made, if I wanted to push it, that that would apply to me. I can do it, sure, and have done it pretty much effortlessly for as long as I’ve lived in Ottawa, but it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to get someone to see the possibility that blind geek plus Ottawa winter equals not necessarily the safest thing in the history of ever. But here’s why I don’t push that.

    Winters up here in general, and this one in particular, can’t be planned for in advance. By the time there’s the potential for possibly unsafe weather, the service would do me absolutely no good. A situation where the service might possibly have been an option for me came up last month. In the span of a day, Ottawa was subjected to 50 CM of snow. By the time we had word it was coming, and quickly, it was well past the latest possible time I could realisticly expect to arrange a ride home and not have it take 6 years to happen. And at the end of the day, it wouldn’t have done me any more of a favour than what I ended up doing instead–I took one look outside when classes were over that day, then got hold of Uber for my lift home–and still beat the worst of it. It cost me $9, but I knew where my ride was, I knew when my ride would get here, and more importantly, I didn’t need to be able to predict the near future to obtain it.

    In short, Uber filled the role Para Transpo thinks might be adequate for me better than Para Transpo has for probably anyone. And there are people who need Para Transpo to fill that role a whole lot more than I do. If Para Transpo can’t do it for them without provoking small migraines, and this is supposed to be their primary customer base, you could not pay me enough to use them. Not even if you somehow managed to collect the money Para Transpo’s saying they’re owed.

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  • New: ReCAPTCHA now exists where it didn’t before.

    written by

    james

    It’s common knowledge I hate spammers. It’s equally common knowledge I hate captchas. Enter reCAPTCHA. Yes, it’s still a captcha, but it virtually eliminates any and all of the reasons I hate captchas. Particularly, the thing is perfectly accessible–at least insofar as my testing goes. And now, it runs live on this website. Which, at end of days, means I should start seeing a significant decrease in the number of spam hits to this often neglected thing–without, as it happens, impacting the 2 of you who comment on every 500th thing I toss up here. In short: Where’s this been all my life? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go coax a Windows VM to do what it’s supposed to.

    Update: I win at captchas. I fail at HTML. And this is why I shouldn’t geek while distracted.

  • Toronto schools figure out kids can get hurt, move to ban it.

    written by

    james

    Ah, Toronto. That lovely little nowhere place where bad ideas go to get themselves one last kick at the can. That place that brought us joys like, you know, rob ford, and the idea of separating the city from the rest of Ontario–it never was actually explained, by the way, how one would go about separating a city from a province while said city resided rather firmly within the geological vicinity of that province, but as we learned from Quebec, such details are pithy little things that needn’t concern the gods who declare it so. And now, Toronto’s back with another brilliant brainchild.

    You see, while the rest of us were busy living our lives and handling things that matter while avoiding the clumsy hand of good intentions, Toronto schools were coming to terms with the fact that kids will play at recess. And during that play, kids will undoubtedly end up hurt. And as it has become politically correct to do, one school has applied an opposite overreaction to what it believes to be a problematic action. Kids playing tag leads to kids getting hurt, you say? Then by all means, ban tag.

    A Toronto Catholic elementary school is under fire for its decision to ban kids from playing tag.

    The downtown school put a stop to the popular chase game — and any recess rough housing — after several several injuries. The Toronto Catholic District School Board defended St Luke’s decision, saying some injuries resulted in bleeding and this was no ordinary game of tag.

    Yes. Kids will get just a little overenthusiastic. It happens. Kids will also get hurt when being a little overenthusiastic. Again, it happens. You know what also happens? They learn that maybe they might not oughta have done that. This is also, I thought, what they had staff assigned as recess monitors for–that and making sure little jimmy doesn’t turn around and pop someone in the nose for stealing his favourite swing, but that’s a whole other issue.

    Look. I get the theory behind the idea. And as theories go, it’s about as good as any other I’ve come across. But unless we start mandating we put kids in bubble wrap until they turn 18, policies like this aren’t going to accomplish much. The kids who are going to do it will do it when they’re away from school–and hopefully where their parents can keep a closeish eye on them just in case. And the rest probably won’t care as long as it’s not aimed at them. In the meantime, Toronto needs to find a more creative way to deal with kids being kids. Like, maybe, explaining to them why maybe it might could not be the hottest idea in the world to run full-tilt into the kid you’re chasing. Unless of course that would take too much effort.

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  • In which I discover that sleep really is overrated.

    written by

    james

    There are moments, often far too many, wherein I don’t sleep much. some call it non-24. Some call it me just being weird. I don’t care enough to call it either way–I call it mostly powered by caffeine instead. And now I discover a likely explanation for how I ended up like that and, rather, why it doesn’t necessarily suck if you’re me.

    I always feel like I’m being more productive on days where I don’t get all that much sleep. There were a few times in the last couple months where I’ve decided to put sleep on the backburner because I had this or that project that needed doing instead. Now, granted they were projects that weren’t yet expected to be done with, but you know. So because I’d be up anyway, I’d often decide to hell with it, stay up, do that, then get some other junk done around the house while I was already up far too late to be healthy. Apparently that’s not abnormal. I don’t know necessarily that the whole of the article applies to me, of course, but there were a few things that I’ve had people closely associate with me.

    According to an article by the Wall Street Journal people who sleep less show some interesting characteristics, “Not only are their circadian rhythms different from most people, so are their moods (very upbeat) and their metabolism (they’re thinner than average, even though sleep deprivation usually raises the risk of obesity). They also seem to have a high tolerance for physical pain and psychological setbacks.” People who sleep less tend to go on the fast lane, they talk fast and are always on the upside of life. They have a different attitude towards getting things done.

    The high pain tolerance thing is interesting–and definitely applies to me, much to the dismay of a few I’m reasonably sure. To listen to my family, so does the talking fast. The rest I just chalk up to not really giving a damn. Except that being thin thing–that’s one that I’m assuredly not, though you’d think I would be given how much not staying in one place I’ve managed to accomplish.

    So. For all those times people have heard me insist that sleep is highly overrated and thought they’d like to have whatever it is I’m smoking, now you know. And now I should probably go about the business of disinfecting my apartment while I still have the energy. And while I do, a relevant video–which apparently doesn’t allow embedding, go figure.

    sleep? who needs it?

  • Education: 1 James: 0

    written by

    james

    Up side: It hasn’t been 4 months since the last time I looked at this thing. Slightly less up side: Academia and I have become incredibly close over the last couple months. to the tune of I may have to tell the next person I’m dating that I can’t marry her on account of I’m married to the college.

    I’m in semester 3 of a 4-semester program, and it’s not slowed down for more than 5 minutes since I started. Which is awesome, if you’re me, but slightly less if you’re other people who may want to hear more than the occasional 4 words from me. But on the bright side, I’ve discovered exactly why I wanted this program in the first place–they grade me on my ability to do sysadmin related things. Which, well, I may or may not have had a small amount of experience with before my webfaction migration. Professor says make me an email server, to which my almost immediate answer is give me 5 minutes with Postfix. This is probably the most fun I’ve had at any level of schooling ever–and this stuff people actually want to pay me for. Since when is that a thing?

    My time not spent in class is spent toying around with Ubuntu, usually for something exceedingly school related–like, say, the above mentioned mail server, or messing with windows Server 2008 because apparently someone somewhere thinks I want to get paid to set up and fix MS Exchange servers for a living. And that’s the way it goes until April, after which everything becomes optional until September.

    Things I’ve had reinforced since this semester started, in no particular order:

    • If you thought being a Windows user was an exercise in headache, spend an hour as a Windows sysadmin. Particularly spend an hour sysadmining a new Exchange server. I have not seen something fail so hard in my life, and I’ve seen a lot of fail. And when it fails, you are not fixing it with a reinstall–unless you’re reinstalling your OS. In short, pray it doesn’t fail. You’ll thank me later.
    • Thoroughly tested does not necessarily mean working. If you’ve tested the hell out of your VM networking setup at home, then bring it into the school environment having passed all your tests, it *will* implode. And sometimes, it’ll look pretty while it does it. Go in with a plan C, because plan B will probably blow up right after plan A did.
      • This is doubly true if you’ve got multiple network cards to play with–VMWare likes to break them both if it disagrees with something you’ve done to one. Then good luck figuring out which one.
    • There are 80000000 ways to accomplish the exact same task. If you decide to do it the overly complicated way, there are 80000001. But if you break something doing it the overly complicated way, there are about 45000000000 possible points of failure.
      • Things you should not do if you get to that point: send your lab partner an email that just says “I broke it”. Your lab partner is very likely to congratulate you and keep working on what he’s doing. Particularly if your lab partner is me.
    • The world really and truly does run on caffeine. I thought it was a myth, even when I was working night shifts handling my 7500th call because the latest Windows update tanked something. Then I came to college. Nope, definitely not a myth. There be people there who consume far more caffeine than I ever have, and I thought I had a lot. Some of it’s justified–the workload will kill a lesser being, and some of these people have families, jobs, and actual social lives to attend to when they’re done. And some of us just don’t sleep. Ahem. *cough* Hi.
    • And lastly: Whatever you do, however and wherever you do it, do not ever dev on the prod box. It is going to break, and break horribly, and when it does, they will hear your frustration down the hall. And some of us, having warned you it would happen, will probably be laughing as we head off to refill our caffeine.

    This semester’s not done yet, and I’m already starting to formulate vacation plans and junk for when it is, but it’s things like this that are why I picked this program. It’s also things like this that are why other people tend to hear a whole lot less from me when I’m in the midst of said program–or, in terms of last summer, recovering from having been pasted to the wall by this program. Education is kicking my ass. But if I come out of this mess with even a little more than I had when I went in, it’ll be worth it. Now, about this caffeine thing…

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  • The road to hell is paved with helpful people.

    written by

    james

    We’ve all seen it, whether we’re blind or otherwise disabled or not. We’re in the middle of something, and all of a sudden we’ve got an extra pair of hands–or sometimes two–we weren’t planning on. Some well-meaning soul has decided we could use that extra pair of hands, for reasons known only to them, even while things wouldn’t go anymore perfectly if you paid them. You almost feel bad about turning them away–after all they were, as they’ll tell you if you’ll let them, “only trying to help”. But if you don’t, you’ll have a whole new problem to deal with–these same well-meaning people guessing at what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, and in the process, that thing you thought should only take you 10 minutes is now making quick work of the better part of half an hour.

    This, I think, becomes even more noticeable if you happen to also be blind and trying, for instance, to avoid small armies of people while getting yourself from A to B. At least, it’s more noticeable if you’re me. To the tune of this happened at least three times throughout the course of yesterday–when all I was doing, as it happens, was going to and from class… Which I’ve done for ages, now.

    It’s the first week back to class for most people, so naturally everything gets several different flavours of chaotic. And my schedule this term has me either coming or going right when the not quite so organized chaos is potentially at its worst in some places. But because I’ve been doing this for ages, the fact that there are more people trying to squeeze themselves down every hallway in every direction than should even be possible doesn’t overly concern me–provided, that is, they’re not standing in the middle of that hallway staring at their phone and therefore oblivious to the fact they’re about to be warned of my approach by way of a stick across the knees. On my way to class, I had two particular very well-meaning people stop me for the sole purpose of asking 1: if I knew where I was going, 2: if I knew how to get there, 3: if I needed help to get there, and 4: if I was really, really sure I didn’t need help to get there–this after one of those people kept themselves a few feet behind me and called out directions to the door of the building, which… Well… I was rather already heading for, though perhaps not exactly how he invisioned it. One of them even offered to guide me directly to where I was going, just in case. Which I suppose seemed like a good idea at the time, right up until they needed to ask someone else for directions to an area I conveniently enough have to walk right past to get to my classes. They meant well, and I didn’t end up late for class, so in that respect even if they couldn’t help, they didn’t hurt.

    The problem shows up, though, when people skip the asking and get right to the helping. Now, I like to think I know my way around campus enough that I can hit most places fairly easily. There are a few tricky spots, mostly on account of I rarely go there, but for the most part I’ve ended up being the one giving directions. Still, when it gets chaotic, I occasionally need to find me a spot out of the way and wait–not necessarily for people to get out of the way, but so I can figure out more accurately where exactly people are. Let me explain largely how I work for travel purposes.

    Everything, if you’re me, becomes a reference point. And I do mean everything. Walls, furniture, rooms I’m walking past, people–if it’s there, I can probably use it. If you’re coming out of a hallway behind me, I can easily use the direction you’re heading in to figure out where I should be going. And I’ve done this thing too many times to count–to the point now that I almost do it subconsciously, and have probably done it more than once without realizing. So if I’ve decided to occupy a spot out of the way for half a second, it’s probably because in a section of the campus where there are something like 2 or 3 very closely aligned hallways, I’d prefer not to have to guess at which one and spend the next 5 minutes undoing what I just did because I guessed the wrong one. I don’t need to do that very often–I can usually cruise right on through without breaking stride, but there are days.

    On one of those days, it was slightly busier than usual–I think the college was doing some sort of open house session, possibly. There were probably three times the people there that there’d normally be. Again, no big thing–I do it so often now that people are just another indicator of where I am and where I’m going. But there’s one particular place at the college where there are two almost identical hallways that will take you to very different parts of the campus. Those hallways are at a slight angle from each other–you could come out of one, lean a slight right turn, and end up down the other while being half asleep. So if you’re approaching that spot from another direction, it’s very easy–and I’ve seen too many people do this just by not thinking–to aim for one hallway, miss, and end up down the other–only realizing it when they actually stop talking long enough to look at the rooms they’re passing. On this day, that spot on campus was rather full of people doing it didn’t look like much. Most of them were trying to push past the rest of them, who were seeming to be content with just taking up space. I was doing my usual navigational trick, ducking in and around small clumps of people wherever I could invent me a hole. Some kind soul thought they’d do me a favour and direct me out of the majority of that group of people and toward the other side of that intersection. There was just one very small problem, and it took me a stretch to realize it was staring at me. The hallway he directed me to and the hallway I actually needed to find were two entirely different–and, arguably, completely unrelated–things. So I get to where I know my classroom should be, come to find out instead I’m walking into a small cafeteria (bright side: I now know where I can go to hide if I want food and no one to find me). Then there’s the small matter of the obligatory few minutes figuring out where in the hell I am and how in the hell I got there. Eventually, I managed to answer both questions, then figured out how I’d be getting back to where I needed to be–which was easier this time, given I was already in the same general area, and the majority of the people who would have been otherwise in my way the first time had cleared out, so that was the end of that. Again, I didn’t end up being late for class–though in this case, that may have had more to do with the fact the professor was, but if that had been my first actual exposure to campus, things could have probably ended up going a lot differently and very quickly.

    There’s a rule I like to toss at people when they get surprised their help didn’t produce the expected results. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. If you already know exactly what you’re doing, or where you’re going, and someone comes along to offer help, things get complicated before either of you catches on–mostly because they know what you’re trying to do, but if they can’t wrap their head around how you’re doing it, they’re going to do it their own way–and their own way is going to probably not give you the results you’re after. And this is why, as much as it gives some folks I used to run with a headache, I don’t often opt for accepting the volunteered help–whether or not they’ve asked first before volunteering. I know where I’m going. I know how to get there. You might even know the same thing. But I know the way that gets me there in about 5 minutes. If you take a different way because, for whatever reason, you don’t know mine, I may not have any idea where we’re going–it depends on how creative I’ve been with my wandering the place ahead of time. Which also means if you decide that no, you actually don’t know how to get where we’re going, or if it turns out the way you know doesn’t work out for any number of reasons, not only have you actually not been helpful–but I may not necessarily be able to undo it and get back to doing what I know eventually works. It’s no slight against the helpful–sometimes, it’s actually incredibly useful. But often, some might say far too often, the road to hell is paved with helpful people. And if you’re already having a day, it’s an incredibly short drive.

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