On post-destroying asides

Oct25
by berry on October 25, 2014 at 9:43 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

I’m in the midst of writing a response to an opinion piece that ran in the Citizen a few days ago (go read it! And the comments! This way you’ll be ready to make fun of^h^h^h^h^h^h a more informed judgment of my piece), and got off on a tangent while discussing where people choose to live. It doesn’t fit with the rest of it, but I leave it here in all its parenthetical glory as a warning of how things can go off the rails (spoiler!) if you aren’t too careful, and have been at the Maker’s Mark:

(a quick aside: Some angry fellow on twitter kept badgering my councillor about the state of the 68 (his argument generally amounting to “When I drive to the park’n’ride to catch it at 8, there aren’t any spots! Then I have to park illegally and then I get a ticket!” Well, catch it somewhere else, bud. They go through neighbourhoods for a reason.), stating that the deplorable ability to get a seat on the bus (!!!!!!! Express bus doesn’t mean you get a seat, bud.) had caused many of his neighbours to move closer to their jobs. Well, duh. That’s actually a smart thing to do. Maybe they were just trying to get away from you…)(OK, that wasn’t so quick an aside. And here’s an aside to that aside: You might think, hey, Mr. High-and-Mighty, what are you doing living so far away from your job? Well, My Sweet works in Kanata, and she loves her job, and she bikes there year-round, and I’m more willing to put up with a long commute than she is, so there.)

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An open letter to me, from my gut.

Oct22
by berry on October 22, 2014 at 8:45 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

Dear Chris,

This is your gut. I think you should listen to me a bit more than you do. Do you realize that you missed what might have been the best day for biking this month? I think you do, that’s why you’ve been sending the beer suds of regret my way, each sip tinged with the knowledge that you didn’t earn these calories. And for what? You didn’t bike so you could go spinning tonight. Parse that out and explain how it makes any sense to you. It doesn’t, does it?And how did it feel when the email came from your spinning instructor saying that she cancelled the class thanks to the shenanigans up on the hill? Pretty dumb, I bet. I told you and told you, “Hey, big dummy! Even if you have spinning tonight, it’s not like an hour of biking is going to knock you out, right?” But you wouldn’t listen. Instead you worried about the time, and your knee (which, I have to grant you, still isn’t feeling all that über since the crash a few weeks ago), so you took the car in. And spent over an hour getting home. So much for saving time, dumb-ass. Anyway, I understand you have hockey tomorrow and I don’t want to come between you and your team, so I’ll let it slide if you don’t ride in tomorrow, but I better see you on your bike this Friday, or there will be consequences. I’m talking GE level payback.

Yours respectfully,

Your Gut.

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Biking in suburbia

Oct19
by berry on October 19, 2014 at 9:48 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

I feel that I have it pretty cushy in Kanata. I live in Beaverbrook, almost one of those “Garden Cities” championed by urban planners in the 60’s. I can get to many places easily by bike without touching too many major roads (though, this has become less true over the years as the Beaverbrook mall lost most of its tenants, including a grocery store and bookshop. Boo.) and I’m not too far from the Watt’s Creek path, the mile 0 of the Bicycle Superhighway, as Dan likes to refer to the Watt’s Creek/SJAM paths into town.

It’s far from perfect though, and while I can handle biking down a road with cars whizzing by 30 km/h over the speed limit, with the bike lane appearing and disappearing all willy-nilly, not everyone can (Campeau, I’m looking at you). I’m not even going to mention (oh, wait, I guess I am!) the new outlet mall which is a mere 20 minute ride from my house (or so Google Maps claims… I could probably do it faster). That’s great, but for the last 3 km of the ride on narrow, soft-shouldered roads that are posted at 70 to 80 km/h. You’d have to take the lane the entire way, and that’s just asking for someone to ruin your day. Sadly, they broke the bridge coming from the south side of Kanata (claim: we’re increasing safety by removing the shoulder! reality: we don’t want people parking at the outlet and walking to the arena!), so again it’s a pain.

Anyway, as I type this, My Sweet sits beside me, inputting data into her North Kanata Cycling Problems spreadsheet. She’s working with the TACK (which I presume means the Transport Advisory Committee of Kanata) to make this place easier to get around in, with safer streets for everybody. I think that’s awesome, and I’m hoping the OCP2013 will not only actually be actioned in Kanata, but they’ll also take into account the changes the committee have been flagging, no matter who gets voted in at the end of the month (I’m looking at you Mr. Let’s-Licence-Cyclists).

One thing actually came up as an election promise from Marianne Wilkinson. She claims: In 2015 I will build an off-road cycling path on Campeau that would separate pedestrians & cyclists, and keep everyone safe #Kanata #ottvote . That’s actually quite awesome, because Campeau, as I implied earlier, can be a massive pain in the butt. It’s not enough that ass-hats constantly mistake the 6 for a 9 on the speed limit signs, but the bike lanes play peek-a-boo the whole way down. A high school at the top of the street sends kids home at the end of the day on their bikes (yes it’s true, folks: kids can and do bike to school), but they usually use the sidewalk. Not an issue until you get to the retirement home area. There it evidently becomes utter chaos, if you can believe the signs posted every 3 feet. Wilkinson came into a TACK meeting wondering why the heck the kids wouldn’t just ride the bike lanes, and left (OK, OK, maybe a few meetings later) with the plan for the MUP. Good on ya, TACK!

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This was actually supposed to be a photo of the one million “do not ride on sidewalk” signs on Campeau, but I can’t find it. Instead, here’s a photo of a Mommy-powered sagwagon, on the way back from Shirley’s Bay (taken in September. Everyone looks so warm!)

 

As an aside, the whole family was out in the Berry Bus today, on Stittsville related errands. We’d been talking about the eventual building of the Campeau bridge, and we decided to swing by on our way to see what kind of progress had been made on it. The answer is not much, though the “road” (single track gravel) does go all the way to the Carp River now(last time I biked over, it only went maybe 50 metres past Didsbury), and they’ve put in water infrastructure, so maybe soon? That’s when I’m going to bike to the outlet, when that bridge is built. The place’ll practically be in a straight line. But I digress. We turned around after taking in the view, and there was maybe a dozen or so cars coming up this single track. One pulled up beside me and asked if they could get to the mall this way. My Sweet, ever the snappy answerer, said, “Sure, you’ll just have to wait a year or two.” Then she explained about the lack of bridge, and gave her directions. If only there were a simpler way to get there, eh?

 

 

 

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On Birthdays and Carding, and a bit of Biking, too!

Oct10
by berry on October 10, 2014 at 9:04 pm
Posted In: Uncategorized

Today I learned an interesting thing about New Hampshire. The Live Free or Die state seems to have a strange law on its books in which anyone present during the sale of alcohol can be asked for ID proving they are over 21. I experienced this today while getting groceries and a sampler case of Woodchuck (amusingly called ‘Cluster “Chuck”’). Bojana slipped into view as the cashier asked me for ID (yes, me. I got carded. It’s their policy, it seems), and the cashier asked “Is she with you?” When Bojana nodded, the cashier asked for her proof of majority too. Of course she didn’t have it on her, and we held up the line while she went back to get her purse from the van.

Upon sighting my cocked eyebrow, the cashier explained the policy, to which I shrugged but accepted, only voicing one of the myriad things that bounced around in my head. “So,” I said, “Were it (ed: yes, yes, I said were it. Get over it!) my kids and I alone, would this have been a problem?” The cashier shrugged.

Bojana came back, showed her ID, and we left with our cider. I began a bit of a rant about such a system, but Bojana smiled it off and said, “Hey, I got carded on my Xity-Xth birthday! That actually kinda feels pretty cool!” I could only agree with her.

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Research fail! This is the Pemigewasset River, which features as a roadblock to my main character in my WIP. But look at it! It’s at most 2 ft deep! She could just wade across. I guess that’s yet something else to fix in the next draft.

So yeah, it’s Boj’s birthday today! Woo! Married to an Xity-X year-old! That’s actually what we’re doing here in New Hampshire. Her birthday coincides nicely with Thanksgiving, and we both like climbing mountains and looking at foliage and the beauty displayed by the Appalachian mountains, notably the Green and White variety, and so we make a point of coming down to either Vermont or New Hampshire to spend the long weekend climbing and taking in local cheeses and beers and whatnot. On our hike today, she even brought up the idea of spending a month or two of retirement life each year in a rented cottage in the Greens so we could get our hike and bike on as much as we wanted. Retirement’s a damn long way off, though.

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Hiking near Newfound Lake (yes, we pronounced it like Newfoundland)

Present-wise, it’s been a little tough for her this year, as while I have told her what I’m getting her, we haven’t had the time to sit at the computer together for the ten minutes it’d take to order exactly what she wants (What she wants is a set of Dill Pickle Bags but I want to make sure I get the right ones, of course. 2015 promises to be the year of randonneuring). The kids, in the excitement and rush of getting out the door and on the road to NH left their present for her at home. Doh. And by “the kids”, of course I mean me. If you must know, the “kid present” is Frostbike, though I agree that it’s preaching to the choir, as Bojana is a dedicated winter cyclist.

As an aside, I described to her my plan for winter biking a couple of days ago (I’ve been looking for a use case for the Rocky Mountain Metro that’s been hanging, lonely, in the garage since I bought the Opus. It involves biking to the Kanata Town Centre (2 km), then hopping on the 96 to my new office) and she gave me a sceptical look. “You don’t like being outside when it’s cold,” she said. “You realize winter biking means being outside in the cold, right? And then being on a bus wearing too much clothing. Right? Are you sure this is something you want to do?” While she has a point, I do want to follow in her footsteps and I think I can hack it. It’s only two kilometres, after all. Two cold, cold, kilometres…

So anyway, Happy Birthday Boj! Woo!   

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On Reading Comments

Oct08
by berry on October 8, 2014 at 10:44 pm
Posted In: deep thoughts

Hello, my name is Chris, and I read the comments. Most people avoid the searing mouth-breathing idiocy that seems rampant on even the most innocent posts (true story: I posted a video on YouTube of K1 doing something reasonably cute. Cute enough that Boj asked me to post it for her family to see. That received ridiculous, negative comments (which I’ve since deleted because, I mean, really?)), but not me! The bile that pours out of people helps me to recognize the knee-jerk reactions that I sometimes have to stories, and allows me to filter my feelings through people who seemingly have no filter whatsoever.

The main reason I read the comments, though, is to hone my skills at spotting logical fallacies. It’s fun! You get to be all snobby and use latin phrases like “Reductio ad absurdum” and “Cum hoc ergo propter hoc” (you all know this one as “Correlation does not imply causation”) and you get to point at your computer screen and exclaim, “Thine argument is poor! Let me enumerate the ways!” It’s usually a good idea to wear some sort of rhetorical headgear when this happens, as it adds to the experience.

Today, as I read the comments in this article posted on my twitter timeline, it occurred to me that this could be an enjoyable pastime for everyone if only they had a method of knowing a fallacy when they saw it. It’s almost as if you could play buzzword bingo, but with logical fallacies! And that’s when it struck me, the million dollar idea. I could make bingo cards using fallacies rather than numbers, or, I suppose, buzzwords.

As all potential blockbuster startups must, I did some market research to see how much demand there was for such an awesome tool, and found this. It looks like my work is done. Phew. To be honest, while the coding would have been simple enough, I wasn’t relishing all the VC meetings and whatnot my creation would have entailed.

The webpage I linked above (and here again, because why make you move your eyes?) is aptly named Logical Fallacy Bingo, and puts up a 5×5 board using a random selection of 24 fallacies from a collection of 40 or so (the free centre square on mine is “Opinion as Fact (basically free)”. The truth in this makes me laugh.). Once you’ve generated your board, you can read the comments on any contentious issue, and become jaded and generally appalled by the human race. But hey! You might get a diagonal!

PS: Here’s the TL;DR if you didn’t click on the Star article. One Ontario Minister said he’d like to lower residential speed limits to 40 km/h, and another one said that it’s not going to happen (this second one is the minister who would push such a change, so boo). Commenters pointed out that there are no speed limits on the autobahn (a: not entirely true, there are limits in built-up areas, so “Factually Inaccurate”, and b: the autobahn isn’t a residential street, so either “False Analogy” or maybe even “Thought Terminating Cliché”.), that driving slower will in fact cause more accidents because people will become bored and will stop paying attention to what they are doing (“reductio ad absurdum” with a healthy dose of “appeal to fear”), and of course the ever popular idea that lowering speed limits, instead of being done to save lives, is really just a cash grab through increased speeding tickets (“Appeal to motive”).

Actually, don’t play this game. It’s pretty depressing.

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