the CTV “countdown” video : everyone is going to think the salient feature of canada is our abundance of helicopters. wish i could find this on youtube, it was honestly 90% helicopter shots of winter sports

requisite “support our troops” shot of people watching from afghanistan: there are old white ladies and teenagers. i think they mixed up their feeds and that is actually a police station in thunder bay

announcer: “australia! 40 athletes!”
rebecca: “let’s see how many inbred people there are…..….40!!!”

“this is the first olympic games for colombia” this is the first time columbian athletes have survived for 4 years without being murdered by cartels

in the cultural segment: Middle-earth, one athlete: Gandalf

is that bear full of helium? is that how it stays up? are the people in the legs high as heck right now?

re: french-irish fiddle players: in addition to our helicopter abundance, the rest of the world has had their suspicions that all french canadians are evil confirmed

i hope final destination 5 takes place at an olympic opening ceremony. there are just so many ways for things to go horribly wrong

the light turned green and i made my turn as she yelled new-age epithets at me (i couldn’t actually understand her, it just sounded mad). it frustrates me to see and hear so many people that take horoscopes at face value (or any value), so this was a very satisfying interaction.

that balcony is here

the cool part was when i was coming home at 5:30. i went around the block to see where the outage ended (avenue), and up to cumberland. cumberland was awesome – all the lights were off (obviously) and i’ve never seen it that dark. everything had an orange cast because it was still dusk, and it looked like it should have been super quiet (there was nobody there except a couple pizza guys), but it was actually pretty loud because all the condos had their backup generators running. the generator for my building was powering some essential stuff – hallway and stairwell lighting, the rfid door system – but it was also powering ALL FOUR ELEVATORS. what a huge waste. i understand people on the top floor would be pretty put out by having to go up and down the stairs the entire way, but i feel like we could have dealt with one or two. i didn’t even realize the elevators had been on until after the power came back…i had been taking the stairs.

related to the generators: i really do not care about anthropogenic global warming or “the environment” very much. it’s true that pollution is a very bad thing (see: los angeles’ air quality, water quality in mainland china, unethical nuclear programs), but the ‘green’ and ‘energy reduction’ and ‘carbon neutral’ buzzwords are just frustrating. what i do care about is resource conservation. petroleum is something that will eventually run out, no matter what. yes, biofuel can be manufactured, but so many steps are involved in the manufacturing process that the idea of ethanol or anything along those lines being “efficient” is hilarious. i’m nowhere near a peakist, but i do think it’s going to be very interesting when it truly hits everyone that fossil fuels are going to start running out – forever – within the next couple generations.

what i’m getting at is how ridiculous it is for dozens of backup generators to be running off of gas, powering elevators so people don’t have to take the stairs. i’m not going to lobby to change this or anything, but it’s representative of ridiculous levels of waste. the same with cars. it’s been a refrain for years and years, but the amount of finite resources being wasted by cars is incredible. i understand that global shipping and transportation (planes, trains, boats, trucks) is so deep-set that it’s laughable to even think of changing it, but the amount of people that drive around ‘just because’ is insane. i’m not concerned that they’re going to kill my unborn children with air cancer, but if i drove around everywhere the fact that i’m just burning up an unreplenishable resource would be eating away at me. another reason i love cycling: keep the bike (and yourself) well-maintained and it will always be a viable method of local transportation.

i know that right now, any form of energy has fossil fuel implications. it would be nice if most electricity came from nuclear (or better, wind/hydro/solar/geo/tidal) sources, but that’s a ways off. what’s cool is that with current technology, fossil fuel is unnecessary (except for the fact that it’s so deeply built into infrastructure): the amount of solar-related energy (photovoltaic, wind, and hydro) that is unharnessed greatly exceeds all of today’s power needs. i’m super glad i live in the generation that i do, science and technology developments are incredibly exciting to me.

note to self: write about protests and petitions. they are ridiculous

tons of spelling problems, nickelback, switchfoot, family guy, wow. i would bet money she’s never read a jane austen book and is actually a fan of the movies.

i feel that i responded justifiably:

when i was in first year, someone very involved in municipal politics told me in no unclear terms that it’s basically impossible to keep a bike in the downtown core for two years…”it will be stolen”, they told me. my bike just turned 3! i have a sweet lock, pinheads, i don’t lock it to stupid places (pretty much post-and-rings only, preferably double ones), and it’s not a sweet-looking racing bike or whatever. one time i left my apartment way early in the morning, something like 4, to get a snack and saw a homeless-looking guy checking out my bike and playing with the lock. i started walking towards him and he ran away. yorkville cyclists are not very hardy – during the summer, it was regularly hard to find an open post-and-ring, and lately my bike has been the only one on my block.

freelance work slowed down a LOT between the second half of november until now, not good timing for christmas shopping. it picked back up this week and i have a bunch of gigs in january. it’s going to be very nice to pay off my credit card and be able to put some in savings. and order sushi.

some advertising firm offered me money to put a bunch of horrible flash ads and games on this site a little while ago. even though i should have because it would have been free money, i was too proud or something and kept demanding to see the code before agreeing to a contract. they stopped emailing after i asked a couple times, which makes me think it was phishing or malware anyway. who knows why they came to me, it’s not like i have any kind of serious pagerank.

i’m going to watch the hurt locker on the plane, which i am very excited about.

the concise and easy to understand article runs down the scientific impossibility of EHS and sums up the pathetic state of the general public’s knowledge on the subject in a much less angry way than i did. i know the space background and planet icons make it look a little like a star trek fan website, but the skeptical inquirer is the periodical of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a group of scientists that – in short – set pseudoscientific nonsense straight. its founding members include carl sagan (my favorite person), isaac asimov (come on), glenn seaborg (he has an element named after him), and james randi (the guy with the million dollar challenge to anyone who can prove supernatural ‘powers’ that has been unclaimed for over 10 years). unless you’re in the same group of utterly illogical new-agers as the conspiracy theorists that replied en relative masse to my last post on the matter, their credibility is unsurpassed.

a couple weeks ago i was doing some tech work for an intelligent, successful older woman. her laptop had a keyboard plugged into it, and when i had to unplug it to access a USB port, i casually asked why she uses a keyboard with her (obviously already equipped) laptop. she responded “to keep the computer farther away from me, you know, for the radiation.” i asked what she meant by the radiation. “well, it’ll give you cancer, of course! this isn’t something you worry about with all the computer work you do?”
that was an interesting situation – normally if someone had said that to me, i would quickly judge them as ignorant and uneducated, but this was obviously not the case. i guess dozens of years of mainstream media (news and otherwise) had drilled “ELECTRICITY WILL EVENTUALLY GIVE YOU CANCER, AND THE MORE, THE SOONER” into her head, and that ‘knowledge’ pushed the high school science out the other side.

i wish i had had this article to reference, because i definitely don’t want to give a paying client a link to my post where they would find themselves lumped in with “morons”, “crazies”, and “insane [people]” (my words). don’t get me wrong, i love aggressive science-related namecalling when people firmly decry cell phones or microwaves, and harsh judgement against anybody who believes in astrology, but there ARE people that i would like to correct in a civil, non-condescending way. so long story short, if you know anybody who thinks that cell phones can give you brain cancer or that you shouldn’t have computers near your bed, send them the article linked at the top. or this one. or buy them a subscription to skeptical inquirer. or lovingly give them a high school science textbook with a bookmark in the chapter on electromagnetic fields.

related to the above, i’m reading the demon-haunted world by carl sagan, and it’s already one of my favorite nonfiction books. it covers some middle-school basics like the scientific method and double-blind studies, but all with extremely interesting anecdotes and i totally love it. i somehow didn’t know that carl sagan wrote books NOT directly focused on space.

ramirez emailed me about his gold dust business last week, asking if i wanted to split his business down the middle. of course i accepted, and he immediately asks me to fly to ghana to meet with him. i reply that maybe i could, but could we do it another way? he tells me no, i must fly to ghana as soon as possible. this is new to me, usually they ask you to fly there, knowing 95% of people they reach won’t be able to drop $2k on a flight AND be gullible enough to fall for it. i run with it, and book fake flights and a hotel stay, and let him know when i’ll be flying in. he asks me to bring gifts of laptops and suits and mobile phones, as well as as much cash as i can to buy gold dust from him. i respond that i can bring all those gifts as well as 40 grand in cash, which excites him greatly.

it’s clear that he wants me to pack as many valuables as i can, fly to a third world country, and steal everything and potentially kill me for profit. yeah, this is a special scambait, i have to cause as much damage as possible.

the time comes for me to ‘fly’ to accra, ghana with a layover through amsterdamn. when i’m supposedly in amsterdam, i send him an email letting him know the flight to accra was overbooked, and i took a voucher in exchange for opting to take a flight to lomé, togo. he obviously didn’t get this email, because i get a call asking me “where are you now, i am at the arrival hall at the accra airport”. i explain my situation until he understands (it takes a couple tries), and i get “wow…wow….ok, get yourself a hotel in lomé, we will come to get you.”

he calls again, telling me he and his “entourage” – his word – will leave for lomé, togo early the next morning. sweet, he’s bringing a bunch of other lads with him.

putting it in perspective: government officials, teachers, and police officers make the equivalent of $30-$40 USD a month in ghana. things like food and lodging are equally inexpensive, so those people live relatively well for, you know, africa. conversely, telecommunications (the calling cards these jerks use to call me every day), and gas (five hour drive from accra to lomé) are the same price (after exchange rate) as first world countries. considering these criminals sit in incredibly inexpensive web cafes all day and email people, essentially equivalent to the ‘high-end’ homeless people who make up stories about how they just need to get a bus back to hamilton, i am to them an incredibly expensive haul, or to anyone else pretty good at scamming scammers.

i ask ramirez to call me when he’s leaving – i was busy and didn’t answer, and soon received this message of him and his crew getting in a car. he called back 4 hours later while someone else was driving, telling me he would soon be crossing the border into togo and that he would be in lomé within an hour. i arranged where we would meet up and when, and asked him to call again after he crossed the border. he called half an hour later (it’s now 5am EST) telling me they’ve crossed the border, and to check out of my hotel and wait in the lobby. so i went to sleep.

woke up later to find this message: “i am here in lomé, togo [...] i need to see you so i can leave this place.“. amazing. he left that at 5:45am EST (9:45am togo time). in the time between that message and my waking up, i had 63 missed calls and three more messages. they made the five hour drive back to accra at around 4pm his time, after waiting for me there for six hours. those poor guys.

ramirez called me a few times and sent some emails, and he initially expressed interest in coming back to lomé to pick me up, but eventually decided against it and gave up on me. total cost is unknown, but i estimate in the hundreds, USD. potential car rental, cost of gas, border bribes, total time on phone at least two hours over the whole bait, and waking up at 3am to pick me up in a different country. burned, ramirez, burned.

i’ve gotten more ‘trophies’ since then, i’ll post with them later.