Less than 24 hours after I posted my previous post on the frailty of utility infrastructures, the next day at around 9am a regional electrical substation in Chilliwack went up in flames. They had to shut down power across the city and everything was down until about 3:30pm today.
Another single point of failure, although this one was kind of obvious.
Earlier today, a single building goes to flames in Chilliwack (specifically in the Yarrow community). Apparently this building was close to some fibre optic cables, and as a result TELUS customers received some outages with wireless and internet service. There was also some collateral damage done to Shaw customers. For example, ping times to anywhere outside the city was about 200ms, with about 10% packet loss. Bandwidth is at about 5kB/s, which makes things feel like to good old days when you used to use the internet through a 33.6k dial-up modem connection.
So a whole city’s internet infrastructure gets shredded to bits because a building caught on fire – a single point of failure.
I also remember quite a few years ago when I was still a student at UBC that a bus crashed on a power line somewhere in Vancouver and the net result was that it brought down power across the entire university endowment land area.
This leads me to the question of: how many other significant points of failure exist in our infrastructure do we have? I bet the answer to this is much more than we imagine, for power, telecommunications and water/sewage.
I am happy to report I have been re-elected to another term to the park board:
PARK COMMISSIONER
* Five (5) to be elected 11 of 11 Polls Reporting
1 * SKONBERG, Owen 3,156
2 * McCREA, Bob 2,764
3 * TOEWS, Carlton 2,735
4 * PETER, Sacha 2,261
5 * SHANKS, Malcolm 2,065
6 ALLINOTT, Scott 1,950
7 ROSS, Austin 1,861
Thanks again to the voters of Chilliwack. It is one thing doing the analysis of elections that others are involved in – it is another being involved in your own election.
Google made a very bad user interface decision with respect to the redesign of their Google Reader. This post is a fairly good summary and I echo the sentiments. I did not use any of the “social” features of Google Reader, but when they switched their interface I do find the diminished screen real estate and horrible colour scheme to be detrimental to the whole experience.
What I find interesting is that this is the first time Google actively did something to a product of theirs that I used that would encourage me to no longer use it. Similar products include Office 2007 vs. 2003 (2007 and later has the new “Ribbon” style user interface which is completely unusable), Windows Vista (although I will note that Windows 7 is tolerable) and quite frankly, the whole internet in general.
I’m finding it very interesting how digital technology is seemingly “eroding” into something less usable and less intuitive. Even when working with my cell phone I have to combat a bunch of stupid features that I do not want that gets in the way of what I want it to do.
Maybe this is a sign of my old age.
Bill C-20 will bring a significant addition of seats to the House of Commons, with the net impact that BC will receive 6 more seats, Alberta will receive 6, Ontario will receive 15 and Quebec will receive 3.
If you live in a province that is not on this short-list then your relative power in Ottawa will decline accordingly.
The interesting part of the new formula is that provinces can not lose seats beyond what they have currently, but they can lose seats in the subsequent redistribution in 2021 and beyond if their population fraction declines accordingly.
That said, the legislation will bring the provinces that have higher population percentages relative to seat count closer in line to the average.
One large complaint is that this will cost more in terms of paying MPs and their budgets, and also the cost to hold an election. This indeed is true. I believe the costing will be about $15M/year more for the 30 MPs and their budgets, and about $12M for an election.
One group that should be oddly in support of this change are the proportional representation fans – the more seats you have in a FPTP system, the more proportional the results become.
I am wondering what the following government model would look like:
1. One MP for every 5,000 people (this would be about 6,900 MPs country-wide);
2. The job of an MP is acknowledged to be a part-time endeavour, with part-time pay, UNLESS if you are in cabinet;
3. MPs vote electronically and do not have to show up to Ottawa every time to vote and are not expected to vote on every proceeding, hence you do not need to be in Ottawa too often;
4. Cabinet cannot vote in the House of Commons.
Obviously this system will have flaws, but it is interesting to see how it would evolve.
There is plenty of garbage out there in the journalistic world, but this piece by Josh D. Scheinert is utterly devoid of logic.
Putting a long story short, a bunch of Conservatives made a video in response to the suicide of a 15-year old (Jamie Hubley) that was bullied because he was homosexual. The video has a bunch of well-known Conservatives saying to the camera “it gets better”.
Scheinert then continues in his article to state that the video is hypocritical because some of the MPs in the video were well known to be against same-sex marriage.
How does one make this quantum leap? Teen suicide is completely different than same-sex marriage. One can vigorously oppose the bullying of homosexual teenagers (or heterosexual or bisexual teenagers) while opposing same-sex marriage. They are not mutually exclusive beliefs.
I’m guessing the media always portray LGBT issues at insanely polar extremes because it helps them sell advertising.
Although I don’t think it will happen, I hope the state of journalism “gets better”. I’m not holding my breath.
It continues to amaze me how much of a price differential the BC Dairy Board puts upon all residents of British Columbia. The latest example is a domestically produced chunk of Parmesan – at Costco in Abbotsford, the price was $29 per kilogram, while in the USA, it was $10. While I realize that not all cheeses named Parmesan are identical in quality and character, the price differential is startling. It is even more pronounced when purchasing it in more smaller-sized “retail” quantity at a place like Superstore (which it is typically double).
Most people that enjoy varieties of cheese should just make a quick trip down to Bellingham and they will save a lot of money in the process.
An interesting result in the Ontario provincial election:
Liberals – 53 (37.6%)
PCs – 37 (35.4%)
NDP – 17 (22.7%)
Greens – 0 (2.9%)
The PCs and NDP got very, very lucky by virtue of the fact that the Liberals are 1 seat short of a majority government (54 seats required). The clear analysis is that the political winds in Ontario will be very volatile – the Liberals will be gunning for an election when they sense they can get a majority, while the PCs will be gunning for the Liberals if they can get a plurality of seats. I can’t see it lasting longer than 18 months before they have another election. Every resignation and by-election would become quite significant in such a knife-edge situation.
The other option for the Liberals is to catch an NDP or PC floor crosser. I don’t know enough about Ontario provincial politics to know who would be on the likely list to switch sides for a cabinet position (and a subsequent guarantee that their political career will end at the date of the next provincial election).
Minority governments are very tricky – the fact that Prime Minister Stephen Harper was able to navigate through 2006 to 2011 relatively unscathed was the exception to the rule. The two notable minority governments in recent history which had a much more volatile fate was Liberal Paul Martin’s 2004-2006 government (who succumbed to the sponsorship scandal) and Jean Charest’s 2007-2008 minority government in Quebec (who pulled off a near-miracle by getting re-elected in a slim majority while the ADQ imploded).
As a side note, 9 out of 11 of my political predictions that I made in January of 2011 appear to have come true.
When I was much younger, I played a lot of computer games. I stopped around 2001 when there were other pressures on my time, but also because of the lack of depth of what was available. When you compare the depth of what is available these days (mainly World of Warcraft, and shoot-em-ups like Call of Duty that never quite deviated from the Quake formula), it really didn’t compare to what was out in the golden era of PC gaming, roughly from 1985 to 2000. Games today have much fancier graphics, but they stopped being fun.
What I am discovering is that with the renaissance of hand-held mobile devices and specifically the iPhone/iPad, developers are looking at their old core of intellectual property (source code and designs) for older PC games and porting them over to mobile devices. One example of such a game is Ascendency, which was an MS-DOS game that I thought had huge potential, but only if they fixed some of the core problems in the game. I was amazed to find out they re-released it for iOS in 2011.
I did a very curt analysis on the state of the PC Game market in December 2004 which is essentially correct today. However, what has changed and if what I am suspecting is true is that the critical mass of Apple infrastructure out there is going to open up a market for PC-type games once again, or at least dredge up some of the gems of the past that were indeed quite fun to play – such as the Maniac Mansion series, or the King’s Quest and/or Space Quest type adventures that you don’t see being released today.
I’m probably still not going to be playing these games since in the adult world grown-ups play the stock market, but maybe my baby son will. At least I will know what to upload to his iPad (or equivalent) when he gets to the appropriate age.
Creating a sky park may be impractical but I would at least investigate the cost of keeping the bridge structure afloat, just as a curiousity.
I must say I normally don’t go for expensive projects that don’t serve much utility, but the potential concept of using the old Port Mann Bridge as a greenway is utterly fascinating.
Here was the article that got me on this topic.
Engineering-wise, you have a few things to worry about: Can the bridge deck support the weight load (of dirt and foliage and related materials)? How would you deal with tree roots and drainage? Would the slope of the bridge cause any issues? How rusted are the bridge supports to the deck? What impact would the new Port Mann Bridge have on the old one?
Also, would you have one huge elevator or lift down to Tree Island?
If they could actually pull this off for less than a million a year in maintenance expenses, it would be seriously worth considering.