Double Blind

I find searching for confluences to be rather addictive. I’m still doing the “low lying fruit”, but I’m planning on some real adventures that require some effort other than getting out of the car for an hour.

35N106W (New Mexico)
35N105W (New Mexico)
32N104W (Texas)

This now means I’ve done confluence points in three US states: Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

I’ve got some more vacation photos coming, but they will wait until later.

It’s amazing how much stuff gets queued up in the reading list when you take a week off on holiday. Posting will probably be light until this weekend.

I was on vacation for the past week and my brain feels like its IQ level is 50 points below what it should be, so I’ll post some pictures in the upcoming days.

If at all possible, I try not to deal with humans on the other end of the phone when doing stuff that could otherwise be automated – airline flights, hotels, fixing software, etc.

The following post by Photon Courier is a good example of how things have gone so screwed up in the customer service domain. Essentially management is trying to force “quality” standards by having people follow a script and not have anybody doing any real thinking on how to solve matters. It works to a point, but when you try over-doing it, it fails miserably.

The following headline synopsis caught my attention:

Just one person of visible minority was asked to move forward to a front-line position at Vancouver city hall during a tour by the federal labour minister in August, according to the deputy city manager. (Vancouver Sun)

This is political correctness at its worst.

Let’s pretend that there were 10 people that would be visible at a front-line position. Let’s pretend the entire employee distribution consisted of 70% of “type X” people and 30% of “type Y” people. What is the chance of seeing less than 3 “type Y” people at the front?

I finally got around to reading this book authored by Katherine Gordon.

This book is a good read for anybody that is interested in the surveying history of the province. It also has a lot of supplementary information with respect to how the BC surveyors came to be and how they fared in various eras of the province.

The book is quite lengthy and is excellently written. For somebody like me that is interested in such issues of provincial geography, I’m very glad to have spent the time and read it. For others, I suspect they might find it a bit dry. I found it fascinating.

In particular, the need to delineate land boundaries is tantamount to having order in society – if multiple jurisdictions claim a single piece of territory, conflicts will inevitably erupt as one side tries to assert their sovereignty. There is a very interesting passage in the book with respect to how native lands were surveyed and the prelude of how the Nisga’a agreement was formed. The whole book is a testament to how the industry has changed over the years in light of the remarkable technological change the field has gone through – I could just imagine what would happen if you took a surveyor from the 1850’s and gave him Google Earth for an hour.

In a way, we still need to know how to do things to “hard way”, and surveying is still one example of that. Just like how calculators didn’t abolish the need to learn your multiplication tables, GPS doesn’t absolve the surveyor from being able to calculate their position on a map without a satellite receiver.

Right now any passenger pays $15 to fly out of the province if they take YVR to fly in the form of airport improvement fees. The fees were originally instituted as a ‘temporary’ measure to upgrade the transborder and international terminals. As anybody knows what happens to “temporary” taxes, the AIF became permanent.

Now YVR’s 2027 vision draft practically guarantees that they’re going to increase these fees. Why not send them an email and tell them you love to be taxed every time you fly?

I’m preparing for a final exam in a course that I’m taking through the Thompson Rivers University open learning agency. I had to dust off my old Hewlett Packard 42S calculator and prepare some financial functions (simple stuff like present/future value of an annuity, just to make sure I don’t forget what the equations were). It has been over 5 years since I’ve used the calculator, but the simplicity and elegance of its design still blows me away.

Back in UBC, I bought a Hewlett Packard 48GX, but it wasn’t nearly as useful as I thought it was going to be. Although the 48GX had more memory and had much more sophisticated math (e.g. symbolic integration for calculus!), I really didn’t use it all that much and kept on coming back to the 42S.

My two requirements for a hand-held calculator continues to be an RPN interface and speedy response. The 48GX had the former, but not the latter. The 42S has it all.

Not bad for a 15 year old piece of hardware.

For reference, here was my previous post on the matter of airline security.

Since I’m returning back to YVR today, I’m at the Air New Zealand airport lounge in Terminal 2 in LAX airport. They allow people to actually open up their own cans of pop and pour it into glasses themselves! What an amazing concept!

So my guess is that this stupidity is due to either Transport Canada, Air Canada, or the Vancouver Airport Authority.

On a total side note, the Air New Zealand lounge here completely kicks ass. It’s spacious, relatively unpopulated, and has a very wide selection of goodies to munch on. This also includes a cheese and meat platter, salad, fresh fruit, chips and granola bars. They also have a decent liquor bar which you can help yourself with, and a nice automatic coffee/latte/cappuccino machine. By far it beats the crap out of the Air Canada lounge here.

It’s too bad that I won’t be coming around here too often anymore since it’s very easily to get spoiled “detoxing” before your flights. It almost makes the whole flight tolerable since it’s easier to sleep with some food in the stomach.

I wonder if the slip in the price of oil over the past three weeks is a predictor of an economic recession or whether it’s about extra capacity emerging into the system.

Note the range on the graph is quite narrow – it’s a 20% band from the existing price. If I were to take a guess, I think we’ll start seeing $50 oil within half a year. But the reason why I don’t own any stocks that relate to the energy market is because I’m utterly useless at predicting the direction of this very chart so take what I say with a grain of salt.