Double Blind

Interesting story about how a three Canadian “mules” were offered $8-10k each for taking 133 pounds of pot across the border, just south of Cultus Lake. They were subsequently busted by US Customs and Immigration officials after they were able to track their snowshoes from the border.

They were picked up by border officials and the driver of an SUV that was heading up a remote forest service road, presumably to pick them up, was also arrested.

That’s not an easy hike! Carrying 45 pounds of pot, plus the necessary amount of water and nutrition, and on a snowpack, on a hike that is probably around 10-20km, plus 4000 feet of elevation gain would definitely require somebody in very good shape to pull off. Interesting how the “market rate” for the day’s work is about $8-10k.

Also, good of the US Customs and Immigration to actually catch the people involved. It makes you wonder how many don’t get caught.

For the first time in about 15 years, Canada is starting to see some more competition in the cell phone market.

Beyond Bell, Telus and Rogers (note that Rogers owns Fido) there were no options. By virtue of their technology, Bell and Telus were joined at the hip, so effectively there were two companies controlling the Canadian mobile phone market.

Now there are two new entrants of relevance – Wind Mobile, which is financially backed by Orascom, and Mobilicity, financially backed by John Bitove (a Canadian businessman having ownership interests in various real estate, media and fast food ventures) and some companies he is associated with. I have no idea what calculations this guy made to decide to get into the Canadian wireless market – if I had a billion dollars in my bank account, opening a wireless network would be fairly low on my list of economic priorities, at least if I wanted to generate a reasonable return.

Shaw is expected to enter the market a year or two later, presumably after they see what happens when the dust settles.

The two new entrants have started their operations in Toronto, being the largest market in Canada, but both are expected to operate in Vancouver later this year. It is not known whether Vancouver means “Metro Vancouver” or the “Lower Mainland” (i.e. including Abbotsford/Chilliwack) but in either case, the competition will likely result in a war of attrition where those with the deep pockets will be able to survive. Using this metric alone suggests that Bell/Telus and/or Rogers will be able to snap up the companies after there is enough bleeding, but in the meantime, the consumer is likely to see some cheaper cell service in the future.

Of note are the “internet on USB” type data plans offered – Wind Mobile has it for $55/mo, while Mobilicity has it for $40/mo for unlimited access. Rogers and other providers have it for roughly $50/mo for 2 gigabytes a month. I have no idea how much bandwidth I would consume in a month if it were to replace my cable modem.

I do note, however, that my notebook was on for 3.6 days (obviously I was not in front of the thing for that length of time!) but when I do a netstat -e, it shows that I’ve chewed up 3.1 gigabytes of download and 230 megabytes of upload data, so I suspect that 2 gigabytes a month would be a drop in the bucket if I were to get one of those sticks (26 gigabytes on a one-month basis). I have no idea why I took up so much bandwidth since I don’t have bittorrent or any related data-sucking applets running.

Apparently the Golden Ears Bridge now exists!

Unfortunately, the Evans Road interchange still does not exist.

I also notice Google has shaded in a lot more green areas.

If you are a voracious sender of letters, you might wish to purchase some stamps before the July 1 HST implementation and realize an instant 7% savings vs. waiting until after July 1 to do the same.

Ever wondered what would happen if you pissed off some US Customs and Immigration officials on the land border when coming to the USA from Canada? Listen to the audio in this recording. The origin of the recording is some website that inevitably picks some sensationalist headline to make the US Customs and Immigration officials look bad, but after listening to the entire tape, this guy had what was coming for him. The first border guard in the recording took a disliking to the guy, but the border guard in the secondary screening clearly gave this individual a lot of leeway before arresting the individual.

All the guy had to do was shut up, and he (and his wife) would have been let on their way to go shopping in Buffalo.

Inevitably, the only real line of defense that a country has against allowing in people that will be up to no good is thoroughly screening people at the border. It is a much more effective method than what you see at airports when they screen for terrorists. They ask you questions and if you give inconsistent responses or appear to be “fishy”, you will be taken in for secondary screening. There is no point in panicking or asking why or anything like that – all they want are consistent and honest answers. They will attempt to verify your answers by using the databases they have at hand and if your answers are consistent and you don’t have a criminal record they will let you through.

The US Customs and Immigration officers have a lot of power, both with entry and exit screening. When dealing with people that have the ability to make your life completely miserable, you have to choose your words very carefully and generally keep conversation as business-like and terse as possible.

It’s odd that the day after (after getting some sleep), this is the least sore I have felt after doing the 10km run over the past five years. Maybe this is why I turned in such a poor time. Not that I’m going to be running 10km today, but at least I can go out for a walk without writhing in agony.

1 hour, 1 minute and 56 seconds. Yuck! Old age is hitting me! Not happy with the horrible run time!

Actually, when finishing down the finish line, I thought I broke an hour. I did not bring my stopwatch so I had no idea of knowing whether I was on a decent pace or not. It did feel like a good run. I think where I lost the most amount of time was going up the hill to the Burrard Street Bridge and also up the Cambie street bridge, but it didn’t feel like THAT much time was lost. I also didn’t feel like I lost much time weaving through the crowds – the congestion in the first 3km was there, but it was always the case with the previous years of running as well.

I arrived at around 9:45am. Taking the Canada Line is such a breeze.

I consciously took it “light” at the beginning, trying not to burn myself out too quickly. Going down the hill on Georgia street, I tried to “glide” as much as possible and use the downhill slope to minimize energy consumption. I pretended I was a bowling ball rolling down hill. After the downhill jog, I ran the pace of the crowd on the left hand side, making some advances through people as necessary, but it was not a hugely fast pace.

I actually felt quite good after reaching the peak of the Burrard Street bridge, and “glided” down again, and ran most of the way down and ran straight until reaching the base of the Cambie Street bridge. I guess my running stride was not very lengthy which lead to the long run-time. For next year, I think I have to work on improving the length of my stride (in addition to losing 20 pounds of mass which would make it easier for my legs to propel my body forward).

I discovered a new phenomenon by observing other people – text messaging while running. Those people are about as dangerous as those text messaging on their blackberries while driving.

This year had a couple changes from the previous year – it was a couple weeks later in May because of the Olympics. Although today was a colder day than average for this time of the year, I think it was an improvement. The other big change is that instead of meeting up in BC Place, they have used the parking lot next to BC Place near the waterfront to put tents and the food and stuff. They had the usual assortment of foods, and I was pleased to see that Island Farms had their chocolate milk very well stocked. They were also giving out samples of Red Bull (which I don’t drink and gave to some homeless guy near BC Place) and the usual bananas and oranges. Finally, they had a stand that was giving out free tubs of protein shake powder, but knowing how disgusting that stuff tastes, I passed even though the lineup for that booth was massive.

I will put a long story short and will say it will be a miracle if I beat my previous best time of 56 minutes and 5 seconds. It’s not going to happen. I will feel lucky if I beat an hour.

Basically the story is that my training schedule got massively interrupted by childbirth and respective parenting duties. It was to be expected, but at least I have managed to train twice a week, and a few times three times a week (three times a week is what is necessary to keep up endurance in my opinion). For the last month, I have been exclusively running outdoors since the local gym facility that I normally go to transitioned ownership.

Really not helping was that falling down while running incident. Although I’m fully healed from that, it has given me a little bit of psychological scarring running on slightly uneven gravel terrain!

The other issue is weight gain – I guess age is catching up, but basically the body is really good at packing on those pounds, and is not good at surrendering them so easily. If I am to do this next year with a respectable time, I have to watch this and not handicap myself with an extra few pounds of weight.

Going into the race, I am going to alter my strategy somewhat – I am choosing to not wear a watch. I will also be showing up a little bit later, since I think standing out in the open for half an hour, waiting for the waves of people to clear is more detrimental to performance than having to wade through the crowds of people. I recall in previous races that it was quite entertaining trying to get around people, and this distraction might make it easier to cope with the race. I also have a problem with starting too quickly, and having plenty of people around might mitigate this – where I need the endurance is the 40 to 55 minute mark, and most others wear out at this time. I’m probably going to experience the same.

I also field-tested some new shoes I bought two weeks ago, to good success – less aches and pains on the feet when running, and no blisters or adverse effects.

Best of luck for everybody on Sunday. The weather is expected to be sunny, highs of 16 and lows of 6, which is a cool day for the second week of May, but is perfect for running purposes.

I am not making a prediction in this election. I simply do not know enough about the political interior of the United Kingdom to properly make extrapolations.

Markets are saying there is a 60% chance of a minority government.

Betfair has the Conservatives at 320 seats (out of 650), Labour at 219, and Liberal Democrats at 84. This leaves everybody else at 27 seats. This is narrowly missing a 326 seat majority, although they will have a bare functional majority at 320 seats because of Northern Ireland politics.

Angus Reid has the Conservatives at 36%, Liberal Democrats at 29% and Labour at 24%. If this materializes, the Conservatives will easily hit a majority.

If I was to make an uninformed and uneducated guess, it would be the Conservatives getting about 350 seats, Liberal Democrats about 120 and Labour about 150.

I don’t think David Cameron, with a minority or majority government, will do much better for the United Kingdom than the previous administration. The UK has serious issues and none of the party leaders seem to be advocating anything other than status quo.

Hilarious hole in their software dealing with letting others tap into the private conversations of individuals. Since Facebook stores all of this information, I bet you Zuckerman can listen into the conversations of half the teenagers across the USA.

I doubt Google Talk is any better, unfortunately.