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.
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.
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.
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.
In what must be a once-in-a-century back-to-back posting of Hollywood, I was oddly interested in this season of America’s got Talent, specifically the final. I was guessing who the public that watches television would rank first based on the final four performances. I was not surprised given what I saw.
Landau Eugene Murphy Jr. delivered an excellent performance. All of his performances were very, very good and with his voice and a good agent, he will be able to go places because his voice is indistinguishable from Frank Sinatra himself. He also sings very effortlessly, which is very deceptive. Suffice to say, he deserved to win based on all of his performances, including the final one, which he nailed.
Team iLuminate did not have their best performance in the final. I believe they were cursed by the camera positioning in that I highly suspect that they are more impressive to watch in real life. I also do not think the audience would appreciate that these people are dancing virtually in the dark and interrupted by their teammates blinding each other with lights on their outfits. This was an original act for their five performances during the entire season and again, while their last performance was not their best (I thought their second performance was best versus their final), I would easily pay to see these people perform live. It reminds me of a dance-based Blue Man Group.
Poplyfe had a sub-par performance in their final act. I feel for them since they obviously are quite talented, but their finale was not up to snuff. Their best performance was the previous one in the semi-finals which I thought was their best performance of the season.
Silhouettes had a very good final performance, but I do not think it was as moving as their semi-final performance, which I thought was masterful and if they had reversed the order of their performances they might have had a greater chance of winning the competition. The group runs into fatigue with the similar themes of their performances, but I do very much like the messaging and they deserved the second place ranking.
In terms of the markets, you could actively place a wager for Team iLuminate at around 55% odds, while Landau Eugene Murphy Jr. was a 25% chance to win it. Silhouettes were 15% and Poplyfe was 5%.
I also do notice that Canada’s Got Talent will be having their first season air on March 2012.
I generally enjoy most movies that involve gambling and casinos. Croupier (wikipedia entry) was no exception. It was a 1999 release and plays quite well 12 years later in the year 2011. It was funny to see the archaic computer notebook that the main character used to write his book.
The only big production mistake was when the protagonist deals a 21 to some customer after he hit for a card, and he then flipped up 21 himself and took the chips – in this case, it would be a “push” and the original bet would be returned.
Otherwise, the movie is short, sweet, simple, and they tie up all of the characters nicely by the end of the movie. Well worth watching.
On the heels of a 1,680 pound silver theft in Chilliwack earlier this year, we have news of a person that was driving from the Lower Mainland and stopped off at Hope to have something to eat. He had purchased $30,000 of silver and had put it in his backpack. Apparently he left his door unlocked since when he returned five minutes later it was stolen.
At the existing market rate, this is approximately 50 pounds of silver. If he had just bought gold instead, this would have been one pound.
I guess the lesson of the day here is that if you buy $30,000 of silver and want to take it back home, don’t stick it in a backpack on your front seat and don’t leave your door unlocked. Also, if you get hungry along the way you may wish to use the drive-through.
I noticed from a link that I had read earlier that the magic to making a Starbucks-type frap that doesn’t separate after you blend the thing is to use Xanthan Gum. I finally tried the recipe. Xanthan Gum is cheap and easy to find – Galloways is a place where you can get it (amongst other great items). Superstore might have it in the baking isle (haven’t checked).
I brewed two shots of espresso with about 200mL of water. I let the espresso cool down for ten minutes in the freezer before pouring it into a blender, along with about 200mL of 2% milk. I put in a tablespoon of granulated sugar and a tablespoon of vanilla syrup (not vanilla extract, but the syrup) and a 1/4 teaspoon of Xanthan Gum. I finally put in a whole bunch of ice (I didn’t measure, but it was a tray and a few extra cubes) and gave it a blend.
The final product came surprisingly close to the real thing – except for the sweetness. Starbucks has to be a ton of sugar into their fraps since while I found a tablespoon of sugar to be sufficient, the ones you get at the store are positively sweeter. Also, I believe 1/4 teaspoon of Xanthan Gum was too much – next time I will try to reduce this by half. The texture of the frap after shutting off the blender was quite bubbly and I believe this was caused by having too much Xanthan Gum into the mix.
The other funny problem is that I am going to try to source some decaffeinated whole coffee beans so that way I can experiment by making more of these things (e.g. mocha, java chip, etc.) without getting all giddy with caffeine poisoning. Realistically if I had more than a double shot of espresso per day, the caffeine really becomes disruptive to the functioning of my sleeping rhythm.