Omega Point

In which Catherine is even more conspicuous than usual

“Wow, Cather­ine! You’re wear­ing a sling and everything!”

Yeah! I tore my rota­tor cuff¹ doing extreme sports.

“It’s a good thing you wore your loos­est pos­si­ble jeans to work then, isn’t it? Really tight ones would make going to the bath­room really, really dif­fi­cult.”

It sure would. Dammit.

1. Yes, again. [↩]

Failed slogans: “Woodbridge: the wine that takes 2 hours to choke down”

So there I was, wait­ing to meet a friend for sushi, when she called to let me know she was run­ning a lit­tle behind. What to do, what to do? Why hello, Liquor Store!

This par­tic­u­lar BC Liquor Store is located in Vancouver’s classi­est shop­ping estab­lish­ment, Kings­gate Mall. Home to the Worst Wash­room in Canada,¹ Kings­gate also fea­tures stores that sell knock­off swords, hooker boots and hos­pi­tal scrubs, as well as a Shop­pers Drug Mart, which is usu­ally the sole rea­son I go in there.² Also, some­times Pay­less stocks Catherine-sized shoes. Mostly not.

On a side note, I was just buy­ing a replace­ment bot­tle of vodka–my pre­vi­ous one hav­ing gone to a good cause: low­er­ing the col­lec­tive IQ of Vancouver’s Twit­ter com­mu­nity by about 2%. So this was more of an errand than any­thing likely to get my 2-day chip taken away.³

Being a smart shop­per, I gen­er­ally avoid buy­ing alco­hol in the evening because, well, who wants to be wait­ing in line for 15 min­utes? Exactly: bored peo­ple.

While stand­ing there, being told by a vari­ety of drunk, jonesing, tooth­less and urine-smelling peo­ple that my hair, hat, paint­brush case and eyes were pretty, I noticed a dis­play in the “impulse pur­chase” rack pro­mot­ing Wood­bridge cabernet.

The first thing that struck me about this dis­play was not that it was posi­tioned where the gum and Archie comics are sup­posed to be, but rather that it appeared that some of the other peo­ple in line with me had been given a copy of Corel­Draw and hired to make wine ads.

I’m actu­ally not really sure where to start. At some point, I’m sure there was a designer, art direc­tor, pho­tog­ra­pher, the whole deal. Sadly, it appears some­thing hap­pened on the way to the print­ers’. (“I said ‘cre­ative’! Throw some more fonts in there!”)

Pos­si­bly the stock photo of the man and woman enjoy­ing ham and pineap­ple with root beer floats is not the most rep­re­sen­ta­tive image of “any evening” with “6 friends”, but hey, it looks like a really good ham, yeah?

I do like the fact that the inex­plic­a­bly wordy “Enter to Win” bub­ble com­mu­ni­cates its rela­tion to the prizes men­tioned in the ad’s footer by totally over­lap­ping some of the text with its drop shadow. Pretty effec­tive, right?

In fair­ness to Wood­bridge, Robert Mon­davi, and their staff of tal­ented media pro­fes­sion­als, the “ENTER TO WIN the fol­low­ing prizes!” bub­ble does impli­cate the importer, Vin­cor Canada. I do also get that $11.50 wine that comes with a chance to win prizes is unlikely to have its rep­u­ta­tion besmirched too unduly by some bad drop shad­ows. How­ever, I don’t think I can for­give the “yes, we’re using Arial” copy:

6 friends
any evening
2 hours enjoy­ing the con­ver­sa­tion
1 bot­tle of Woodridge BY ROBERT MONDAVI

You know, it’s not ter­ri­ble. That sounds like a pretty good evening, actu­ally. Fun times, am I right? Er, wait, what? One bot­tle? How big is it? Are we sure this wine actu­ally comes in a bottle?

750mL, 13.0% alcohol.

I see: 750mL. Not being a huge wine drinker, I was a lit­tle con­fused, as this sounds to me like a fairly small amount. In fact, I can recall shar­ing a sin­gle bot­tle of wine with only one other per­son. Maybe I am an alco­holic. Is that one of the definitions?

So what gives? The LCBO, Ontario’s coun­ter­part to BC Liquor Stores, describes a “stan­dard” glass of wine as being 5 US fluid ounces (147.9mL) and a 750mL bot­tle as con­tain­ing 5 glasses of wine. In fact, the LCBO goes fur­ther, pro­vid­ing a handy “Party Cal­cu­la­tor” that esti­mates a more rea­son­able vol­ume of wine for “6 friends” to chug back whilst “enjoy­ing the con­ver­sa­tion for 2 hours” is four bottles.

Sweet. I knew I wasn’t some kind of insane lush. Ad writ­ers: you’re clearly there any­way. Make sure you run your mar­ket­ing copy by the line at your local liquor or wine store. It’s important.

1. Dur­ing my sole visit, I was able to accu­rately dis­cern the height of one of the pre­vi­ous vis­i­tors to the stall. Think about that. [↩]
2. Shop­pers Drug Mart is awe­some. [↩]
3. Inter­ven­tion averted! [↩]

Pride by any other name

As a quick aside, one argu­ment I’ve heard about the Gay Pride Parade recently is that if its pur­pose as an activism tool has ended in North Amer­ica, maybe it shouldn’t be called “Pride” any­more. Hon­estly though, we have vir­tu­ally no hol­i­days or tra­di­tions that make any sense when viewed from their orig­i­nal con­texts. Seri­ously, Guy Fawkes Day? Valentine’s day? April Fools’ Day? Look­ing for authen­tic­ity in hol­i­days is pretty futile, in my opin­ion. They are what we want them to be, and they’re sig­nif­i­cant because we cel­e­brated them last year and the year before that, not because our great-grandparents observed them exactly the same way as we do.

Frankly, in a thou­sand years, when Pride has become all mixed up with St Patrick’s Day and every­one car­ries a genet­i­cally engi­neered blue cucum­ber because that’s tra­di­tional, the ori­gin of the day’s name–whatever that may be by then–is just going to be a weird bit of trivia men­tioned on the news on years when they need hol­i­day filler.

So there.

Blogathon 2009: Infographics, Part 1: Why the CBC sucks

Okay, this is some­thing that has bugged me for a while. Peo­ple who say “inter­ac­tive” when they mean “hard to use” and “Flash scroll­bars”.

While oth­er­wise a com­pe­tent, irri­tat­ingly under­funded news orga­ni­za­tion, the CBC sucks at info­graph­ics. Most of their “inter­ac­tive fea­tures” are just text that requires a lot of click­ing and scrolling to read. That’s not “inter­ac­tive”, guys. That’s “bro­ken”. (In fair­ness, a lot of these come from the Cana­dian Press, which pre­sum­ably also sup­plies these hor­ri­ble clicky things to the two other^[1] Cana­dian news organizations.)

But I digress. A tad.

Yeah, that’s a shame.

This graph of the depress­ing fail­ure that is North­ern Tele­com is pretty good because it ties news and events to stock price over time. There’s still ridicu­lous amounts of click­ing on tiny lit­tle dots though. Mouseover, anyone?

(In fair­ness, there are at least forward/back buttons.)

I find it really bizarre that the two most effec­tive “inter­ac­tive” fea­tures on CBC’s web­site are both incred­i­bly mor­bid: a “where did peo­ple find feet washed up on beaches?” map, and a map of gang hits in Metro Van­cou­ver. (Wow, that map cer­tainly makes the Down­town East Side look quiet. “DTES: Too poor for gang-bangers.”)

Both of these, pre­dictably, use Google Maps, and colour-code the dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of event at that loca­tion. (“Rac­coon paw hoax” or “stab­bing”, for exam­ple.) This con­veys a decent amount of infor­ma­tion with­out hav­ing to select the icon to view addi­tional details. How­ever, you still do have to click the thing to find out any­thing more.

I will say, though, that the effec­tive­ness of both of these hor­ri­ble death maps could be improved by tak­ing time and date into account: per­son­ally, I want to see how long ago those peo­ple down the street got mur­dered in their attic. I mean, really, now. (I remem­ber see­ing a Google Maps mashup that did this, with a slider at the bot­tom. Can any­one help me out with a URL?)

The New York Times, on the other hand, takes online info­graph­ics to a whole new level, rival­ing the qual­ity of their print fea­tures. I’ll explain more about this in 30 minutes.

[1] Yes, seri­ously. (Stu­pid Con­rad Black. Stu­pid CRTC.)

Won’t you be my neighbour?

For the past few years, I’ve lived in a Van­cou­ver Spe­cial, chopped up into a few suites. My entire street, and in fact, most of my neigh­bour­hood is like that, I sus­pect. It’s the sort of apart­ment real­tors and land­lords describe as “cozy”, but it’s decent.

I know a few of my neighbours:

• There’s the autis­tic tween two doors down who throws extremely loud tem­per tantrums.
• There’s the stu­dents on the other side of my house, one of whom once dated a guy who was extremely emo­tional dur­ing sex, to her irri­ta­tion: “I just love you so much.” “Yeah, whatever.”
• My upstairs neigh­bour and her teenage son, whom I do see and speak to reg­u­larly, are nice: she plays golf, he likes video games. Their (great-) uncle lives down the street in what I sus­pect is the first house to be built on that lot. Van­cou­ver is an extremely new city, remember.
• I don’t know the guys next door, but they always have very enter­tain­ing con­ver­sa­tions in Man­darin. One of them fre­quently sings com­mer­cial jin­gles and Frank Sina­tra med­leys. They then argue about them. Once, he was play­ing a flute!

But this all brings me to my point. Today I was think­ing about the fact that it’s actu­ally kind of weird that I do know any of my neigh­bours’ names. Most of us don’t. We live in apart­ment build­ings, or com­mute from the sub­urbs. My street def­i­nitely has more in com­mon with the lat­ter, with its stu­pid wasted space and iden­ti­cal “tech­ni­cally it’s a detached home” houses.

It’s not much, but the view’s amaz­ing.

But worse, we all buy into it. Between my house and my neigh­bours’, iden­ti­cal to my own and built at the same time, there lies approx­i­mately 6 feet of space, more than half the width of my weird, nar­row apart­ment. So what do we do with it? On my half, there’s a two-foot-wide path from the front of the house to the back, a foot of cedar chips, end­ing at a ter­ri­ble, rusty chain-link fence. On theirs, the inverse. Only they have gravel instead of cedar chips.

Bravo, archi­tects. Instead of hav­ing access to a fairly nice shared patio, allow­ing us to sit out in the cool breeze between the two houses, to bar­beque, fix a bike, or do some win­dow­box gar­den­ing, we have an ugly fence divid­ing the space, forc­ing the addi­tion of a buffer zone in the mid­dle, lest we brush up against it and totally get rust par­ti­cles all over our spiffy new bike’s han­dle­bar tape. (Not that this hap­pened to me recently or anything.)

By putting up a bar­rier and main­tain­ing the fic­tion that we can’t actu­ally smell each other’s din­ner, we’ve wasted what amounts to an entire laneway. In some cities, there would be an actual street sign along a gap that wide between two buildings.

This is ridicu­lous, hon­estly. It’s time to stop cater­ing to the idea that enclos­ing a chunk of lawn with a fence is a sta­tus sym­bol. Nobody is helped by this fence remain­ing here. The own­ers of our two houses don’t even live here. It’s not help­ing resale val­ues. Any­one want­ing to buy one of the prop­er­ties and return it to a single-family home would incur tens of thou­sands of dol­lars of con­struc­tion costs, only to be left at a dis­ad­van­tage pay­ing the mort­gage. (Seri­ously, is there any­one in Van­cou­ver who can afford to own a detached home and not rent out a suite?)

With­out the fence, both units would have an extra amenity, appeal­ing to renters. As ten­ants, we’d have more usable space. I could turn my bike around with­out hav­ing to lift it above my head or pick it up on the back wheel.

And most of all, maybe I’d actu­ally talk to the guys across the fence some­time and ask them if they want any help set­tling the argu­ment over the Sleep Coun­try Canada jingle.

Adventures in self-checkout UI

Part of being me is that basi­cally every pos­si­ble task I decide to under­take in my day-to-day life is com­pletely unac­counted for by city plan­ners, archi­tects, design­ers, doc­tors, soft­ware engi­neers, and so on. Some­times, this is sim­ply due to the fact that I am tall^[1], as in the case of the face-level wall sconce mounted in the hall next to my desk at work, or the fact that every­thing from door­knobs to toi­lets are gen­er­ally too low for me to com­fort­ably operate.

Other times, it’s due to my trade­mark life planning.

Con­sider the fol­low­ing scenario:

I stand in line for the self-checkout sta­tion at the Real Cana­dian Super­store in Metro­town^[2], hold­ing a $4 bag of chips and noth­ing else. Super­store shop­pers will note that this bag is going to end up weigh­ing some­where in the neigh­bour­hood of 1-2kg. In my defense, I’m not aller­gic to pota­toes. So it’s healthy.

Upon actu­ally step­ping up to the machine, I am prompted to enter the num­ber of bags desired. Super­store shop­pers will recall that part of their no-frills pol­icy, they have a suck­ass web­site and charge 3 cents per plas­tic bag.

I select zero bags, pleased to see that what­ever cir­cu­la­tory prob­lem that pre­vents me from using touch­screen kiosks has tem­porar­ily reversed itself. Prompted to scan my item, I do so.

“Please place the item in the bag,” instructs the machine. I do not.

Instead, I toss my chips onto the bag-filling plat­form, trig­ger­ing the weight sen­sor which tells the com­puter that an item has been added to… noth­ing, in this case. The machine prompts me to either scan my next item or to com­plete the sale. I briefly spec­u­late about the num­ber of peo­ple who bring their own reusuable bags to Super­store com­pared to the num­ber of peo­ple who don’t want shop­ping bags because they’re buy­ing the biggest pos­si­ble bag of potato chips before decid­ing that it prob­a­bly isn’t worth attempt­ing to guess whether or not some­one is liv­ing entirely on carbs and trans fats, just to see if they’re more likely to want to com­plete the trans­ac­tion. Besides, I can’t imme­di­ately think of a way to make the “I am done and want to pay now” option any clearer.

For­tu­nately, the “pay­ing” part goes well and only a mod­icum of grum­bling and frown­ing is required.

[1] (Dude, please stop being offended that I won’t sit in the bus seat next to you. My legs don’t fit in there.)

[2] I am not afraid of Metro­town crowds because I can just push every­one out of my way and they’re usu­ally too bewil­dered to do any­thing. Tragedy of the com­mons, bitches!

A friendly neighbourhood reminder

To whom it may concern:

Firstly, I want to assure you I have noth­ing less than the utmost sym­pa­thy for what you are going through. I can cer­tainly appre­ci­ate the sheer num­ber of emo­tional and logis­ti­cal chal­lenges inher­ent in car­ing for a dog as large and as gravely ill as yours appears to be. On a more opti­mistic note, we can prob­a­bly take your pet’s hearty appetite as a good sign.

How­ever, I would like to remind you of the pro­por­tion­ate rela­tion­ship between the height of very tall peo­ple (e.g. yours truly) and the size of one’s foot. This nat­u­rally cor­re­sponds to the area of the sole that con­tacts the ground. Also con­sider that height has a bear­ing on other val­ues: weight, momen­tum, sprint­ing abil­ity, fist size, et cetera.

Addi­tion­ally, you may not be aware of the well-established cor­re­la­tion between time spent clean­ing shoes (t) and emo­tional irri­tabil­ity (i). i increases expo­nen­tially as the value of t rises. I’m just saying.

In con­clu­sion, please buy a snow shovel and clean up after your dog, jerkface.

Attention Catherine’s Neighbours:

Please do not mow your lawn in Van­cou­ver in July. It’s dead. You’re just spray­ing dust into my kitchen window.