Omega Point

On Haiti and Sarcasm

Dear CBC Com­menter:

I under­stand that “some of [your] best friends are Hait­ian” and that you’re only talk­ing about the “bad ones” when you say “Canada will be over­run by gangs and HIV” if we fast-track the immi­gra­tion process for Hait­ian refugees. I get that you’re not really a racist, I do.

In fact, I totally agree with your thoughts on it being “their prob­lem” for liv­ing on a fault line, or that “those peo­ple” should have taken mat­ters into their own hands and risen up against the suc­ces­sion of vile dic­ta­tors more fre­quently. Clearly a coun­try with such a rich his­tory of coups could do bet­ter. Heck, the Amer­i­cans were there for 20 years to help out, and where are their thanks?

And let’s face it, a coun­try that poor? “What would they do for us,” indeed?

…you com­plete asshole.

Catherine’s Vancouver is growing

While hang­ing out at a Main Street cof­fee shop this after­noon, I over­heard a con­ver­sa­tion between a mom and her four-year-old.

“We can go out to the air­port,” the mom said as they were leaving.

“Oh, that’s a long drive!”

Yes. Yes it is. With the open­ing of the Canada Line now moved up to August 17th, less than two weeks away, it will actu­ally be quite a bit faster–for me, at least. The clos­est sta­tion is a 2km walk, bus, or bike ride away, but I expect door-to-door travel time to be much, much shorter than call­ing a cab.

It remains to be seen how well the exist­ing bus ser­vice will inte­grate with the new sta­tions, and if more fre­quent east-west buses will be needed to fun­nel Van­cou­ver res­i­dents into the Cam­bie Street cor­ri­dor. In any event, by open­ing early, Translink and InTran­sit BC will hope­fully have some extra time to work out many of the bugs before the old bus routes out of Rich­mond get discontinued.

I prob­a­bly won’t use the Canada Line much myself, still being closer to the Main Street bus myself. Since I tend not to go to Rich­mond or Oakridge Cen­tre much, I don’t see a lot of oppor­tu­nity to use it, but it would def­i­nitely make get­ting to Yale­town or Davie Street from my neigh­bour­hood much more convenient.

Plus, as has been pointed out to me by friends and drink­ing bud­dies alike, now that I’ll be attend­ing Lan­gara Col­lege, the 49th Avenue sta­tion makes it extremely con­ve­nient to blast down to Gas­town for a drink imme­di­ately after class. (Guys, you get that school isn’t 9–5, right?)

Still, this really does ham­mer home the point that for a pedes­trian and tran­sit user, the shape of our city really is defined by which buses go where. (Hint: they go down­town.) Per­son­ally, when I’m a pas­sen­ger in a friend’s car, I never think about tak­ing 12th Avenue to cut across town because there aren’t buses that go there.

These fas­ci­nat­ing travel-time maps of Great Britain effec­tively illus­trate what even a densely-populated coun­try like the United King­dom must con­tend with when mov­ing peo­ple and goods around.

Also inter­est­ing is the impli­ca­tion of what “cen­tral” means to dif­fer­ent peo­ple. This week, there’s been some dis­cus­sion over at the Van­cou­ver League of Dru­palers, of hav­ing some cowork­ing mee­tups to chat about Dru­pal projects we’ve been work­ing on, get some cod­ing down, and so forth. But where to actu­ally meet? The Grind at Main and King Edward? Sweet, I’m there. Waves in New West? Yeah, not as con­ve­nient. How­ever, if I lived right beside any Expo Line Sky­Train sta­tion in Van­cou­ver proper save for Sta­dium or Main Street, it would be faster to go all the way out to New West­min­ster, hands down.

For­tu­nately, hav­ing my spiffy new bike has opened up a lot of options too, par­tic­u­larly with the abil­ity to switch to tran­sit when I need it, now that all the buses have bike racks.

So far today, I’ve rid­den just under 8 kilo­me­tres to three out of four sched­uled errands. The last one will dou­ble that. I’ll spend most of it on the cross-town 10th Avenue bike route. In the end, I will have spent about the same amount of time on the road as I would have, had I dri­ven, if you fac­tor in park­ing. It’s pretty lib­er­at­ing, I have to say.

But hey, even if it isn’t some­thing that’s totally use­ful for me, a link to Rich­mond and the air­port was nec­es­sary. I wish dif­fer­ent choices had been made in con­struc­tion and plan­ning, but it’s def­i­nitely some­thing we’ll be get­ting some use out of as a city. Plus, hey, Vancouver’s the first Cana­dian city with a sub­way link to the air­port. Go us.

Blogathon 2009: 3 killed, 14 injured. Also, kitty videos!

So this has been bug­ging me for a long time: Digg.com seems to have grown past the point of use­ful­ness lately.

Digg is osten­si­bly a link-sharing site, where the most pop­u­lar sites peo­ple are read­ing and vot­ing upon are pro­moted to the front page. The down­side to this is that pop­u­lar­ity does not equal rel­e­vance. When we sum­ma­rize what’s pop­u­lar, we get this:

• Five Awe­somely Stu­pid Infomer­cial Products
• 150 Dogs Found Dead in Freez­ers in Michi­gan Home
• N. Korea Pub­licly Exe­cutes Chris­t­ian for Dis­trib­ut­ing Bible
• Stretch Limo in San Fran­cisco FAIL
• Ubuntu to make Linux appli­ca­tion instal­la­tion idiot proof

Yeah. It ends up being some mix of scary, depress­ing, and gen­er­ally button-pressing news, as well as silly pic­tures and reviews of expen­sive hand-held elec­tron­ics. Unless you’re the sort of per­son who obses­sively reads and up/downvotes arti­cles on Digg all day –and I’m will­ing to enter­tain the idea that a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of its vis­i­tors are– most of those sto­ries are not use­ful to you.

There’s also many CMSes and tem­plate engines capa­ble of imple­ment­ing a Digg clone. There’s Drigg, which is based on Dru­pal, Blinkk, FolkD… suf­fice it to say, there’s a bunch of them.

Just as oth­ers have argued that Slash­dot has lost rel­e­vance as it’s grown, I think Digg has come to the same point.

Smaller, more focused com­mu­nity sites like Buz­zfeed or Kirtsy, a straight­for­ward Digg clone run by a group of women, are sim­ply bet­ter posi­tioned to com­mu­ni­cate infor­ma­tion to their respec­tive tar­get audiences.

Seri­ously, what’s the value in wait­ing for a site to aggre­gate pic­tures of baby zoo ani­mals that you have to pick through when you can go right to the source?

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.

Suggestion Box: Attribution/ShareAlike/ActuallyTellMeAboutIt

Cre­ative Com­mons cov­ers almost all use cases apart from one revealed on Twit­ter this morn­ing: you’ve granted oth­ers the right to use and remix your work, but how do you know if someone’s done it? Sure, it’s cer­tainly cour­te­ous to do so, but they’re not nec­es­sar­ily under any oblig­a­tion to let you know about it.

This post is © Cather­ine Win­ters, licensed under CC-Attribution-ShareAlike. Also, let me know.

With that in mind, I pro­pose the Cre­ative Com­mons Actu­al­lyTellMe­AboutIt license. I know I’d like to hear when some­one uses my stuff! Plus, hey, the icon’s obvi­ous, right?

On the other hand, CreativeCommons.org defines “Attri­bu­tion” as: “You let oth­ers copy, dis­trib­ute, dis­play, and per­form your copy­righted work — and deriv­a­tive works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.”

So I sup­pose it is already implied that you would even­tu­ally hear of this. Still, it would be nice to cod­ify it some­how with­out hav­ing to post any specifics of the means of attribution.