Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

Switching subjects

I am relieved to say that my most active area of reading has turned away from biological weapons and towards the question of what makes humans happy. Toward that end, I am reading Yale psychologist Paul Bloom’s new book: How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. He taught the psychology course that I discussed at length earlier, and which included some discussion of happiness.

Just a few pages into the book, there is a nice nugget from Steven Pinker, who explains that humans are happiest when “healthy, well-fed, comfortable, safe, prosperous, knowledgeable, respected, non-celibate, and loved.” In addition to providing some interesting intellectual insights, I am hoping the book will provide some additional practical advice and insight into how humans operate. In particular, it is always useful and intriguing to learn what people generally misunderstand about themselves.

Collarbone injured

Thanks to an unseen pothole on Somerset Street, I ended up spending the night in the hospital with a broken left collarbone.

At the moment, it is quite obviously and painfully out of alignment. It needs to be kept immobilized in a sling for six weeks. In a week, the doctors will take more x-rays to determine if surgery is needed. At the moment, things are pretty foggy from lack of sleep and painkillers.

I will stay totally immobile for the rest of today, then see how I feel tomorrow morning. If moving is as painful as today, I will likely stay home to give my bones a bit more time to reconnect uninterrupted.

[Update: 3 June 2010] I had a follow-up x-ray at the Ottawa General Hospital today. At this point, it looks like surgery will not be required. I have another follow-up on June 18th.

[Update: 7 June 2010] As of today, my shoulder is a lot less painful than over the last week. I can even tie shoes.

Praise for Teksavvy tech support

For the last few months, my internet connection has been maddeningly unreliable. Oftentimes, it has trouble with basic tasks like loading text-based websites or accessing email. The only mechanism I have found for improving matters was to power down my DSL router, wait a few minutes, and then turn it back on. That made things better for a little while, but it soon got patchy again. TekSavvy is my internet service provider.

Non-geeks may want to skip the next section.

Technical details

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with a TekSavvy customer support guy named Peter who helped me break down the problem. Replacing the phone cord between the modem and the wall did nothing. The problem could be the modem, the wiring in my house, or the wiring outside. To know, I would need to test the connection at the demarcation point between the Bell network (which TekSavvy leases) and my apartment’s own wiring. To isolate a modem problem, I would also need to test it with another modem.

Today, I cycled way up Bank Street to the Home Depot beyond Billings Bridge. Despite not having a driver’s license, I convinced the manager there to rent me a 50′ extension cord for 24 hours.

My one complaint about tonight is how long it took to talk to a TekSavvy tech person. I called their customer service line at about 10pm and was told someone would call be back ‘shortly.’ Forty-five minutes later, I called again and was told they had no record of me calling before. I waited some more. Then, at 12:30am, I called their customer support person and told them I had been told two and a half hours before that someone would call me shortly. At that point, the customer service person put me directly through to Todd in tech support.

He was extremely helpful. Out in the rain with my headlamp, modem, multi-tool, and extension cord, I plugged my modem directly into the demarcation point. From there, it synced properly and at the right speed. My heart sank a bit. That meant the problem was with my wiring: Bell would not fix it for free and, in the worst case, it would be necessary to rip out from the walls. I started thinking about switching to a cable modem.

Todd then explained to me that the problem could just be corrosion. The inside of the box at the demarcation point had fine black powder covering every horizontal surface. The male portion of the telephone connector inside was also brown and gunky. After scraping through the gunk on the male portion of the connector, I closed up the box and moved my modem back inside. Now, according to TekSavvy’s diagnostic, it is syncing much better.

The next step is to do a more serious reworking of that demarcation box. Ideally, I should clip the copper wires inside, strip the ends, and wrap those around the connectors. Then, I should cover them with some sort of waterproof, oxygen-excluding gunk (Vaseline?) and seal up the whole box better than it was before. That might allow decent, reliable internet access without the need to tear wires out of my walls. Another possibility for improvement is replacing the telephone jack inside.

Conclusions

All told, I am very pleased with the service from TekSavvy. After all, the wiring in the old house where I live is not their responsibility. Rather than make me pay for some Bell person to come out, test at the demarcation point, and throw up his hands saying that the problem is my wiring, they helped me isolate the problem, and then suggested practical steps for improving the situation and hopefully eventually resolving it.

I called their customer service person one more time and asked her to make a note in the tech guy’s file that he had really helped me out and I appreciated it.

One thing about all this is a bit funny. While it is easy to think of the internet as some ethereal thing that empowers human communication like nothing before it, it is also possible for a gunky little connector inside a sooty grey plastic box to interrupt it, causing months of agitation for a person like myself.

Catching up on reading

Right now, the collection of books around my house contains the following sub-groups:

  1. Fiction in progress (some abandoned for months or years): 8 books
  2. Fiction not yet started: 11 books
  3. Non-fiction in progress: 12 books
  4. Non-fiction not yet started: 13 books

My current reading project is to finish all the non-fiction and all the interesting fiction I have already started (I don’t much like fiction these days). Then, I will read the remaining non-fiction, before I go out and acquire any more.

Given that most of these books are 300-400 pages, a rough estimate of how much reading I must do to clear the backlog is 15,400 pages. For the sake of comparison, I have reviewed 89 books since I began doing so in a systematic way.

Montreal spring, by night

Despite being right at the cusp of spring, the nights I recently spent in Montreal were decidedly mild and enjoyable. They made it more than worthwhile to lug around a tripod.

In addition to the sometimes intriguing distortion produced by very wide angle lenses, one useful property is how their short focal lengths allow for relatively long handheld exposures, without too much danger of camera shake. It is certainly novel to be able to shoot at 1/20″ with a lens lacking in image stabilization capabilities.

I think I was the oldest person at this party, by the space of several years. Nonetheless, it was a colourful and entertaining event and a nice counterpoint to the calmer parts of the weekend.

Climbing Mont Royal at night is certainly one of the nicest and most scenic things to do in Montreal. Personally, I think the city is best viewed from above at night, though it can also be quite pleasant around sunset.

I have fond memories of going up in the midst of an intense but very warm thunderstorm with my friend Viktoria, back when I was participating in the Summer Language Bursary program.

I like the interplay of colours here, particularly the orange and green on the stairs and the blaring purple from inside the building.

While Montreal does have a substantial urban core, it certainly cannot rival Toronto for sheer bulk or Vancouver for startling growth. Indeed, whereas Vancouver felt substantially denser when I visited in December than when I was there a few years before, Montreal basically seems like the same place now as it was in 2003.

Rue St. Denis may be a bit touristy, but it contains a substantial variety of pubs and restaurants, as well as some interesting murals and graffiti.

Fondue is actually a very nice dinner option, when you want to have an extended conversation. The need to individually cook each item to be eaten extends the meal in a rather pleasing and natural way.

I have always rather liked the standard architecture of Montreal lowrise houses: with a balcony at the second level and a staircase rising up to it either directly or in a curve.

It is around this monument in Parc Mont Royal that the famous ‘Tam Tam Jams’ occur, along with many other informal social activities. While I was taking these night photos, there was unusual shouting and drumming emerging from somewhere within the darkened trees uphill, along with the noticeable scent of wood smoke.

The distortion from a wide-angle lens does seem to have the commendable property of being able to make a vertical monument look like the heavy foot of some elephant or dinosaur.

The vertical lines here are lens flares, induced by the streetlights that run in front of the monument (and which make it so nicely lit for long exposures, from that direction).

Throughout the Easter weekend, these parks were full of people picnicking, playing sports, and generally enjoying themselves. At night, the area is rather more gloomy and desolate. The few people who you do encounter – often as they skirt along in the shadows – sometimes make you glad for being a relatively large and tall man, with a substantial aluminum tripod at hand.

These trees have a rather menacing look that matches the atmosphere of the area, at least on some nights.

Montreal spring, by day

Montreal has always been a city which I have appreciated. As an undergraduate, I was lucky enough to spend most of a summer there, participating in the Summer Language Bursary Program. The city is a layered and culturally engaging one. I was happy to visit my brother there for the Easter weekend.

The Montreal metro probably has the most character of any in Canada – largely owing to how the design of each station differs substantially. Vancouver probably has the nicest views from overhead track, but Montreal almost certainly has the most to offer underground.

While they are far from flattering, portraits taken on wide-angle zoom lenses can have an interesting quality. This one of my brother was taken in a diner where we were having a late breakfast.

One definite advantage of wide-angle lenses is that they allow you to incorporate people into images in such a way that they assume themselves to be quite outside the frame.

As with Paris, Montreal is notable for having excellent graffiti in places – though it is regrettable that vandals with no skill frequently decide to emblazon their insignificant aliases on the works of far better artists.

Heading up Rue Mont Royal, I encountered a very friendly bus driver who was eating her lunch. She encouraged me to explore the bus storage and maintenance depot around us, despite many ominous signs warning of grim consequences for outsiders who did do.

A firefighter I encountered was equally welcoming. Their approach contrasted substantially with a security guard at the Journal de Montreal building, at the foot of the road, who gruffly informed me that I had no right to be in their parking lot. Their building was boring, anyhow.

The Plateau area, where my brother is living presently, has a wide variety of attractive and interesting buildings. It’s remarkable how they serve as variations on a theme, yet still express such architectural scope.

Even with a rented Canon 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 lens, I could not resist making some use of the superb Canon 70-200mm f/4 L telephoto zoom. Of all the lenses I have owned or used, it may well have the best optical properties.

At the head of Rue Mont Royal, up against the mountain of the same name, there is a park with a stately monument. It is often a nexus for social gatherings, such as the ‘Tam Tam Jams’ which often permeate Sunday evenings with the sound of drum music, for many blocks around.

The same statue, seen from a wider perspective, gives some sense of how it looks in aggregate.

Among the many other spiral staircases of Montreal, this particular one led down from the balcony of a flat inhabited by a friend of my brother to a yard that has become a favourite hangout for cats. We saw at least a dozen lounging there at once, that afternoon.

This insignia adorns a fence somewhere in the slightly ambiguous zone between the park with the monument and the beginning of the McGill University campus.

While not the most attractive of photos, this one amuses me on account of how the car and building blend in a shape like a large clown shoe.

This angelic statue sits beside the largest contained green space at McGill, near the entrance to one of the libraries.

Fountain statue, McGill University

One of three bearers of a fountain within a fountain is shown here.

Here again is the park with the monument. During the Easter weekend, it was an incredibly active place, well populated with many locals taking advantage of the time off and very fine spring weather.

One odd feature of being a semi-regular visitor to Montreal is that I become familiar with bits of graffiti, only to see them subsequently altered, erased, or overwritten.

Tomorrow, I will put up some photos of Montreal by night.

Four days in Montreal

I will be spending the Easter long weekend visiting my brother in Montreal and playing around with a rented 10-22mm EF-S lens. As such, I am unlikely to be adding anything here before Tuesday or so. In compensation, there should be some interesting and unusual photos appearing next week.

In the mean time, perhaps readers can ponder the following question. BuryCoal.com has gotten off to a good start in terms of content, with a large number of good quality posts from several contributors. What it has largely been lacking so far is discussion and community. How can such things be effectively encouraged? Has anyone ever considered posting a comment on either a climate change entry on this site or on BuryCoal, but then decided against it? If so, why?

Complaints about ties and bad pockets

Perhaps more slowly than might have been expected, I am making the transition from almost exclusively owning comfortable, functional clothing of the sort that works well for climbing mountains to owning an increasing proportion of the kind of clothes I once owned in singular sets for the occasional wedding, funeral, or high table dinner.

I can’t say I object to the difference between wearing decent dress shoes and wearing $100 shoes I originally bought for a minimum wage position at Staples. Nor, living in Ottawa, can I deny the utility of long woolen coats for much of the year. I must, however, object to two intolerable aspects of formal clothing.

Impractical pockets

Firstly, I object to the pockets. There are too few of them, they are lacking in volume and ability to carry objects unobtrusively, and they are almost always too easy to lose things out of. In an ideal world, I should be able to carry all my day-to-day gear in the pockets of my jacket and trousers: keys, wallet, change, phone, iPod, headphones, point and shoot camera, liner gloves, earplugs (I like reading in silence), bus/security pass, miniature tripod, etc. In this ideal world, all of these things would also be in deep, zippered pockets that do not bulge horribly, when burdened with such necessary objects.

I have never found these desires to be satisfied by formal clothes. Keys seem absurdly capable of sawing through the pockets of dress trousers, leading to the loss of coins, phones, and other things. Jacket pockets are too few in number and too open and horizontal to be trusted. This is especially true when carrying electronic devices.

The silken noose

The other aspect of formal clothing to which I must object most forcefully is neckties. There are a number of reasons why Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a man worth taking seriously, and his hatred of neckties seems to me to be among the most convincing. The things serve no practical purpose whatsoever. Even worse, they inescapably cause frustration, annoyance, and discomfort – not least by obstructing both breathing and circulation.

I am truly glad to have been able to go many months now without wearing one, and devoutly wish to eventually find myself employed in such a place and manner that I will need to wear them only for funerals.

All the above being said, and in keeping with my earlier appeal for quality durable goods, those men who find themselves obliged to wear formal clothes often should subscribe to the blog Put This On, which is a good source of information and advice for those who have never been personally educated in such things.