I came across this on DeviantART, and it felt so…like me

Nephew by *kris-wilson on deviantART

Okay, I might not be *that* bad, but I know nothing about babies or what to do with them.  Folks should know to keep their kids out of the hands of incompetents like me

Folks who live in really big cities because they *want* to live there are, in my opinion, kind of weird.  But I can sort of see the appeal of being able to walk to trendy shops and restaurants, and particularly being able to make it to the office without driving.  I can understand how that would be attractive, and if I didn’t prefer having a bit more space and privacy, I could even see living in an urban core.

But what is a self-respecting New Yorker to do if they want to live in the Big Apple and still have the convenience of parking their car right outside the door?  The answer, of course, is an elevator for your car.

I’m fully aware that parking elevators are not new.  But the particular excess here is that each apartment has a private parking garage on the same level as the apartment itself.  If your $10 million dollar condo is on the 12th floor, your parking spot is too- right outside the door.  And you have an elevator right there to take your lovely automobile down to the ground level.

I can just imagine the fun at 7:00 am, waiting for the car elevator to become available, knowing that the millions you spent on your 1200 square foot condo could have bought you a veritable mansion with a four car garage in any normal community.  But hey, its New York, baby!

[tags]new york, condo, urban, car elevator[/tags]

Bill Gates has been traveling a bit recently, and was apparently doing a bit of touring in Africa.  Unfortunately, his request for a Nigerian Visa was initially met with a somewhat rude refusal.

The Nigerians were worried Bill might arrive in their fabulously wealthy and desirable nation and perhaps try to over-stay his welcome, scamming their incredibly generous social welfare programs to support him in his impoverished condition.

Earth to Nigeria: Bill could probably buy your whole country and still have a few billion in change.  Okay, seriously: they probably didn’t believe it was *the* Bill Gates, and reasonably asked to see proof of his financial situation.  But still…you have to admit, it’s funny. 

I have this recurring fantasy of being Bill-Gates rich, putting on my grubbiest clothes, and going in to, say, a Bentley automobile showroom and asking to take a test drive.  Then, when they either try to show me the door or smarmily suggest that the automobiles might be out of my price range, handing them my American Express and saying “I’ll take the whole showroom”.  I think I might update that fantasy to going to  Nigeria, being asked to demonstrate my financial solvency, and handing them my American Express and saying “I’ll take the whole country”.

I heard several news reports regarding some study performed recently on Canadian attitudes towards immigrants.  The conclusion was that Canadians are less tolerant than we used to be, and several of the news reports said we are “more racist”.  They then cited such things as requiring Moslem women to reveal their faces for ID purposes when voting, and referenced our vaunted “cultural mosaic” political mantra.

Like a lot of good ideas, the “cultural mosaic” or “multiculturalism” has flaws when interpreted to extreme ends.  Some people, including some immigrants, believe that Canada’s cultural mosaic (versus the American “melting pot” mantra) means that they can transplant all of their personal beliefs and cultural standards to Canada wholesale, and Canadians will gladly accept them.

So if you come from a culture where the appropriate way to express your dissatisfaction with your wife’s behavior is to beat her with a steel rod, that’s fine.  If men are absolute rulers, and women are considered chattel, that’s perfectly acceptable in Canada.  If “divorce” of your wife means pouring gasoline on her and lighting her on fire where you come from, that’s okay too.  If your religion has hated, tortured, and killed members of another religion for generations, that’s welcome in Canada as well.  If your former homeland has fought a guerilla war with another land for decades, feel free to bring your hatred and fear here to Canada too. 

Maybe that’s the way original crafters of the multiculturalism policy were thinking, but I don’t believe so.  To my way of thinking, to be a Canadian you must accept certain values and agree to abide by our laws.   Tolerance of cultural differences is all well and good, but that tolerance stops when those differences violate Canadian laws and basic principles of behavior.  If the law says I need to wear a helmet to ride a motorcycle, then belonging to a certain religion or culture shouldn’t exclude me from adherence to that law.  If carrying weapons is unacceptable in some areas, then having a particular faith shouldn’t get me a pass. 

Canadian tolerance says that we should attempt to make some accommodations to support one another’s differences.  For example, allowing veiled women to vote by providing them some alternate way to identify themselves is being “tolerant”.  Removing unnecessary (I.E.: no practical purpose) headwear rules from organizations so that other cultures can participate is “tolerant”.

But if believing that “cultural” practices of violence, oppression, and hatred are unacceptable in my Country regardless of the individuals skin colour, country of origin, or religion is “racist”…then count me as a racist.

Weird Al has a spy camera at my house…

Once in a very long while I’ll do something that isn’t really “me”.  Today, I went to an NHL pre-season hockey game at GM Place.

It is worth while to note that I am not a sports person.  There isn’t a single sport that I watch: not football, not baseball, not hockey, not basketball…none of them interest me.  I don’t play them either.  Basically, I never really figured out the appeal.  The only sports that I ever got involved in even to a minor extent were things like track and field: sports without teams.  I think a significant part of it was that I hated being yelled at or teased as a kid, and team sports is all about being yelled at and teased.  When I ran the 100 yard dash and came in 13th out of 19 competitors, no one yelled at me.  I just had myself to blame, and that was okay.

So, back to the hockey.  Why, given my lack of sports interest, was I sitting in a stadium with 15,000 people, sitting in a seat that cost $120?  Well, firstly, it was a treat or reward given by my employer, so I didn’t pay for that seat.  Several of us had passed through a security review relatively unscathed, which saved our entire site from various negative outcomes.  Security reviews are time consuming and stressful, and the folks I work for recognized this.  Taking a few of us out for dinner, beers, and a hockey game was a nice thing for the managers to do, and I felt good to accept the thanks.

The hockey game wasn’t too bad.  It was a pre-season exhibition game between the Vancouver Canucks and the Edmonton Oilers.  Seven seconds before the end of period three (the end of the game) it was tied 4-4.  With 2.7 seconds left to play, the Canucks scored and won the game.  Now that was worth seeing, and even I, who doesn’t have much interest in the game, could get involved in the excitement.

The game having ended, it was now time to go back to my car and make my way home.  I parked in a lot right next to GM Place, and paid “event” parking rates- $25, which I subsequently learned was high- most “event” lots charge about $20, and some nearby spots go for as little as $6.  But live and learn- I didn’t know the area, and for a once-in-a-blue-moon trip to downtown Vancouver I can spring for convenient parking. 

I have one complaint regarding the parking, though.  You’d think, having charged $25 a car for 400-500 cars to park for a total of perhaps 3 hours, that the parking lot could have sprung $50 to have a couple of guys direct traffic exiting the lot.  But no: what happened instead was  that those 500 cars tried to merge randomly into a space wide enough to let two cars pass.  That’s right, there was one exit from this lot.  It didn’t work very well….  And guess who manages the parking?  You guessed it, Imperial Parking, the masters of craptastic parking management Canada-wide.  There was, however, a homeless guy standing in amongst the exiting cars trying to get handouts…that made me feel really comfy about the security of my car when a homeless guy is watching over the lot instead of someone from Impark.

Oh, yeah…Go Canucks!

I want a fully electric car.  One that can go 200 km at highway speeds on an over-night charge.  I might accept a chargeable hybrid: one that has sufficient battery capacity to go 100 km or so on a full charge before the gas engine kicks in.

I have decided I don’t want a hydrogen fuel cell car.  I thought fuel cells were a good idea a few years ago.   But now hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are just another way for the oil companies to sell really expensive processed oil.

Batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, gasoline: they are all different ways to make energy mobile for consumption in a vehicle.  Hydrogen *could* be produced without oil, but it won’t be: the fuel oil companies will see to that.  Electricity, however, already has a lot of centralized methods of production that are much more efficient than processing and burning gasoline and hydrogen.   Even coal, the dirtiest of the electricity generating options, can be made more efficient than burning gasoline, and far cheaper than any petroleum based hydrogen will ever be.  The only problem today is how best to store electricity in the car in an efficient manner.

Hydrogen powered vehicles have the same basic problem as electric ones: efficient energy storage.  Hydrogen gas is tough to compress and store in a way that will give the same kind of range as gasoline.  But the advantage to electric vehicles is that they have the *potential* to remove oil from the equation entirely.  And regardless, producing the electricity directly is about three times more efficient then producing hydrogen to put in a fuel cell vehicle which then produces electricity. 

Modern batteries are *almost* good enough for my 200 km range that I’ve noted above.  A vehicle based around such batteries could be built today for about $100,000.  You can order one today, if you want: the technology exists right  now.  Fuel cell vehicles are still hard pressed with current technology to achieve the same range…and the best available today would cost more like $1,000,000.   The industry experts say that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are probably at least 30 years from being practical. 

What prompted this rant?  I just finished watching Who Killed the Electric Car, a documentary mostly about the death of the GM EV-1.  Ten years ago, there was already a fully electric car with a growing support infrastructure available in the United States.  That car was lease only, and when the leases expired GM took every one back.  They then systematically erased all evidence that the car had ever existed, going so far as to destroy every returned car.  Once the cars were all destroyed, GM fought tooth and nail to overthrow the Zero Emissions laws in California.  The final nail in the coffin was when the U.S. Federal Government took California to court to erase their ZEV laws for good.  George Bush and his oil-company crony enriched administration saw to that.

I strongly recommend taking the time to watch Who Killed the Electric Car if you see it in your TV schedule.  It isn’t fun or exciting…but it is thought provoking. 

I went to meet my Mom and sister Judy at the casino today.  This is a pretty common thing: every couple of weeks they come to the Langley Cascades Casino where Irene and I join them for brunch.  But this day was to be a day for resolving a mystery.  For a week or so, Judy had been telling me that I had to come this Sunday since she had something for me from Shane.

My nephew Shane is a cool guy.  In ancient times, he and I both played Dungeons and Dragons- not together, unfortunately, since we were a twelve hour drive apart by car.  We both occasionally remember the “good old days” of adventuring with pen and paper.  For whatever reason, Shane saw this T-Shirt, thought of me, and got it for me.

I love it!  Not many people would understand what it means, but for me, it brings back many fond memories.  Thanks, Shane!

My visit to the endodontist yesterday (Tuesday) could be described as a success.  He confirmed based on my description of the pain and a neat diagnostic trick involving a piece of ice that a root canal was in order.  And the endodontist was able to immediately proceed…so long as I paid the deposit and signed my life away.

For a mere $1,450, am now the possessor of a gutted tooth.  Although I’m sore, the process itself wasn’t unduly painful or distressing.  The use of power grinders/drills was actually rather limited, and most of the process seemed to involve manual work with small needle-like files. I elected to spend most of my time during the process with my eyes closed, so I didn’t attempt to closely watch what was going on. 

Looking at the root canal entry on Wikipedia, which includes a picture or two of the files used, I can see the broach file more or less matches what I imagined he was using.  A tiny, pin like thing for going down inside the tooth core: it was all done by hand, and he kept asking for different sizes of files, all of which seemed tiny to me.  Tiny or not, the endodontist still had to put some elbow grease into the process- my jaw is sore and tired, and my entire face feels worn out.

I guess it will be a week or so before I feel confident that the pain is gone for good.  If it is, then the last few days will have been worth it.  I have another couple of “ordinary” dental appointments before I’m done, though- how much do you want to bet that another nerve or something will become involved?  I hope not…

I went back to my dentist today for a follow up regarding the pain I’m experiencing with the tooth that was prepped for a crown.  I’ve now been booked in to see a specialist on Tuesday: an endodontist.  I find it curious that an endodontist is a specialist (according to the Wikipedia link) in the “inside [of] the tooth”.  So, all that drilling, grinding and scraping a normal dentist does, that’s on the outside?  News to me: seems odd that it hurts like it does.  Apparently, endodontists are the guys who do root canals- I was really sort of hoping to avoid that, but the pain trumps my desire to minimize time in the dentists chair, I guess.

Anyway, my non-endodontic dentist pulled off my temporary crown, checked for infection (none), put some pain deadening stuff on my crown-prepped tooth stub, and installed my permanent crown using temporary cement.  “Don’t be too worried if it falls off: just call us and we’ll get you in right away to put it back”, he says: yeah, $900 worth of fancy ceramics falls off and say, gets swallowed or lost on the ground, I won’t worry one bit.   And I’m booked in to back to back weekly dental appointments for several weeks now…my worst nightmare.

The other thing he did was prescribe an anti-inflammatory.  It’s not one I’ve used before: Pms-Dexamethasone.   So of course I had to look it up on line as the previous link attests.  Interesting reading, particularly this part:

Psychiatric disturbances: Corticosteroid use may cause psychiatric disturbances, including depression, euphoria, insomnia, mood swings, and personality changes. Pre-existing psychiatric conditions may be exacerbated by corticosteroid use.

Oh that’s good to know.  Like I’m not already prone to mood swings: technically, I was diagnosed as “chronically depressed” about a decade ago, but I definitely cycle through stages.  Fortunately, Irene is away this weekend visiting her folks, so hopefully she’ll avoid taking the brunt of any odd side effects this might cause in me. 

I can say, however, that it seems the Dexamethasone has done some good, although I’ve only had the first dose.  I was getting to the point where painkillers were only taking the edge off the pain.  Note this is with me taking eight or so extra strength Tylenol a day, plus a couple of Tylenol 3’s if the pain woke me in the middle of the night (which has been happening most nights).  Right now I’m feeling pretty pain-free: a bit of relief is nice. 

When all of this started, I had one tooth which was more filling than tooth that had cracked and from which a small piece had dislodged.  I had no pain, and was well over a thousand dollars richer.  Remind me again why this is dentistry thing is good for me?

Yes, I know I’m whining- this is my blog, dagnab it, and I’ll whine if I want to!