It seems as if each generation of Canadians will be visited by the specter of Canadian Unity vs Québec nationalism. It’s is a fight that waxes and wanes, but never seems to end. Of course, this also brings up the argument that Québec is not the only population to deserve a special mention. And so it goes on.

So how about this:

Canada is a nation of many peoples and cultures – those that inhabited the land, those that founded the nation, those that make Canada what it is today, and those who will carry it forward. The strength of Canada is the recognition of its past, present and future. Canada is a celebration of cultures coming together with a goal of being a great nation, not for itself but for each other.

That is the country that I lived in for most of my life, and that is the country that I talk about when people ask me about where I’m from. It is the vision that I would hope to see spread over the world and to fellow Canadians.

As an interesting side note, many of the things that I attribute to being Canadian, and much of the basis of my national pride, comes from the years of Lester Pearson’s leadership. The country really needs someone to follow in those footsteps. In fact, I think that’s exactly what the world needs.

I received a card from my dad yesterday, in response to the letter I sent a few weeks back. In the card, he placed several bank notes, all in pristine condition, from various countries. I’ve never been a collector of things, but I now find myself with a collection. I’m not entirely sure what to do with it. I should take care of them and put them into a photo wallet of some sort, but after that, is there anything to be done? The idea that I had was to use it as a travel guide – a list of places to go:

• Haiti
• New Zealand
• Columbia
• Paraguay
• Guatemala
• Argentina
• Canada
• Scotland
• Some country with Cyrillic script
• Chile

I’ve obviously already been to Canada and New Zealand, which means that I’m off to a decent start. Now it’s just a matter of keeping it all going.

The gods were smiling, and probably pointing and laughing, at me yesterday. I was flailing my arms and desperately trying to get my weight back over my feet, fighting the weight of the backpack hanging behind me, after landing slightly behind my heel when jumping over a small sink in the footpath. There were plenty of witnesses, and I was skating with a friend, so there was no reason why I should have made the miracle recovery. In the end, I was happy to still be standing at the end of it. I’m sure that most of my parallel universes would have seen me fall, get up and brush off my bruised ego.

CBC has some news on the development of new biodegradable materials that can be used to replace the ever-present coffee cup. The next trick will be convincing the cafes to adopt them, even if it happens to cost a bit more.

This morning I received access to Peapod’s Sourceforge page and svn repository. There are a few things that I want to get done with this, and I’ve already got a few patches sent in, but first things first: documentation. I understand a lot of what is going on in there, but it is a good exercise to write out the existing functionality before trying to make any sort of modifications.

Not once, but twice, did one of my paintings fall off the wall yesterday. When I put up the sticky-backed plastic hook, I’d wiped the wall, the first time with a dry cloth, and the second time with a wet cloth and dried it off. Even still, the adhesive caved in under the weight of the painting. Luckily, the wooden frame that the canvas is stretched over didn’t get damaged. There’s nothing left to do but put nails in the wall and hang it again.

When it came down the second time, I was startled awake by the sound of the adhesive giving way. At the time, I thought was that there was an earthquake in progress, but GeoNet says that we haven’t had one in a few days. But it brings up a good point: we’re constantly given instructions about earthquake-proofing our homes, and it’s clear to me that I haven’t. This particular painting isn’t behind glass, but there is one right beside the bed that is. Having that come down would leave a lot of glass on the floor to step on.

Wellingtonista has the word on a series of free Shakespeare shows around Wellington over the first two weeks of December. I’m thinking of catching one of them, but I’m not sure which yet. I’ll have to wait to see how my schedule pans out.

For anyone interested in sending Christmas presents, I’m going to start a wish list. I’m not planning on crazy-expensive stuff that I’ll never have a chance of getting. I’m thinking of somewhat realistic things.

• A subscription to Scientific American Mind. Even though I don’t understand it all, it’s an amazing read and always interesting. The price gets up there for international readers, but it’s still cheaper than a lot of my IEEE subscriptions

First, Don Brash is resigning as leader of the National Party of New Zealand. This stems from an incident involving leaked email and a yet-unpublished book. The book is on hold thanks to a court injunction barring anyone from communicating the contents of the email.

A strong lesson needs to be learned here. Email is not private. If it hasn’t been encrypted, it is public. Even if it has been encrypted, there are no guarantees that it is secure. The best analogy is that of a postcard traveling through the postal system. Anyone with a pair of eyes pointed in the right direction can see what is written on the postcard, and exactly the same is true for email. I believe that it was wrong for the judge to grant the injunction, and I think that the general population should take care with what they think is personal, private and secret.

Second, a conversation with a friend who’s since moved to Australia brought to light a strong point:

Sure, the corruption might be low, and we don’t stand for fascist stuff, but kiwis are SO short sighted.

The driver behind this was more a generalisation on my part – that politicians are responsible only for getting themselves re-elected. With a focus of two to five years, they’re being asked to make decisions that will continue to impact the region for decades. What’s missing is a proper sense of planning. Why isn’t there a set of well-defined goals to work towards? There is the Wellington Regional Strategy, but it seems surprisingly short on details when it comes to things like traffic volume growth in the next decade. When you read of the changes possible within the largest of cities, it makes you wonder why we’re letting the government shovel money into motorways and bypasses in hopes that increasing the amount of road-space that drivers have a available, they’ll somehow stop congestion problems. They don’t seem to understand that natural systems have a way of filling resources to capacity.¹

So the next time that I’m watching 2 buses go by before there is enough room for me to get on, I’ll be sure to silently thank our city councillors for planning for drivers instead of passengers.

Edit 24–11-2006 Noticed broken link

¹ There is a bit of mathematical proof‘_paradox [2] that adding resources doesn’t always help congestion.

² I see that textile has failed to handle the link above. It should look like

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess’_paradox

There are some things that just seem to be true, but rarely get verified. Things like Murphy’s Law fall into this. It just seems so true, how can it not be.

The driver for this topic came from waiting for the bus this morning. Of the two bus routes that pass by my stop, one is much longer than the other. Since the time difference between the two bus arrivals is nominally less than the time difference between the lengths of the routes, it makes sense to take the later, shorter bus ride. Having waved on the first bus, the second bus proceeded to be late – so late that it would have been faster to take the first bus. This is hardly an isolated incident. Nearly every time I wave on a bus to opt for the next one, it is late¹.

Is this provable? Is it just that I remember only the times waiting and not the times when the bus arrives on time? By setting up the test condition for observation, does the system change? Maybe it only happens when no one is looking.

A very related thing I’d like to find a way to test: does everything actually conspire to make you late if you’re already in a hurry?

¹ Or doesn’t arrive at all.

Over the weekend, I caught up with a friend who I knew from living in Auckland. He’d mentioned something that I never really thought about. The group of friends that we had there has almost entirely dispersed. Over the Auckland Anniversary long weekend last year, we had 13 people staying in a holiday house. Of those 13, 2 of them are left in Auckland. Some of them are still in New Zealand, but most are overseas, at least for the time being.

Short term relationships are more common than we think. We’re surprisingly good at dealing with it, but it’s sad to think that people that you spend so much time with and give so much energy to are only going to be with you for weeks or months.

A Jazzberry Ram [1] song was played by the Randomiser™ on the way home from work last night, and ever since then, I’ve been seriously craving some XTC. I’d never thought of a connection between the two, but it’s hard to imagine a band playing poppy music that doesn’t owe a nod to XTC.

¹ While the split up of Jazzberry still saddens me, the final concert is easily one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to.

Words speak to the head; actions speak to the heart.

Along with the new flatmate that just moved in, we also have a new cat. This is the third black cat that I’ve lived with this year. In fact, it’s almost hard to imagine my life without one. Everyone should have a black cat. Unless, of course, they’re allergic.

I’ve made arrangements for the lounge suite to arrive Friday morning, which means that I’ll have to take another half-day off of work. It’ll be nice to have a place to sit in the living room again. At the moment, it’s spectacularly barren. This also means that I’m collecting stuff now. If I were to leave the country, I’ll have to consider shipping things overseas. I’m thinking of a barbeque, too. After all, it’ll be summer soon.

It’s been about 2 months since I moved into my flat in Hataitai. In that time, it’s been a veritable circus of comings and goings. With old flatmates coming around and sleeping on couches, and now with the shift of one flatmate for another, I can only hope that it settles down a bit.

There are still three of us living in the house, but with Justine moving her furniture along with herself, there are a few things that will have to be replaced. It looks as if my Christmas present to myself this year will be some living room furniture. Not the most exciting gift I’ll have given me, but it might just be the most expensive.

So far today, I’ve managed to miss half of my buses. However, for the first time since starting to use public transit to go to work, I caught a bus by sprinting for it as it was pulling away. Having already missed one bus, I couldn’t afford to miss another. I’d seen it at the stop, and started into a run to catch it before it pulled away. I started to sprint when I saw the signal light flashing. Having gone for a morning run and then walking into town to catch the bus, I was a bit tired already. Thankfully, the driver took pity on me and stopped to let me board. From what I understand, drivers are only allowed to stop at marked bus stops. He didn’t have to let me on, which would have meant that I would have had to keep up to the bus until the next stop, which was not going to happen.

Now that the southerly has come in, bringing rain, I’m hoping that I won’t be chasing the bus tonight.

Having a coworker perform pirouettes past my office door makes me laugh every time.

Braving the wind that was raking the hills yesterday, my girlfriend and I went down to Wellington Zoo. The start was a bit slow, after searching for otters that seemed to be MIA. Things slowly picked up as we came by Monkey Island, although even they seemed a bit keen to stay out of the wind. By the time we got around to the ostriches and giraffes, it was looking more like a real trip to the zoo.

A lot of the enclosures have too fine a mesh to take pictures through, but we did get a few between the two of us. In fact, I’ve decided that I need a larger memory card for my camera. I’d gone through the 256MB of space just as we were finishing the trip, and that was in less than 2 hours. I could have spent another half hour with just the Red Pandas given a chance.

As we were leaving, I saw a pamphlet promoting their Zoo Crew. It’s a one year subscription to the zoo, with the ability to bring a couple guests for free. I’m quite tempted. A trip to the zoo every 6 months is enough to make it worthwhile, when bringing a friend along.

The “5th of November” has come and gone, but several rounds of personal fireworks are still going off into the nights. The big show in Wellington, lit from the harbour, was impressively captured by several people in the Wellington photo pool. However, not everything was rosy. Aside from the traffic nightmares and general drunken revelry, the mess left on Oriental Bay was disgusting by the next morning.¹

Personally, I thought the show was amazing. I’d arrived with a couple friends, a bit late, half way up Mt. Victoria. We could hear the percussion of the explosions and see the smoke and glow as we came around the hill, and were greeted by a street at a standstill, filled with cars and spectators. Unfortunately, I had no vantage point to take pictures. The finale would have made a spectacular shot. This is exactly why I’d much rather see a good show than fire of a few piddly rockets of my own.

¹ Given the current discussion of whether there should be a ban on personal fireworks, you’d think there would be a bit of responsibility shown.

It’s been a while since I’ve been doing regular morning running, but it’s something that I really want to get back into. I got out of the house this morning at 5:38 and got back at 6:23. I didn’t have a route planned, so I just wandered over the hill to the waterfront and around into the city. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to come back through Newtown, which meant that I was coming back through the tunnel, lungs full of car exhaust. Next time, I’ll have to plan better. This walking track should be a good place to start.

While driving to and from Tokaroa yesterday, I was tripped up by the console arrangement of the car we were in¹—the signal light handle and the windscreen wiper handle were reversed. This often catches me when I’m driving a car at home, too. Left vs. right vs. left again. The interesting thing is how fast the brain gets accustomed to the new situation. Due to some bad planning and some late sleeping, I ended up driving to work this morning. On the first corner away from the house, I switched on the windscreen wipers…

¹ It was a Holden Astra, which was fully equipped with the most uncomfortable driver’s seat I’ve ever had the pain of driving in.