Mayor Dean Fortin has warned that switching to a rail-upgradable design will waste some of the $2 million spent on design work so far and jeopardize the $12 million in federal funding contingent on completion by March 2012. Given that everything Fortin said about the Bridge before the election was spin, I’m not sure his election win is enough that we should listen to him.

One argument against spending a dime on rail-upgradability is that rail would be used entirely by people living in other municipalities, so Victoria taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for it. But mass transit to downtown would increase the value of downtown for offices and shopping that will result in increased taxes and prevent sprawl (like Uptown).

My argument is that we have absolutely no evidence that there will be demand for mass transit over the Bridge in the next 100 years. BC Transit has said that their first priority is the Douglas Street corridor, followed by mass transit to UVic. Only after that is built would a transit line running through Esquimalt be considered.

Ben Isitt says that we’ll need rail on the bridge after Peak Oil. But there is no regional strategic plan for mitigating Peak Oil. He shouldn’t just be coming up with this plan in his head as potential mitigation strategies occur to him.

Victoria has an infrastructure deficit. That means that every dollar invested in future infrastructure is a dollar that isn’t spent to keep the infrastructure we currently have.

Via the Nudge blog, according to the New York Times, the Dutch have a different solution:

When you are about to get out of the car, you reach for the door handle with your right hand — bringing your arm across your body to the door. This forces a driver to swivel shoulders and head, so that before opening the door you can see if there is a bike coming from behind.

I think this would be more effective than current campaigns urging us to, you know, just not hit cyclists. I’m going to teach myself to do it and then start getting other people to do it.

Via Dutchie.

I’m trying very hard not to graffiti.

I’m trying very hard not to steal things.

I’m trying very hard not to hurt the people around me.

So yeah, I’m taking some time off to calm down. But one last thing: I’m starting to claim white male privilege.

Example:

“Do it this way.”

“Why?”

“White male privilege — because I said so.”

It’s good fun. I feel like I need a soccer-type card (coloured white) as a punctuating prop.

But yeah: I’m actually seeking professional help. More later. Also I might be dropping a music video soon, and TVO might want something I did a long time ago (I’m guessing that won’t happen — but we’ll see).

Anyway, trying to manage my karma. Out.

To that end, they’re getting me to help them revise their hiring process, towards which I am also ambivalent: I get to pick my own coworkers, but I have to do HR — traditionally the most useless development task of all.

How does one hire coders? Interesting question. More to follow (and much discussion, I imagine). Since I’m building HR policy from the ground-up, here’re my preliminary decrees:

HR policy #1: We will never hire anyone who has had anything to do with iTrade or Canada Post.

HR policy #2: We will never hire anyone on my shitlist.

HR policy #3: all my industry friends now have job offers (let me know if you want one).

Corrupt, I know. Fun, too!

Okay, whatever. No ads for you. I don’t want a truck or fucking Budweiser anyway. I guess that’s why they’re fucking me off. Anyway, Chomsky:

It’s a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority, and group cohesion behind leadership elements — in fact, it’s training in irrational jingoism.

George Martin “forgot about” the guitar solo. Sounds nice, and it’s cool to have the audio from the mixer synced to the video and see the other Beatle do it live.

via

System: “For service in English, press 1.”
me: 1
System: “For residential inquiries, press 1.”
me: 1
System: “Welcome to Canada Post Customer Service. Goodbye.”

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THIS AIN’T OVER

Surplus tickets will be redistributed in one of three ways:

• The official Secure Ticket Exchange Program
• Craigslist, eBay and StubHub
• Local community transactions

Since physical tickets aren’t distributed until July, there is a significant risk to buying tickets unofficially online. The official exchange program will only redistribute tickets at face value, but many Burners believe that is the only ethical price. I suspect most Burners will redistribute their tickets in their local community.

Unfortunately, applications for theme camps, art installations, mutant vehicles, fire conclave troops, regional effigies and other projects are due before many of the tickets will be redistributed. Most people who submit proposals for projects are connected to their local Burner communities, so they will have no problem getting tickets in the long run. The question is: will uncertainly about tickets cause these projects to lose momentum? Certainly I’ll have trouble continuing my personal planning and local contributions with full enthusiasm. (I hadn’t really thought about this when I first endorsed the lottery.)

Although I still think a lottery is the best general solution to excess demand for an economically-diverse event, the participation aspect of Burning Man suggests a different approach: have leaders of projects and regional contacts hand out tickets. It distributes and scales the selection on merit currently done for low income and art grant tickets. This is not necessarily more biased against virgins than any other way of distributing tickets and would skew attendees in a mostly good way.

That’s me playing the nanoPAD2, which is a cheapo Korg pad controller*, and the X-Session Pro, which is an M-Audio DJ mixing board. I, or “we” maybe, was/were going to get an APC40, which is something similar and slathered in blinkenlights and much more costly, but the Akai factory was destroyed in the Thai tsunami and no one in Canada has been able to buy new Akai stuff since before XMas. Or so, at least, the kind hipster at Moog Audio informed me.

I used the pads to trigger all the instruments, and tweaked various parameters like snare snappiness and the frequencies of the noise floor during the drop with the mixer.

* like Araabmuzik uses