Monthly Archives: November 2007

Karma Police, Arrest this Tailgater….

I left my Mom’s house about 7:00 pm last night.  Just after Biff’s home town I could see some headlights making there way up behind me.  They weren’t moving too fast but it was noticeable.  About 2 minutes it took to narrow the km or so between myself and ‘him’ (maybe a her but let’s just assume a him).  I had been only going about 95km so I wasn’t at all surprised. 

By the time he had caught up, I was the last in a line of about 4 cars going about 90km.  Not surprisingly as I assumed he was an aggressive driver, he was right on my tail looking to make a pass.  He was tailgating fairly close but not enough to alarm me.  Unfortunately for him (and I guess me), there was no opportunity to make the pass before the next town. 

Through the town we lost a couple cars in the line but gained a couple more.  So, for the next 10km to the next town he did not have a chance to make the pass and he was now tailing me closer than my comfort is accustomed to.  As I am a fairly aggressive driver I can relate somewhat to the driver behind me, but this was closer than I’ve ever experienced and closer than I would ever do myself.  With OG in the car it was somewhat disconcerting.

There were a couple of times where I could have let him pass me and begin his leapfrog but my foolish pride prevented that.  I just couldn’t make the gap between me and the car in front large enough for him to make an attempt.  In fact, we were tight enough that he would have had to pass 3 cars to succeed and this road doesn’t really provide that opportunity.

So in town, still behind me, I could sense something beyond simple frustration.  When we got to the only light in town, 1 car peeled into the right turn lane and 2 of us continued through.  It looked as if my tailgater was going to proceed to the right as well and leave my life.

Alas, and alarmingly, at the last second he swerved back into the through lane and proceeded to ride my tail as we proceeded through town.  I contemplated turning off to a side street or just pulling over but quickly shooed the thought from my mind. 

As we worked our way to the edge of town, eventually I became the lead car.  Nobody in front as far as I could see, but somebody behind me.  Right behind me.  As we left town and the speed limit bumps to 70 he was still unable to pass (and I’m not sure now if his motive is to even pass anymore).  And just before it hits the 80 again the road is ALMOST clear to pass.  One more car.  My tailgater nudges ever so close in what appears to be an anticipated pass although it seems odd that he’d be so close just in order to pass. 

It’s at this moment where I think of all those times that I hear people say “Damn I wish that guy could get burned by the cops.  Where are they when you need them?”.  And then, out to the left at the crossroad I see what is usually the disturbing and familiar reflections of an O.P.P. cruiser.  Still in the 70, I’m going 100 so I have this uneasy feeloing that he’s not just going to sit there.

And I was right.  As I’m passing I notice 2 things:  1)  The cop pulls out from the intersection and 2) The tailgater is STILL riding my bumper.  The next thing I see are the cherries flashing.  The tailgater slows down and nudges to the side, clearly to me he’s assuming that the cop is about to nail me.  Through the rearview mirror I see that the cop is following the tailgater over to the side and clearly it’s time for my friend to pay the piper.  As I had thought, if the cop is gunning me at 100km but notices somebody INCHES behind me, he probably has more interest in that person as should be his wont.

Now, at night in the boonies with a daughter in the back seat, the imagination can run a little rampant.  But I can’t help wondering how this roadtrip would have panned out if the friendly neighbourhood smokey hadn’t been at the right place at the right time for one of the rare goodside karma O.P.P. moments in my life.

ee-oh ee-ay ee-ayoh! Did I go against my rule?

I went to a concert last night. The opening band was FictionPlane. The lead singer’s name is Joe Sumner. He has a very strong voice and also plays the bass. The style is bold and aggressive. If you like TEB or Matthew Good you may want to give this band a try. Their latest album is “Left Side of the Brain”
If the name Joe Sumner rings a bell don’t be alarmed. His father’s name is Gordon Sumner, a.k.a Sting. And there’s no doubt that they are father and son. Once you hear a song from FictionPlane you’ll hear it plain as day.

Naturally (nepotism be damned) they were the opening act for the reincarnation of the Police. The original members are back after a 24 year hiatus and they haven’t missed a beat.  Sting continues to have that powerful haunting voice while working the bass like one of the greats that he is.  Stewart Copeland was a drum machine that had several tricks up his sleeve for the concert.  His usual drum set plus in behind a platform would raise up for certain songs (King of Pain, Wrapped around Your Finger) with massive orchestra drums, gongs, various bells and xylophones.  He was displaying his maturity and added his 20 odd years of creativity to the songs that weren’t present in the early days.  And then there was Andy Summers on the guitar.  He’s matured/mellowed over the years and has had similar post-Police experiences akin to Copeland by writing scores to television and movie productions but getting back to his roots has produced a re-emergence of his innovative guitar playing.  Check out Wikipedia to learn more about these truly accomplished musicians and learn how they are considered the masters of their instruments.

What I like most about this concert (and it was excellent) was that they stuck to only Police songs.  I was suspicious as to whether they were going to sneak in some solo post-Police work from each of the members and I was glad that didn’t happen.  It provided for a feeling that it was as if they had never left and were truly just 3 guys in a band, not these 3 ego-hungry guys all coming back from accomplished careers.  It was as if they only ever were just the Police and the last 24 yrs never really happened.

And this brings me to a clarification.  I have stated in the past that I’m not a fan of the revival bands a.k.a the bands trying to re-live their glory.  But I need to elaborate on this.  What I dislike about this notion is that these bands typically have been around the scene too long, have inundated the industry with post-glory-day songs and use this re-union to try to promote new material that just doesn’t fit the current day.  I.e. it’s the out-of-touch, overstayed-your-welcome sort of feeling.

The Police reunion does not meet the requirements of sucky revival band.  They produced 5 albums in the late 70’s and early 80’s and then that was it.  They disbanded at their peak and were never intending to reunite EVER.  So for 24 yrs these guys have flourished on their own but have not produced any ‘Police’ material.  So, there wasn’t any ‘past-their-prime’ songs to be played.  All songs were big hits that everyone associates with a ‘glory day’ mentality.  So after 24 yrs these songs are still fresh.  And that’s how they were played.  With enthusiasm, not with another paycheck or a ‘let’s milk the fame’ sort of feel to it.

The concert flow I felt was very good.  But not a 10 out of 10.  They opened with Message in a Bottle followed quickly by Synchronicity II.  Very high paced renditions.  Showed off all their skills quite admirably and set the tone that this was going to be something to remember.  They may look old but they’re not going to play old.

Great renditions of Walking on the Moon,  Don’t Stand So Close to Me, Wrapped around your finger, De Do Do Do De Da Da Da.  Always a great solo/duet guitar/bass montage in the middle taking what everyone is used to hearing and then twisting it up a bit.

The keynote song was ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’.  Some real power chording and crowd participation.  They cranked up the Reggae big time and was something to hear.  I really hope there’s a DVD release of one of these concert stops for the tour.

Where it got a little disappointing was that they closed the pre-encore set with Roxanne.  That’s to be expected, but the way it was played was not energetic.  It was more of a sombre version that was great for a lot of guitar and drum exploration.  Which they did do.  But that sort of song should go in the middle somewhere to change the pace.  They maybe should have taken a page out of the Echo formula and use that song to explore a medley of other songs the group like but were created by other bands that have influenced them.  That is an Echo mainstay and is often the highlight of the concert.  People love hearing great bands play other great band’s songs with the band’s flavour added in.

Anyway, the encore was King of Pain, So Lonely and Every Breath You Take.  A predictable mini-set that did not take away from the magic.

After digesting the concert I couldn’t stop admiring the talent that each performer has.  And I couldn’t help making comparisons to another great 3 player power band with a lead singer who is also the bassist:  Rush.  And I couldn’t help but see the similarities of each member.  Yeah, I know Geddy Lee’s voice can be grating to some, but ala Sting, he does have a powerful voice, it has not degraded over time, and he is a bass master.  Stewart Copeland is a percussion pioneer with techniques and styles that he invented and are emulated by a vast number of drummers today.  Neal Pert also can add these qualities to his resume as well.  And Alex and Andy are both rock stable guitarists with a lot of charisma and dexterity.   Both bands have extremely clever lyrics to their catchy tunes and you can certainly hear similar beats and progressions in their songs.

What amazes me most though about both these bands is that the lead singer plays the bass.  It’s mind boggling how they can sing the main ‘tune’ of the song and simultaneously (and masterfully) complement the song with the bass which is complimentary yet usually quite polar to the notes being sung.  It is no wonder that not many bands can put this type of product together.

It was a great experience and I don’t care if I’m considered a hypocrite to my no-reunion band policy.

I leave you with one thought.  High praise for the concert but hey, it was not Echo so really, it simply cannot get the 10/10 rating.  I give it 8.5/10.

Betting the Ponies

I went to Woodbine with Sonia and Brandon last Wed night.  A chilly night it was.  But the races run until Dec so I guess the horses don’t mind.

It was my first taste of Thoroughbred racing.  My previous experiences have all been harness.  Thoroughbred is wayyy much more exciting.  The horses are packed in tighter along the rail since there is no carriage to consider.  And it is a faster race.  The runs down the stretch are more dramatic as there is more possibility for the closers to gain ground.

The gambling result?  I am as poor at picking the thoroughbreds as I am with the harness horses.  Which is to say I suck.  But most of it is due to the fact that I usually bet triactors or superfactors.   Sonia and Brandon opted for the win/place/show type bets and were very successful.  But picking the favourites doesn’t really inflate the wallet.  But the winnings were enough to feed my fruitless risk bets.

I didn’t win a thing.  I came close with the Superfactor in the last race.  But of the 4 horses I selected, it was the favourite that let me down.

One time, and one time only, I bought a show bet.  I bet on a 1st time racer in the 6th called Shy Wit.  I made this bet before seeing the horse.  Which was a shame.  When the horses paraded in front of the stands, I couldn’t believe what a saw.  A short little fellow at least 2 hands shorter than any other horse in the race.  Such a small stature had no chance to win.  He stumbled out of the gate and in the end finished about 5 seconds behind the pack.  At 45-1 I didn’t expect much but thought I’d give the newbie a chance.

A great time all in all.  It was cold enough that we didn’t sit outside up close to the action.  And there weren’t many people there.  Next year we’ll head over in the summer and see what it’s like when there’s a big crowd on hand.

Traffic Light Complaint

Does anybody know who I need to contact to complain about the poor time intervals at a particular traffic light?  There is a traffic light at King and Bathurst that spends far too much of its time green for the King Street cars.  This intersection doesn’t warrant that length of time for most of the day.  Just around the 8:00-9:00 and 4:00 to 5:00 time.

Privatizing Roads

I read an article in Time that talks about how several states are starting to lease their road infrastructure to private companies, some of which are not even U.S. owned (e.g. Cintras, a company from Spain is gobbling up contracts at a gluttonous rate).  The states are turning towards this strategy as a way to solve their degrading road problem.

Since the Feds aren’t budging on upping the gas tax (it hasn’t moved since ’93) in order to continue feeding the US greed for oil and negligence upon the environment, the cash towards infrastructure hasn’t moved either.  And the results are becoming visible.  Most notably is the bridge collapse in Minneapolis earlier this summer but there are many other occurrences of degradation.

The way this leasing works is that the state rents out a portion of the road (usually a more lucrative portion like a beltway or bypass around a city) to a private company for x number of years.  Most of the contracts seem to pan out to 99 years. The private company pays up front billions of dollars which is what the government wants:  immediate cashatola.  In return the company is required to update and maintain the quality of the road/bridges/tunnels under their care.  The pay-off are the tolls that the company now controls and reaps.

This is not a new concept and has been done in Ontario (Route 407).  I have major issues with this (there are others but I wont’ get into them):

1.  Are we the taxpayer losing out on long term gains?  Does the $$ up front exceed the long term profits that go into the private company coffers.  Consider that the company is not even local to the country and it becomes an intriguing debate.

2.  How much influence does the government have on the road itself?  One of the benefits of the government running the show is that they will react to what the people need.  For example, if a town/city is developing new business sections or suburbs (god help us), a new exit will play a huge factor in the success of the project.  Will a privately run road respond to the need?  Will it be more costly than if it were politically initiated?

3.  The cost of the tolls are not directly controlled by the government.  They can be influenced in the contract but I’m almost certain the verbage will allow the company to increase its tolls over the years at a very profitable rate to the company.

That being said, I have mixed feelings about this.  But one thing I’d like to pull out of the discussion is the concept of the toll.  I think setting up tolls along the 401, particularly between KW and Toronto would have some serious pay-offs.   There are several problems that we have:

  • There are WAY too many cars on this stretch of road
  • In each car there are WAY too few passengers
  • There are WAY too many accidents on this stretch of road
  • We have infrastructure issues with our 400 series highways

Placing tolls on this stretch would be great to address these issues.  Yes, there would be a LOT of complaining, especially by the commuters (not by me since I only go that way maybe 10-15 times a year), but this is the shot in the arm they need to start packing their cars with passengers, or moving closer to where they work.  Either way it’s a win-win.  Don’t change your behaviour means more money to whoever runs the tolls…..which I believe should be the Government of Ontario.

Temperature dropping

It snowed this morning. Not enough to stay but the first ‘official’ snow of the fall. From 30C to -5C with windchill in the span of 2 weeks. Canada, O Canada!

To add to the mini-depression, the clocks were turned back over the weekend. Thanks to G.W. Bush and the Yanks we didn’t have to push them back until 4 weeks later than usual. I like that.

Bring on the Indian Summer!

Eww! I’ve drupaled all over myself! Or, what is that Wonderboy all about?

That’s right, I’ve drupaled. If you don’t know what drupal is go here: drupal.org

The two second summary is that drupal is an open-source content management framework (CMF) for setting up and maintaining community-type websites. It has built in features for managing discussion groups, image galleries, community blogs, stories, upcoming events, basically anything you need to host a site where a group of people will contribute the content. Content that people can add and others can modify and enrich.

It is written using php and is, more or less, a community version of wordpress. It essentially has the same concepts in place (themes, modules, plugins, security, etc. etc.) but geared towards multiple user content. WordPress is great for individual blogging but not so good for communities. Drupal is great for community hosting but not so great on blogging although it does have a blogging feature.

Admittedly it gets a site up and running very quickly but, like I’ve discovered with all of these open-source frameworks, for the site to be slick and just the way you want it you have to go into the code and hack it up. For example, the forums module is pretty vanilla out of the box so for it to behave like a respectable forum it needs to be beefed up.

The good news about drupal which holds true for wordpress is that there is a massive amount of user support out there. If there’s something you need it’s most likely out there on the web. The downside is, at least with drupal, it’s friggin’ hard to sift through all the sites to find exactly what’s needed. I.e. I found it easier to hack up the stuff myself. I found wordpress communities to be far more elaborate and tidy. Very easy to find stuff for wordpress.

Anyway, enough geeky blah blah. Why did I drupal all over myself anyway? Well, ever since I placed a link on my blogsite to a palce called ‘Wonderboy’, I’ve had a heck of a time figuring out where the link should go. For the 2 years I’ve been blogging I’ve attended 2 Wonderboys and have struggled with how or even if I wanted to publish anything about the event and my experiences. I took a half-assed very poor shot at it by creating a page for the link that had some vague garbage about the events and a lame explanation of the spirit of Wonderboy. In a nutshell, my attempt was a blemish on the integrity of Wonderboy and justice was NOT being served.

So, what better way to express the glory of Wonderboy than to dedicate a site to it’s existance and the valiant participants of this hallowed event. Why not leave it to the wonderboys as a whole to divulge the true spirit and comraderie of Wonderboy?

An opportunity came up when one of the committee heads proposed that Wonderboy continue its exploration into the 21st century by leveraging the WWW to its advantage. No more paper and pen and snailmail and (yawn) normal ole’ group emails. Let’s get with it.

So after a little back-and-forth with the heads of state, I volunteered my hosting site and then went out and purchased a very special domain for our very own. I then discovered through Fantastico (cPanel stuff) that my site has drupal all ready to go at the click of a button. Thanks to my wordpress endeavours my site was already good to go for drupal. Also, thanks to the awesomeness of my hosting site, I can easily plug in many add on domains (I currently host micheldesroches.com, my wife’s name .com (for privacy reasons I won’t divulge that) and now, drumroll please……………….www.thewonderboy.org

Why .org you ask? Because there’s not much out there available for wonderboy. The nerve of some people. All of the www.wonderboy.* were taken except for some obscure ones that are too embarrassing or stupid to use.

At any rate, check it out! It’s very new. So new in fact that only a few of the wonderboys are aware of it, all of the data is test data and there’s no real content pertaining to Wonderboy up there yet EXCEPT for that picture of the log cabin. That is the home of the annual Wonderboy. The boys below are shovelling off part of the lake for a rousing mid-February shinny during breaks between the gruelling Wonderboy events. I’ve disabled many of the features that drupal provides because most of the wonderboy participants are web 1.0 alpha users: i.e. they barely know how to use email.

Now, that Wonderboy link in my left menu bar actually goes to a real place that is only bound to get better.