TwoBlog

I have been a Good Life member for over 10 years. I became a member just after graduating university. The only thing that mattered then was finding something cheap. The club was a perfect match for me and for every other grad as witnessed by the age group of the crowd that goes there.

Time passed and I got comfortable going to that club. I grew up with those grads and watched new youngsters joining the gym. I thought the equipment was great, plentiful and modern.

Then, the closest branch closed down on Columbia Street. The owner of the building is converting it to office space. Can’t blame them because this area is becoming quite lucrative for office space and real-estate to build 5 story student ghettos. Chris my friend, I wonder what your old property would be worth today? You’ll be happy to know that the house still stands there like an old 18th century church surrounded by imposing city-scrapers. Must be some wild-assed voodoo going on there.

When the branch closed, there was a solemn oath that was pledged by the company that a new, improved, and state of the art facility would be ready on Weber/Columbia just down the road. 2 months have passed and we’re being directed to the WLU gym to sweat it out with a million other acne-faced goobers. Nothing will be ready until at least January.

Well, I was sad. Even with having a baby I still would have time to hit the gym and there’s no way I’m going to WLU to battle for parking space and then wrestle for limited equipment with some muscle-head.

So, I poked my head into the gym across the street from work (literally) and a whole new world was opened up. I will miss you o Good Life. I will not miss you that much however. Yes, I’m paying a bit more at this new gym, but I like paying more to keep the riff-raff out and to work out in an enormous gym that is usually virtually empty when I go. Those who are there are usually mouse-slinging desk jockey types who are there to do their business and go home, not strut around and ruffle their feathers like a peacock. The facility including the change rooms are very modern, relaxing (lounge with HiDef TVs) and immaculately clean. The equipment is ultra-modern and always in working order. I really didn’t know it could be this way.

Yes, there’s a time and a place for a Good Life membership. But then there’s another time and a place for a step or two above. Man, I must be getting old.

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Our household was very disappointed with the broadcasting of the Olympics in Beijing. The games themselves seemed very good and there were some pretty good events like the 100M and 200M dominiation by Usain Bolt. It’s the broadcasters we loathe.

Sonia (and I agree with her) was very disappointed in what NBC and CBC (and TSN I guess, but who cares about them since they only were able to show basketball and boxing. Whoppeee!) were broadcasting, particularly in prime time. Of the most irritating things: why did they have to spend about 40% of their broadcast time showing profiles on Olympians and docucrap on China? My god, we can do this ourselves on the internet. So, add in commercials and of the ‘billion’ of hours of broadcasting, about 25% was actually devoted to showing the events themselves. And that leads to aggravating point number 2: they were often showing stuff that we just didn’t care to watch. IN PARTICULAR: BEACH VOLLEYBALL. Man, this made up hokey sport for drunken teens to play on spring break shouldn’t even be in the Olympics (nor should a lot of other events like syncro swimming. Table tennis can stay but it should be officially renamed to ping-pong). If you add the amount of time CBC spent on Beach Volleyball, now were down to about 18-20% of the broadcasting time was spent on anything remotely interesting. And get this: Canada didn’t even have any entrants in Beach Volleyball that would have garnered any real interest! But I guess that could be said for pretty much every event (Bah-dum!)

So, grow up you silly excuse for a ‘national’ television station and start using TV a little better. Start getting the real guns involved like Rogers and start offering multiple On-Demand options so that I can watch what event I want, when I want. Boy, I was Jonesing for some badminton or archery, you know, stuff I never see outside of the Olympics but not once did I catch any of that. And don’t give me that ‘how do we make money if we go On-Demand’ crap because there are many creative ways to make a profit going down that path. Though I’m not going to make your life easier by telling you how.

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This winter has been a killer on the roads. We’ve been experiencing the extremes: One day it is -20 and snowing like mad. The next day, literally within 2 to 3 hrs it’s +8 or even higher. There have been a couple of times when the temperature has swung both ways by about 30C. That is unbelievable and would think doesn’t happen in very many places on this planet. Another interesting behaviour this winter is that we haven’t been getting the consistent ‘average’ snowfalls distributed over the winter. Either we get dumped on or we get nothing at all for days. Which makes it SOOOO nice that I have a snowblower this year. Shovelling is not a problem when we get bits and pieces at a time. But this year its been 15-20 cm at a time which leads to back-breaking.

And the weather has destroyed the roads in town. I have never seen so many potholes on so many roads (including newly paved ones) and the severity of them are tailbone wrenching. The cars are taking a serious toll. I am alarmed at the amount of $$ that will need to go into the roads this year and the level of inconvenience I’m going to have to be put through. I’m partially blaming those people that put on winter tires and chew up our roads with their fancy treads. It’s irrational of me naturally but it justifies why I don’t want to contribute to the wealth of the tire industry and buy into the hype. My ‘no’-season tires work just fine. Even though the treads are worn down to the nubs. I love it!!

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About a year ago, there was a car in the parking lot at work that always had the wiper blades sticking vertically up off of the windshield during the winter days. Now, if you visit the parking lot you will see close to or even more than a 1/3rd of the cars with their blades upright in similar fashion. It is embarrassingly amusing to see all the wipersin this prone position ready for some hooligan to run around and snap them off.

The obvious ‘reason’ that people do this is that they don’t want their wipers to become fused against the windshield if/when the weather calls for freezing rain or some level of precipitation. But people are doing this EVERY day regardless of the forecast. Working at a tech company and being able to relate to the ‘common’ personality of the people that work there, here are the plausible reasons why there’s a plethora of ‘wiper salutations’ in the parking lot:

- effort avoidance: computer programmers/developers typically seek the least effort path to existance. Which is what makes them great programmers. In their disdain for having to manually repeat steps and work efforts a developer will automate or seek effiencies so that they never have to revisit the problem again. The wiper thing is their attempt to forgo the minimal effort required to unstick the wiper blades when the rare occurrence comes up. I wonder though if they evaluated the effort they spend each morning lifting up the blades and then placing them down in the evening vs. the one or two times they would actually need to unstick the blades. Unless these people simply lift them in December and lower them in April which explains the increased # of reported traffic accidents
- Lemming-itis. We’re all Lemmings to some degree, let’s admit it. But I wonder if the tech industry has a higher occurrence of Lemming behaviour. I asked a colleague a couple offices down why he raises his blades to the car each morning. And his response, and I’m not making this up, was: “Because I saw other people doing it”. I wonder, do these people lift their blades up in their driveways at home or have they been brow-beaten by some obscene form of peer pressure?

So, I am really interested in knowing if other parking lots exhibit this behaviour. I have NEVER seen this behaviour beyond 1 or 2 cars in ANY other parking lot I’ve loitered. Have you seen mass wiper-lifting anywhere?

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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.

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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!

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