All in a days work #1 · Saturday April 12, 2008 by colin newell
You might find this funny… or not.
I work at a local University in Technical-Rich Media.
I would tell you the department but we change names almost weekly.
Part of my job involves debugging anything electronic anywhere on campus… on any piece of equipment… excluding fax and photocopiers.
Anyway – I noticed a ticket in our computer based help-desk system for a task over in IMP – the Island Medical Program… in an area that I had a small part in building. But other than some visits to various lecture halls in the last year, I have not been upstairs.
One of the labs on the Upper levels had some issues with a flaky multi-media distribution matrix… and they wanted a 2nd opinion on expediting a solution.
So I exchanged a few e-mail with the lead tech over there, grabbed my doctors bag and some extra cable terminations and the appropriate tools, and away I went.
The issue in question was in G.A. Gross Anatomy…
complete with bags… and people, I mean, cadavers in them.
I should have read the fine print on the work ticket… not that it would have mattered.
So there I was… working in a lab full of bodies… one “bag”
within a few feet…
So I said… after looking in my tool-bag.
“Which one of you knows where my Red Robertson screwdriver is?”
“Anyone?”
Yea. Funny huh?
I felt a bit queasy for a minute or so… but it passed.
I asked the resident Tech there: “Why didn’t you tell me that
I would be in a room full of bodies?”
And he said…
“Because you would not come over…”
And I said.
“You have a point…”
I my entire life, I have seen about 2 bodies one with his head underneath a jacket. I will spare you the details because this is not that kind of web-blog.
But being in a room with 12 sets of human remains in body bags… a room cooled to single digits… well, it was sobering in an odd kind of way. It is one of those experiences that you never know how you will feel until you are actually there.
Bonus blog life in the big city #1 · Friday April 11, 2008 by colin newell
Pulled from BoingBoing.Net – and I am looking for comments from a Victoria B.C. or Canadian perspective…
Lenore Skenazy wrote a piece for the April 4 edition of the New York Sun about letting her 9-year-old son find his way home from downtown NYC using the subway system. Many people were upset with her.
Isn’t New York as safe now as it was in 1963? It’s not like we’re living in downtown Baghdad.
Anyway, for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.
No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it. And no, I didn’t trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn’t do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, “Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I’ll abduct this adorable child instead.”
Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.
Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.
Personally, I think there is a right age for allowing this kind of exploration. And I guess it also comes down to the environment as well.
I was about 10 or 11, on or about 1970 when my parents dropped me off in a somewhat more innocent and small Victoria B.C.
I spent about an hour downtown before I high tailed it back to my country home some 4 miles from where I was dropped off. The World seemed like a much bigger place then.
I do believe that we live in a World (at least here in the West) where we are constantly exposed to a barrage of fear-filled messages on how dangerous our World is… and that is because there are corporate forces at work that profit from a culture of fear – plain and simple.
The government of Canada (and especially the government of the U.S.A.) totally buy into this culture of fear; terrorists under every rock and baddies around every corner…
I say: The only thing to fear is the Government itself!
Living with the health mullahs of British Columbia · Monday April 7, 2008 by colin newell
I am a non-smoker.
And as I wander past the Old Morris Tobacconist, on Government Street – Victoria, like hundreds of times over the last 25 years, I slow down to take in the wonderful smell of leathery tobacco and cigar products – merchandise that represents of all things: Being Male!
My wife even muses, “If you had the occasional cigar… I would be OK with it…”
Thank you, dear wife! This is one (of many) reasons why I love you so much: From time to time (but not too often), she lets me make up my own mind.
Not so in the province of British Columbia! God forbid we actually use our heads occasionally. Oh no. This society wants, no it needs, to be protected from decision making. We need to be protected… from ourselves. And the World around us.
And I here I am, walking past the tobacco shop… for the 4000th time in as many Saturdays of years gone by. Still not tempted. What I do love about adult products in this (apparently) adult World is knowing, at any time, I can have a flight of whimsy and turn right (or left) into the Old Morris and buy myself a big, fat and unhealthy cigar, pipe or cigarette.
Because the ability to see temptation and make up my own mind… Well, it is a wonderful thing. Because God… or whoever she is, gave us the ability to think these sweet temptations out and make up our own minds.
And although I have had the odd cigar and cigarette in my 40 plus years on the Planet, I have not been a regular (or irregular) consumer of tobacco products.
Now, after all these years of luscious free will, the glass windows at the front of Old Morris Tobacconists at 1116 Government St. have been frosted over. Owner-operator Rick Arora knows its not enough – he leaves the doors open. It is part of the draw… part of the experience of letting us make up our own minds.
But that has been taken away. Tobacco products in stores, like Rick’s Old Morris, have been forced to cover-up. Ostensibly to protect us and our children… from the evils of tobacco. New word: To-Burqa – meaning the shrouding of any tobacco product or smoking accessory.
So how about this… To those other Government Street tourist traps that taunt me: Enough with the vanilla waft of the waffle cone vendors! Take those ice cream cones out of the window!
And finally, a message to all grocery stores: How about covering up those displays of candy bars and junk food? I have never been able to resist the siren song of the Salt and Pepper potato chip… or peanut and chocolate in a deliciously satisfying bar.
And don’t get my started on all those coffee shops!
The mind. It was meant to be used… and tuned along the way. Do not let the government take yours away.
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Your Daily Planet #1 · Friday April 4, 2008 by colin newell
Inflation is hitting everyone these days – gas prices up in Canada, the price of wheat, flour and now rice. A local baker recently reported that his price for one particular grade of flour went up 65% in one week.
And however unusual that is, pity residents of Zimbabwe in Africa. Once the breadbasket of Africa and one of the most successful and stable economies, years and years of government mismanagement have left this gem of a country in fiscal chaos. Inflation rates over the past few months have been reported in the double digits – on a typical day, prices rise 10 to 15%.
In February, the national bank of Zimbabwe issued its first 10 million dollar note – to respond, in part, to the death spiral of its own currency and buying power.
And that 10 million dollar note today? It buys a loaf of bread. If one can find a loaf of bread on the many empty grocers shelves that is.
In an even more brazen and pathetic move, the national bank issued a 50 million dollar note this week.
It is worth about 2$ American and buys about 3 loaves of bread.
Keep that in mind when you are queuing up at your local Sobey’s or Target store.
