Green Bin Mystery... Solved!

So one of the criticisms of the Green Bin program was that during the summer, maggots would infest the bins, feasting on the organic waste within.

When we received our Green Bin, I wondered how this might be so, since the bin's latch was advertised as being Raccoon-Proof(*). Surely a closed lid that could resist raccoons would present an effective barrier to maggots, yes?

Then I come home one Monday, and find this waiting for me:



Oh.

And it wasn't just us, the entire street (plus the other two streets in the neighborhood I drive through coming home from work) was like this.

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(*) == Yes, even though the city paper has video(**) showing this is demonstrably, laughably false; thus proving either that the Green Bin manufacturers are lying, or that they are employing stupid raccoons in Product Testing.

(**) == I find this hysterically ironic.

Significance

Significance is left as an exercise for the reader.

On Twitter

Yeah, see, sending out all those (almost daily, at this point) Twitters about your service seeing higher-than-normal error rates or other service problems is fine and makes you look all transparent and open such... but when Google Chrome thinks this is a representative thumbnail of your service:



...then you have an availability problem.

On Comments, Again

Look what I found on the post about comments:



I really need to figure out how to turn comments off.

(Hmmm... This post doesn't have comments activated. So I'm probably safe for the future.)

On Comments

I agree with this post:

I don’t see my site as a community in which I need to enable internal discussion via comments.

Freedom of speech is not the same of guaranteed access to a particular audience. You have the right to speak; you do not have the right to compel me, or anyone else who happens to be my audience, to listen to it.

If you want your own platform for speaking, go to Blogger like I did and get yourself set up.

Further, Daring Fireball says:

Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches.

This is particularly interesting to me right now. I have four (erm...yeah, four) blogs going on Blogger right now. I've received perhaps five on-topic, relevant comments on my posts from authors other than myself. By contrast, most mornings I have to whack at least one chinese porno comment spam from at least one of the blogs.

Finally, I have a fundamental distrust of those who would hide behind pseudonyms. There are always exceptions, but somehow hiding behind a handle implies a bit of shame, either of the name, or of the content labelled with that name. I put my real name on my posts.

Altogether it isn't worth the effort, and I think I will be disabling comments.

There is still the problem of how to see who (if anyone) is actually linking to my posts; Google Analytics does a bit of it, but I find it a bit tedious to work through.

Wanted: One Clue, Apply Within

Wanted:

The directory thing you were talking about, and how when it's set up, we can save all of our work on the Server's HD rather than the desktops so the users are able to access their files using any computer

Someone's obviously taken an email and just pasted it into Craigslist.

Oddly enough this is the point of hiring outside help: you can pay people to know things that you either don't have any interest in and/or don't have time to deal with. But it would help if you demonstrated a willingness to learn a bit more.

Certain Uncertainty

I'm always amused when I check the weather forecast and discover something like this:



A day set for "Cloudy with sunny breaks" gets 10mm of rain, while "Cloudy with showers" gets 1mm.

Also, the POP (Possibility Of Precipitation) is 10% less for the day with more rain.

Internet to Google: We Fear Change

Internet users rebel over change to Google search page. Google reverts changes.

Now I'm especially resistant to change, but even I think this is sad, sad, sad.

I Understand Dr. Johnny Fever Now

Unbelievably, I have the power to effect change across the internet with only the slightest of effort.

Last week I mentioned a plethora of social-networking buttons that were infesting the web and picked on one 'blog more or less because his post happened to be the one I was reading when I had the time to write. As a result of that, said blogger ran an opinion poll, observed the voting, and then changed his setup.

I just wanted to share the doubling of traffic at this blog created by this firestorm of controversy I triggered, courtesy of Google Analytics:



I promise to only use this power for good in the future. And to take Cincinnati home and kiss her all over in the dark.

$100

Wait, what, really? $100 a year? $2 a week? Per family? Spread out over the year across all the purchases a family makes? That's what the conservatives have their collective shorts in a bunch over?

The impact for households with income ranging between $70,000 and $80,000 will be $95 a year, the study says. The tally jumps to $480 a year for those households with incomes between $150,000 and $300,000, the highest level examined.

Surely there must be something more relevant: the poor getting screwed, perhaps?

However, those households that fall below the $60,000 threshold will come out ahead financially, the study says. This group will benefit from new tax relief measures that will more than offset the higher cost of everyday goods under the HST.

As a Kanata home owner, I'm about to get "special levied" $100 a year for 10 years so the city can bury a hydro line.

Mr. Hudak, you seriously need a sense of perspective. Surely there are real things you can do to protect taxpayer interests rather than this cheap pandering and grandstanding?