How Refreshing

Here's something refreshing: a new pitch to city council requesting use of one of their under utilized facilities. Let's see how this pitch stacks up!

• The facility in question is owned by the city -- check!
• The facility has inadequate parking to fill the facility with people -- check!
• The facility is practically unserved by public transit -- check!
• The owners are proposing to attempt to run a sporting franchise of a type which has failed multiple times already in this facility -- check!

Oh wait, it's just as stupid as the other ones have been. The only difference is this is Baseball at the Jim Durrel White Elephant as opposed to football at what's left of Landsdown Park.

If these guys want taxpayer support, I say no. If they want to put their own money up, then giddy up.

Inadvertent Disincentive

Hyundai is offering an additional $1000 rebate if you trade in a 1995 or older car at purchase time.

This made me curious as to how likely are they to be getting any Hyundai cars in trade.

While we can't know for sure, we can guess. I went to AutoTrader.ca and hit their advanced search. If you search on Hyundai cars alone, you get almost 1350 hits. If you search on Hyundai cars that are 1995 or older... you get none.

Honda, by comparison, gives you more than 3700 hits for all years, and 147 for cars 1995 or older. A low percentage, to be sure, but still infinitely more than Hyundai.

Think about that. You are trading in a car that's done almost fifteen years, in exchange for a car that isn't likely to do the same.

I have to admit that when we bought the Yaris last year, we test drove a Hyundai Accent 4-door. The price was right, and the offer on my Subaru was six times what we got for it from Toyota -- in total, we would have saved around $3000 on the price of the Yaris all told. And yet, on the test drive I already knew that we were not going to buy it before we made the right turn out of the parking lot. It was a case of sit down, put the car in gear... and right away, the decision "no" was floating in my head.

I'm not trying to bash Hyundai here... I was just curious about the apparent longevity of their cars.

Who's Agenda Is This?

West End Action asks if Smart Growth is really Smart (empahsis mine):

The article in the blog talks about how the leading political classes have larger duck houses - paid for by taxpayers - than citizens have regular houses. Typically, the proponents of more dense cities and smaller housing want it for others, but not themselves.

This is something I've often felt, but never actually saw in print (virtual or otherwise) until now.

Building for the ages

Tom Limoncelli finds a quote he likes at the Sears Tower, and idly offers it for use by sysadmins:

"Therefore when we build let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such Work as our descendants will thank us for and let us think as we lay Stone on Stone that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them and that men will say as they look upon the labor and the wrought substance of them, 'See this our fathers did for us.' " --John Ruskin

It would be nice to think that what we build is meant to last forever, or even merely for years. But in this business, it doesn't.

Recently I've been called back to a previous employer's site, and it warms me a bit to see that systems I set up ten years ago are still doing today more or less exactly what I left them doing. But when I compare those systems to the computers of today, it is amazing that they are still around at all. In many circumstances, continuing to operate such a set of systems could even be considered irresponsible. (Not in this case -- the computers are original development and verification environments for a product which is still being supported.)

Ten years is a long time in this business, and to find something still running after that long is a rarity. This business operates on waves of change, and that change is only likely to continue into the future.

My God, Larry, We've Missed You

Mayor Larry O'Brien says this morning:

After a press conference for the Ottawa Chinatown Gateway project Tuesday morning, O'Brien said the city was "operating at the maximum capacity fixing some of the major problems we have," and would not be seeking additional funding to improve sewer infrastructure in flood-affected neighbourhoods. “In a couple of years, absolutely, we’ll be going back to our federal and our provincial partners and looking for more significant funding,” he said.

Updated this afternoon:

"It's not the position of the city to wait two years for that," said Brent Colbert, O'Brien's chief of staff. "We're going to find out what needs to be done and then we're going to put in our applications to begin that work as soon as we have a sense of where that is."

How the city managed to run while Mayor Larry was off obtaining his "ringing endorsement" is totally beyond me.

Hello RSS Reader!

(Non-RSS reading readers can ignore this.)

I've hacked around so that my planet RSS feed comes through the same location as the old Wordpress one used to. There's at least one person with the old wordpress RSS feed in their reader, and he's going to get a whole lot of noise.

If this is you, and you want to cherry pick what you get rather than the whole flood, I suggest you start by looking at the home page at http://www.xdroop.com/404.html and picking the one(s) you think might be interesting.

Happy Reading!

Evergreen 747 Water Bomber conversion:

Saw a reference to this while flipping through a Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine this weekend:



What gets me is the way the 747 visibly starts to lift from the shooting aircraft as all the water leaves the bomber.

See also this longer video.

Claimed capacity: 90,000 litres. By comparison, the CL-415 capacity is just over 6,000 litres. The Martin Mars conversions operating on Canada's west coast have a operational capacity of around 27,000 litres.

Wikipedia suggests the Evergreen is not oprational, due to the US Forestry Service wanting bombers to deliver fire-retarding foam instead of water; the retardant is denser than water, and this means a full load in the Evergreen would be heavy enough to cause concerns about the aircraft's service life.