Googlegooglegoogle…

“Define ‘Luddite’”

“Luddite: ‘one of the 19th century English workmen who destroyed labour-saving machinery that they thought would cause unemployment’.”

OK, That’s probably way too strong.

“Luddite: ‘a person opposed in principle to technological change’.”

Hmmm… Even “opposed” is a bit over the top. (Hey, I’m a blogger, dammit! How “opposed” to technological change can I be?)

But a recent conversation with a co-commuter has left me thinking that if “technological change” and I are not “opposed” in our relationship, we certainly are not cordial and, in truth, are probably barely on speaking terms at best. As we were waiting for the bus to appear (the co-commuter and I; not “technological change” and I), she mentioned an item that, coincidentally, I had also read in the previous day’s newspaper – this one:

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OTTAWA -- Enterprising salesmen think they've found the next big thing in school fundraising -- the bank machine.

The $1.25 service fee is an irritant for ATM users, but the revenue can also help cash-strapped principals pay for school activities. Independently operated bank machines in schools have already taken off in the United States, and they've started popping up in Canadian schools.

At Esquimalt High School just outside Victoria, the parent advisory council splits the service fees with the local operator of the bank machine, and invests the revenue back into the school. In Brandon, Man., the student council at Crocus Plains High School asked for the ATM and it gets to decide how to spend the school's portion of the service fees.

"It's been a really nifty addition to our school," said Crocus Plains principal Barry Gooden.

Salesmen keen to expand automated-teller machines beyond convenience stores and bars and into high schools are trying out this pitch on school officials.

"It is a good way to create revenue, especially if you have a really large school district," said Jeff Stewart. Earlier this fall, the sales associate for Cashline AMB Inc. in the Lower Mainland offered a deal to the Surrey school board to pilot test Cashline machines in the high schools. (Vancouver Sun, November 15)

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It took a mere sentence or two of shared reaction to discover that we both clearly were wondering the same thing: Why in hell do schools need ATMs? After all, how much cash does a typical school student need to hit up the vending machines a couple times a week, even daily, or, at most, the cafeteria for lunch? (And as an aside, should we be concerned about the education level of our school principals when the best they can produce in the way of expostulation is that the machine is a “really nifty addition to our school”?)

Anyway, from there, we took to musing (both of us, I should add, are parents – in my case of an offspring just launched into teenager-hood) about the recent breathtaking advances in cellphone technology and ended with a headscratching series of questions about just how many functions do you need built into a device that began life as a portable telephone and is presently a fraction of the size of what used to be a 50-cent chocolate bar. Here for example, is a list of “features” from a model of cellphone randomly found online (take a deep breath if you’re reading this out loud):

“Built-in Digital Camera - Shoot digital pictures with the built-in VGA camera (640x480 pixels) with auto-focus lens and zoom capability. Instantly capture pictures with your choice of high, medium, or low resolution; Sprint PCS Picture MailSM Capable - With Sprint PCS Picture Mail, you can take a picture anytime and send it to family and friends instantly while on the enhanced Sprint Nationwide PCS Network. You can attach a 10-second voice message and text message to your picture. Easily save your pictures on your Sprint PCS® Phone or store them online; Picture Enhancement Options - Personalize your pictures with a fun frame (five to choose from), use digital zoom, take up to eight multiple shots, or use the self-timer; Sprint PCS Ready LinkSM Capable - Now you can enjoy the convenience of quick, walkie-talkie style communication at the touch of a button with one or several Sprint PCS Ready LinkSM users anywhere you go on the most complete, all-digital, wireless network in the nation; SMS Text Messaging Capable - Send, receive, and reply to text messages instantly with an SMS-capable Sprint PCS Phone across the room or across the country while on the enhanced Sprint Nationwide PCS Network; Vibrant Full-Color Screen - Vivid 1.8" main and 1" external color sub LCD; both are TFT and support 65k colors; Customizable Photo Caller ID - Know who's calling you by linking downloaded images and photos to the contacts in your internal phone book; Built-in Speakerphone - Hands-free operation of your phone, open or closed, is made easy with the built-in speakerphone; Voice-Activated Dialing - Say the name of the person you want to call and the number is dialed automatically without using the keypad; Enhanced Ring Tones - Personalize your Sprint PCS Phone with eight festive melody ringers in 32-chord polyphonic sound; Two Internal Phone Books - Store up to 300 entries, each storing seven numbers for a total of 500 numbers and up to 300 email and Web addresses. Separate Sprint PCS Ready Link Phone Book provides easy access to 200 personal contacts and 200 company-provided contacts; Personal Alarm - Features an alarm clock that alerts you one time or daily. Just set the alarm—it's that simple; Multiple Languages - Supports English and limited Spanish text prompts; 2.5mm Universal Jack - Accommodates most standard headsets for hands-free operation; E911 Emergency Location Capable - Features an embedded Global Positioning System (GPS) chip necessary for utilizing the E911 emergency location services, where available; TTY Compatible - Compatible with select TTY devices.”

This is a phone, fergawdssake!

Leaving aside the fact that I’ve only ever know a “TTY device” as a teletype machine, some of that stuff honestly creeps me out:

-- “Know who's calling you by linking downloaded images and photos to the contacts in your internal phone book” Didn’t we used to come to know who was calling us by picking up the receiver and saying, “Hello”?;

-- “Eight festive melody ringers in 32-chord polyphonic sound” Oh yes, doesn’t it just do wonders for your appreciation of classical music to walk along a busy urban sidewalk and, from the pocket of one of the nameless strangers passing you by, hear Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” reduced to a couple dozen cheerless chirping electronic tones? (OK, hands up. How many among us have ever got halfway up off our chairs to answer the microwave? Only a few. OK, well how many among us have walked halfway to our “festive melody ringer” device only to discover that the “ringing” had been part of the soundtrack on the TV show we were watching at the time? Yep. A whole lot more. Thought so.)

There was a time when, as a Society, we collectively determined a need and used creativity to identify a process or invent a device to fill it. Now, it seems to me, more often we pitch devices into production and ideas into implementation first, and only then set about to justify the decision. Technology is going berserk. We have cameras in cellphones simply because we can put cameras in cellphones, not because Society woke up one morning and began clamouring for a device that would enable us to photograph our clogged nasal passages while phoning the boss. (“See? I told you I was sick!”) Our cellphone buttons are the size of a flea’s rec room carpet because we can make them that small, not because someone asked for an array of buttons so minuscule that they’re completely covered by your thumbprint, thus pretty well guaranteeing you’ll screw up at least once every time you dial a call. (And yes, I know “dial” as a verb is soon to lapse into the lore of “How did placing a phone call ever get to be called ‘dialling’, Daddy?”, but that’s a rant for another day.)

It won’t surprise me to hear one day soon that the latest plastic surgery wave has generated waiting lists months long for a procedure to have one of your finger tips whittled down to pencil-point sharpness because frankly, the only thing limiting the further reduction of cellphone button dimensions is the diameter of the typical human digit. When we can beat that, we’ll be inundated with cellphones that pack all of the above features into a finished package about a quarter the size of a Ty-Phoo teabag.

But I digress.

Once Technology does these things – because it can – it is up to Sales to convince us we need them.

Go back and re-read that list of cellphone features a few paragraphs back. Does anyone honestly think this device was manufactured in response to surveys and focus groups whose participants agreed that they wanted all these features in their telephones?

And yet here we sit. The device exists. Did we ask for it? (Nope.) Do we need it? (Damned straight, if Sales has done its job right.)

Some other things we apparently need? (Everything in the following few quotes comes from websites breathlessly pitching their unquestioned value to us as consumers.):

– “The LG Refrigerator with built-in LCD TV is a sight to behold.” Yep – a refrigerator with a built-in TV, because the online promotional material tells us that the American family is spending more and more time in the kitchen. The website, after cheerily extolling at length the specifications and quality of their built-in LCD television, adds as an afterthought, “LG didn't overlook the refrigerator either.”

– A mechanical “waistband stretcher [that] can add up to 5 inches to the waist of your jeans, shorts, pants or skirts.” (Actually, I already have one of those. I call it a stomach.)

– A “rechargeable insect vacuum [that] lets you quickly capture insects from a safe distance without having direct contact or leaving marks and scuffs on walls. Bug Catcher draws flies, spiders, bees, etc. into its transparent 17" nozzle and into a disposable, sealed cartridge. Each cartridge is lined with a non-toxic gel (harmless to humans and pets) that quickly kills insects and then slides out for easy disposal.” (I’m still trying to decide if this one plays on fears of killer bees, or a simple dislike of cleaning fly-swatted bugs off the wall.)

And if you want a genuine limited edition 1994 election ballot from South Africa, when Nelson Mandela first appeared as a candidate, you can buy one of those too.

With no shame whatsoever, Hedonics.com, a site that offers a whole lot of crap like this, pitches it to you with the slogan, “Stuff you never knew you needed but now you can't live without!!!”

Well I beg – no wait, I DEMAND! – to differ.

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And finally, Wednesday this week was the long awaited “Collect strike pay” day – and damned good timing too, because Wednesday this week was also “Your regular paycheque has finally had your three strike days deducted” day. True to form, the mighty PSAC had sent out a notice by e-mail telling us the event was arranged for the lobby of our building – date and time: 11am – period.

What they hadn’t bothered to tell us about was the chaos that would take place as people mobbed the half dozen scattered tables they had set up until, by about 11:15, they posted a hand-lettered sign on the wall behind each table indicating what line you should be in if you were in such-and-such a local, and your last name starts with such-and-such a letter. They had also omitted to tell us to bring our reduced paycheque stub as confirmation we were entitled to strike pay. (Fortunately, I had mine with me. Not because I knew I would need it, but only because I carry a small shoulder bag that, were I a woman, would be called a purse. And it was tucked in there by force of habit.)

Finally, they actually had the gall to wait until we were all standing in line until they circulated an information bulletin among the dozens of us waiting. It said, in part, “CEIU 70702 and 70708 [70708 is my local] do not have an executive. Jacques Archambault has approached the banks holding the funds of these locals and will arrange to have the cheques distributed as soon as possible. Please do not call him this week. Thank you for walking the line.”

Gnrrr… gnrrr… gnrrr… (That’s supposed to be the sound of wheels spinning uselessly.) But it was not a total loss. We did receive cheques to cover the PSAC portion of the strike pay – half what is due to the strikers. Just not the local’s half, because they couldn’t get their act together to be able to distribute cheques on the day they have known for weeks would be the day on which they needed to have the cheques in hand.

What “[These locals] do not have an executive” has to do with anything is beyond me. Every organization I’ve ever belonged to has operated under the rule that signing authorities remain in force until subsequent signing authorities are appointed. So you’re trying to tell me no one presently has access to the union local’s bank account or can sign cheques drawn on that account? Right.

But “do not call him this week” is abundantly clear. It means, “We know you’re likely to be a little ticked at our hopeless disorganization, and the fact you’re only getting half what you were expecting to get, so we’re not going to answer the phones for a few days in the hope that most of you will cool down.”

And in a totally unplanned (I swear!) coincidence, literally at the moment I was snarlingly banging this final thought out on my keyboard, I was abruptly aware that my CD player was happily (Adverb overload! Adverb overload! We’re losing containment! Captain, this sentence is about to blow! Eject the warped core!) conveying The Band’s “King Harvest” into the adjacent ether:

“I work for the union,
'Cause she's so good to me;
And I'm bound to come out on top,
That's where she said I should be.
I will hear every word the boss may say,
For he's the one who hands me down my pay.
Looks like this time I'm gonna get to stay,
I'm a union man, now, all the way.
The smell of the leaves,
From the magnolia trees in the meadow...
King Harvest has surely come.
Dry summer, then comes fall,
Which I depend on most of all.
Hey, rainmaker, can you hear the call?
Please let these crops grow tall.
Long enough I've been up on Skid Row;
And it's plain to see, I've nothing to show.
I'm glad to pay those union dues,
Just don't judge me by my shoes.”

RIP Mr Arafat…

But c’mon everybody, ‘fess up, because it can’t be just me, surely. (“Yes it can, and don’t call me Shirley.”)

Every new story I heard or read about the endlessly drawn-out but inevitable passing of Yasser Arafat brought to mind (i) the never-say-die sequence in Peter Sellers’ “The Party”. As Indian actor Hrundi V Bakshi, he plays a movie scene in which he’s a pseudo “Gunga Din” bugler and just plain refuses to die, eventually attracting the sustained rifle fire of his own troops in an effort to shut down the ever more pathetic bleats from his bugle.

Or (ii) (so sue me) – even more often, I recalled:

“Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Scene 2

‘Bring out your dead!'
[thud]
[clang]
CART MASTER:
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[cough cough...]
[clang]
[...cough cough]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead! Ninepence.
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out...
[clang]
...your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!

CUSTOMER:
Here's one.
CART MASTER:
Ninepence.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm not dead!
CART MASTER:
What?
CUSTOMER:
Nothing. Here's your ninepence.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm not dead!
CART MASTER:
'Ere. He says he's not dead!
CUSTOMER:
Yes, he is.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm not!
CART MASTER:
He isn't?
CUSTOMER:
Well, he will be soon. He's very ill.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm getting better!
CUSTOMER:
No, you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment.
CART MASTER:
Oh, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
DEAD PERSON:
I don't want to go on the cart!
CUSTOMER:
Oh, don't be such a baby.
CART MASTER:
I can't take him.
DEAD PERSON:
I feel fine!
CUSTOMER:
Well, do us a favour.
CART MASTER:
I can't.
CUSTOMER:
Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
CART MASTER:
No, I've got to go to the Robinsons'. They've lost nine today.
CUSTOMER:
Well, when's your next round?
CART MASTER:
Thursday.
DEAD PERSON:
I think I'll go for a walk.
CUSTOMER:
You're not fooling anyone, you know. Look. Isn't there something you can do?
DEAD PERSON: [singing]
I feel happy. I feel happy.
[whonk!]
CUSTOMER:
Ah, thanks very much.
CART MASTER:
Not at all. See you on Thursday.
CUSTOMER:
Right. All right.”

But in all seriousness, I think it’s wholly appropriate tonight to quote William Holden who, in an early scene in The Bridge on the River Kwai, after having just buried Corporal Herbert Thompson, another victim of the Japanese prison camp’s many diseases, suspended his sarcasm just long enough to say: “For the greater glory of... (pause) What did he die for?... I don't mock the grave or the man. May he rest in peace. He found little enough of it while he was alive.”

At home, we’re finally down to the finishing touches on a renovation project that began seriously about a year ago with one too many repetitions of, “Gawd, I hate the linoleum in this room!”

“This room” is an enormous family room with a picture window that looks southward over a large backyard. The linoleum has been, for years, an ever more greying surface that might once have been moderately, even attractively tinted. But we’ve only ever known it as “yuck”.

(Its yuck factor was enhanced many years ago by several deep scratches added when a dozen brave men and true from the Ottawa Fire Department dragged what felt to me – when I eventually had to move it out to the curb – like a five-ton ice cream freezer up from the basement after I had inadvertently hacked open its ammonia line in an effort to salvage its motor, promptly filling the house with fumes that were toxic enough to cause paint to blister. The justifiable “Oh you idiot!” response was magnified at the time by the presence in our house of one who was then fairly recently born, and whose infant lungs required more unflavoured oxygen than could be biologically extracted from the ammonia-rich air I had caused to circulate through our home. Hence the “Help!” call to our fire department, who were absolutely everything you want in a fire department: prompt, overwhelmingly resource-backed with four trucks, a Chief’s car, probably 30 men – all wearing breathing apparatus – and sufficiently muscled that wrestling the massive olfactory offender from basement to backyard took them all of five minutes… but I digress.)

Finally, about a year ago, we decided the linoleum had to be replaced. After a lot of “maybe this / maybe that” consideration, we settled on a hardwood surface for most of the floor, and ceramic tile for the floors in the adjacent spaces – a hallway, a closet, a two-piece bathroom and a laundry room.

The hardwood, we did ourselves. That proved to be (home handypersons take note) a valuable lesson in spending a few extra dollars in favour of convenience – in this case the convenience of a compressor-driven nailer, rather than the manual hammer-blow driven nailer that likely would have given me irreversible wrist and elbow damage, given the googol or so of nails (actually staples) I eventually drove through the tongue-and-groove of the new ¾-inch thick planks.

For the ceramic tile, we had also attended a do-it-yourself seminar on installing it and had come away thinking we probably could do it ourselves. But in the end, because it involved a lot of “fiddly bits”, including circular cuts required to accommodate a toilet, and the drain pipe under a laundry tub, we decided to have professional installers do it.

After finding a tile we liked at a price we liked a lot, we contracted with the tile seller to have the installation done by them. That’s when we learned what they do – and what they don’t do. What they do – literally – is install. Period.

What they don’t do is any of the pre-installation prep work. So we, over an especially energetic couple of weekends and about ten evenings, did all of the following on the floors of the spaces slated for tile: tore up the linoleum and the underlying layer of quarter-inch plywood; pulled out or pounded down thousands, and I do mean thousands, of staples that remained behind when the wood underlay was pried up; removed a toilet, sink pedestal, clothes washer and dryer, laundry tub, and quarter-round baseboard moulding all around the rooms in question; and we cut and nailed down maple “shoes” to hold new rails and railings for the stairs at the entrance going down into our basement.

And that was just to get ready for the tile installers. I felt like one of those characters in a Cecil B de Mille movie who enter a room in advance of the returning conqueror, strewing rose petals about in the hero’s path. “Enter, Your Esteemed Grandeloquence! Your pathway is prepared!”

Turned out to be a marvelous little guy named Nino who has been a tiler since the age of 8, when he was apprenticed to his grandfather. (Another home handyperson Rule of Thumb: If you’re going to hire someone to do tile, stone, brick, concrete, in fact any form of masonry, make sure he or she has a family name that ends in a vowel. You can’t go wrong.) Over the course of two days of highly professional work, he regaled us with stories of just how many times he had been called into someone’s home to repair the damage that would-be do-it-yourselfers had caused, in some cases more than doubling their costs.

Which recalls another digression… (Bear with me, it’s hilarious.) During the toilet and laundry tub removal, we also had to shut off the water supply to the entire house because I discovered that, apparently, it never entered even the wildest imaginings of the original builder that someone might actually some day want to replace the laundry tub. After one of the more thorough walk and crawlabouts of my basement and crawlspace that I can recall, I discovered that there was no independent shut off for the water feeding the faucets attached to the laundry tub. They are split off the pipes that feed water to the washing machine. And while the washing machine lines have faucets that shut down just fine, the lines splitting off to the laundry tub were installed with no such option.

None.

The toilet has its own water supply shut-off. As does the bathroom sink. As do similar fixtures upstairs in our kitchen (No, we don’t have a toilet in our kitchen! Wait for the end of the sentence…) and full bathroom. (Oh.)

But the absence of separate shut-off valves for the laundry tub’s faucets left me with a dilemma. Once the house water was shut off, I thought I would have no problem whatsoever hacking the laundry tub away from its connections. But of course, that still meant I had to close off those severed connections before re-enabling the flow of water through the house, if I didn’t want water gushing from the open pipes when I turned the water back on.

My first thought was that perhaps I could simply re-connect the faucet and leave it hanging off the wall over a sinkless space while the flooring was laid down. But unfortunately, removing the tub required the destruction of the faucet’s fittings, because it had clearly been installed with an eye to permanence – its joints welded or soldered – and it was not going to give up its perch without a struggle. The struggle, however, once I unlimbered the serious artillery – a pipe cutter and a hacksaw – was very short lived. The faucet lost.

But for me it was a Pyrrhic victory because I found out that I cannot solder worth a damn. Or so I thought. It turns out that soldering just has some very specific rules beyond the simple “Make it hotter than the fires of Hell” that I thought was the only requirement.

After a couple tries at capping the pipes’ open ends with a soldered copper cap, only to be rewarded with a tiny jet of spray when I re-started the water flow, I called a friend who told me the pipe being soldered had to be bone dry – inside and out – at the point where solder was being applied. And because one of them ended ultimately at the hot water tank, I was faced with the prospect of 40 odd gallons of hot water slowly trickling, drop by relentless drop, out the end of the pipe (a plumber would call it “siphoning”), even with the house water off. At that rate, the pipe would by “bone dry” in about 30 years.

Unless…

And here’s a fantastic plumber’s trick. Because the trickle is, literally, a drop by slow drop process, the solution is to jam something into the pipe, something with sufficient absorptive capacity to capture and hold the trickle while you solder, and because you’re putting a cap on the pipe using a method that is a permanent seal, obviously your pipe-stuffer is not going to be removable when you’re done. So it also has to be water-degradable and capable of swiftly breaking down inside the sealed pipe so as not to interfere with the water’s flowing to other outlets in the system (like our upstairs – where our kitchen and bathroom are located). Sound familiar? Yep – you stuff bread into the pipe.

My plumber advisor also told me (and this is the hilarious part – no, I haven’t forgotten that several-paragraphs-ago promise) of an episode where he had been replacing a hot water tank in a tony home in one of Ottawa’s wealthier communities. In response to his request for “some bread”, the homeowners produced a thick slice of a lavishly nutritious whole-grain brown seed bread that probably commanded a good $5 a loaf at a nearby gourmet bakery. They no doubt assumed he was simply feeling peckish. He didn’t hurt their feelings by actually letting them watch his successful use of the bulky slab as a pipe-drying accessory, but he did get a call about 24 hours later that not one of the home’s faucets was working.

When he returned to the house to investigate, he discovered that faucets throughout the house were equipped with aerator heads, and every single aerator head had become completely jammed with the whole grains and small seeds that were released into the water feeding system when the full-bodied bread dissolved.

Needless to say, I used Wonder Enriched White Bread. Just my luck it’ll atrophy into something like cement.

But it turns out that my repair has been so far successful. (Knock on the W-O-O-D keys.) When I re-enabled the flow at the main valve, water flowed only where it is supposed to and only when we turn on a tap or pull a flush lever down. (And this entry has taken a little longer than usual to find its way into the blog because it’s a lot more difficult to keyboard when your fingers are all crossed.)

So take that, Bob Vila!

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Crossing my mind (a short trip at the best of times)

After seeing yet another preview for an upcoming movie (“Polar Express”) produced entirely using computer animation, I wonder how much of a future remains for “movie stuntman / stuntwoman” as a career.

Granted, a lot of the movies by Dreamworks, Pixar, Disney and their brethren still feature character voices provided by actual flesh-and-blood actors, but obviously the computer-generated stunts hardly need the gymnastics or the car-flipping capabilities of highly-skilled stuntmen and women any more.

Even in movies that are largely live action (Spiderman and its son, Spiderman II, come to mind) all the stunts which require motion beyond a simple walk across the street are called forward from a hard drive instead of being staged – as they were until recently – as carefully choreographed products of the USA (United Stuntmen’s Association / United Stuntwomen’s Association).

So kids… maybe you oughta be asking your guidance counselor for contacts in a thrilling field like chartered accountancy (or given the current corporate climate, forensic accounting).

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And finally, from the “You can’t win” pile. In the wake of the US election, left-leaning chocoholics who might be looking for solace among the wares of Lindt, Toblerone, Godiva and their like recently woke up to discover that the world price of cocoa is now soaring because its principal supplier, the Ivory Coast, is presently (at this writing, that is) in the throes of a major shooting battle.

On one point of the gunfire triangle is the current government, who accidentally killed several French peacekeepers in a recent attack aimed at rebel forces. On another point of the triangle are the armed rebels and, on the third point of the triangle, French military regulars sent in by the Government of France, who promptly destroyed the Ivorian Air Force (two old Russian Sukhoi-25 jet fighters and a trio of MiL-24 “Hind” Russian combat helicopters).

Unfortunately, like the hapless policeman called to quell a vicious domestic argument, the French now find themselves under attack by forces of both the “mind your own business” Ivorian government and the “mind your own business” rebels, the latter who for good measure are also now going after the homes, businesses, property and life ‘n’ limb of any French civilians still living unsheltered in the country.

Given the uncertainty of cocoa moving around the country for a while to places like… oh, say the “departure” dock at Abidjan, it’s now going through the commodity market roof.

Sigh.

Maybe a glass of Cabernet-Sauvignon instead…

Just wait ‘til 2008!!

Dammit.