Some people still don't understand zoning and what decision the council is making. A citizen claimed that zoning need not be changed on columbia street as currently there is an over supply of student houses. Trouble is twofold, first that the supply is counting all the bad, unsafe, in the middle of Beachwood housing we are trying to get off the market. Secondly changing zoning isn't about what is happening today, it won't mean the bulldozers are revering there engines, it just means when selling happens, someone can buy up and redevelop the land. It is about what can happen in the future.
On the other hand some people think it is still just the Universities' problem. Aren't we all in this together, we are a community, but more important the University has enough problems to deal with. The Board has the veto, not Bud like some people would imply. The University, understandably has different visions for the large parking lots south of campus. Both Waterloo and WLU do a comparable job to other universities, I couldn't see what more any member of the community could ask. Also taking a stance to provide more, or all of the housing is a slippery slope for an entity which charge is research and education, not housing.
Though Bud shouldn't call students customers. He might be the only administrator who can get away with it, as he is Business Operations, but it didn't help his argument at all.
The plan we are left with is just like the one in the discussion paper, Neighbourhood Preservation with a slightly better name, University Neighbourhoods, and one small area that benefits mostly WLU. The nodes and corridors do more benefit Waterloo so I guess it is fare. Maybe if it was more true to the name and we did get University Neighbourhoods, as in a few of them, it would be better. Things are better, but misunderstanding still abound. If only a vision like Edey's or any other planners would be followed. Still the idea of University Neighbourhoods is more forward looking and Neighbourhood Preservation, and that is some kind of start.
In the end one of the most unfriendly stake holders have been the City Councillors. Gieswetter and Whaley's comments about growing up in the war time housing in the area under debate were neither here nor there. Future city councillors will not grow up in that area, because it is all students and the elderly. Why should society fight that because families once grew up there? It is somewhat amusing that though he often asks strange questions the most reasonable and somewhat the most future vision friendly on the Council is D'Ailly, the representative for Ward One, Beachwood.
The lawyer said, the insurance company won't listen them when they say lodging houses are safe, as they inspected. Unfortunately the companies still see them as flop houses. Since this won't change the city should outlaw lodging houses in condos; persuasive isn't it? Too bad the argument doesn't have any rationales why the city should make this distinction other than the condo corporation might not get insured. This is a band aid solution if I ever heard one. Insurance companies have become like society's conscious, at least our passive conscious. The criminal code and civil court have a roll to play, but most passive concern boils down to can we get it insured. There could be a slight problem when your conscious high value is profit. You could under cut the competition and get a load of business, but business is only good if you turn a profit on insuring them. This of course is why risk assessment are elevated; to turn high profits it is important the risk need be as small as possible. In insurance the higher the risk that taken doesn't lead to the highest profit. Medium risk at high risk prices work out much better. How much you can squeeze out when nothing goes wrong is where the money is at. A price fixers dream, when all your undersellers are scared of loosing there shirts. There is a balance like any other competitive system, but social factors could increase the pressure and the uncertain leading to inflation of insurance premiums.
I do not like any party in opposition. Clearly the Federal Conservative.s behavior has been making me consider this position, but I was also not very happy with some things the Manitoban NDP did in opposition before become the government.
I think the problem is they spent too much time trying to just make the government look bad, and themselves look good, and no enough just keeping the government accountable. Now often those two aims coincide, but other times the former trumps the latter.
Lets look at a few things with the Conservatives and the Liberals. First the moving of Opposition days to the end of May. Now there certainly an element of the Liberals trying to squeeze as much out of their mandate as possible, but it was observed that it is likely that Liberals postponed opposition days because they already knew the Conservative were going to do non-confidence. What is the problem here? Well it seemed in the media that the moving of the days themselves were the straw that broke the camels back, yet it was likely that was all for show.
More recently though, it has been getting worse. The only purpose to these faux non-confidence motions of late is to make the Liberal look bad for no good reason. The Bloc and Conservatives know the Liberals are not going to step down over a motion which is not clearly a non-confidence vote, and if they were in power, they would not either. However they get to say that the Liberals are barely hanging on to power, and betraying democratic ideals. That is the only message the average voter will hear, and it sound pretty bad.
Yet parliamentary scholars say these motions are not votes of non-confidence. There is some room for interoperation as always. CBC has some information about how confidence motions work. The amendments, one of which have now passed says something like, say such and such a committee doesn't have confidence in the government. It is clear a motion which says that the house doesn't have confidence in the government is a vote of non confidence, but what about minor legislation that says some committee doesn't have confidence?
In the end the problem is the Opposition doesn't care. I doesn't care about getting business done, it doesn't care about making the government accountable, it only cares about a new election, and more importantly a new election they can win. They don't want to just bring down the government, they want to raise there opinion polls. This hasn't really worked so far for the Conservatives, and if people knew that was what was really going on, it probably still wouldn't.
So in being so busy to actually overly disregard the common practices of hygen implies not much posting this blog thing, and so you have been the result. Just be glad you don't have to smell them. Why must this been on the record.
More importantly this blog now has a name, it is Schedule A. Why? Well you would understand if you have signed (and actually read) a Non-Disclosure Agreement. The Schedule A is where you get to write down all your Developments, to make sure you own them, and so the Company doesn't get defacto ownership. I understand the Company has a potiential problem with idea that they in some sense own being stolen, but the NDA isn't a good (ie balanced) solution, no it is just the biggest hammer they can have. It will never be used, but just incase they can smack me. I could discuss some of the more troubling parts of the agreement, but suffice to say it is a bad solution to a small problem. I am more amused by the small irony in the name, especially if I happen to type stuff on here while at work.
When I am building a system, usually through writing code, I get to that point when I believe it works and try to use it. Now at this point i often had this feeling a dread that there is no way it could possibly work. There are of course then two outcomes, either the pleasure of it actually working, or the acceptance that it doesn't and I have made a mistake. I don't believe I want to have this feeling of dread any longer. In order to deal with it I need to some understand of what it is.
This feeling generally comes when I generalize something I have done. Usually this generalizing step also takes a few leaps of faith. I am not simple performing the same action many times, or on more generalized data, as much as combining actions in a more generalized way. While this happen invarients on my starting point tend to change.
I believe in order to end this feeling I must always step up and through the process. It is the jumping over steps I have largely only consider in my subconscious is the cause of the dread. It is like stating the conclusion to a proof and hoping the intermediate steps are actually correct. This implied I must instead step through each progressive step with a great deal of care. Only then can I be in a position to confidently trust my code.
Last night I had the odd experience of having a dream with in a dream. My dream was that I was dreaming that I had an exam in a few days, and then another. One in my History course, and another in some ECE course which I was going to do bad as the exam are always really difficult. I also didn't do good on the project. I was relaxing after my previous exams, yet forgot all about the existance of the three more I had to write. The dream with in the dream was of this sudden and scary realization. Then I woke up from the internal dream and try to figure out if it was true. I try looking at the exam schedule but there were no ECE course. I finally consulted my laptop, and though it was very hard to read, it looked kind of like a crayon drawing, I realized that those exam were last month, and I was done school.
When I did final wake up for real, the fact that I was indeed done school was self evident, and I was only left with the strange feeling of having a dream with in a dream.
In the basement of the SLC some Mac people were showing that music and mac works well together (specifically producing, oddly what I want to do isn't supported very well). I watch it for a bit, they are just using garage band though, not a very impressive piece of software. Yet the thing I notice is they are using a huge display, and the image of the desktop of the mac doesn't look right. I think they weren't adjusting for the pixel aspect on the display being different from a normal Mac display. I would expect more from Macs. The world would be a better place if pixel aspect ratio was taken into account more often.
Byron doesn't care!
When you are writing code major, bugs are at the same time deeply frustrating embodiment cognitive dissonance, and cute interesting puzzles. In the end unless you are fortunate enough to have come across a deeply rooted compiler or OS bug, all bugs are your fault. Despite your minds assertion that everything you have done is correct somewhere you have made a misstep. You and no one else decided that passing objects with virtual function tables across a stream socket into different processes was a good idea. It was you who inadvertently, in the constructor of your object, called a function which in turn calls a function which in turns tries to invoke a member of the very object your are constructing. In the face of the belief of having done everyone right the computer, in its binary defined consistency, spits out the fact you screwed up with one line: segmentation fault. No matter how sure you are that everything is right, everything is ok, after checking and rechecking, you must accept that somehow, someway, you are wrong. Then you can embrace the fun part, figuring in what amazing convoluted way you managed to screw up memory, or whatever you managed to do.
I am going to quickly mention Fusion, mostly so I can remember. All and all a very good event. Personally bring the crowd up and dropping Hammer is a good feeling. Though it was kind of dark and hard to see, as far as I could tell the audience was coming with me on that one.
The setup as always was very nice. Much thanks is needed to Colin, Nat, and Steve who helped moved stuff, and setup stuff (namely the screen which was a bit of a project). Also to everyone else who brought equipment (esp Maria for the ghetto video camera, it did the job, but it has lots of little problems :)). It would have been nice distribut the tech a bit more. My computer for graphics should have been more supped up with graphics. Also I ended up crashing near the end and I am not sure why.
As for this blog I will be adding comments soon and improving the engine, so keep reading, and I will keep posting... Hopefully... :)