A trip back in time

Leave a reply

Last Friday was my annual “ski day” at Devil’s Glen, organized by my second-line manager, Dave. I only ski once a year, though I’d like to increase that to at least a couple of times — maybe I’ll bring the boys out with me, since (a) Gail doesn’t care for downhill skiing, and (b) Nicholas is still free until he’s six. Devil’s Glen has an annual “Men’s Day”, which is when we went last year, but Men’s Day can be pretty busy, so this year Dave decided to have it on the Friday after Men’s Day. There was no free beer or gifts and no prize draws, but it was a little cheaper, the lift lines were almost non-existent and we had less trouble getting tables near each other for the 28 of us, so that was good. It snowed like crazy all day, which made for some treacherous driving on the way home, but the skiing conditions were great.

I used to ski all the time in high school, and now it’s once a year, at most. As a result, whenever I ski nowadays, memories of skiing back in high school come flooding back…

(Everything goes all wavy as we go back in time…)

It’s a Wednesday night in early 1986. I’m sixteen and in grade twelve at Dunbarton High School in Pickering, Ontario. After school ended at 3:30, I put my school stuff in my Adidas bag and head down to the tech wing where my skis and stuff have been stored all day. I find my stuff among the piles of other people’s stuff and head towards the ski club bus. 45 minutes later, we’re at Dagmar Ski Resort in Whitby [This is where I would normally put a link to the Dagmar website, http://www.skidagmar.com, but it’s incredibly lame (no pictures, no map, nothing) so I refuse to even link it]. We get changed, grab our lift ticket, and hit the slopes.

They’re playing CHUM-FM through speakers at the top and bottom of each lift. [This was back when CHUM-FM was a pop-rock station, not the “easy listening” “adult contemporary” “really boring” stuff they play now]. All evening, we hear songs like “These Dreams” by Heart, “Rock Me Amadeus” by Falco, and “Kyrie” by Mr. Mister. I’m skiing with my friends Glen Fujino and Kevin Day (and others, sorry guys but I don’t remember other names). Glen is a better skier than the rest of us, and likes to do goofy things like spin around and ski backwards in a tuck position. The guys I usually hang around with at school (Faisal, Doug, Paul, Glen) aren’t here because they don’t ski. My fourteen-year-old sister is out here somewhere with her friends as well, and every now and again I see her, but she usually ignores me. The big hill right in front of the chalet is called the Big Daddy, and we spend most of our time on that hill. There’s a little mini-mogul run down the right-hand side, underneath the chair lift. From the top of the lift, you can go left to hit the couple of black diamond runs, but they’re not really all that hard. One’s called the Dive Bomber because about halfway down there’s a drop-off; if you hit that with some speed, you can get some airtime. The other direction from the diamond runs, on the other side of the Big Daddy, are some other narrow intermediate runs, and beyond that are some easy ones, including one called Lover’s Lane. Inexplicably, very few jokes are ever made about this name, which is surprising considering the number of teenage boys here. A guy can yell “Hey, let’s go over to Lover’s Lane!” to a bunch of other guys, and nobody will make any “no way, man, I ain’t gay!” jokes you might expect from guys of our age group and maturity level.

At some point during the evening, we hit the chalet for dinner. This is almost invariably a burger and fries, scarfed down as fast as possible so we can get back out skiing again. At the end of the night, we return to the chalet before boarding the bus for a hot chocolate. After that, we pack up our stuff, put it in the holding area under the bus and get ready for the ride home. Glen, who is teaching himself some really weird computer language called “C”, tells silly jokes the entire way home.

(Everything goes all wavy again as we return to the present…)

Things I worry about now when skiing, but didn’t back then: Can I do the more difficult runs without killing myself or someone else? Will the pain in my legs stop at some point today, or just keep getting worse? How badly are they going to hurt tomorrow? Why haven’t I been doing squats for the last month, like I promised myself last year that I’d do this year?

Things I worried about then but not now: how cool do I look? Where are the cute girls skiing?

PaulDotCom and Security Now

Leave a reply

I’ve been listening to a podcast called Security Now for a few weeks now. It features security guru Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte (who also hosts another podcast I listen to called TWiT (This Week in Tech)). Gibson is also the author of a hard disk recovery and maintenance tool called Spinrite, and in each SN episode, he reads an email or two from a Spinrite customer talking about how they lost tons of data when their hard disk failed and how Spinrite got it all back for them. This is not security-related in the least, but other podcasts have commercials as well, so it doesn’t really bother me. The podcast itself is pretty good — it’s not super technical (i.e. it’s not directed toward security programmers) but it’s not dumbed down either. Every other episode is Gibson answering questions from listeners regarding everything from online authentication (i.e. when using paypal or stuff like that), to disk encryption to browser security (like cookies and such) to spyware, malware, and viruses.

Last week, I heard of another security podcast called PaulDotCom Security Weekly, so I thought I’d give that a listen as well. My first impression was not very favourable.

Before I go any further, I should say that I’m no security expert, but I am relatively knowledgeable in the area. Computer security has interested me for a number of years, and I am one of the de facto security people at work. I have written (and re-written) pretty much all of the database and communications encryption code in the SQL Anywhere server and client software, and I’m also responsible for other security-related things like permissions, authentication, and auditing. My point is that I’m not ready to start my own security podcast anytime soon, but I am able to at least keep up.

Back to PaulDotCom. The hosts introduced themselves and one of the first things they did was talk about what beer each of them was drinking at the time. Immediately after that, they made fun of Security Now and Steve Gibson by referring to Security Now as a “Spinrite commercial” (and they’re not far off with that, I suppose), and played a bunch of clips from various SN episodes — each clip was one where Gibson had lost his train of thought, or said “um…” a couple of times while trying to think how to say what he wanted to say. Of course putting all the clips together made it sound like Gibson was some moron who didn’t know what he was talking about. On top of that, they are now sponsoring a contest for listeners of PaulDotCom to come up with videos or whatever talking about how they “made the switch” from Security Now to PaulDotCom. This is not a great strategy for first-time listeners — if the first thing you do in your podcast is tell me how much better than the competition you are, you’ve just set your own bar pretty high, and now you have a lot to live up to. They seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time talking about how their podcast is so much better than SN, but it was twelve minutes into the podcast before they actually discussed something security-related. It also seemed a bit hypocritical to talk about SN being a Spinrite commercial, since they asked every guest they had if there was anything they wanted to hawk, like websites or products or anything, and even came right out and said “if you’re looking to hire computer people, send us an email, we know people who need work”.

The word “professional” did not come to mind at all during this podcast. As I mentioned before, one of the first things they did was talk about what beers they were drinking during the podcast. They seemed quite proud of the fact that they were doing this, and referred to it a couple of times later as well. One of them made a simple mistake and amid laughter, one of the other guys jokingly suggested he “have another beer”. Making fun of Gibson and SN was childish (though I did find it quite funny), and there were even a few curse words in there as well. I have no huge problem with cursing in general (as long as my kids aren’t going to be listening), but again, it doesn’t exactly scream “professionalism”.

The weird thing is that it seems to me that PaulDotCom and SN aren’t aimed at the same audience. While SN is aimed at anyone who is interested in technology and security and familiar with computers (but isn’t necessarily a programmer or IT professional), PaulDotCom seemed to assume a much higher level of knowledge. They had a pretty interesting interview with a guy that works on analyzing (i.e. reverse engineering) malware, and how some of the more advanced malware programs try to avoid being detected and also avoid being reverse-engineered by covering their tracks, changing their behaviour if they think they’re being debugged, and even modifying themselves. But they got way into the technical details of how this is done, which I found interesting, but I suspect many SN listeners wouldn’t. They also talked about some other web-based attacks and how they could be defeated, and got into some details on specific routers (i.e. they mentioned specific model numbers and what kind of firmware they were running and so on), but some of these discussions assumed a level of knowledge above my own, and they certainly didn’t stop to explain what they were talking about. The guys at PaulDotCom are certainly knowledgeable, but they seem to assume your level of security knowledge is the same as theirs. Rather than a bunch of security experts explaining things to people less knowledgeable than themselves without talking down to you (which is what I find Gibson does pretty well), this was more like eavesdropping on a conversation between a bunch of security experts who don’t care if you are listening.

If you are a programmer directly involved in writing some kind of anti-virus, anti-spam, or anti-spyware software, then this is probably a pretty good podcast for you. It’s probably the best security podcast for people who are already security experts. For the rest of us, Security Now seems like a better choice, if you have to choose only one. Even with my aforementioned experience in the field of computer security, I still found myself glazing over during parts of the PaulDotCom podcast, because they’d start talking about stuff with no background for those who were unfamiliar with the terms they were using. I mentioned before that Security Now isn’t dumbed down, but having said that, there are certainly times when I glaze over during that podcast as well, because Gibson is going into great detail explaining what a “cookie” is or something like that. But I’d rather skip stuff because I already know it than have to skip stuff because I don’t understand what the hell they’re talking about. To be fair, I will probably continue listening to PaulDotCom at least for a while, because I did find it interesting for the most part. I’m not trying to “defend” Steve Gibson and Security Now, but the next few PaulDotCom episodes better be pretty darned interesting, because the whole “we’re better than Security Now” thing just turned me right off. Since that was the first thing they talked about in the podcast, well, you know the whole thing about first impressions.

Update (Feb 4): I listened to the next episode of PaulDotCom on the way to work this morning, and felt obliged to update this entry, because the next episode was really interesting, and I quite enjoyed it. There was almost no mention of beer and no cursing. They mentioned Security Now but only in reference to their contest. There were a few off-colour sexual innuendo-type jokes, but no big deal. The technical stuff was at a lower level (and by “lower” I mean more technical in nature — definitely aimed at developers and security professionals) than Security Now, which as I mentioned is more aimed at security-conscious people who are not necessarily security pros. I haven’t “made the switch”, in that I still enjoy listening to Security Now as well, but unless the second episode was the anomaly and most episodes are like the first one I listened to (which seemed less focused than this one and I didn’t enjoy as much), I’ll continue listening to both. My first impression of PaulDotCom may not have been very favourable, but my second was pretty darn good.

Fire up the transmogrifier

Leave a reply

Rejoice, one and all! Calvin and Hobbes, the best comic strip EVER is available online, with a “new” one every day! Of course, they’re not new, since Bill Watterson isn’t doing it anymore, but there’s a different one every day. There are lots of different comics at that site, actually, including another of my favourites, Foxtrot, and if you want, you can also get really lame ones like B.C.

Sadly, no The Far Side.

Dock problems

Leave a reply

Shortly after I got my iPod last August, I bought a docking station from DLO, on recommendation from a guy at work who has one, and loves it. The dock connects to my receiver and TV, and allows me to play music from the iPod through the receiver, and watch video from the iPod on the TV. Since all my music is on the iPod and the physical CDs have been put away, I use this to listen to music at home. It looks nice, has a remote, a nice on-screen menu, and the audio and video quality is very good (I’m using standard RCA connectors for audio and S-Video for video). I also found it very convenient to download some TV shows, convert them to iPod format, then watch them on TV rather than on the iPod screen. That is, I did, until it stopped working.

A new iPod software version was released by Apple and I updated the iPod, and suddenly the dock stopped allowing me to choose TV shows. (At least, I think that’s when it stopped working.) It lists the different shows in one menu, and when you select a show, it lists which episodes of that show you have. Except now, no matter which show I choose (Battlestar Galactica, ST:TNG, Family Guy, or whatever else), it always shows me the episodes for Battlestar Galactica. I can’t watch anything else. I found that a new version of the firmware was available, so I downloaded the new firmware, connected the dock to the laptop via USB, then ran an installation program on the laptop which was supposed to upgrade the dock. Except that it didn’t. I kept getting a checksum error when trying to do the install. I emailed DLO support, and after 10 days of waiting (and one “I haven’t heard from you. Is there any progress on this issue?” email from me), I received the following message. Other than the huge footer of the email (complete with the tech support person’s name in a fancy font, the company’s address, phone numbers, logo, hours of operation and a couple of links), this is the complete text of the email:

Please check our support website periodically for the drivers to update your HomeDock. It may correct your concern.

I responded saying that this was unacceptable. Since my first email to them was within the warranty period, I sent the dock back to them (at my own expense) and asked them to send me a new one with the latest firmware installed. Surprisingly, a new dock was mailed to me just four days later, and I received it four days after that. I expected it to take numerous weeks, so that was good. The new dock did not have the latest firmware installed, but I found that an even newer version of the firmware was now available on the website (the dock came with version 2.0.1, I was unable to upgrade to 2.0.2, but now 2.1.2 was available). I downloaded that and was successfully able to upgrade the dock to that version. However, the TV show problem is still there.

I emailed them again, and after another four day delay, they asked what type of iPod I had and what the software version was. I responded right away, and at 6:30 this evening (three days after my last email) got another response, simply asking what generation my iPod is. I’m willing to give them whatever information they need to solve the problem, but if it takes them four days to ask each question, this is going to take forever.

So far, I can’t say I’m all that impressed with the tech support offered by DLO. Whenever I send an email, it takes them 3 or 4 days to respond. The first thing they told me was “wait for a new upgrade, and maybe it will fix the problem”, which didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. It sounded like they simply had no idea what the problem was and didn’t want to be bothered looking into it. They were fairly quick in getting a new dock out to me when I returned mine, though they just grabbed one from the shelf and fired it off, they did not send me an upgraded one like I asked them to. I first reported the problem to them on December 7; it’s now January 28 and I’m no closer to having the problem solved. Well, I guess that’s not true; since I’m using a different dock, I can safely assume that it’s not a hardware problem, it’s probably a firmware problem. Maybe an incompatibility with the iPod firmware, but it’s the latest firmware — shouldn’t they have tested that?

I will update this entry as progress occurs, but at some point I’m just going to have to send the thing back, ask for a refund, and move on. That’s too bad, since this is the nicest dock I’ve seen, and when it worked, I was really happy with it.

Blogger vs. WordPress

Leave a reply

When I changed my blog over to the new URL, I started thinking about hosting the blog myself, rather than going through blogger. My first thought was “How am I going to move the existing articles over?” I have since decided not to do this, at least for now, but while thinking about it, I realized that I had no backup of my blog entries anywhere. I thought this might be a good idea, so I looked for an export function in blogger, but there isn’t one. After a bit of searching, I found a couple of complicated methods of exporting all of your blog entries. One of these involved replacing your template with a different one, which would change the actual blog itself so that you could basically cut and paste the entire thing and then replace the template afterwards. This seemed like overkill, but then I found a comment that said something like “I just created a wordpress account and imported everything”.

I looked at wordpress and found that not only did it have an import feature that would automatically import all blog entries and comments from an existing blogger blog, but it also had an export feature which would to export your entire blog (including comments) to a single XML file. This seemed like exactly what I wanted, so I created a wordpress blog, imported everything from my blogger blog, then exported it to an XML file. The whole process took maybe 5 minutes, and I now have a 1.4 MB file containing every entry and comment on my blog from the beginning of time (also known as April 9, 2005) until January 26, 2008. I then changed my blogger setup so that it will automatically email every entry I post to my gmail account, and I’ll set up a filter there so that entries automatically get tagged as blog entries and archived so I’ll have a record of those as well.

Truth be told, I actually prefer the look of the wordpress blog to that of my blogger one. The export feature is a very nice thing that blogger doesn’t have, and I was considering switching over to use wordpress permanently, until I saw this at the bottom of wordpress’s features page:

To support the service we may occasionally show Google text ads on your blog, however we do this very rarely. In the future you’ll be able to purchase an upgrade to either turn the ads off or show your own ads and make money from your blog.

I seem to have this implicit dislike of online advertising (though I use (and love) gmail which does have ads, and I appreciate that this is how these services can be offered for free), so no thanks. If I had hundreds or thousands of readers, I could maybe see putting some ads on there for a little extra income (though having said what I said about online advertising, I might feel like I sold out to The Man). However, the way my readership numbers look now, I’d likely make nothing — the odds that either of my readers would click on anything are pretty low. Isn’t it ironic that one of the reasons that I don’t want to switch is because WordPress might show Google ads, while blogger (which is owned by Google) does not?

Another problem is that if I wanted to use http://www.cutthechatter.com (rather than cutthechatter.wordpress.com), I’d have to pay $10 / year, whereas it’s free with blogger. (Well, I have to pay for the domain itself, but I’d have to pay for that either way.) So I think that for the foreseeable future, I’ll be sticking with blogger.

I do think I will have to play around with my blogger template to make it prettier, possibly using the WordPress one as a guide.

Gail’s television debut

Leave a reply

The drama with the school issue I wrote about before continues. There was a meeting at the high school last night, where over 100 parents and members of various school councils (including Gail) met to brainstorm on ideas of how to best solve the problems at the high school and Greenleaf without busing our kids away. Each participant with an idea wrote it down on a piece of paper, and Gail now has a huge stack of paper here with lots of different ideas. One of the “rules” for this meeting is that any idea was to be submitted, even if you thought it was silly or impossible, so some of the ideas are pretty “out there”, but it was great to see a lot of people come out and not only show their support but voice their opinions. Gail, some other Greenleaf council people, and members of other school councils will be meeting with our school board trustees next week.

Someone called the local TV channel and they sent a team up to the meeting. A few people, including Gail, were interviewed and appeared on last night’s 11:00 news. Since this was Gail television debut, I’m trying to find a link to the video online, but no dice yet. We did tape it (with actual video tape, no PVR yet…), so I suppose I could record it from there onto the video camera, and then transfer from that onto the computer, but I’m sleepy. Maybe tomorrow. She was also interviewed the other day for the local paper, and that story came out today.

Toy review: Universal Remote

Leave a reply

With my winnings in the football pool, I decided to buy a new universal remote control. We’ve had one for a few years, and it’s been great, but the back cover recently broke, and so we wrapped an elastic band around it to keep the cover on and the batteries in. It looked ugly, the batteries wouldn’t sit properly because the cover wasn’t as secure, and so it was getting flaky, so I got a new one. The Logitech Harmony H659 was on sale at Future Shop, $139 rather than about $200.

This thing is very cool. The big difference between it and most remotes is the concept of “activities”. With my old remote, and most that I have seen, you have buttons that switch among different devices, and then the rest of the buttons may or may not change depending on which device you’ve selected. So to watch TV, here’s what we had to do:

  • Press TV, press Power, make sure TV is set to standard input, channel 3
  • Press Receiver, press Power, make sure receiver is set to TV input
  • Press Cable, press Power

Turning everything off was at least six button pushes, up to ten if the VCR and DVD were on. That was a hell of a lot more convenient, however, than picking up the TV remote and turning the TV off, then picking up the receiver remote and turning it off, then picking up the cable remote and turning it off, then…

Now, when we want to watch TV, we press the “Watch TV” button. It turns everything on that’s not already on, and sets everything up properly. When you’re done, you press “Off” and everything goes off. There were ways to use fancy macros to do all this with the old universal remote, but it was enough of a pain to set up that I never bothered. Also, the remote was not smart enough to know, for example, that it had already turned the TV on, so if you hit the “watch DVD” macro, it would attempt to turn the TV on, and thereby turn it off. With this, the hardest part of setting all this up was trying to read the model number on the back of our (36″ tube) TV. The rest was easy.

The remote assumes that everything is off when you start, and then keeps track of the on/off state of the devices. If you manually turn something on or off, that will mess it up a little, but there is an easy method of recovery. If something goes wrong, you press “Help”, and it will go through everything one step at a time, asking you each time whether the problem is solved. This is helpful if, for example, you turn the DVD player on manually to insert a disk, and then press “Watch a Movie”. The remote thinks that everything is off, so it turns everything on except the DVD player, which it turns off. If you press the help button, the first question is asks you is “Did that solve the problem?” This is kind of a dumb question — no, simply pressing Help did not solve the problem. After you say “No” to that, it goes through the affected devices one by one and asks if they are on and tuned appropriately. If you say “No” at any time, it re-sends that particular command and asks you if it’s OK now. If so, it asks if the problem is solved and if not, continues through the rest of the devices. It’s straightforward enough that Ryan (who’s 8) has had no problems using it so far. Nicky has been fine with it as well, though he hasn’t run into any problems yet. Since he can’t read as well as Ryan, he may have some trouble, but Nicky has no problems yelling for someone to help him if he can’t do something (or even if he can but just doesn’t want to). The “tutorial” for teaching the family how to use the thing was quick and easy — choose one of the activities (watch TV, watch a video, watch a DVD, play the Wii, listen to music), and everything on the remote just works the way you’d expect. If you have a problem, just press Help and follow the instructions. That’s it.

There are six “soft” buttons at the top, and you can program them for any function in each mode. For example, in “Watch TV” mode, I have two of them set to “Page Up” and “Page Down”, so I can quickly scroll through the channels in the guide listing. In “Watch a Movie” mode, I have them set to DVD-related buttons, like Menu, Next Chapter and Prev Chapter.

The software you use to program the device is good but has one drawback — it’s a web app, so you must be connected to the internet in order to program the remote. Not sure why they couldn’t have a standalone app that can connect to the internet to download new supported devices and fixes and stuff. I have a laptop with wireless internet access, so it doesn’t really matter for me, though if my internet connection was down I wouldn’t be able to program the remote, which seems like a silly limitation. Also, if I were to buy one for my dad, he’d have to do everything over a dial-up connection which would be painful. The software itself is pretty good, though it’s all “wizard-based”, so it asks you what you want to do and gives you screens and options based on that. I’d like to see an “advanced” mode, where you have more detailed control so if I want to change one button, I don’t have to navigate through twelve different screens to get to the right one. The interface to the remote itself is high-speed USB, so once you’ve got the programs the way you want them, you plug the remote in, click “Update remote”, and wait a minute while it downloads everything and reboots it.

I’ve only had the thing two weeks, but I love it. The only thing it doesn’t do that the old one did is control the ceiling fan/light. The fan is an old Sears model (came with the house), and the new remote refuses to “learn” the IR commands from the fan remote. The old universal remote did learn the commands, though it was flaky, so Gail always had to ask me to turn the light on beacause you had to hold the remote an inch from the remote sensor on the light. Yes, this does rather defeat the purpose of having a remote control. We don’t use that light all that often anyway, so as long as we keep the real fan remote around, we’re good.

Ferguson gone, Fletcher back

Leave a reply

I’ve been calling for the firing of John Ferguson as GM of the Leafs for almost a year now. Now that it’s happened, I’m not sure it’s the right move. Well, sort of. It’s a move that definitely needed to be done, but I’m not convinced it’s the only move that needs to be done.

On Ferguson’s watch, the Leafs have gone from a just-making-the-playoffs mediocre team to a laughing stock, bordering on the worst team in the league. Based on the moves that he has made, I believed that Ferguson was simply incompetent, and did a lousy job of running the team. In recent days, however, I’ve heard a lot about what’s gone on behind the scenes — Ferguson tried to make a number of deals that were nixed by Richard Peddie, the CEO of MLSE, and not a hockey guy. Given that, it’s quite possible that it was not entirely Ferguson’s fault. If his hands were as tied as I have been led to believe, there wasn’t much he could have done.

Having said that, as I’ve mentioned before, MLSE has treated Ferguson very badly over the last few months. His contract was going to end after this season, and MLSE didn’t bother to renew it, implying that he was going to be done after this season, and Peddie did say that hiring Ferguson was a mistake. Ferguson says it did not affect how he did his job, but I think it must have, and it more than likely affected the other GMs in the league and how they dealt with him. Over the past couple of weeks, the Leafs have all but announced that Ferguson was going to be fired, and that they were talking to Cliff Fletcher about the position, so he knew his days were numbered. Openly talking about who the next GM is when the current one is still there is just not very nice. So it was kind of unfair to Ferguson not to put him out of his misery and just fire him.

Cliff Fletcher has been hired as interim GM, and will search in the off-season for a new full-time GM for next season. MLSE has announced that “As all of our general managers have had, he will have the autonomy and responsibility for all hockey decisions…” If that’s true and Ferguson did have complete autonomy, then he’s at fault and deserved to be fired. If that’s not true, and some of his attempted moves were blocked, then Peddie should also be fired. Since the Leafs have been making money hand over fist on Peddie’s watch, I doubt that the rest of the board of directors of MLSE would even consider firing him.

There’s also been talk of firing coach Paul Maurice, which I don’t agree with. As the old saying goes, you can’t turn chicken turds into chicken salad by adding mayonnaise. Given what he had to work with, I don’t think we can look at the Leafs’ record from this year and last and conclude that it’s Maurice’s fault. Even if Maurice was the best hockey coach in the world, I’m not sure he could turn this team into a winner. I say wait until Fletcher (and whoever the next GM is) makes some moves and gives him a half-decent team, and then see what he can do.

Ironically, Cliff Fletcher was GM of the Leafs in the early 90’s, and made the trade that brought Mats Sundin to Toronto. Now his first act at GM might just be to trade Sundin away.

Save Greenleaf!

Leave a reply

I don’t write too much political stuff here. This is mainly because I don’t follow politics all that closely, and I don’t have strong opinions on a lot of political issues. However, there’s a local issue that’s recently come up that I really have to write about, since it directly affects my family, specifically my kids.

My kids go to Allan A. Greenleaf Elementary School, and Gail is the chair of the school council there (and has been for four years). They love the school, and Gail and I have grown to know the school and its staff pretty well. Over the years that Gail has been on the council, there have been lots of events intended to bring parents into the school and foster a real feeling of community: in particular the annual spaghetti dinner and silent auction which raises a ton of money for the school, and free family movie night.

Greenleaf is right next to Waterdown District High School (WDHS), the only high school in town. They share a parking lot, and there are a bunch of portables between them. WDHS has over 1200 1400 students, and is severely overcrowded; they have an astounding 29 18 portables scattered around the school grounds. They have to expand the school, there’s no question about that. The school grounds, which includes the high school, Greenleaf, and also the local YMCA, is bordered on the south by a fairly major street, and on the other three sides by farmland, all of which is owned by a developer. The school board has been in negotiations with this developer for years to buy some of the land next to the school so that they can expand. This deal recently fell through. I’m not going to comment on that, since I know none of the details of the bargaining, but the end result is that the school will have to expand on its existing land.

Here is a Google satellite map of the area. You can see the high school at the top right, Greenleaf at the top left, and the YMCA at the bottom left. The picture must have been taken a little while ago — I can only see 11 portables at the high school, and only two at Greenleaf, which now has eight or nine.

The board has come up with two plans to solve this problem: (1) build extensions onto WDHS, or (2) take over Greenleaf and make it part of the high school. If they go for option (2), they then have to decide what to do with the 700 kids that currently go to Greenleaf. The two options there are (2a) bus the kids to two currently empty schools in Dundas (~10-15 km away) while they build new schools in Waterdown for them to return to, or (2b) scatter the kids between the other three elementary schools in Waterdown. Either way, the school spirit and environment that they’ve built over the years will vanish, as Greenleaf will cease to exist. In option 2a, at least most of the kids and staff will be moved en masse so the environment would be similar, but they’d still be split in half and they wouldn’t be going to school in Waterdown. They’d be moving to older schools that have been abandoned and stripped (everything from the air conditioners to the fire bells have been removed). Also, there is no timetable for when they might return to Waterdown — the board doesn’t currently even own any land on which they can build a new school.

The board did mention another “unofficial” option: expropriate the land from the developer. They apparently have the power to force him to sell it to them at fair market value, though I believe there are some legal stumbling blocks that make this option difficult. Someone sent an email to the local city councillor as well as our MPP asking them about that possibility. The councillor replied (rather rudely) and said that the city could not help and it was up to the board, but our local MPP said that he spoke to the mayor about it and would look into this possibility. The MPP was helpful and polite, the councillor was unhelpful and rude. One of those two has announced that they will not be running for re-election next time around — three guesses which one, and the first two don’t count.

Option 1 (building additions to the high school) is not without its problems either. The renovations will take two years, during which time the high school students and the Greenleaf students will be going to school in a construction zone. There is only one entrance/exit into the school/YMCA area, so the school parents and staff and YMCA visitors and staff will be using the same entrance as the construction vehicles, and part of the plans include building a second storey above an existing one. While that’s happening, students will not be able to use the first floor of those areas.

The board has not stated which of the options they are leaning towards. They held a public information meeting at WDHS last Wednesday where they outlined the options. Lots of Greenleaf staff members and parents were there. Gail tore a muscle in her calf on Tuesday night and spent three hours in the hospital on Wednesday, but even the inability to walk didn’t keep her away from this meeting. She hobbled in on crutches to make sure she knew exactly what the options were so that she could present them to council at the regular council meeting the next night. The result of that (second) meeting was that the parents and staff are pretty much united that we don’t want to lose our school. We understand that the high school needs to expand, but the option of taking over Greenleaf and busing 700 kids to Dundas or scattering them among the three already-crowded Waterdown schools is simply not acceptable.

At the meeting, a third option was proposed, which will be presented to the school board. The original option (2) was to move the kids to an abandoned school, expand the high school, and then build a new school for the Greenleaf kids to come back to. We submit option 3: the construction should simply be ordered differently. Build a new school, move the Greenleaf students there, and then let the high school take over Greenleaf. The high school is apparently big enough to handle the current student load for another couple of years, so they’ll be OK during the construction of a new school, the Greenleaf students and staff don’t get scattered to the four winds, and after the new school is built, the high school can take over Greenleaf and grow as necessary. Everyone wins.

Greenleaf was built because a group of Waterdown parents wanted a new elementary school and formed a group to look into the possibility. The parents group contacted developers and did most of the legwork and then presented their findings to the board, and Greenleaf was built within two years. Given that, here’s no reason a new school couldn’t be built within the same two year time frame.

Disclaimer: My wife Gail Perrow is the chair of the Allan A. Greenleaf school council. The opinions expressed here are my own. I am not speaking on behalf of her or the council.

Update: Fixed some of the numbers which were inaccurate.

What it’s all about

Leave a reply

During Nicky’s skating lessons this morning, they played the “Hokey Pokey”, and it brought back a memory of me getting confused with the lyrics when I was a kid. I was as pedantic then about the English language as I am now.

According to the lyrics, here’s how the dance goes:

  1. You put your in
  2. You put your out
  3. You put your in
  4. You shake it all about
  5. You do the hokey pokey
  6. You turn yourself about
  7. Revel in the fact that you now know what it’s all about

But look at #5. “Do the hokey pokey”. I thought the whole thing was the hokey pokey. How can you do the hokey pokey as part of doing the hokey pokey? Is this a recursive dance? Can’t be — there’s no way to end the recursion. Us computer scientists would be dancing forever until we dropped dead of starvation or exhaustion, and not only would none of us would ever get to the “turning yourself about” part, but we’d never know what it was all about.