Blessed by the Potato

The parched soil scrapes and crunches beneath my hands as I pull myself up on the ledge and catch my breath from the climb. I look solemnly at the grity ground swelling around my fingers, afraid to look up to see how much further this cliff rises. Knowing I cannot delay forever, I lift my gaze to find to my great surprise that the land has levelled off.

This is the end then; I’m out of the pit.

I take off my shoes and dig my toes into the ground, playing with pebbles to distract myself from reality. It’s overwhelming to think about, after over a year spent in that hellish place. Part of me fears I’ve gone mad, inventing hope where none existed before.

A moment, at least, I can spare to reminisce. So much pain that year, and so much hard work wasted on dead ends. I’ve accumulated a lot of scars from the experience, not the least of which is the damage done to my stubborn pride. It’s clear that I’m not the man I was before I was lost there, a change that I’m sure must be apparent on my face — not that I’ve seen a mirror for a year. Sadly, I doubt the changes were for the better.

I sigh and put my shoes on. Time to move forward. My knees crack as I rise, and I doubt I’ll ever again stand my full height, with my back twisted and hunched. I try to survey the plains before me, but find that I can’t pick out any discernable features: the landscape has been plunged deep into shadow by what I’ve left behind. Definitely flatter though, of that I’m sure.

Perhaps that’s better, I think to myself: small hope seems more real, and I almost feel greedy for wishing that these trials were over all ready.

Not knowing for sure what lay ahead, only that it couldn’t be worse than what I had been through, I plunge ahead into the darkness three steps before halting. Already the dry, caked earth is not so harsh and unrelenting; no longer seeming to resist my every step with a malevolent purpose and infinite patience. My spirit soars again, and I spare just one more moment to turn and spit in the gorge.

I don’t bother to wait for it to land.

Happy New Year’s Eve, everyone!

Well, I ended up checking Futureshop’s boxing day sale against my better judgement. It didn’t turn out too bad in the end: I got a 512 MB SODIMM for my dad’s laptop for $80 (with a $30 rebate yet to come), Civilization 4 for $30, and my dad’s present: QuickTax (which mysteriously existed in a quantum state of in stock but not released on the website). I only ended up going in person because I just needed to get out for a walk and stretch my legs, and it’s not all that far from my parents’ house.

Turns out it went a lot smoother than checking out the website, which was really slow from the traffic, and which kept running out of stock on things on sale, which would then come back in stock, only to be out of stock again between adding them to your cart and going to the checkout. And the system wouldn’t let you order something out of stock and just wait for it to come in — no way you were going to save money that way!

In other news, a record number of hits to the webpage was received yesterday, and I didn’t even check it myself! 40 hits. Wow. However, I don’t have the tools to say if that was one person reloading a lot through the day or 40 unique visits. Either way, it might be getting popular enough for me to consider getting a new host with renewed fervor.

Netbug sent me a flash animation that I just love (well, the animation itself is mediocre, but the whole package had me laughing out loud. I’ve watched it 8 times tonight :)

The Ultimate Showdown (of Ultimate Destiny)

Sorry I haven’t had more updates going over the break. That time has been consumed first by the hectic pace of family obligations, movie watching, and poker playing, and later by the sweet, seductive time wasting embrace of Civilization 4’s “one more turn”.

Happy Potatomas to everyone!

I’m in the midst of packing up to spend a week with my parents. While I’m gone, the poor web server will have to chug along without me: odds are, it’ll sieze up around day 5. I’ll apologize for that in advance.

I had my CT scan today, it went fairly well (and boy is that contrast agent injection feelling rather strange). I stopped by futureshop on the way home (why do I bother?) to try to get a last-minute gift for my dad. I checked the in-store availability checker on the website, and it said that the item I wanted was in stock — but it was no where to be found in store. The clerk said not to put any faith in that tool, particularly around the holidays. Well, there goes another strike against futureshop in my book.

I’ve heard a bit about Peak Oil lately, and figured I would talk a bit about it.

First off, let’s put this discussion in context. A while ago, people were worried that we would run out of oil, and there would be a disastrous effect on the world (especially the economy), perhaps plunging us into a dark age. The fear had immediacy: in the 80’s, we were afraid we might run out of oil as soon as 2010. As technology developed, we found more reserves, and better ways of extracting the oil from difficult-to-work reserves (cf. Alberta Oil Sands).

Then the concern flipped around: one of our biggest fears was that we wouldn’t run out of oil. While it may sound paradoxical, you have to consider that the use of oil as a primary source of energy creates a lot of pollution: greenhouse gasses and waste heat from the burning of the fossil fuels, and toxic deposits from the extraction and refinement. If we weren’t going to run out of oil, then consumption would not slow, and alternative technologies would not develop.

Recently, another idea has been getting wider attention, that of “Peak Oil”. The concept here is that we extract the easiest to access sources of oil first, ramping up production with demand over the last century or so, and then eventually we reach a point where we have depleted the easy reserves, and have to resort to harder sources (such as the oil sands). For a number of reasons, the amount of oil extracted reaches a peak, and then begins to decline.

All the while, demand is constant and/or increasing.

So while we may still be 100 years or more away from extracting the last barrel of oil we’ll ever find in the planet, we’re actually getting very close to the peak of production. Soon production will slow down, and we’ll be unable to meet the current demand (or for some fossil fuels, such as natural gas, we’re at that point already). The interesting thing economically is how little production needs to slow down to lead to massive increases in price. Since oil is so necessary for many endeavors, businesses may be willing to pay much more money to keep their supply constant. For example, if energy costs are 5% of a company’s total finances, they’d easily be willing to pay double if it meant they would stay in business. And clearly, the SUV drivers of the world don’t care how expensive oil is — if the price were to double, it would be you who ended up having to conserve out of necessity, not them.

After all, since I started driving the price has already just about doubled (from a low of 45 cents/L when I would put $2 of gas in my car at the 7-11 at Sheppard and Willowdale and go out “cruising” for an hour, to $1.43/L during a road trip to the cottage when a hurricane struck New Orleans; gas today is 90 cents/L). Yet driving habits haven’t really changed much in the last few years (if anything, school kids have gotten lazier/parents have gotten more paranoid, and people are driving for short trips more often than before).

Exactly how soon is soon varies: it’s hard to predict exactly when it will happen, and there are various confounding factors. Pretty much anything that shuts down oil production (wars, hurricanes, recessions) slows the coming of the peak, both because you leave the oil in the ground, pushing back its eventual extraction, and because during those slow-downs fields that are still developing get to catch up in terms of their infrastructure development. Estimates place the peak as soon as 2010, or as far away as 2050. To me, both of those dates look pretty close though, as I’ve got a reasonable chance of living to see both of them.

I think I had more to say on that, but it’s getting pretty late. Anyway, something to think about.

I figured out how to lay the recipes section out more like how I wanted it. I’m in the process of reformatting and posting my recipes now.

Also note some new links on the right. First up is a Page for guest rants. I already have one submitted by Joce!

Now, note how I put page up there in bold and capitalized? That’s just to clarify that a WordPress Page is a very specific type of page (“page” of course referring to just about any document we pull off the www, including this post; but usually referring to HTML documents). A WordPress Page is a dynamically generated document that exists outside the usual blog chronology, and is thus typically static (but not actually static, since it’s not just raw HTML – the contents are stored in the MySQL database and rendered on the fly).

Confused? Yeah, that’s why it took me so long to work through the WordPress documentation to make the recipes page look (closer to) the way I wanted. If you’re just reading this site, the confusion means very little to you: simply know that there are my posts on the main page here, which you can also find using the search function, categories, or monthly archives, and also some other pages linked separately on the right there that you can only get to on the sidebar links. They tend to be more static.

If you’re using WordPress, you might need to figure a little bit of this out (I know Netbug expressed interest in the concept when the Recipes first started appearing on the sidebar there). I think they’re doing themselves a disservice by choosing to call them Pages (so much confusion with lower-case pages!). I’ve seen some suggested alternative nomenclature, such as calling them a “folio”, “leaf”, “pane”, or “panel”. Personally, I like the first two, and in my head and hand-written scribbles refer to them as folios to try to reduce confusion.

But that’s delving a little too much into the guts of the site.

Next up, I’d like you all to notice that I’ve put up some links relating to the upcoming Canadian Federal Election. I would urge you all to consider the ludicracy of our first-past-the-post system. It encourages “strategic voting” so that you vote for a candidate or party that you don’t think will do the best job, but one that you think has the best chance of defeating one that you really don’t like. It discourages independents & new parties from trying to join the race, allows majority governments to form with only a minority of the popular vote, and vote splitting concerns are the main reason the old, somewhat respectable Progressive Conservatives were forced to merge with the Reform party to give us the new Conservatives (which are a fair bit scarier). There is a petition being created at Fair Vote Canada to encourage the government, no matter which one wins this election, to consider another method of voting. I would encourage you to go sign, and if you come across any other respectable petitions (as I’m sure there has to be more than one group petitioning for this) feel free to send a link my way. Also, write your new MP as soon as this election is over and let them know that you want it to be a priority of the new government (or better yet, write all 4+ candidates in your district before the election and let them know it’s an important issue for you).

Finally, has anyone tried the RSS feed from this site? I decided to give it a whirl when I was visiting my parents (in theory, to give me a feed of your comments while I was away), but I got an error about not having a style sheet for the feed. No idea what that means, as I’m still learning here.