Blessed by the Potato

I really like the weathernetwork.ca, the website of the Weather Network. Their forecasting is about as accurate as you can expect weather forecasting to be, and they have a bunch of other neat utilities like the highway forecast or current highway conditions. However, lately they’ve been getting really anxious about issuing weather alerts that often don’t pan out, but that’s not what’s been getting me lately. What I really find bugs me is that while you can go back and look at past weather predictions with their site, they never tell you what actually happened. So, for example, if we were to go back and look at December 8, 2006 (or the band of days 6th-9th), London got hit really bad with a huge snowfall that was way above what they were calling for — 30 inches in front of our place (760-odd mm of snow). However, the archives on the Weather Network show a measly 25 mm of precipitation. Now, they might not count a mm of snow as a mm of precipitation, since snow can be quite fluffy and volumous, but still, 760 is nowhere near 25, and I don’t think they discount snow that much (perhaps a factor of 10, and they were calling for 25 cm of snow that night).

I had the same problem this weekend: they were calling for freezing rain, ice, and snow to hit London through Toronto, which was going to make my drive home miserable. Then in the early evening they started changing their prediction: Toronto went from getting a mix of ice and snow (up to 20 cm) to a predicted 5-7 cm of snow. They were still calling on London to get iced in: basically the weatherpeople were wailing “But if you have any friends or relatives in London, it may be too late for them, as they’re already encased in their icy tombs. There may still be hope, however, as scientists ten thousand years from now may thaw them out and ask what it was like to hunt the Woolly Mammoth that was briefly resurrected from extinction by genetic engineering; they will, of course, have to sheepishly admit that they were frozen in the London ice storm just a few decades before that actually happened…”

The snow in Toronto was pretty gentle, and we only got about 2 cm, which wasn’t going to stop me from driving. It made me wonder what London actually got, because I’d hate to get halfway down the 401 just to find the driving impossible. Did we get spared the full wrath of the weather network’s predictions, as Toronto had? Or was Toronto merely spared because the clouds had dumped their load in London? The weather network’s site was pretty much useless for trying to answer that question. Their highway conditions page said that the roads were slushy and awful all along the 401, including through Toronto, but it didn’t look that bad out my window. I kept hitting refresh hoping to get an update, when I noticed that the information was several hours old and not getting updated. At that point I just decided to get in the car and risk it. I’m here now typing, so everything turned out fine: in fact, Toronto was the worst part of the drive, with a tiny bit of slush on the roads and the snow still falling. London’s roads are wet, but clear of snow (I guess it was largely regular rain, as opposed to ice — or the city put down a lot of salt) though there is some slush on the sidewalks.

It was just brought to my attention that there’s a strange error on the site right now where the sidebar is not loading properly (at all) for many people. It’s very strange because it loads fine for me when I use the local address for my webserver (192.etc.) but it doesn’t work for me when I go via the web (www.holypotato.com). I have no idea what could cause behaviour like that, so if anyone has any ideas I’m open to suggestions.

Edit: As soon as I posted this, the problem appeared to go away. I wonder if the extra post pushed the image (a few posts below) far enough down the page that it wasn’t interacting with anything on the sidebar or something along those lines…

Twice after we moved in, Wayfare and I asked our landlord how to turn off the water to the pipes on the side of the house. “Oh, you don’t need to” she said, “I’m pretty sure they’re the new ones that won’t burst.” I had never heard of such pipes. It was possible there was a small heating element in it (there is a small wire attached to the pipe, but as far as I can tell it then goes into the cable box, so my guess was that it was a grounding strip). It’s also possible that the world of plumbing has advanced and water freezing and expanding inside pipes doesn’t lead to failure anymore. To be safe, I asked the last tennant as well, and she said she never had to turn it off.

“Oh well,” we shrugged “it should be fine.” Of course, now my landlord’s on vacation in New Zealand (not just out of the country, but completely out of touch and in a completely different day/night cycle) and the pipe decides to burst. It’s very strange though that it would burst today: it’s close to freezing for the first time in weeks; I would have thought it would have burst last week in the bitter cold. Naturally, along with the water spraying all over the side of the house and the deck, there’s now water seeping into the basement.

I just went to get some ice cubes for my drink, which around here is pretty rare. So, the frost free freezer, with its cycles of temporary heat, had evaporated (sublimated?) almost all the ice out of my ice cube tray. The few, shrunken ice cubes that were left were dirty. Eww, that’s just not right. Ice cubes shouldn’t get getting dirty in the freezer, especially not in one I fully cleaned out in December.

I haven’t had a chance to tell all my stories from the trip out to PEI, and I’m not quite sure I want to. But I do want to mention that it is traditional, perhaps universally so, to send food to mourners. Perhaps because food can be very comforting to our ape-brains, perhaps to spare us from having to cook for ourselves, or perhaps just because practically every get-together/tradition involves food in some way and it would just be wrong to not bring something. Anyhow, there was so much food waiting for us at my grandfather’s house after the visitation. The food was piling up at the front door, with more people stopping by with more as we were eating. Any flat, unsuspecting place that stood still long enough accumulated food. The kitchen table and counters, naturally, were nearly overflowing. A folding table set up in the living room accumulated food along with the coffeetable; some food even found its way on top of the TV. The stove had a few pots on it to keep warm, and then someone else came along and started piling food up between the pots. What I found hilarious though is that the washer and dryer were covered in food.

This of course meant that everyone had to eat in their laps with their good clothes on…

I’m not usually a concert-going guy: I typically figure that the added experience of seeing a band live, once, along with the between-song banter and special live-only covers/ditties/version is usually not worth the hassle of sitting in a packed hall/stadium with lots of screaming people and the very high admission. I’d rather have the CD and listen to it a number of times all by myself in the car, thanks. Nonetheless, I’ve heard that the Barenaked Ladies are a fun band to see live (and I like almost every song out of their catalog, so there won’t be embarrassing moments like when Robert Smith tried to pass off his newest song list as worthy of playing in front of people) so I decided to go. Plus it made for an awesome you-know-what-day present for Wayfare. (No modesty needed).

Now, we had tried to see BNL in concert once before, a few summers ago at the Molson Ampitheatre for their day-long “Barenaked circus” concert. That, my friends, was not a very good concert. It was basically Mama Page going up and smacking Stephen over the head and forcing him to let his whiney kid brother do an opening set for the now wildly popular BNL (though to be fair, his kid brother was one of the best of the acts). And of course, once that happened everyone wanted to let their cousins, friends, or people who play in the subway station on their morning commute do a set. It could have worked, if they had tightened up the set changes a bit lot more — it was pretty ridiculous, since we could see the stage hands wheel everything out pretty much preassembled on the rolling platforms, then take 40-45 minutes connecting stuff up and doing sound checks. I really thought a professional group of stage hands sould have been able to do that in less than say, 10 minutes. I think they did too, since Sean Cullen, who was entertaining us between groups, only had about 10 minutes of material at a time, then lots of dead air. It was also a little unfair that they didn’t really tell anyone that was the way the concert was going to go: we were not prepared to spend nearly 8 hours in our seat in the sun. Also, the actual BNL set (while fairly good) was really short, due in part to the crazy noise restrictions at Molson/Ontario Place (why they don’t just start concerts an hour earlier on a summer saturday afternoon, I don’t know). Of course, that concert did give us “Wood, Cheese, and Children” so not all was lost.

This concert was better. One opening act, as the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the good doctor Funkenstein intended. It wasn’t just that they had a curling song (though, really, that was the highlight of the whole affair, right up there with Lovers in a Dangerous Time for you-know-what day), it just seemed like a better concert. They were a little… cold at first, and there were some issues in getting the volume balanced between the instruments and the vocals. But it was smooth with very little downtime.

It’s much nicer seeing concerts in London. For one thing, the tickets are (a bit) cheaper. We were in the cheap seats, up in the nosebleeds, and we were about as close as the sort of second price tier seats would be in Toronto (for the Molson Ampitheatre, about where the seats turn to grass). It was also a breeze to get there: if the weather had been even remotely decent, we would have walked. Instead, we took a cab for $8, and afterwards walked like 4 blocks to get on a bus to come home — all in all, a much more enjoyable experience IMHO.

The record companies (or more properly, the artists) really haven’t seemed to see some of the strengths of digital music with respect to their concerts. There are almost always unique one-off moments in a concert: a different version of a song (even if it’s just more vibrant with cheering fans), or a new cover, or some little throwaway ditty that didn’t seem worth putting on an album. But there are quite often fans who would like to have that song: the BNL live version of “Brian Wilson” is now the definitive version of that song; personally, I’d love to have a copy of “Canada Curling Stone” that they played tonight, or “Bounce to This“, a really good, catchy song at the George Clinton concert that I’ve never heard before or since. Sometimes, they’ll release a concert CD or DVD, but it’s often of a representative night of a particular tour, and still misses some of the jokes, local flavour, and audience reaction. So, my point is: wouldn’t it be great if bands sold recordings of each stop of their concert tour? Of all their songs, in all their many flavours? It seems like it should be trivially easy to record and sell MP3s once you already have the infrastructure to do so for full studio album versions. Plus it would be a great way to extort more money from the die-hard fan who has to have everything, and cut down on the desire to record performances: if you knew you could go and buy any particular song you really liked live afterwards, why even bring the tape recorder? (And I think I like Pinch Me better when the line is “take a drink right from the hose, and change into my sister’s clothes”). This is the kind of way that digital media scales: it’s just as easy and profitable to sell a thousand different songs/versions as it is to sell 26 off two albums. Shelf space is no longer a concern: the only issue remaining is the customers’ ability to sort through it, find what they want, and absorb it.