Blessed by the Potato

My connection to Rogers went dead in the middle of the night last night, and when it came back up I had a new IP. That might cause a few minor headaches for readers of the site (hopefully no one noticed — traffic has been really light lately so I don’t really know if anyone is reading this anymore). My new IP is in the 99.* range, which is a new range of IPs opened to Rogers in the last few months. Reports are that they’ve been a bit of a hassle — most of the rest of the internet doesn’t know that they belong to Rogers, so sites that say, for example: “welcome, visitor from Canada” don’t quite know what to make of you. Likewise, many routing tables aren’t optimized for that block of IPs yet, so reports have been that it was a slow IP range to have (by now, I guess those problems must have been fixed since I haven’t noticed any problems… yet). Also as a heads up, my IP tends to change fairly rapidly in bursts and then settle down for a few months, so there might be more spontaneous changes in the days to come.

It’s tough these days to get people to come to your Halloween party! Wayfare has, for the longest time, been the thrower of Halloween parties, but the last few years it’s been really tough to get people to come (yes, we live in London now, but it’s not really any harder to get to than Hamilton was, and at this age people are in the habit of staying in guest rooms or hotels for weddings, and out-of-town baby showers, so why not for Halloween?). Never mind that we have even more decorations, more candy, and a fog machine!

Ah, well, if you’re a reader of this blog, (one that doesn’t try to push discount pharmaceuticals in the comments, that is), then feel free to stop on by (in costume, of course!) on Saturday, October 27 (yes, Saturday — that other date was a brief and wild mistake that has been corrected).

I’ve been catching up on 24 (a show I initially dismissed as gimicky, and while I do find some faults with the execution of the concept, it’s actually quite watchable). I think it really is meant to be watched in rapid succession like this. There have been a few things that have bothered me, such as the computer people constantly “opening sockets” to do anything. It’s really strange technobabble, and it kind of annoys me that they keep repeating it (it is ok to make up some new technobabble).

What gets me the most though is that nobody seems to wear seat belts. Which is strange considering how many accidents they all get in… Likewise, Jack Bauer goes on all kinds of raids without strapping on a bulletproof vest, except for one or two times when he goes out of his way to put one on, and those are the times he actually gets hit.

Some unrealistic things are just going to be a given to help the show along, things like magical security cameras that can be enhanced to show an incredible amount of detail, and send their images over “a socket” to CTU. And the fact that this high-security government agency can’t go a single season without a mole or traitor sneaking in. They stock a good number of security guards (who have recently started wearing red shirts to indicate that they’re disposable), but apparently keep them in a closet except when called since they never actually stop anyone from getting in to or out of the building, or keep an eye on the people while they’re working. And it just wouldn’t do to have commuting across LA take more than 10 minutes…

A number of other plot inconsistencies bug me, though.

Spoiler alert!

For instance, in season 5 there is much lamenting over the terrorist threat to attack Suvarov’s motorcade. The whole time I was thinking: if you’re the kind of person willing to sacrifice a few secret service agents for nothing, then why not send the motorcade on, but send the Russian president by helicopter instead? Then many, many episodes are spent trying to recover a certain voice recording. Several times Jack has it in his possession only to lose it again. The big question I was practically screaming at the TV was why didn’t Jack just copy the stupid thing?! He had a cell phone and a tape recorder, he could have just called CTU, played it up to the receiver, and let them archive it that way. Or later when they capture Henderson and the recording isn’t on him, and Jack figures out that he’s using it as insurance (otherwise he would have destroyed it), why not just kill Henderson? After all, as he threatened, if anything happened to it, that would be made public. That would save all the effort of tracking it down, and just get it out there. Sure, it wouldn’t be ideal chain of custody procedures for evidence, but in a case like that it probably doesn’t matter as much. Plus it would help a ton for all the people who say “I think Bauer is telling the truth, but I haven’t heard the evidence myself…”

Well, from the preliminary results here before I head off to bed, it looks like the Liberals have won with a handy majority. However, I have to wonder how many people actually voted for the Liberals, rather than against the Conservatives? How many ridings were hotly contested, and how many people would have been better represented by some degree of proportional representation?

These issues didn’t seem to trouble voters, as it looks like the referendum failed miserably. I don’t quite understand why. Yes, the education and awareness campaign was pathetic, and most people were talking about religious schools rather than electoral reform. People were writing letters to the editor every day to the local paper with misconceptions and FUD about how the list MPP system would work (and not understanding how the current system of getting your name on the ballot as a local candidate works, either), so even people interested (and irate) enough to pester the paper couldn’t (or wouldn’t) learn what it was about. And with a budget of under $7 million (something like fifty cents a person — I’d like to tell you what the parties spent on advertising, but I can’t find that figure; I know the limit is something like 70 cents per voter province-wide, plus another $1 per voter for local candidates), and a somewhat complicated/subtle/boring change to explain, it’s not too surprising that the education campaign wasn’t very effective. But at the same time, I figured people would be hungry for electoral reform, as I am most of the time. The referendum in BC was not that long ago and it was so close*. And in fact, I believe that BC is going to re-hold their referendum in 2009 (with more education campaigns, and more details fleshed out, such as the proposed boundaries of the new electoral districts).

I’m disappointed, Ontario.

* – granted, their proposed system was STV, which I personally preferred over MMP, even if it does make voting and counting more complicated.

Oh those many years ago, when Google first went public, I thought about investing in it. I was a keen user of Google, loving the slick, minimalist interface and improved search results from right from when I first used it in beta. But when the initial share price was announced at $85 or so, I balked. No way was I going to drop that kind of money on a company that didn’t have a solid revenue stream in place, especially following as it did the bust of the dot-com bubble where so many other bright-ideas-but-no-revenue companies ballooned up just to crash. I figured it was overhyped and would fall not too long after the IPO into a range that would be more appropriate, less inflated by rumour and speculation. (Also, to avoid an odd-lot-trade, a share price of $85 (US, which was expensive at the time, too), would have required buying 100 shares. While I might have believed in it enough to invest say $500 or even $1000 in Google just to see what happened in the long run, I couldn’t put down the nearly $10,000 it would take to buy a lot of 100 shares…)

Well, I was wrong. Google’s just kept going up, nearly linearly, for the last three and a half years, and is actually profitable. Someone get me a time machine!