Blessed by the Potato

I think the last time I watched TVO was when Today’s Special was on the air (right after Polka Dot Door), but I just noticed that they have some interesting videos on their site that you can go watch, including a recent interview* with David Suzuki. I like David Suzuki, and I hate to speak against him, because he might burst through my wall and throw a basketball at my head, but he says some downright silly things about hydrogen cars. It’s just a throwaway line though, so I’ll leave that comment at that. I also disagree a bit with his comments on nuclear: I still think it’s the only medium-term solution open to us. Demand management and renewables are going to be a vital component of managing our electrical grid, but we’re still in the hole from the shutdown of 2 reactors at Pickering and Bruce, and if we want to shut down the coal plants as well then some kind of massive capacity must be built soon. There are tricky issues with nuclear, since when it goes wrong it goes wrong in a big way — whether that’s leaks, waste management, cost overruns, or whatever. You have to make sure to have massive amounts of money and trained personnel at all times for up to a century into the future, and to keep reckless people like Stephen Harper far away. The crumbling of a country and its economy/infrastructure is no reason to let your nuclear reactors go unattended, and those costs (take out an annuity?) can be massive; higher perhaps than a straightforward massive renewables buildout in the final accounting.

On the topic of demand reduction, an article about the real-world efficiency gains of CFLs is making the rounds, brought to my attention by Michael James. Because CFLs are more efficient, they produce less waste heat… but this leads to a secondary effect: when heat in your house is desirable (such as a Canadian winter) you have to replace that heat somehow, which reduces the real-world benefit of CFLs. Professor Peter Blunden at the University of Manitoba is credited with working out the math, but no news article cites a primary source other than that, so I haven’t had a chance to see how he figures it (and I’ve looked around for a primary source and can’t find one; I’m tempted to email the guy directly). After all, you will have to replace some of the lost waste heat with more efficient bulbs in the winter, but our houses are not perfectly insulated boxes at equilibrium, so heat generated (and trapped) near your ceiling is not as effective at making your house comfortable as systems designed for heat (baseboard heaters, forced air systems, etc). Plus making heat is generally quite efficient (since inefficiencies in most devices are represented as heat production!), but making cool air in the summer is nowhere near as efficient… The various news reports of this study (back of the envelope calculation?) are reporting different numbers too, with the CBC saying that “real energy saving for Winnipeggers using CFL bulbs is probably closer to 17 per cent” but the Winnipeg Free Press giving “Winnipeggers would end up with energy and cash savings of 17 per cent, similar to Manitoba Hydro’s findings. Those who use air conditioners would see savings of around 24 per cent, he said, while cash savings will be a little higher for people who heat with gas instead of electricity.” So what does that mean for someone in Toronto with less heating requirements in the winter and the A/C cranked to full for four and a half months out of the year? Seeing his work would go a long way to figuring out the real answer.

* – This interview with Allan Gregg was less of an interview than an opportunity for David Suzuki to speak. In fact, I’ve watched a number of these interviews and they were quite enjoyable because Allan Gregg is just there to help facilitate the interesting, articulate guest speaker in ranting for a half hour, it’s a great way to do an interview (since except for David Letterman or Conan O’Brien, who really cares what the interviewer has to say?). It’s a neat series to go back through the archives and watch over at TVO.

A final note: the forwarding and dynamic IP behind the scenes here look to be getting troublesome. I don’t have time in the next month or two to get around to moving hosts (and probably upgrading wordpress as well) and all that nonsense, so for now I’m just going to add a permalink to this post whenever I remember.

Last weekend when the wind was blowing and it was -20 in the sunshine I had the unfortunate luck to not be able to start my car on the first try. There was no second — the key turned but the engine didn’t. Luckily, in a slow, painful-sounding third attempt the engine did turn over and I was on my way.

By Wednesday night though, that was it, the battery was dead. Luckily I had an eliminator emergency jump kit in the trunk so with just a minor delay I was off and made my curling game. It’s pretty clear that the battery has been run down by all the short trips I’ve been making — I haven’t gone further than the grocery store or curling in 2 months, and it’s been cold and miserable. I drove around for a half hour to charge it up again and things seem to be working ok for now, but I know that I’m going to have to replace it pretty soon, it was coming due next fall anyway. Fortunately having that eliminator in my trunk will buy me some time to get around to it at my convenience, though I’ve lost the confidence to do things like shut the car down at long lights or railway crossings to save gas.

More bad news with the car though: when I had the hood up to jump the car, I noticed that my coolant was nearly empty. My radiator has been “weak” according to my mechanic, and obviously has some rust issues, and is another thing that’s on the list to get fixed at some point in the future. However, at the time the leak was first noticed I was losing less than a litre of fluid per year. Now I’m down nearly a litre in three months. I’m tempted to just keep topping it up — as long as the leak stays small like this a tub of coolant a year is a lot cheaper than fixing a radiator on a car that’s probably only got 2-3 years of life left in it anyway — but sadly coolant is both necessary for the car’s operation (whereas a weak battery I can skimp by on as long as I’ve got the backup jumper) and if a slow, minor leak turned into a big leak I could get stuck. Plus it might be a bit of an environmental hazard (though I’m not sure if losing a litre of coolant is any worse than the four of windshield washer fluid I might go through in that time).

Update: While the battery did run fine for a few days after taking it out on a drive and charging it up, it didn’t last. It’s completely dead now (6 days later), it won’t even run the lights after I turn the car off, let alone try to start it. The eliminator looks to be good for 3-4 boosts per charge on it, which has been fantastic. I bought a new battery at Canadian Tire and installed it myself; I have to go back tomorrow to trade in my old one. Unfortunately the battery there wasn’t as cheap as I thought from looking online: the price says “from $89.99” but I suppose that’s for like a motorcycle or something. My car has a pretty “normal” battery (mid-sized 4-cylinder car), and it was $120.

I’m very sad to say that less than 3 months after buying a Petro-Canada Mobility phone for Wayfare, they are jacking the calling rates: local calls are going up 25%, while long-distance goes up 50%. This is a ludicrous price increase, and really cheeses us off. While the rates are still competitive with most other offerings, we might switch to PC [President’s Choice — slightly confusing since Petro-Canada has the same initials] out of spite (and to get a phone with volume controls). At the very least we might start using PC calling cards for our long distance; since we’re all over the place when we do use our phones almost half the calls were long distance, and the decent rate (30 cents/min before) was part of the attraction for Petro-Canada.

Other than that the service so far has been just fine, with the exception of the fact that the phone comes with a camera and FM radio tuner but no bloody volume control (since when is volume an optional feature??).

Thanks to Ben for pointing this out; we still haven’t received any kind of notification from Petro-Canada.

I really enjoyed Fallout 3. So much so that I think I’m going to reroll a new character and play through it all over again. So even though I may be my own critical self and focus on the parts of the game that freaked me out, I did really enjoy it.

First off, you might as well start by watching the Yahtzee review at the Escapist since he is a professional.

Right, so first off that part about the characters being in the uncanny valley… well, it gets worse. Not only do they stare at you weirdly rigidly when talking, and not only is everyone covered in a layer of itchy-looking, radioactive grime, but they glow. If you talk to a NPC in a dark area you’ll see that their eyes and mouth are self-illuminating. I wasn’t sure if that was a way of trying to make them look more life-like in the regular lighting, or a product of the radioactive fallout, but it was pretty creepy. Plus as photo-realistic as the broken terrain is, the characters don’t seem to ever quite touch the ground.

Ok, to start a little closer to the beginning: Fallout 3 is a hybrid between a role-playing game and a first (or third, depending on your camera preferences) person shooter. You level up, assign skill points, rummage through things, and go on quests like an RPG, but also can fight it out and go for headshots like a first-person shooter. The game takes place in the area around Washington, DC sometime around 2277 — about 200 years after a nuclear war broke out. Things are, to put it succinctly, post-apocalyptic.

My faithful readers will recognize that I have a soft-spot for post-apocalyptic fiction, and Fallout 3 snuggles up in there quite nicely indeed.

The world is broken and everyone is focused on survival, except for the vault-dwellers, who live beneath the ground in massive fallout shelters, largely ignorant to the plight of the world outside after generations of electricity and safe water. Of course, things are starting to run down beneath the ground too, and throw in a bit of a political crisis when your dad (voiced by Liam Neeson) does the unthinkable and leaves the vault. Forced outside to find him (and escape the insanity of the vault’s overseer) you have to survive in the ruins of DC. The game takes itself fairly lightly, with lots of humour around and cutesy 50’s-style cartoons and billboards (and cars with fins), and home-brew steam-powered teddy bear launchers. Highly advanced nuclear powered levitating robotic butlers are controlled by monochrome text-entry computer terminals. There are numerous entertaining small touches to be found throughout the game world.

I found the game to be quite hard at first: resources were so scarce that I would quite often run out of ammo when exploring (and not all that far from town, either), which was doubly damning because early on my small arms skill was not very good so a lot of shots missed their target (for the min-maxers, I have to say that small arms is probably the most important skill to level up). Every half-full clip of ammo was a treasure. On top of that, the world is just run down: the vendors have very poor stock, and are themselves nearly broke, so even if you do manage to load up on vendor trash in your explorations, they may not have enough caps (bottle caps — the currency of the Fallout world) to buy it all from you. And even if you have the caps to pay for ammo instead of finding it, you may find the vendor only has a half-dozen bullets themselves.

Of course, by the end it was one-shot one-kill, and I had a mountain of ammo (though the traumatic experience of the early levels kept me paranoid so I never went anywhere without at least 3 guns that took different bullets and a melee weapon). I continued to play long after I hit the level cap of 20, partly to finish off the main storyline, and partly just because it was fun to explore the world, meet the quirky characters, discover the unique weapons, and set giant mutant ants on fire. It helps that the game world is very pretty (better than most of the characters), though this is also the first game I’ve played on my new PC (all settings were on max).

You can effect fairly sweeping changes in the game world with your choices, one of the biggest of which you face very shortly after escaping the vault (spoiler warning!): you come across a town built around an unexploded atomic bomb. You can choose to detonate it, destroying the whole city and leaving nothing but a radioactive crater behind, which was very pretty to watch. You can be nice and help those in trouble, or you can just bash their heads in and take their stuff. I haven’t tried murdering the characters central to the storyline, but no one else is sacred: you can go on a rampage and wipe out virtually any settlement you want to.

There are a lot of subway tunnels to explore, most of which are mandatory for the downtown DC area (which you will need to thoroughly explore for most quests, including the main storyline). Fortunately, once you’ve navigated the tunnels once, the areas appear on your map for fast-travel (which is a godsend). These parts of the game in particular were a little freaky, I found. Things can jump out at you, and if you find Dogmeat, then his growling in your ear does not help. The game can get pretty gruesome, with bags of skulls, bodies hung from the ceiling like meat, and cannibalism, along with the splatter and decapitation/dismemberment physics of combat.

The game is a little slow at the beginning when you’re in the vault, and then it whipsaws up to what I thought was the most difficult right after you get out: you go from being in this small, contained space with clear objectives to being in this huge, open, visually stunning world to explore, and no direction at all. You have essentially no resources, no “home base”, no allies, very little ammo, and only a few levels under your belt.

My biggest wish for the game is that it had a multiplayer co-op component, I think the world they’ve created would be a really fun place to rampage through with a buddy. Beyond that, I found some of the clipping and character animations immersion-breaking (at least the sentry robots were supposed to be robotic), and the difficulty curve wasn’t very consistent through the game, with few challenges left after hitting level 20 and having a full arsenal. I also found the big guns and energy weapons a little lacking: even in the end game I found very few uses for them (although ash piles were much tidier than gore splatters). The AI isn’t great, and seems to rely a lot on super-speed running if you catch it off-guard, though some (scripted?) encounters feature some enemies trying to flank you, etc. The teammate AI is even worse, they love to go charging in to any situation. I played through the first time without patching, and actually found it pretty stable, with the main exception being the VATS turn-based combat kludge (which I try not to use too often, except to score righteous decapitations or to instantly wipe out one enemy when faced with several). I got the patch and the Operation Anchorage expansion, and it’s been crash city since.

Anchorage is a fun little add-on, focusing more on the first person shooter aspect (you can’t even try to loot the bodies), and it was a neat storyline to play through. However, aside from the power armor and gauss cannon you get at the end, the content’s only good for about an extra hour or two of commie-busting fun. Since my main complaint is that I didn’t want it to end, I think I’ll be getting the Pitts expansion as well when it comes out.

The level editor/mod kit has also been released, so there might be some decent user-generated content coming soon. One thing I would like to see is a “rock climbing” ability — ruined overpasses and waist-high cliffs blocked my path far too often.

There are a great many cheeses to choose from in the world; each Eurpoean town seems to have its very own (or one for each day of the year). However no cheese can hold a candle to Cheddar, the God-Emperor of cheeses. There are a plethora of positive attributes that make Cheddar the best: its ready availability, its gentle, non-footy flavour, its pleasing colour and texture. However, the reason that elevates Cheddar to god status is its omnipresence and malleability. No other cheese can transmute itself into so many forms, from organic dairy farm goodness to powdered horror and still be recognized as Cheddar. It can be mild or aged strong; uniform in appearance or marbled (my personal favourite). It’s good cold or melted, in solid cheese form, semi-solid slices, or powered and/or liquified. As a “flavour” it can appear on crackers, gators, fish, and a variety of other fried or baked snack foods that turn your hands orange.

In fact* Cheddar is so synonymous with cheese that in some languages/dialects Cheddar is the word for cheese, and the locals may know of no other types. The French word for cheese, fromage, comes from the word for mold or form, which is used in the making of Cheddar-like cheeses. Here at UWO we are going to have a brain imaging study starting very soon (as soon as we get funding and ethics approval and MRI time) that will objectively prove that when people think about “cheese”, they’re really thinking about Cheddar (and a non-significant activation in the “smiling for pictures” region of the brain). A serving of Cheddar contains 20% of your daily calcium & B12 requirement as well as all kinds of other good stuff, yet as little as 5% of the lactose of milk, making it suitable for lactards such as myself. It’s also stable in the fridge for over a month after opened, and up to 6 months before that, very important for shut-ins who don’t like to grocery shop very often. You can find it in the deli counter, the fancy cheese section, and the general dairy case in your local supermaket simultaneously, and that’s just for its most common chilled cheese form. Cheddar is also the only product that can be put between two pieces of bread on its own and still be considered a “sandwich” (indeed, two sandwiches depending on whether heat is available: a cheese sandwich or a grilled cheese — peanut butter requires the help of one other item, usually jam or bananas; bacon, itself a prince amongst meats, requires both lettuce and tomato to become a BLT). Cheddar is often the glue holding together other foods, originating all around the world, such as KD, quesadillas, casseroles, grilled cheese, nachos, and cheeseburgers (note that it requires two pieces of cheese to hold a cheeseburger together; this is not the common distribution of double cheese cheeseburgers, but should be).

Cheddar also does not rely on the action of mould, nasty fluffy stuff that invades your basement, to make the magical transformation from milk to manna in its wax chrysalis. Many other cheeses mistakenly went bad in antiquity, picking up mould veins or fuzzy coatings, and people ate them. Continue to, in their ignorance, despite the fact that starvation is no longer the only alternative, and that mould and fungi are not from one of the three kingdoms of life that humans have evolved to eat (plantae, animalia, and petrochemical). This makes Cheddar one of the few cheeses actually suited to human consumption and digestion, even without the purifying effects of fire cooking. If we need an antibiotic we’ll call you, Roquefort, but for something to put in my mouth I’m going to stick with Cheddar.

Yes, if it weren’t for the need to have mozza (the queen-consort of cheeses) for pizza we could in fact get by with Cheddar as the only cheese in our society. And we would be happy to devote ourselves to the God-Emperor of cheeses.

* – not an actual fact.

[Photo credits: wikipedia, flickr user srboisvert, Kraft Canada. The idea for this post came from Mr. Cheap]