I got a haircut last night. I went to First Choice Haircutters. I'd checked prices and First Choice was $11.49 for a haircut and Wal-Mart was $13.95.
It's not bad, I just get my hair cut short so I don't think It's complicated. It's a $12 haircut so you get what you pay for. I'll just let my hair grow out again for 6-8 weeks and get another haircut when it starts getting too long.
I need to fix my personal finances so I can afford a regular hairdresser in the $18-$25 range and get more frequent haircuts, around one a month. I'm now working on it.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Avoidable Traffic Accident
I saw a traffic accident in Bayers Lake last week at this intersection.
What happened was car A started in the right hand on ramp. Then a big truck came roaring through the intersection at high speed. Car A choose to stop. Unfortunately car B behind him started after A trying to get through with A ahead of the truck. Car B wasn't looking at A and ran right into him from behind. I was taking the left and saw A's rear bumper on the ground.
This must be about the most avoidable car accident. If you are behind someone on a ramp waiting to take the right, do not even look out your left window at oncoming traffic. Look straight ahead only and make sure the car in front of you has gone into traffic and you are at the front of the line. Do not even look out your left window until you are at the front of the line.
What people like the car B driver often do which is very bad is they assume the driver ahead will go in a borderline window of opportunity. They then aggressively try to piggyback tight behind the first car and also get onto the road within car A's chance. Now if A chooses not to go then B has no time to stop and may not even be looking at A when he slams into his rear, a bonehead move causing an accident.
When you consider the time and money lost by being at fault in a car accident, trying to save a couple of seconds by aggressively piggybacking behind someone on a right ramp turn into traffic is not worth attempting.
What happened was car A started in the right hand on ramp. Then a big truck came roaring through the intersection at high speed. Car A choose to stop. Unfortunately car B behind him started after A trying to get through with A ahead of the truck. Car B wasn't looking at A and ran right into him from behind. I was taking the left and saw A's rear bumper on the ground.
This must be about the most avoidable car accident. If you are behind someone on a ramp waiting to take the right, do not even look out your left window at oncoming traffic. Look straight ahead only and make sure the car in front of you has gone into traffic and you are at the front of the line. Do not even look out your left window until you are at the front of the line.
What people like the car B driver often do which is very bad is they assume the driver ahead will go in a borderline window of opportunity. They then aggressively try to piggyback tight behind the first car and also get onto the road within car A's chance. Now if A chooses not to go then B has no time to stop and may not even be looking at A when he slams into his rear, a bonehead move causing an accident.
When you consider the time and money lost by being at fault in a car accident, trying to save a couple of seconds by aggressively piggybacking behind someone on a right ramp turn into traffic is not worth attempting.
Monday, July 02, 2007
The environment
Our environment seems to be in the news more recently. There have been a number of serious reports around global warming and emissions. There is some scary stuff of what we could be in for the next 4 generations in some of the projections. That's like within all of our lifetimes, near enough that we can't ignore it as some future problem we don't have to care about today.
Sometimes I think about the environment and I wonder if a major factor in the damage to the environment is being consciously or unconsciously overlooked. That factor is the single family detached and semi detached house.
I mean think about it. The Kingswood subdivision which is typical in Canada has been described as "800 acres, 800 houses". That's a pretty inefficient and wasteful use of land for the number of people living there. Most people there has to drive a long way to commute to work, typically in downtown Halifax. Clogging traffic and spewing emissions.
Then there's oil heat. Each home having an independent heating system seems pretty inefficient. Plus the oil trucks going around to every single individual house, generating emissions and burning more fossil fuels as they go. It's causing a lot of environmental damage. I suspect the independent home heating plant is based on historical rural traditions of the small family house with the big cast iron stove that heated it. They used wood or coal off their own land to get their own heat, it was the only way. With the rise of the suburbs probably people just did what they grew up with and put in independent furnaces without thinking that gridded heat, like the electricity grid, is better. Surely it's better for the environment.
It seems strange to me nobody ever mentions the damage to the environment and consumption of land and resources caused by the detached family house. Is it because most people live in or grew up in a house and it's just something that's part of life like sidewalks or the clouds that we don't think about separately.
Or is it the pink elephant in the corner for government and the media, something they dare not ever say or even hint about for fear of a swift and sure backlash. A lot of people have a deep emotional connection to their house or the house they grew up in. If the media or the government said this was causing excessive damage to the environment then a lot of people likely become very defensive and hostile at this suggestion. There would be a huge backlash with no meaningful discussion. Who would want to face that wrath?
What's the alternative to the detached house. Probably large 10-100 storey residential buildings right in the city as close as possible to where most people work. Telling people today they have to give up their house for that generally would not be well received. Many (most?) people would say let New York sink into the ocean and the polar bears go extinct before I give up my house. But the thing is if we focused on it then the architects, engineers and city planners could come up with innovative designs to make such shared living comfortable and nearly as good as the traditional detached house. I wouldn't be surprised to see this happen in my lifetime though.
I'd like to see a meaningful discussion on the effect of the detached house on the environment and global warming. I'm not expecting to hear anything about it from the media or government any time soon though.
You never know though. In just the last couple of years SUVs have gone from the toast of the town to frowned upon due to the price of gas and the damage to the environment they cause. The recent federal budget introduced a new tax on these types of vehicles to discourage people from buying them and to get them to fund dealing with the environmental problems they cause.
This same transformation may take place slowly in the coming years in more areas of society, including home ownership. The new gas guzzler tax establishes an important precedent in linking individual activity to the environmental impact of that activity. In the future additional such levies could be established on things like clearing land for a subdivision, installing an oil or wood burning furnace, building a detached or semi detached house.
Sometimes I think about the environment and I wonder if a major factor in the damage to the environment is being consciously or unconsciously overlooked. That factor is the single family detached and semi detached house.
I mean think about it. The Kingswood subdivision which is typical in Canada has been described as "800 acres, 800 houses". That's a pretty inefficient and wasteful use of land for the number of people living there. Most people there has to drive a long way to commute to work, typically in downtown Halifax. Clogging traffic and spewing emissions.
Then there's oil heat. Each home having an independent heating system seems pretty inefficient. Plus the oil trucks going around to every single individual house, generating emissions and burning more fossil fuels as they go. It's causing a lot of environmental damage. I suspect the independent home heating plant is based on historical rural traditions of the small family house with the big cast iron stove that heated it. They used wood or coal off their own land to get their own heat, it was the only way. With the rise of the suburbs probably people just did what they grew up with and put in independent furnaces without thinking that gridded heat, like the electricity grid, is better. Surely it's better for the environment.
It seems strange to me nobody ever mentions the damage to the environment and consumption of land and resources caused by the detached family house. Is it because most people live in or grew up in a house and it's just something that's part of life like sidewalks or the clouds that we don't think about separately.
Or is it the pink elephant in the corner for government and the media, something they dare not ever say or even hint about for fear of a swift and sure backlash. A lot of people have a deep emotional connection to their house or the house they grew up in. If the media or the government said this was causing excessive damage to the environment then a lot of people likely become very defensive and hostile at this suggestion. There would be a huge backlash with no meaningful discussion. Who would want to face that wrath?
What's the alternative to the detached house. Probably large 10-100 storey residential buildings right in the city as close as possible to where most people work. Telling people today they have to give up their house for that generally would not be well received. Many (most?) people would say let New York sink into the ocean and the polar bears go extinct before I give up my house. But the thing is if we focused on it then the architects, engineers and city planners could come up with innovative designs to make such shared living comfortable and nearly as good as the traditional detached house. I wouldn't be surprised to see this happen in my lifetime though.
I'd like to see a meaningful discussion on the effect of the detached house on the environment and global warming. I'm not expecting to hear anything about it from the media or government any time soon though.
You never know though. In just the last couple of years SUVs have gone from the toast of the town to frowned upon due to the price of gas and the damage to the environment they cause. The recent federal budget introduced a new tax on these types of vehicles to discourage people from buying them and to get them to fund dealing with the environmental problems they cause.
This same transformation may take place slowly in the coming years in more areas of society, including home ownership. The new gas guzzler tax establishes an important precedent in linking individual activity to the environmental impact of that activity. In the future additional such levies could be established on things like clearing land for a subdivision, installing an oil or wood burning furnace, building a detached or semi detached house.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
The best of Sesame Street
Over on YouTube I found my favorite old Sesame Street skit. I enjoyed seeing it again after all these years. My kids also enjoyed it.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
God damned
This is kind of a funny saying if you think about it. I mean why would God bother to damn something.
A traffic light glitch causes it to go flashing and delay motorists. Like God personally damned that traffic light this morning to go flashing.
Some dog barks at night. It starts raining while you walked from the bus stop to work. More likely stuff just happens, breaks, wears out, bad luck or whatever just happens on its own or by chance. Much less likely is that God for some reason decided to damn it.
But who knows. Maybe God for whatever reason does choose to damn things. Perhaps each morning He sits on His throne for a few minutes with a coffee and a huge printed list of thousands of things that He will choose to personally damn this day. Elevator out of order in Dallas. Newspaper ink smudge in Montreal. Traffic jam in Chicago. Bank machine out of service in Calgary.
A traffic light glitch causes it to go flashing and delay motorists. Like God personally damned that traffic light this morning to go flashing.
Some dog barks at night. It starts raining while you walked from the bus stop to work. More likely stuff just happens, breaks, wears out, bad luck or whatever just happens on its own or by chance. Much less likely is that God for some reason decided to damn it.
But who knows. Maybe God for whatever reason does choose to damn things. Perhaps each morning He sits on His throne for a few minutes with a coffee and a huge printed list of thousands of things that He will choose to personally damn this day. Elevator out of order in Dallas. Newspaper ink smudge in Montreal. Traffic jam in Chicago. Bank machine out of service in Calgary.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Classmates.gone
With many clicks and a Yahoo answers search I've managed to delete my Classmates.com account. It was not an intuitive process. I'd been on classmates since like the late 90s.
Why did I leave? Well it's because I've switched to Facebook which is much better. Facebook like classmates lets me connect with people I know from back when. However with classmates both me and the other person have to pay classmates money to interact in any kind of meaningful way. Facebook is free and frictionless. And classmates is hardly cheap. Why should I pay classmates to broker a connection. Facebook recognizes the huge pent up demand with classmates and solved the dilemma - make it free to connect with people and for people to connect with you. Like any free service such as tv or gmail or whatever I'm well conditioned to accept some targeted passive advertising on the screen in exchange for using the cool free service. Facebook gets this in a way classmates never did.
Classmates.com is like that girl from High School. You know the one. Popular, good looking, She acted at times like she was kinda sorta maybe in a way interested in you. You were friends and she seemed to flirt with you at times. Phoned you more than once. But then she seemed to almost always have a boyfriend in some complicated situation. You never really knew where you stood with her or if she was really interested. So eventually you get to graduation day and nothing ever came of it. You never went out or kissed. And that's fine, no regrets. Maybe if you'd made a move things would have turned out different, or maybe you would have just made a fool of yourself. In any case it's all good and everyone moved on to better things.
Why did I leave? Well it's because I've switched to Facebook which is much better. Facebook like classmates lets me connect with people I know from back when. However with classmates both me and the other person have to pay classmates money to interact in any kind of meaningful way. Facebook is free and frictionless. And classmates is hardly cheap. Why should I pay classmates to broker a connection. Facebook recognizes the huge pent up demand with classmates and solved the dilemma - make it free to connect with people and for people to connect with you. Like any free service such as tv or gmail or whatever I'm well conditioned to accept some targeted passive advertising on the screen in exchange for using the cool free service. Facebook gets this in a way classmates never did.
Classmates.com is like that girl from High School. You know the one. Popular, good looking, She acted at times like she was kinda sorta maybe in a way interested in you. You were friends and she seemed to flirt with you at times. Phoned you more than once. But then she seemed to almost always have a boyfriend in some complicated situation. You never really knew where you stood with her or if she was really interested. So eventually you get to graduation day and nothing ever came of it. You never went out or kissed. And that's fine, no regrets. Maybe if you'd made a move things would have turned out different, or maybe you would have just made a fool of yourself. In any case it's all good and everyone moved on to better things.
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