Don Tai (Canada) Blog

All machines need maintenance or they will break down. My GBC 450-KM binding machine is no exception. My machine uses common plastic combs, will punch comb rectangles and bind into a booklet of varying thicknesses. Given use it will jam and will refuse to bind, so you need to open it up, trouble shoot, tighten and grease. The user manual also does not fully explain the left side controls of the machine nor any maintenance, so I thought I would embellish here.

Sometimes you meet a person that you feel is so out of touch with the world, you wonder how they live. This is what I feel about Tommy, whom I met yesterday. Tommy advertised a guitar and an amp on Kijiji in Toronto, Canada, so I went to take a look. When I got to his door, he wanted to hand me the guitar and amp and take my money, transaction completed. His Dad seemed to not want to let me into his house to test the guitar and amp. The guitar was severely damaged in multiple ways, not disclosed in the ad. The amp he handed me was not remotely close to the brand name amp shown in his Kijiji ad photo. On top of that he cussed off his Mom when I was there, and his Dad was swearing like a drunken sailor in a nearby room. Misrepresentation of the ad shows you are a real douchbag, Tommy.

Something catches my eye. it may be a piece of clothing, a familiar movement of the body or gait, a look or other similarity. I become hopeful for something that I undeniably know cannot happen. When he turns, alas, it is not as I wish. Reality meets expectation. The two worlds seamlessly merge together, like they should, the wish now a mere thin thought that slowly vanishes. Still I feel genuine disappointment.

This is not the first time, and I am sure it will not be the last. Still, these encounters cut like a knife. The scar does eventually heal, but slowly. I must busy myself or it will get worse. Who am I to wish for the impossible? I continue to search, without end.

dai/da4i (Mandarin)/Tai (Cantonese, Japanese)/Thài(Gan, Jiangxi)/Tè (Hokkien)/?ái or ??i (Vietnamese)/Dae (Korean): Ranked 57 of the 100 most common Chinese surnames (2006), gaining from 64th in 1990

1. put on; wear: put on one’s gloves, wear glasses
2. respect; honour: love and respect
3. Da4i: a surname

So Canada is much better off than all other OECD countries? We have economic growth of supposedly 2%. How can this be? Statistics magic saves the day. Lose well paying full-time jobs, gain low wage part-time jobs, and call it even. Unfortunately your average citizen here in Canada knows first hand that job and economic statistics do not put food on the table. Long-term joblessness, as I know first hand, is a common and growing problem. We need to overstate that this personally decimates the job seeker but society overall. The negative implications long-term joblessness or unemployment are widespread and damaging to society in general. The newly jobless scale back discretionary purchases. The long-term jobless change their philosophy of life and spending, resulting in radical systemic changes to our retail and marketing environments. Health deteriorates, resulting in higher long-term health costs. No matter if you are currently employed, long-term joblessness will affect you directly or indirectly.

AT thus summer’s G20 meeting in Toronto, Canada, over a 1,000 fellow Canadians were illegally arrested, detained. About 900 of these were eventually let go without charge. Clearly our right to assemble was trampled to bits by police boots. These people should not have been charged in the first place. There is an ongoing call for a G20 public inquiry by many but it seems to fall on deaf ears. I will not and cannot forget this travesty of injustice and will remember the G20 the next time I vote provincially and federally. Here is an article excerpt from the Toronto Star from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. I would like to read the complete report but have not found it:

Hhere are some interesting leather working links, all from Instructibles. They have some great tip on making near anything. These are leather related. Leather is an excellent material to use, being all natural. Mankind has a long history of using leather to survive, and rightly so. If taken care of leather will last a lifetime and keep its suppleness as well as protective properties.

• Make a leather watchband or bracelet: This is really a Leather 101 course because it covers leather prep, stamping, rivets, staining and finishing. This is an awesome instructible. (KentsOkay)
• Leather Bookbinding: Not so difficult, but the instructions are very clear. (gmjhowe)
• Make leather stamps: He calls them leather tooling punches, but these are leather stamps. I will need to try this but won’t use a nail. I will probably use a bolt instead. Then again the nails he uses are quite thick. Still, pretty cool how he makes these. (cbm104)
• How to Peen a Rivet: from a nail. Beginner’s guide to tradition riveting

I will add to this list as I find more leather projects.

Democracy works by allowing anyone to campaign for a political position, and the person who gets the most votes, gets the position. Apart from a couple of years living in China, this is all I have known. Here in Toronto we have a new mayor who campaigned on the platform of cost and waste reduction. Roughly a third of all councilors were swept out, replaced by fresh faces and ideas. We have “polls” that predict the outcome of the election before election day. These polls are akin to taking the pulse of a patient, an indicator of events to come. Using scientific and statistical analysis one would think that these polls would be quite accurate, but in the case of Toronto’s mayorality race, the polls were very wrong, by a large margin. It turns out that the offline community, those that do not have internet access or those that spend very little time online, threw the polls off, so much so as to question the benefits of polling all together.

It is with great dismay that I have been reading news reports that the recession in Canada has been over for many months, yet I still cannot find work. I consider myself to be an intelligent fellow, very well educated with work experience to match, but somehow I’ve lost my golden touch. Really, that is putting it mildly. Logically speaking if I had not been fortuitous enough to live a frugal and stable life in the past, today I should be in bankruptcy, living off food banks and be a beggar in the street. Smart strategies and a whole lot of luck in the past have saved me this fate. Or was it typical Chinese values. One will never know.