Mobile phone service is unquestionably complex, needing a lot of research about both the phone and your service provider. After an exhaustive search of all the providers in the Toronto area, we found that Wind Mobile had the best cell phone plans to suit our needs. Yet the devil is in the details. Choosing a phone and the specific plan is trickier than we initially thought. There were other issues to consider, including cell phone coverage, unlocking the phone, buying the phone outright, and how Wind does their tab. Specifics of the Wind plan can change at any time, so this post is valid today in August 2013 and will change in the future.
Looking for a way to stream HD news from China, I asked a Chinese friend for a recommendation. He said try Funshion.com. They have a downloadable program that I thought would facilitate streaming their movies. What I got was a program that was parasitic, spammy and hard to remove. If you are considering using Funshion, do not download this app.
The download went well, but at once I started getting a huge amount of popup boxes usually blocked by Adblock Plus. My bandwidth went up by a lot as well. Then I realized that the damn program installed not in my program files directory but in the main directory, all without asking. When I went to uninstall the program it said I had no access to do this.
Intriguing, the mix of African and jazz, with a little Caribbean thrown into one song, is Lionel Loueke. His bassist was Massimo Biolcati. I did not catch his drummer’s name, so if you know them please tell me. There are a lot of Black musicians, but the mix of African language in song really adds a complex level of texture to the music, and I really like it. Markham Jazz Festival, August 17 2013, 5:00-6:30pm. They did not take much of a break either. It was a special event for me.
In my current contract I had the opportunity to work with optical character recognition (OCR). We had over 50 documents in paper format that were published before 1991 that needed to get digitized and published on the internet. While these documents were old, they have really in-depth knowledge that simply needed to be shared with the world. OCR, however, has its quirks and is not all that straight forward. Some are due to the age and handling of the original documents over the years, and some are due to the original typographical or layout decisions of the original publishers. No matter the reason, they are not to be found and you need these documents on the internet, so the monkey is now on your back.
Beto bicycle floor pump V1, early version, bought at MEC in Toronto. The pin in the valve head broke. Photo By Don Tai
Bought from MEC a decade ago for $25CAD, this pump has served me well pumping up kids schrader low pressure tires, as well as the odd presta style. A litle bit of inattention from the Big Weed and she broke the valve head. Specifically the plastic pin that holds down the valve head to the valve. A repair was in order.
After 11 years with Rogers we pulled the internet plug and are trying Bell. Yes, there have been problems with the Bell installation, but if you know Toronto, Rogers and Bell you should have expected problems, and I did. In summary Bell Fibe does work, sort of, but my upload speed is no more than .7 MBps, 7% of what they told me I would get. There is also nothing I can do increase the upload speed. Apparently because I live 1.2 km from the central office the upload speed cannot increase, yet they did not tell me this when I signed up. I have been a Bell landline phone customer for 15 years, so they should be fully aware of my location.
Like most large cities, Toronto, Canada has storm drains. These drains help remove excess water from the area after a heavy rainfall. Usually forgotten until needed this unsung system requires very little maintenance. Here is what is done in Toronto.
Storm drains are located on both sides of the street, about 6 houses apart, or 120′ between drains. In the past the storm drain cover was parallel to the road and sidewalk, but this was problematic for cyclists, who would get their tires caught in the drain cover. Now the cover openings are diagonal from the curb to the middle of the street. Storm drain covers are cast of heavy iron and do rust.
Dramatic or boring as it might be, I see the battle between simple and complex play out in our lovely world, pretty much on a daily basis. I am, and has always been, decidedly on the side of simple. Simple is, well, simpler, with less moving parts, increased reliability, easier to understand and repair, and, to me, much more elegant. Be it lines of code, moving mechanical parts of a machine, the design of a child’s game or an essay with fewer words but more meaning, simple always wins.
Driven by a sense of futility with the Chinese justice system and willing to kill himself and others, motorcycle taxi driver Ji Zhongxing went to the Beijing Airport from his home town of Heze, Shandong Province and tried to blow himself up with a home made bomb. Seemingly a rare occurrence of such cases in China, was this guy just a crackpot that blew his lid, or does this point to a deeper and troubling issue in Chinese society? Let us consider the Chinese perspective.
