Don Tai (Canada) Blog

Here is a great map on the bikeability of various cities. Seeing as I am from the suburb of Scarborough, in Toronto, Canada, I naturally wanted to see my areas’ score. Thankfully, you can use a Google maps tool to drill down to your street, making the whole experience much more useful.

I am unsure how they get their scores, because I don’t think the area is very bikeable. There are few streets in the area that encourage bikes, and plenty of fast thoroughfares and dangerous drivers that discourage biking. That being said, we have a fair share of bikers, namely the geriatric Chinese group, who ride all year. They are not insignificant.

It is never easy to admit fault, but only through acknowledgment of an error can said error be corrected. In Toronto’s G20 summit in 2010 Toronto and other police and RCMP beat up and violated the rights of over 1,500 Canadian citizens. The police became the criminal element. It is only the passing of almost 2 years of time that this wrong is beginning to turn. Maybe.

In my quest for more information about North-East Toronto, Canada, specifically Scarborough, here is information about walkability. The City of Toronto has published a report about how easy it is to walk about the city. The theory is that ease of walking contributes to better health and well-being, and therefore better living overall. How does my area of Toronto, heavily biased towards Mainland Chinese, rate on walkability? Overall, not very well.

The Walkability project is interesting to me in that I would rather walk or ride a bike to shop or go places yet I live in the suburbs, a statistically less walkable area of Toronto. While we do have better air and a far greater supply of Chinese groceries, I hope that my neighbourhood’s walkability will increase.

Some things stay the same, and that is just fine with me. When they stay the same and I see them in the news, I am ecstatic. Keep rolling, guys and keep your balance. Hey Nick, how is Zach? Learn to ride with the Toronto Unicyclists.

Nick (left) and Darren Bedford (right) and the Toronto Unicyclists play unicycle basketball at St. Josaphat Catholic School, Toronto, Canada

Darren Bedford (left) and the Toronto Unicyclists play unicycle basketball at St. Josaphat Catholic School, Toronto, Canada. A Bedford Unicycle with a fat knobby rests in front.

By destiny, luck or fate, I live in a Toronto neighbourhood that has a high percentage of Chinese families. I have often wondered, like many families, if by neighbourhood is safe, relative to other Toronto neighbourhoods. As well, if a friend from China was about to migrate to Toronto and wanted to live in a safe Chinese neighbourhood, where would I recommend? This blog post tries to answer these questions.

We always wonder if our neighbourhoods are safe from crime but are really never sure. Until now there has been little data released about crime by neighbourhood in Toronto, Canada. Recently the Toronto Police released a map of violent crime stats to the Toronto Star, which included gun shootings and homicides. While a statistician could pick apart the validity and lack of specific detail of these stats, for me they are interesting nonetheless. For home owners, find your neighbourhood and see the relative crime rate. For those thinking about buying a house, take a look at crime in prospective neighbourhoods before you buy.

This question has repeatedly come up during face to face interviewers of one specific company here in Toronto, Canada. It is supposed to test programming logic. You may judge for yourself its effectiveness. Trick interview questions such as these are controversial. Do such questions really show IT intelligence and talent or are they used as a chance method to eliminate candidates? One web site, CareerCup.com has a collected a database of such interview questions.

Q: There are three covered boxes that are all mislabeled: one contains “apples”, one contains “oranges”, one contains “mixed”. You cannot see the contents of these boxes. You may stick your hand into one box at a time and take out a fruit. How do you correctly relabel the boxes?

After two months of recruiting for permanent and contract IT developers for a specific company, this experience has shown the psychological resilience and toughness of IT contractors. No matter the rejection and abuse they get from companies, this does not faze them. Life merely carries on. Need it be this way?

This morning I was submitting candidates to this company for interviews. The company was asking us for convenient interview times. But by noon the news turned grim: all contractor positions were filled. Anyone looking for a contract that was not already interviewed was being offered permanent positions only. The abruptness was a bit shocking to me, as it looked like there was a lack of planning.

Eye opening was my new job as an IT recruiter here in Toronto, Canada. As a North American born and Canadian raised and educated, I knew something was askew. Reading hundreds of resumes per week I wondered why it took so long for me to find work, though it is not exactly in my job stream. Why where there so many newly immigrated foreigners out of work? Why where there so many second generation immigrants, fluent in English and Canadian educated, having such a difficult time finding work, in our ethnically diverse Toronto?

Going back to the commute routine has been eye opening, which caught me by surprise. It’s not like this is new to me, but getting used to the TTC and the quickness of pace has been eye opening.

The TTC seems to have stayed the same. I expected advancements, but this is not so. They struggle to keep from falling backward on themselves. While most bus drivers are courteous, I have met those who are not. Once there was a detour because of a crime and police had closed the road. This driver did not even announce why he was detouring, so many people asked. He got so mad.