Always very beautiful, the season’s first snowfall is a joyous ocassion here in Toronto, Canada. This year the first snowfall came very late, today, December 27 2012. It started last night, but when we woke up we had over 10cm of snow.
Winter First Snowfall, Toronto, Canada, Dec 27 2012. Photo by Don Tai
Note a couple of things in the photo. Today was garbage day, so we have green bins for compostable (not yet picked up) and grey bins for non-recyclable garbage. These have already been picked up. The black blob in the treetop of the middle tree is a squirrel nest. This is where they hibernate over the winter. There is a streetlight on the left of the photo, which goes on in the night.
We attended the Toronto Buskerfest on August 23 2012, on the Thursday because it was the cooler of the 4 day festival. I think we should have not attended the first day, because many of the acts seemed to not have arrived into Toronto yet. There was little juggling or unicycling, though still lots of comedy.
Jackie Wise from Ireland, magician, Toronto Buskerfest 2012, Toronto, Canada. Photo by Don Tai
My neighbour’s large maple tree at the front of their house was growing threateningly close to the front second story window. Pruning of the limb was in order. As this limb was quite large there was a discussion about calling in a Canadian or Chinese arborist. The Canadian arborist would come in with a large cherry-picker style truck and crew, and complete the job safely. Of course they would be much more expensive. The Chinese crew they chose came in with a ladder, rope and a small electric chainsaw. At least they had some climbing equipment and safety harness.
Our nearby street light was flickering on and off oddly for a couple of days, so I called the City of Toronto to investigate. My neighbour also called. Toronto Hydro came and changed light bulbs. Street maintenance here in Toronto is really good. Call the City and trucks get dispatched. Though it might take a couple of days, it does get completed. This is what our high property tax buys us.
Street light bulb change in Toronto, Canada. Photo by Don Tai
Street light bulb change in Toronto, Canada. Photo by Don Tai
Adventure rightly sums up every selling experience I have on Kijiji and Craigslist. One would think that selling your used goods would be so simple, but there are definite buyer patterns that emerge. Maybe exchanges using Kijiji and Craigslist are a true reflection of the society we live, with some good and some bad. Here are some that I see here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Lowball Offers: I research my products and do not over charge. I prefer that my goods sell quickly. When I get someone emailing me with an offer of half what I want, this is a lowball offer. These offers are extremely common. I ignore them.
Olympia Nomad motorcycle jacket: nice jacket, well constructed inside and out
Textile motorcycle jackets are really for one time crash use, then they are trashed. “Face”, from Toronto, Ontario, Canada had bought an Olympia Nomad textile motorcycle jacket in May 2012, then lowsided at 80 mph in Montana in July 2012. With only a couple of months of use and about $300US later, it was a shame to trash the jacket. We opted to try a repair of the damage. The jacket had minor melting and a hole in the left elbow, some teeth missing from one of the air vent zippers, small rips of the cordura that covered the zipper, and abrasion and stitching destroyed in the slide. The right elbow had a couple seams abraded away that needed to be resewn.
Disbelief is what I felt when I first saw two pedestrian texters walk straight into each other, head to head. So engrossed with their lives that they could not spend the time to watch where they are going? As a technologist I am always interested in the social effects of technology on society. Distracted walking shows that the vast majority of people cannot do two things at the same time, that multi-tasking is really not feasible for most people, and that this behaviour can be potentially dangerous to the person and those around them.
Anyone who lives here in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, a suburb of Toronto, can tell you that incomes have markedly dropped. We see it in our schools and neighbourhood. A Toronto Star article on the widening income gaps here in Toronto brought me to a couple interesting maps by Dr. J. David Hulchanski. His paper “Report: The 3 Cities within Toronto, Income Polarization, 2007” gives much food for thought.
Dr. Hulchanski’s paper includes a couple of maps of Toronto by change in income from 1970 to 2000. It is a very sobering map for those of us who live in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto. It is not that we are special, because other suburbs of Toronto have also experienced similar income drops.
While I consider myself a project manager, I can also play the role of business analyst. Situations often occur in life that scream for the need to re-engineer the business process.The Little Weed has attended the same summer sports camp here in Agincourt for the past couple of years, and each year there are many inefficiencies related to the initial first day of camp: registration. I have written about these in past posts, but today I will re-engineer the registration process that I participated in this year, 2012. Note that I do not work for the camp nor am I in anyway related, other than the Little Weed participates, and therefore I am only a consumer. Please note that this and other articles on this camp should not be considered a criticism of the camp. The Little Weed and I have verified that this camp is largely well run, the kids have a lot of fun, and to me, this is much more important than the inconvenience and inefficiencies that parents experience on registration day.
We did not intend to live in a Chinese enclave when we moved into our Scarborough, Canada home in Toronto. It seemed like when a white elderly couple would move out, a Chinese family would move in. As the years passed, this continued, until 50-60% of our street is now Chinese. It also was not our desire to live in a Chinese enclave. Our intention was to live in a multiculturally mixed neighbourhood.
I write this post after being prodded by this article on Markham Chinese enclaves. Markham is just north of the Scarborough and Toronto border, and can be considered an ethnic extension of Scarborough. In fact we often shop there.
