One day you might realize that your down is up and your up is down. At first it is most disorienting. Your head spins at first as your world is violently shaken up like a snow globe, but eventually you accept the reality, or non-reality, of the situation. Acceptance of the situation is the first step to rehabilitation. The alternative is to go crazy.
Having your down become up is most frightening. What you thought was your base has now become your ceiling? This leaves a most unsettling feeling in the gut of your stomach, which, for a long time does not go away.
Wet snowfall in Toronto, Canada on Wednesday Feb 27 2013. Note the thickness of the snow on the trees. The temperature was about 0C. Photo by Don Tai
We are Canadian and therefore we have winter. In winter we often get snow and did we ever get a dumping this Wednesday here in Toronto, Canada. We got about 20 cm of snow at 0C to -2C, making for very wet and heavy snow. Wet snow is difficult to remove because it is heavy with water. Still it really looked pretty outside.
We save money by automating, or so the City of Toronto politicians say. For the last couple of years there has been changes to our weekly garbage pickup, specifically trucks that have large claws that pick up our garbage cans and dump our garbage into the truck, all without the operator leaving his seat. There is also only one guy on the truck, saving labour costs. Of course there are other details to note.
You need to fit in, somewhat, to live in harmony with society. This is true. Even those that are anti-social will form groups, of which there will be rules that govern who is part of the group and what constitutes acceptable bahaviour. I believe all societal systems run this way. It is part of who we are.
This is not to say that conformity is a bad thing. Without conformity there would be no way to drive down the street and not get hit by a car. Drivers, pedestrians and other users of the road need to conform to the road usage system, namely the Highway Traffic Act. We have laws that govern these things. Those that scofflaw the rules can hurt other people and get punished for their behaviour. In the name of safety this is good.
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
To be close in thinking to oldsters that have lived through the Depression is uncommon. Yet I see this happening today. Youth and the tail end of the Baby Boomers cannot find work, yet the Baby Boomers are still hammering the youth saying that if you persevere and work hard you will get that job. It is not so easy when you are down. Clarity from this article In tough economic times, personal drive goes only so far does help identify the problem though.
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
Hilarious! This is a Chinese idiom, but this translation given to Froog is much more colourful.
“The seemingly bright and colourful overcoat could not possibly cover up the patched underwear beneath.”
金玉其外, 败絮其中
jīnyùqíwài, bàixùqízhōng, or “gilded exterior, shabby and ruined on the inside (idiom)”, or my dictionary says “rubbish coated in gold and jade”.
The web is said to be about free access, and I certainly agree. When China’s Great Firewall entered a more rigorous phase, and Google decided to leave China, some said that free access to information on the internet was a basic human right, I disagreed. Still, here in Toronto, Canada I do appreciate open internet access. There are limits, however, when certain people take advantage of your hospitality. People try to scrape your site to use for their purposes, they try to break in and use your site to launch their own malicious doings, they try to spam you so that your site’s comments increase their link and trackback stats. There are all kinds of schemes that cost the site owner bandwidth, and eventually money. The site owner is forced to increase his level of service from his ISP (or get kicked off of his shared service), or move to another ISP. This is not a zero sum issue: The site owner loses financially.
Ever since I started this blog I have been wanting the ability to write in Chinese. Every time I did WordPress would dutifully save the content but would then replace my characters with rectangles. Well, now I think I solved the problem: UTF8 encoding. As roundabout as life is, I solved my Chinese input problem while trying to track down the remnants of the Pharma Hack injection.
