Just a Gwai Lo - fun within prescribed limits

The Recently Deflowered Girl by Hyacinthe Phypps, illustrated by Edward Gorey

Richard — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 05:53:54 +0000

Blithe advice for a girl after her first time. [link]

Monique reviews The Nature of Economies by Jane Jacobs

Richard — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 05:41:25 +0000

"Her approach is to use imaginary characters and didactic dialogue so readers understand complex arguments as they develop between the characters. In this way, we, the readers, are part of the process, perhaps even part of the ecology of the text." [link]

What will happen when you move to Dubai

Richard — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 20:54:10 +0000

Forget about living single but attached and talking about anything other than the rent you pay. [link]

Short Turns, a blog about driving the bus by a newly minted operator

Richard — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:59:56 +0000

Lot of inside tidbits, as well as a short note at the very beginning about the difference between a "driver" and "operator". [link]

Stéphane Dion and Quebec Separatism

Richard — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 07:06:21 +0000

Digging in the crates over the Christmas holidays led to a journal article read in my days as a political science major at Simon Fraser University. Writing an article titled "The Dynamic of Secessions: Scenarios after a pro-Separatist Vote in a Quebec Referendum" in the September 1995 edition of the Canadian Journal of Political Science, a professor at the Université de Montréal reviewed several books by his contemporaries discussing what impact--economic, bureaucratic, political, etc.--the largely French-speaking province of Canada deciding to leave confederation would have both on the "Rest of Canada" (ROC) and the newly created country itself. The author of that article: the former leader of the Liberal party of Canada, Stéphane Dion.

Along with Jean Chrétien, then prime minister of Canada, Dion architected the Canadian government's position on the conditions under which Canada would negotiate with a separate Quebec. Reading Dion's review article after more than a dozen years to simmer, Dion appears to have clearly thought about the questions surrounding what happens not leading up to the referendum, but in the days after a Yes vote.

I offer for consideration the sections in the article I highlighted back in 1997, well after the 1995 referendum. (I was at basketball practice in high school the day of.) In this section, Dion reviews Nationalism et démocracie: réflexion sure les illusions des indépendentistes québecois by Jean-Pierre Derrienic, Dion writes:

the secessionist claim of legitimacy is certainly disputable. The position adopted by Quebec secessionist leaders suffers from a double moral standard: allowed a right to secede from Canada, they deny anyone the right to secede from an independent Quebec. They cannot justify such a double standard on the grounds of either Canadian Constitutional law or public international law. They consider a 50 per cent plus one vote sufficient to justify secession, while democratic conventions hold that critical decisions, those that cannot be reviewed without high costs, must be taken by qualified majorities.

I appear to have spent most of my attention towards the article looking at the 50%+1 rule. I also highlighted the following text along with a footnote. First the text:

As fro the 50 plus one rule, the view that a slight majority for the Yes vote in Quebec is sufficient to secede is likly to be challenged if the proportion of citizens that agree with this rule remains so low, both in Quebec and the ROC.

In the footnote for that section, I highlighted the following: “With respect to the 50 per cent plus one rule, only 19 per cent in the ROC and 43 per cent in Quebec think that it is sufficient to allow secession.”

Dion concludes with his estimations of what will happen during the referendum (saying in a footnote that “[a] Yes victory seems to me unlikely”). Though by this time a staunch federalist, Dion admits there was one very compelling reason to secede from Canada:

intellectual curiosity. One would like to know which scenario is the most accurate: the inevitable secession, the impossible secession...or the Parizeau scenario [i.e. a smooth secession]. As a political scientist, my clear interest lies in voting Yes. But I am a citizen, after all!

Unofficial TransLink API

Richard — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 09:40:38 +0000

It was open, but undocumented until now. [link]

Spanning Sync Keeps My iPhone and iCal, My Mac and Google Calendar Synchronized

Richard — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 01:45:56 +0000

Synchronizing your calendar between devices is still a mess. My personal calendar is on one account, my work calendar is shared with my personal account, and my girlfriend shares her calender with me as well. Initially I tried NuevaSync's Microsoft Exchange server to have over-the-air synchronization, and that worked well, allowing me to create events and have them appear, right away, on the Google Calendar account without intervention from iCal. The downside of NuevaSync was that every calendar event appeared as if it were on one calendar, so I couldn't tell which was work, which was her event (imagine everybody's surprise if I were to show up to an appointment she had with a heath care professional!), and which was a personal life event.

Google had CalDAV integration in beta, and recently launched it as an official service. That worked to keep iCal on my Mac synchronized well, but I could not add events from my iPhone. Having to move events over after a sync is not a habit I'm willing to form.

Spanning Sync is the least worst option, an endorsement that probably won't appear on their site. Through Spanning Sync, I get all my events in neat calendars but still have to manually synchronize the iPhone with the computer. It's something I have to do periodically anyway, so no loss there. The holy grail, of course, is direct, instant iPhone-to-Google Calendar synchronization.

Boris schooled me to Spanning Sync's referral program, which means that when anybody clicks through his image link, he gets a cool $5 sent to his PayPal account. Anybody clicking through that image also gets a cool $5 off the product. So in the spirit of trying to get something for free in an honest way, I encourage those frustrated with the state of calendar synchronization to click the image at the very top here to get me a fin, the term for a 5-dollar bill I learned from watching The Simpsons.

2008 Intentions (One Month Left)

admin — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:40:27 +0000

Long-time readers will remember that on January 1st of this year, I posted a list of New Year's Intentions. Events blew most of them off-course.

Start a savings and/or investment account and make regular deposits.

I have a moderately-high-interest savings account, currently with exactly 43 cents in it. After realizing how much money it could make while sleeping, I understood the power of such an account, but could not get into a rhythm of saving regularly. K has shown me the way with regards to tracking spending and earnings. Although my situation is much worse than I imagined, I now know enough to make goals with numeric values involved.

Fix Urban Vancouver.

Not done.

Go on a real vacation where I don't check work email.

Done, though the best vacation was a staycation. It enabled me to attend a friend's father's funeral and to attend my girlfriend's graduation ceremony and recharge without the stress of travel. Definitely doing at least one week-long staycation per year for the foreseeable future. I did not go to Portland, Oregon.

Continue bookshelf sustainability.

So far so good. As the result of a move, I identified a few books to donate, and last night I looked at my bookshelf and set myself a goal of donating about half (let's go with a third for now) of them by the end of 2009.

Bike to and from work each weekday for a month.

Failed. Living closer to work means it takes an hour to walk, and instead of biking to work taking double the time it does to bus, it takes about the same amount (including walking and the daily morning and evening nightmare that is Cambie St. near Broadway).

Take a full weekend and get rid of stuff in my closets.

Spring cleaning succeeded, and moving led to getting rid of even more stuff. It's time to spend 2009 removing everything but the most important things, including scanning and discarding photos and documents and buying a multi-tool.

Write Christmas cards to my friends.

In progress.

Rediscover my sense of wonder.

The month of August 2008 will go down in history as the month I rediscovered my sense of wonder, in a way I couldn't have possibly imagined.

More GlobalSat GPS logger tomfoolery.

I bought an iPhone instead, so the GlobalSat sits on a shelf. Want it?

Dance again.
Learn to sing.
"Accidentally" break the kit lens on my camera and replace it with something decent.

No time for dancing, singing or photography lessons this year.

Currently Reading: Dumbocracy and Radical Acceptance

Richard — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:11:02 +0000

Those that follow me over at All Consuming know that I use the service to catalog some of the media I partake in. It will also show up in my shared items feed when I remember to note that I've watched a movie or read a book. I'm currently reading two books, one sent to me for free by its author and another lent to me by my girlfriend. The first is Dumbocracy: Adventures with the Loony Left, the Rabid Right, and other American Idiots by Marty Beckerman and the second is Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach.

Beckerman, you'll remember, is the author of Generation S.L.U.T., a fictional novel of teenagers and sex in middle America, read at a time when sex wasn't a part of my life. Having three years of experience, now, I know a little bit about how complicated that can make life, yet in the book love did not inform many of the decisions and actions taken by the characters. In his non-fictional account of spending time with extreme liberal and extreme conservative forces in the United States, it's clear a chapter or two in that he exposes discrepancies between what those forces propose and the methods they use to enact what they propose. Based on a little bit of interaction with both Beckerman himself and reading interviews and his other writings, he projects a high intensity that calls into question his belief that he speaks for the political centre. This, keeping in mind, after only having read a tiny portion of the book so far.

Radical Acceptance, on the other hand, picks up for me where Buddhism Plain & Simple by Steve Hagen leaves off. In Hagen's book, we get a sense of what Buddhism is, where Tara Brach relates Buddhism to our daily, psychological life. Karen, who lent me the book, recognized I was struggling with the way I was dealing with some strong emotions in the last few months during this, the current episode of my life which people close to me are familiar with. While Dr. Brach's prescription—such as it is prescription—has much for me to in turn struggle with in understanding, putting some of them into practice, particularly the acknowledging and naming of emotions when they are particularly strong, has improved my mental state over its previous state. Some concepts and approaches to explaining them fall short of my full grasping, as I resonate with some of it and outright reject—more like fail to let myself grasp—other parts. More full sentence than two-word phrase, "nothing endures", from Hagen's book, resonated so much with me when I read it that it became a tagline for this website. While the brain fully understands it, the heart needs some convincing. It's with Radical Acceptance, having read half-through, that I've found ways to deal with some of the changes up until the 30th year of existing on this planet that I refused to believe are could happen in my life.

Closed

Richard — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 06:07:32 +0000

Going to close comments here for a while here on Just a Gwai Lo in order to focus on the upgrade of the site to Drupal 6 and to attend to things that don't necessarily involve ethernet cables and IP addresses. (And some that do.) Catch me on Twitter.