Received a letter from the Empire Club of Canada, and saw a familiar name. Apparently the hard-working former pastor of my grandparents’ church has gone on to much grander pastures!
Archive for » 2006 «
13
Nov 2006
My wife and I attended Saturday’s Remembrance Day ceremonies at the Old City Hall cenotaph. My photos have been posted to a Flickr set. I apologize in advance for the fuzziness of some photos; I think my hands were a little shaky because I misjudged the temperature and left the scarf and gloves at home.
10
Nov 2006
France: Almost cool again
Andrew at Bound by Gravity has posted a sampling from McGill University’s collection of Canadian wartime propaganda posters. My personal favourite is the one below, showing a brave but foolhardly French rooster taking the stuffing out of a German eagle. I initially thought this was something of a backhanded compliment to the French, not realising that the Gallic rooster was an actual (if unofficial) symbol whose association with France dates back to the Renaissance. The Latin word “Gallus” carries a double meaning—both “someone from Gaul”, and “rooster”. The rooster was, at one point, prominently featured in French patriotic artwork and even on the buttons of 19th-century soldiers’ coats.
You have to admit that at best, the eagle looks mildly inconvenienced by the agitated rooster. Eagles have been known to hunt and eat roosters, after all, and one can hardly imagine even the bravest chicken turning the tables on a raptor. Imagine a notional Boer War poster where the South African national symbol, the springbok, takes a swipe at the mighty, iconic British lion. This kind of prey-turned-predator conceptual absurdity is what elevates the recruiting poster above from mere propaganda into the realm of sublime comedy. That and the soldier pointing at the unlikely spectacle, as if to say “Where’s that ten bucks you owe me? Eagle got PWNED!”
Here’s a close-up of the French rooster opening up a can of whoopass on the German eagle. Or as the kids today would say: “im in ur aerie plucking ur head feathers”
Hats off to the anonymous fellow A.G.R. who created this recruiting poster during the Great War. And on a more serious note, this weekend, be sure to remember those who have served, and are serving, this great nation at home and around the globe.
Category: Amor Patriae, Pro Victoria
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09
Nov 2006
A new life awaits you in the Off-World Colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.
Apologies for being under radio silence the past couple of weeks — I was busy celebrating my dearest Wanda’s birthday, swapping out four old home computers, and replacing all the tired old 100-megabit / CAT5 network hardware with new 1-gigabit / CAT5e stuff. I know what you’re thinking — who in their right mind needs five PCs? The short answer is, a guy who manages servers for a living. (There’s actually seven, but some of them — like the Firm’s laptop — are not mine, although they will use the home network’s services every so often).
See, in the large corporate environment of The Firm, each technical group is responsible for a small portion of the overall infrastructure. The server hardware guys are responsible for assembling and rack-mounting the physical components, on a timeline about two weeks after you wanted it. The network guys are responsible for making sure your server can’t get through the firewall, plus cabling new servers into the appropriate switch and ensuring that port-specific acceleration (or blocking) takes place. The domain administration guys are responsible for messing with machine and user accounts within the domain directory service, plus pushing security fixes and patches. The risk management guys are responsible for intrusion/virus detection, prevention and generally telling you how your new project architecture breaks some obscure IT security policy. The application-level guys are responsible for maintaining particular software services on each server — the stuff end-users might actually be familiar with, like e-mail or databases. We all have some familiarity with other pieces of the puzzle beside our own, but to really work with each and every piece, you have to be working for a very small company indeed.
In smaller firms, all of these duties are bundled into a single job title called “system administrator”. Unfortunately small companies’ IT departments are not, generally, where the dollars are. They are a good place for building experience and figuring out what you want to specialise in, but they are not so good if you need to pay down a mortgage. In a large outfit like the Firm, these responsibilities are farmed out across multiple teams of dozens of individuals. While this division of labour makes sense for The Firm, it can make it difficult for system administrators to maintain maximum proficiency in all areas of the field. If you’re a hardware guy, you will never end up managing applications. If you’re an application guy, you will never touch the firewall or intrusion detection systems. If you are a security guy, you will never touch the application servers nor the hardware that they live on. I am highly specialised in enterprise messaging stuff (i.e. e-mail and application infrastructure for multi-thousands of users), but I try to maintain proficiency in most areas of the sysadmin field. For the past 8 years or so, I have structured my home network just like the average corporate network — including fault tolerance and redundancy, hence the four to five boxes. It is a fully managed corporate environment in microcosm.
“Fully managed”, by the way, is I.T. jerk code for “not left up to the discretion of the user, who may do something dumb”. Whenever you read “fully managed” in I.T. literature, it means the same thing as “child-proof” does to civilians. In my home network this means that, for instance, the firewall and network configuration of each workstation is automatically set and cannot be tampered with. File shares are clustered; if one file server fails, the user is automatically redirected to its mirror on another file server. Centrally-managed automated backups pull data from all five boxes every weeknight. Anti-virus protection is pushed to each machine, at the same version, with server- or workstation-specific policies and settings — and they are all polled several times an hour to report their status. Intrusion attempts and virus outbreaks for all five systems are centrally logged and deflected (or in the worst case, contained) automatically. The network will also notify me whenever any of these conditions step outside the normal profile. Aside from providing me with the opportunity to maintain proficiency across a broad spectrum of system engineering tasks and tools, the major objective — just like that of a real corporate environment — is to maximize automation and minimize the amount of tasks requiring direct intervention of the support staff. For maximum value you want your I.T. staff working on projects to make life easier and more efficient, not fixing the broken crappy technology some other misguided soul decided to buy.
The good news for trees, the ozone layer and fuzzy creatures is that, thanks to the advances in electronics, the newer, faster five-box network has a smaller physical and energy-consumption footprint than the older, slower four-box predecessor. Actually the energy footprint is a lot lower, since the old boxes had 250W power supplies and the newer ones get by on a mere 175W. My old 21″ and 19″ CRT monitors (which could easily raise room temperature by a degree or two all by themselves) have been replaced by less power-hungry 22″ LCDs.
The old computers have been decommissioned, had their drives wiped, and are now awaiting transportation to family members and a local charity. I am hoping that the charity will take the 11-year-old 21″ CRT as well, but it weighs about as much as a young brontosaurus and its thermal output rivals that of a space heater.
As you can imagine, all of this takes time and energy to put in place, so ah, that’s my lame excuse for being a lazy blogger.
Category: Web/Tech
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30
Oct 2006
… is the word on Celia following the weekend’s accident. She has undergone a lot of surgery and is heavily sedated / unconscious. She has managed to pass most of the early hurdles that threatened her survival.
Despite all that has happened she is pretty fortunate to be alive. A 19-year-old man was killed in another pedestrian accident early Sunday morning near Highway 27 and Humber College Boulevard — right beside a hospital, no less. The poor gent was believed to have been clipped and knocked to the ground by one car, then run over by a second car. The first car stopped, but the second car fled the scene.
Celia could easily have been hit by another vehicle if two fast-thinking gents, in the inner eastbound and westbound lanes of Eglinton Ave. East, had not bracketed the scene with their cars and prevented anyone else from running her over. Thank God they were paying attention and acted quickly.
UPDATE 010139Z NOV 2006: I misunderstood earlier information, Celia has undergone microsurgeries only. They can not operate (not anything requiring general anesthetic) on her major injuries yet because she is not breathing on her own. Hence the medical professionals look skeptically upon her odds of survival.
29
Oct 2006
On Saturday evening, Wanda and I and our roommate went to a friend’s birthday party near Eglinton Avenue and Brentcliffe Road. Since the evening was semi-pot-luck, we made our famous Easy Cheesy Broccoli and Wanda, with her customary attention to detail, packed it carefully for the trip from High Park to East York. Two friends, Silmar and Daniel, picked us up in their car and we made our way toward the party. They were bringing two varieties of cake from a well-known bakery in Brampton, and cake is never a hard sell for someone with a sweet tooth as strong as mine.
We had to park across the street from the actual apartment building — in the Winners / Robert Lowrey’s Piano Experts lot — because the apartment building’s management had recently converted the last of their visitor parking spaces into tenant parking. We parked beside the birthday girl’s car and made a beeline for the curb. I tucked the covered broccoli dish under my arm, intending to jaywalk through Eglinton Avenue’s moderate traffic to our destination. “Cross at the lights,” Wanda said, reasoning that it would be hard to sprint between traffic and keep the cakes and other dishes intact. Of course the cakes must be preserved, even if it means their porter will get a little more wet in tonight’s light drizzle. All four of us all crossed at the lights like dutiful law-abiding citizens.
Approaching the apartment lobby, we heard the crunch and tinkling glass of a car accident on the street. Having worked near Leslie and Highway 7, where fender-benders are practically a daily occurrence, I didn’t feel an overwhelming need to check it out. Trees and a low brick wall partially obstructed the view, at any rate. Curiosity got the better of Daniel, the cake-bearer, and he headed toward the street for a look. I followed him, reasoning that it would pass the time until our host answered the buzzer.
I saw a woman sprawled in the middle of the street — clearly one party to the thud and tinkling I had just heard. I abandoned the broccoli dish on the low brick wall and jogged out into traffic, fumbling for my phone and dialing 911. Two cars (one heading westbound, and the other heading eastbound) had already stopped and put on their headlights and flashers to keep other cars from striking her. Good thinking.
“What is your cell phone number?” asked the 911 operator. I gave it to her. “Do you need fire, ambulance or police?”
“I need an ambulance at Eglinton and Brentcliffe, a pedestrian has been struck by traffic.” I looked at prone body on the wet pavement, hoping to see some sign of life. Two other gents were bent over her, one at her head and one at her feet. I saw them both bend down and I was on the verge of hollering “Don’t move her!” as they abandoned the effort.
“Male or female?”
“A woman, middle-aged”
“Middle-aged? What does that mean, middle-aged?”
“Thirty to thirty-five, I guess”. Do they need census information before they dispatch EMS? She was an attractive woman in her mid-thirties, stylishly dressed; I didn’t recognise her. The woman’s eyes were wide open, staring straight ahead into the murky night sky,
but I didn’t see any chest movement indicating breathing. I thought she was gone.
“Is she conscious?”
“I don’t know, standby.” I waved a hand over the woman’s face and shouted to be heard over the traffic. “Miss, are you all right? Can you hear me?” No response.
“I think she’s unconscious…”
“You think? You don’t know?”
“Her eyes are open but she is not responding to visual or audible stimuli,” I said, “She is probably in shock.” Just then I saw her chest rise and fall, and her mouth twitched. I paused for a millisecond and there it was again. “She is breathing.” Some of the onlookers started covering her in blankets and jackets to ward off the cold night air.
“Does she have any injuries?”
There was a small trickle of blood from the woman’s mouth. No other external bleeding that I could see. Her jeans were torn at the right hip and the skin had been punctured / lacerated, but it was not bleeding. I informed the operator of the visible trauma.
“Okay, police, fire and ambulance are on the way now. Did you see the accident?”
“No, I did not.” I looked at the growing crowd — now up to seven or eight people — surrounding the stricken woman. “Who was first on the scene?” I asked. A young man in sweats put his hand up, and he described the accident. She was jaywalking across the street, and a car heading westbound on Eglinton Avenue hit her as she was crossing. The car that hit her continued on.
I relayed the description to the operator.
“How far was she thrown?”
“Fifteen to twenty feet at least,” I said, looking at a now completely detached driver-side mirror and estimating the distance to the where the woman now lay. “I’m not sure if the car is still at the scene,” I said to the operator, “it sounds like he may have left.” The
two cars bracketing the woman both had intact driver- and passenger-side mirrors.
“No no, I’m still here” said an older gentleman in his late forties or early fifties. He was tall, about six-foot-four, and his breath came in short, sharp bursts. He looked quite pale and distraught; I thought he was going to faint or toss his cookies all over the scene (and the young woman). Thank God he had enough decency and good sense to stay on-scene. “Where is your car?” I asked. He pointed to the intersection of Brentcliffe and Eglinton, about fifty yards away. “It’s around the corner”.
I pointed to a young twentysomething South Asian man, one of the first witnesses. “Go get his plate number and come right back here once you have it.” He nodded and ran towards the damaged vehicle. I heard distant sirens approaching us from the west, along Eglinton Avenue. “Fire department is a few minutes away,” I told the operator.
“My God, I know her!” I looked up. My roommate Rogner was standing beside me. “It’s Celia.” I looked down again, but still didn’t recognise her. I had met Celia once before at Rogner’s birthday party several months earlier, but the catatonic woman on the pavement
hardly resembled the lively, vivacious Celia. She was not, fortunately, the birthday girl — but she was definitely supposed to be one of the attendees.
The South Asian gent returned with the license plate number written down. The car was badly damaged with a smashed windshield. I relayed the license plate information to the 911 operator in NATO phonetics to avert any misunderstanding. “I don’t know if you need any other information,” I told the operator, “first responders are on the scene and I think we’ve done all we can.”
“Thanks for staying on the line so long,” she said. I hung up.
Rogner collected Celia’s personal effects as Toronto Fire Services moved in to treat her. “Get on the curb” growled a elderly, grizzled fireman, shooing all of us onlookers away. “This is our friend,” I said “her BlackBerry is somewhere out here and we need to notify the
family”. “Get on the curb!” he barked again. I thanked the South Asian guy for getting the plate number and shook his hand.
“It’s my duty,” he said evenly. I’m glad somebody still thinks so in this day and age.
A white-haired fiftyish policeman came over and questioned all of us, but as we didn’t see the accident occur, we weren’t much benefit to the investigation. All we could tell him is her name, address, and where her car was (parked alongside ours in the Winners lot). We asked for Rogner to accompany Celia to the hospital. Grumpy TFS fireman waved us off as a nuisance; he just blew any chance Toronto Fire ever had of getting money or sympathy from me for any cause they might care to name. I would rather see my house burn to the ground — with me inside it — than be rescued by this ancient lout from TFS.
The white-haired policeman was much more reasonable and consented to Rogner riding along with Celia to the hospital. He and Rogner walked out to the newly-arrived ambulance as the EMS technicians embarked their patient. Another officer started asking Rogner a lot of pointed questions about alcohol consumption, because the scene smelled of some kind of booze. Interestingly I didn’t recall smelling any booze from the driver, and we could not see Celia being the type of person to a) drive someplace drunk or b) drive someplace drunk and then get clobbered crossing the road.
Eventually the white-haired police officer returned and gave us the lowdown on Celia’s extensive injuries. He told us what trauma center she was headed for, and gently reminded us that there was no point in standing around on the sidewalk getting wet. So we went inside and made what we could of the birthday celebration and, accident aside, excellent food and drink. Rogner called a couple of times from the ER with status updates. Celia had a lot of broken bones and some serious internal injuries, but the medical professionals didn’t seem too pessimistic.
The seriousness of the situation did not really sink in until several hours after the accident when Rogner returned. Peering out the window after dinner, it was apparent that Toronto Police lingered long after EMS and TFS had departed. A big slab-sided forensics truck had joined the cruisers, and witnesses’ cars had not budged an inch. In fact Eglinton Avenue East between Leslie and Brentcliffe was closed in both directions. The driver had not been drinking (his breathalyzer test was A-OK), but did reek of wine because Celia had been carrying a bottle of wine when she was struck. Presumably this wine made it inside the perforated windshield and ended up all over the driver. Bits of the bottle were apparently all over the road, too.
Silmar and I went outside to check Celia’s car for her BlackBerry, in the hope that we could get the names of her cousins in town to notify them. Calling her phone number, the phone rang, but there was no ringing sound from the street. We started to cross Eglinton to the south side but were hailed by a police officer and told to stay away. He had one of those surveyor tripods and we were blocking his line of sight to another officer holding up a pole with a flashing red light. Interesting, I haven’t seen police use that at a traffic scene before. Crossing the street to the parking lot on the south side, one of the officers in a cruiser asked us what we were up to. “Looking for our friend’s BlackBerry, we replied”. He nodded and went back to his work. We strolled up to her car, opened the driver-side door, and called the BlackBerry again. It rang, and we located it.
I saw a couple of policemen scanning the north side of Eglinton with their flashlights, and I let them know we had found Celia’s Blackberry.
“You’re friends of the young woman that was hit?” said an officer.
“Celia? Yes,” replied Silmar.
“She’s in bad shape. It’s in God’s hands now.”
Silmar and I shared an uncomfortable look. This was not welcome news. ”Why are you guys giving this scene the white-glove treatment… mobile crime scene lab, surveyor instruments, et cetera?”
“It’s standard procedure in fata– ah, life-threatening accidents,” replied the officer.
So there you have it. I don’t know if Celia made it. But if you can spare a couple of minutes, a prayer or two probably wouldn’t hurt.
26
Oct 2006
If anybody (aside from me) actually uses the T&C event calendar in the left sidebar of this blog, please note that for your convenience, the event types have been separated into venue-specific calendars (i.e. Toronto Symphony, Royal Ontario Museum, Holy Blossom Temple, etc). They are all colour-coded and their appearance on the main calendar can be toggled on or off as desired. Each sub-calendar can now be viewed (and subscribed to, for notifications) independently.
Some events (particularly those of the ROM or JCCC) may be restricted to members only; I will always attempt to make note of this limitation (when I am aware of it) in the detailed event description.
NOTE: I was informed by the ROM yesterday afternoon that tonight’s lecture has been canceled as the presenter is ill.
25
Oct 2006
One fellow I work with has occasionally been so on-the-ball that he sometimes ends up requesting something from my team that he already submitted two months prior. When I respond and tell him "You already requested these changes on August such-and-such, and they were actioned on the same day," he replies half-jokingly "I am always one step ahead of myself".
After the St. Louis Cardinals’ 5-0 win over Detroit last night, I can’t help but wonder if the same thing is at work in the current MLB World Series. It occurs to me today that, two months ago, I elected to trash two customized Detroit Tigers jerseys, on the justification that my closet was running out of space, and the Tigers would probably not win a World Series any time soon.
Category: Miscellania
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24
Oct 2006
On Sunday afternoon, my wife and I (and several family members) attended the RCMI’s 17th Annual Massed Military Band Spectacular at Roy Thomson Hall. The concert featured the pipes, drums and brass/woodwind bands from many units in the Toronto Garrison:
- HMCS York
- Governor General’s Horse Guards
- Queen’s York Rangers
- 7th Toronto Regiment, RCA
- Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada
- 48th Highlanders of Canada
- 400 Squadron Pipes and Drums
- Toronto Scottish Regiment
The entire performance was somewhere just shy of three hours, and had a good mix of contemporary (“The Sands of Kuwait“) and popular (“Colonel Bogey on Parade“) compositions. The pieces that employed the massed pipes and drums of the attending regiments were my favourites. The scarlet tunics and the skirl of the pipes tends to call up visions of Balaklava in my mind—the “thin red streak tipped with a line of steel”. I tend to get all misty-eyed over pipers belting out ancient regimental songs rather than say, “Amazing Grace”.
One slightly jarring note was the way the master of ceremonies, Mr. Henry Shannon (RCMI), repeatedly editorialised about peacekeeping versus peacemaking. Readers of this blog will no doubt know that peacekeeping is the insertion of a neutral force between two (or more) willing countries at the invitation of at least one of their governments, whereas peacemaking is the insertion of combatant forces that aim to stop conflict (whether or not the other combatants happen to agree). Bosnia and Kosovo, for instance, were peacemaking — not peacekeeping — missions. This is all elementary stuff and I had a hard time fathoming why Mr. Shannon kept focusing on it. Surely the people who attend a military tattoo have some knowledge of military missions and roles. It is not as if the Hall were full of NDP delegates trying to shout down missions for Afghanistan but ratify those for Darfur.
That aside, the concert was a good one and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys martial music and the slowly fading warrior traditions of yesteryear. And just because I can’t get it out of my head, may I present the Post Horn Galop, written by Herman Koenig in 1844 and performed much more recently by the London Banqueting Ensembles.
Category: Ars Gratia Artis, National Defence
Tags: Canadian Forces, music, performing arts, Toronto Comments off
24
Oct 2006
The eminently quotable Victor Davis Hanson , Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford University), and professor emeritus at California University (Fresno), on the attitudes and behaviours emanating from the world’s perennial hotspot for conflict:
It is difficult in history to find any civilization that asks as much of others as does the contemporary Middle East—and yet so little of itself. If I were to sum up the collective mentality of the current Arab Middle East—predicated almost entirely on the patriarchal sense of lost “honor” and the rational calculation to murder appeasing liberals and appease murdering authoritarians— it would run something like the following:
- We will pump oil at $3 and must sell it over $50— and still blame you for stealing our natural treasure.
- We will damn your culture and politics, but expect our own to immigrate in the thousands to your shores; upon arrival any attempt to integrate Muslim immigrants into Western pluralistic society will be seen as Islamaphobic.
- Send us your material goods, whether machine tools, I-pods, or antibiotics. We desperately want them, but will neither make the necessary changes in our own statist, authoritarian, religiously intolerant, tribal, and patriarchal culture to allow us to produce them ourselves, nor will show any appreciation for the genius of others who can do what we cannot.
- We ostensibly wish you to stop the killing of Muslims by ourselves and others—Milosevic murdering Kosovars, Saddam destroying Kuwaitis, Kurds, and Shiites, Russians killing Afghans and Chechnyans—but should you concretely attempt to do so, we will immediately consider your intervention far worse than the mayhem caused by others or ourselves.
- Any indigenous failure in the Arab Middle East will eventually be blamed on the United States or Israel.
- Your own sense of multiculturalism must serve as an apology for our own violent pathologies, that can only be seen as different from, never worse than, your own culture.
- We must at all times talk of anti-Americanism and why we want you out of the Middle East; you must never become anti-Arab or anti-Muslim, much less close your borders to our immigrants and students.
- We will tolerate and often defend those who burn churches, ethnically cleanse Jews from our cities, behead priests, kill nuns, and shoot infidels as the necessary, if sometimes regrettable, efforts of our more zealous to defend Islam. But if any free spirit in the West satirizes Islam, we will immediately demand that Western governments condemn such blasphemy—or else!
- Material aid—billions to Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, or the Palestinians—is our entitlement. Any attempt to curtail it is seen as an assault on the Arab nation.
- We are deathly afraid of nuclear Russia, China, and India who have little tolerance for either Islamism or terrorism, and so will ignore their felonies, while killing you for your misdemeanors.
– Victor Davis Hanson, Middle East Madness
Works and Days, 22 October 2006.
You don’t say.
(With a tip o’ the hat to Damian Penny )
Chris is most often found flying a desk, but he delights in studying the Golden Age of Aviation (1919-1939). He admires all the pioneering men and women who navigated the skies with nothing more sophisticated than a map, compass and sextant—and the conviction that there was no place they could not reach.
