I see you’ve been busy in your new role as heaven’s technology innovator. I really thought you’d take it easy for a bit, but no, you’re right back in it, stirring things up as you always did in the mortal world. But I have to ask: what did I do to deserve today?

I’m sure you had nothing to do with our internet/phone connection literally being dug up (that was human stupidity along the lines of move the equipment, but forget to move the buried trunk line before demolishing the building). However, did you really have to rub my face in how bad the windows world is for lack of coordinated design? Yes, I know only three USB ports right on top of each other sucks, with me having to choose between keyboard, mouse, internet stick, and a Blackberry, which I was trying to figure out how to suck internet off of. Yes, I know that the same system is a steaming pile of cruddy 3rd party software bloat slowing it down to a crawl while I try to research and install software. But I didn’t need to sit half the afternoon on it while I’ve got other people needing internet sticks installed. I also didn’t need to be reminded how our Windoze boxen become sloth like because they keep trying to authenticate to a connection that I know has been snipped, but I have no way to stop the madness. I also didn’t need to be reminded about the bloatware that is Roger’s Rocket Stick installer - trying to install while virus scanners that I can’t turn off are fighting me for every CPU cycle. On the way home at the liquor store, I didn’t need a POS Windows system (that’s Point of Sales, as well as the obvious) acting up not scanning my nectar of Lethe. To top it all off, I didn’t need every friggin’ piece of software I have on my home machine nag me for updates, and reboots when I sit down at home. It’s like coming home to a virtual nagging wife.

For what ever I did to offend you, I’m SORRY! Oh, and can you lay off the Blackberry servers for just a bit? I really need them to work right now while we don’t have a working internet connection.

Perhaps it’s just that KD has been in the news. Today, I see that Kraft Canada has been “cease and desisting” a local teacher trying to teach students how to eat less crap - ie there are alternatives to KD. He called his program “Kick the KD”, with a logo that is certainly evocative of the KD brand. While I have no problem with the company protecting it’s brand, I do have a problem with the media trying to make a story out of nothing. Kraft asks teacher to stop using their brand marks in advertising his course. Teacher complies. This is not a story.

Hell, I can come up with a better story for the media to cover. How’s this grab you:

Man Eats Kraft Dinner from 1999 and Lives to Tell the Tale

Calgary Random Blogger has an amazing tale to tell of having eaten a Kraft Dinner brand Macaroni & Cheese that expired in December 1999, and having suffered no ill effects. According to Random, “It still tasted good, even though the noodles seemed to be loosing their integrity”. Random Blogger discovered the pack of noodles in the back of his cupboard, having a hankering after seeing a recent news article about Kraft persecuting teachers trying to teach courses about better eating. “I saw the expiry date, Dec 30th 1999 and thought, what the hell, what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, right?” quips Random Blogger, “besides, I have faith in the quality of Kraft’s preservatives, a company with Krafts’ reputation will make sure it’s products have enough high quality preservatives to way outlast any ‘best before’ date”. No word from Kraft Canada on if there are any preservatives that would extend the lifespan of it’s product out 12 years past the recommended ‘best before’ date.

True story, I have yet to die and it’s been 30 minutes since I’ve eaten the whole box. To be fair, I did have some salad with that so maybe that made a difference.

Okay - It wasn’t quite that long ago, but I did drink some very good beer from Big Rock sometime ago. It’s been gone a long time now…

But it’s back! May 1st! In stores! The beer is… Magpie!!! (Read the link if don’t know about what is one of the few rye ales out there)

I regularly visit Big Rock Restaurant, and the beer store attached to it, both of which are well worth a visit if you are looking for lunch in the 52 St / Glenmore SE industrial area. I have been lamenting the loss of Magpie pretty much every time I drop into the beer store. I kept getting the same response for the last while. Something along the lines of ‘We hear that a lot. Have patience, it might be back sometime.’ Thus, my continual lamentation. Teasing Ralph with beer bad. Ralph no happy. Ralph keep pestering Big Rock to bring back beer.

Last time I was in the beer store I get a different response. Do you have a few minutes? Come with me. We go upstairs to what is normally used as a wind down space after the beer tours, where they have some taps that you can sample the normal Big Rock products. Except now there are no normal products there, only a bunch of new beers I have never seen before, except the Magpie. My excitement is building - Magpie returns AND a bunch of new specialty beers? Could Big Rock be back to it’s roots of brewing good beer, domestic be damned?

We belly up to the bar, where sample glasses are being poured. Magpie must be had first - it is true to what I remember - must stock up when this one comes out, May 1st I have been told. I continue down the line and quickly come to the conclusion that Big Rock is back when it comes to brewing unique specialty beers that are different from the standard domestic mold. It’s been a month since I sampled them so forgive my beer and age inhibited memory.

There is a picture of an IPA that I believe is the new bitter. According to Big Rock, it’s very bitter. For you hop heads out there I would say it’s on the bitter side, but not extreme. It mellows to a nice floral aftertaste as you have a few sips. Could pair very well with a curry. There was a cherry beer that is going to be popular with the ladies - these tend to be too sweet sometimes, but Big Rock has resisted that and made something a little more citrus like, not to heavy on the cherry flavor. It will make an excellent summer beer for when you can’t decide between a cooler and a beer. There was an oak aged beer that I wasn’t too fond of. If you like that oak aged Innis & Gunn’s beer you should check this one out when it’s out. There was another heavy roast beer than had a wonderful smokey flavor - complex with changing flavors that I can’t even peg until I sit down with a whole glass. Woe is me - so much beer to choose from in front of me I didn’t have time to properly enjoy them. I can’t even remember the others. I think we were at around 7 taps, so there is at least one more, there might have been a tap of Trad or such mixed in there I didn’t notice.

According to the Big Rock Blog, it’s all part of there new Brewmaster’s Series of beers. Everyone of them different, with the first one being the triumphant return of Magpie. Now, unfortunately, it’s not a permanent return - it’s supposed to be one of a seasonal rotation of beers. The blog only has a hint of what is to come, (post to follow soon according to them). At least when the Magpie rotates out, I’ll have others to look forward to!

{edit Apr 15th} Went to the Big Rock for lunch today. Due to production issues with the new packaging, Magpie is delayed until the end of May. The good news is that Magpie is available on tap in the restaurant now!

So now we get to the fun part - the pizza. It lived up to it’s name “rizin’ crust”. Actually has 4 pieces of Pepperoni per 1/4 pizza. The cheese looks like cheese and seems to be there in a not too skimpy amount. First bite…

Hmmm. Not that bad. (Why yes, I *am* writing this while I’m eating the pizza!) Second bite. Crust is kinda doughy, some crispy on the outside - passable. Cheese is standard for a cheap pizza. Third bite - get a whole piece of peperoni in this time. The peperoni is not that bad, actually has a bit of kick to it - unlike the usual bland crap you see. Forth bite - get the crust edge this time. Perhaps shouldv’e kept it in for a minute more - not quite as crispy as I’d like. Stop writing now to finish off the piece. The tomato sauce is pretty bland, and a little too sweet.

Overall verdict: This pizza is a cut below the standard Mcain or Kraft rising crust, but not that far below. I actually think it’s better than say, a Little Caeser’s (more topping), definitely better than Pizza Hut, which is the worst grease fest pizza ever in my books. For $3, this is a steal of a deal for a 12″ pizza, feeds two hungry people, or one hungry teenager. As always, YMMV. I can’t find a web site for them, although I did find a reference to food poisoning (eep!). You’ll just have to head over to Walmart and get one of these things if you want to try it. If the pizza doesn’t agree with me, I’ll definitely write a follow up, assuming I live.

For DSLR owners, (and some high end point and shoot cameras I think) life is not so fun. As designers of cameras from a film background, Canon and Nikon built sensors on a 3:2 ratio. You take these pictures and put them on a 4:3 frame and you will get one of several possibilities, possibly under your control if the frame supports it:
- Fit the picture to the more square 4:3 ratio - everything gets distorted. People will seem to be fatter or thinner depending on the orientation of your frame.
- Auto crop of the short sides to take it down to 4:3 If you’ve been composing carefully and care about what is on the edge of your photo, this will drive you nuts.
- Fit the picture as is, leaving black areas on the long sides of the frame. Probably the best option - at least the picture is left as is.

The only solution if you want proper control is to do what the photo labs used to do for your 8X10’s - crop the photos yourself to intelligently remove the unimportant bits - you might as well resize them for the native resolution of the frame at the same time. You can get a lot of pictures on even the paltry 16MB some frames give you for in-frame storage - the native resolution will take up way less space than the much larger original picture from your camera.

So, what I want is a 3:2 picture frame to display my DSLR pictures without having to crop. I had briefly looked for one when I bought my last 15″ frame - no luck finding any and I had not yet had the pleasure of going through every photo I wanted to put on the frame and tweaking it. Now that I’ve done some of that, I REALLY want a 3:2 frame. Surely by now there is some “professional grade” digital photo frame to satisfy the picky photographer like me?

My initial search turned up nothing. Barely even a mention of photo ratios out there. Tuning my search to a discussion of photo ratios - I find I was wrong - - it turns out that Philips did make a 7″ 3:2, yet they dropped it, probably because people like me never found their product in a sea of generic and brand name frames available today.

What surprises me is that a company like Sony, which has absorbed Minolta, has not had the camera people talk to the digital frame people and point out that a quality 3:2 digital frame might be a high margin seller with all the consumer SLR owners out there who have a bit of dosh to spend for convenience and quality. Actually, working for big companies myself, I’m not *that* surprised that the left hand hasn’t talked to the right hand.

At any rate - Sony, Canon, Nikon - you have a niche you have not filled yet - high end frames tailored for your high end DSLR’s. 3:2 ratio - better LCD’s of computer display grade - I know I’d pay 2X over the current price of a 15″ if I could get something like this.

Dear Mr. Obhrai,

As a voter in the riding of Calgary East, I wanted to drop you a line regarding the current government’s plan to make the long form census optional. I do not support the optional aspect. I work as a data analyst, working with statistics and having a good knowledge of general statistical theory. I agree with those statisticians who have come out saying that results from the proposed census changes would result in bias data. The results coming from this proposal would not be as accurate - in fact I believe that the results would for the most part be ignored by most groups outside the government - leaving the government using flawed data to make important decisions about where to allocate our money. I feel this is an important decision - I rarely have offered anyone in any government my opinion on anything, yet I do so today because I feel the government is about to make a mistake that will affect pretty much every program the government rolls out to help its citizens.

I don’t buy the government’s argument that there have been many complaints - if so, please provide evidence to back this up.

What I would like to see is a review of the questions being asked on the long form census - if we need to remove some questions deemed objectionable by the public, removal is a better option than making the whole long form optional. I feel an open debate where statisticians, policy makers and politicians among others can argue the merits of the questions against the privacy of the citizens of this country would be more productive by far than what seems like an arbitrary move by the government to change the requirements for answering the long form census.

Thank you for your time,

Past Conservative voter, Calgary East.

I can live with that. I’ll even put up with the waste of cash that is “own the podium”. Are we that vain that we must worry about our medal count?

What’s got me got me ticked is the media making it look like everyone is going to be watching the Olympic hockey. According to the media, everyone was watching the Swiss / Canada men’s game. Well, for the record, most people I know didn’t watch it, including me. I would say there is a whole third of the country who doesn’t care about hockey, or any other sports for that matter.

So, quite treating the Olympics like it’s news and put it in the sports section where it belongs. The third of us who don’t give a rat’s ass about sports will thank you.

For those of you that can’t watch You Tube at work on your break, it turns out that worms will NOT come out of your cola-marinaded pork chops, so don’t go beliv’n all ‘dem internet rumors!

Today, I decided to try this thing out for lunch. Looking at the bill, I see that I paid $2.89 for this thing. $2.89?! This had better be some damn fine noodle for that money. Looking over the ingredients list I see fried bean curd noodles, cabbage, French fries… French fries? I bought cabbage and French fry noodles for $2.89? Trying to keep an open mind about this, I poured boiling water into the cup up to the line and waited 5 minutes. At least, that’s what I assume I’m supposed to do based on no instructions in English, and a “no microwave” symbol on the cup. Everything is already in the cup, no packets to open and dump in - nice.

You know what? That was some damn fine noodles for $2.89. All I know is the little English label stuck on the clear wrapping called them “Myojo (Sapporo Ichiban vegier sio falvor..” noodles, they come from Japan (unusual these days) and they are in a green container showing the noodles in a bowl with vegetables, surrounded by a bunch of vegetables and potatoes, but no French fries.

In the process I noticed a few things. Quite a few things. Some of which I’ve investigated further this evening and am now posting on.

For starters, I’m pretty sure that Streetview plots its’ images automatically by matching the GPS co-ordinates of the road map with the CPS co-ordinates of the car at the time the picture is taken. This should work quite well, until there is a problem with the road map being off. Road maps are off in a lot of places in Calgary due to changes, and I have found that the current Google map seems to be skewed a bit in general.

How do I know this? Well, of course the first thing you do in Streetview is look up your home to see what pictures they caught of it. Hmmm - taken in around June, before I got the lawn fixed up nicely - but at least the hedges are not grown out hugely. So I start surfing around the neighborhood, traveling down the street, turn a corner, when all of a sudden I get a view of a back alley. WTF?! Being near my home, I quickly figure out it’s the back alley of the street I’m surfing on:

I kind of just assume it’s a bit of a fluke for a minute, when turning another corner, I encounter another back alley, also mis-aligned as being the street. My first conclusion is that Google must have driven a bunch of back alleys as well as the streets, you only won’t see them in Google maps, since back alleys are usually not mapped. I tested this on an exception to this rule I happen to know about, and ‘lo: the back alley was mapped, just like a front street. I later see a comment on a CBC article complaining about how back alleys in Vancouver are all mapped - will have to check this out.

So, taking the previous information once step further, we have the amazing ability of the Google cars to go where no other driver seems to be able to go, for example here:

My first thought was WTF - where are we now?

My second thought was WTF - how did the car get here? (You will note the road direction is completely off too)

This is a result of road alignment being off, as in - Google does not have the correct street map for this area. The intersection being photographed now has a loop to the north, rather than an on-ramp to the south as listed in the map. It looks like the software Streetview uses to plonk the images down just put the image on the nearest available road, being Harvetta Rd. in this case. You’ll find if you follow Peigan trail west past the #2 on the map, the loop will start and just end it’s images for no reason - well there is a reason - the map goes off to the south for the on-ramp, the actual car went north to start the loop around to end up going south. Some of those images end up on the Harvetta Rd image, see this link for an example (assuming Google hasn’t fix it)

So, at this point, you might be thinking, ‘yeah, but how did the car get there?” Well, at this point I had to figure this out too. You see, “Harvetta Road” road isn’t normally open to traffic. It’s used as a walk path for people that want to take their dogs somewhere where a lot of other people arn’t, or just as a nice viewing path to Calgary’s industrial area. So how did Google’s car get in there?!

Here we have the answer:

Yes, he saw the gate was open, and that the road was on the Google map, so why not drive up it?

He made it all the way to the end, where the construction guys must have been going “WTF kind of fence building thing is that?”

So, in conclusion for this part; Google - if by some miracle you are reading this, a road update for Calgary would be a good idea, with updated road maps (there have been many changes in two years), a better alignment, and back alleys mapped, if you are going to show us back alleys in Streetview.

Google has crowed about how good it’s face recognition software is for blurring faces. There are examples of it blurring out the KFC logo since it’s colonel Sander’s face, it’s THAT good. Bullshit. It’s just set to be really sensitive, to try and get as many faces and license plates as possible. In statistical terms, it’s set really high so that there are a lot of false positives, while minimizing the number of false negatives. Here’s an example:

You can see it blurred out “Volter, in Volker Stevin, and the whole text in the second barrier. Why? It looked like a license plate to the software. I can only hope it didn’t look like a face, like in this example:

Okay, it’s not the most obvious blurring, but it was the first thing that came to mind for me when testing out the face recognition technology. Oh, and I’ve found a few plates and faces not blurred already. Not many, so Google is doing a pretty good job of meeting the stupid privacy requirements set by the Canadian gov’t., at a cost of having random blurs all over the place in the streetview. They’re everywhere!

The previous photo was taken on Stephen Avenue mall during the daytime, at about 9:20am. How do I know this? The Streetview car had just passed a clock:

Why do I care what time it was when the Google car took these pictures? ‘Ya see, Stephen Avenue mall is a pedestrian mall during the day, no cars allowed - only in the evenings and at night are cars allowed, to keep down the drug dealers by running them over I presume.

So, how did Google get these images of the street in the middle of the morning? He just drove by the barriers and kept on going:

Approaching the barrier - you can see the no entry sign (6am - 6pm):

Going by:

and we’re by:

Perhaps someone at City hall was really smart and somehow got the message through that Streetview could come through any time they liked, but I doubt it. If this Streetview driver actually just said “fuck it” and drove around the barrier, I salute you, sir, for having gotten some of the best views of Calgary as a result.

So, to conclude, Streetview for Calgary is awesome. The images are really good. For those that were worried that the images were taken early in the spring when Calgary was still brown and ugly, don’t fret - that’s when they *started* taking images - most of them are during the late spring and into the summer - showing the nice greenery of Calgary at that time of the year. As a bonus, there were several days of really good weather with great clouds in the sky and nice sun - I’m going to do up a compilation of shots from Streetview at some point, show the Calgary and surrounding (west) area captured by streetview.

To finish off, here a couple of extra shots I couldn’t resist:

Riding the pink bike down 1st st. S.W.:

Google car self portrait: