/life/sabbatical/Bell Canada Sucks -- I'm leaving!
I called Bell a few days ago to cancel my cell phone plan. It was a twelve (12) month contract, and I'm pretty sure there was a 30 day cancellation period. After the identity verification, the conversation went roughly like this:
Me: I'd like to cancel my cell phone plan.
Her: When would you like cancel it?
Me: Ideally, September 30th, but if it has to be at the end of a billing period, then September 19th or whatever it is.
Her: Okay. We can do it for September 30th. That's after your contract period, so you should call back on September 19th.
Me: I believe I'm required to give 30 days' notice, and since there aren't thirty days after the end of my contract, I'm not sure that will work.
Her: What day do you want to cancel?
Me: September 30th if I can, but the 19th is fine.
Her: Okay, well, for the 19th, here will be a fee for cancelling early.
Me: I don't understand. It was a twelve month contract, I'd like to cancel it after 12 months.
Her: Yes, there's a fee of $100 because you're future-dating the cancellation during the contract period, so you're terminating during the contract.
Me: Can you explain that to me? I just want to terminate my contract at the end of it.
Her: Yes, so there's a fee for cancelling early.
Me: That can't be; you can't charge me an early cancellation fee for ending a twelve month contract after twelve months. Is that really what you're trying to do?
Her: Yes, there's a cancelation fee for that.
Me: Okay, can I speak with your supervisor please?
It was the fastest and fiercest I've ever gotten angry with a telephone person, partly because I saw it all coming, and I'm generally ticked at the horrible customer service and pricing and market manipulation in telecomms in Canada.
It took a couple minutes, and then the same voice came back:
Her: Sir?
Me: Yes.
Her: Okay, it looks like we can go ahead and do that for you.
Me: Oh, great! So cancelling Sep 19, and no fees?
Her: Yes. Can I ask why you're cancelling?
Me: I'm leaving the country.
Her: Oh, forever?
Me: Well, for a while.
Her: Okay, you will be disconnected on September 19th. Anything else I ca--
Me: Great, thanks. That's all, then.
Her: Good bye.
Weird. What happened while I was on hold? My best guess is she played back some of the call for the supervisor. My tone was extremely curt, and I had said "you can't charge me an early cancellation fee for ending a twelve month contract after twelve months" with great conviction, mostly 'cause I felt..err..great conviction.
It really seems like they were just fishing for me to go along with another month or whatever. The transcript above is actually substantially less ambiguous than the original conversation.
This all stems from the fact that I'll be moving to New York in late September. I'm going back to Google after a reasonably successful leave. Canada's my ultimate home, and I think Toronto in particular, so I'll be back often to say h'lo.
New Albums from the Gallery
/life/sabbatical/Letter to Minister Prentice
I just fired this letter off to Jim Prentice, who tabled the rather vile Bill C-61 on Canadian copyright dereforms. I'm not sure if it's all properly addressed, but then I realized I really shouldn't have to care.
Hon. Minister,
As a Canadian citizen, I'm disappointed by the lack of balance in Bill C-61. The balance in copyright policy should be struck by governments, with strong provisions for fair dealing and personal use to maximize art and the enjoyment of art. Certainly, a "balance" should not be left to corporations shielded behind legal buttressing of so-called "digital locks".
When I buy a DVD, I should be able to format- and time-shift it, regardless of the existence of digital locks. To call this a "very technical issue" as you did in your interview with The Search Engine is disingenuous; this is a simple issue that will affect Canadians in their day-to-day lives. Indeed, since a truly effective digital restriction system would prevent the fair dealing that's inherent to the social balance of copyright law, it's unclear to me why they should even be permitted in Canada. These problems only scratch the surface of what's wrong with Bill C-61, but I'm surprised something so clearly out of balance was tabled in the House of Commons.
As an active citizen, I participated vocally in the last round of national copyright consultations, and I'm disappointed and distressed that the lessons learned then were ignored, and no further public consultation was held. I strongly support thriving art and culture in Canada, but I certainly don't believe this bill will serve small artists, nor does it serve consumers.
Sincerely,
Rob Ewaschuk
Toronto, ON
In other news, Toronto Pride Parade 2008 was super fun, World Wind Energy Conference 2008 was super learnful, Canada Day in Ottawa was a giant party of red and white and sunny green grass fields, I think our mouse is really actually gone, Trev, Krista and Phil visited from Dublin and it was good, and summer in Toronto is lovely.
/life/sabbatical/A Good Day
Yesterday was a good day. I spent two hours working with the local Green Party candidate on the permanently soon-to-launch new website, with great productivity in terms of deciding what content to put up, and where to draw the lines around duplicating the central Green Party website.
Then I got a call from Jesse and we had a good lunch at Fresh -- the Ninja Bowl has the tastiest preparation of tofu I've ever had.
Then I went into Pembina and did some actually-good work, which I'd been struggling to do this week. Then it turned out there were two events at the Center For Social Innovation, where Pembina has its office. The first was a "speed geek" event, where you went table to table for five minutes each, hearing about what people are doing. Then there was a free-beer party for a long-time Environmental Defence guy who was about to start his own legal practice.
The "Speed Geek" event was a fascinating examination of leverage. Jeff presented Borealis Offsets, who are doing tree-planting for carbon credits. They're selling
"80-year carbon", which means that they sell today carbon to be absorbed over the next 80 years (unless those trees
burn, or are eaten by pine beatles, or the land is illegally logged, or..) In the offsets biz, this is a pretty
unpopular practice from what I can tell, but they still seemed to be getting going and planting trees pretty cheaply.
He said they'd shift to one-year carbon as soon as it was cheap enough to do so; present voluntary carbon offset prices
are in the $6-$10 per tonne CO2e* range. He had an interesting argument that, since we were already over the 350ppm CO2 that we need to safely end up at, emissions-reductions credits were
bogus since we necessarily must do that anyway, and the only realcarbon credits are true net-sinks of carbon, not
just net-reductions.
Jenny was representing a large but informal network of youth workers and researchers. It reminded me how little I know about working with people who aren't colleagues or peers or customers or teachers, but children or youth or troubled people or the elderly. They seemed to be almost forming non-labour union, objecting to the repeated bogus "consultations" from the government that went nowhere - though that certainly wasn't a central message, it was clearly something she felt very strongly about.
But by far the most interesting group was Markets Initiative. In some sense, they were a free-marketers nightmare in terms of what they demonstrated. Essentially, 10 or so years ago, they walked into the paper industry, and asked paper mills why they weren't making more recycled paper and paper using sustainably harvested pulp, and the industry said there was no demand. They went to the publishers, and asked why they weren't buying, and the publishers said that it was a boutique product, and far too expensive. Markets Initiative got publishers to issue policies over a large (years) timescale about ramping up recycled paper usage, so the mills had a clear demand signal. They also got authors to sign on, requiring that their books be published on Ancient Forest Friendly (AFF) paper. That's a designation, not a certification, meaning (I think) that it's not monitored and audited as tightly, but they do depend on the Forest Stewardship Council for the certification of sustainable forests.
The acheivements of a small group of people in greasing a market effect were phenomenal, aided in no small part by the concentrated clout of the authors - Margaret Atwood, J. K. Rowling -- as opposed to the much more diffuse clout of the book-buying public. But, they basically had to do all of this work not-for-pay to get it to happen, acting as free environmental and business development consultants to smooth things along. To me, it's a testament to the amount of market inertia, especially where costs are basically totally externalized, even in the presence of strong signals. The most recent Harry Potter book was published on fully AFF paper in 22 countries, and the presses were halted in Finland by Rowling because they weren't using it. Cool!
After the party dwindled, a fella I know from the Green Party and a CSI guy who works for Carbonzero and who is of asian descent talked about racism, multiculturalism, the subtle semantics of context in questions like "where are you from?", "where did you grow up?", "what's your ethnic background?" and whether (as I often think and hope) Canada, and especially Toronto, and especially the core, is finally entering a post-racist period, where your skin colour (though not where you grew up, or where you were educated) is finally becoming irrelevant.
In other, less world-altering news, I've found some time to work on Learning Cubes (formerly and maybe futurely known as pbrain, but all the good domains are taken), which is basically online collaborative flashcards for learning things that require brute memorization like languages.
* tonne CO2e means "tonne of Carbon Dioxide or equivalent"; since some gases like HCFCs are actually have a much more potent greenhouse effect than CO2, you can offset a tonne of CO2e for a much smaller amount of HCFCs. Either the IPCC or Kyoto (or both?) have conversion rates to use.
/life/sabbatical/Update and Morals
A friend sent me a link to a New York Times article called The Moral Instinct (free reg req'd.) Fairly interesting, though it contains one of my pet peeves:
On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says "yes."
Consider now a different scene. You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge? Both dilemmas present you with the option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But most people don't see it that way: though they would pull the switch in the first dilemma, they would not heave the fat man in the second. When pressed for a reason, they can't come up with anything coherent, though moral philosophers haven't had an easy time coming up with a relevant difference, either.
I hate these so-called utilitarian questions. I wouldn't throw the fat man, and I'll tell you why: it might not work. In fact, my aim with a fat man throwing off a bridge is less than 20% likely to work. Plus he might resist, and I might get hurt, or he might just slow me down until it's too late. Plus he might be about to discover the cure for cancer, or otherwise save lives (though that's true of the single man on the spur as well). There are so many practical distinctions between these so-called "moral equivalents", I don't understand how they're an accepted technique for experimentation. Even in the first one: is that really the only way you can intervene? Really? Are you sure none of the men know it's coming? I'm not sure I'd throw the switch even in that case, though I'd certainly try to do something. In fact, wouldn't the men hear the trolley coming and jump out of their way on their own?
My philosophy textbook had one about (as I recall -- it was old writing) someone saying they were going to kill 20 Indians unless you shot one of them yourself, then the other 19 could go free. Again: how do I know he's telling the truth? It certainly sounds implausible. If it's true for 20, it's true for 2, and if that happens, I'm doing half the "immoral work" for this mysteriously murderous man. I have no reason to believe him.
These are cases of over-analysis of an intuitive decision, without properly trying to understand the intuition.
In other news:
- Mouse: still there. Still only one, I think. We thought he was gone, but I've seen him recently. He either doesn't go into the trap, or can get back out again (I think the former, but I'm not sure.) I really don't want to get a sticky trap, but I might have to get the snappy kind. I sat one night trying to wait for him to come out, but that didn't work either.
- Pembina work: Good. Working on something substantial, doing some web work and some research and some good discussions.
- Ants (did I mention we had some ants?): seemingly gone.
- Clare's mum's visit: victorious.
- Trip to Montreal: great. better than I expected. weeeird modern dance thing. nice churches. fairly good food. looks like Europe.
/life/Man vs. Nature
This morning at about 3am, I went to the kitchen to grab a snack, and saw a little furry quadruped skitter across the counter and down behind the couch. "Something must be done!" I thought to myself, and then went to bed.
Today, I've put together a humane mouse trap from instructions
I found on the internet. Mine is a little simpler -- instead of the wooden board for stability and weight, I just
wedged it into a corner. I used twist-ties instead of heavy-gauge wire, a Chris
Tindal pin and a Bic pen instead of a drill, and a knife on my bike tool
(which I once accidentally brought through airport security — oops!) instead of an exacto blade, and
oil-on-a-paper-towel to slick things up. I'm a little skeptical that the original hole is big enough for a mouse, but
I'm sure I'm wrong.
Speaking of "vs", I wrote a little webapp using Google App Engine that mimics a game we used to play on the whiteboard, and it's called "versus". At the risk of nerding out, I can't really explain how excited I am about GAE — it's definitely the coolest thing Google's done since Google Maps, and possibly even cooler. The time to develop a reasonably sophisticated app, and be able to nearly "deploy and forget", not having to worry about rotting servers, overloaded MySQL databases, etc, is incredibly powerful. It probably divided by 3 or 4 the time to get that app running, and over the next year it will probably divide the time to keep it running by 10 or 100. (Note that "versus" is mostly a proof-of-concept and learning tool, and not actually that exciting of an app.)
Don't worry, dear reader, I'll be sure to let you know the result of the epic struggle of man against nature.
/life/sabbatical/Visits, Kayaking, and a quarter of leave
I updated my Objectives for Leave with scores, comments, and the goals for next three months, most of which are carry-overs. Comments welcome. Especially on how to have more self-discipline. :-)
I tried to go kayaking with my friend Jeff. We got all packed up and ready to go, then drove up to Port Severn, unloaded, and got going. Three hours and about three kilometers later, our hands were cold (no gloves, but socks were making it livable) and the waves were picking up. We pulled into a little unsheltered nook to decide whether to continue. I pulled up alongside some rocks (shown at 0:16 in the movie) in a feet of stupidity, and then started getting pushed up onto them by the waves. It was all pretty scary, and I seemed to be getting pushed up higher with every wave. Eventually, I managed to figure out how to ride the waves down the rocks, instead of up, got myself off, paddled frantically to a more sane docking place. By the time I got there, Jeff was up and out of his kayak and on his way around to where I nearly tipped. It was pretty exciting and scary — tipping's never fun, and rocks and frigid water make it less so — but it all worked out in the end.
New photos are up from when I visited Halifax, and some random ones from around Toronto. I "lost" my camera (in the recycling pile, as it turned out) for while my whole famiy was gathered in Orillia, so no photos from that.
/life/Food Crisis
Update: Some guy named George Monbiot did the analysis better than me: The Pleasures of the Flesh
From Soaring food prices now top threat, IMF says:
WASHINGTON - The global food crisis has pushed aside fears of a recession and mounting banking woes as top priority for the world's economic leaders
Ministers representing 185 countries agreed on the weekend that soaring food prices threaten global calamity and pledged to co-operate on a solution to save the world's poorest people from starvation.
But that solution remains elusive.
Maybe it's just the veggie hippie in me talking, but:
- Put a tax on meat
- Reduce subsidies to CAFO operations
- Let's all give up on ethanol
Boy, those sure are elusive.
There is no food shortage. There is a collosal, immoral, tragic economic misallocation of subsidies and taxes, and thus nutrients and arable land towards 5% to 25% efficient protein and probably negatively-efficient transportation fuel replacements. This crisis is policy-created, and it must be policy-destroyed. Preferably before millions of people starve, riot, and turn back development in some of the most fragile states by many years.
/life/sabbatical/Six Months; Two Months; a Train Ride
Quietly, we passed the six-months-in-Toronto mark on March 18th. A week later, I passed the two-months-on-leave mark. Easter happened -- ending Lent, and my associated restriction on durable purchases, and presently I'm on a train to Halifax. The rest is just details and thoughts.
I like this part of Nova Scotia, that the train is rumbling through. This is my fourth or fifth time through it by
rail, and for a while I'm pretty sure the rail line was twinned with the highway I cycled on for my first distance
cycling trip. With a rented cell phone, home-made energybars and a low-ball estimate of 90km/day, I ended up clearing
500km two days early, and catching the train home from Bathurst.
Mostly the train is going through a 6m-wide clearway sliced out of empty wilderness, with the occasional cluster of
houses wizzing by. We're an hour behind schedule, which is about two hours ahead of schedule from past experience.
The trainmuffins are terrible -- in ingredients, texture, flavour, excessive packaging (a plastic package wrapped in shrinkwrap!) -- but they were on special for 75 cents since they were day-olds. Actually, probably more like 10-day-olds given the preservatives. I ate breakfast with a fellow named Ken who did cable installing near Kingston before retiring to PEI. I'm not sure if it was cable-as-in-TV or cable-as-in-industrial-wiring. He had some good stories about driving across the southern US as a "long-hair" in the 70s and taking a lot of intimidation and threats for it, and about getting caught on the open seas while sailing. The oatmeal portion was too small, but there was lots of good fresh fruit.
I woke up yesterday feeling nauseous and generally a little under the weather, uncertain about whether I was going to go ahead with the journey I'd decided on only the night before. Around 10:15, after some mini-wheats and OJ went down okay, I decided to run with it; by 11:30 I had rush-packed, caught a subway to Union Station, bought a one-way ticket, and boarded the train. One-way tickets are so much more dramatic than the return kind. Running on not much food, with a headache and general malaise on top of my post-by-election lassitude, I spent a couple hours feeling claustrophobic, unmotivated, and vaguely regretting the commitment of 28-hoour train journey. I wondered drearily if that's comparable to what some unlucky people feel like all the time: slightly unhealthy and unmotivated. (I've been reading Matthew Good's blog, which is an interesting mix of tough health and happiness problems with a lot of motivation; makes me glad I have both, most of the time.) The last two weeks have given weight to the implied warnings of the people who remarked about my leave that they didn't think they'd have the motivation to do get up every day and be productive. After a long but wakeful sleep in the too-cold train ("I thought I was riding a train, not a freezer," lamented an elderly man at breakfast this morning. "Never again!") I feel much better today.
Six months in Toronto. 5 of them winter. Bring on the spring! 'nuf said.
Two months of leave -- if I had internet access on the train, I'd check my objectives list, panic about how many of them were unstarted, and take immediate action. Good thing there's no internet!
Okay, so the six months of Torontonianism hasn't been so bad as to be summarized in one whingy sentence -- I think we've settled in fairly well, with some community involvement, a few gigs, lots of restaurants, some exploring, one play, and some germinating friendships. In fact both Clare and I have already met "friend-potentials" who are leaving Toronto soon; it seems a very transitory place for people our age. But yes, bring on the spring; even I'm growing weary of winter. Poor Clare.
The end of Lent ended my somewhat-successful embargo on purchases of durables. One of the policy decisions was what to about gifts; for outgoing gifts they were counted in my three material purchases (two gifts, one corn-plastic filled duvet) and for incoming I just ignored it, not wanting to unduly expand the intent of the project. But then since this period included my birthday, which included gifts of cash since I'm so hard to buy for, I ended up stretching things a bit, and buying some CDs, some cloths, and a replacement iPod. All within the budget of the cash I'd been given for my birthday, but it certainly seems like a cop-out. (Though to be fair I didn't realize the period included my birthday until I was rather well into it.) Maybe next year I'll do it again with more buy-in from those that might give me stuff. I don't think it actually made a huge difference, which is mostly what I wanted to find out; most of my consumption is..err..consumables.
To that end, I also did one shopping trip with a meal plan, after reading someone somewhere saying how much it cut down on their food waste; we got pretty good results too, I think. Just the process of working out roughly how many nights would actually involve cooking, rather than going out, grabbing a sub before a night course, or eating something quick from the freezer. It feels very hyper-organized to have a list of what to eat, but it seemed pretty effective. We'll see if it continues.
In blog news, I now use Google Reader pretty heavily to read too many repetitive, redundant, duplicative blogs about stuff I'm interested in -- there will be a cull soon -- and I've integrated into the blog the stream of items I've found and shared for interest, humour or perspective. Go, web 2.0!
/life/sabbatical/Finding Leverage
One of my goals for my leave was to find leverage: places where I could make a disproportionate impact, by helping the right group of people with the right goals at the right time, where they needed the things I could bring to the table.
I think I found it. Yesterday's by-election put the Green Party nearly tied with the NDP in three of the ridings. It probably squished expectations for an imminent election. And it looks like it helped push the Liberals towards Green Tax Shift.
The campaign was a blast: I met a tonne of people, knocked on many hundreds of doors, said "Chris Tindal" twelve zillion times, and jumped in on election day to help repair a logistical problem. Elections Canada was beta-testing a new system for reporting who had voted to the campaigns (I didn't even know this happened) and it caused a knock-on effect on the paperwork required for scrutineers to get that information.
The whole thing was hugely educational, both as a citizen and as a partisan. I learned how elections work from the inside, which is great -- this was one of the best-run Green Party of Canada campaigns ever, as I understand it, and differed in scale but not kind from the Liberal campaign, at least as far as I could see: they had organized lunches for scrutineers, and plenty more of them, and we ordered pizza and didn't have as many volunteers heading out, but it was a full-blown election machine, and that was great to see.
Here are some photos from the Victory Party. There's some good neutral analysis over here. And there's some good commentary on the campaign machine.
I feel like I have a second lease on my leave -- the last few weeks have been pretty campaign focussed, though "full time" isn't quite accurate, since I've been keeping up with some other stuff. But now my time is suddenly re-freed, which is nice.
/life/sabbatical/Got a Gig!
Yesterday I had a chat with someone from the Toronto office of the Pembina Institute. I'll be ramping up slowly with them, by mutual agreement. It's a one-person office, and she's very busy, while I'm spending a lot of free time working to get Chris Tindal elected, or at least record-setting vote numbers.
Though I don't think they're secretive about what they're doing, I don't want to go into detail -- it's related to the Renewable is Doable campaign. And electricity grids. And things that are not entirely dissimilar to my work at Google. And they want me to be a Combinatorist and Optimizationist, per my degree title -- better bust out those linear algebra textbooks. woop woop.
After a few weeks, I'll hopefully be going in two days a week, which should suit me just fine. Then I will design in a tiny component of the system that shaves a rounding error from every power transmission and diverting it to my private lair, where I will use the power to build an army of monsters.
Please don't tell anyone.
