Here in the Glebe in Ottawa we live in a village within the city. We have our own main street (Bank Street) that has it all: hardware store, photo store, stationery, restaurants, groceries, pharmacy, flowers, even some clothing. We can go a long time without trips to far-off big box land and it’s one of the reasons that Jen and I wanted to stay.

The city is planning for a major reconstruction of this street. It’s needed because we have 100 year old sewers and watermains, but it offers the challenge of a total rebuild. The burning question: what should change, and what should stay the same on this relatively narrow 10-block stretch of urban village.

We attended the open house a few weeks ago, and the comments period is closing this Tuesday. I’m putting my response behind a cut, as non-Ottawa people may not care.

Read the Complete Entry

 › letters     2005-04-24 15:41   ...1 comment

Another great Canadian micro-brew is being bought by a faceless mega-brewer. This time it’s Creemore Springs which is being bought by Molson.

Apparently Molson wants to keep everything the same at the craft brewer, but increase their sales, spending and geographical penetration. That seems like a contradictory statement to me. We have seen this happen in the past, and I’ve always had to find a new beer.

Ah, for the lost days of Hart’s Festive Brown Ale (link via archive.org).

 › food     2005-04-23 15:39   ...0 comments

As we are about to become homeowners here in Ontario, I have been thinking about our electrical service. Like many jurisdictions we have a deregulated electrical market. I generally don’t think these are a good idea (especially at the consumer end of things) and now need to figure out whether to buy power at the market rate (which can go up and down) or lock in with a contract at a particular rate.

One positive option is to try to support environmentally friendly generation of power. You’d think that with a deregulated market you could just buy green power, but it is actually a good deal more complicated than that.

Here’s my understanding of the process: In Ontario the guys who make the power just jam it into the wires and it comes straight to me; I don’t pay these power-making guys, however, I pay some middle man who bought it from them in what I call Big Power Deals™. The middle man also keeps a bunch of my money for the privilege of making these Big Power Deals™.

Because I don’t make Big Power Deals™ I can’t choose to buy from green power making guys. The green guys just jam their power into the wires along with everyone else. There’s one price that power producers get paid, and the green guys make the same as everybody else. This would seem to preclude buying and supporting green power.

There is a way to buy green power though. Some clever people have determined that green power is worth more than non-green power because it has clear benefits (like lower health costs due to a cleaner environment, etc.). To steal a sentence from one outfit: The value of Clean Power has been divided into two components, the energy value and the environmental value. So, you can’t just buy green power, but you can buy the environmental value of the green power.

So, if you want to buy green power you want to buy two separate things:

First, you want to buy the energy part of the power. That’s easy… the green power guys already sell that into the standard energy system and get paid for doing so at the normal rate. So just go buy a regular electrical contract from one of the middle-men and you’ll be hooked up (pardon the pun).

Second, you want to buy the greenness of the power. So totally independently of your electrical metering and service contract, go to Green Tags Ontario. You buy from them a ‘tag’. In exchange for this, they go to a green power producer and get them to actually send a big whack (1 megawatt-hour, or 1 MWh) of green power through the grid and the middle-men. In so doing they will displace some crummy old dirty power which would otherwise have been put onto the grid. In other words, the tag is essentially a coupon for the environmental value of that green power.

Where does the money you pay for the tag go? Basically, if you want to set up a windmill or other clean power source, you are going to be paid by the normal electrical system for selling your power, but not compensated for the fact that the power is more expensive to generate. The green tags are sold by a non-profit co-op which basically invests in clean power generation, and ensures that green power produced here is delivered to the Ontario market (thus allowing us to shut down our polluting coal stations). The co-op helps with the increased costs associated with green generation. As green power gets cheaper to produce over time (and governments are starting to reward it), the co-op’s contracts state that it will share in increased profits from clean power over time; the co-op can use the revenue to stimulate even more green power in a snowball effect (or give power rebates to green power users or whatever it wants to do with the profits).

The other cool thing about decoupling the energy and environmental value is that homeowners can start small. You can buy as many tags as you want, meaning that you can source anywhere from 0% - 100% or more of your personal electrical usage from green power. The average home of four uses around 10 MWh of power each year. One tag represents 1 MWh, so if an average household buys one tag a year, then 10% of the power it uses will be green. One tag currently costs $75 per year. You don’t even need to own your house to buy a tag — anyone can buy them and they are totally separate from your power contract and how much you actually consume.

We won’t buy 10 tags, because the cost is prohibitive, but think about this: The Ontario power mix is 30% coal, 30% hydro and 40% nuclear. The coal is very bad, right? But if you were to buy 3 tags then you’d be getting your personal power mix from 30% wind, 30% hydro and 40% nuclear… now that is a satisfying change!

More info: Overview. There are three producers listed there, but I think the best (and incidentally cheapest) is the non-profit green tags guys listed above.

Also interesting is the idea of generating your own power. Ontario now supports Net Metering where you generate some of your own power with no need for separate circuits or batteries. And here is some information on home-based Wind Power Generation.

    2005-04-20 19:56   ...2 comments

I like the Safari web browser, but it is lacking a privacy option that I think is important. I want Safari to accept cookies, but to throw them away at the end of my session.

Background about cookies for those not in the know: The web serves files over transient connections. That means that if you request two web pages in a row from the same server, the server has no idea that you are the same person requesting both pages. This is both a great benefit and a terrible mistake in terms of system design. It is a benefit because (amongst other reasons) the powers that be have trouble tracking an individual to profile their use of the web. It is a mistake because many sites (think of your online banking) want to establish a session with you; they want to authenticate you using your password and then exchange a number of requests with someone who they hope continues to be you.

To partially mitigate the problem, Netscape developed the Cookie system. It was a silly name, but the idea was OK… The website essentially tells your web browser to take a number, and present that number whenever it asks for a page. Now you can have sessions, because that number identifies you. As long as the server gives out numbers intelligently, it can be reasonably sure that you are still you. This is how your online banking works.

Cookies have a light side and a dark side. They can help you do your online banking and then expire when you quit your browser. The site that hands it out can also ask that it be retained until a certain time; this is more problematic. This is how Amazon.com always seems to know your name, your browsing habits and what books you might like.

As you know, many browsers allow you to switch off cookies. This is a bad trade-off, however, if you want to do any banking online, or establish a session with any website at all. A few very good browsers allow you to do something smart: accept all the cookies, but throw them away when your browser is closed — even if the website had asked that they be kept indefinitely. That means that Amazon can try to track you (and they will, while your browser is open) but tomorrow you look like a new person they’ve never seen before. Meanwhile your banking keeps working.

Safari does not support this option. Which is my biggest irritation with it. However, someone has found a way to manipulate the filesystem permissions to produce the same effect! There’s a discussion of how to do it here. I haven’t tried it in Tiger, but it works in Panther!

 › technology     2005-04-18 22:57   ...0 comments

this is highly amusing.

 › funny     2005-04-17 00:51   ...1 comment

Just thought I’d make a quick post to generally update what’s going on in my life at the moment.

Work: Working on three projects at the same time, none of them currently announced, but suffice it to say that things are busy there. Not too stressful, but never enough time to get it all done (which is a bit of a stress in and of itself). We recently hired Kev and that seems to be working out very well. He is helping to get the load off of Chris and the other Kevin, and getting a bit of coding in for good measure.

Home: The apartment is a bit messy at the moment. In house news, we have (today) applied for our mortgage. I was hoping this would be signed and sealed today, but their approval zone decided to have someone drive by to make sure there is a house on our lot or something; we should hear back from them mid-week. This will draw a successful, but stressful home financing period to a close. I have a half-written entry regarding the house buying process that I may post someday. (Not sure yet if that one is going to be for prime time, or just kept for posterity on my laptop… it has some uncomplimentary things to say about some of the professionals who supposedly helped.)

School: School has been a source of high stress for the last few months. Basically I’ve been a bit stalled. I’ve been reading and reading to try to prepare for a meeting with one of the experts who came to my talk last year. I have some data to analyse relating to the model I was working on, but little idea how to move forward. Basically, a cognitive science student should have more to offer than a just-so story about his model, but crowd and fire simulations are obviously hard to test. To make a long story short, I met with the expert and she had some suggestions on how to move forward. Not a case of “take this free data to test your model with,” but at least some ideas on how to move forward.

Sports: I am doing the running room’s learn-to-run clinic again this spring. Last summer I basically stopped running after the May 5k race — “I’ll just take a few weeks off…”. (Although I did do a fair amount of biking last summer.) Part of the problem last year was that I didn’t make any connections in the running clinic. This year the group is nicer, and I look forward to chatting with the other runners on Monday nights. Also I am doing the Wednesday night practises, which I can continue with once the clinic is over. As of last weekend our bikes have been fixed up, so I may do some biking to work too.

Wedding: We are still targeting February 2006, and are thinking seriously about the Museum of Nature as the location. This location (believe it or not) is going to be gutted as part of their reno plan, but likely not until 2008. We went to a wedding show today (mercifully not too big) and made one happy discovery. The owner of the photo studio that shot May and Dan’s wedding has moved to Ottawa and opened a branch here. This is good news as I love the photos from their wedding. The photos are important to us.

Stress: With all this on the go, as you might imagine, my stress levels are a bit high right now. Too high, really, as they are starting to make me feel unwell. I’m trying to compensate for this by trying to create weekend downtime, but this cuts in to school productivity, so may prove counter-productive in the long run. I think once the house is financed and insured I’ll feel better, and am looking forward to the move being complete.

I was feeling like I was starting a sore throat, but am feeling better today. Perhaps I will go for a run this aft after all.

    2005-04-16 16:29   ...2 comments

Well, it has been a fantabulous weekend here in Ottawa. The temperatures have been mild (15 °C) with brilliant cloudless blue skies. The snows have mostly receded to those shady areas where the days just aren’t hot enough to penetrate.

We decided to drive up to the cottage, to see how things had come through the winter, to see how far the snow had melted (45 minutes North of town) and just generally to get out into the country a bit to enjoy the weather.

Of course, I had to bring along my camera (recently described as my third arm — except it disables an arm instead of adding one). The light was excellent and I got a few good shots.

Side of the boathouse

Read the Complete Entry

    2005-04-10 17:49   ...2 comments

Voldemort can’t stop the rock. Wow.

 › cute     2005-04-09 01:25   ...0 comments

I was thinking tonight at supper that we need a cooking meme. Here’s how it works. You think of, and post the recipe for a food item that you prepare just a little bit differently than everyone else does. The catch is that you italicise (or otherwise call out) your formerly secret ingredient / recipe / twist for all to enjoy. It doesn’t have to be a fancy food item, or a long recipe… just something that others may not have thought of.

Here’s a couple to get you started:

Sweet Daddy’s Spicy Salad Sauce
Blend equal parts olive oil and balsamic vinegar, a small blob of mustard to help them mix, a dash each of salt and pepper and then spice it with cayenne pepper to jazz it up.

Awesome Asian Omelette
In south-east asia they add fish sauce and sugar to beaten eggs to make great tasting omelettes. Try it with coarsely chopped onion and bean sprouts as the toppings. (Optionally, you can make this one spicy as well… add Thai bird peppers.)

Now hop to it. I am licking my lips in anticipation.

 › memes     2005-04-02 20:51   ...14 comments