General

Signs of rebellion, signs signifying nothing, signs of fish slowly cooking

I took a photo of a woman smoking in front of a No Smoking sign at Metrotown. She got up and left after I took the picture, though I don’t think she actually saw me (I was not close by).

Yes No Smoking
A sign of smoking

I see smokers doing this a lot. I wonder if they are simply natural born rebels (“You can’t tell me smoking is addictive, smelly and expensive!”) or if smoking somehow causes them to read signs and interpret them in the opposite manner (“I must smoke here, I see the little cigarette symbol.”) or if maybe there are so few places for people to smoke now that they just smoke anywhere outside because nicotine/addiction/etc.

Mostly I just like the juxtaposition.

Here’s another one I took in Central Park. This is a nice place to go for a leisurely stroll, especially if your hip isn’t stupidly sore. I hadn’t been there for awhile and went to consult the map to find the little duck pond so I could look delightedly at the ducks. The map was kind of a “make your own adventure” thing:

Mystery map
Can’t get there from here.

I eventually found the pond with the ducks and noticed it was also stocked with zombie fish. You can’t really tell in the shot below but if it was animated it would look no different because these were the least active but not actually dead fish I have ever seen. Given that it was recently confirmed that this July was the hottest since they started keeping records (and also the hottest month ever) the fish are probably swimming in the equivalent of warm soup. I felt bad for them, even though their hips would be perfectly healthy if, you know, fish had hips.

Very slowly cooking fish
Very slowly cooking fish at Central Park.

By the by, I realize I have the photographic eye of a tree sloth. If I was feeling a little more limber and daring I might have tried climbing a tree for a more dramatic angle on the fish, but I was sore (the hip, you see), it was hot and why risk falling on the fish and making their lives even more wretched? Plus I wouldn’t put it past myself to drown in two feet of water. I am not Aquaman.

Comfortable dorm living

I am looking at a Canadian Tire email flyer titled “Find everything you need for comfortable dorm living.” The items highlighted include:

  • Mastercraft Metal Sawhorse
  • MAXIMUM Impact Wrench
  • Cuisinart Forged Knife Set
  • Mastercraft 8 Gallon Compressor

This sounds like Saw Goes to College. Or maybe that fresh-faced college student is really into renovating his tiny dorm room. And then knives, somewhere.

I’m just kidding, Canadian Tire. I love your store and your fake money, too. I still have a giant stack of it somewhere I’m saving to cash in on a ratchet set or something.

Federal Election 2015: Long, terrible and depressing

I’m not going to offer incisive analysis of the ongoing federal election campaign. Here’s all you need to know:

  • It’s really long. Most Canadian federal election campaigns are five or six weeks long. This one goes on for an interminable eleven weeks because the Conservatives have lots of money to spend and, I don’t know, I guess maybe they figure the NDP, Liberals, Green Party and others will run out of money and the last three weeks will feature nothing but glorious, shining Conservative ads extolling the bright future of Harper’s Canada.
  • The Conservatives are horrible. Anyone knowingly, willingly voting for them is a fool. Don’t vote, fools. Stay at home and shout angrily at the TV instead. Speaking of which, this is my favorite wish-it-was-a-campaign-ad so far:

Context of angry Conservative supporter can be found here: Stephen Harper supporter hurls profanity at journalists over Duffy questions (The image I first saw in the Canadian politics discussion thread on Broken Forum).

I’ll report back with the results on October 19. Don’t make me an angry not-Conservative supporter, Canada!

Happy (hot) Canada Day!

There are probably a billion jokes about Canada floating around the web today. Everyone knows how to use Google so I’m not linking to any of them. If you use Bing I’m still not linking to them but I salute your rebellious, free-spirited nature.

For the record, this Canada Day falls midweek, which makes it kind of sucky when it comes to planning holiday activities. I’m sure there’s a petition online for recognizing the official day of confederation while moving the actual day off to the first Monday of the month, making for a nice three day weekend.

I like three day weekends and I like Canada, so I would support such an initiative.

In the meantime it continues to be hot with more hot in the forecast. With the temperature currently hovering around 30ºC the jokes about us living in igloos on vast plains of permafrost may die out in another century or two.

Ominous signs

My usual running spots are Burnaby Lake and the Brunette River trail. Metro Vancouver has in recent years provided copious new signs that provide maps, reminders and advise one of the park rules. They also strongly imply you may be lucky to get out alive as I will demonstrate below.

The Brunette River trail is an approximately two km long gravel service road used by Metro Vancouver parks vehicles and CN Rail trucks (the road parallels the train tracks, located not too far off behind a line of trees). It’s a nice place to run because the road rarely has traffic on it and is nice and wide, accommodating runners, pedestrians and cyclists with room to spare. Most of the time.

Upon entering the roadway you are currently greeted by these signs:

fire bad, water bad

  1. Venturing off the trail may result in you drowning.
  2. Venturing off the trail may result in you burning to death.
  3. Maybe both.

If you make it to the end of the trail and successfully enter Burnaby Lake Regional Park, you will find this sign at the Cariboo Dam:

water still bad

You at least now know why you may find yourself drowning if you risk venturing off the trail. It’s the unpredictable killer dam upstream unleashing fatal torrents of water.

The Cariboo Road entrance to Burnaby Lake is replete with signs. I would probably exhaust the disk space of this site trying to host images all of them. Here’s one set you will see as you pass through the gate to get in:

fire and bicycles bad

  1. No vehicles here. You will not be run over. Technically that’s not true because parks vehicles have free reign so you can in fact be run down by one of those little two-seater jobs they tool around in.
  2. No cyclists. You will not be knocked down by some dope on a bike. Technically this is also not true because people break this rule all the time. They often seem to be the worst cyclists, too.
  3. More “you may burn to death by going off the trail.”

You may notice another post festooned with signs beyond this one. Let’s take a closer look.

bears bad

  1. Pets are leashed so no worries about some dog getting in your way or attacking you. This rule is broken so regularly that the sign should actually read “Pets MUST be leashed (haha).”
  2. See above, re: cyclists. Some entrances to the park have two or three NO CYCLING signs. Cyclists cannot read.
  3. You will be eaten by a bear. This one doesn’t mention whether or not you should stay on the trail so you’re probably going to get eaten no matter where you go.

In summary, while at Burnaby Lake Regional Park, if you venture off the trail you may find yourself chased by a bear, catch on fire and then get swept away in an unexpectedly raging river. At least the raging river will put the fire out. There’s probably another bear in the river, though, waiting for a fish, you or an especially clumsy cyclist. You’re pretty much doomed no matter what.

To quote one of the other signs I didn’t get a picture of: Enjoy your visit!

engadget.com: Big Picture Edition

engadget is a fluffy tech website. It doesn’t provide pages of benchmarks and charts like AnandTech or in-depth analysis like Ars Technica. It provides stories about consumer electronics in simple, easily-digested stories. And that’s okay. I don’t always want comprehensive.

The site has apparently gone through a quiet redesign in the last few days or an intern has gotten his unauthorized hands on the code. The main change is the left column that lists stories in chronological order has been widened. Eyeballing it, it now seems to occupy a little over two-thirds of the page. As every story also includes an image below the headline, the images are correspondingly bigger, too. The image in the Vimeo story shown below is 960×535 pixels. My browser window (on a 24″ 1920×1200 pixel monitor) is currently sized to 1512×1000 pixels (this is somewhat randomly chosen but seems to work for my browsing needs). This means the image–a stock photo of an iPhone showing Vimeo’s Cameo app icon–is the single largest element in my browser window. The actual content of the story is reduced to three lines before I need to scroll to see the rest of it.

Larger than life
Would you like a very big image? Yes, you would!

Having stock photos and other unneeded images dominate the page is bad design. I don’t know why they would do this, there doesn’t seem to be a logical reason for it.

Anyway, I don’t have the time or inclination to complain further. I’ll just stop here with another image of another story from the site. Enjoy very large stock image!

Also larger than life
Robot hand likes friendly pretend smartphone.

Another incredible deal on Apple products – act soon!

Until April 7th Best Buy Canada is offering some boffo deals on various Apple products. Check out this bargain for the iPad Air 2:

iPad Air 2 big savings

Are you wearing a hat? You may want to hold onto it before reading further, lest it zing off your head from the shock. Are you ready? This deal amounts to a colossal savings of…

1.4%

I think it’s fair to say this will put an end to the notion that Apple hardware carries premium pricing.

Posting is hard

Actually, it’s not, it just takes focus and a little time. I have a smidgen of the latter and not much of the former lately. If this were a diary-style blog (and I’m sure there’s one or two out there) I’d go into lavish detail over what has distracted me from posting but it isn’t, so I won’t.

All shall remain shrouded in mystery.

I will try to post more, though.

For now, enjoy this random cat gif I found after doing a random search in Google:

Funny-Cat-GIF

Signs (not the movie) and coyotes

Back on June 1 2012 I encountered a coyote while running. It was ahead of me on the trail and dashed off into the bushes as I approached, probably because I wasn’t carrying a nice juicy baby in my arms. I also encountered coyotes twice this summer on my way to or from Burnaby Lake. In each case the coyote scooted away at my approach, then stopped at a safe distance as I passed by. Again, each probably did so because I wasn’t covered in layers of sausage links or raw meat.

Coyotes are generally to be avoided because you never know. Maybe the one you see is scouting ahead for a pack that will tear you apart. Maybe the one you stumble across is starving and will tear you apart. Maybe it’s just in a bad mood and will tear you apart.

The City of Vancouver knows this and near the trail that circumvents the Langara Golf Course they have erected this sign:

coyote warning sign
One thing I’ve learned while jogging is that people ignore signs. I’m fairly certain that if you put up a sign that said the following:

WARNING: If you take ten more steps you will fall into a pit filled with lava and large iron spikes. This will kill you very painfully. You should immediately turn around now.

At the end of the day the lava and iron spike pit would be filled with so many bodies that they would pile above the edge of the pit and thus the pit would no longer be an obstacle to all the other people ignoring the sign.

I am being unfair, though. Many people do read signs. They just interpret them. I’m not sure why they do this. Perhaps it comes from a lot of dangerous free thinking or a general belief that rules are for bad people and no one sees themselves as bad so the rules obviously don’t apply to them.

With that in mind, I present the interpretation of the coyote sign that many people may have:

coyote sign perceived

This is not my best example of sign fakery but I spent way too much time on it as it is. At least I put my research skills to use in trying to determine which font was used (my best guess is Century Gothic).

By the way, if you use your favorite search engine (okay, Google) you can find enough stories about coyote attacks to convince you to never step outside again. Especially if you’re a juicy baby. Heck, just check out the Vancouver Coyote Sightings Map. There’s about a billion coyotes out there. Imagine if they all operated under some kind of hive mind and began a reign of terror. Now imagine someone writing a really crappy novel about it. Now go buy the novel on Amazon because I’m pretty sure someone has already written this book.