Why are Toronto Parks the First Choice in Dump Sites?

So, the Friends of Christie Pits Park are not only protesting their park being used as a temporary dump by Toronto, but they're also protesting the use of the pesticide Permethrin (Dragnet FT), a rodenticide (Generation Mini Blocks), and a chemical to slow down decomposition of organic matter (OCS Deodorant). Well, really.

How insane can you be, to prefer rats and mosquitoes over Permethrin and rodent killing traps. I mean have we become so complacent that we've forgotten that malaria used to ravage humans here and that pests carry many diseases, even if the plague is not in the Toronto area. Have we forgotten how ill pests can make us, worse perhaps than Permethrin, especially as they're all making a comeback between climate change, no more use of DDT, and the city's garbage policy. Only West Nile got our attention in recent years, but the anxiety over it too is fading.

That was my response when I watched the television news reporting that the Friends are against using the chemicals as they pose a hazard to humans worse than rats, flies, and mosquitoes and strikers are blocking the pesticide trucks as a civic duty (yeah, right). But then I started wondering why the city is suddenly so worried about rats when their garbage policy has led to an increased number of rats and raccoons whose territorial fights merit not even a shrug from them? Is it because the garbage is now in plain view of the public and thus the rats will be too -- unlike normal when garbage at transfer stations is hidden from all but the relative few who trek there -- and that obvious twosome will make citizens start to wonder about rat control in general or about the infrequent garbage pickups? Or is it because they don't want the real message of the Friends to get out?

Why are parks the first choice in dump sites?

On the CBC radio show Metro Morning, the Friends of Christie Pits' spokesman Boris Steipe said he wasn't too concerned about Permethrin and the deodorant as they've been well tested and long used, but he was concerned about what they didn't know: what's in the leachate from all those garbage bags. (It always pays to listen to the horse itself as reporters usually manage to skew the main message, although it doesn't help that the different Friends seem to have different concerns and the strikers are mixing it up too.) He knew the bags are leaking as they drip when carried across the sidewalk and into the hockey rink where they're tossed into the growing pile. On their website and in news reports, the Friends worry about that leachate trickling into the ground water (I think Toronto's ground water is pretty much a lost cause personally) and Garrison Creek. Yet Steipe said that the rain is accumulating into a turgid pond because being a rink, the water is not leaking out. So I find that part of their argument a bit, um, like skating on thin ice.

Still, his question about why parks first is a good one. The city is full of wastelands bigger than multiple hockey rinks, ginormous parking lots -- which in winter get shrunk in useful size by snowplows, so we're already used to dealing with smaller lots -- hidden under-highway deserts, all places where people tend not to congregate, children tend not to roll around on, and which are already polluted, yet City Council in concert with the city management chose some hockey rinks children use extensively and mostly green spaces sitting cheek by jowl to houses as the first choice in temporary dump sites.

Since they've always done it, it's an easy decision for the city to make, no thinking involved, kind of like Council's decision to approve their own cost-of-living pay increase as they froze non-union workers' pay and faced a looming strike. Also, car drivers would honk like mad if even one parking space was taken from them. But since the city has decided to make this strike their line-in-the-sand, they ought to have known that it will probably last the summer (well OK, maybe they're dumb enough not to have realised that) and that using the parks as dumps would essentially shut them down during the whole of the hot weather when we need them most, especially inner city kids with no means of escaping city heat.

But these dumps being near homes does serve one purpose: to so overwhelm citizens' noses that they'll scream to their Councillors in ever shriller choruses for back-to-work legislation and then City Council will say we wanted to wait it out but Torontonians inundated us too much with protests, so what could we do but, uh, cave.

Happy Canada Day 2009!!!

Happy Canada Day 2009!!!, originally uploaded by Points North.

Canada is a paradise. That's what I thought when we came here. Empty streets, clean pee-free sidewalks, trees and more trees, and cool grass under the tootsies. Most amazing of all, everyone had a car!

That was my childhood impression. As I grew up, I noticed other differences. Racism infected my schoolmates and society in general, but it was nothing as invasive as in India where there was always a reason to look down upon or despise "others" whoever the "others" were. The weather was marvellous, ranging from soft white flakes that fell from the sky to Bombay-like weather to the amazing glory of trees turning red and gold in the Fall. And then in the spring, all this growth starting anew in concert with the crack of the bat. And yet...

Education is revered in India, but here it's despised as if learning is a way to take childhood away from children, with ne'er the thought that children by necessity learn everyday, otherwise how would they leave diapers behind, learn to speak, learn to share, learn to work with others, and on and on and on. Children love to learn; it's innate. It's adults who hate it. Yet in the current information and knowledge revolution, it's the country that reveres education and learning that's going to prosper. And yet...

Those Canadians who came before us did not relish living in the stone age; they worked hard and long to build a modern, prosperous nation out of dark forests and raging waterways.

I wonder what drove them? For it seems to me that that gushing desire to create, to build has melted into a puddle of complacency.

I discovered part of the answer when I travelled north, way north. Canada's spirit lives in its wilderness. We here in Toronto can get glimpses of it in our deep, leafy ravines and the wildness of Lake Ontario on a stormy day. But one must travel to the northern territories to more than just feel it. Seeing the young mountains of the Yukon, experiencing chicken lunch time in a small store in a small place on the one road snaking north, marvelling at a forest burnt down 50 years ago with nary a new growth yet to be seen, boggling at the rigorous hike men and a few women endured to get to Dawson City while gazing upon the river churning nearby, imagining that river flowing into all the large and small waters that bless our land, all that and more makes you feel the deep, dangerous heart of Canada, a heart that beats for her people yet expects much.

That heart must've been what drove our ancestors to tame pockets of wilderness into cities, to ambitiously build a railroad from coast to coast, to declare that the 20th century belongs to Canada, to forge a national identity on bloody battlefields, to imagine and build places like Chalk River, to create a social safety net that alleviated so much worry, to bring the Constitution home, to aver that we are strong and mature enough to handle free trade. Our past leaders always dreamt big for us, visions almost as vast as our north, and we'd follow them, cheering and kicking and screaming but never slowing them down. Their courage, their persistence, their imagination built us a paradise.

I wish all my fellow Canadians a happy day in Paradise!!

Toronto Garbage Strike Thoughts

It's only Day 3 of the city workers' strike, but you'd think it had been several weeks already, as it has been in Windsor, with the way Torontonians are reacting, lining up at transfer stations with one bag of garbage or dumping garbage in parks or stuffing soda cans in those tapes around the sidewalk trash containers. I don't know what the big deal is at this point because our garbage is only picked up every 2 weeks; our recycling is only picked up every 2 weeks; our biodegradables are picked up weekly, which is also a long time for items that rot within a day. But that's what the city has gotten us used to; that's the level of service we've grumbingly acquiesced to. So you'd think that being obedient sheep, we'd not notice any change for about 2 weeks.

That's for householders. It's a different story for businesses like restaurants that generate mounds of rotting trash every day. From a public health point of view, you'd think the city would've figured out a way for these business owners, who really don't have time to line up until arrogant union workers let them through, to dispose of their trash quickly. But this lack of foresight marks Mayor David Miller's and City Council's response to this strike. Yes, they told us transfer stations would be open; yes, they're arranging for local dumps in a few days; yes, they've arranged for a special side door entrance at City Hall for parents using a day care there, which Miller has promptly abused, being as his time needs are more important than all those poor schmucks lining up at Bermondsey transfer station. Yet they seem to have been taken by surprise at workers blocking the entrance to the garbage dumping points. Or have they?

Miller on the Bill Carroll show this morning on CFRB sounded firm and resolute and blunt with Torontonians who're already making this dumpy city more of a dump. But he used typical legal, obfuscating language to talk about the incendiary tactics of the union at the transfer stations. He talked of taking days and days to resolve this situation, a situation that occurred in the last strike and so was perfectly foreseeable and thus preventable. Why did the city not already have in place a conduct policy for workers picketing those stations when the strike started? Why when I've seen court injuctions happen in a day, will similar efforts in this situation take till next week? Why is the security not there for the citizens of this city, but to ensure union workers get their way? I liked the boldness of one Torontonian who ignored the picket line to dump his trash and then helped an old man with his trash. Such compassion is missing in the workers' tactics and the city's entire garbage policy, of which I've ranted about in the past, a policy designed only for healthy, strong people with lots of time on their hands.

It seems to me that the prematurely pissed off attitude of Torontonians is because of that garbage policy. People suddenly see an opportunity to get rid of their garbage in a timely fashion instead of storing it for weeks on end. And, as well, perhaps it wasn't just me whose garbage wasn't picked up the week before the strike. They tell you it'll take one to two business days to pick up missed garbage (unlike same day in years past), but in reality it's the next regular garbage pickup day. Meanwhile, the city insists you keep your missed garbage outside. I guess they feel sorry for those poor garbage-diving raccoons who can never get enough. Since we haven't seen any massive garbage worker layoffs and since Toronto isn't doing massive infill housing building, then this situation is a simple drop in level of service. Less professional in their pickup; less professional in rectifying missed pickups. Meanwhile, a missed pickup has bigger ramifications than before as pickup frequencies have been quartered. Garbage missed once means garbage moulders on your property for a month.

Yet people did not protest in ways the union is protesting now to stop this downward spiral in service. Instead, like weasels in the dark, they rush to the dump sites to regain a semblance of old levels of service, only to be forced to wait for hours or not get in at all, thereby thwarting said oppportunity. They deserve it at this stage; they shouldn't have been so apathetic in the first place.

And that makes me wonder if anyone in Toronto has the guts to use this strike to make changes. I doubt citizenry are going to inundate Councillors with requests to resume old levels of service. And beyond venting their rage in polls and in illegal dumping, I doubt that citizens will give the city the kind of backing Windsorites have given their Mayor -- to take this strike as long as needed to ensure a more financially prudent contract that will allow workers to take short-term disability when truly needed. Already people are calling for the province to bring in back-to-work legislation. That means arbitration people, which means the union will get their way. Hello, wake up Torontonians! You really want your taxes to not inflate with this landmine of a sick-day-banking ball headed our way, then you gotta stick it out.

That also means Toronto citizens need to support the city, like Windsorites have theirs, by arranging, like one local Toronto resident, for neighbourhood garbage pickup, or local stations for helping people dispose of their garbage, like CFRB announced this morning, or looking after your neighbourhood parks (which is not much different than normal with parks' service dropping too over the years -- I don't know what the heck all those new hires are doing, sure as heck not looking after the city). And it means that you fellow Torontonians tell Miller loud and clear that he cannot represent the city, and, at the same time, underhandedly support the unions. If these banked sick days are really going to bankrupt the city, then he needs to roll back councillor pay increases -- show some belated leadership, for heaven's sake -- like how did this idiot not see the unions' legit grievance coming when he didn't insist on freezing Councillors' pay and gave all other workers good increases as well as ballooning the size of the civil service while stiffing non-union workers only?!!! -- and he needs to insist on holding out longer than the workers. And he can't do that if you start screaming for the province to step in! In the end, Torontonians need to ask themselves: who runs this city? You? The want-it-both-ways City Council? Or the workers?

Why Ignatieff Doesn't Want to Lead a Coalition Government

Ah, the classic decision dodge: strike up a panel. Prime Minister Stephen Harper gave Liberal Opposition Leader Michael Ignatieff a get-out-of-jail free card. Harper looks progressive, in agreeing to study Employment Insurance (EI) reform; Ignatieff gets to look like an action man. And neither has to call an election in the summer and piss off the entire nation. Oh brother. Such courage.

In all of this election talk, there is one thing missing: the possibility of a coalition. A coalition would force Ignatieff to work with the NDP, like he or Harper don't already when it suits them, but it would make him the Prime Minister, the one job he covets. He could then make those EI reforms, do something about isotopes, bring down that deficit rising like yeast out of control. Real action. But for some reason he's anti. Rather puzzling.

It could be he saw what happened in Ontario and fears it'll happen on the national level. Basically, the Liberals rose to power by forming a coalition government with the NDP. Real action happened. It was exciting times. The Liberals got heady on hegemony after 40 years of being in the political wilderness and called an election. But us Ontarians were fed up with the fat-cats holding majority governments, and we saw the Liberals weren't all that clean (or bright). As well, it may have been all Tory in Ontario for 40 years, but we had seen what Liberals did nationally and could extrapolate to the provincial level. Most importantly though, the coalition showed us that the NDP weren't opposition flakes after all; they had forced the Liberals to govern. The NDP won.

That could happen nationally, with one bonus: NDP Leader Jack Layton will have learnt from Bob Rae's mistake and be prepared to govern with prudence and with all Canadians in mind. The worst thing for Ignatieff is for the country to see that there really is a third choice, that we really aren't stuck with alternating Liberal and Conservative governments in perpetuity, that we do have power at the ballot box. And so Ignatieff talks tough, Harper strikes a panel, and Canadians remain leaderless and ungoverned.

Naked Ambition Nets Canada Zero, Harper and Ignatieff One

Naked ambition. Doesn't look good on a woman. And it doesn't look good on two men right now. Naked ambition got Prime Minister Stephen Harper the leadership of the new Conservative party, and naked ambition got Michael Ignatieff the leadership of the Liberal party, the only difference is that Harper retained a semblance of democracy by running for his leadership, while Iggy got his cronies to crown him. For a guy that didn't want to wait around for his kingship, he certainly is dragging his feet now, or so it seems, until you realise that power is the ultimate goal for these two men.

It's not that power is bad or that no one else wanted it this bad -- I remember former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney machinations to get into power and John Turner's long wait -- it's that neither seems to know what to do with it. It's one thing to want the power of the Prime Minister, to centralize it so that you become the de facto government; it's another to know how to run Canada. Reporters and talk radio show pundits sometimes talk about how they like our politicians, how they're decent people, but I wonder why these decent people are doing so little for our country and so much more for feeding their own power needs.

Harper first got elected to run the government in 2006. Unfortunately for him, it was a minority. The ultimate power is a majority, and so he played chicken and egg with the Liberals as they scrambled to find a new leader; he played with the smaller opposition parties to get his own way but had no problem calling Liberals traitors when they played that game this past winter; he ran attack ads and got away with it so kept it up and stayed in perpetual election mode, paying little attention to what was happening to the world's economy and the people of Canada and still got elected; but then he pissed off the Liberals, and Stéphane Dion showed backbone. Such an un-Liberal thing to do! So Harper goes sniffling off to the perfectly coiffed Governor General, called the coalition all sorts of names -- he doesn't like people stealing his ideas -- and got the electorate and Iggy to believe his lies, all to cement his power. But that running got him on the ropes for the first time. At last the Liberals had a way to get the Conservatives to run the country.

And so they promptly ditched Dion and hared away from the coalition, screaming with fear at such a democratic idea, and "elected" Ignatieff to replace him. Like Harper, he'd been plotting his ascent to the ultimate throne for awhile. But unlike Harper, he did much of it in a foreign country, not growing along with the rest of us as Canada found a new place in the world and a new sense of herself. Having secured the penultimate step to the ultimate power, he promptly folded before the Harper budget. I mean, could he have been more cowardly? Could he have been less like a leader? Could he have been more Harper-like? The man dismally disappointed. Acting like the mealy-mouthed wishy washy Canadians of yesterday who liked to opine on how we have no identity and we're not warriors, he talked about holding the Conservatives to account with these quarterly economic updates and asked for not one concession, not one change, not one addition, not one leadership-like policy, not one innovative idea. Oh no. Ignatieff plotted and schemed so that he could sit on his hands, until the Liberal war chest is ready for an election, and talked tough like the Emperor with no clothes. For him only the black-and-white American idea of one party governing will do. Harper doesn't like the coalition because it will put him in the Opposition; but he does like it if he gets to lead. Iggy, being more familiar with the American system now than the Canadian, can only think in terms of one party being in power and negates the opportunities a coalition would provide. Of course naked ambition doesn't like sharing power either.

Meanwhile, Harper, being in perpetual election mode, and perpetual pouting against anyone who stands up to him, fired the chair of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission over the shutdown of Chalk River as an antidote to acting, and with the complicity of the Opposition, led by the Liberals, did nothing, absolutely nothing to replace it, repair it, ensure a continual supply of medical isotopes. This action or non-action is typical of the new Harper-Ignatieff. All talk, no governing.

Fifty years ago real leaders in Canada decided to be more than hewers of wood and built Chalk River. Their leadership created value-added jobs to our resource jobs, bringing stimulus to our economy for the long term and keeping our bright brains here. It also led to us becoming a major supplier to the world. That means we now have a duty to the world to ensure a reliable supply, not just to our own sick fellow citizens. And so what do these two power-hungry politicians do?

One ignores the report on Chalk River and decides to close it down without replacing it. Harper does not even follow up on one of the key recommendations to convert the nuclear research reactors in universities across Canada to create medical isotopes. No, that would take him away from hobnobbing with foreign reporters à la Pierre Trudeau and Mulroney when they were on their pre-retirement farewell tours. Instead, Harper announces we're returning to the hewers of wood days and will get out of the medical isotope business. The world is in the information age, when power is in knowledge and money is in innovation. And Harper thinks the best thing for this country is to get out of one of few innovative things we're good at. (However, I do have to ask, why were we able to build a reactor to create isotopes 50 years ago and cannot today? Have we collectively become stupider?) Iggy must agree. Afte all, the Liberals watched over the beginning of this decay when former Prime Minister Jean Chretien slashed the innovation budget to useless levels and ignored the Chalk River situation, and now Iggy is pretty quiet on the whole idea of becoming even less innovative.

But it's more than just usual Liberal do-nothing-more-than-we-have-to to get elected crap. Iggy rose to power on the strength of his brain, his ideas, his ability to think. But like the comfortable professor in the armchair of George Orwell's essay, he has done little but talk. And talk and talk and talk. He's brought forth no ideas of substance. I believe he didn't even want to talk policy at the so-called leadership convention this past Spring. Imagine if the coaltion had gained power; imagine if Chalk River was being replaced, not mothballed as Harper with Iggy's
blessing is doing now; imagine if Dion had put into action his environmental plan or even NDP leader Jack Layton's; imagine our economy being stimulated into the paths of innovation and knowledge, not just pothole filling. That's what we gave up when we rewarded these men of naked ambition.

We have a third choice in the next election. But Canadians, for reasons beyond me, are as afraid of it as Iggy and Harper are of leading.

Smacking Up Against the Brick Wall of Church Orthodoxy

When I started reading Job in the Old Testament of the Bible, I did it for the same reason every person who's going through a hard time does: to find out why God is punishing me, is there a God, why is evil rampant, am I totally alone. Because of my brain injury and because this is a difficult book of poetry, I was unable to read it on my own. Unbelievably and kindly, my Pastor came to my rescue and discussed it with me each week via e-mail. As we progressed, I learnt that the study of Job is problematic for two reasons: translation, and really out-of-touch interpretations being touted as the best word on this book. And in contrast to other books, people don't discuss Job much in public.

Job is written in ancient Hebrew, a language from a different time and culture than from English. And so that plus some sloppy scribing in long-gone centuries lead to some very different translations, to the point where I wondered if the translators paid any attention to Job's character and the ways of poets. Worse, many seem to read it from the New Testament viewpoint and don't just stick to the text itself. They end up twisting the text inside out to suit their own prejudgements of what it should say. And in the process they harm, don't help, the suffering person. Job was written for the suffering person, not for experts who want to hang onto their religious assumptions by hook or by crook!

That's why I started writing a series of articles on Job, to help people read it.

And so at times my Pastor and I clashed over accepted interpretation versus what I saw from my totally ignorant-of-orthodoxy, totally Jobian-person viewpoint. But this clashing never really got problematic until God spoke in chapter 38. And now I've smacked into the brick wall of orthodoxy. I know my interpretation is not unique, but it doesn't seem to be representative of the church nor even of my father's Zoroastrian faith. Doubting my understanding, I spent long, brain spraining hours reading chapters 38 to 42, referring to my notes on the other chapters, going back to Genesis, looking at a couple of different translations, all the time keeping in mind the character of Job and of God as described in the first two chapters. I tried to look at it from the orthodox viewpoint despite finding virtually nothing written on it by the church or at least not easily found. But all I get is completely, totally, utterly depressed. Going back to seeing what I think Job saw uplifts me; it gives me hope.

And so I wonder how a church that talks little about the nature and origin of evil, of Satan and developed its orthodoxy long after the time of Christ can really meet the needs of the too-many but few of us who've been isolated like Job was, who've been blamed cruelly for our travails, who look fine on the outside but struggle just to follow the hymn or to understand conversation, who live on little, bouyed up by the generosity of one or two persons as the road to bouying oneself up has been banged shut. If the church is unwilling to enter into why God would treat Job with respect and truly answer him not just confuse him with imagery and is unwilling to look hard at why God would create evil even though the answers are strewn throughout the Bible, then they never will understand and really help us. We will forever hear people talk at the lectern about helping the poor and then only helping the obvious poor. We will forever have coffee cliques after church, where the known but fine-looking congregants will be ignored. We will forever have congregants asking after a missing person without actually calling that person up. We will forever have churches full of people looking to the Pastor and leaders to show compassion so they don't have to. And we will forever have people like Job's friends blaming the suffering person and trying to walk away from them.

The church must face this head on, and saying evil only comes out of sin, when clearly that's not the case, and saying that humans cannot resist it on their own negates the experience of too many who've had to face it without God's help as He watches, just like He watched Job to see how he'd resist the evil thoughts of his three friends and the unbelievable youthful cruelty of Elihu. Because Job resisted successfully, God treated him like one does an equal, came out of the whirlwind, and spoke to him with respect. While humans and even the church still scoff at Job for having the temerity to question God, God does no such thing. God talks and talks to Job, building up His answer knowing how well Job listens, until at last he sees. God wants Job to see. And that's why I can't fall in line with church orthodoxy on Satan and people's ability to resist him.

Bill Carroll says No! to Bike Lanes. I say...

Bill Carroll was ranting today on CFRB about Toronto City Council's latest ideas. They want to get rid of Jarvis Street's fifth lane and put a bicycle lane along Danforth/Bloor from Victoria Park to Kipling, and he is looking for 100 e-mails to support his cause. He reminded us of Toronto Council's priority list for people, bikes, and cars and asserted that because of our climate, bikes are unpractical -- the city is either covered in snow or too hot. (I must say that if I could, I'd less want to ride in saunaville than in the cold.) It's also dangerous to ride them. Well, that's what bike lanes are for, to remove the menace of cars...that's the theory anyway. And because of few lanes in our city, nervous nelly bicyclists ride up on the concrete away from the cars and straight to that poor sod on the sidewalk.

However, I'm not totally for bicycle lanes either. My beef is that Mayor David Miller and Toronto Council think these lanes should be for manually powered bikes only. They talk about being green, getting people out of cars, being environmentally friendly, but their knowledge and understanding of new forms of transportation are stuck in the dark ages. Just as they think incinerators haven't progressed since the dirty '60s, so too they think cars are only belching gas-hogs, bikes are only powered by people, and strange new devices should be run off the road. They have raised taxes in new ways so that they can pretend to keep property taxes down, yet they won't support a home-grown industry, which would provide a rather rich source of tax revenue for our stretched coffers as well as helping Toronto be green. Imagine the excitement of a buy-Toronto marketing campaign for us beleaguered Torontonians: buy a Zenn car, and you'll clean our air, support our workers, and enrich our city. Guess it's too radically win-win. And it's a car.

Although the province has the final say on whether the Zenn car will ride Ontario's streets, Toronto could easily mount a campaign to get Ontario to support it as a true city car that will help reduce locally produced smog. But it's new, it's a car, and they can't wrap their heads around such a complex concept. The province is just as bad. You'd think with them chucking money at GM, a foreign company really, they'd be just as interested if not more in chucking money at a completely Canadian, Ontario company. But no.

And so this non-thinking approach will produce a half-assed solution to pollution. With the Jarvis Street change they'll increase idling in gridlock and thus pollutants in the air. And with putting in bike lanes along a busy, packed road and restricting who can use them, once again only the healthy and well off will benefit -- which means they'll never get as many people out of their cars as could be possible, including those who would like to but cannot pedal a bike. God forbid we ever return to old levels of inclusivity (good service helped everyone), never mind aspire to new heights and make it so everyone could participate.

1and1 Retreats Behind Corporate Wall of Silence. Twitter Picks up Slack.

Well, I'm back where I started this morning, sitting on the couch with my laptop, except this time I'm not checking my e-mail but recovering from what that simple act led to.

I began my day with Thunderbird; it checked my IMAP mail servers but failed to connect. I tried again. Again it failed. So I went on 1and1.com's website and tried to log in to their webmail, but all I got was a page load error message telling me Firefox couldn't find the server. I had no problem logging into my admin page, and no problem logging in to Twitter or Flickr nor with my other e-mail account, so it couldn't be a browser issue or a Thunderbird issue. I called 1and1. I got a friendly female voice fairly quickly.

Unfortunately, I'd forgotten that 1and1.com's customer service reps aren't the brightest bulbs in the box. She started off with the standard protocol of questions, which basically meant she either hadn't heard what I had said or she didn't know how to troubleshoot. Probably both. She asked how I'd set up my mail in Outlook. Uh, don't use it, and since I hadn't touched my settings, why are we going there anyway? I moved her off that idea quick. She sounded a bit discombobulated. So then she asked me for my password. Why? I had told her my e-mail program couldn't even connect and Firefox didn't even load the page; I had gotten nowhere near seeing a login screen! She insisted; she wanted to check if she could see my e-mail and didn't seem to understand that I was stuck before the point of checking e-mail!!

Her computers showed her the webmail login screen, the admin screen, and she could even send and see my e-mail. What's my prob? I took a deep breath and repeated that just because it worked for her didn't mean there wasn't a problem.

So then she asked about the browser. I've recently discovered that many people don't clear their browser cache's, don't even think about it although they know it exists. So I didn't chew her ear off about that though I saw no point in doing that as I had told her it was a fresh startup and I always clear my cache -- plus all the other websites were fine and dandy. Her puzzlement grew. I cleared my cache. After some off-phone discussion, she thought it might be how I started webmail. She wanted me to go direct instead of through my admin panel. No dice. Sigh. Finally, she threw her last card down: go to Google.com, the last sure-fire solution of the customer service rep who thinks you're an idiot. I already had it up, but I didn't tell her that. Apparently, when I said I had no problem seeing and logging in to other websites, that meant nothing. Only Google counts as real proof my browser works.

She said she had a tool to use to fix my account; it would be fixed within an hour; and if not call back. Only problem was that by the time I called back, 1and1.com's circuits were so busy that I got a nice automated Bell female voice saying "circuits are busy. Please try again later." Well, you know that's pretty futile. Worse, the admin page was now down, and I couldn't find a status page. So I bitched on Twitter.

This is what Twitter is for, to vent, to moan, to wonder about a seemingly insolvable situation. It didn't occur to me to see if 1and1 had a Twitter account, maybe because any company that doesn't have an obvious status page probably isn't service oriented enough to have a Twitter account.

Well! Within moments, other Twitter folk were retweeting my tweets and offering me suggestions. Some folk even seemed to have started a Twitter account for the sole purpose of following the discussion and offering their suggestions. For two hours (!) the Twitter community commiserated with each other, kept each other up to date about whatever useful tidbits they discovered, and as time went by lambasted 1and1 for being so silent and unhelpful. 1and1 did have a status page, but as one Twitterer said, it was down too, and as another said, if all their DNS servers were down, one couldn't expect their status page to be up. Yet I know other companies not only can keep their status page up when their main services are down, but would have responded in a more intelligent way to my phone call than shrugging their shoulders at something incomprehensible and thus to be ignored beyond taking the standard steps. And in the age of Twitter, there's no excuse for not talking to clients. Twitter provides an instant alternative way to keep clients informed about what has happened, what they're doing to rectify the situation, and where they are in the process.

But 1and1 was overloaded on the phone; their main page went down; their status page went down; they did not think to immediately create a Twitter account as a way to communicate; and so clients were left to figure things out on their own. Some were able to use POP mail thanks to tips from some Twitterers, and after two hours, we could trace where service came back on through our collective tweets. Toronto was at the front of the pack.

Apparently, 1and1.com's DNS records were broken perhaps due to a server configuration change. You would think that when 1and1 makes changes to their servers that they'd alert the customer service reps so that when calls like mine come in the techies would automatically be alerted that something went wrong and I, and other clients, would not have to put up with going through inane standard steps that have nothing to do with my problem.

My biggest beef with 1and1.com is not that their servers went belly up, it's that their customer service rep had no clue and that 1and1.com did not keep us informed. They remained behind a wall of silence. Unfortunately, it's standard operating procedure for too-many companies these days. It's a shame-based human response to something going wrong, but as Maple Leaf Foods showed the world, when you're open, honest, and communicative, people respect you and will continue to buy your stuff even in the face of a huge crisis. Meanwhile, people are now blogging about how much 1and1 mucked up, not about how it fixed a huge problem in a short number of hours.

New SIGG on CafePress. New Water Design By Me

It's been awhile since I created a new design for my CafePress shop, but this week CafePress.com announced a partnership with SIGG to provide eco-friendly 1L water bottles that shop owners can create designs for.

Well, that got me inspired to design something in Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 (there really should be a short nickname for that program). The most obvious idea for me was to play with the word "water" and to play with images of water, like waterfalls. But I haven't photographed waterfalls in awhile. I thought and thought, very tough you know, and then clicked onto a whole series I'd forgotten about of the fountains at Dundas Square. Lots of water shots! The handy dandy magic wand helped me cut out a fountain; I found a lovely piece of sky in another shot; I concentrated on figuring out how to make images appear in text; and then I got stuck on how to make font larger than 72 points. But as usually happens with me, I click enough and I stumbled onto a solution.

I'm very pleased with the results. And I hope you like it enough to (shameless request here) to buy it! And while you're there, check out the matching his and hers organic T-shirts.

No Wonder Public Transit Sucks in Toronto: It's Number Three

Continuing from yesterday's rant on Bill Carroll's rant of Toronto's anti-car culture, I heard him say this morning that Toronto City Council's priorities are

1. Pedestrians
2. Bicycles
3. Public Transit
4. Cars

Bill does agree that pedestrians ought to be at the top of the food chain. And for the most part Toronto is a pedestrian-friendly city until you have to cross one of those wide, grand streets within the time allotted or navigate the litter of broken bricks on fancified streets or compete with garbage bins on garbage days or tip toe through the garbage that litters our city or try to maneuvre on icy sidewalks or play cat and mouse with bikes and cars due to lax traffic enforcement. That's how the city treats its top priority.

Bill was ranting about bicycles being number two. I don't think bicyclists would be too thrilled with being number two, given how it's treated. The city doesn't seem to meet its meagre bicycle path building goals even when it has the money. It doesn't clear them in the winter when the snows fall; it takes its time cleaning up fall leaves, making for slippery surfaces -- for pedestrians too. And on top of that, it's not interested in promoting bicycle-like alternatives, like e-bikes, Segways, and the like. Although these are under provincial jurisdiction for licensing, the city, if it was serious about being green, would make a massive PR push to get these alternatives on the road for people who want out of their cars but don't have the physical ability to pedal. But their collective raspberry to the teenage physically disabled who only wanted to ride a Segway with her parents so she could join them on a bike ride through the parks, says it all about their number two priority.

Public transit is number three?! Where do these pea brains think people in their cars will go to -- walking? Biking? Not likely. Most people in the city don't drive to the convenience store. They get in their cars for either longer journeys or ones requiring a lot of carrying of stuff, like groceries. And the mobility challenged need their cars to visit doctors, do errands, visit friends. There is no alternative for the latter, but if there was, public transit would be closest. None of these kind of car drivers are going to get out of their cars to go bike downtown. Really. No wonder public transit sucks in Toronto when city council is so dismissive of it that they put it number three. And think subways are elitist to point they don't want them.

And cars are number four. As I said yesterday, our councillors have a very simplistic view of who uses cars. As evidenced by their garbage policies, they couldn't care less about the least in society. As long as they can make stupid statements to puff their chests up enough to be seen as doing something, when they're not, they're happy. If they really wanted to make cars number four due to their polluting and space-hogging ways, they would encourage the Toronto-built Zenn car as a great city-alternative to polluting cars -- creating jobs here and cleaner air at the same time -- and they would have kept the TTC parking lots free. The city ought to be supporting the Zenn car -- if the police won't enforce the speed limits, encouraging every Torontonian to get one would do the trick. And as a non-car owner, I didn't care that car owners got free parking at the TTC. Why? Because more cars off the road, the better I can  breathe. I don't see cars as the enemy. I see them as an alternative mode of transport that the hale and hearty don't need, but people in need, people who can't walk far, people who provide services to others need the most, and we need not to be making their lives any tougher. Punishing the hale and hearty for using cars only punishes the vulnerable the most. The hale and hearty will rant like Bill, but continue to use their cars because they can afford it and because public transit remains stuck at number three priority.

The emerging pattern in all this is the real priority of Toronto City Council: get rid of people! They are bad bad bad especially the most vulnerable.

Thoughts on Toronto's So-Called "Anti-Car" Culture

I heard Bill Carroll on CFRB this morning complain that this is an anti-car city, and it got me thinking about what kind of city this is, in practice.

The hale and hearty assume that car culture is all about hale and hearty and busy folks zipping round one by one in their big cars, taking up road space, taking up land in parking spaces, when they could be saving the city and our air by using public transit. But they're not the only ones. More and more, as medicine can save lives but not cure illnesses, we're becoming a nation of the chronically ill. These are in most need of cars; these are the ones who can't walk a block without breathing hard, who can't navigate stairs, or require help to do the most mundane of shopping chores. These are not the ones in wheelchairs or playing murder "pedestrians" with their electric scooters, who would be able to use an accessible public transit system, which we don't have, a few elevators notwithstanding. They need to drive from point A to point B just so they can continue to live independently. By restricting parking and making it few and far between and far away from destinations, politicians don't harm the hale and hearty -- they just piss them off like Mr. Carroll -- but they do make independent living for the most vulnerable harder. Yet a city full of parking lots is pretty much an eye sore. And a city that doesn't provide public transit accessible to our entire population is missing the point of public transit. It's a complex problem that everyone looks at as an us-them issue. And it's not.

Toronto politicians' simplistic way of looking at car versus public transit, of asking for and accepting the cheapest way, isn't working.

Toronto politicians talk lots about public transit, pedestrian-friendly design, and bike paths, but that's it. Public transit sucks in Toronto. We do not have Montréal's subway network, which would drastically cut down on commute times -- subways don't have to contend with narrow streets, bicycles, car pigs, parked cars, and darting pedestrians. By going the Light Rail Transit route and capitulating to the no-subways-for-Toronto idée fixe, Toronto politicians are trying to force the hale and hearty and time-challenged to transit the cheap way, but short of passing laws that forbid people from driving inside Toronto's city limits, it won't work. The only way to get them out of their quick cars is to provide a quiet, efficient, and quick transit system.

Politicians' must have some inkling of the inadquacy of our transit, one that no longer meets the needs of car folk, for they haven't enacted congestion charges, odd-even license plate days, or other "anti-car" measures. They aren't narrowing streets and converting them permanently to pedestrian-only places like in New York city or many European cities. They're dragging their feet on carving bicycle lanes out of roadways. And parking is difficult but not impossible like in some major cities. So I don't know what Mr. Carroll is talking about, Toronto being anti-car. If anything, the recent provincial hiccup in funding the new streetcars (sorry, LRVs), proves this place is anti-transit, anti- in the way it's not funded to meet the needs of commuters of all kinds. In fact, looking at the reality and windy words of car-public-transit-pedestrian-space, Toronto doesn't know what it wants.