Doug Sheppard is a Web developer by trade, and a writer and improviser by vocation. He lives in Toronto and considers it one of the finest places in all of Canada. You may also be amused by his twitter, or you can see him perform live improvisational comedy without a net with the Impatient Theatre Co..
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Yes, I am a spreadsheet nerd. This one breaks down today’s LRT vote by the number of votes each councillor received in the 2010 elections, and by the population of each ward in the 2006 census.
In short: we win, we win, and we win. The majority of councillors who voted today voted for LRT. The majority of voters whose votes for council got a candidate into office? Their councillor voted for LRT. And the majority of Toronto residents are represented by a councillor who voted for LRT.
If anyone tries to tell you that there is not a broad mandate for Transtintz City, at best they are a fool and at worst they are a damned liar.
You are likely to be eaten by a grue If this predicament seems particularly cruel Consider whose fault it could be Not a torch or a match in your inventory
(Summary for tumblr people: I almost had my Mac’s hard drive lose everything but then I didn’t, and this has nothing to do with Toronto politics or the Simpsons, so if this is just the next post in your dashboard just scroooooollll on ahead, trust me.)
Here’s what you do if the hard drive in your Mac is failing, you are running OS X Lion, and you don’t yet have a Time Machine backup. (In the words of someone I somehow still consider a friend: “What is wrong with you, besides everything!?”)
How did I know my hard drive was failing? The first indicator you’ll come across is random, inexplicable hangs while you are using your computer. Every so often your cursor will continue to move across the screen, but windows will stop responding to clicks, the Dock won’t show names as you mouse over icons, and so forth. You might be stuck like this for as much as a minute, and then you go back to normal. This is because OS X prioritizes user responsiveness over everything else; the window server (the part of the OS that displays the desktop and cursor) will stay alive even when everything else is screwed.
Basically, if your cursor is still moving, but nothing responds to clicks, and it stays that way for a half minute or more, then you are having the same symptoms I did. Time to investigate.
Fire up Console. (You can find it in the Utilities folder inside Applications.) In the upper right corner, type “disk0s2” to filter out messages, and see if you have anything that says “/disk0s2: I/O error”. If you do… you’re in trouble, but you might get out of it. I did, and now I’m writing this post to explain what I did. It might work for you; it might not. Read everything! Good luck! I can’t help you any more than this!
First things first: you are living on borrowed time. Your hard drive is working just well enough to inform you it’s dying. If you recover even one file that you thought you would have lost forever, dayenu. Everything past that is gravy. There are going to be people who suggest that you fire up Disk Utility and run a Verify Disk, or check the drive’s SMART status; these are useful, but in my case the disk looked as fine as fine could be as far as Disk Utility was concerned. Don’t take a “verified” SMART as a sign there’s no problems.
It is time to shut down your computer. Right now. I said now. Use the power button if absolutely necessary. We are going to assume that, like me, you are lucky enough that you’ll be able to boot it one more time later. (If not, my sympathies. I thought it was pretty touch and go for me for a while.) Your hard drive’s remaining time is finite and you want to spend as little of it as possible doing nothing.
Now, go get two external hard drives that are both at least as large as your computer’s internal drive, preferably bigger. I have a 320-gigabyte drive in my iMac, so I bought two 500-gig drives. One of these will be used for Time Machine and the other will be a live bootable disk we’re going to make later.
Attach the Time Machine disk to your computer. Start your computer up and log in. The Mac will see the new, unrecognized disk and ask if you want to use it for Time Machine.Hell yes you do. The disk will be reformatted and 120 seconds later, it’ll start backing stuff up.
Normal Time Machine backups run pretty quickly and don’t have problems, but we’re not in that world. Just let Time Machine do its work, grinding through, even if the disk errors occasionally cause it to pause mysteriously for minutes at a time, “288,110 items remaining”. Let it run, probably overnight. (My Time Machine run started at 11:30am on Sunday and finished at 8:46am Monday.) It might even crash. If it does, just let it restart on its own; Time Machine will do its best to pick up where it left off. (Mine crashed once, during one of those mysterious pauses.)
Once you have a working Time Machine backup, eject that disk. Right now. Now. You have just finished creating a snapshot of whatever Time Machine was able to save from your hard drive. You can look in Console for messages containing “backupd” to see if there were any files that it couldn’t read.
If you feel lucky, keep the Time Machine disk attached and wait an hour for the hourly backup to run. Some of those missing files may be readable the next time around when Time Machine tries to back them up, because your hard drive is now behaving unpredictably. Others may just be gone gone gone. (I ended up running a second hourly backup because I was asleep when the full backup finished. As it turns out, I lost several MP3s and an email from 2008.)
Now shut down your Mac, then reboot it in recovery mode by holding down the Option key as you turn it on and it powers up. You will be given a choice of two disks to boot from: Macintosh HD and Recovery HD. Pick Recovery HD. You will be shown a menu with four options, one of which is Disk Utility. That’s where we want to go right now.
Plug in your second external hard drive and fire up Disk Utility. It’s formatted as a Windows drive, which is good enough most times but right now we need to make it a bootable Mac disk. To do this, repartition the drive with a single partition called “Macintosh HD”, and use the options panel to set it to use GUID Partition Scheme. Let Disk Utility reformat the drive and exit Disk Utility.
Now you have your new boot disk, pining for an operating system. Reattach your Time Machine drive. (Yeah, this sounds a little patronizing. You are almost certainly not stupid enough to reformat the Time Machine volume. I wasn’t that stupid. But I was running on not enough sleep and too much worry, so it was close! Better safe than sorry.) Select the option to reinstall OS X Lion, and when you’re asked what disk to put it on, pick the boot drive we just reformatted.
You will now go through the usual Lion install rigamarole. You’ll be given a choice on how to set up your new disk: as a new Mac, off an existing hard drive, or off a Time Machine volume. You know what to do. Pick the Time Machine option, select your TM disk, and go.
This is going to be slow, I’ll warn you now. You’re reading from and writing to your disks over USB. It took two and a half hours for my restore to finish. Go have dinner or watch a movie or something. Either this will work, in which case you don’t need to babysit it, or it won’t, in which case I honestly have no idea what you could do.
(The reason I installed to an external drive is that a backup without a restore is not actually a backup. It’s just a disk. If it was okay for your backup software to just make you think it worked whether it did or not, you could replace Time Machine with a five-line script that pops up a dialog window saying “Backup complete.” By reinstalling from TM right now, we’re proving that we have a backup disk that works.)
Once the install finishes, you will be able to start using OS X from your external disk. The first thing you should do is go to System Preferences and tell Spotlight to stop indexing your internal hard drive. Remember, the reason we’re going through all of this mess is that your internal disk is screwed up. We don’t want to touch it any more than we have to!
You now have a slightly slower system — though compared to those random pauses from the dying disk, it might actually feel a little bit faster. You could in theory run off your external drive. Try not to do that. Cheap external drives are cheap because they are going to be just reliable enough to screw you over; lots of people have horror stories about their drive only lasting a month. That’s fine in our case; we don’t want a month, we just want a few days.
Shut down your computer and take it to your preferred repair shop. Tell them that you suspect the hard drive is fried. Or, hey, it could be something else. All you know is the symptoms you tell them. They’ll make you right as rain, and send you home with your Mac with a brand new hard drive. You can now reinstall Lion on it, using either your bootable disk or your Time Machine backup.
Now go out and buy an external disk that’s at least twice as big as whatever external drive got put in your Mac. This is your new, long-term Time Machine drive. And you are severely aware of the necessity of having a long-term Time Machine drive now, aren’t you? Yes you are. Just nod.
Fortunately you are no longer in a race against time. You have a brand-new hard drive in your Mac that’s working fine. You’ve also got a known-good Time Machine disk you can restore from, and a known-good OS X Lion disk you can boot with. You have two good copies of everything.
DOUG FORD: You know, a city with a development plan’s like a mule with a Ferris wheel. No-one knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it.
TORONTO SUN COMMENTER: mule lol@
DOUG FORD: The name’s Ford, Doug Ford, and I come before you good people tonight with an idea. Probably the greatest… ahhh, it’s no use. It’s more of a Mississauga idea.
JOSH MATLOW: Now wait just a minute. We’re twice as tired of partisan bickering as the people of Mississauga. Just tell us your idea, and we’ll vote for it!
DOUG FORD: All right, I tell you what I’ll do - I’ll show you my idea! [unveils a model] I give you the new Toronto waterfront, complete with monorail! I’ve heard they have monorails in Putrajaya, Wuppertal, and the Chiang Mai Zoo, and by gum it put them on the map! [reveals map] Well, sir, there’s nothing on earth like a downtown hotel and mall connected by a monorail. What’d I say?
KAREN STINTZ: Monorail!
DOUG FORD: What’s it called?
DENZIL MINNAN-WONG: Monorail!
DOUG FORD: That’s right, monorail!
CROWD [chanting]: Monorail. Monorail. Monorail…
FRANCES NUNZIATA: Won’t construction costs set this up to fall?
DOUG FORD: The private sector will build it all!
JONATHAN GOLDSBIE: Is there a chance it could run a debt?
DOUG FORD: Well, it hasn’t run one yet!
GARY WEBSTER: What about my essential-service slobs?
DOUG FORD: We’ll contract out low-paying no-strike jobs!
MIKE LAYTON: Were you sent here by your brother?
DOUG FORD: No, we both come from our mother.
GIORGIO MAMMOLITI: My Dyke March videos got thrown away.
DOUG FORD: Here’s some Girls Gone Wild to get through the day! I swear Toronto doesn’t have a choice, so throw up your hands and raise your voice!
CROWD: Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!
DAVE MESLIN: About the Jarvis bike lanes, I was hopin’—
SUE-ANN LEVY: Cram it, commie, Ford Nation’s spoken!
Many years back, when Jack Layton was on city council, there was a proposal to truck off the city’s garbage to a mine in northern Ontario. Environmentally risky, sure to be more expensive than they were claiming.
Jack won the debate in the awesomest possible way: by using his question time to show a clip of the Simpsons where Homer becomes garbage commissioner and just buries all the trash under the town.
Today, Mike Layton, Jack’s son, sits on city council.
And the mayor’s brother has proposed a downtown monorail.
To you from failing hands the torch has been thrown, Michael.
It’s the day after Canada’s 41st federal election. Here are the things that you probably know, but can’t quite synthesize into an understanding:
Most people didn’t vote for the Conservatives
The Conservatives won
So, what went wrong? (Alternately: what went right, if you’re a Conservative voter?) Here’s what you need to know.
Canada is a parliamentary democracy. You can skip to the next boldfaced header if you know what this means. There are 308 seats in the House of Commons (similar to the House of Representatives). During a federal election, there is a separate race in each of these parliamentary districts, or ridings, to determine who gets sent to Ottawa as a Member of Parliament for that riding. Each race involves a minimum of two candidates, and probably more.
Once all 308 MPs have been chosen, the role of governing the country goes to the political party that has more MPs than any other party has MPs. They’re called the government. Every MP that isn’t part of the government is part of the opposition and the party that gets the second-most seats is called the Official Opposition.
Keep in mind what I didn’t say just now. I didn’t say “the party that has most of the MPs”. The government will probably have more MPs than all the others put together (this one, for example, holds 167 of 308 seats), but that’s not necessarily the case. When this election happened, the Conservatives held only 143 seats. When that happens, it’s called a minority government.
Canadian governments only last as long as they keep winning votes in the House of Commons on bills that involve spending money, raising taxes, or the like. If they lose one of these votes, they’ve lost the confidence of the House and, because they’re no longer considered fit to govern, a new election has to happen. There can also be a thing called a motion of no confidence, which votes on whether or not the government shoud fall, and if the government MPs are outnumbered and the opposition thinks it’s time to go to the polls, boom. In this case, that’s what happened.
Great, I understand all this. Now explain why the Conservatives won if everyone hates them. This happens because in each election in each riding, we use the first-past-the-post system. You know it and it’s simple: the candidate who gets more votes than all the other individual candidates wins. In a two-candidate race, it means that whoever got more votes wins, and they’ll have gotten more than half the votes.
The problem is that none of these were two-candidate races. All of these 308 individual races involved at least three candidates and some as many as eight. (In my riding, there were candidates for the Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats, Greens, Communists, Marxist-Leninists, Libertarians, and one guy who ran as an independent.) In this case, it’s possible to get more votes than any other candidate and still not get more than half the votes. You might not even get what any normal person would consider a lot.
Imagine you’re one of thirteen people at a party, and you’re trying to decide what to serve for dessert. Three people vote for chocolate ice cream. Three people vote for vanilla ice cream. Three vote for strawberry ice cream. And four people vote that screw dessert, they’re going to hold you down and punch you in the face until your nose is broken.
First-past-the-post is the system where if you don’t lie down and let them break your nose, you’re an enemy of democracy.
And that’s pretty much what happened in many ridings in this election. The Liberals and the NDP, bless their hearts, are very close on many issues, and both of them differ much more sharply from the Conservatives than from each other. But because there’s just enough difference, and it really does sometimes come down to chocolate-versus-vanilla, in many ridings the vote broke down as Conservative 30%, Liberal 25%, NDP 25%, plus a smattering of other. Most people wanted ice cream, but they didn’t get any ice cream.
The Liberals, by the way, screwed the pooch. They campaigned poorly and with an ineffective leader. Most of these 30/25/25 ridings that went Conservative were ridings that went 35/25/20 Liberal/NDP/Conservative last time. It took a lot to lose these votes, but nobody ever said that Michael Ignatieff wasn’t a hard worker who thinks outside the box. These split votes weren’t the result of Conservative quality so much as Liberal suckitude.
Wait, really? 30% and you win a riding? That sounds pretty messed up, dude. Yep. The Conservatives won 40% of the votes nationwide and got more than half the seats in Parliament because of that 40%. The other parties got 60% of the votes nationwide and got less. This happened even though in nearly every riding, the winning candidate was outpolled by a combination of their two closest competitors, and the Liberals and the NDP weren’t so very different.
That’s horrible. Couldn’t you change the system? Oh man, plenty of people talk about this. There are many ideas on how to change the voting system to more accurately reflect the beliefs of the voters. Most of them involve ranking the candidates on the ballot in some way, so that even if your first choice won’t win, you could still count for your second choice. Google knows all sorts of things about better voting systems; start with the words “instant runoff voting” and go from there.
All of these vote-reform efforts are generally discarded as too complicated for the average voter by important-sounding political pundits. The average voter, you see, cannot understand the complexities of “I like chocolate more than vanilla, but honestly, I’d rather have vanilla ice cream than get punched in the face.” Don’t tax your brain over it, sweetie. Thinking gives you wrinkles. The face-punchers got four votes. Your precious chocolate got three. Put those hands by your sides and take what democracy gave you.
(Note that the parties themselves pick their leaders with runoff elections like the one I just described. They don’t use first-past-the-post. Apparently politicians are smarter than you.)
In the meantime, there’s two things that can be done: strategic voting, or party merger.
What’s strategic voting? Strategic voting is picking your second choice because your first choice is doomed. If you know that there’s four people at the party who are looking to pick a fight with you, and you know they’ll do it if they have a chance, perhaps it’s not so bad to pick vanilla ice cream instead of chocolate. Convince someone else to switch their vote too and you win.
Opponents of strategic voting hate this. They consider voting to prevent the face-punchers winning to be a cheat, and you ought to be voting your conscience. I don’t feel this way. The lesser of two evils is still less evil. If enough Liberals (in ridings where the NDP came in second) and New Democrats (vice versa) had had the courage to vote for a Conservative minority, they would have gotten one.
The other possibility is a party merger, and here’s where things get interesting. The reason the Conservatives were able to get 40% of the vote is that they are the result of a party merger. Everything I’m writing in 2011 about how the Liberals and NDP foolishly split the vote is in fact plagiarized from the complaints of right-wingers in 1993 about how the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform Party split the vote and let the Liberals slide through to a majority. They got tired of losing. They merged into one party, called simply the Conservatives. Now their leader ran Canada for five years previous to this as the head of a minority government and is guaranteed four more with the leash off.
So that means the parties will merge, right? Because 60% of the country wants something different? Noble reader, I’m assuming you’re American and liberal because I wrote this essay for my American friends who are mostly liberals. Tell me again the story of how Ralph Nader and the Greens switched over to endorse the Democrats in 2004 because Bush turned out so horrible.
Oh. Yep. And we have a Green Party here, too, just in case splitting the vote two ways wasn’t enough.
So, what next? Damned if I know. Damned if the six-tenths of voters who didn’t want the Conservatives to have this much power know. But hey, at least we practiced democracy and voted our conscience. Now, does anyone have a splint?
Google is dropping H264 video from Chrome. They’re going to only support WebM natively. You know what that means, right? The next thing they’re going to do is remove H264 support from YouTube. That will basically break streaming video for iOS devices.
The reaction of the Apple userbase will be as follows: they will blame Apple for being closed and proprietary, throw their iPhones into a nearby septic tank, and spend hundreds of dollars replacing them with new Android phones with native WebM support.
Fanfare, shouts of huzzah, good triumphs over evil, Steve Jobs exits pursued by a bear, and so forth.
Now, this is a pretty… interesting… theory. The funny thing is, as little sense as this makes from a neutral perspective, it makes even less sense if you buy into all the stereotypes offered by your dyed-in-the-wool, hardcore, devoted Apple hater. The chain of logic appears to be as follows:
1. Apple makes overpriced locked-in shiny useless toys for stupid hipsters who love spending too much money on pretty baubles that make them feel good about being stupid hipsters. They make money when stupid people buy shiny objects.
2. Dollar for dollar, Google is an advertising company with a search engine and an email server bolted on the side. They make at least 95% of their money when advertisers give them money to put their products in front of an audience.**
3. As you know, Bob, advertisers hate it so much when their products are put in front of an audience of stupid and impressionable rich people who buy any random gewgaw that passes in front of their tiny little hummingbird brains. So much.
4. Therefore, Google will destroy YouTube for iPhone.
But, you know, maybe it all makes sense if you watch the WebM version.
* conspiracy fantasy: This is a term made up, by me, just now.
** Okay, this is more than just a footnote. It seems pretty obvious that Google is making money hand over fist with Android. They say that in 2010, their revenue was $1 billion from Android. That’s dollar-sign-one-bee, which is some serious cash or possibly cashola. Except in megacorporation terms, it really isn’t.
Imagine that Google spun off Android tomorrow into its own company. Let’s assume that this $1 billion is genuinely new revenue for Google, money that it had no chance of touching before, none of it involves showing ad impressions to Android phones. And let’s say that they’re on track to double that for 2011. (I may also place a bet that the sun will rise tomorrow.) That means that our hypothetical Android Operating System Manufacturing Concern reports $2 billion in revenue in 2011.
Well, here’s some other things that make between $1B and $2B in revenue a year:
Torstar, the parent company of the Toronto Star newspaper and Harlequin Romance.
Panini Group, a leading manufacturer of baseball cards and stickers.
Carl’s Jr., sponsors of the Secretary of State in the year 2505.
A Google that divested itself of Android would be a huge, multinational Mecha-Godzilla of business. An Android that got cut loose by Google would be on track to be twice the size of supermarket checkout rack romance novels. That’s why I say that Google is an advertising company with other stuff bolted on.
Just in time for nobody to care anymore, I’ve figured out why the Lost finale bothered me so much. And given time to reflect, it turns out that it wasn’t just the final ten minutes. It was the entire last season.
I had started watching Lost because I got caught in a simple mystery - what is Crazy Polar Bear Island? - that involved characters who, however uncurious they may be, still were interesting and had cool backstories. Also there was Boone. And then when “crazy island” and “cool backstory” weren’t enough, we were hit in the face with the Dharma Initiative. That’s when the show really caught fire.
The Dharma Initiative brought a theme out: science versus faith. On the island, faith is simple: you believe that you have been brought here for a reason. You believe that if you type these numbers over and over, nothing bad will happen. You look into the heart of the island and find it beautiful. And then you can stop wondering, because you have the gifts of faith and they are good. Faith is clean and safe.
Science is messy, and dangerous (and run mostly by jerks). Science is what happens when you try to harness electromagnetic properties. Science is making people write detailed logbooks of security camera footage, and then dumping the logbooks unread in a giant pile in a field. Science is seeing a smoke monster and learning enough about it to know that sound defeats it, so you build a giant sonic fence that has the happy side effect of making anyone who tries to cross it die.
We watched these two themes play out, over and over. Science always poking its nose where it doesn’t belong, faith always being content to have what it does without knowing why. (Widmore, the guy who wanted to exploit the island, is Science; Ben, who had no ambition beyond staying the emperor of his own little fiefdom, is Faith.)
And then, during the last season, this powerful theme got kicked off the dock and we watched it drown. During the last season science didn’t even get credit for being dangerous, let alone effective in any way. We learned that everything involving Dharma was a sideshow intended to come up with a reason for more time travel. Everyone who might have used reason to overcome their challenges either died or abandoned the gifts of science. (Did you love Alternate Daniel Faraday playing piano, and smile at how he was finally free of that stupid “time-travel physics expert” junk?) And in the end, the way to solve the problems of the island was to have a fistfight and then put a cork back in the hole where we were keeping all the evil.
That isn’t the show I thought I was watching when the Swan orientation film played and Jack and Locke argued about whether this “button” thing was a scam. It’s not the show where Charlie tried to redeem himself by helping build a church, the show where Eloise Widmore told Desmond that there were rules to time travel, or even the show where Waaaaaaaalt(!) was killing birds with the power of his mind and that intrigued the Others so much they were willing to kill to learn more.
This is not about mythology and explanations. This isn’t me wishing that the sixth season had been nothing but nanobots and Dharma hatch after Dharma hatch, each one more surprising than the last. The problem isn’t that there was too much Jacob and not enough whatever her name was who was on the Widmore away team and then she got killed or something.
This is about the way I feel like I was sold a bill of goods. The show I was watching for five years was sometimes aggravating, but when it returned to that well of science and faith, it always delivered. That show might have screwed up its last season too, but it would have at least tried. There would have been a genuine war. One that started as Science against Faith, but eventually turned into Science and Faith together against Evil. (No, I don’t think that the smoke monster would have been any different.) The Dharma Initiative would have offered some tool or tactic that, even if it failed, would have shown that Skinner-box-hippie science still has something to bring to the table. There would have been armies of polar bears carrying machine guns. (This part is a lie, but you cannot deny it is an awesome lie.) We would have watched the power of pure reason, applied with the dedication and clarity of mind that comes from true belief, and both of them together would save the world.
Instead we got to watch the cork be put back in the hole where we were keeping all the evil, because otherwise the island would have sunk, and we were told this would be bad, and it was bad because we were told it was. Everything about the science/faith conflict turned out to be a shiny little distraction intended to delay the revelation that a wizard did it and then everybody died.
I’m sad that if you had a time machine, you could make damn good money by going back to 2005 and saying “Yeah, I know this Dharma stuff seems plenty cool, but I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that the secret is really just impostor ghosts with immortality potions.”
I don’t think I deserve better. But I do mourn what could have been.
It’s amazing how many arguments remain exactly the same if you change “thin client” and “mainframe” to “web browser” and “Gmail”. Which totally means the conclusions reached are exactly—
If I were Apple, and I wanted to be a giant jerk, I’d take an ordinary iPad, jack up the price by $99, stick an Xcode DVD and a serial code in the box, and sell it as “iPad Maker Edition”.
