Wait, what?

Oh. The net. Zak asked two interesting questions. I answered one there, but he asked a second, more interesting question:

"Tell me how it is that the Net matters to you, even after all of the long days, short nights and wrecked weekends."

And my answer to that bears repeating here:

A good job, a mediocre hobby, and a lot of intercommuncation.

Also, some great deals on LED flashlights. I just bought one that has 900-lumen output!

Reading back, that's terribly glib, but I won't really come to terms with what the raw information glut we're experiencing now (I mean, Wikipedia alone!) will mean for a decade. It's not just the devastating volume of information, it's the massive amounts of it I've been able to actually put to use in real-world stuff that simply would not have existed if my horizons were limited to locally-situated interest groups and trade magazines.

I love it, but coming even halfway close to coping with it seems like a skill I've desperately half-learned, and that after re-learning it about every 24 months or so for the last 15 years.

Will meet "Ameri"...

The result will be an two-girl Japanese prog rock supergroup that, if there's any justice in the world, will rise to crush all other popular music by sheer force of awesomeness!

Well, except Beyoncé's "Single Ladies (put a ring on it)," and with luck they'll keep doing Rush covers.

I don't think I realized what an action-packed year 2008 was until I cataloged the goings-on. It started with being on Test the Nation in January, proceeded through more odd construction projects than I have ever attempted previously, sent me to places I haven't been before (like inside a brewery) and ended with about four months of work-related stuff that was dramatic (in a good way). Projects that I championed went from side-of-the-desk proof of concepts to absolutely vital pieces of infrastructure, sometimes with astonishing speed. I got a new job that means I now have, for better or worse, a position with more responsibility, creativity, and outright project management than I have previously.

To impose a theme on this year, it was all about Getting Things Done. Not that I am a GTD disciple per se (heck, even Merlin Mann has half-recanted), but I will probably think of this as the year that I went from agonizing about the stuff I was procrastinating to finishing what I started in a timely manner. Early days, but the progress is in the right direction.

One person deserves more credit for this than any other, and it's my bride, TLO. She has been an example of how to finish what you start, and one I have tried to emulate since I met her. 12 years later, it's starting to sink in a little, and I am grateful.

This has been a year of early rising, early to bed, and fairly frenzied living in between. It's been a year of good friendships and good family, good rides (but alas, bad racing) and a dog that was mostly good, occasionally bad.

Rebecca, for her part, saw the career centre she works for sold and moved to Gastown, but that was quickly followed up by a promotion to Academic Director. On the downside, she's suffering from a nagging and painful back problem that cropped up several weeks back, and is still ongoing.

Let's see what I did this year...

January: Talked to a screaming cockatoo, Flew to YYZ to be on national television and saw the HHOF.

February: Discovered One, Two, Three.

March: Tried to ride to a hot spring, failed. What an excellent ride.

April: Made Lego aircraft on my lunch hours.

May: I turned a goofy part into a goofy bike, then TLO and I had quite possibly the finest Chinese dinner we will ever have.

June: TLO fed me well.

July: TLO and I debated whether it was ethical to lie to a remote control.

August: Drank beer, got a lovely beer hat.

September: Drank more beer, went to a brewery, drank beer there, then got beer sent to my house.

October: got older, got a promotion, built an especially weird bike, made a funny movie:

The Dog Spends most of its Day on the Couch from Ryan Cousineau on Vimeo.

November: Made stylish cycling pants, then got very mad at a USB docking station.

December: TLO and I skated at the Richmond speed skating oval, and I changed my facebook profile photo.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good day, and a good next year, and do good.

What, you didn't know? The Westwood Association of Mario Kart Almost Racing has a schedule. And like bowling night, deviations shall not be tolerated!

No, seriously, it's semi-regular. It's ongoing. And if you have a copy of Mario Kart Wii, you should be participating. Soon, we'll have scoring tables and everything.

How to join:

1. Add Ryan as a Friend in Mario Kart. 3265-6230-6565
2. Send Ryan your Friend Code in Mario Kart
3. Around 8 pm Pacific time on Monday night, turn on your Wii and fire up Mario Kart. Go to the WFC, and when you look at your list of friends, you should see a room associated with my name

Try to beat Casey. It will not be easy.

• Took care of a doctor's appointment
• Helped my father-in-law buy a minivan (only a little)
• Played Mario Kart for 90 minutes
• fixed the hot water heater

I guess in retrospect, it was a pretty productive evening. Of course, I still have some tidying up to do before I can sleep.

Real problem: Narvey's blog is called "Currents." Can you really vote for a blog with such a silly name?

In conclusion: don't vote, it's probably a waste of time.

Nonetheless, my adherence to conservative principles is not necessarily an endorsement of Conservative tactics. It's the difference between wanting the Allies to win the war and believing Operation Jubilee was a good idea.

First, having got that out of the way, I thought it worth noting my thoughts on recent events. You have done the assigned reading, right? So you know what the Byng-King Thing is?

Second, what happened? As best as I can lay out the timeline, the Tories made the tactically unsound decision to attempt to revise the federal funding of political parties. Whether this was, in principle, a good idea is an open question, but its short-term effect would have been to cripple the funding of almost every party except the Conservatives, as they are the only ones with no debt and a reasonable grassroots-donor network. I think the theory was these parties would neither force a new election, or would find defending their need for public funding to politically hazardous. Right on the first idea, very wrong on the second.

The opposition parties reasonably balked, and the Conservatives backed off, which is what they're supposed to do when trying to run a minority government and their confidence bill is not going to pass.

Whether the funding fiasco was the impetus or the excuse, it got Stéphane Dion and Jack Layton together to declare their contingent love for each other, with M. Duceppe as the silent(?) partner in this relationship. In a minority government, this is a totally legit move, albeit perhaps one based more on desperation than any more coherent principle. So what, it might work regardless.

Now, whither the G-G? Her Excellency, as best as I can tell, has a simple job: to ensure that Parliament can and does work. In practice, this means she is responsible for granting elections when necessary, and for offering the Prime Ministership to the MP who can make the most reasonable case for the confidence of Parliament. In dire circumstances, the Governor General may need to decide a few things.

So here is a combination of what I think will happen, and what I think the Governor General should happen, since I think they're the same thing: Confronted with the coalition's representation of a majority of the House and its explicit willingness to make a go of it, she will let them have a shot at forming government.

What I don't know is whether this will happen before or after the Tories lose a confidence vote in the House. I think there's some reason to wait until a confidence vote actually fails, as it sets the good precedent of demonstrating a loss of confidence before assuming it. On the other hand, the on-again off-again nature of Parliament being what it is, this may delay the changing of the drapes at 21 Sussex until the New Year, and I don't really know the constitutional precedents for such a situation, if any.

As for how long this coalition will last, and how popular it will be, I think le Bloc holds all the cards, and my suspicion is that the border between Dion looking tough on separatists and Duceppe looking tough on Canada is so thin that they may not be able to split the difference to the pleasure of their respective supporters. In other words, I think the compromises they will have to make to govern are incompatible with some mix of their philosophical principles and what each party should do to gain popular support.

Also, and this is purely a personal feeling, I'll be pretty mad if Canadians don't punish the Liberals and NDP for throwing in with separatists. I don't think a separatist party is an illegitimate mode of political expression, but I think inviting them to be a vital part of a governing coalition is somewhere between stupid and evil.

Further Reading:
Colby Cosh on the tactically inept "Rally for Canada"
And earlier, Colby Cosh makes popcorn in anticipation of the political show that the Triple Entente will be
The Unionists of WWI, the last federal coalition.

Update: as usual, I was mostly wrong in my guesses.

About three seconds later, we raced at each other and tried to bite each other's face.

Today, with cyclocross season over, my club had our Toy Ride, so Jak and I rode out to the ride in Kits, starting at dawn.

It was a smooth, steady ride. I was overeager as always, Jak kept a steady pace as always. We've ridden together often enough that we are used to each other's habits.

The ride saw the debut of my latest cycling project, my complete retro wool kit:

Before and after photos.

I've had the wool team jersey for a year, and like it very much. It immediately led to a desire to build a retro-styled outfit. I started by buying some cheap cotton argyle socks, which did little to satisfy my yen. There things sat for most of a year, until the weather turned and I realized I'd need some winter lower-body wear worth the name.

This fall, I bought a pair of wool dress pants, found on my second or third thrift-shop trawl for this item. Nice Daks, made well. About the same time, I finally found the socks of my dreams: full-calf height, wool blend, and an argyle pattern in my team colors. The pants cost $5, the socks cost about $35 shipped. Yes, I have a problem. But I've been looking for socks like that online for a year.

Getting the pants hemmed to suit my needs involved more web research, and visits to two different alteration shops. The second shop got what I wanted to do immediately, and hemmed up the pants with a nice elastic cuff tucked into the hem. It's hidden by being rolled under the "hem" of the knickers, and the result makes for a slight bloused effect which seems to be fairly close to what the ancients might have called a "plus two" knicker, as opposed to the shorter, traditional knickerbocker, or the longer, puffier, more famous "plus four."

This is much like the garb seen on some of the riders in that video up there, though the men in longer pants are largely wearing something like a plus four. My somewhat sleeker pants are a bit more sporty. You'll notice that my whole outfit, compared to those actual 1955 riders, is a sort of otaku parody of their garb: instead of subdued olive socks, mine are bright red argyle. My jersey is a team jersey with a bold pattern. And the pants are, as I said, a bit trimmer than a puffy plus four. The details are all exaggerated to emphasize an idealized conception of retro gear.

I also cheated by wearing bike shorts under the knickers, and a synthetic base shirt under the jersey. This kept me a tad warmer, a tad comfier, and prevented any undue chafing. Stylish and practical.

This morning's ride was about 3 hours of bike time, more or less, with a couple of breaks (when we got to the ride start and at La Bicicletta on the way home). In an inversion of the usual order, Jak was the one who semi-bonked on the way home, and had to be told to eat. By the time we got to the final 10 km of the ride (the same fast, elevation-losing section that we always ride on the way home), he had largely recovered and we shared the work as we rode a soild tempo home. As the road went up, he came into the lead, and I rolled back in front on the flats and descents. We've ridden together often enough that we are used to each other's habits.

A as in Aye
B as in Bee
C as in Cue
D as in Django
E as in Eye
F as in Fnese
G as in Gnat
H as in Hour
I as in Ita
J as in Jefe
K as in Knee
L as in Lee
M as in Mnemonic
N as in Nee
O as in Oll
P as in Phonetic
Q as in Qat
R as in Rhotic
S as in See
T as in Tse-tse
U as in Use
V as in Vie
W as in Why
X as in Xerxes
Y as in Yew
Z as in Zeus

Further Reading.

And here's Louis CK pointing out that there's a lot of luck to go around:

"You're flying! It's amazing." . . . "You're sitting on a chair. In the sky!"

Behold the Toshiba Dynadock. It's a USB "docking station" (aka "port replicator", aka "dock") for a Toshiba laptop. A docking station is the lazy way to quickly connect a laptop to a keyboard, mouse, external monitor, and network port. They probably made more sense in the bad old days of PS/2 mice, where if you plugged the mouse into the computer directly, you'd need to reboot for it to work.

In the old days, the most common way to connect a docking station to a laptop was through a proprietary docking connector. The laptop would click in, and voilà, you'd get all your devices. For especially small laptops, the docking station might even add ports your laptop didn't ordinarily have.

Now it's 2008. proprietary connectors are lame, and docking stations cost too much and are too laptop-specific. Enter the USB dock, which does the same job using a single USB connection, which is nice and easy, and works with almost any laptop.

This is perilous, because a USB doesn't have unlimited bandwidth, and trying to multiplex a video signal, network signal, and whatever other stuff is hooked to your dock bangs up against the limits of USB. In the case of bad docking stations, you'll see fun stuff like displays that stop refreshing properly when the network is especially active.

The Dynadock isn't a bad USB dock, it's a comically bad USB dock. Here's what it does:

The X200 laptop, which this dock is specified for, uses a non-Basic version of Windows Vista, which means it has Windows Aero, the shiny-happy needs-extra-graphical-power user interface.

The Dynadock does not support Windows Aero. If you want to use the video connector on the dock, you have to turn off the nice graphics.

The Dynadock routinely loses track of the perfectly ordinary USB keyboard plugged into it. So the user sometimes has to unplug and re-plug the keyboard after docking the computer.

What we thus have is a dock that forces you to plug the monitor directly into the laptop using its own connector, and which often requires you to unplug and re-plug the keyboard upon docking. Given that the user's mouse is a wireless one, and the receiver is permanently attached to the laptop, that means the dock is functioning as a glorified network connector. And the list price is $180.

The Dynadock is such a terrible technology it is not even wrong. It is the Basil Fawlty of docking stations, witlessly sabotaging every useful function it could provide. Its best feature is its looks, and it looks like a bookend designed for a post-literate world. It works like one, too. It is terrible. It is, by its fiendish incompetence, one of the most comically rotten impractical jokes ever foisted on an innocent public by a name-brand computer maker. If you read the customer reviews, you will see that it fails in just about every other function you might desire from a docking station.

Okay, some context: the white dog with the gruff voice is the father of the family. it's an ad for a mobile phone plan. It all makes more sense that way, doesn't it?

Okay, more context and more ads. Also, I learned about this from Gen's post, which will lead you to even more ads.

Let me know if it does anything annoying that I should fix.