So this week news washed over the transom that the CBC, along with many other Crown corporations, faces more direct Treasury Board intervention in its union bargaining.

Now, I have experienced exactly this at the bargaining table, from the union side, because of how bargaining was done with provincial post-secondary institutions. There was a rep at the table who was not from the college, but from the Public Sector Employer's Council, a special group that effectively ties the employer's bargaining mandates to the desires of the government.

Bargaining like this is about exerting control over sectoral bargaining and wage mandates. The government doesn't want wage rises in one part of the public sector to set precedents in other parts (there may also be a big helping of no-confidence in the ability of the organization's managers and directors to run within their budget. If so, this is a heavy-handed but pragmatic way to manage a huge portion of the operating cost in as apolitical a fashion as possible (it's only money, ha ha)).

This is probably mostly good for taxpayers. It limits wage rates about as well as possible. Of course, as the guy trying to get a raise (and from a college that had done a good job of its finances and enrolment levels), it sucked because we were tied to a pretty brutal mandate (not to mention the fortunes of other colleges, some of which were in pretty dire financial straits).

Some of my friends got pretty excited about the CBC news, thinking it was a grasp at the autonomy (!) of the CBC in some way. I think I've described the relatively apolitical goal of this power-grab, but let's talk CBC as an institution for a moment.

Name a CBC TV show you actually watch. Great! Now name something other than Hockey Night in Canada. Hm. I can no longer do so, since the uneven spy-com "Insecurity" went off-air (and let's face it, that show was pretty stupid, but I loved it, if only for the episode where NISA (a CSIS stand-in) went up against the Dutch intelligence service. Watch it if you dare, Canadians.

As a person who actually did loyally watch every episode of a recent CBC drama (or indeed any other non-sports show on the ceeb), I may have a leg up on everybody reading this little story. Indeed, even in the world of the famous slow-motion death of mainstream over-the-air television, CBC's TV ratings are not just a little bad, they are cover-your-eyes awful in every way. You can see in that snapshot (picked as just the recent weekly (April 8-14) ratings report, there's lots and lots of nearly identical ratings reports; this is representative. Out of the top 30 shows in Canada, CBC has four: "Hockey Night in Canada (East)", "Dragons' Den", "Murdoch Mysteries", and "Hockey Night in Canada (West)". CBC's news broadcast is murdered by various CTV news shows (CTV's early, late, and weekend news shows are all top-30; no CBC news show is top-30).

Also, Canadians love "The Big Bang Theory" like crazy. The new episodes are higher rated than HNIC, and the daily reruns of the show beat every CBC show except "HNIC (East)".

I could say more snarky things about the CBC, but I already have. In 2006, I observed nearly the same ratings patterns. I also had a notable debate that same year about the existence of CBC TV in which, among other things, my prime antagonist (a sincere and decent man who was not arguing disingenuously) admitted that he didn't watch anything on CBC TV.

In several of those previous notes, I professed my conflicted but devoted love of CBC radio, even as I trashed the TV service. Returning to local radio ratings again, the story is again the same: CBC Radio One is a player, behind only QM FM in audience share, (and again, I believe CHQM's ratings profile is a result of their status as the official radio station of work places that want inoffensive ambient music). The also-rans are a diverse bunch, and I don't know enough to interpret the interestingly divergent "share" and "cume" numbers, but it looks like CBC listeners tune in and stay tuned, while CBC non-listeners avoid it like the plague. Many stations don't have that pattern: CHQM has massive cume as well as share, and the all-bass music station "The Beat" (CFBT) has a respectable share but nearly triple the cume of Radio One. CBC Two is interesting, with nearly the cume of CBC One, but less than half the share. I think this marks them as a relative bit player in the market: they're ninth-ranked in share, and 12th in cume.

As to why the radio station is important, it may be this: I might have a philosophical objection to the existence of a taxpayer-subsidized radio station (even as I love the commercial-free format, hypocrite me), but if the grand bargain was to shed the monstrous TV broadcaster while protecting the remarkably competitive radio service, I'd jump at that, with its promise of freeing up the vast majority of the billion-odd dollars that the federal government puts into CBC services. I don't see substantial synergy between the radio and television networks, either; in Vancouver they share a common building, but radio stations are much smaller affairs than TV stations. And I think it's worth crediting the CBC Radio staff for putting out content that Canadians actually like!

Unfortunately, the owner engaged in the smart practice of locking their phone, so I can't troll through their personal information looking for a way to contact them (like their email address, a phone number called "home," or similar).

Then began a little odyssey in which I tried to reunite the phone with its owner.

Option 1: turn it over to the police

This is the easy and good-faith thing to do with a phone, but it's not that likely to get phone and owner reunited. For perfectly good reasons of better things to do, little time is spent on lost-phone cases. Even if the owner drops by the police station to try to find it, they may discover a large bucket of turned-in phones, and how to find theirs?

Option 2: turn it over to Apple

This was suggested, and might work, but it's not clear that Apple always has tidy access to enough info about their customers to reliably contact them. Probably, but I'm not sure. It's not clear that they routinely reunite people with phones, expecting perhaps that Find My iPhone is supposed to do that. But ah, there's the rub.

Option 3: Find My iPhone

With most lost iPhones, "wait for owner to activate Find My iPhone, hope he sends a useful message" is good advice. Find My iPhone will reach out to an iPhone, and allow the owner to remotely do a few things, including locate the device, send a message to be displayed on the screen, play an alarm (I've used this to find my iPad in my own house) or even wipe all data.

Unfortunately, this phone appears to be broken enough that it cannot get a cel signal. It doesn't show any signs of finding a wireless signal either (possibly because that radio is also somehow broken), but in case I misread the symptoms, I tried tempting it with various open Wi-Fi access point names that it might have connected to in the past. Having failed to lure it out of its shell with "Apple Store," though, I declared that radio dead.

Option 4: give it to their mobile company

This phone had a Telus SIM in it, so finding out where to take it was no problem. Telus beautifully has an official support account on Twitter, and they rapidly confirmed that dropping it off at the nearest Telus store would get it into the right hands.

I'm pretty sure this will work, since Telus will have the owner's complete contact info on hand, and is naturally motivated to reunite phone and owner.

What Didn't Work, but was interesting

Having turned on the phone, I hoped it would do the simple thing: connect to a mobile network, get found by Find My iPhone, and maybe send a message telling me how to contact the owner. When that didn't work, I tried plugging it into my Mac Mini, hoping that, while the device wouldn't dump any data because it was locked, there might be a back-channel by which it would feed its ID into iTunes, and iTunes would quietly check in with Find My iPhone. If this does work, the phone gave no indication that it did: no message, no sudden wiping. It may be the owner didn't try to find it though, or didn't activate the messaging or wiping modes.

However, plugging it in did tell me new information in the form of the iPhone's "name," which might be the owner's name, since it looked just like a Korean name. Facebook stalking turned up several name matches, but none of them was obviously local to the Vancouver area. So there's an avenue that might work in other cases.

I shot a photo of the phone's distinctive lock-screen background, and tweeted that around with the note that I found the phone in Port Moody. Despite quite a few retweets by my friends, this didn't turn up an owner, but I figured that move was a long-shot, even when I tried another message with the owner's name.

I tried popping the SIM in and out, in hopes of reactivating the radio, but that didn't work. It did let me confirm the presence of a Telus SIM, though.

I also tried activating Siri and "call home." No matches, possibly not a surprise for the phone of a person who probably speaks Korean natively. That said, the phone is set up in English, not Korean (and I'm pretty sure Korean is an available language).

Fiddling around with the lock screen did activate iTunes, though, so I'm now learning about some trends in K-Pop.

The last thing I'll do before turning the phone over to the proper authorities (by which I mean Telus) is take a picture of myself with a URL to this blog post in frame. I don't have any expectations of the owner, but if they want to contact me, they will be able to, and reading this post might amuse them.

Travers was a great, sweet lump of a man. Tall, dark, and by no means a small man, he was both one of the most physically imposing people I knew, and one of the gentlest. His default emotional mode was a cheerful fatalism that, combined with a wry sense of humor, made him a neat guy to know. He was plenty smart, happily took up the hacker's mantle, soldiered through a Computing Science degree at SFU (where our paths crossed again; he was two years older than me, and less of a slacker, so I knew him in high school and university, but our friendship was tempered by that age difference at a time of life when two years can split two people into very different natural social groups. And thanks to my slow progress from high school to university, he was leaving SFU within a year or so of my arrival). Nonetheless, he was one of those guys who, in both high school and after, I had many a long phone conversation with, just because we both loved to talk, and about the same wonderfully nerdy subjects. Oh how we were going to change the world when we grew up (and in retrospect, if we didn't personally change the world, our basic guess was right: nerds rather like us changed the world again and again over the intervening years).

Through the magic of electronic communication, we stayed in contact even after we didn't call so often, and it was grand. Travers went on to get into the exciting world of creating video games, only to be shunted into the less exciting world of development tool construction, the team that does thing like write audio subsystems that let the sound guys add sound to each game.

After a while, he threw that over for similarly exciting but more remunerative work in geographical information systems, and I think genuinely enjoying his ability to contribute, in very clever and valuable ways, to the projects he was working on. He had a perceptive mind, superbly suited to programming, and I think he did his job well, all the while marvelling at the management structures that surrounded him. It would be easy to dismiss his as unglamorous work, but I think unglamorous work gets a very short shrift in the world, and there is an awful lot of value tucked away in organizations that consists of solemnly overqualified nerds just getting on with the project of making their little part of the world suck less, in as many ways as they can. Hell, I'd call that my aspiration.

We didn't speak too much about it, but he was broadly unlucky in love. A morose, lumpy big nerd is nobody's idea of a natural ladies' man, but he never carried around any notable bitterness about it. I'm telling you ladies, you missed out.

In his hobbies, his nerdy, clever mind continued to assert itself. He took up robotics (his blog on the subject was the excellently named Gentle Maker), and was working on a self-balancing Segway-style robot, and an autonomous Arduino-powered little tracked vehicle. He was thus playing with technology and programming right until the end, because why not?

The last time I saw him was just about two weeks ago, and I suspect he was more aware of his imminent death at that time than I was. We went to The Red Wagon (his request) a charming hipster diner in East Van that serves fantastic food. We ate well, and after, I took him over to The Commissary to have some Cartem's donuts, which he had not tried before, and liked very much. We spoke not at all about his illness. Instead, we talked of nerdy things, and probably mentioned "neo-retro revivalism," a coinage of mine he latched onto with great love.

He was raised Anglican, and he found that faith again after his diagnosis, and I think it gave him great comfort (especially in the form of a few wonderful people from the church who talked to him in some pretty dark post-diagnosis hours), and one can hope, salvation.

There is no grand lesson here except for the only lesson: remember that you will die. Live accordingly. In his own way, Travers did.

I have now read both of Daniel Coyle's cycling books, "Lance Armstrong's War" and (as co-author with Tyler Hamilton) "The Secret Race." As of now, here's some of the tell-all memoirs I'd like to read from retired bike racers:

-Miguel Indurain, because (at least in English) he is the most enigmatic, least-profiled superstar rider ever
-two or three sprinters, including Cavendish, because their training, goals, and attitudes are so different from that of grand tour teams (which were well-covered by Coyle)
-George Hincapie, because he has said so little, and unlike Hamilton, he was there from the beginning to the end of Armstrong's cycling career
-Jens Voigt, because Jens
-Jonathan Vaughters, as the consensus pick as smartest ex-Postal racer, and currently active rider (but more about Vaughters later)

I'm very far from an expert on pro cycling, and I have not read many long works on the subject, aside from Coyle's two-parter. But let me start with the favoured lay question about cycling:

Did Lance dope?

Almost certainly. The first-hand accounts, separate and together, by his former teammates and professional associates, sometimes in their own interests (as in the case of Hamilton's book), sometimes by accident when they did not realize they were being overheard (as in the case of the infamous text messages between Frankie Andreu and Jonathan Vaughters), and sometimes out of an absolutist sense of justice, and against personal interests (Betsy Andreu, and eventually Frankie Andreu) all speak of highly organized doping within US Postal that absolutely included Armstrong, along with almost all other members of US Postal. Further, it appears that every other Tour contender of that era has been plausibly linked to doping

WIth the dull question out of the way, I found "The Secret Race" fascinating. I believe it is the most widely corroborated memoir of any tell-all from the peloton. The writing is very good, which I attribute to Coyle, but I think he achieved his goal of writing in Hamilton's voice, not his own.

This book is an excellent primer on what it is to race in the pro peloton, and particularly in the Lance Era, and particularly with US Postal and Hamilton's other teams. It answered a lot of questions about the specifics and technicalities of doping. For me, a key revelation was how simple the protocols for both doping and test-beating were.

The doping that mattered was EPO at first, and autologous blood transfusions later, and testosterone (pills, then patches) throughout. There was some sophistication about the dosing protocols (both to avoid testing positive, and to maximize effect), but not that much. More exotic treatments, including perfluorocarbon synthetic oxygenators and Hemopure (a blood substitute) may have been present, but it's not clear they were much used or especially effective. HGH, steroids, and other stuff seem to have been virtually irrelevant (and little used), at least to grand tour racers.

Beating the drug tests is hilariously summarized as "wear a watch…keep your cell phone handy…know your glowtime…none of these things are particularly difficult to do."

There are many more lovely little anecdotes and bits of gossip from the pack. The poor, burned-out doping courier US Postal used for the 1999 Tour de France; the way there was an inner circle and outer circle even within US Postal; the fact that except for Lance, most USPS riders were using shabby old bikes and helmets, apparently because of corruption within the team. These tidbits are fun and add spice to this story, and I will not try to cite all the best bits.

As you would expect from a story by Hamilton, it dwells a lot on Lance Armstrong. Hamilton was a key part of Armstrong's story, and Armstrong was an even more important part of Hamilton's story, as a teammate, then rival, then mortal enemy. Armstrong is the villain here, especially given incidents where he tried to rat out Hamilton (and others) for doping, an infamous (and previously publicized) confrontation between Lance and Tyler at a Boulder restaurant, and other examples where his win-at-all-costs reputation is darkly confirmed. But he is given a bit of the old more-in-sorrow-than-anger in this book, and Hamilton is careful to give Armstrong's incredible natural talent and the singular intensity of his training their due. I don't think it is said explicitly, but you get the impression that even in a completely clean ("paniagua", in the excellent slang of the pros) sport, Armstrong would still have been the dominant racer of the era.

And now, what of Tyler Hamilton? Considering it's his autobiography, he is a less sympathetic figure than you'd think. I don't really credit that to his profound honesty in this tale. He is, as far as I can tell, as honest about the facts as he can be, not obviously holding anything material back about his life as a pro bike racer. But in his descriptions of himself as a pro, the justice (or injustice) of his treatment when he got popped, and the fairness of what he did in doping to victory, I think he minimizes his own culpability. He lays out the facts in sufficient detail that they (and he) are there to be judged, but I think I judged his behaviour more harshly than Hamilton. I believe, in the end, he felt the choice was, at some point, to either dope and have a bike racing career, or to not dope and not have a bike racing career. I think, without being able to point to a particular quote in the book, he feels he made the right choice.

By way of comparison, his former teammate Jonathan "JV" Vaughters made a much more ambiguous choice. JV is quoted at length in the book, apparently the result of interviews with Coyle, and was obviously a key corroborator of many of Hamilton's stories. He gets, as you might expect from his reputation (Hamilton dubs him "the nerd"), he gets the most perceptive, fascinating, and funny quote in the book, a passage I'll quote in its entirety:

The thing to realize about Fuentes and all these guys is that they're doping doctors for a reason. They're the ones who didn't make it on the conventional path, so they're not the most organized people. So when they leave a bag of blood out in the sun because they're having another glass of wine at the café, it's predictable. The deadly mistake that Tyler, Floyd, Roberto, and the rest of them made when they left Postal was to assume that they'd find other doctors who were as professional. But when they got out there, they found--whoops!--there weren't any others.

I'll admit to loving this quote because it confirms one of my favourite aphorisms: cycling is not a professional sport. The doping in cycling, long thought of by fans and those in other sports as the most sophisticated and leading-edge, is in fact amateurish, the province of profiteering gynaecologists and their senile assistants.

I'm a big fan of JV, both as a twitter presence and as Directeur Sportif of Garmin-Sharp, Ryder Hesjedal's team. He is, in many ways, the example of an alternative path. JV, just before this book was released, made sure to publish his first unambiguous, public admission that he doped during his career. But while Hamilton played the game of doping, winning, getting caught, and fighting the charges all the way to the end, JV quietly left USPS, rode out his career as a clean rider, and founded a racing team that has now won at the highest levels, all while making an effort to be as transparently clean as any team ever. (I'm a fairly gullible guy, and it's possible JV is running one of the great long cons of all time, but I don't think so. His team has gone above and beyond the requirements for anti-doping testing, and according to this book, the biological passport and post-Postal culture in cycling may be working: it's no longer easy to manipulate blood values usefully. Most importantly, I think (and I think JV thinks) doping scandals are sponsorship repellents, while plausibly clean programs will attract sponsor money.

It's far from clear in Hamilton's account, but the amount of money these pros are making is not that impressive. Hamilton, one of the elite talents of the peloton, seems to have scraped into seven-figure territory for his best year or two, if you add up all sources of income. (Lance, always the overachiever, has apparently earned more money than any other pro racer ever, and probably more than anyone will earn for the foreseeable future. He was, above all else, a singularly marketable bike racer). In an alternate life, It's easy to imagine Hamilton as a high-achieving professional with a gift for winning semi-pro bike races. Given that he spent virtually every dime he earned as a bike racer while fighting his doping charges, he would have been ahead financially if he had never taken up the sport (or, for that matter, if he had accepted his suspension without a fight).

True to the book's title, Hamilton tells a lot of secrets, allowing a balanced and truthful description of what's really going on. The story needs to include doping in order to be the complete story, but it also describes all of pro bike racing in a clear way: the training, the eating (to Hamilton himself, a much more complex and important matter than dope cycles), and the racing, and the people. I recommend "The Secret Race" to anyone with an interest in the sport of cycling.

An uneventful flight. The interesting events in our two-legged flight from Vancouver to Athens were seat selection and AV problems.

We selected our seats relatively late, and as a result should have been even more screwed than we were. The YVR-YUL leg was on an A320, and we ended up with Rebecca on the aisle, and me one row behind in the middle (3-3 seating configuration). I asked the gentleman in my row's aisle seat if he would mind swapping with Rebecca, so we could sit together. He demurred, as the woman in the window seat in my row was his wife.

Yep, I was the unwelcome meat in a spousal sandwich. There's two rational reasons for a booking choice like this couple's: you hate your spouse, or you are trying to sneakily book your own private row of seats, aka ghetto first class. The down side is what happened, on a heavily booked flight where they got me in the middle.

Which was fine. This is some very borderline Seinfeldian system-gaming, at worst. They were perfectly quiet, and Rebecca and I got an accidental revenge when she tossed a snack to me and I deflected into my seat-mate's crotch. D'oh.

But on the long YUL-ATH leg, we lucked into ghetto first class: we had two of the middle three seats (767, 2-3-2 configuration), and to my right was my favourite kind of adjacent passenger, which is to say no passenger at all. Air Canada's revenue loss was our gain, and Rebecca was able to sleep stretched out across three seats for much of the flight.

We were also part of a block of seats in the middle of the airplane that had no audio for the in-flight movies and no working reading lights, either. iPad and Nintendo DSi to the rescue: we were not bored, and I got in a good nap, too.

Our connection in Montreal was uneventful (the Tim Horton's in the Montreal airport is as pure a bilingual workplace as I have ever seen, the behind-counter chatter being evenly distributed between English and French, sometimes even between the same co-workers). The flights were uneventful, too. Air Canada gets a lot of stick, and they charge for food on domestic flights, but the planes worked, the seat pitch was wastefully generous for Rebecca and I, wine is free on international flights, and they would have flown a bicycle to Athens for $50 had I been inclined to take advantage of it (and the biggest reason I didn't take advantage of it is because getting the bike from Athens to Syros would have been more hassle than getting the bike from Vancouver to Athens).

Rebecca's cousin Argiris picked us up at the airport, and we're now resting up at her aunt and uncle's place in Athens. We sail for Syros in the morning. We will in theory have been about 30 hours between bed-sleeps before this long travel day ends, but in practice Rebecca is sleeping now (early afternoon, local time), while a judicious combination of in-flight sleep, caffeine, and drugs is keeping me perky, for now.

Letter from Greece, on our way to Syros, Tuesday, 18 September 2012, 0955 Greek time (2355 Vancouver time), somewhere in the Mediterranean
We had a very early taxi ride to Piraeus, the port of Athens, to sail on the Blue Star Naxos to Syros (and here's a peril of naming your boats after ports of call: the Blue Star Paros was going to Naxos, while the Blue Star Naxos was going to Paros. Both were in port, side by side). an 0730 departure time had us leaving right at dawn. I hope the photos turn out nicely.

Greece is an easy habit for us now: arrive in Athens, spend a day or two with the Apostopolous family (John and Helen, Rebecca's relatives, a bit older than her parents, and our patient and generous hosts for many transits through Athens), and sail for Syros, a 4 hour trip on a Blue Star ferry. Even our stroll down to the shore in Athens, an easy walk from John and Helen's flat, took us to the same place, for the same walk to see the marina, and then along the length of the swimming beach, before we walked home, the same route we have done on previous trips.

You always see different things, though. One of the several men fishing off the marina's breakwater landed a decent-sized fish while we watched. John and Helen's yard is now occupied by five cats, a change from the turtle who was in residence last year.

When we got to the port, we hit up the vendor of sesame seed-covered bread rings for a sort of breakfast, as we always do. The rings were a tad stale; the giant sugar donut we bought as a chaser was much better.

The natural question in Greece, circa 2012, is "how is Greece doing?" Even the Greeks want to know. Greeks are a culture that is delightfully casual about questions like salaries and whether you have gained or lost weight, but there was a studiousness to the discussion I had with Helen about comparative salaries in Canada and Greece.

And how is Greece doing? It could be worse. Note that it has been a relevant question for at least 5 years. The seeds of what has been called The Crisis were manifest even then, but more acutely each year for the last three. It is glib, shallow, and wrong to judge an economy by the trip from the airport to your evening accommodation, no matter how familiar you are with the sights.

Let me be cynical for a moment and say "Greece is doing fine." Greece is, compared to the Greece of five years ago, absolutely not doing fine. Unemployment is higher, salary cuts among the still-employed have been substantial, and there isn't much optimism. My wife's cousin, a smart and hard-working businessman, is seriously considering transplanting his family to where his business opportunities are: Nigeria.

But his business aside, Greece is not Nigeria. I enjoy jokes (to TLO's annoyance) about Greece's status as a first-world Eurozone country, but it remains such: the concerns in Greece are mostly NOT existential: few people are poor enough that food is a concern. The medical care is at least adequate, and life expectancy is well in line with other non-Scandinavian countries in Europe. The city streets have as many cars as ever, and if it's the usual European mix of very small cars and very small engines, it was always that way (and with gas at €1.70, you get why). I don't have crime stats on hand, but my relatives are not very paranoid about crime or security, and no more so than in years past.

That said, here we are, TLO and I, traveling to Greece, while our Greek friends and relatives are decidedly not traveling to Canada, or many other places. In the past, many of them were active travelers.

For the tourist, Greece could not be finer right now. Most visitors from outside the Eurozone will find everything is 10% off last year's already low Euro prices. It's still a great place to visit, the food is still fantastic, the restaurants have not closed down (and knowing Greek culture, they'll be the last thing to close). and the weather and beaches remain in excellent working order.

As I'm sure I related last year, fall and spring are the nice times to see Greece. The greenery is actually green, the sea is still lovely to swim in, and the temperatures back off from the oppressive low-40s of the summer to the low 30s. Year round, the Greek islands we visit are about 10C warmer than Vancouver. You risk a certain amount of rain in the equinox seasons (and when it rains, it POURS), but it is my favourite season.

I type this while sitting outside on the ferry to Syros. The sun is shining, the Mediterranean is as ridiculously blue as ever. We're here for nearly a month, and I am happy.

Letter from Greece: Day 3, Syros
Thursday, September 20, 1830h

After settling into the house yesterday, shopping, and having dinner with Rebecca's aunt and uncle (Antouaneta and Dmitri), we spent today hiking and swimming.

Lia (Λια) beach is a quiet spot that has no road access. You get there on foot or by boat. The hike is not trivial: the trail is rough and poorly marked. But by now, we are used to the tricks of the route (and for most of the walk, you can see both your origin and destination). The trailhead is about 200m down the road from the house, and the hike is posted as 30 minutes, optimistic for anyone who isn't a fit and committed hiker.

TLO's yoga paid off this year: she had the easiest time hiking down and back of any trip. We swam and did yoga on the beach, and ate pistachios.

For some reason, the beach was especially busy this day, with a couple of guys camping on the beach, having motored in by boat, and then a pair of serious-looking hikers (Tilley hats, poles, boots) came by. Word is getting out about Lia beach, so please don't tell anybody about it, okay?

I took my bicycle wheel in to be repaired on Wednesday, and had an amusing translation problem: the proprietor spoke virtually no English (even less than I speak Greek, quite rare here among shopkeepers), and TLO doesn't understand bike jargon. It took a few minutes to figure out that he was warning me he had to re-true the whole wheel to fix the missing spoke, but I'll have the wheel back on Friday.

A friend linked to this article published on the Atlantic's website: "1% Wives Are Helping Kill Feminism and Make the War on Women Possible," by Elizabeth Wurtzel. I usually ignore such things, because while I think the Atlantic is a great magazine, I want to engage with strong arguments, not weak ones, and my initial response was, dismissively, "this is terrible...cyanide-laced Kool-Aid for movement feminism."

I am convinced by the response though, that some people regard this article as advocating something reasonable. I guess I can write a rebuttal, then (and what follows is slightly edited from a comment I made on Facebook).

Quoting straight from the article, "Who can possibly take feminism seriously when it allows everything, as long as women choose it?"

So the author is specifically concerned that some choices women make, specifically full-time motherhood, are not feminist choices.

Let's call this definition of feminism "Wurtzelism," just to give us a handy label. Wurtzelism wants to dictate which choices are good and bad, and says "there really is only one kind of equality...economic."

Wurtzelism is a comically totalitarian philosophy of life. It manages to claim the supremacy of economics while being economically illiterate at the same time (Wurtzel rubbishes Romney for saying his wife's job is more important than his, because "if he thought that, he'd be doing it." This only makes sense if you believe economics is really good at pricing in-family decisions about roles and goals, and also don't know about Ricardo's theory of Comparative Advantage*), but it is at least clear: "Real feminists...have money and means of their own."

This is an argument against ever throwing your lot in with anyone else, ever. It is a claim that every domestic arrangement where people do not maximize their personal earnings is anti-Wurtzelist. Wurtzelism decries child-rearing as non-useful work (because it's not conventionally paid), and implies that parents have no natural advantage in raising their own children over paid help (Wurtzelist logic seems to be that if you can earn more than a good nanny or childcare service, you must put your kids in full-time care and go to work.)

About the most charitable argument I can make is that Wurtzel is stumping for a Guaranteed Minimum Income, or in terms she is surely familiar with, £500 a year and a room with a lock on the door. Noble goals perhaps, but I think more universal than feminist, and badly undercut by her specific charges against wealthy full-time mothers.

The reason I say Wurtzelism is "cyanide-laced Kool-Aid" is that this is so far at odds with the decisions of real-world women, both in claimed values and revealed preferences, that it would redefine feminism as completely at odds with large numbers of women. It would, metaphorically, kill off feminism's followers by making them swallow a completely ridiculous set of claims, surely extending beyond just the stay-at-home moms Wurtzel is specifically excoriating, and into the broader group of men and women who are sympathetic to some strain of feminism, but are also sympathetic to allowing women to choose things.

I would caution anyone that free-market pricing is a great tool for finding out information about prices, but you are not beholden to market value! That's Veblen good crazy-thinking.

*Comparative Advantage is a topic well worth looking up, but applying it to this example, if raising the kids is the thing Mr. & Mrs. Romney value most highly, and Mrs. Romney is better than Mr. Romney at both raising kids and earning money, then Mr. Romney will spend all his time earning money, and Mrs. Romney will spend all her time raising kids, and that will maximize the total amount of "value" they can extract from the marriage. I'm not going to elaborate on how diminishing returns on investment and other factors complicate this calculation.

NPR is reporting on a bunch of studies (also summarized here that just got published in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology.

I have not read the studies in detail (and am not enough of an expert to do so seriously), but the studies revolved around 1628 Danish mothers who were surveyed on their drinking habits while pregnant, and then their kids were tested (IQ, attention span, and other stuff) at age 5. It looks like maternal drinking was not significantly correlated with any effects in mothers who drank up to 8 drinks/week, or even in mothers who engaged in occasional "binge drinking"!

Caveats? Again, I haven't read the studies. The notoriously non-standard standard drink in this study is Danish: 12g of alcohol (roughly a 1 oz shot, 330 mL beer, or a 5 oz glass of wine). Consumption above 9 drinks/week was correlated with shorter (not sure how much shorter) attention spans in the kids.

So there you go. Another bit of evidence suggesting that Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is not a significant concern for any but the most ragingly alcoholic expectant mothers. If you feel like having a glass of wine with dinner, you're not harming your baby (quite the opposite, probably).

And most importantly, if you see an obviously pregnant woman enjoying a drink, whether you know her or not, your default action should be to mind your own damn business. She's having a baby, and you don't want to stress her out for stupid reasons.

Las Vegas, and I was theoretically prepared for this, is a profoundly, wildly strange town. What follows are little vignettes of my stay here for Infocomm 2012, the trade show for audiovisual nerds.

Disorientation is the default setting for me here, and I have stopped blaming my poor sense of direction. Even the conference centre is laid out such that it has taken two days to figure out the relationship between the North and Central exhibit halls. And yes, I realize there is a pretty big hint in their names, thank you.

Vegas is profoundly, wretchedly unwalkable, and not because of sprawl issues. Obviously, the weather itself is the first and most profound problem: temperatures this week are flirting with 40C. But beyond that, even when relatively short distances are involved, Vegas seems designed to be actively hostile to anyone on foot. Gargantuan city blocks, huge intersections with surprisingly long cycle times, and sidewalks that end abruptly are typical. The lively Downtown seems to be the only exception, with large crowds on the sidewalks, but even there they feel like an afterthought. Almost none of the casinos or hotels I have visited seem to be designed to be walked into: my own hotel, the business-oriented Springhill Suites, is maybe the best example. I thought the modest doorway to the lobby I had been dropped off at (and which, on foot, is my normal means of entering and exiting the complex) was a side entrance to the lobby, until I went looking for the "real" hotel entrance. There is none. That's it. This place has its first seven floors (except the lobby area and lobby-level restaurants) devoted to car parking, and I suppose most guests enter the hotel from the parking levels.

As if to emphasize the wacky transportation infrastructure, Las Vegas has a monorail. Yep, the silliest form of mass transit this side of cable cars, and Vegas has one. That said, if it goes where you want to be, it's fine: cars arrive every six minutes or so, are clean, and it is an acceptable $5/trip (cheap compared to a cab). On the other hand, I was literally standing underneath the Harrah's monorail station, having ineptly walked there by a route that only made sense as a disoriented best effort, looking in vain for any way to get to the platform! I finally spotted a nondescript staircase 100m down the street that led up to the walkway that connected the nearest hotel to the monorail (and the hotel parkade).

The hotels and casinos are nice to walk in, but they are structurally disorienting. This is sort of fun if you're amiably wandering, and it's ok to just go with it. But standing in front of a floor map in the Venetian, with marked points on the map all around me, it took me several minutes to figure out what direction I was facing.

And by the way, the Venetian is just as joyfully crazy an idea as you'd expect: there is a "Grand Canal" located on a floor above street level, with trompe a l'oeil skies painted on the ceilings. It was wonderful and terrible. Then as I popped into a washroom, I was standing beside three men speaking Italian to each other. What the...I don't even...they weren't cast members: just three street-casual Italian men (one wearing a "USA" track jacket, of course), spending their vacation at the Venetian. I never mustered up the courage to ask them, well, to ask them I don't know what.

I wandered over to the World Series of Poker (at the Rio hotel) to sweat a friend, and while poker is fascinating, serious business, the place where the greatest tournament series in the game is dealt out is profoundly banal. Huge ballrooms with hundreds of poker tables set up, and conference room chairs for the players, and this is where games are dealt out with the winners of the tournaments taking home six and seven figure prizes.

The art of vendor seduction was practiced on me very gently by a master of the art, so I got to have a very nice dinner at a nice restaurant called "First." Good conversations too, though as usual I worry that I'm the know-it-all boor at the table, though hopefully I wasn't too much my usual self.

At Infocomm, I haven't seen too many jaw-dropping new technologies, but I did discover a company pursuing the strangest niche technology imaginable. Prysm is touting what they call a "laser phosphor display." imagine the colour-dotted phosphor mask of a traditional CRT design, except that instead of having a vacuum tube with an electron gun behind it, the LPD has a laser shooting at the back of the phosphor mask, stimulating light emission just like an electron beam does in a CRT. No vacuum needed, though! The resolution (or at least the dot pitch) is not impressive, but the power consumption is. They're trying to make it big in certain kinds of digital signage and video wall markets.

And there's the usual raft of Far East vendors arriving with mad technologies at crazy prices, desperately seeking first-world distribution. A presenter-tracking PTZ HD camera for $1500? A five-input seamless HD switcher for about $3000? I know you don't know what that means trust me: those prices are amazing. If the stuff works.

I rode my folding bicycle about 3.5 miles from my hotel to the Rio (see WSOP vignette above). It was painfully hot, the roads were not built for bicyclists, and it was by no means an easy trip, despite the dead flat terrain. No sane person rides a bike in Vegas at this time of the year. When I got to the Rio, they had a bike rack! There were two other bikes parked in it. One was a nondescript cheap mountain bike. The other was a competition grade Quintana Roo triathlon bike, probably worth almost as much as my car. Who owned it and why they rode it to the Rio, I have no idea.

Infocomm has a special International Lounge for foreigners, with refreshments, seating, and free wifi: the three greatest show-floor perks imaginable. I have never been so glad to not be American, and yet I'm fluent in the local language, and I'm still in my own time zone. Being Canadian here is almost like cheating.

My beloved supplier Ben entered his job title as "King of the Bongo." so he walks around the show floor with a perfectly official badge that proclaims him King of the Bongo. It's good to be king.

Dinner conversation tonight fell off the deep end somewhere around the time we started discussing the sad low-level job of handing out hooker cards on the street, a sort of misbegotten pimp-in-training occupation that is ubiquitous in Vegas. This led to the idea of InfoPimp, an international conference on pimps and pimping, and speculation on the metrics and best-practices oriented sessions you might find at such a conference. In my defense, I had been drinking. Then I killed all the fun with a long monologue on monarchy, governance, fiat currency and the problem of ideal currency zones. In my defense, I had been drinking.

My hotel has a decent complimentary breakfast buffet. The highlight is the make-your-own waffle station.

So yes, Vegas is wonderful. And I haven't even been to the Pinball Museum yet.

First, there was a national legislative election on Sunday, and the result was fairly dramatic. The ruling left-of-centre PASOK party was comprehensively trounced. The right-of-centre New Democratic Party (yes, a right-leaning NDP, very amusing to all Canadians) gained a bit. Those are also the only two parties, as far as I can tell, that were committed to continuing the austerity/bailout policies.

The remainder of the seat-winners were parties with an anti-austerity bent, as far as I can tell. The Greek Communist party (KKE; a party that consistently gains a bit less than 10% of the popular vote) made modest gains. The even-more-left Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) made huge gains, getting 17% of the popular vote and more than quadrupling its seat count, having been far less popular than the KKE in the previous election.

More dramatically, two new parties that were anti-austerity splinter groups from PASOK and the NDP both picked up seats, and a minor right-wing party affiliated with a pro-Orthodox Church message and accused of crypto-fascism (LAOS) was wiped out of parliament. It was effectively replaced by the rather more fascistic Golden Dawn party, whose members flash the Roman salute (really, Greeks?) and whose logo hints at both the Greek Key pattern and a swastika. It's an impressive bit of graphic design, if you'll forgive me a Sobchakian moment of admiration.

What does it mean? Well, the NDP won the most seats, so they got the first shot at forming a governing coalition, and failed. SYRIZA is the next up, and I'm not sure if they will form government or not; they're trying as I write this.

(A quick aside: Ekathimerini is a pretty good source for English-language news about Greece; they're the local arm of the International Herald Tribune, which is to say they're the local arm of the New York Times, and the go-to English-language newspaper in Greece.)

At the risk of getting instantly overtaken by events, I expect that there are two completely intractable divisions in the Greek parliament: pro-bailout versus anti-austerity parties, and fascists and communists.

The most natural coalition is the two pro-austerity parties, but they don't have a majority between them; the anti-austerity parties have the majority, but only if the fascists, communists, and super-communists are willing to pull together. I'm skeptical that will be possible for even the single issue of sticking it to the IMF and the Eurozone bailout nations. I believe this if only because all three parties come from historic backgrounds that preach, more or less explicitly, that "the worse the better." It is possible the Greeks will have to go back to the ballot box before this legislature sits.

As for what will happen, even if the Greeks hold a new election, I believe this result (and the national sentiment) will push Greece to reject any further bailout compromises, which will very likely lead them to default, which will very likely lead them to exit the euro. The Greeks, unless the polls have changed since I last checked, are still very enthusiastic about the Euro in theory. But the Greek attitude to the Euro is like Elizabeth Taylor's attitude towards marrying: enthusiasm untempered by any evidence of commitment.

Meanwhile, they are still running a current account deficit, which means that even if their interest payments were zero, they would still have a deficit, which means (given that a defaulting country as virtually no access to credit markets) they'd have to cut spending or raise taxes (likely both). In other words, austerity either way.

The Greek exit out of the Eurozone seems all but certain to me, quite possibly before the Fall, for the simple reason that the Greeks have grown weary of the bailout conditions. I predict they will like what comes next even less.

Darren Barefoot linked to a semi-interesting but disappointing article about exercise myths.

Instead, here's my rough-sketched precepts of exercising, which draw on the Lifehacker article, but are more succinct, more coherent, and don't lie to you about the value of hard workouts.

Most people should do strength training. It is far more important than we previously realized*. Shorter, high-intensity workouts and drills are more useful than long-slow workouts; unless you're training for an endurance cardio event, you don't need a cardio focus in your workouts.

Go hard enough that you suffer, stop before you injure yourself. Fundamentally, exercise works by stressing your system, which causes your body to respond by building up the stressed systems. (Which is why you have to leave recovery time between workouts).

And now for some dark, disturbing news: you may be one of the people for whom exercise response is not very high. I don't really have any advice for you.

Choose a workout process based on what motivates you and what excuses you fall back on. In my experience, this is the most important element of your workout. If removing barriers to exercise means always ensuring your yoga bag is packed and near the front door, that's what you do. Get a workout buddy. If you're competitive, start a Big Loser challenge at your office. If you're too busy, do 10 push-ups every time you have a minute alone. If you like dogs, run your dog once a day. If you are cheap and motivated by deadlines, ride your bike to work.

That said, I don't follow this advice well. I don't do enough strength training yet, because I've been bad at finding my motivation or nudges. I do a ton of cardio, because I am training for endurance events (bike racing, where I need to make it to the end to unleash my sprint). Nonetheless, I'd encourage you to do push-ups, sit-ups, weights, and whatever it takes to build strength. The treadmill is largely a waste of time, except for distance runners.

*I'm feeling a little lazy, so no links to evidence for this, but the few studies I've read reports on and the general thrust of recent exercise thinking all point in one direction: strength is the core of fitness and ability, and strength-focused workouts are the core of building that. Cardio can be added on top of that base, if you need.

Compared to its mirrorless adversaries, the resulting body is thick. Imaging Resource published a preview that has side-by-side pictures of the K-01 against some other cameras, and you can see how much thicker than a small micro-4/3 body this one is. (The Sony NEX was curiously absent from the comparisons, but it's about as thick as a micro-4/3, albeit using lenses that are closer in size to typical dSLR systems, including, ahem, the Pentax K-mount).

I didn't really get the idea of taking a dSLR and whacking off the mirror box until Pentax made a second announcement this week. They're bringing out a bunch of new lenses soon, but this post has a big picture of the most interesting lens right at the top: a future lens for the K-01, where half the guts are going to stick inside the camera body.

That very flat lens will not fit on a conventional Pentax K-mount body: there are bits of lens well behind the lens mount, and the mirror would get in the way on any conventional body.

I think this is the first of many of these special lenses, and they'll let Pentax advertise something very interesting: a K-01 body will be a bit of a chunky camera, but a K-01 with special "XS" lenses will be one of the slimmest system cameras around! Even better, Pentax uniquely has a library of very flat lenses to draw on. The first announced XS lens was a 40mm f/2.8, which was an impressively super-flat update to a lens they have made for about 40 years (it also will work on normal Pentax SLRs, as it happens). Just looking at this new XS lens, I speculate it's a variation on their 21mm f/3.2 pancake, with everything pushed further back into the body (and resized to be APS-C only).

Pentax has one other pancake in its portfolio, a 70 mm, and I expect it to be the next lens in the XS series. All three of these lenses are very unusual: to my knowledge, only the micro 4/3s system has mainstream pancake lens options. They're notably lacking from the current E-mount options for the Sony NEX series.

The core selling point of the K-01 camera will then be: yes, you can use every piece of K-mount glass ever made, when you need to, and the camera will be big. But when you want a small, carry-around camera, you can put an XS lens on it, and the camera, despite its body thickness, will be more compact than any other APS-C camera, and competitive with the micro 4/3s models. Buy all three of the XS pancakes, and you can have a wide, normal, and tele lens set that fit in a small pocket.

I don't know if the K-01 will be a market success, but I think it is an idea that physically makes a LOT more sense than you would think at first glance.

It would be the f-word, "HDCP," and then a paragraph's worth of the f-word being used in its adjectival, nominal, adverbial, and verb forms to describe the technology, its creators, its implementors, and its shortcomings.

HDCP has bitten me in the metaphorical ass numerous times, both at home and at work, and only while trying to do stuff that was utterly non-infringing: I don't get bit by HDCP when I'm trying to copy protected content, I get bit by it, repeatedly, while trying to play HDCP sources in boring ways that were non-issues in the Analog Era. It has cost me (and thanks to my professional capacity, taxpayers) a disturbing amount of time, energy and money.

HDCP has done a tremendous amount to poison my previous good feelings about Blu-ray, content creators, HDMI, digital video, and just about every element of the A/V industry that went along with this nonsense. Thanks for screwing me, your loyal customer, professional specialist, and recreational enthusiast over for trying to use your award-winning* garbage. Meanwhile, I suspect that HDCP set back the entire video-piracy industry about 15 minutes.

*HDMI's 2008 Engineering Emmy was given to the many companies that contributed to that technology. One of those key technology contributions, mostly by Intel, was HDCP itself.

In January, TLO bought us a car, as we finally surrendered to the reality that our semi-beloved New Beetle was not reliable, and between me and our mechanic, we had neither the will nor the wit to make it right. The Versa has been a quiet charmer: surprisingly comfy seating for four; flip the rear seat, and it eats bikes with no wheels off, no bad habits, driving-wise, and the cupholders can actually hold cups, unlike the comical VW cupholder parodies. (We also sold the Beetle, of course).

In May, my parents invited us to join them for a four-day cruise, which was a first for TLO and I. It was something we will do again.

In June, I went to Orlando for a major AV conference, and it was there, in a bar in the bowels of the Hard Rock Cafe (courtesy a vendor-sponsored party), that I saw the Canucks utterly fail to win Game 7 of the Stanley Cup, confirming my belief that it's the The President's Trophy that really matters.

I wrote a comprehensive guide to bicycle commuting for my workplace, as an interesting side job, along with a extra-nerdy appendix. I was proud of the effort, and I hope it drives a few people onto their bicycles.

I wrote an Essay in Favour of Plausible Events. This could go places.

TLO and I did our now-usual trip to Greece, this time in the Fall, and it was our best vacation ever. There were many delights large and small.

On a pet front, we adopted a cute Jack Russell Terrier cross named Abe. He is not perfect, but he is a delight, and even with the the usual biases accounted for, my favourite pet ever. The addition of a loach to our fish tank turned it into a Death Tank for all the other poor fish, but we have now converted the tank to all mean fish, and they, um, don't try to kill each other.

Bike racing was something I took a little more seriously this year, albeit in fits and starts. I've had a tremendous amount of fun, and I've picked my spots in terms of the kind of events I'm doing, often quite novel. As for the results, I didn't always cover myself in glory (fun notwithstanding), but I had my moments.

And really, track cycling deserves its own paragraph: I joined the Burnaby Velodrome Club this year, and am so glad I did. Aside from flattering my particular gifts as a rider, it has proven to be enormously entertaining, and I've even seen friends and family come out and have fun watching me tear up the track. This is all low-category beer-league nonsense, to be sure, but lots of fun.

Here were last year's resolutions, with scoring:

-Drink less, Internet less, eat less, ride more.
I drank about the same. I Internetted about the same. I ate the same, maybe slightly better. I rode more, though, getting close to my desired level of training.

-Learn some things. Greek or Objective-C, or project management, or personnel management. Any two would be great.
I learned a bit of Greek, and it was very good. Obj-C? Nothing. PM and PM? I learned on the job, but I feel like my project and personnel skill are slightly better than last year. I hope for a big breakthrough on projects in 2012, thanks to some tools, notably Basecamp, that I have started using habitually. Personnel skills? I've...gained a lot of experience.

-Learn or improve or regularly use a technique for making things with my hands. Brazing, whittling, circuit assembly. Something. Could even be more bike building, I guess.
Not much on this front. I did some random crafting, though, including sorting out a new camera strap (prototype here) that involved a bit of design and a bit of scrounging and a bit of sewing. It was interesting.

-re-exhibit the History of Video Games.
Watch this space.

-divest a considerable amount of my under-used bike gear. I have too many bikes, too many frames, too many parts. Time to tidy up.
With TLO's encouragement, I sold a lot of accumulated stuff, mostly not bike gear (car tires, roof racks, a dishwasher). This is still in the plans, but I may start fire-saling gear. What is good is that I didn't gain too much bike junk, and I did divest of old clothes, random junk, and unloved books in a fairly ruthless fashion.

-Some personal resolutions that are none of your business.
I can't remember exactly, so they probably only went so-so.

So here's some resolutions for next year, once again with lots of recycling:
Drink less, Internet less, eat less, train smart: not "ride more," as I think I've got enough riding in my schedule, so it's a matter of doing things correctly, so my weight goes down and my speed goes up, I do the valuable non-bike workouts that make me stronger and faster, and I plan around peak performances during goal events.

Learn Greek, start an Objective-C project (I actually have a project in mind this time), be better at my job.

Learn to use TLO's new sewing machine for minor alterations and a mini project. That will be my "use my hands" resolution, but I'm not giving up on getting a MAPP torch and some brazing wire.

Acquire a Computer Space arcade machine. Or maybe a Pong.

Sell some surplus bike frames.

Some personal resolutions that are none of your business.

Published authorship is a star system, and it sounds like cynical craziness, but widespread literacy means a lot of people have the basic tools to become a writer, which means supply swamps demand at the non-superstar end of the market (think of pro sports, in terms of the rewards at the top, the relative lack of depth in the middle, and the total lack of demand for mediocre athletes) except with a less-clear system for detecting and recruiting superstar talent.

All I can suggest if you really desire to write, as the distilled advice that writers usually give on how to write, and the experience of people I know who write for a living, is this:

1) probably don't do it
2) if you must, write lots
3) periodicals of all kinds are great opportunities to work up your writing chops in a paid way, as well as working on essays that might become books. It's surprising how far you can get with a few well-targeted query letters.

I think a fourth element is blogging, in that I see a lot of star bloggers who just reflexively emit books after a while, and the nice cycle there is that the blog acts as both a creator of the book's audience, a promotional tool for the book at the end, and a way to practice the craft of writing and test the ideas you are writing about. The pay is quite bad, of course, and the difficult part is the bit where you become a star blogger.

So here's Alex running for a job as a public servant, and where the decisions are important and have deep consequences*, in a community where transportation is a major civic issue.

I assure you, he's the right man for the job.

Alex Gives Back

Ever since I've known Alex, he's been helping out with things he wants to make better. We met as fellow members of a cycling club that requires members to volunteer in support of races. And Alex did, putting in as needed, at every level of the sport from laying out traffic cones before a race to sitting on the board of Cycling BC.

Did I mention he's got a lovely family, too? He's doing something right.

Alex is Wise

I have an easy affinity for anyone with a computing science background, since I regard the essence of that field as pragmatic analysis of problems, followed by constructing a solution.

Civic politics presents fuzzier problems than programming a computer, but the basic desire is for someone who can analyze issues and pick solutions. Alex is such a man, and he's got a lot of experience in problem-solving, the minutiae of governing large organizations, and the small-scale diplomacy of a board meeting, so similar to that of most town councils. He's smart, but more importantly, he's wise.

Alex Knows Transportation

It's easy to paint Alex as a one-note cycling nut (just as it is with me), but like me, Alex is a guy who has a car, isn't afraid to use it, and understands both the benefits and limitations of cars, bikes, and everything in between.

Like a lot of Metro Vancouver communities, transportation issues are a huge part of what it means to live in Maple Ridge. Alex does not have a narrow view of these issues, and I believe he is very aware of the current best-and-brightest thinking on how transportation infrastructure affects communities.

That thinking would presently push a place like Maple Ridge towards a greater focus on making it easy to ride your bike around the city. This doesn't just benefit cyclists: every bike moving around is one less car adding to the traffic jam. The same principle applies to transit use.

The freedom to move is an incredible thing, and transportation reaches deeply into things as wide-ranging as town planning (everything from the aesthetics and land requirements imposed by parking accommodations to how walkable a street-level retail strip is) to childhood obesity levels (which seem to have risen in an eerie coincidence as walking and cycling became abnormal ways to get to school).

Conclusion: Vote for Alex

In conclusion, vote for Alex.

*I have come to believe that civic government is the level at which the most important decisions are made, in terms of how governments affect the day-to-day lives of the governed. All the glamor is in federal politics, but when your city council goes bankrupt, well, you don't want to become Vallejo, California.