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musings of mark since 2001

Less than a week to a Federal election in Canada, and there isn’t a single candidate worth voting for. News World had a special last night about the declining rates of people voting. In the 60’s, more than 80% of Canadians voted, then along came the new drug, television. If you follow the demographics of the age groups that voter decline is taking place (the under 40 crowd mostly), you’ll find it follows the same pattern as television standards in that as they dropped while the “news” became more and more entertainment rather than information. Since the mid-70’s just thirty short years, or a single generation, the people participating in the electoral process has declined to just 61%.

Gives the whole experience a very Amerikan feel having the thing played out on television; using their method of electing the people that pay for the most television advertising is fast encroaching our country too. It gets worse when you split the numbers up into income categories, the poor and under educated are the least likely to vote, which leaves their fate to the people that are most interested in exploiting them – the rich ones that have the time and access to read about what the candidates really will do once they are elected to office.

A little more exploitation of the poor reported in the NY Times this am, the entire US is now using electronic debit cards for food stamps. This gives total control and monitoring of poor people with a minimum of effort. The ones making the money like it, they get paid within 48 hours now and the govt. likes it because no longer do the recipients get change back from their coupons. The exact amount is taken out and so when there’s a few dollars left over in the kitty at the middle of the month (when most people have used up their food coupons), it just goes right back into the governments pockets instead of the recipient or taxpayers.

We do have one party worth voting for, a Green party that has at least an interest in our environment as something other than a resource those with the money can exploit; but they have been locked out of the process by the people that hold the $ bags and they get zero television time in the debates or news. Some complain that even though they have good motives, they “wouldn’t know how to run a government” which translates to me that they wouldn’t be accountable like the other candidates to the lobbyists that give them power and money to exploit others, so are not acceptable to the establishment.

Missed calling Dad for Father’s Day, but making up for it with a package coming in the mail that will put a smile on his face. Brother John was up for the day Saturday, and we even talked about calling him then instead of Sunday but after kayaking all afternoon we just said adios and I went for a three hour nap forgetting all about it until today.

Got lots of necessary things done with my day off, including meeting with another store on the island to discover what they needed for their new web site hosted on the MG Web Services servers and preparing a new contract proposal for the next year with the Arts Council. Also the first template set for the Chamber of Commerce site, got to do another one yet while I’ve been messing around with Spip. It’s a very complicated CMS so far, still haven’t figured out to make a template work as directed in documentation. Thinking I may go back to Textpattern, if someone else happens to take over the site they will probably have just as hard a time figuring out where things need to be changed to customize it. Doesn’t help that all the code is still in French either, hard to follow sometimes what functions are going to do if they have a name that’s basically gibberish to me.

An SFU student is doing a paper on Bowen Island and asking for submissions of opinions about this place and it’s culture. Wendy has written an excellent synopsis that sums up the island as it is now pretty well.

It’s a far cry the island has come in a short time from the bohemian writers and artists culture sprinkled with the slightly more eccentric folks that could afford the time or didn’t need to commute to the mainland. Stories of the 3 week winter power outage and getting a phone call from North Vancouver asking if a war was starting because Denny D. was blasting a road to Valhalla are now just stuff of legend instead of recent memory.

Busy as a bee in the springtime on Bowen Island with recent updates to a number of sites on my web server and putting together new ones too. Finding time to do freebies for my favourite people and still doing tutoring, and fitting in a visit from brother John on Saturday. Haven’t seen him in a long time now, should be a good visit as he’s got most of the day and we can do some hiking up Mt. Gardner.

Construction is going well, the forms are all off finally today. Still got some nails to pull and a bit of cleanup, but 98% of the old wood is stacked and nail free. Started the first section of painting tar on the cement that will be buried under fill on the mountain side of the home, kinda smells like an oil refinery in Edmonton till the dirt goes back in the hole. There’s a bunch of timbers sticking up into the air now too, we’ve been standing them up without benefit of a crane – four guys and some sticks in the air balancing them until the two bolts holding them in the anchors are fixed. It’s going to be a spectacular house when everything is put together.

Off to the continent yesterday, picking up a router and optical mouse along with groceries too expensive or unavailable at our island general store. The new mouse is great, after a few years the ball on the old one just gets to a point where it’s never totally clean and always sticks at some point, a real pain when your picking up some code from one place to another and you don’t get exactly what you were aiming for.

In kind of a hurry to catch the ferry back, I picked up a Linksys router and then the salesman at Future Shop shows me this other router with a wireless access point built in for only $10 more. It’s a Microsoft product so I’m a little wary but the box says it does NAT and the latest wireless standard so I get it. Big mistake. First thing it wants to do is install software that has to phone home to a M$ server every 15 minutes to get an update, and after installation it won’t run unless talking to another M$ server out there somewhere first. There’s no place to do port forwarding or any of the other functions you would expect from a router, just a piece of M$ crap really with CE running in it. There’s also no need for them to know when I decide to use their equipment, I paid for it and when I connect to the Internet is my own business thank you very much.

Back to the continent today, grrr.