One Thing I Miss About Belleville

One thing I sorely miss about Belleville when I’m living in Waterloo has to be municipal sidewalk clearning.

9:30am the morning after a spectacular snowstorm and the sidewalks are clear and easily walkable. All of them. Everywhere.

I know that by the time I’ll have to walk to work in the morning, I’ll still have to trudge across unshoveled sidewalks and risk my back (again) on the ice. It’s awful. There are people who *never* do it. I suppose I could call the by-law enforcement people on them, but honestly, they might be bed-ridden old people for all I know. Yeah, it’s their responsibility, but it’s a shitty system.

I don’t even have a sidewalk in front of my house and I think municipal sidewalk clearing is an absolutely blessing.

Go ahead, raise my taxes!

Posted from the train

I haven’t taken the train in ages. There isn’t an easy train you can get straight from Kitchener to Belleville and back (unless you want to get up very early morning and wait a couple hours in Toronto). It takes about three times as long to get home, taking delays into account, and costs about twice as much as driving (if you don’t take the cost of owning the car into account).

My mom insisted, too. It’s winter, and the weather can get pretty crappy. And since I’m going to be making the same trip back a week from now, it seemed like a good idea.

Before I got a car, I took the train home all the time. I checked my VIA frequent traveller reward thing and apparently I can get a one-way ticked to Kamloops just on points. Not that I would, of course. I’ve done that trip before. Three days on the train is pretty hard on the ass.

Sometime in the last five years, they put WiFi on the trains, and little outlets by all the seats. So I can get online and talk to people and post blog posts and all sorts of stuff. I can’t do that when I’m driving. It’s not the greatest connection, particularly since I’m connected through the VPN to work for safety’s sake, but it works, and I can check RSS feeds and stuff. YouTube eludes me, but I can live without that.

Where are we? I think we’re just leaving Oshawa… I can see the suckers on the 401 from here.

Actually, traffic’s really good.

On Canada’s DMCA

As I’m writing this, I’m listening to a CD comprised entirely of [bootleg Christmas remixes](http://www.djbc.net/santastic3/). Even under current copyright, this stuff shouldn’t exist. And while most of it’s kind of awful (but awful in a good way, I think), there are tiny bits of beautiful brilliance that *should* exist.

Today, Canadian Industry minister Jim Prentice was supposed to put forward a new Canadian copyright reform bill. The phrase “copyright reform bill” sends a chill down my spine. While Canadian copyright reform could use some reform, I’m pretty sure that the idea of “reform” in the minds of the authors of the bill will be quite a bit different than what I think would actually be useful or necessary.

As I was saying, there was supposed to be a new copyright reform bill today. But there isn’t. It’s been “delayed.”

Continue reading On Canada’s DMCA

Ice-Free Eaves

Apparently having not learned my lessons from [last winter’s leaky roof adventure](http://www.flyingsquirrel.ca/index.php/2007/02/13/leaky/), I didn’t quite get around to cleaning the leaves out of the eaves troughs before the snow came. Over the last couple weeks, ice was starting to build up again.

In my defense, there was only about a week between the leaves falling off the trees and the snow starting, and the snow hasn’t let up since. I was hoping the [Looj](http://www.flyingsquirrel.ca/index.php/2007/11/05/leaves/) would help me out, but it didn’t fit. I called some maintenance company about an estimate, but haven’t heard back.

So I was pretty much on my own. As I was saying, the it’s been looking pretty grim as the snow hasn’t let up. Until today. A Saturday.

Today, miraculously, the temperature drifted briefly above 0°C. That was my cue, and I sprung into action.

I hooked up the rubber hose to the hot water tap in the garage, got a chisel-like device, climbed up on the ladder and chunk by damp, icy chunk, removed the leaves from the eaves troughs.

They work much better now.

I only did the L-shaped section bordering the back patio. That’s the only part that’s been giving me trouble (the ice really likes to build up in the L-corners of roofs, it seems), and it was most easily accessible by ladder. I ended up very wet by the end, and my hands ended up dyed bluish-black from the gloves I was wearing. The ladder ended up a little bit icy. I’ve put the damn thing away till the spring. I hope I don’t need it again.

I’m really going to have to work on getting someone to help me out with this maintenance stuff, since I can’t seem to keep up with it all. I’m just glad I was able to get this horrible weight off me, especially since I’ll be home in Belleville the next few weekends.

Caffeine (The Gym Part 3)

So [the first time I go to the gym](http://www.flyingsquirrel.ca/index.php/2007/12/06/feeling-faint-the-gym-continued/) and do much of anything, I nearly pass out. This is not a good sign.

And this is annoying, since one of the reasons I wanted to start going to the gym was because I figured this near-fainting thing was just due to me being incredibly out of shape. But by this point, I’m thinking there must be more to it than that.

I could rule out a couple theories about feeling faint after exercise: things like dehydration (symptoms were wrong and I’d drank lots), low blood sugar (I’d eaten more than enough), heat exhaustion (it’s not that hot), etc. None of them really matched up.

I’d been poking around and doing research about this for a few months now, since it’s been happening more often lately. The one thing that stood out is I’m always fine when I’m sitting; it’s when I’ve been doing work with my legs and then standing up, that’s when I feel it.

The symptoms are all basically the same as fainting, and you faint when you’re not getting enough blood to the brain. It’s the body’s way to get you to lay down so it can get oxygen to your brain so you don’t die. Very handy.

I figure the muscles, unused to exertion as they are, are taking more than their fair share of oxygen. So the answer is get the muscles more used to exertion.

Even so, there are lots of people who are way more out of shape than I am, and they don’t nearly pass out after a little bit of bike riding.

I went in for a follow-up orientation to finish going through my routine with a different guy. I explain to him the situation, and he is almost ready to turn me away and make me get a doctor’s note before we can proceed. What I’m describing may, after all, be a sign of low blood pressure. He takes my blood pressure, and it’s pretty much okay.

I’d realized something since the first gym trip and decided to bring it up. My caffeine intake was kinda high. Like 5+ cans of Coke (Zero) a day high. We get free pop at work, you see, and since the start of the whole diet thing, I’d been drinking an awful lot of diet pop. And I know diet drinks are bad, and I don’t really like them. As [Marion Nestle points out](http://whattoeatbook.com/tag/diet-and-energy-drinks/), they’re introduction hasn’t seemed to have a positive impact on obesity at all. But they’re “free”, both in terms of money and effort and calories, which made them too tempting to avoid.

I think I’m going to avoid them now.

When I mentioned the diet Coke thing, he backed off from the doctor’s note idea and explained how caffeine can dilate the blood vessels and how artificial sweeteners are amino acids which require more water to flush out of the system.

I am planning on bringing this stuff up with my doctor, but laying off the pop this week, I’ve been to the gym twice so far with no ill effects. Wednesday I actually pushed it kinda hard, and came out okay. So I’m hoping I’ve got this thing figured out.

I’m planning on going to the gym three times a week. This month is going to be a bit iffy with the number of trips home and back, but I think I can get into a routine which will help me out with stage 3 of the diet…