Canadian Stupidity

We like to think of Canada as an advanced member of the 1st-world clique, but I'm sorry, at least once a day, every day, I just don't see it. Maybe it's because we're stressing so hard about the foleys of plagiarism that people just get indoctrinated into reinventing the wheel on every task. Consider the luge track. It's not a particularly complicated design and certainly not the first of its kind. It should, by all means, share many features, and many problems with other tracks previously created elsewhere.
Tracks where they very likely have encountered the same issues found and implemented solutions.

Here's a bright idea, Mr. Canadian Engineer, next time you're asked to design something that's been done before, go see how someone else did it, learn from their mistakes, adopt their strong features and come up with something better, not just new, better. Any replicated system that repeats the mistakes of its predecessors is a failure. All you needed to save that life was padding or a Plexiglas wall that would have had him sliding back onto the track rather than hitting a pole at 140 km/h.

One Georgian dies while beta testing Canadian design.

I can't imagine how many other needless accidents could be avoided with minor changes to our incredibly poorly designed traffic system by simply implementing what other countries have done with theirs.
Lose the 4-way-stops and the right to turn left wherever you want, replace them with roudabouts and dedicated left-turn signals in every intersection, and you should reduce traffic accidents by at least 60%.
But that's not the only issue. People here just don't know the rules. The written exam is ridiculously easy and the book is messy and rather than focus on the rules of the road it bullshits you about "Safe" driving, which usually means - don't drive while drunk. If you know the answer to the question "should i drive while drunk?" you can probably pass the written exam, it's that poorly designed.

I have lost count of the number of times I reached a 4-way intersection at the same time as another driverette on the opposite side. I want to turn left, she wants to continue going forward, but she stops and waits for me to turn left (essentially waiting for me to cut her off and take her right of way). If it happened once or twice I would say it's her fault for not knowing she has the right of way, but when it happens this often, then the system's to blame. When people don't know that traffic in the roundabout always has the right of way, then the system's to blame.

Canadians say "But that's the courtesy system. It promotes being polite." And that's a pile of crap. This is an ambiguous system that promotes deadlocks and congestion. If I do take her "courtesy" and cut her off, and she then decided to race into my car, by all legal means I am 100% to blame, if I wait for her, and she waits for me, none of us goes anywhere.

The UBC roundabout on 16th Ave. and Wesbrook Blvd. is another prime example of poor Canadian engineering. Same deal as the luge track: Simple design exists in countless working samples across the globe. One stupid Canadian engineer tasked with roundabout and gets it wrong at least 5 times, before finally settling for a semi-working highly-ambiguous model. They've actually had traffic accidents in that roundabout. How is that even possible? It's a roundabout! You can't speed in it even if you tried. That's like having a traffic accident in a mall escalator.

Maybe the education system should focus less on social justice and more on encouraging students to improve on their work, learn from their peers and always look for existing models before making their own.

It is quite embarrassing that the whole world has to see how incompetent we are, but it's inexcusable that someone has to die for us to see it. (And do we?)

O' Canada...

All your interviews are belong to us.

My interview got bumped from monday the 8th to friday the 5th, which left me a day to prepare.
I didn't even have any business outfits, so I had to quickly buy the appropriate attire.
Man, I hate ties and pointy business shoes. It's just not me. I look scary enough as it is, no need to dress me up as a contract killer. But protocol is protocol.

The interview went fine I think. Just fine, not well or fantastic. I think I had good chemistery with the interviewer, but i got nervous during the technical evaluation. I was so nervous It took me a couple of minutes to write a binary search function. And it came out all messy on paper.

I nailed the SQL question though, and I think I successfully conveyed the impression that I'm responsible, organized and motivated.

Turns out Perl is quite a useful thing to have on a resume. I need to polish up on my Perl.

Given my performance in the technical phase, I don't expect them to hire me.
I'll be depressed if they don't, but not surprised.
Would it be such a loss? I don't know, it's primarily a testing gig. But I like the atmosphere, so if they offer me a job, I think I'll take it, even if it's not design. I think I have much to learn before I am worthy of design, especially if I can't even write a goddamn binary search function on the spot.

):

Ah, i found a way to connect names to blogs to emails.
It's called the history option on Ted's wiki page. Combine that with facebook and you have a mugshot for every name and email in the class, most of them anyway. If i didn't have that 471 assignment due, i'd make a webcrawler that gives me a best estimate of what everyone looks like.

Too bad I don't have a day to do it in. Could be an interesting data mining project. What can you get on a person given their name and email. Sound like my next mid-semester project.
After I finish the auto-pirate, anyway, which only needs about 4 days work i estimate. 4 days I don't have.

Also, I got an interview with SAP for the localization engineer position.

I have no idea what that means.
I'm assuming it means a technical installer, like Chuck, but I hope it means more.
Anyhows, I can't be picky, this is my first co-op and I've only been approved for coop applications this saturday.
I've already missed out on all the big companies.


By the way, writing cover letters is excruciatingly annoying.
I haven't done this much brown-nosing in years.


On another note: It's funny, one of our bloggers wrote "It rained in torrents" and naturally my mind misrouted the ambiguous intention of this simple senetence. How would a syntax recognizer become aware of dynamic changes to a language. How do we formally acknowledge when a word like torrent gains a new meaning in a technical context? We can either receive the definition statically by reading or hearing about it, or we can infer it by first experiencing a translation conflict, where what we think it means becomes inconsistent with an external response, then we research actively about it, or become more aware of future conflicts containing that word.
Then finally we redefine an ambiguous definition.
Which leads to another problem: How do you decide among ambiguous definitions.

To make a thinking robot, a robot you must become.

What Yaniv can do, Yaniv will do.

Ted threw a rock in a pond that started a ripple. There is now a list of blogs I can read that transforms what I previously considered to be scenery (because i'm a horrible person that way) to actual people. I just went through every single blog, or at least the ones that aren't locked, and it's kind of interesting.
I even entertained the notion of commenting. Should I ? What if it will achieve nothing but drive the author to lock their blog upon realization that they're not as isolated as they think they are?

Oh and don't think I haven't read your comment, Ted. Points taken. touche, councillor, touche.

I have a concurrent client/server model due tomorrow and I haven't even started. I've been swamped by everything else. This semester isn't going as swimmingly as expected. I'm not happy with myself.

Got my wisdom teeth pulled out this morning then drove to class, even though i signed a paper that said I shouldn't, it wasn't as terrible as last time, I don't think my face is going to swell up. There wasn't even any pain.

To reiterate Graham Templeton's column from 2 weeks ago. If god made us in his image, what the hell is up with wisdom teeth.
There you have it, people. If atheism hasn't caught on to you yet, you need your wisdom teeth removed. Maybe that was the whole idea behind the inquisition! Oh how it all unravels.

Anyway, time to drive home and get some advil on the way. Though i feel no pain i've been spitting blood all day, it's gotta start hurting somewhen.