Living In Ottawa

I am sure everyone has heard about the Ottawa transit strike by now. It has been going on for more than a month now. It has the entire city in complete chaos and everybody (even the non bus-riders) has an opinion on it.

Personally Irene and I (and most of my suburban friends) are not totally messed up. We are in the enviable position of owning a car and Irene is able to get a ride to work with her dad. However I would prefer to take the bus to work, especially on the really snowy days.

The problem is there are many people in this city who totally depend on the buses to get around for everything. A lot of those people are probably in the lower income bracket and they certainly don't have the luxury of buying a car or getting to work late.

Basically what I am saying is that there is not a lot of sympathy for the bus drivers. Personally I think they are a bunch of greedy bumcaps. First of all there is so much economic uncertainty right now and these guys are saying that they want more, more, more. They already have very good job security, high pay, etc. and all this with a high school education. (It reminds me of GM and Ford). Secondly, the main issue they are arguing for is control of the scheduling. But in every other transit system in North America the scheduling is run by the management. The city of Ottawa wants to be able to take control of scheduling in order to save money by hiring less drivers and buying less buses. It would also be safer since currently some of the younger drivers have to work insane shifts because the senior guys take all the good ones. It doesn't make sense to have the inexperienced guys doing the harder shifts - accidents are bound to happen.

From the city's side I have never seen the city council and mayor agree on anything since Larry O'Brien was elected. But on this issue the council is tight. It makes sense to all of them that OC Transpo needs some changes.

Recently the city proposed a new contract (much the same as the first one) that included some serious raises (7% I think!) and a good signing bonus. Who gets a 7% raise?!? That is ridiculous. But it is all a ploy to pay off the drivers so that they accept the scheduling being handled by the city. The union voted to turn down the offer. About 75% voted 'no' according to the union. And now it's back to striking, and insane traffic and people's lives being messed with.

I think a few things should come out of this:
1. Public transit should be designated an essential service - so they can't strike.
2. The city should control scheduling - it just makes sense.
3. The city should set a deadline and if they aren't back to work by that time, fire 'em all.
4. The provincial/federal government should step in and get some legislation through that forces them back to work.

The somewhat humourous aspect of this is that the city is saving millions of dollars while the transit system is down while the union is losing huge. That is because OC Transpo, like every other transit system in the world (except Tokyo I think), is a money losing system and it is not like a regular business. But it is essential.

So get back to work you stupid bumcaps.

Edit: Apparently the term asshats (as hilarious as it sounds) is not appropriate. I have reverted to the more subtle term: 'bumcaps'. Please notify me if that is inappropriate too.

Interesting Music News

There is some interesting news coming from Amazon concerning their best selling MP3 album of 2008. According to this story, you could have downloaded it for free - legally.
The latest album from Nine Inch Nails was put under a Creative Commons license which meant you could download it legally for your personal use. But it was still the best selling downloadable album on Amazon.

Pretty cool stuff. Oh and I don't really recommend downloading that album. NIN isn't really for everybody.

The Whopper Sacrifice

Burger King has really been upping it's advertising these days with such campaigns as the Whopper Virgin and Subservient Chicken. They don't seem to mind dealing with social/ethical issues by throwing in some humour.

The latest campaign is offering you a free Whopper if you DE-FRIEND 10 people from your friend list on Facebook. The funniest part is the "sacrifices" show up in your activity feed. So it'll say, for example, "Reuben sacrificed Irene for a free Whopper."

I have to think about whether I have 10 friends on Facebook I could stand to lose - everybody does. But I don’t know whether I really want a whopper that badly. I have only gone to Burger King once and it was disgusting. Now if it was a Harveys burger then everybody would be gone.

World Juniors in Ottawa

I know this post is a little late and everyone knows that Canada won Gold in a game against Sweden. But what about bronze? No one pays attention to that game. The bronze medal game took place just before the gold medal game and we were there! Yup on Monday Irene got the tickets from her boss who had tickets for all the games. She wanted to go see Canada play Sweden but wasn't planning on showing up early enough to see Russia and Slovakia play for bronze.

So we went and it was an awesome game. I was wondering who everybody would cheer for. We picked Slovakia since they were underdogs and apparently Ottawa likes underdogs because by the end of the game everybody was cheering for Slovakia.

We had pretty awesome seats on the 100 level just in front of the boxes.
The game play was pretty fast and there were plenty of good chances on both ends. Both goalies made some fantastic saves.
We ate some crummy food. Note to self - always double check that you got what you ordered before walking all the way back to your seat.The place was already filled with Team Canada fans getting pumped for the next game. These guys were so excited they put their underwear on over their pants. Good thing they chose the Team Canada underwear.
Russia ended up winning the game 5-2 but Slovakia got more cheers from the Ottawa crowd who are used to cheering for underdogs - at least this season.
The best players of the game got Swiss watches.
The winning team standing for the Russian national anthem.

Mac Wins Again?

In light of my last blog post I thought this latest comic from xkcd was pretty funny.

Yay for Itunes

So the annual Mac symposium was held today. Other than all the rumours surrounding the health of Steve Jobs there really wasn't all that much super exciting news. Those super exciting rumours were quelled by Steve himself in a letter to all apple fanboys.

The only things that interested me was the news that Picasa is now availiable on Macs and....wait for it..... iTunes are now DRM free!!!!! Yes you read that right. Apple is relinquishing it's deathgrip, albeit slightly, on it's users. I am sure not everybody will be as excited about this as me and my ilk but it means a lot for apple to do something like that. They like being able to pull all the strings, even after you buy their products and try to bring them home and use them for what you want.

Now all they have to do is make iPods able to plug into multiple computers without deleting everything. Yes, all you iPod drones, regular MP3 players can do that without a problem - why can't yours?

In other news, my father-in-law just bought a Macbook Pro and iPod touch both of which I am really in love with.

Happy New Year from Microsoft

Remember Microsoft's supposed Ipod killer from a couple years ago? Yeah the Zune! Well it's back in the news again. I came across this story about every 30Gb Zune crashing on December 31st at 2:00AM. Apparently it has something to do with the latest firmware not being able to support the extra second that was added to the year on New Years Eve.
Whatever it was, it is extremely amusing to me.

Here is another quote from this story:

Late Wednesday, the Redmond, Wash.-based company said the outage affected only the 30-gigabyte Zune models and was caused by a problem with their internal clock. Microsoft expected the problem to clear up as the clocks ticked over to Jan. 1, though users will have to jump through some hoops to get their Zunes back to normal, including letting the batteries die down completely before the devices will restart successfully.

Oh Microsoft, when will you learn.