Monday, July 2, 2012

#9 I'm Not THAT Old!


I used to pride myself in looking much younger than my actual age. In my thrifty teens, I saved fifteen cents on a movie ticket on more than one occasion thanks to the elderly ticket taker charging me the Child price. And all through my twenties, I was mistaken for being in my late teens.
Unfortunately, the exact opposite has started to happen recently.

The thing is, the extent at which people are now over-estimating my age is growing alarmingly.

Only two years ago, when guessing my age in an ill-conceived game, a co-worker erred on the side of recklessness by adding ten years to my life.

Last fall when running for School Trustee, another candidate assumed that I was retired, adding at least ten more years, bringing the margin of error to over twenty.

A few months ago, my wife and I attended a movie after work. We had to meet at the theatre in order that we could both make it in time. I arrived first and bought our tickets, and because it was raining, I went inside to wait for her.  I told the ticket taker that I was waiting for my wife to explain to him why I would be loitering near the door.

I wandered off to one side in order to get a better look at the advance poster for The Artist and heard the voice of the ticket taker behind me saying, “Your husband is over there.”

I turned to find that it was not my wife, but another woman who was meeting her husband. However, this woman was at least seventy-five years old. Boom! Another ten years.

And now, I have been given at least ten more on top of that. Yesterday, I was attending a Canada Day celebration at a seniors housing complex when a gentleman asked me if I was a resident.

I now appear to other humans as someone who lives in a community where eighty-five is on the low end of the age range.

I feel I must now avoid going to any funerals lest I be mistaken for the guest of honour.

But now the thought occurs to me that perhaps, in my thrifty forties, I can find a way to start taking advantage of Seniors discounts. I recently noticed with some surprise that some banks offer seniors rates to people fifty and over.

Perhaps I should try an experiment the next time I go to the movies. I’ll have to make sure I got to a young ticket taker, though. Those elderly fifty-year-olds that gave me an inadvertent break when I was in my teens will surely be onto me if I try to pass for one of them.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Green Bits - The Greener Internet Initiative


You've bought a hybrid car, insulated your home and bought power smart appliances, but have you given a though to greening your Internet use?

That's the latest source of carbon being targeted by a group calling itself the Greener Internet Initiative.

Their goal is to reduce the carbon footprint of data been sent over the Internet.

Everyone knows that you need electricity to run your computer, printer, scanner and router, but maybe you've forgotten that it takes energy to send the data itself down the cable and around the world.

All of those ones and zeroes need power to get from one place to another. "Well, the ones do," explains GII spokesperson Randolph Gatling.

"As we all know, data is transmitted as a series of ones and zeroes. The zeroes don't take up any extra energy, because they just ride the carrier wave as blank space, but the one is transmitted as a spike in voltage which is then decoded on the receiving end as a one. All of those quadrillion ones being transmitted every second add up to a huge amount of electricity usage across the planet.

On average, you can expect an equal number of ones and zeroes in a transmission, but the GII wants software companies, developers and also the average Internet user to make a conscious effort to use fewer ones.

To explain how this can be done, it's necessary to give a quick tutorial on how computers store numbers and letters.

In the simplest example, all characters are translated to a seven bit binary code called ASCII.

The letter 'A' for example, translates to: 100 0001, and the letter 'E' translates to: 100 0101.

As you can see, only two ones occur in an A, whereas three ones occur in an 'E'. The 'E' therefore, takes 50% more energy to transmit across the Internet.

We asked ourselves the question, "How can we reduce the amount of electricity used by the Internet?" And the answer, obviously, is to use letters whose ASCII translations contain fewer ones.

A lower case 'w' encodes to: 111 0111. Six out of seven bits are ones! This letter is clearly very expensive with respect to carbon usage.
Whereas letters like A (100 0001), B (100 0010), H (100 1000) and P (101 0000) are greener choices.

The GII has come up with a three-point manifesto of sorts, that urges its adherents to abide by the following rules:

1) Programmers - name your variables, table names, column names, etc. using only the greenest characters. For example, instead of recklessly naming a variable wo_no7, consider naming it RK!BR0.

w (111 0111) o (110 1111) _ (101 1111) n (110 1110) o (110 1111) 7 (011 0111) = 34 ones out of 42 bits
R (101 0010) K (100 1011) ! (010 0001) B (100 0010) R (101 0010) 0 (011 0000) = 16 ones out of 42 bits! A more than 50% saving in energy!

2) Software Companies - use compressions algorithms that re-encode data to character sets that use only green characters.

3) Internet users - Ask yourself, "Do I really need to send an e-mail to Uncle Frank (41) when an e-mail to Aunt Gertie (40) will help save the planet?"


"In the future," Gatling notes, "your hand-held device will have an additional option when writing a message.

Where we now have an auto-correct feature that offers dictionary words to help you complete a word, we will also have an Auto-Green option that automatically changes words in your e-mails or texts to synonyms that have a smaller carbon footprint.

For example, when you send a text that reads, "The landlord called, and your apartment is flooding," your text will be Auto-Greened to "The lessor rang, and your bedsit is inundated."

Gatling summed it up with the GII's motto: Saving the Earth, one Bit at a time.

Sorry Uncle Frank.

Monday, January 30, 2012

#8 The Great James Bond Blu-Ray Triumph

I had been holding off for years buying the James Bond Blu-Rays for several reasons:

1) I did not have a Blu-Ray player (although that didn't stop me from buying DVDs back in the late 1990s)
2) Having watched DVD prices finally drop after several years, I felt I could wait out James Bond on Blu-Ray
3) Only about half of the movies had been released

In the early years of DVDs, I purchased the twenty-two I Spy releases, one at a time, at twenty-something dollars per release. In those days, DVDs did not come down in price, even after several years, so I would buy everything at release, taking advantage of the pre-order discounts offered by Amazon. Then Best Buy started putting out displays of cheap TV Show sets at around Christmas, and I got things like WKRP in Cincinnati and How I Met Your Mother at really good prices.

So I started holding off one some of the immediate purchases. For example, I bought the last few Mary Tyler Moore releases for $10.00 this past year. The Adventures of Superman, also $10.00.

Which brings me to James Bond. Having purchased three Blu-Ray films in the last year to watch in our building's media room, I finally bought a super-cheap Blu-Ray player so I could watch the extras in my apartment.

After Christmas, I had some time to kill and browsed the $5.00 bin at Future Shop. There I found two James Bond Blu-Rays. Knowing I could return these if I changed my mind, I snapped them up. They were the only two available, and I assumed it was just that store. But when I got home, I checked online, and every pre-Craig Bond was on for $4.99. Most of them were sold out online, but I bought another five (free shipping), and the next day made my way to a much larger Future Shop, where I bought the remaining five.

I did not open any of them, because, during my online research I had also looked for reviews on the print quality of the Blu-Ray releases. And during that process, I found a posting revealing that an announcement about a 50th Anniversary box set was due on January 10.

So I figured I could always return all twelve if the new set had considerably different content.

The thing is, I realized later that I could have gotten Best Buy points if I had made my purchase at Best Buy instead.

A couple of days later, I had cause to go to Best Buy to price match a Christmas purchase.  It took the better part of an hour but I got Best Buy to price match the Future Shop price of $4.99.

An excellent deal, and points to boot.

But I had completely forgotten about Best Buy's policy of giving an additional 10% of the difference. All of these Blu-Rays were selling at Best Buy for $19.99, so ten percent of the difference was $1.50. To my great delight, I ended up paying only $3.49 for each of the twelve releases.

Best Christmas Ever. And I feel this makes up for all of those I Spy DVDs I paid full price for a decade ago.

On January 10, the 50th Anniversary announcement revealed that a box set with new extras will be released this year. I decided that I would keep my $3.49 Blu-Rays and wait out the next few years for the rest to come down to $3.49.

It's not entirely a matter of patience. I have run out of shelf space. Maybe it's time to do something about those five hundred VHS tapes.