Sub-metering

The Ontario government is considering legislation that would force tenants to pay their electricity bills directly.

The main problem with this is that tenants don't always have the resources to make their homes energy-efficient - the landlords would have to do that. To demonstrate how drastic the changes would need to be to make some apartments energy-efficient, here is a description of the heating/air conditioning system in my apartment, taken from a longer letter I am sending to my MPP and the energy minister.
My building has central heating and air conditioning. The hot or cool air, depending on the time of year, comes out through a vent that is located on the wall, about a foot below the ceiling. The intake vent is located on the same wall, directly below the output vent, and just above the floor. The thermostat is on the same wall, in between the output and intake vents, at about eye level. The whole setup is in a corner where the wall meets the windows, about eight inches away from the windows.

Anyone familiar with the basic principles of convection can see that this is problematic.

In the winter when the furnace is on, the heat is emitted near the ceiling. Heat, as we all know, rises. You can visualize the effect of this vent placement by picturing the heat as a fluid being poured into a container, except instead of flowing first to the bottom of the container it flows to the top. My apartment has to be "filled" with heat from the top down, and enormous amounts of energy are wasted heating the ceiling area before any of that heat gets down to where I am.

In the summer when the air conditioning is on, the placement of the output vent is not a problem, but the placement of the intake vent is. Because heat rises, the coolest air in the apartment is likely to be near the floor, and that air gets taken back into the HVAC system instead of being permitted to circulate around the apartment.

The placement of the vents near the windows is also problematic, because the windows are not very well sealed. They do close properly, but they are cheap and 30 years old, so there are drafts in the cracks and no attempt has been made to make the glass energy-efficient. I'm sure this results in some of the heat and air conditioning being lost by flowing directly out the window.

The placement of the thermostat is also very inefficient. Because it is so close to the window, it is affected by the weather conditions outside. For example, it may be sufficiently warm in the apartment, but a draft from the window might be blowing directly onto the thermostat, thus encouraging it to keep heating the apartment. I'm sure the fact that the thermostat is directly below the output vent and directly above the intake vent also means it gets an inaccurate reading.

The other problem with the thermostat is that it is not very precise. It is an old analog model that doesn't even mark the degree numbers on it. It is simply a knob that I can turn to "higher" or "lower", so I can't turn my temperature down a couple of degrees like so many people recommend. Even if I could, I don't know if it would make that much of a difference. Because of the location of the thermostat, on the wall directly below the output vent, directly above the intake vent, and inches away from the drafty window, it doesn't shut off when the apartment is suitably heated or cooled. One cold winter day, I did an experiment. I turned my thermostat to the very lowest level that still made the furnace be on - just one tiny increment above where the furnace shut off. It took the thermostat two days to shut off by itself, when the apartment was suitably heated within an hour or so.

With heating and cooling taking up 49.5% of the energy use in my whole life and over 2/3 of the energy use in my home (according to the One Tonne Challenge website), all the austerity in the world isn't going to make a significant dent in my energy bills. I already open my windows on cool summer nights, keep them closed through the cold of winter and the hottest part of summer days, close my curtains in the summer and keep them open in the winter, and turn on the fan above my stove to suck out hot air on hot days. What I need is serious renovation to change the locations of my vents, the quality of my windows, and the location and quality of my thermostat.

If the government insists upon passing legislation to make all tenants pay their own utilities, they must first make all landlords ensure that all rental units are reasonably energy-efficient, so that austerity measures on the part of the tenant can actually save energy.

Things They Should Invent: discontinued product early warning system.

All too often I have gone to a store to buy one of my favourite products, only to find that it has been discontinued. This can be particularly annoying in the case of hard-to-fit clothing items or cosmetics of The Perfect Colour. As a service to their loyal customers, companies should offer a service where you can go to their website and "subscribe" to a product. You just fill out a form that automatically tells a web server that this product is one of your favourites, and if the company is ever thinking of discontinuing a product, the server can automatically send out an email to all the subscribers informing them of this. That way the customers can go out and stock up before it's too late, and the company (or maybe the store, I'm not entirely sure how this works) can make some extra money by sending out this information before the stores reduce the item to a clearance price. I know I would certainly buy multiple copies of, say, my favourite concealer or bra at the full price if it were about to be discontinued, and people who didn't need it quite so badly could buy the last few items left after they go on clearance.

If it is true that discontinued items are those that don't sell so well (as opposed to companies discontinuing stuff just to piss us off), then this system shouldn't present too much of a problem because there won't be that many people running out to stock up before the item is discontinued. This system could also help companies and consumers in other ways, for example by showing companies just how many people are loyally devoted to a particular product (as opposed to those who buy it once then find out the colour doesn't work for them), or by sending out a notification to customers when a particular store in their area is having one of their favourite products on sale. I'm sure it would also provide some kind of valuable demographic information, since companies are always using air miles and stuff to see what products I'm buying where and when.

Gesticulating wildly in five languages

Scientists have proven that waving your hands around helps you think of the correct word.

This is SO TRUE and I'm glad it finally has scientific justification! I always wave my hands around when I get stuck on a translation, and I find it quite helpful! Yet another reason why I shouldn't be an interpreter - in the tiny interpretation booth, I'd put my partner's eye out!

How to build word processer brand loyalty among language professionals

I use MS Word, WordPerfect, and Lotus Word Pro all on a regular basis. Regardless of the other merits of any of the software or the corporations behind them, Word remains my favourite because when I go to change the language of a document, it is most likely to take for the first time in Word. There's nothing more annoying than having to change the language of every cell of a table individually, or having to close and reopen the document for the new language to take! Yes I could proofread manually, but that can get rather dull and tiresome and I always end up missing typos when my red and green squigglies won't show up (or rather, show up on every correctly-spelled word).

An analogy

A non-confidence vote is like a movie sex scene: both can be quite enjoyable if the scriptwriters take the time to build up a good plot, but they just come across as sleazy when they're completely gratuitous.

Problems with so-called "spas" and "holistic centres"

The Star is running a series on business that advertise themselves as "spas" or "holistic centres" but actually offer sexual services. An assortment of my thoughts on the subject:

1. I think the prices mentioned in the articles are too low. I'm sure the reporters got the prices right, but I think the sex workers themselves should charge more. Why? Someone I know got a legitimate massage from a registered massage therapist, and it cost about $70. Most of the prices listed in the article were less than that. Since the conceit is that sexual services are "extras" offered on top of a massage, it should cost more than an actual massage.

2. The huge problem with this industry is that I don't know how to tell by walking past whether a business is a legitmate spa or whether it's a front for a brothel. They showed pictures of some of these businesses, and I couldn't tell by looking at them that they were brothels. Apparently they sometimes advertise in places where sexual services are typically advertised, but I'm not in the market for sexual services so I'd never look at those kinds of ads. (In fact, I would make a point NOT to look at them out of respect for mi cielito.) However, I may one day be in the market for legitimate spa services. Since I have no way of knowing whether a small local day spa is legitmate or a front, and I certainly don't want to be seen walking out of a place that sells sex, or inadvertently pay a prostitute to give me a pedicure and have some of that money go to a pimp (is there a technical word for pimp?), I'm now likely to avoid all small privately-owned day spas, and instead go to a spa affiliated with a luxury hotel or something. I'm sure I'm not the only one who doesn't want to accidentally walk into a brothel, so this might hurt legitimate small businesses. It also might result in people walking into legitimate small businesses and sexually harrassing their employees.

3. I have decided that I would be perfectly willing to support legislation that legalizes prostitution if and only if it resulted in a system where sex workers made more money than the other people involved. As I've mentioned before, the thing I find squickiest about the sex industry is that people who aren't sex workers make money from it. Someone once told me that pimps are only necessary because prostitution is not legal - I don't know about the economics myself. But if prostitution is legalized, it should be set up to ensure that each and every sex working in a particular organization makes more money per hour/per client than any one of the support workers, if they need or choose to have any support workers. And this should be before any tips. Ideally the sex worker should be the only one making money (well, ideally there should be no market for sex work at all because no one wants to be that pathetic, but...), but if some sort of support worker is necessary, obviously they have to get paid. But in a fair and just world, no one should be making more from sex work than the sex workers, and if we're going to make specific legislation, it may as well be fair and just.

VE Day

They keep talking about VE Day itself, but I'd be more interested to hear about the aftermath. How did men who had spent perhaps their entire adult lives in combat zones go back to working in an office or a factory? What happened to women who needed to work to support themselves but had to give up their wartime jobs to veterans coming back home? What kind of long-term psychological effects did people who had been born in a war zone and spent their entire childhood in a war zone suffer? What happened to people who developed their political awareness as WWII broke out and grew up to be young adults whose entire political awareness had taken place during propoganda-saturated wartime? How did they transition from rationing to not rationing? What happened to prisoners of war? How did people in internment camps reintegrate into the rest of society? This would all be much more interesting to hear about than how everyone ran out of their offices and jumped on cars and looted liquor stores and partied.

Things that were invented in my dreams

Last night I had a dream that I was in my high-school German class. It was all the same people, plus a few people from other aspects of my life who had nothing to do with high school. We were all the same age we are now, and had been pulled from whatever we are doing with our lives to take this class. I was dressed for work because I had to go to work after class, and people kept asking me if I had a job interview because they didn't believe that I could actually have a job requiring office clothes at the tender age of 24.

I haven't used German in five years, so I was a bit rusty. However, I didn't think I deserved a poor mark in this class since I am, in fact, a translator (despite the fact that my translation work has nothing to do with German). So I successfully negotiated an agreement with my German teacher (who, in high school, was also my French teacher) that I can answer in French when I don't know the German answer, as long as I use an equal number of German words in French class. Everyone thought this was a good rule that should be implemented posthaste in all language classes everywhere.

Thoughts from the COS movie

Dobby's special house-elf magic bears a striking resemblance to the "lightning" used by Sith lords.

Amancay Cabernet Sauvignon

By the initial scent, I thought this would be too strong to drink by itself, but it isn't. It's the usual vanilla/berry taste of cabernet sauvignon and not at all tannic, but I don't find it particularly exceptional. There's nothing wrong with it, it just doesn't stand out in any particular way.

Things They Should Invent: free doggies at charity walks

They often have walks to raise money for various charities.  What they should do is partner up with a local shelter, and bring free doggies to the walk for whomever wants to walk a doggie.  You don't get to keep them, but you can walk with them if you want and play with them along the way.  So the doggies get a walk, the shelter gets higher visibility and maybe more people would be motivated to adopt after going for a walk with a beautiful doggie, the charity behind the walk gets an incentive for more people to walk, and the people get to play with a doggie if they so choose! It's a win-win-win-win situation!

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

This book was almost universally well-reviewed, but it just didn't do it for me. I simply could not understand the protagonists motivations for the vast majority of the novel. He did this and he did that and someone says, "Lets to go visit this random person!" and he agrees and he tells lies and makes up stories and I don't understand why he's doing any of it. This might be cultural (it's a translated Turkish novel) or it may just be my lack of ability to read people well, but I just couldn't get emotionally invested in a book where I didn't understand the motivations at all.

Random things

1. My exam went well. It was in a chapel, which was weird, but I think I got at least 90% on it. I'll have more accumulated vacation time next September than I did last September, so if I decide to take the next class next year I'll be able to take slightly more frequent mental health long weekends. Of course, I don't have to (in fact, I CAN'T) make the final decision until August.

2. People keep trying to sell me insurance lately. I have no idea why. Probably because I'm very unlikely to need insurance.

3. I just realized that, knock wood, there have been no you-know-whats in my apartment in the last EIGHT MONTHS! It is SO refreshing not to be walking around in a constant state of anxiety!

More politics (*yawn*)

If the majority of Canadians think the way I do (and I have no way of knowing whether they do or not), the Conservatives are in big trouble.

We already know that I don't agree with them on matters of policy and, of the parties that run in my riding, they are the ones who would have the greatest negative effect on my life. (Is "It would be in my worst interests to vote for them" a real expression, or did I just make that up?) I can deal with all this in a more or less rational manner, however. I can intellectually separate my own interests from the interests of Canada as a whole, I can go through their platform point by point and say "This policy would be bad for me personally, that policy would produce a Canada I'd be ashamed to live in, and there's nothing particularly wrong with this other policy, but Party X has a much better policy on this particular issue."

But now their latest move has added a visceral dislike for the Conservative party.

They have just announced that they will be calling an election as soon as possible, no matter what, because, um, because they can? And because they want to? That's certainly the impression I get anyway. This move makes them come across as cocky and aggressive, and I don't like that - in fact, that simply makes me want to see them defeated with the same visceral emotion that makes me administer a cut direct to cars with thudding subwoofers and thugged-out guys who sit with their legs open wide to take up three seats on the subway and anyone with a mustache who attempts to be charming. I like consensus-building in my politicians, or at the very least going through the motions of pretending that they value consensus-building.

If enough other Canadians also feel this way, this would be very bad for the Conservative party. Because even if they change their policies (or other parties change their policies so that the Conservatives are no longer the worst choice for myself personally and for my vision of Canada) that visceral dislike is still going to be there, and that doesn't just go away all the sudden.

Harry Potter non-theory

I think Harry's innate teaching skills in the DA will have to play a role in future books. However, unlike many fics, I don't think he will be made a teaching assistant since there is absolutely no precedent for that. I very much like the idea of Harry not being treated like he's special at all, but given the prophecy and his discussion with Dumbledore at the end of the year, I don't know if that can happen.

Stoneleigh Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc

This one is very interesting. In addition to the usual refreshing aspects of Sauvignon Blanc, it has a sort of grassy taste to it. It's kind of the average of lemongrass and green banana and the smell of lawn being mowed. It sounds weird, but I quite like it. Also, it comes in a screwtop bottle! I know that this is generally accepted as an indicator of cheap wine, but I find it rather convenient. Hey, maybe it is cheap wine and I don't know what the good stuff is, but I like it and the bottle is convenient, so it's all good.

Almay wants me to look like a child experimenting with her mother's cosmetics

I saw a commercial saying that Almay has special shadows specifically designed to bring out your eye colour, so I went to the drugstore to look at them, to see what colours someone with green eyes should be wearing.

Apparently I'm supposed to wear plum on my lids, dark green in my crease, and light green on my browbone.

That seems a tad ill-advised, no?

Interestingly, the colours they had for hazel eyes were very close to what I'm wearing now, which might be why my eye colour has been mistaken for brown by parties who shall remain nameless. I would like my eyes to look as green as possible, but I don't think green and purple shadow is quite the way to go...

Commercials

I'm watching Simpsons and Family Guy. I'm greatly enjoying the shows themselves, but from the commercials they're showing, I get the distinct impression that Global does not want me, personally, watching the show. It's not just that the commercials aren't targeted to me, it feels like they're actively trying to drive me away with commercials that make me feel dirty or insult my intelligence.

Half-formed theory

Most misunderstandings are the result of people assuming that other people's motivations are the same as their own would be in the same situation.