The Perils of Plans

"Plans are nothing; planning is everything" (Dwight D. Eisenhower)

     When I was in high school I had my whole life planned out. Once I got into University for Computer Engineering I’d go off and do computer stuff all the time. Then I realized that Computer stuff mostly involved looking at code all day and decided that ‘some sort of science’ would probably work. I ended up studying Economics in university and now work at a library. Not to say that planning is always bad, just than an excess of it is likely to lead to undue stress.

     An area that definitely benefits from planning is meal management. I work in what is apparently described as a ‘middle shift’, unlike a night shift (which is what I thought I was doing) I come in sometime after lunch and stay until sometime before midnight. Due to this I usually need to plan to eat something for supper. While I could go out and find some fast food nearby, it would be prohibitive as I usually lack non-student back up to cover while I’m away, and it would get expensive fast.

     Due to this, I usually find myself having to plan out what I want to eat over the weekend, and prepare some of it then. Generally I cook a meal on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday and coast on the leftovers for the rest of the week. There are usually some shortcuts, a side of potatoes, when cooked en masse can last over many meals, and veggies can usually be eaten raw or the prepared the day of. Generally, I really just have to focus on a main. I try to make my meals relatively balanced, so I plan for some sort of protein based main, a side that can be starchy, grainy or milky and then a vegetable side. Sometimes I get lucky and I can smoosh many of these things together, like when I made stuffed peppers, but usually I need a little more forethought.

I try to plan a little further than this... usually.

     It can be easy to rest on your laurels though. This week I learned the hard way when you feel like you’ve cooked plenty, and your fridge looks full but not with the right kind of food. This weekend I made Mac and Cheese (The homemade kind, not Kraft Dinner for all you doubters all though), Sarah made Quinoa with Paneer and Mango and then I made some Salmon with fried potatoes as a side. Thinking this would be fine along with a few leftovers hanging around in the fridge from last week I didn’t worry about food preparation this week.
    
     Predictably this backfired hilariously as it is now Tuesday and all I’m left with is Split Pea Soup! Fortunately the way my schedule breaks down I don’t need anything for Wednesday (as I have a big lunch when I get to work from French  class and then just have a sandwich or something for supper) and Friday I usually just have a sandwich as it’s a dayish shift. So that just leaves Thursday in which I guess I’ll be having soup.

I hope you enjoy that all your meals consist of 80% water!

     Speaking of planning, thinking about this has once again made me realize how much I would love to own a car. I keep wiling time away by pricing models of cars and comparing reviews. This isn’t exactly productive planning since car models change and I’m unlikely to get anything as long as I work under a contract with a set expiry date. It doesn’t make sense to commit to a big car payment when in a few months you may have a stint of no job at all. For now I just have to sigh despondently and daydream about the day when I can travel faster than 40km/h.

Maybe I can compromise.

On Being Sick, Beating Games and TV Series Endings

            This entry is more of an omnipost since I’ve been sick for the last few days. Think of it as an omnibus bill for your eyes. Except I’m not out to push my own legislative agenda while squashing voices of dissent, at least not yet…

Being Sick

“Health is not valued until sickness comes” (Thomas Fuller)

I had the misfortune of being sick with some sort of bug over the last few days. Starting Sunday I wasn’t feeling very well in terms of loss of appetite and some nausea. Monday progressed where I had so little energy that I couldn’t get out of bed to phone into work that I couldn’t come in. I eventually managed to, but I always feel a little silly calling in sick when you’re not shackled to the toilet sick. I mean, you can still work if you’re tired, you just don’t get much done. Either way I always feel like I’m being a lazy whiner, but where I might not stay awake until the end of my shift I figured it was a safe bet. Tuesday I still felt a bit off but I felt well enough to head into work, that is until an hour before my shift started and I had some sort of digestive attack, that was enough to call in sick again and sent me right back to sleep for another three hours. Wednesday, I miraculously felt better.

I don’t get sick very often, and I especially don’t get sick with a flu type bug. I feel like I have a pact with my body where I allow it to roll over on the common cold twice a year for 4-6 weeks and the rest of the time I’m ok. Recently it’s been much better than that, which I credit a better diet and more active lifestyle, as well as the removal of the stress crash that is the end of exams. Since I don’t get sick often, I don’t really know how to deal with being sick. With a cold you can usually just take some Tylenol Cold or its assorted medicine and just blow through your day with the sniffles. When you have no energy or you feel like your insides are full of grease it’s a whole different story. While I feel lucky that I don’t deal with it very often, I feel like I may be the worse for the fact that I don’t know how to cope with it.

Despite the fact that I don’t understand why they work, I’m going to list the three go to things I have on my ‘what to do when you’re sick’ checklist. All three of them are from my Mother in that these are the things that came out during the uncommon moments where I was taken with a non-ear infection illness.

1.       Flat, Room Temperature Ginger Ale: I know that Ginger helps settle the stomach (or at least Gravol has been trying this as a marketing ploy in recent years) but I figure that Ginger Ale is as closely related to Ginger as Lemonade is to Lemons. Both of them are mostly water and sugar and not much of the ingredient that is supposed to help. As well, you’re making it even closer to water by taking it after it has lost its carbonation. That I can understand, since the bubbles may hurt an already upset stomach. The room temperature is what I understand the least, drinks are either taken hot or cold, I don’t think I’ve ever had a beverage served at room temperature that could not be improved by moving to either extreme. All I know is that when you’re sick this beverage is amazing, presumably through magic.

2.       Salted Top Soda Crackers: I’m talking Premium Plus, or whatever sad no-name brand the store might peddle next to it. I’m pretty sure that there is only enough room at the top for Premium Plus because there is never any other type of cracker competing with it. It must be a bit of a cash cow because this is the one thing you’re probably guaranteed to see in every kitchen that belongs to someone that can eat gluten. This one is more understandable for being sick, it’s basically salt and crunch, easy to digest and not very extreme in terms of flavour. It’s a way of getting calories into your system that isn’t going to make your stomach hit the ‘evacuate’ button.

3.       Chicken Noodle Soup: This makes the most sense. It’s either the from-a-powder broth and noodle variety or its home made with lots of vegetables. Either way it’s a method for getting water, vitamins and noodle into your system. However I can’t feel like this is one of those things corporations brainwashed people into thinking they needed when they were sick in the 30’s. Envision a corporate boardroom at the height of the depression, trying to figure out how to get people to buy more soup. Someone suggests they imply chicken noodle soup is good for this common cold they have going around. Everyone exclaims and someone gets a promotion to Vice President of Vegabond Marketing.

These three things will set you on the right track on the road to recovery. That and drinking enough water to make a Mermaid Jealous, but that goes without saying. I found that tea has a way of making you feel better as well, if only because it’s warm and not very heavy. I know there are a million varieties of teas out there, but I’m going to stick with my green tea for now. Don’t worry about me though, I’m already better at the time of writing, I was just putting my time honour sickly traditions out there for scrutiny, and thanking that in my contactless, union dues paying without getting benefits temp job, I still get sick days.

Beating Video Games

“You must do the thing you think you cannot do” (Eleanor Roosevelt)

Although I spent most of my time being sick sleeping, it still provided me with about 10 hours of time where I was awake and not at work. Of course I was able to use this time productively, and of course I used that time to play video games. I had been trying to beat Mass Effect 3 since I bought the super-premium collector’s edition in November 2011. I got a good way through the game before Christmas but then Graduate School picked up (If anyone from MAEP is reading this, this would be when the Policy One Two Punch came down) and I had to put it down. People I know often say that when they get to the end of a book series, they have a hard time reading the last one because then it would be over. I never had this experience in terms of books but I think this time I got it in terms of a game. Every time I tried to pick up the game I’d finish a mission or two and then get disinterested. I really wanted to see it to the ending, but I never could get around to it.

What makes the ending of Mass Effect 3 so special is that it is the end of a very popular franchise and it was very controversial at the time. I say at the time because Mass Effect 3 came out more than a year ago and in the video game world the controversy is now old hat, but I still want to talk about it. I thought the ending was an interesting take to end a franchise that had been very well designed, if not ground breaking (Bioware has since taken the choice and morality driven engine to the Medieval World with Dragon Age). When I was first watching it I thought that the main complaint may have been the lack of a happy ending. The fact that it has the feel of a Space Opera you might be inclined to expect a Star Wars-esque happy ending. However, Mass Effect was more driven by the choices you made and the paths you followed, and it turns out that was the heart of the issue.

After beating it I went and looked up all the endings and found they did have sort of a same-ish feel to them, especially before Bioware responded to the fan reaction. Two of the endings were functionally identical with the exception of two or three tweaks, where the third one wasn’t very much different. The combination left the whole thing feeling as if all decisions led to the same outcome, very much different from the ‘chose your destiny’ theme the game had been developing over three titles.  In their defense, Bioware released an ‘extended cut’ DLC that extended the endings of the three choices which caused them to bring out their distinctions from each other. As well, they added a fourth ‘none of the above’ option that which technically being the worst outcome, stayed closer to the theme of the game.

I can see where some of the fan outrage came from, but I don’t understand at the root of it why people were so upset about it. In the end it was the designers and writers of the game that guided us to this outcome, and that’s what we get. Fans should not be able to re-write the ending because it did not live up to their expectations. Although in this case they largely didn’t, they were just able to get more clarification on the question of ‘What happened in the end?’ which is a fair inquiry.

 This is definitely the end of the Sheppard storyline (barring a prequel), I can definitely see many other games coming out of the Mass Effect universe. In fact I hope they do release more games under the Mass Effect banner, it was one of the most enjoyable universes I had the pleasure of delving into. 

TV Series Endings

“When Television is good, nothing is better. When it’s bad, nothing is worse” (Newton N. Minow)

Along with Mass Effect, Fringe was another big ending that I had to deal with recently. For the uninitiated, Fringe was a Sci-Fi Drama that started out with a Special FBI Unit investigating ‘strange’ occurrences (Usually tied together with explanations in ‘Fringe’ science, hence the name) and snowballed into a trans-universal epic involving multiple timelines and a strong theme of strong personal bonds seeing you through adversity.

It was a show that my old roommate got me into while I was still doing my Undergraduate. He had the first two seasons on DVD, but had already watched them. So one Christmas I borrowed the first season and watched the whole thing. I think we watched the second season together but I don’t remember. The third season I enjoyed with another roommate and his girlfriend, watching the episodes as they came out. I watched the end of the fourth and all the fifth season with Sarah. Where the show had many transitional periods, as did my life over the time that I watched it. I started watching it in my final year of my Undergraduate and finish watching it as a graduate of a Master’s program.

I think that Fringe might have a bad rap of getting the ‘Lost’ effect, where the show had to keep ramping up the Sci Fi aspect in order to keep driving the story. However, for Fringe I think it was the natural evolution of the story. In order for things to keep making sense, the surrounding universe had to become more elaborate. I’d like to think of this as the ‘Futurama effect’ (In the fact that as Futurama continued to make episodes, they had to delve into more ridiculous scenarios, all held together as canon. Especially after the four Movies) and helped make the case that a show that is essentially Science Fiction can still hold up a prime time slot.

I personally really enjoyed the ending. I think they brought everything to an end in a very satisfying way. Especially where the show was slated to end at Season 4 (which had the ultimate happy ending) and was brought back due to strong fan support. It is due to this support that I feel that there was a bit of disappointment around the ending, I think is focused on its distinct lack of a happy ending. However, it does provide closure on the majority of the loose ends, and in the end, Fringe was never about happiness. It had its happy moments, but it was more about extoling family values and exploring people’s brains while really high on LSD.

Night at the Library: Part I

“The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do” (B. F. Skinner)

     This is going to be a special series that will feature noteworthy incidents that occur during my Evening Shift at the Library. It’s sort of like the Movie ‘Night at the Museum’ but instead of the books coming to life and running rampant over the library, it’s more about the library being overrun by lethargic, listless students trying to study during the moonlight hours. Additionally, instead of thieves attempting to steal the collection, patrons come in and attempt to take advantage of our low staff levels by asking difficult questions or making ridiculous demands.

I wish that this job featured a talking Teddy Roosevelt, but I’ll have to settle for a non-sentient biography of Teddy Roosevelt, among other interesting books. Although the way the library is set up, you might be surprised we have any books at all! The first floor is currently set up more as a social study space and computer lab, with the main collection comprising the upper floors.

I feel like this is a common thought among people entering the library.

     In this edition, I investigate the perils of relying too much on a ‘system’.  As a bit of background information we process Library ID’s for us, but also for a few other institutions and related organizations. So Patron A came in and was concerned, when they went to make an account for their ID, it said the barcode was already in use. This was odd since the ID System is supposed to issue a unique ID for each new patron, often even issuing a new barcode for a replacement card of the same person!

     I looked up the record registered under the barcode for Patron A and found that it was indeed registered for Patron B. While I would like to think that Patron A was some sort of time traveller to went back in time and got his ID printed for an alternate version of himself before coming back and lodging a complaint, the reality was much more mundane. The alternate scenario was likely fuelled by my recent binging on episodes of Doctor Who.

In this episode: The Doctor screws around with librarians by getting a Library ID before it should have existed!

     I contacted Patron B to confirm his barcode and it was indeed the same one as Patron A. For some reason, the ID System had issued the exact same barcode to both patrons. Was this the first sign of a massive conspiracy of our workhorse electronic systems? An uprising of our ID processing system saying ‘No more, I have worked without pay, sustenance or acknowledgement long enough!’ or maybe it was a finicky system. 

     After collecting some summary information from Patron B I returned to the ID system and demanded answers. It refused to reveal to me any information on Patron B as it has been established computers do not respond well to threats of violence. However, I had advanced machine interrogation techniques known as ‘advanced search’. I was able to squeeze the ID system to tell me all the IDs that had been printed in the last little while. The Shyamalanian twist was the Patron B’s ID was never created in the first place! At least it had no record in the computer, despite having a library record.

     Exhausting the better part of my ID searching ability, I had to relinquish authority on this matter to the higher ups, hoping the combined brain power of the day staff could solve this problem. Returning to work the next day revealed the solution: The ID system had run out of barcodes! So it was just printing the same barcode to every Joe Patron who came looking for an ID. The problem was quickly solved but the resolution was less exciting than I had hoped. It’s like pulling away the curtain at the end to reveal the super villain was actually a pile of custard attached to a pulley system.  

     So the moral is, don't trust your machines to do all your thinking for you. Or you might end up with three people who all have the same barcode on their Library IDs. In hind sight this lesson could have been worse...

Malfunctioning Software, a terror to humanity since Pirates

Even Younglings should know these facts

'Do or do not, there is no try' (Yoda, in this case in terms of a half-hearted fan calendar)

This is right up there with 'Anikin built C3P0, who eventually went on to work with Luke'

     I’ve been laughing my way through the first month of a 365 day desk calendar that I received for Christmas, or as marketers are not branding them: a ‘day at a time’ calendar. While it is an excellent product in the fact that it is a great calendar, it has the date clearly displayed, with a smaller embedded month in it so not only is it known what month it is but also where the day fits into the greater theme of the month, so you always know where you are at. It is a great calendar because it is Star Wars themed and I really enjoy the Star Wars franchise (I am part of the group who are intrigued and maybe a little bit excited by the prospect of new movies). It is even a good purveyor of Star Warsian goodness since it has full colour pictures of scenes from Star Wars to grace my desk in a daily rotation of the episodic space opera. What makes it laughable is that it promised to provide ‘star wars facts’ in addition to the cosmetic beauty and chronological functionality of this desk calendar, and these facts are terribly deficient. If Mom happens to be reading this, I really like the calendar! It just makes good fodder for pointing out how marketers get us.

     What gets me is that I assumed that someone receiving a Star Wars Calendar would already be affiliated with fandom and therefore be initiated into some basic level of trivial knowledge.  I would hope anyone who had seen the movies and liked them enough to not go on a tirade on how terrible they were (and you’ll find even some fans who do just this) would know at least the few main characters and what the death star is. The Day at a time calendar hasn’t hit that low yet, but I’ve found so far they’ve been mining moderately obscure but very common sense points that even if you’ve seen the movie but don’t consider yourself a fan have probably puzzled out. For example, the one that set it all off was Friday’s:

     ‘Once Anikin got so mad at Padme that he force choked her until she fell to the ground’

     This wasn’t so many trivium as describing a scene of the movie, so it’s more testing your memory. Today’s entry was

     ‘The Battle of Geonosis begin in the arena with the Jedi versus the droid army, 

     This is a slight improvement since many people may not know that the planet was called Geonosis but fails to provide any context. Why couldn’t the designers have said ‘The Battle of Geonosis precipitated the conflict widely known as the Clone War? Failure at providing proper facts may be part of the design however, as a friend of mine pointed out.

     It could be that these calendars are not marketed to the fans of the universe they are extolling, but people attached to them. It would make sense that the significant other or a friend of someone who can’t stop going on about Star Wars might be inclined to get this calendar. It gives them the functionality of a calendar while giving them the tiniest bit of immersion into a vast and expanding franchise. Why someone would give themselves one out of context fact coupled with pretty scene shots a day rather than sitting down and watching the movies (or just googling the basic premise if beyond me). It could also be the ultimate in the selfish gift where the uninitiated give it to the fan but then reap the benefits of being able to mooch the facts daily and being that much better able to converse about Star Wars or whatever the theme of the year is.

     My only alternative hypothesis is that I read a bit too far into the whole trivia thing. The box only promises ‘one Star Wars fact a day’ and certainly fulfills the obligation. Rather than try to dredge up obscure factoids that would tickle the fancy of calendaree they simply post a scene from one of the six movies and provide an associated fact. From this perspective they do quite well. However, I am still perplexed by the fact that of who would buy this calendar? Does the Day at a Time Calendar market subsist solely as Christmas, Birthday and theme gifts? Rather than cater to the dedicated fanbase, they producers seem content to move through non-fans in the form of thoughtful gifts that fulfill their base purpose as a way to track time, but not much else.

A new adventure!

"Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist, but the ability to start over" (F. Scott Fitzgerald) 

        This is the inaugural post of my new HaligonIan blog, while it is a new blog it isn't my first attempt at blogging, it's more of a restart of my blogging experience. Please don’t judge the content of this blog by its name, it simply reflects a few things about me:

1.       My love of fusing my location and my name. 

2.       My love of the fact that residents of Halifax are known as Haligonians, a handle that they embrace rather than shun.

3.       My love of puns, and terrible jokes in general. (Haligonians are people from/living Halifax and I happen to be an Ian living in Halifax) (Ba-dum-swish)

        For those of you who didn’t follow my blog where I took a roadtrip across Canada with my best friend Geoff, you can find it here at: caniescape.blogspot.com. I very much enjoyed the experience but what I didn’t expect was how much I would enjoy blogging about it. 

        Currently this blog isn’t expected to have a unifying theme; I didn’t want to pigeonhole it into talking about one thing to the exclusion of others. I hope to be able to put a spotlight on things that I happen to be enjoying at the time, although some mainstays are to be expected. I don’t expect it to ever rally around one topic or the other, but you’ll probably end up hearing about some things more than others (namely board games).

        For those of you who did follow my blog and wondered what happened in the meantime the synopsis is as such.  In June I was back in Ontario, I enjoyed a Summer of Leisure interspersed by intense periods of moving stuff in my car from my old Apartment in Halifax to my Dad’s house in Oakville. I had already been accepted into a Master’s program before the roadtrip but I didn’t make a big deal about it. I have since finished my studies as of July 2012 and had a ton of awesome experiences including trivia nights, water polo and meeting my girlfriend Sarah.

        After July 2012 and taking a look at the state of the labour market for new Graduates in Ontario I shamelessly decided to take the first job that came along with both hands. Hilariously enough as it turned out I got a Maternity Leave position as the Evening Manager at the Library that I had previously worked at before my Master’s degree. It had a bit of a regressive feel towards taking it, I went and got a graduate degree and landed up at the same place as I had left, albeit in a more senior position (for more pay, horray!). I enjoy the people I work with and I the experiences I have working every evening at the library make it worth it. These experiences have even been encouraged by some to get spun into their own special blog feature, so stay tuned to see if this becomes a reality. 

        Since then I have moved back to Halifax (which was an ordeal in itself) with Sarah and currently live in an area of Halifax that has a worse reputation that it deserves. I really enjoy living in Halifax and I hope to take advantage of everything this city has to offer. Another Haligonian mentioned to me one time that ‘Halifax can be a hard city to make it in, people who want to make it easily don’t survive here and they move elsewhere, so Halifax ends up being full of simply awesome people” which is a statement I can agree with, you have to want to live here in order to fully appreciate all it has to offer, rather than it being a place that you live in while you work.

       So far I haven’t had a chance to venture much further than the core: it took longer than expected to get settled and to renew old social contacts. However in the coming spring I hope to do much more exploring around Halifax and surrounding area, or at least as far as I can get by bike and transit since I don’t have a car. 

I don’t have an update schedule to stick to, but I plan to make additions to this as often as I can accumulate enough interesting things to say about in it. For now, continue enjoying the new year of 2013!