Devauld.ca

A lot of people ask me 'What are you going to do with that?' after I mention I'm going to return to school for my Master's degree. As being 'done' almost assuredly happens after you have 'started', I never paid much thought to my future after my return to school. I always figured that I would return to programming, this time within the finance industry. There is a good chance that I could fill a role here within Calgary, although I have been weighing other options as well.

Most people would agree I'm very patriotic, and I would love nothing more than to keep myself within Canada. Within Canada, the epicenter for finance resides in Toronto. Now, moving to an even larger city, with more traffic and more urbania is not very high on my list of life choices. Although if I'm going to move to a larger city, I would like to keep it in Canada. The problem: Ontario has a real thing against some dogs.

Sonja tuned me into Ontario's hate for particular breeds of dogs. After a bout of examining skill sets on a financial job website, and again realizing that over ninety percent of the financial programming jobs in Canada are located in Toronto or one of it's suburbs, I decided to dig into this so called 'pit bull ban'.

The ban comes in two parts: The original Dog Owner's Liability Act, and an amendment passed in Bill 132. The first five or so sections of the Dog Owner's Liability Act make sense. If you dog bites another person, you as the owner are liable. The later sections around search and seizure also make sense if your dog has done something to make it a 'menace to the safety of persons or domestic animals'. Sane logic around how your animal can be taken from you, what will happen to it, as well as what repercussions exist for the owner are laid out through the law. However, Section 6, as well as all of Bill 132 are completely stupid bullshit.

The Liability Act lumps Riley, an American Staffodshire Terrier, in with Pitbulls. And, Ontario does not like Pitbulls in a very big way. There seems to only be two ways an individual can own a Pitbull or one of its cousins in Ontario. The first is that you owned one before the law came into effect, and you have bent over backwards with muzzles, registration, 1.8m leashes and sterilization. The other is that your dog is a flyball competitor, registered with a kennel club which has formally (written letter) invited you to a competition within Ontario's borders.

This means as a Canadian citizen, if I want to do a cross Canada road trip, I either can't bring my dog, or I can't enter Ontario. Failure to comply could lead to 'a fine of not more than $10,000 or to imprisonment for a term of not more than six months, or both.' Seems a little steep for just owning a particular breed of dog. Especially because the process ends up with the dog being taken, and most likely destroyed.

Getting back to my future, it looks like TO is off the list. Considering my success with negotiating away The Cat, I doubt I will have any success getting Sonja to give up the dog because I landed a job in Ontario. The truth is particularly frustrating because of Riley. She is an incredibly loving dog, and is more obedient that a lot of dogs I know. A little comfort comes from facts showing that the ban in Ontario is not reducing the amount of dog attacks. Perhaps the people in Ontario will lead a charge and get the bill amended to not focus on specific breeds. After-all, if we focused on the specifics, shouldn't the man that spearheaded the law against pitbulls be working on making Saabs illegal because they stall, disorient people and cause them to ram drunken cyclists into mailboxes?

Photographers contend that gear does not make you a better photographer.  Learning about depth-of-field, composition, and moving around the aperture-shutter-iso triangle will make a point-and-shoot a formidable tool in anyones hands.  Taking control of the available light and using a tripod will result in much better photos than dropping extra money for a megapixel count.

Of course, everything has an exception.  Today I got my hands on Nikon's tilt and shift lens.  Not prepared to drop that kind of money on a lens, we instead decided to rent it.  Now that I've had a chance to play with it, I'll admit that there is really no way to replicate tilt and shift without having the gear.  Normally, your focal plane is runs parallel to the film or sensor in the camera.  With tilt built into your lens, you can turn the focus plane so that it isn't running along the same boring parallel line.

Examining the large version of the above photo you can see that the focus plane does not sit perpendicular to the viewing angle.  The bottom left of the photo is in focus, and the focus plane moves across the middle of the photo to the upper right.  The focus plane makes the braiding in the upper right pin sharp, whereas if you step off the plane the image is quickly overcome with pleasing bokeh.

It's too bad this lens costs as much as it does.

Hello June!

The year is nearly half over, summer is waking from its slumber, the yard looks like a jungle and I still haven't finished the trim in the basement. The problem, I have discovered, is that I am terrible at estimating how long something will take.

This is not something that is limited to basement renovations; it can also be found in my estimating the time it takes to create software, complete yard work, travel between two locations and even read a book. An example is the gate that leads to the back yard. Over the winter, one of the structural boards let go of some of the nails, and as a result the bottom board would drag across the ground every time the gate was opened or closed. The plan was to string out an extension cord and use a drill to pull out some screws and get the gate off the fence. Next take the gate into the shop, change out the semi-rotten board with a new board, screw it into place and then hang the gate back up. How long should something like that take? I initially thought it was going to be a couple of hours. It ended up taking over 10, putting my work into the fading hours of the day and resulting in nothing else getting done on my precious weekend time.

In all of my estimating, the reason behind my terrible estimates isn't in me predicting the work that needs to be done, it is in not foreseeing the problems that inevitably arrive. The problem with the gate: it wasn't actually square. When I got it under a measuring tape, I found that the top of the gate was an inch and three quarters longer than the bottom. I wasn't about to let that fly, so I set out with some power tools and more wood and squared it up. Then when I hung it back up, I discovered that whomever built the original fence made the gate to offset non-level fence. Out with the jack and chain, pull up the post.

Oh look! It's rotten!

Obtain a post, get it level and pack it in. Oh look, the pounding turned it and it isn't square! Rinse, repete. Then the gate went up, and could swing without scraping along the ground. The simple task of replacing an old rotting board, turned into a whole day adventure in home maintenance.

This is not an isolated incident. One of my first large scale projects was scheduled to take approximately one thousand man hours. By the time the project shipped, there was over ten times that amount of hours billed. Blowing the budget? Anyone who works in software knows what I'm talking about. You'll find a library function won't execute your call-back, the library you installed won't work on your 64-bit architecture, and when everything appears to be working, there is that one case discovered in quality assurance that is a security risk and results in a total rework.

I've been starting to refer to this phenomenon as the 'Time Ratchet'. Like the turns on a ratchet, each item doesn't itself appear to be a big deal. Although after enough turns or problems you end up with something much larger. Each of the turns of the ratchet work towards the same goal: a tighter nut. The same can be said for the small individual setback in your projects, each works towards a longer timeframe.

The Time Ratchet effect appears everywhere. I had to meet a client to talk about a photo shoot. I time boxed the entire thing into about 2 hours. Driving through downtown, I run into some traffic adding about five to ten minutes *chuck-chick*. Client takes a phone call that lasts about 3 minutes *chuck-chick*. I can't seem to find a gallery that contains the example I'm talking about. I stumble around the website for two or three minutes until I have it *chuck-chick*. Answering all the questions takes twice as long, due to divergent chat about travelling across the US border *chuck-chick*. Now the ratchet effect has me still in a cafe when I planned to be at home starting on something else.

The Time Ratchet is turned by whatever you are currently doing, and tightens up the time you have to do other things. When you are turning the ratchet, you are simply working the tool. It isn't until you get into the compressed time on the other end and wonder why it is so tight.

A stack of pay stubs made an excellent candidate in Photo Friday's Arranged challenge.

The new bike had its first good ride yesterday. Being the geek that I am, I was sure to bring along my heart rate monitor, as well as my GPS. The weather was really nice, and I was on a mission to take pictures of Charlie's Coin at the Boer War Memorial in Calgary. The total ride was about 30 kilometers, and for the most part was quite enjoyable exercise. At other times I thought I was going to die.

If you look at the heart rate chart, you can see I pushed myself decently throughout.  The low points around 1:15 were when I was on and off the bike taking pictures.  If you look at the Google Earth KMZ file, the spike in heart rate to 191 beats per minute coincides with the marker referred to as 'Killer Hill'.  I'm not sure if I was misusing my gears, but about 3/4 of the way up that hill, my heart was in my neck and I felt like I was about to keel over.  Nothing like a change in exercise routine to show you the poor shape of your body.  Granted, I haven't maintained 160 minutes of moderate intensity in a very long time.

I was pleased that I am able to keep up with traffic downtown.  I can pretty easily get up to 30km/h, which is par for the course in stop and go traffic.  I could keep up with the flow, and didn't have to resort to riding along the sidewalk like a inconsiderate moron.  The bike is also pretty fast, as I peddled it up to over 50km/h, on the downhill of course.

In the end I did my Geocaching, went for a nice bike ride on a beautiful day, and managed to collect data to get my geek on.