Chan's Personal Blog

Saw this interesting article on Forbes.com today entitled, "Path to the Truth May Lead to the Stomach." Some 16 year old high school student in the United States came up with a lie detector which monitors your stomach activity as a way to gauge your stress/lying. Apparently this device is more accurate than today's polygraph machines which are 90% accurate. (Perhaps my fellow criminologists and crime fighters can share some insight about lie detectors.)

Well, I am now officially half way done my Master's degree. Ten months down, ten more to go. I think it's safe to say that the feeling has finally set in, and I feel like a grad student. Usually it takes me a while before something like this seems real.

I think one of the most valuable things that I'm learning ironically isn't things related to computer science, but rather public speaking and writing. Most of the courses I take typically involve doing some research on a topic, writing a paper about it, and sharing the results in a presentation.

People that know me well probably know that I attend church. People that REALLY know me have probably heard me rant about this, why doesn't my church accept Visa? In this article I will outline benefits that I see if churches accepted credit cards as a valid form of tithing.
 

Just a heads up for those who have kids or those who are young at heart. Every year, North Douglas Pentecostal Church hosts a safe Halloween alternative. The church calls the event, 31 Kid's Street. They open up the church gym to the community for Halloween. They set up a bunch of game booths, give away candy as prizes, and hand out free hot dogs to everyone. It's a safer alternative than wandering the streets with random strange people. So, this is one of the services that our church offers to the community, and it's absolutely free, and everyone is welcome. Every year, they have 150-300 kids attend the event, so it's a fairly well-received event.

Event: 31 Kid's Street
Place: North Douglas Pentecostal Church, 675 Jolly Place (off Glanford)
Time: Oct 31, 2005 6pm - 9pm
Admission Cost: Free!

This has been your public service announcement

Today we had a number of developments surrounding the current labour dispute. There's three headlines I want to cover in this article. The BCTF being fined $500,000 for their illegal strike, the BCTF and Government reaching a tentative agreement, and the teachers winning the public relations battle.
 

As with any great drama, it is customary to follow a tense scene with some comic relief. So after a week union and government non-sense, what better way to end it with some light-hearted humour. I present to you one of the treasures of the Internet, The Star Wars Kid.
 

As previously announced, today's BCTF union action escalated with their buddy unions jumping into the frey. I, being the eternal optimist assumed that BC Transit would be running their buses as usual because mass transit is part of the critical transportation infrastructure. It became abundantly clear that my morning bus wasn't coming, so I had to get my parents to drive me to UVic in the morning.

I later found out why transit was not running, and it really made me mad. The story is, Telus employees who have been locked out of work for a while now decided to set up picket lines at the transit bus yards. The drivers were there, but they couldn't cross the picket lines. Why on earth is Telus setting up picket lines at BC Transit? The official reason was that transit carries Telus ads on the side of the buses, therefore the union had a right to set up a picket line there to disrupt Telus' business. By that rationale, the union could have picketed television stations because they run Telus ads on TV right? Anyways, I don't buy that reason for a second.

How did this loss of transit services affect people? Well, a lot of students couldn't show up at UVic because they live too far away from UVic. One of my friend's co-workers usually takes the bus from Land's End all the way to downtown. Today, he had to bike the entire distance. Another one of my friends is a tradesman who has to bus to Langford every morning, and he couldn't get to work as he has no other means of transportation.

Anyways, I got dropped off near UVic because all of the main roads leading into UVic were blocked by more picket lines. I managed to get into campus which was supposedly closed according to the friendly union people, but it was totally open. These was quite a police presence as some guy's car got damaged as he was trying to negotiate his way through a picket line, and the cops had to be called in. That is definitely not cool. People in big mobs tend to not think and do stupid things like this.

I arrived at work soaking wet and fairly angry as expected. My parents arrived at work late. As the morning progresses, I see some fairly grumpy people as well. A bunch of staff members normally don't bring lunches to work as they eat on campus, but all the food services were shut down. One of the Deans wandered into our main office looking beleaguered, and asked if anyone could get him a coffee because all his support staff were on strike, and they normally made him coffee. That was actually pretty funny.

Today was a bad day to be in a bad mood since I had a project that had to be finished today for work. I scrammbled to finish it in the morning, and I got it down 20 minutes before the deadline. Some of you may criticize me for going into work today, but firstly, I'm not part of a union, and secondly, I am not one to drop my duties. Duty comes first.

Thankfully none of my classes were affected by the strike. One of my professors remarked that in Italy, they have strikes and such, but they're never about petty things like wages. They go on strike about important things like decisions to go to war.

When I got home, my parents told me about downtown today. The entire core was completely paralyzed because of the union protests. The business day was absolutely useless and we lost hundreds of dollars in sales. Thanks to all the unions for that one.

I was watching the news for an analysis of the day. One of the panel members said this dispute will end based on public opinion. If the government feels the electorate is on their side, then they'll stand firm. If they don't, then they'll cave in to negotiations. So it all boils down to a public relations battle, and controlling the minds and hearts of the citizens of BC. I agree with that assessment.

I'll tell you straight up that it doesn't help your case if you're disrupting my ability to get to work, disrupting my food services, and messing with my family's small business. This is not how you wage a public relations battle. You'd do a lot better diverting your union money towards advertisements illustrating your case, writing editorials to newspapers, etc.

The site that hosts the Times Colonist has an interesting poll (albeit not scientific at all) asking, "Do you think the union protest in Victoria to show support for B.C. teachers is going to help get the dispute solved?" The results are 23.3% Yes, 74.57% No, 2.22% Not Sure. How's that for public relations?

The way I see it is, we're all a bunch of pawns in this dispute between the unions and the government. We are the innocent bystanders that are getting hit. The unions are also responsible to no one for their actions. I also say to the Telus union, who are you to dictate that there will be no transit service for the city? Do you know that 90,000 freakin people rely on transit to get to downtown for work?!

Today, there are no winners, only losers.

Thank goodness transit was restored late in the afternoon, or else I would have been on campus until 7:30pm tonight.

To end off this crappy day, I lost a year's worth of bookmarks of websites because that file got overwritten for some reason.

Current mood: Angry