The VrtuCar reservation page sort of sucks. It works, but it’s ugly:
It’s also hard to use, as it:
My greasmonkey script makes the site look a little better:
If you’d like to improve the look of your VrtuCar reservation page, grab the script from the GitHub repo.
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that Second Cup started sporting a Fair Trade logo on their signage. Being the kind of person that thinks people should be paid a reasonable wage, and knowing that coffee workers can be treated like serfs, I started stopping by Second Cup to grab the occasional cup of java. Then I started wondering. When I order myself a caramel corretto®, is it really fairly traded?
So I sent an email to Second Cup’s customer care. Their response was a little disappointing:
Thank you for your email and your interest in the Second Cup. I have included below our Fair Trade Coffee available through Second Cup. Currently this is the only coffee in our series that is certified. Please do refer to our website at www.secondcup.com to review our selection and how we are making a difference environmentally and socially.
So, even though Second Cup says “24 fairly traded coffees available every day”, they really mean they have one fairly traded coffee.
It’s back to Bridgehead, and their fully fair trade menu for me.
Remember the prorogation kurfuffle? No, not the one in 2009 one. The first one.
It looks like history is about to repeat itself.
Mr. Harper has announced that he wants to eliminate government subsidies for political parties. So far he’s only said that he wants to use that as a Conservative plank in the next election, but I’m betting that it will appear in bill form sometime before early March – just before a budget would have to be brought down.
Why? The first time the government tried to eliminate subsidies, the opposition parties freaked out and botched forming a coalition. This time around, instead of proroguing, Harper is going to force the vote and allow the government to fall on this handy dandy wedge issue. In the subsequent election, he can paint the other parties as pigs at a trough, and say “there are already generous credits and incentives in the tax system to encourage people to give to political parties today.” Oh wait. He just did.
I can pretend the move is antidemocratic: the subsidy means that everyone’s vote has value. In a donation-only system, only people who have spare cash can donate, so they’ll donate to parties that pander to their wants meet their needs. Poor folks (who can’t wait until tax time for their tax credits to be returned) won’t be represented as well.
But, in my heart of hearts, my main reason for supporting the subsidy is that it benefits the Green Party. The subsidy forms a substantial part of the our budget, so any reduction of the subsidy would cripple the federal party. I tend to think of that as a bad thing, but others would probably disagree.
For the past couple of weeks, Blogawa has been misbehaving. It’s been quietly ignoring posts from Perspective Ottawa. I use FeedWordPress to aggregate posts from around town, so this weekend I looked into it a little more seriously.
After I upgraded to the latest FeedWordPress, I started seeing errors like:
WP HTTP Error: Operation timed out after 10000 milliseconds with 48,382 bytes received
when I manually refreshed Perspective Ottawa’s feed. With a bit of digging, I discovered that there’s a default timeout of 10 seconds in the library FWP uses to download and parse RSS feeds. I’ve pinged the author about it, but in case you’re having a similar problem, here’s my fix:
With that fix, FeedWordPress and I are now BFFs again.
A post on Transit Ottawa reminded me of a recent poll on CFRA.
89.6% of respondents believed that Clive Doucet and Alex Cullen wanted to cancel road projects because “[they] aren’t interested in keeping taxes down; this is just a thinly veiled attack on car owners by a couple of public transit lovers.”
That’s the first time I’ve heard “transit lover” used as an epithet. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
David Chernushenko was elected as Councillor for my ward last night. Not only did he win, he rocked the ballot box with 41% of the vote.
My voting career has spanned almost two decades now. I think this vote was the first winning vote I’ve ever cast.1 It’s good to know that I’m in the majority largest single voting block for once.
I was only at the victory party briefly, but there seemed to be a degree of shell shock. Lots of the folks in the room had supported David’s previous campaigns, and we didn’t quite know what to do when our candidate actually won. I’m glad that we got to see it.
Congratulations to David, his campaign team, and his volunteers. You all did a great job.
Even though Canada lost the race to join the UN Security Council, the government was able to break one notable record. They succeeded in making a statement so bizarre and self-serving, it actually parodied itself. According to Harper’s communications director:
A big deciding factor was the fact that Canada’s bid did not have unity because we had Mr. Ignatieff questioning and opposing Canada’s bid.
And according to our Foreign Minister, Lawrence Cannon:
Not being able to speak with one voice as a country had a negative impact on Canada’s bid.
The Conservatives are actually saying that Canada lost its bid to sit on the Security Council because of the Liberals. They apparently think Canadians are stupid enough to believe that a guy less popular than Stephen Harper was able to convince fifty-some governments to vote for Portugal.
It’s too bad that our new Governor General’s coat of arms features an apparently meaningless string of binary. Considering that every other device in coat of arms has some degree of symbolism, I’m surprised none of the folks at the Canadian Heraldic Authority bothered to find something nifty to encode in there.
In entirely unrelated news, Bobby Scrawls, Assistant to the Deputy Herald Chancellor of the Canadian Heraldic Authority, recently got his first tattoo! He wanted to get “out of the box” of his day job, so he got some really awesome Chinese Japanese Korean Asian characters inked on his back. Because of his incredible artistic ability, he got “Writes like a ninja” tattooed over his spine:
Of course, opinions on the meaning of those characters differ.
(Images from Hanzi Smatter used without permission, see Mental Floss for more tattoo fun)
I’d like to welcome a bunch of new bloggers to Blogawa! In chronological order:
First among equals is GJ Hagenaars‘ now ex-campaign blog. He’s no longer in the Bay Ward municipal race for all the right reasons. It sounds like he intends to keep his blog updated with his thoughts on the future of our city.
Keeping in the electoral vein is Municipalities Out Of Control – sort of a Girls Gone Wild for city politics, but with finances instead of sex and city councillors instead of drunk/stoned/payed teenagers. (Mr. O’Malley, I apologize if you don’t like the simile, but the name of the blog was too good to pass up)1
Blogawa also welcomes its first online magazine, in the form of UnFolding. The whole thing looks pretty snazzy, particularly the previews section.
iKEN is an excellent photoblog by a Korean exchange student visiting Ottawa. The photos of Korea are particularly cool.
We also get to welcome ThumbShift a cycling blog. Fellow cyclists are always welcome, especially those who post pictures of street art.
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