Pie Palace

The folks at Fair Vote Canada are holding a MeetUp on Tuesday, June 19, at the Royal Oak on the Canal. Here’s the text of their mailing:

This is your chance to gather with like-minded electoral reformers to relax while chatting about the state of our democracy. It’s also an opportunity to learn a little, swap ideas, and maybe even get mobilized for the ongoing Referendum Campaign – the largest in Ontario history. Even if you’re not familiar with the Fair Vote movement or electoral reform, come out anyways (and bring a friend). The atmosphere is always casual and everyone has a great time!

We’re usually on the main floor – take a left after coming in. But depending on number of attendees, we may move upstairs to accommodate more people. Be sure to look for us both upstairs and downstairs.

The theme for this meeting is organizing the “Vote YES to MMP” Campaign for the Oct 10th referendum on electoral reform. Local and province-wide strategy will be discussed, and plans for reaching over 1 million local voters will be struck.

The Pub Night is at the friendly Canal Royal Oak Pub at Colonel By & the Queensway (221 Echo Drive. Website: http://www.royaloakpubs.com/canal.html ).

The meetup group used to have about 9 members, now it has 69. Here’s hoping that’s a sign of things to come.

My tablet runs Windows. Every few days this dialog greets me when I log in. The only thing stopping me from installing Ubuntu is the lack of handwriting support.

I recently rented the first two episodes of HBO’s Carnivale. The first two shows were enough to make me hit the HBO website and look up the cost of buying the entire series: USD$119, which is way more than what I expect to pay for media.

Which has me wondering if my pricing expectations are fair. I’d be happy to pay up to CAN$40 for the 24 episodes, but anything more than that strikes me as overpriced. I’m not sure where I got the notion that $40 is the most a series is worth, but I’m having a hard time shaking it.

And so I ask you, gentle readers: what’s a fair price for that kind of production? Am I being too much of a cheapskate, or is HBO pricing itself out of the market?

(NB: Since my local independent rental store has a copy of both seasons for rent, my intent is to pay $60 to see the series. With that I also have the ability to quit watching if I get bored)

I like democracy. I like having the right to vote for a party I believe in. But my vote doesn’t usually count for much. I’ve been voting Green since the late ’90s ¹. Since then, the only tangible result of my vote has been about $4 awarded to the federal Green Party in federal funding.

Even though roughly 500,000 Canadians voted Green in the last election, we didn’t win any seats. Why? Because our votes were spread evenly across the country, instead of clumped into a few ridings in one of this country’s many regions. If there was a mass migration of Greens into ridings in Ontario, we’d be able to take roughly 12 seats²

So I’m happy that Ontario has put together a Citizens’ Assembly to look into ways of improving our provincial electoral system. The result was presented (with little media attention) in mid-May. The system has the following features:

1. Ontario will have 129 seats in the provincial legislature.
   
2. 90 seats will be “local” (ie, associated with a given riding).
   
3. 39 seats will be “list” (ie, parties submit an ordered list of people to represent them).
   
4. List members will be awarded in a manner that tops up the number of their local seats. If a party gets 40% of the popular vote, but only 30% of the local seats then they will be given an extra 10% more seats from the list seats.
   
5. Voters will be presented with a ballot that has two parts: a local vote, and a party vote.

I’m not entirely happy with the proposal. The whole idea of “topping up” strikes me as overly complex. The percentage of list seats is quite low (it’s only 30% of the total) – I would rather see it at something closer to 50%.

Having said that, the proposal is better than our current system. It lowers the barrier to entry felt by smaller parties, while preserving local representation. As such, I’ll be doing what I can to support it.

It looks like the Yes Campaign is being run by the folks at Fairvote Canada. I’ve sent of my email asking to get involved. I encourage you to do the same.

1. After a brief flirtation with spoiling my ballot, and an even shorter flirtation with the NDP (back)
2. This is an extremely conservative estimate. The assumption behind it is that a riding in Ontario has 75,000 registered voters. If 40,000 people decide to vote Green in each riding, then we could spread the 500,000 Green votes across 12 ridings. Of course, most candidates win with a minority of the votes (40%ish, say), so we could probably squeeze another few Green seats out of those 500,000 votes. But keep in mind that most seats have fewer than 75,000 voters registered in them. In PEI, the average is closer to 27,000. (back)

The Drunken Master Revue is hosting a screening of City of the Dead. According to the poster, it’s on this Saturday at 11pm at the Mayfair theatre.

I played my first real (ie, competitive) game of ultimate tonight. The game itself was… meh. We got our butts kicked.

I have to say that I still find the game play jarring. The only time the team without possession has the opportunity to gain possession of the disc (or “frizz” as a member of the opposition tried to convince his compatriots to call it) is when the disc is in the air, or they lose a point. There is no feat of handiwork that the defending team can do to pry the disc out of the possessing team’s hands. By extension, the only way a player can get the disc is when someone passes to them, or the oppositions’ pass fails.

Ultimate feels modal. In the “setting up” mode, the disc is being held by someone who wants to pass it to a member of their own team; while the other team is trying to remove passing opportunities. In the “throwing” mode, the disc is in the air, and players on both teams are trying to get their hands on it. In “setting up” mode, the disc may only be touched by the person holding it. In “throwing” mode, anyone may touch the disc. Each mode gives players different roles. Each mode has a distinct start and end that triggers activity.

My previous team sport experience has been soccer, played with North Americans and South Americans/Europeans/Africans. I’m used to the North American style of play, which involves a lot of passing, and is slower moving. The South Americans/Europeans/Africans have a more possessive style of play, that sees individual players hold on to the ball longer, more one-on-one challenges, and much less passing. The one benefit of that style of play is that an unskilled, tenacious defender can often beat a skilled attacker, gaining possession of the ball.

Soccer feels like it has fewer modalities, and that those modes are less pronounced: any player may touch the ball at any time; the same rules apply at all times. I’m not sure why this feels significant to me, but it does.

Ultimate feels kind of like soccer played In The Rest Of The World: whoever has the ball/disc dictates how the game flows, but without the balancing effect of tenacity. Regardless how tenacious a defender is, the disc cannot be taken from an attacker.

I suspect that as I play more, I’ll find more nuances in ultimate; and I’ll start to enjoy it more. I’m assuming that the mad rush that seems to happen whenever the disc is in the air will flow into the interminable periods when the disc is clenched between someone’s fingers.

It only took about five hours of half-assed poking around, but I’ve finally figured out how to configure my desktop machine to work with it a WMP54G Linksys wireless card. I would recommend not buying this card if you’re attempting to add it to an Ubuntu desktop.

First approach: Upgrade to Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn, and hope the installer detects and properly configures the card. Failed miserably. The card was detected, and a driver was installed, but the driver caused my machine to freeze when I tried to run it.

Second approach: Downgrade to Ubuntu Edgy Eft, and hope that the installer detects and properly configures the card. Failed miserably. Another nonfunction driver was installed (rt61pci) that didn’t work. Although it didn’t take my machine down.

Third approach: Install the RaLink drivers. Success!

The steps were:
1) Download the linux driver from Ralink.
2) Follow the instructions in the readme for the 2.6 kernel (stored in the Module directory).
2.1) Blacklist the old (bad) driver. Add blacklist rt61pci to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.
3) Don’t use the /etc/network/interfaces file to configure the ra0 interface. Instead, edit the Ralink config file, as specified in the readme. Don’t forget to set the dhcp option in ifcfg-ra0 before running make install.
3.1) Do use the interfaces file to let the kernel know about your interface. Add iface ra0 inet dhcp to the file. I didn’t bother with any further config, as that causes problems when you actually raise the interface. If you want the interface to be raised on reboot, add auto ra0 to the file.
4) Raise the network interface with ifup ra0.

The sources for this were an Ubuntu bug report, and numerous web searches.

It’s a bummer that the Ralink drivers in the main Ubuntu streams seem to be broken. The rest of the install was positively smurfy.

Update: Added the comment about auto ra0 in step 3.1.