Pie Palace

A couple of years back I wrote a javascript version of a quasi-diagnostic test used to help diagnose Asperger syndrome. I wrote it for a lark: I was working with peeps that were socially awkward (like me), and I wanted to play with javascript. I stuck it on this blog and forgot about it.

Today I noticed a link from Common Sense Atheism pissing on some god-botherer’s ebook. It turns out that my AQ test has been tramping around the intertubes and is now moonlighting in theist/freethinker debates.

The apple falls close to the tree.

Here’s a quick rundown of my experiences with the vendors I used for my wedding. These vendors are in Ottawa, and, for the most part, they did a decent job at a reasonable price.

Venue and catering: The Carleton Golf and Yacht Club hosted our wedding. We were looking for an all-in-one venue that would handle the ceremony, the reception, and the catering. The CGYC clocked in at about $60-$70 per guest. The cost was less than other locations we looked at (notably Strathmere), and the hall was nicer than either the Monterey Inn or Bearbrook Farms. Laurie O’Brien, the clubhouse manager, did a fantastic job at ensuring the reception hall was properly decorated and that everything went smoothly. She (and her staff) were fantastic. Highly recommended.

Transportation: Because our venue was out in the middle of nowhere, we chartered a school bus from Rideau Bus Lines. Their driver knew how to pacify a bunch of drunk wedding goers (turn out the light, natch), was friendly, and knew where he was going. Recommended.

Photographer: We went with Julie Young Photography. She (and her lovely assistant) did a great job at herding the wedding party and composing us into something that I hope is photogenic. We haven’t gotten the final pictures yet, so I’ll hold out on my assessment.

DJ: First Choice Entertainment (613-830-7009) satisfied our music and MC needs. The owner, Greg Fedor, was easily the most energetic vendor we hired. His posse had a good selection of music (even if they didn’t know a good track to foxtrot to), and good equipment. They provided music for the ceremony as well as the reception and dancing. Recommended.

Officiant: Lynne Langille of Exceptional Wedding Ceremonies in Ottawa presided over the ceremony. She did a good job, given the various hiccups we threw at her (collapsing chairs, wrong rings, and a giggling bride and groom). Recommended.

Limousine: We hired Elite Limousine to ferry us from our photo venue to reception/ceremony venue. The driver got lost en route, making us 20 minutes late for our own wedding. Disappointing.

Cake: We ordered cupcakes from the Buttercream Bakery. The cupcakes weren’t bad, but they didn’t have the richness I had hoped for. I can take part of the blame for that – I should have bailed when we did our tasting. Similarly, a cake we ordered for the cutting proved to be pretty bland. What’s worse, a day before the reception, we called them to make sure they had the right address for delivery. They didn’t. Recommended with reservations. If you go with these folks, call at the last minute to make sure they have the right address.

Rings: I tried various jewelery stores, but I didn’t see anything I liked until I went to Magpie. They had a wider selection in styles and materials than we found elsewhere. Their stuff has a bit of a hippy look, but some of us like that kind of thing. Recommended.

I’m now a married man. After a fantastic party last weekend, and a great trip to Quebec city, I’m back in o-town. Once the wedding craziness has subsided, PiePalace.ca should be a little more active. It’s remarkable how planning a six hour event can expand to consume almost all available time.

I owe a shout out to all of the PiePalace readers who came to the wedding: thank you for coming out. My wife and I would live a much poorer lives without your friendship.

(Image from http://www.2020site.org. Used without permission.)

On Monday I went to the City’s open house on the Lansdowne Live plan. It was a zoo. Concerned Glebe-ites singing protest songs; people asking passersby to sign petitions against the “sole-sourcing” of the plan; and people handing out leaflets telling the truth about the deal.

Inside, it didn’t get much better. Tiny posters in small font, replicating the text of the City’s Lansdowne Live website. Each poster was surrounded by a crowd three or four people deep trying to read what was on display. There were officials from the city and/or the developer, but they were too inundated with people for me to get close to them.

It was insanity.

I went there to find out what was proposed, and ended up with more questions than answers:

What happens if the CFL team folds? The Ottawa Renegades lasted only four seasons. Aside from the $300k in annual rent[1], where would the team’s failure leave the city? According to the business plan, the CFL team is supposed to contribute $42 million dollars back to the city and developers.[2] That seems like an awfully large risk in a $200 million plan.

How will people get there? The transit portion of the slides seems optimistic. Lansdowne is far from the transit way, far from the planned LRT, and far from the nearest highway on-ramp. During peak use, the plan suggests that people will park and ride from the burbs to get to Lansdowne. That seems optimistic. Bank street becomes terribly congested for anything larger than a 67s game (eg, the Ex). Without a change in infrastructure, that seems unlikely to improve.

What about public use? The City of Ottawa is short on centrally located sports fields. There doesn’t appear to be an allocation of land for amateur sports such as soccer and ultimate. The plan would see a “front yard” that would serve as parking for large events. There’s no mention of use for amateur sports.[3] It sounds like they’d keep the winter bubble over the field at Frank Clair stadium, but that’s about it. Even though the pictures show fountains and a plaza, but I couldn’t find any mention of those in the posters or business plans.

What about the extras? The first phase of the plan is replacing the stadium and asphalt parking lot with something a little nicer and adding retail to the site. Phase 2 is the development of hotel, residential, and office components. The plan doesn’t describe what those developments will be. How large will each retail space be? What is the 41,000 square foot “unique food store“? Since the site is far from major arteries, it seems unlikely that a big box store would move in there. What will happen if the space can’t be rented out?

Aside from these questions, I have to say that the event didn’t feel like a consultation. It felt like something verging on a coronation, or perhaps a revolt. The vocal members of the crowd clearly didn’t like what they saw. The city and the promoters did little to answer visitor’s questions – although there was a Q&A session at Wednesday night’s consultation.

After reading the City/promoter’s docs I’m left with the simple conclusion: even though the Lansdowne Live proposal is no worse than what’s currently at the site, it doesn’t have much going for it. The proposal envisions Lansdowne as an attraction, but without the necessary transit to get visitors to the site. It lacks public space: no statuary, no gardens, no playing fields, no plazas, no skate parks, no amphitheater. Nothing.

[1] – Business plan, page 20.
[2] – Business plan, page 23.
[3] – Take a look at the stadium page and search for “winter”.

Gawp has impressed on me the value ofcuration – that’s the process of normalizing and verifying data so that it can be used elsewhere. Clean, useful data is clearly awesome, but I didn’t realize it would be possible to build a business on it. AggData apparently has. They scrape publicly available data, normalize it and make it available for a small fee. I’m amazed that they can employ five people with a business model based on pure curation. Good for them! Further proof, if any was needed, that we live in the future. (Via Weather Sealed)

When OC Transpo tried to prevent atheist ads from appearing on buses, I started thinking a bit more about my philosophy. I’m an atheist. In general, I have no problem with religion, as long as people don’t use it as a weapon against others (that’s a shout-out to you al Qaeda! And you too, Jerry), or as an excuse to harm themselves (I’m looking at you, Jehovah’s Witnesses). So, as an atheist, I thought I’d start reading what other atheists had to say.

And I got bored.

There are plenty of atheist blogs out there, but they spend a lot of time talking about religion. Like 99.9% of their time. I don’t get it. Consider how far women’s magazines would have gotten if they spent all their time talking about how lame men are. Or where Sports Illustrated would be if every issue was “Chess sucks!” Or if Playboy was full of pictures of naked guys, just to show how ugly men are.

I’m an atheist. If you want me to read your blog, stop writing about religion.

I ended up emailing Ebon, who posts to Daylight Atheism. I asked him why there was so much religion on his blog. In response, he wrote back:

First is the trivial answer: [...] I keep a cache of posts that I wrote some time earlier and can release at my convenience, so the site doesn’t go dark for too long. Since these stored posts have to be timeless, many of them are about philosophical or theological topics rather than current events. [...] I think it helps to be a knowledgeable and well-equipped atheist, and I find human culture fascinating no matter how it manifests itself.

Second, and maybe more importantly: While I do write about positive atheism and humanism as often as possible, I want to maintain a balance. And one thing I’ve found is that posts which pick a fight, or disassemble an argument, often get more hits and more attention than posts which promote atheism as a positive worldview. [...] That’s not something I’m thrilled about, but that’s how it is. I don’t want my site to be all arguing all the time, but to keep things lively, it does help to stir the pot on occasion.

(I’ve abridged his response – I’ll post the whole thing in the comments)

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy reading his Contributions of Freethinkers series, and some of the other posts up there. But I just don’t care about the fiddly bits of Christianity, and how demonstrably wrong they are.

I hope this is a phase in the growth of atheism. Many posters to these blogs talk about “deconversion”¹ or how they decided that religion wasn’t for them. My hope is that these are first generation atheists who are reacting against their upbringing, and that their kids will be able to be atheists who don’t care about religion, and are able to write blogs that can talk about atheism itself.

It’s too bad. I enjoy my atheism because it doesn’t force me into anything. I enjoy being able to construct my own morality. I enjoy being ethically responsible to myself. I’d like to see what my fellow atheists think about their newfound world view. I’d love to know what society would be like if atheism was the dominant philosophy. It’s a pity that I haven’t been able to find a blog that scratches that itch.

1. For a well written deconversion story, take a look at Confessions of an Atheist. (back)

I’m back. My wrists aren’t 100%, but they’re much better than they were. To prove it, I’ve squeezed another feature into Blogawa: events. Our friendly events robot reads OttawaEvents.org daily, randomly picks some upcoming events, and posts them to Blogawa.

The events are currently jumbled together, regardless of category, but that may change with time.

I’ve always liked the idea of open source bounties. I want open source coders to be able to make money on what they do, so I like the idea of users banding together to pay for a feature. The only drawback is that I’ve never actually seen a bounty collected. As an experiment, I’ve picked a worthy project, and I’ll be matching donations to it that (a) link back to this post, and (b) total no more than €60, (c) comment here. So hit Cofundos and take my money! (Yes, I’m avoiding typing. But this is a minipost, so it doesn’t count.) UPDATE: I’d like to make clear that I’m only offering €60 in total, and that’s matching on any single donation made after the original date of this post (April 14, 9:00am-ish, EST). I also added (c) above, so that I don’t have to check the cofundos site.

Today is the day that Ottawa city council votes on whether atheist bus ads should be allowed on OC Transpo’s property. For those who haven’t been following this tempest in a teapot, the ads feature the sacrelicious message “There probably is no god, so relax and enjoy life,” and the alleged controversy comes from OC Transpo staff disallowing the ads. Ironically, the religious leaders interviewed on CBC and in the Citizen don’t seem to care about the ads.

So why should they be allowed?

First, this is a freedom of speech issue. Bus ads promoting various philosophies have appeared on OC Transpo property for as long as I’ve been in Ottawa. In 2004 we had the Alpha Campaign, trying to convince wayward christians to return to the fold (while offering backhanded insults to athiests). More recently there have been ads for SupremeMaster.net, a weirdly amorphous (if seemingly harmless) eastern-inspired cryptoreligion. Our bus company must not be allowed to prevent specific philosophies from entering public discourse.¹

Second, the ads are not offensive. The ads have seemingly been disallowed because the statement “there probably is no god” is offensive to some group. We’re never told who that group is. Nor has anyone publicly grieved. It’s as if OC Transpo is holding a protest, but forgot to tell anyone to show up.

Third, the ads are affirming. Atheists don’t have much of a support group – we don’t have an annual athiest party; we don’t get together to talk about how important our values are; nor do we hijack political parties. As such, atheists don’t get to see each other very much. It’s pretty easy to feel like the only one of your kind. Add to that the overt religious references in our society², and it’s pretty easy to start feeling like you’re all alone. Just hearing about the atheist bus ads in London made me feel good – not because I really like the ads, but because I’m reminded that other people share my philosophy, and that I’m not alone.

Here’s hoping that City Council does the right thing.

1. Do you really want an organization that can’t manage to negotiate with its own employees to act as an arbiter on the marketplace of ideas? (back)
2. • semi-mandatory prayer in schools,
   • religion on TV,
   • pervading evangelical Christianity since 9/11,
   • occasional attempts at conversion
   (back)

Years ago, I contributed policy to the Green Party of Canada on media. In it, I stated (words to the effect of) “media is a business like no other, it has a responsibility to be profitable, but more importantly, it has the responsibility to hold our public offices to account.” The policy items were my rough attempt to discourage the rise of large media conglomerates, and to support regional media outlets.

Yesterday, one of CTV shut down evening newscasts in Ottawa, and did similar things in Barrie, London, and Victoria. In doing so, they have cost Ottawa yet another media outlet, and yet another avenue for paid journalists to keep our politicians, bureaucrats, and corporations honest. Coincidentally, kottke.org has linked to a story describing how the cuts to Baltimore’s daily newspaper has made the police force less accountable:

Half-truths, obfuscations and apparent deceit — these are the wages of a world in which newspapers, their staffs eviscerated, no longer battle at the frontiers of public information. And in a city where officials routinely plead with citizens to trust the police, where witnesses have for years been vulnerable to retaliatory violence, we now have a once-proud department’s officers hiding behind anonymity that is not only arguably illegal under existing public information laws, but hypocritical as well.

And this isn’t just an American problem. As the Dziekanski enquiry is proving, Canadian police reports can sometimes differ dramatically from reality. Without an engaged, and well funded press, there will be no one to hold these officers to account.

What solutions do we have? A CRTC-mandated carriage fee for cable broadcasters? Preferential tax treatment for smaller news organization? Increased funding to public broadcasters? There are solutions, but we, as an electorate have to wake up to the fact these cuts don’t just cost jobs, they are a danger to our public institutions.