Are street cleaners a form of crowd control?

The fireworks were on last night. We live about 3 blocks from the place where they have them, and depending on where they anchor the barge in English Bay each year, we get to see bits of them from our balcony.

Of course, the fireworks only last for about 1/2 an hour. There will be 3 nights of them this year.

But for many hours before the event crowds of people migrate to the beach to get a spot to see the fireworks. The first wave is typically young families with whining or screaming children and parents. Organizing a trip to the beach is quite the exercise in major troop movements for them. The second wave is typically the hooting and hollering teenagers. They've shed their parental monitors, and now they're drunk and just out for a good time. The third wave is typically the mid-twenties adults in ridiculously high heels clattering along, having arguments with their dates, all running to the beach because the fireworks have already started.

Then thousands of dollars of fireworks go up in pretty explosions.

And now comes the exodus. It took hours to accumulate all these people. Now there are loud speakers telling them to get out quickly; police to move them along efficiently; thousands of dollars of fences around the gardens in the neighborhood to keep them off the flowers; security guards at most of the buildings to monitor our homes for vandalism... and street cleaners.

Machines to clean streets. They have brushes in front that turn to sweep big debris. They have water that sputters onto the ground to clean dirt. And really big, loud, insistent engines to drive them. Possibly making them the most efficient crowd control device we have.

The machines that comb the beach the morning after to get all the debris left by the thousands of people who don't live here, and think dumping their garbage here is OK, are also seriously big machines. No one ever sees them unless they get up really early, but they do a lot of work. And if you are on the beach at that time... you will go off for breakfast somewhere else quite quickly.

Cleaning as a form of crowd control. That's what we've come down to.

Do flies copulate in mid-air?

If we leave our balcony door open in the mornings by noon we have half a dozen flies flying about in our living room.

If we leave the balcony door open into the evening... the flies go away. This is a bit disturbing... I hope they are flying out.

It's like they commute into the office in the morning and then leave again in the afternoon. Or I'm just going a bit insane.

So when they are here, they spend the entire day flying around in circles. Just over there. In reality, just in the one spot. Again, I'm thinking desks in an office... insanity creeps up on you, you know.

Sometimes they meet in mid-air and briefly fly around each other. So are they having sex? In mid-air? Is this office romance? Are the co-workers finding they have a lot in common, and getting to know each other really well?

Or is this just a plot to drive me insane? I don't like driving, so I guess it's nice to have a chauffeur, but I do get dizzy watching them fly around in circles.

Will I ever paint again?

No, not a whine about losing abilities... just a long think about painting that makes me wonder if I ever will paint again.

Wall painting, not artistic painting. Just to be clear.

My spouse and I have just spent yet another long weekend painting. We painted the kitchen and a hallway that hadn't been painted yet. And now we are done. We moved in about 12-13 months ago, and had managed to get almost everything except a washroom, the kitchen, and the hallway painted before we moved in. And we are now declaring ourselves finished.

You know... you can pay people to paint walls for you.

Yes, that is true. This is what we told ourselves last time we finished painting a new home. We vowed "we will pay someone to do this next time". This was next time. We did it ourselves again.

But we do so much better than others. The painting mess we just painted over was badly done. No, we don't know who did it, but we have our suspicions. The place was bought by the previous owners with the intention of fixing it up and flipping it. They didn't live here, they just rented it out. So who did the walls? The cheapest labour possible. Judging by the appliances that were put in (all new, all cheap) that's all we can say.

But what about the next time we need walls painted?

We never expected to paint again. Of course, we never expected to be middle aged, we never expected to be married for 20 years either. Just when did that happen? When did those years fly past? Where did they go?

So what about next time? We said "never again" last time, but that didn't happen this time. Is life too long for "never again"?

Why don't ebooks have indexes?

Must admit, this is a sore spot for me - I create book indexes part time as a freelancer.

I'm one of those people who enter a non-fiction book from the back - from the index! If I know what I want, and I can find it in the index, I will dive into the book... if it's not in the index I can save myself a lot of time by just finding another book. But if the index is missing - or in a lot of ebook cases, it isn't linked to the text... page numbers just won't work for an ebook - using search just makes the effort tedious.

I'm currently using Adobe InDesign to help an author publish his book, and he wants to go ebook, rather than print, to start with. For print publication InDesign does have a rudimentary index generation function - nothing like my professional indexing software, Cindex, but useful when I've already written the index in Cindex, and can just input it into InDesign. But for an ebook... I've been Googling for how to translate the index into a functioning - click an entry and go into the text - index. If I can figure it out, it doesn't look like it will be easy.

So it looks like the available software to create ebooks is not up to the task of creating an index. I think this is a big gap that should be filled. I hope more people will realize this and start asking for indexes on ebooks.

Does a water tornado mean sushi rain?

Waterspouts or water tornados are a truly awesome thing to see. With the huge number of land based tornados in the US this year, it doesn't seem to be so odd that there are water ones around Australia as well.

But what about the fish?

Do fish get caught up by these water tornados? Well, yes, it seems they do! See this news article from the UK Daily Mail on the subject.

So what would you do if a whole lot of fish started falling on your head? They're probably dead from their flight... but they are fresh. Is it sushi time or not?

And what about the fish's take on this... just swimming around, minding their own fishy business, and whoosh, they're airborne! Flying fish. They probably think those silly fish that started walking millions of years ago were nutters, but now they're flying in the air.

There are fish that leap out of the water by themselves and attack people in boats in the US. Intentional flight, not just a gust of swirly wind.

Does this mean the fish are trying to take the next step on the evolutionary ladder? Is Nature trying to help? Should we sit them down and have a talk about this... is it really a good idea?

How distracting can Google get?

I think it's wonderful that Google changes its logo for special occasions, but this is getting to be a bit too distracting isn't it?

The logo from one day a month or so ago that was actually a little movie of a Charlie Chaplin impersonator when you clicked on it was very distracting.

The Earth Day logo that had different moving parts on it when you moused over the different parts of it - the swimming fish, flying birds, moving water, jumping frogs, etc. - was so distracting I completely forgot what I was going to Google on. I spent quite a bit of time playing with that logo, trying to remember what I was supposed to be searching on!

But today: "the 76th Birthday of Roger Hargreaves: Little Miss Shy" has many different logos. Every time you go into Google, you get a different picture! Wait, let me reload that page! Oh, that's a cute one.

Honestly, anyone not completely focussed on their task is going to find it very difficult to concentrate today.

This is fun, but is it really a good thing? Maybe I should Google on "distraction" to see if "Google" is part of the definition. Oh, that's a cute one too!

Why is the poll so late in reporting results?

I worked as a poll clerk at the federal election on Monday. It was an extremely long day. Many people on the outside were grumping that it took a long time to get the poll results in from our area. Apart from bad organization on the parts of most of the people in the room after the poll closed and we started counting the votes, the poll was also late because there is only one handicapped washroom stall in the typical public washroom.

Yes, the counting couldn't start until everyone was locked into the room to count, and I was in the washroom, delaying everyone.

But was it really my fault?

I must use the handicapped stall. I need to use the bars in the stall to help me stand. Another woman - physically fit and fully abled - was in the handicap stall. So I waited for her to finish. And everyone waited for me to finish.

Angry about delays? Welcome to the world of being handicapped.

I think everyone should spend one day in a wheelchair. Try it, you'll see the world from a different perspective.

So do you really need to use the handicap stall in the washroom? Ignorance can be a handicap, but you can get over that one.