Markus’ Blog

Apparently, there are some issues with the new trolley busses by New Flyer. In hindsight I now know that it’s been slowly building up over the past two weeks or so.

While I noticed at the beginning of this year that Translink was using new trolleys almost exclusively on the #9 route, I realized last week or maybe even two weeks ago that the old trolleys were coming back more and more.

Now I know why: the new ones have been failing. Yesterday, at around noon, Translink posted a warning that people should expect delays on pretty much all Vancouver bus routes, because of issues with the new trolley busses. The manufacturer is working on the issue. That’s all they said then.

Later in the evening, they predicted similar problems this morning and, again, they listed pretty much every single Vancouver bus line.

Right now, they are saying this (which means this is the third rush hour in a row that is affected):

Due to a minor power steering problem with some Vancouver trolley buses, the following routes will experience service disruptions during the afternoon rush hour: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 15, 16, 17, 22, 25, 32, 41, 49, 84.

So, now we know that it’s the power steering that’s causing the trouble. However “minor” the problem may be, though, the impact it is having is not.

The part that I like least about it is the fact that it is even affecting non-trolley routes that are serviced by diesel busses (#15 while Cambie Street is under construction, and all busses from #22 to #84 are diesel).

If I was Translink I’d start thinking about how I could get extra busses to run instead of the broken trolleys, restoring regular service during rush hour. It could be a while till the trolleys are fixed. I can just imagine a whole bunch of things going wrong while they are trying to fix it. Similar to a small bug in a computer program that you think you’ll have tracked down and fixed in no time. As you’re working on it, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, its actual complexity unveiling only over time.

Let’s hope I’m wrong and it won’t be like that.

Yes, I am going to sound like some spoiled snob who doesn’t have any real problems. I’m going to rant anyways. Besides, I like travel adventures and always have. I would have never ended up in Vancouver otherwise.

It seems, lately, that we have too freaking many places we want to travel to. And we are continuously coming up with new ones, before we manage to “work off” the previous ones.

Let’s see, there’s:

• San Jose, Josh Groban and the Napa Valley (March 2007)
• Tofino and the Wickaninnish Inn (August 2007)
• Austria (December 2007 / January 2008)

Then there are these potential ones:

• New York City (July 2007????)
• Montreal + New England (Boston) with train ride to New York (Fall 2008????)
• Thailand (no date yet)
• Hawaii: Maui or the Big Island (no date yet)
• Trip(s) around Europe; too much to see there for just one trip (no date(s) yet)
• Australia and New Zealand (no date yet)

I could probably come up with more, if I thought a little harder.

What a “tough” life we have, being able to worry about things like that. In the end, I think we should consider ourselves very lucky.

It’s been a week today and I have to say the whole procedure involved less pain and suffering that I thought. It actually wasn’t so much pain that I was feeling, just a certain amount of discomfort and tenderness. Not being able to eat properly for two days or so was what sucked the most.

It’s still a little tender right now, but almost back to normal. I am still being careful to mostly chew on my right side. Let’s hope it’ll progress just as nicely over the next few weeks, because then I’ll need the left side to chew.

The part I like least about having the right side done three weeks from today is: two more days of jello, yoghurt, ice cream, soup and not much else. At least, this time around I know what to expect as far as extraction and recovery are concerned.

Looks like there’s some hope as far as contractors are concerned. (I’m not getting too excited, though, as disappointment would undoubtedly follow.)

Anyways, Milani agreed to give us a $300 discount on our bill without much of a hassle. That brings it down to the level we were quoted when we first contacted them.

The next experience, however, is already in the making. We need a tiled backspash installed. Looks like we finally managed to pick a tile that we (a) like and that’s (b) not super freaking expensive. Now it’s time to find and hire someone to tile the area behind the sink. Let’s hope that it will be a pleasant experience — before, during and after.

Does anybody remember the Dont’ Book Milani post from back in October? Back then I described how bad of a job they did — well, the job wasn’t so much bad, they were just taking forever to get it done.

We complained to them back then and they seemed to be listening and taking our concerns into account. Also, they didn’t charge us right away. They said they’d send us a bill (and it sounded like they meant after conferring about our concerns and working out an acceptable solution).

Weeks went by, then months. No bill from Milani. Not too long ago, when I saw one of their vans, I was thinking: “Yes, they were a pain in the ass to deal with, but at least they were decent enough to not send us a bill, because they realized just how upset we were.”

Well, that illusion was thoroughly shattered yesterday evening when I found a letter from Milani in our mailbox. I opened it. Yep, it’s a bill. I read it. I read it again. Then I read it a third time. Then I thought: Those bloody f*cking evil bastards!!!!

Not only did they have the audacity to send us a bill FOUR MONTHS AFTER the fact, they billed us for the ENTIRE TIME (no credit, no nothing). The total comes close to a four-figure dollar amount. That includes FIVE HOURS to MOUNT A SINK for almost $400 (before taxes).

I don’t know where you people (=Milani) come from, but your galaxy sure is a lot different from ours. You guys are delusional if you think you’re getting a thousand bucks from us.

What do we learn from this? Don’t book Milani, DON’T EVER, EVER BOOK MILANI.

WARNING: The geek level of this post is off the scale. lol

I got quite a bit of stuff done for the Blastwave Project this weekend.

I joined this initiative in 2003 and have quite regularly maintained and contributed OpenSource software packages to the community. — Except for the last two or so months where haven’t quite managed to find the motivation to do much. So stuff kept piling up, packages were getting old and bugs remained unfixed.

This is no longer the case. I caught up on quite a few things. I built new packages of Exim and CUPS, as well as a couple of smaller programs like jhead, dcraw and micq. It’ll be a few days till the new packages hit the world, but they are in the process of being released and pushed out to the mirrors.

In addition I managed to track down a supposed bug in CUPS that people had been experiencing. Turns out it wasn’t CUPS at all, it was a shared library (libgcrypt) CUPS is using that caused the problems. That one got updated, too, after I told Torrey about the issue.

The big TODO now is to finally get a new release of libgphoto out. One that supports USB cameras on Solaris 10 and up (works perfectly fine with a private SPARC build at home). The delay for official packages wasn’t entirely my fault, though. Until recently I didn’t have an x86 box with Solaris 10 to build on.

Sure feels good to get some stuff done and receive positive feedback from people out there who are grateful that an annoying bug has been fixed.

The extraction yesterday went pretty well. They did the left side this time around.

First thing they did was look into my mouth and say: “Oh yeah, all four are erupted. That’s going to be an easy extraction.” And it was. No digging around in the gums to find them or anything like that.

The upper tooth came out no problem, the lower one he had to cut in half and take the two pieces out separately. The reason for that was that the roots were not going straight down, but a little sideways, and it was pretty close to the neighboring tooth.

After the procedure he explained to me that he decided to leave a tiny bit of root in my lower jar. Again, because the root of the lower left wisdom tooth was going sideways, taking all of it out would have been too risky. A nerve runs through there and could have been damaged. The piece of root will just stay there forever. It won’t do anything.

Recovery is going well, I think. The only downturn (so far) came at about 11:45pm yesterday night. I had been perfectly fine from 4:00pm till then. Lying in bed, however, I suddenly thought I tasted blood. I got up and checked. Sure enough, my mouth was all red.

The following half hour I spent trying to stop the bleeding — without much success. Finally, after having gone through three pads of gauze in record time, it seemed to be slowing down. I kept pressure on for about 45 minutes, just like they told me when they first finished. So, by 1:00am there was no more bleeding. I stayed up for another 45 minutes to make sure it’ll stay that way. It did, so I went to bed again at 1:45am.

I still don’t know why it started bleeding again all of a sudden — more in fact than it had right after the procedure. I’m just glad everything as been fine since then. And fortunately there’s hardly any pain.

I’ll have to go in and get my wisdom teeth removed today. Two of them anyways. The other two will follow in four weeks.

The fact that I never had any dental work done except for scaling (there has never been a need to do anything else), doesn’t help right now. I am a little (lot) scared. Getting wisdom teeth pulled is not the prettiest thing in the world. Also, I am not exactly looking forward to the swollen mouth and the pain for the next few days.

Anyways, I keep telling myself that millions of people went through this procedure before me and they are still alive.

Please cross your fingers and “hold your thumbs” between 3pm and 4pm today.

Looks like the new server, well virtual server actually, is up and working fine. I moved the blog over and everything seems to be running. I hope it stays that way. Moving web sites from one server to an other usually means that a few things were overlooked or forgotten. Sometimes those mistake stay hidden at first. So it is certainly possible that the site will stop working again. I hope that won’t happen, but if it does, I’ll try and keep it short.

Seems like Vancouver can’t get enough snow this season. The Lower Mainland is, yet again, covered in a white blanket. Not even two months ago it looked like this and we’re back there now. There have been little interludes of snow between the first big snowfall and now, as well.

The rules of snow here are:

• Vancouver never gets snow as early as November.
• Vancouver never gets snow several times during a season.
• Snow never sticks around except for a few hours, maybe a day.

There’s just a tiny, little problem with these rules. Every single one has been broken this season.

On the other hand, there’s Austria. They would like snow. Lots of it (in some parts anyways). However, they are experiencing the mildest winter ever. It is not unusual for Vienna to not get a lot of snow. It is unusual if the daytime highs approach or even exceed 10°C — and not just for a day or two. It is also unusual for the Western provinces to not have any snow at all. Innsbruck, for instance, is forcast 6°C for Friday and 9°C for Sunday. Apparently it is so bad that pollen are in the air already.

And, of course, Tourism Austria is not happy at the lack af snow at all. It’s pretty bad for the economy.

Crazy stuff!