sqwabb

Pictured on the left: A simulation of the view from the parkade up to a year ago. On the right: The current view of the new condo. Click the images to enlarge them.

I miss my view! Don't get me wrong, I like my current sleeping spot. It's clean, and I sleep really well -- I suppose I could get used to sleeping on a mattress, but I sure adapted quickly, and well to sleeping on a hard surface -- as I was saying, I like the spot, but millionaires stole my view. The old building across the lane from the parkade was a tall, single storey warehouse affair. About a year ago, it finally came down and a three-storey condo complex went up. The brick wall visible in the After image, is well over the old edge of the lane. In fact, The lane is now so narrow at that point, that I watched an ambulance get stuck, and a delivery van actually gouged a bit of the brick wall -- they did a better job fixing it than they did building it! The units still aren't all sold, but, with the view they have, I guess it's just a matter of time.

[caption id="attachment_1643" align="alignnone" width="497"] I think a future Transformers film should have an Autobot that only communicates via bumper sticker. Click the image to enlarge it.[/caption]

I stopped to see the top bumper sticker, on the back of a Ford hatchback, and saw there was more to it. It's a bit like a blog: the stickers are posts, and at the bottom, someone's left a slightly inarticulate comment.

[caption id="attachment_1608" align="alignleft" width="314"] Click the image to see it larger.[/caption]

This apartment building in Fairview  is reminiscent of the 30-plus buildings put up across Vancouver in the 1960s and 1970s by the Wosk brothers.

[caption id="attachment_1621" align="alignleft" width="132"] Click to see a silly little animation.[/caption]

Most Wosk buildings were clad in similar pale blue tile. The Blue Horizon Hotel at Robson and Bute is the best-known, but maybe this is one of them.

The Wosk bros' & their bargain-priced batch of blue tile ►

A blue tile clad building on 12th and Cambie ►

Can't help myself. I read the story -- who hasn't? Poor Belarus man, who tried to pick up a beaver -- like trying to grab a running chainsaw -- they have Darwin Awards for that sort of thing. My condolences to his family.

I watched the YouTube video, purporting to be the very footage of the killer beaver from the fellows's camera, and felt a keen thrill. But, I then read that it's probably footage of a different incident involving a Russian guy (and thus a Russian beaver); so, that was dissappointing.

I thought how Canada has such luck with national symbols, the chief one being the Maple Leaf (don't get me started on the Leafs), which graces, our, admittedly beautiful, flag. Then, of course, beavers, which grace our nickel, and then there's Canada geese, surely one of the laziest, foulest, and most bad-tempered of all birds, with the possible exception of swans.

What ultimately held my attention is how, in less than 24 hours, every Tom, Dick, and Harriet, was running with their own angle on this story of cuteness gone wrong. Nothing left for little old me, and, anyways, I think it's unseemly, and callous how people can be entertained by such a tragedy. It's a dam shame!

[caption id="attachment_1574" align="alignnone" width="497"] Oh look, the circus!? Click the image to see the poorly spliced-together panorama shot.[/caption]

Velofix describes themselves as a mobile bike proshop. I saw their truck-and-pavilion set-up yesterday, parked off Heather Street, on what might have been 14th Street (I think), if it had been marked, except this was within the grounds of the Vancouver General Hospital, where the street plan is trumped by the buildings, which sit wherever they seem to have been dropped.

Velofix looked, to me, to be a mobile bicycle repair shop for an upscale clientèle who can afford the expensive-looking, skinny-tired road bikes I saw them working on. They work by appointment only, so someone booked with them for bike service at that location on the VGH grounds -- quite probably the Suit who is speaking with the mechanic in the photo below. I didn't get a chance to get even a ballpark idea of pricing, but we can guess, right? Click on the images to enlarge them.

This evening, I observed a commendable thing: Fairview residents patrolling back alleys as Kitsilano Fairview Community Policing volunteers. Three residents, to be precise. They were wearing outfits appearing to be made up of hand-me-down articles reminiscent of police, or traffic flagging gear. Better still, the three of them were as noisy as a murder of crows. They were mostly interested in each other, but they did notice me, naturally -- with my bike and trailer, I stick out in a lane, but so did they, and I made a bee-line for them.

They explained what they were, and then told me a shameless fib, to the effect that they patrolled the alleys all the time -- That may be what they're telling the Vancouver Police -- they were, as they told me, "the eyes and ears of the police" -- but I can not remember the last time I saw Community Police volunteers in the back alleys of Fairview. They wouldn't consent to be photographed -- privacy issues -- but they gave me a card; a model of late 1990s connectivity; street address, phone, fax, and an email (plus a mailing address), but no Web site. When I left them, they were busy analysing the different bits of gear each of them had.

It's good when residents take a pro-active interest in looking after their neighbourhood, even if, like the three I saw this evening, they treat it as a game. On top of the increased police patrols of the lanes, seeing it tells me Fairview residents may be feeling there's a bit too much disorder in their back alleys.

If you sit, patiently, and stare at this picture for two or three minutes. you will experience an authentic sqwabb moment™, feeling what it was like to be ME, earlier today, when this dumpster-collecting garbage truck just sat, chewing it's cud, or digesting trash -- I've no idea what it was doing besides standing in the way of commerce.

[caption id="attachment_1537" align="alignnone" width="497"] A flexi-hosed, screw-on-the-stem, metal mini-pump; fat plastic tire levers; glueless patches, with no felt marker in sight. Click image to enlarge.[/caption]

What causes bicycle tire flats? Riding your bicycle does! The more your ride, the more flats you'll get, so get the kind of gear that makes repairing flat tires as trivial as possible. Most everyone knows the basics: little rubber patches, sandpaper, contact cement, fifteen minutes, and an air-pump, and away you go. There's more than one right way to do the job, so I'm not going to tell anyone what to do. I going to explain some of what I do.

1. Mini-pump with metal body, flexible hose, and screw-on connector

Cheaply-priced, cheaply-made, plastic mini-pumps, with snap levers that friction-fit onto the valve stem, are false economy. They don't last; the friction-fit is finicky, awkward in the dark, and progressively more impossible as your tire size drops below 26-inches, like with kid's bike, or a trailer -- 20-inch tires, depending on the rim style may still offer enough clearance for the lever, but 16-inch tires likely won't.

By contrast, I use a mini-pump style modelled on the traditional floor pump: The connector, on the end of a flexible hose, screws onto the valve stem, and the whole thing is made of metal. They are not that expensive and have real advantages:

• Screw-on connector is fool-proof. You can do it with your eyes closed.


• The flexible hose allows you to easily make a connection on smaller tires, and keeps the cylinder out of the spokes altogether, for easy pumping.


• Metal construction makes them so much more durable.

More than one company makes this style of pump, but a Lezyne hand pump is as good as it gets, for about $80 CDN. I had a Lezyne for many years, similar to the HP Pressure Drive model. My current pump, pictured above, is an older style of Topeak's RaceRocket Mini Pump. I've had it for about two years and it's maybe as good as the Lezyne was, and it was two-thirds the cost.

2. Fat plastic tire levers -- can you say Pedro's?

Some nylon tires have such a thick rim bead that real force is required to pop  them off the rim. Metal tire levers (which are making a weird comeback) really can rip a tube, and plastic levers will just fold, like taffy, unless they are big, and thick -- so get big, thick, plastic tire levers. I love Pedro's tire levers. They work so well; they're easy to see in low light, and they snap together.

3. Glueless patches

Imagine a future where you can fix a flat in well under five minutes -- two minutes, if all goes well; no messing with contact cement, waiting ten or twenty minutes for it to cure (tick... tick... tick...). I live in that future. I use glueless patches. There are many, many, brands, and they all work the same: Insure the puncture area is clean; roughen with included sandpaper/scraper; apply patch, and press-and-hold for 60 seconds; done.

I'm using Felzer Zippy glueless patches (12 patches for $5 CDN at Mountain Equipment Co-op). I've been using glueless exclusively, for over two years, with fewer problems than the traditional method. Still, it's controversial. MEC's own customer review page for the  Felzer glueless patches they sell, gives the product a negative rating.

"X" marks the hole

Normally I also carry a red or green permanent ink marker, for the sole purpose of marking the puncture, which I find by pumping up the tube, and rotating it slowly, very close to my cheek, so I can feel the escaping air -- looks damn silly, but it works. The marker sounds trivial, but I missed it last night, when I was fixing a trailer tire flat. You can skip a lot of this falderal, if you have the capacity to carry a spare tube, in addition to your tire patching gear.

I hope this fix can hold the damaged trailer hitch arm for a while -- the real solution involves a new hitch arm, and some welding, or a different trailer. The short, T-joint tube seems indispensable to this design, so I've made two small, perpendicular hacksaw cuts in the tube, top and bottom, just wide enough to thread a hose clamp though; the hose clamp then, well, clamps the T-tube to the hitch arm. The pictures are better than words. Click the images to enlarge them.

The hitch arm fails completely! ►

On a chill, dreary day in Vancouver, nothing warms you up like W. A. C. Bennett's "Hot stove of Socialism!" McDonalds regular Pat shows up at at the Broadway and Granville location, showing his support for Adrian Dix, who led the BC NDP to shock defeat at the polls in the recent British Columbia Provincial election. Click on the images to enlarge them.

[caption id="attachment_1513" align="alignleft" width="186"] If the godless commies had won.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1514" align="alignleft" width="183"] But they lost![/caption]

This flattened glass wine bottle has been hanging around the cash register at the Go Green bottle depot for years; I'm jealous -- I flatten all the plastic, aluminium, and bi-metal containers I cash in, but I just haven't figured out how to do the same with glass. I guessed this would require temperatures in excess of 500 degrees F, meaning a pottery kiln, which seems to be correct. Web pages which detail how to flatten a bottle in an oven all appear to be jokes, or hoaxes. Click image to enlarge.

Apparently the correct term to search is bottle "slumping." One exhaustive page called Bottle Reworking covers slumping using a pottery, or glass fusing, kiln in some detail. Also, here's a link to a Youtube video showing how to melt a bottle neck with a propane torch.

[caption id="attachment_1476" align="alignleft" width="213"] Not barking now! Click the image to enlarge.[/caption]

After patching up the trailer hitch arm, I doggedly continued binning. A few lanes along, I pulled over to let a truck out of its parking spot by some blue bins; I'd noticed a couple moving stuff between the truck and a red car. As the truck pulled away, the woman passenger looked back at the bins. As I squeezed between the aforementioned red car and blue bins, the dog, the couple had left in the red car, went off. Of course I took it's picture -- a few times -- with each flash, the barking diminished, until the pooch just looked at me, dazed.

As I was pulling away from the blue bin set, a woman on a bike blew past me -- bags on her handle bars, bags tied to her rack -- a binner. I had seen her, and "interacted" with her before. She was a Chinese woman with little command of English and absolutely no regard for other binners. I caught up with her, and, pointlessly (doggedly) tried to impress upon her what a no-no it was to cut off other binners. Silly me.

"Go way. Go way. You no king. Go way. You not king here." As she explained what I wasn't, and where I should go, as if to emphasize her points, she fetched a short, thin, plastic pole out of the basket on her handlebars -- It looked like a section of fishing rod, and she swished it at me menacingly. It was ridiculous that I even tried to talk to her. Now it was farce. From apartments above us, I could hear some laughter. I left her then, and continued up the lane, and on my way. I didn't see her again. Any ways, it was just about my bedtime.

[caption id="attachment_1497" align="alignleft" width="497"] Couldn't have been that bad if I had time to snap photos of the night sky! Click image to enlarge.[/caption]

I was warned about the new-old trailer -- Toad told me that the hitch arm would probably break before anything else. So it was, but perhaps not how either he or I expected. The break occurred where a short piece of tube, is welded perpendicular to the hitch arm. This forms a T-bar, which fits into a frame tube, so as to keep the hitch arm from being able to pitch or yaw. It was the weld that broke. A "field" repair using six hose clamps should, I hope, hold well enough until I can make a long-term fix. This tells me that all the welds on this rusty old trailer are potentially suspect. Click on the animated image above to see a larger still.

Update on fixing the hitch arm ►

[caption id="attachment_1460" align="alignnone" width="497"] I'm sorry ma’am, there's no deposit on babies![/caption]

Almost the end of May, and Vancouver is submerged in, what is forecast to be, a dreary, grey, rain-soaked week. Well, If it was like Fall outside today, that may be partly because nine-month-old Summer was inside the Go Green bottle depot, with her mother Sam, and an unidentified brother. Click the somewhat blurry image to enlarge.

Check out another Sunny in Shaughnessy ►

Not such a fan of indiscriminate tagging; about as creative as a dog marking territory, says I. But, graffiti can be visually and mentally stimulating -- the stencils of Banksy for example. The tentacles-and-wave stencil, pictured above, and below has survived for years, in the alley on the North side of West Broadway, near the cross-street of Columbia. I don't know if it borrows from any actual Japanese woodblock prints, but, I think the use of woodblock style is sly, and appropriate, and cool. It makes me smile, and think every time I see it. Click on the images below to enlarge them.

[gallery type="rectangular" columns="2" ids="1438,1437,1439,1440"]

This large, shallow dumpster full of old bricks, appeared in a Fairview alley off 16th Avenue, near Granville Street. Nothing near it was being demolished. Today I talked to two workers bringing wheelbarrows full of brick rubble to the dumpster; it took two of them to lift, and empty each wheelbarrow into the dumpster.

While one worker, Marco, was occupied with not having his face photographed, the other worker explained, there was no demolition. The building adjacent to the dumpster was merely being renovated -- the entire brick cladding was being removed -- merely renovated indeed! He didn't say what was replacing it. He also didn't say exactly what would happen with all that old brick, because he didn't know.

I use to think old bricks were stronger than new ones because they'd been subjected to years of compression, and were thus sought after for new construction, but I can find no evidence of this on the Internet. Bricks can, I read, be recycled in two ways. If they are intact, they can be reused. Their distinctive, aged look, suits them for heritage restoration, or the appearance of heritage in a new construction. Otherwise, apparently, old bricks are crushed and used as aggregate for concrete, and road construction. Click on a image for a gallery view.

[caption id="attachment_1398" align="alignnone" width="497"] Does she make you thirsty? A detail from a 1953 Shiner Texas Special beer ad, by a master of the pin up form, Gil Elvgren (1914-1980). Click image to see the full image.[/caption]

Slight irony: I make money collecting beer cans to recover the deposit value, but I can't stand to drink the stuff; just thinking about the taste makes me bilious. I'm half-Chinese, and a lot of Asians have a poor tolerance for alcohol, due to a particular ALDH enzyme deficiency. Whatever the reason, I don't drink much at all.

But I do like to look at the pictures. Female glamour has long been used to sell beer (I drew my share of flaxen-haired, buxom beauties hefting tankards of brew for Oktoberfest events) but it's been a lowest-common-denominator, easy, animal brain sell. These days we're seeing a more nuanced use of female allure; the blunt sex sell is filtered through the retro visual vocabulary of mid-Twentieth Century pin up art. I say this is thanks to the safe icon-ification of  1950s pin up model Bettie Page, and thus the notion that Burlesque can be empowering for women, as well as the modern acceptability of tattoos, which are all about retro visual vocabulary. Pin up imagery is cool, and a politically-correct way to sell the hell out of sex, and beverages!



From left to right: a Lagunitas beer box I've just seen in an alley, though I haven't seen the bottle yet; Red Racer, a Surrey, B.C.-based beer; Old Milwaukee, is brewed in Canada by Sleeman  Breweries in Ontario. A popular beer, empties-wise, with several different pin up model cans to choose from; Happy Water isn't beer, but this Vancouver, B.C.-based company is pushing it's new therapeutic water, beer-style, with classic pin up imagery. Click the images to enlarge.

A nice look at Happy Water's colourful promotional van ►

McDonalds so-called "Big Breakfast," is almost perfect space food, but not quite; it's enough to induce cognitive dissonance in a fragile brain (my actual breakfast at 3.1 megapixels). Click an image to make it BIG breakfast fare.

Neat how nature can erode a corrugated-plastic, vinyl-letter sign; makes it look some old, Depression-era (the one in the 1930s) sign on the wind-lashed fence of a dust-bowl farm. The nine-year-old VGA camera phone really brings out the detail, doesn't it?. Click the images to enlarge.

[caption id="attachment_1348" align="alignnone" width="497"] A car binner I was playing with, drove right by these -- guess I distracted him a bit. Some people like to make artful displays of their empties. No, not night-vision goggles, a crap VGA camera in my Treo.[/caption]

We Vancouverites enjoyed a beautiful evening yesterday. I didn't think about my bottom line until after 11 pm; most night I'm in bed by that time, but as I say, it was a be-you-tiful evening -- a Friday evening -- and my 90 Lumen headlamp wanted to shine, so I went out binning at Midnight. I had a lot of fun working an area on both sides of Broadway Avenue, which is a mojor traffic corridor running East-West. I covered the neighbouring area West of Fairview, called Kitsilano -- an affluent neighbourhood packed with single-family homes.

[caption id="attachment_1350" align="alignleft" width="150"] The upscale corner of Broadway Ave. and Macdonald St. features a rare phone booth containing this utterly trashed and gutted phone (I came for the can). You can click the image to to enlarge it, but it's hardly worth it.[/caption]

On Friday and Saturday nights, the section of Broadway which cuts through Kitsilano, can be one long party strip, which can make for lots of beer cans, and interesting encounters -- Kitsilano's street partiers can be drunk as skunks, but generally remain polite and friendly.

I had one brief encounter with a car binner, in a white SUV. I was friendly. I waved at him, though I was holding a wine bottle at the time. At one point on West Broadway, I had some rich-looking kids, on rich-looking mountain bikes, pacing and circling me, out of -- it turned out -- curiosity, not malice.

All-in-all it was two hours of good-value binning; an enjoyable bike ride, and I got to listen to almost an entire chapter of William Shirer's Berlin Diaries.

A brief word about the camera -- I've been using a dazzling 14 mega-pixel Canon camera a friend gave to me (frankly way more camera than I need), but they couldn't find the battery charger. It took nearly three weeks for the battery to run down, but it has. I'll be getting a charger soon as I can, but in the meantime...

[caption id="attachment_1328" align="alignnone" width="497"] Put that in your pipe and smoke it Mayor Ford! -- Photo: Vince Talotta/Toronto Star. Collage by SQW. Click the image to enlarge.[/caption]

I believe Rob Ford's a punk. Okay, alleged punk; I don't have video. I base this belief on what I understand he's done as Mayor of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and how he's done it -- loudly, abusively, and divisively. That he may-or-may-not have smoked crack is just so much gilding on the lily.

[caption id="attachment_1302" align="alignleft" width="491"] Click the image to see how they always get their search results.[/caption]

Well, I certainly didn't need an American search engine to tell me, a Canadian, that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) were celebrating their 140th anniversary. Actually, I had no idea whatsoever. I just didn't need an American search engine, pointing out my ignorance -- or maybe I did. That is, after all, the kind of the job Google does now, isn't it; keeping track of just how dumb I am, and making allowances.

How Google is my brain. Let's list the ways:

• understands and corrects my crappy spelling


• answers all my stupid questions to the best of the Internet's ability


• handles all my correspondence


• used to be able to handle all my RSS feeds


• Since 2009, has been tailoring my search results to make me happy

There's probably more ways, but, Google knows, I just can't remember.

I have joked that, thanks to the Internet, I don't need a brain anymore -- that the content from ten-million-or-so people equals about five smart people, and that's enough to take care of all my intelligence needs. Want proof? Just Google "how to tie yor shuz."If you're still remembering how to do stuff like that, then you're working to hard.

After reading (at least the cover of) Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble, I could have become concerned by this so-called filter bubble -- how Google has been spoon-feeding me biased personalized search results based on my previous search history, to keep me happily Googling for more, but golly, what choice do I have?

My brain is in the cloud. Does that mean it's free?

The catchy phrase, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product."  lies somewhere at the heart of what Internet privacy activists, such as Eli Pariser, are on about. Others, such as Derek Powazek, say the phrase just lies. I remember back in the latter 1990s when the free version of the dominant Macintosh email client Eudora began displaying advertising banners -- there was no revolution, and so it began.


One key to succeeding in the Internet Age seems to me to involve profitably identifying things people won't miss. This is a hard one for me to explain: Remember long-play records, and all that dynamic range they could hold in those wee grooves? Well, the MP3 format threw that stuff away to compress the file, and no one cared; they still preferred MP3s to LPs.

Facebook is a dumpster?

Google, Facebook, Wordpress.com -- all social media, are learning  to profit off of the kinds of personal information, which people don't care about, don't think is important -- their likes, their shares, their search patterns. People are just tossing this stuff out on the Internet, and social media is binning it, and selling it. I'd say it's like human derivatives, if  I had more than a clue how fiscal instruments like that worked.

But what am I saying,  I don't need to try and understand or remember that sort of stuff anymore. I may not know [fill in the Google search bar], but I know what I [like].