The commute to campus on my bus is usually quite relaxed; a lot of regulars and sleep-deprived students makes for a mellow atmosphere. I was heading home one day in the winter evening dark as the bus pulled up. The driver was one of the younger guys, one who usually reads a paper spread out over the steering wheel as he waits for the time to leave, unconcerned with checking the fares and passes of people getting on the bus.
    That evening there was a new person hanging around the bus stop; a transit supervisor, or something similar judging by the fleece vest with the company logo and the all-authoritative clipboard. The bus driver got out to talk to this apparition and some news was exchanged. It seemed that this news was not to the driver’s liking, as he was set off on a loud and energetic tirade which was surprisingly lengthy and varied given that every adjective was ‘fucking’ and every noun was ‘shit’.
    The commotion gained the attention of the students and other passengers. Various electronic devices were removed from various orifices to figure out what was going on. Nervous glances flew back and forth. A girl one row up from me looked at the person beside her and asked “Are we safe with this guy driving us?” The bus driver stormed onto the bus, sat down, got up again, went out and continued his rant. A few nervous passengers fled out the back door. I was trapped in a window seat and the person next to me wasn’t panicking yet. The girl up from me was texting someone on her cell phone, I could make out the words “GOING FUCKING INSANE” on the screen.
    The bus driver got back on, sat down, and started up the bus. Calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean, man, I telepathically chanted at him. He left the bus loop, yielded to an oncoming car, and took the turns with a comforting degree of control. A few stops later everyone was feeling back to normal and we all lived another day.
 

   The ski jacket was $150; which wasn’t a bad price, except that it was a child’s ski jacket for a five year-old girl. Light green/blue with gold details, and it was already discounted by 50%. We thought the sale price was an error, but no, the regular price was $299.
    We were looking for a Christmas gift for my cousin’s daughter; eighteen months. We found a (rather cheesy) pink souvenir t-shirt, and now we were milling around as the t-shirt sale was completed by a scruffy-haired twenty-something guy who looked like he would only be selling children’s clothes if they were handmade out of organic hemp by a fair-trade co-op in Nepal.
    The thing about Whistler is that it increasingly feels isolated in its social strata. It was always a resort community, but now a look through the real estate listings doesn’t show any house for under one million. The nicer apartments and condominiums also top the one million mark. The development of high-end resort hotel/residences and the prevalence of luxury retailer, commercial art galleries and fur outfitters tend to reinforce this feeling.
    It’s even worse when you’re on the mountain. To be halfway decent at skiing or boarding represents thousands of dollars invested in equipment or rentals, lessons, lift tickets, transportation and accommodation. It’s hardly a representative sample of the population when you plonk down in a sweaty mess at the lunch tables.
    Of course I’m in no position to complain, but I’m not living off my own money here either. The people who really lose out are those who would be filling the labour pool, except for not being able to afford to live here. The commute from (somewhat) nearby communities is done by many, but there is still a chronic lack of people to fill jobs. It also means that those needing workers have to pay premium wages to keep the labour they have.
    I guess the problem is one of scale. Within the scope of the Whistler that tourists see, it’s all gloss and high end. If you zoom out (the World as it looks on Google) and take in Function Junction, Pemberton and Squamish, and the Lower Mainland, things do tend to balance out. Also the issue is one of perception; if you are fine with living in the simulacra of an affluent and untroubled pseudo-European snow sport fantasy, then everything is just fine.
 

    Well that's another year over with. I guess it's good to be doing too much to write down all of it, better than the alternate anyway. May random neutrino particles smile on you in the new year as they blast undetected through your body.

28.12.07
    It’s just past 6am, I’m up and I have no idea why. I’m still on holidays, though I have been waking up around this time for the last few days, but usually I just go back to sleep. Perhaps my body has no idea what to do with this much time off. Also, I had an incredulous amount of caffeine yesterday, a cup of coffee AND a pot of tea; I’m a wild man. This morning I figured I might as well get up and get some things done. Let’s see if it turns into one of those days.
 

    Updated the links page. There's something not quite right about coding HTML before breakfast.

18.12.07
My Co-Workers are Robots
    A few weeks ago we underwent “environmental testing” at work. This involved small vacuum pumps sucking air through filter paper to monitor what kind of stuff we’re breathing all day. The pumps were in boxes the size of a VHS cassette (remember those?) and seemed to be of earlier vintage. A clear plastic tube came out of the box and terminated in a funnel with the filter paper. I had one on my desk for two days and they gave off a constant mechanical drone.
    Some lucky individuals, one from each department, also got to have the privilege of strapping one onto a belt and clipping the end of the tube to their lapels. The assistant I was working with was one of these people and I could monitor her position behind me based on the direction and intensity of the sound coming from the pump. Eventually she got so used to the sound she couldn’t hear it anymore and thought that the pump stopped working. I became so saturated with the noise I only noticed the absence of the sound when I left the area. At one point, another pumped-up co-worker came into the studio, and her unit was notably louder, with a more aggressive noise. This caused someone else to observe that we were all like robots with our own distinctive energy signatures wandering around and showing up on each other’s proximity sensors. Or maybe they only mentioned the robot bit and I took it the rest of the geeky distance.

17.12.07
    Usually the drive up for the winter family vacation is fine, yesterday was another story. The highway turned to ice as evening set in. A few cars slid off the road into the side ditches somewhere ahead of us and the highway was blocked. We saw a fire truck and an ambulance ahead and the line of headlights behind us stretched as far as we could see. All the cars were at a standstill.
    We do this trip twice a year, have been doing so for a while, so we pack everything, including far too much food. We do this trip in our minivan, the second one we’ve gone through actually, so everything is accessible if you’re willing to climb over all the bags and dig around for the secret stash. First up was the bar of organic dark chocolate with a hit of lemon I received as an early Christmas present. Second was the container of the remaining cookies from the cookie exchange we did at work. Of course you can’t select from a delightful assortment of homemade cookies in the dark, so the interior lights came on, in all their glaring intensity. We had been used to the fading light outside and the red glow of the brake lights ahead of us. I fashioned a facial tissue into a combination diffuser/gobo (look at me with the photographic lighting terms) and we had a nice ambient cookie-selecting glow inside the car. We munched along and listened to the local radio station with the dismal traffic updates watching the snow fall.
    Eventually the cars were cleared, we moved a little, some new cars slid into the ditches, then those were cleared, then traffic started moving. A white Chrysler two cars ahead of us resolutely refused to go over 30kph, which was fine, except when we were inching up hills and any time we stopped and lost momentum we spun our tires for a while on the ice. We got here eventually, passing a solid and stationary line of cars trying to go in the other direction. After a quick meal in a restaurant that quickly filled with people coming in from the same traffic jam, we checked in and ensconced ourselves on the newly-installed wireless internet.
 

    In professional-related news, one of my images was much reduced and uncredited, but it was still published in Synergy >> Journal of UBC Science (link to PDF).
    I also got an acknowledgement in this paper (PDF) for the volunteer work I did at the Herbarium.
    And you remember that post about the lab website contest and the interview with The Scientist? They published a list of "Winners", and I didn't get the popular vote (what else is new) or the consenus selection, but both of my sites that were nominated got individual Judge's Choice selections here.
    And to keep the size of my head in check, I was adding these updates to the portfolio when I discovered a consistently broken top-level navigation link. Why doesn't anyone tell me about these things?

11.12.07
    So that list of things... all the nonessentials got bumped from tonight and I still haven't done the essentials. Nope. Found a Christmas Music meme on LJ, including five albums worth of Sufjan Stevens. Guh. (Enter the dark side: http://savvy-elf.livejournal.com/302499.html)

10.12.07
    Well, the Festival of Lights was... enchanting.
    I'm rather busy, but most of it's with self-imposed Christmas tasks, so I've got no one to blame but myself. I've got a list of the days to come and what needs to get done by which day. I have plenty of blind faith that it will all get done somehow. Internal blind faith; sure. External blind faith; not so much.
    I've also been meaning to write up several amusing anecdotes suitable for this venue, but I still don't have the time. Rather sadly (I was told), I intend to take the laptop on vacation and do some of the nagging things I keep meaning to get around to. If that happens you can expect stories including: My Co-Workers are Robots, The Angry Bus Driver, and Our Anti-Christmas Party. Stay tuned.

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