aMMusing

I told you a while back that I’m secure at my day job for at least a while longer. Last Monday, though, things became a lot more specific. Over the next year, I will be affected to another “conversion” project that will see nearly a thousand of our clients switch from an obsolete mode of communication to a new, more secure mode.

Amusingly, however — at least to me — is that my supervisor asked me, still the new kid on the block, to devote about a quarter of my time on “monitoring and maintaining stats” for the project. This came about because of this tracking system I developed a few months ago (read “Excel workbook from hell”) to tabulate what I’m doing and measure if I’m meeting my goals. That I’ve taken to doing this shouldn’t come as a surprise to you if you’ve spent any time wrapping your head around the electoral numbers I spew out semi-regularly on this blog.

So, now I have a few more challenges at the day job. First, I have to learn and understand what exactly it is we’re converting so that I can help clients with their conversion. And second, I have to find a way that will be super easy for my peers to keep track of what we’re doing yet keep our stats accurate at all times. It would be so much easier if I could develop this thing with the tools with which I’m already familiar, but alas that likely won’t be possible. So that’ll be quite the challenge indeed…

I stayed up late last Monday night to follow the Quebec provincial election. Given that I don’t have cable TV, I had to follow the incoming results on the Web while listening (alternately) to the live feed from Radio-Canada or CBC Radio Montreal. The otherwise excellent radio-canada.ca website crashed spectacularly about an hour into the results coming in, thus why I alternated between French and English coverage.

Absolutely no one, including Gregory Morrow whose crystal ball is usually pretty clairvoyant, expected the spectacular rise of the right-leaning Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ), which consistently ranked third in the polls right up to the eve of the election. Indeed, no one quite expected this:

Through much of the evening, the ADQ was first in the “elected or leading” category in front of the incumbent Premier Charest’s Parti Libéral du Québec (PLQ). By the time the PLQ took back a weak first place, Radio-Canada declared that Charest himself had lost his own seat in Sherbrooke, only to reverse its call an hour later. By the end of the evening, as a result of the first three-way race in recent memory, Québec had given itself its first minority government since 1878, with the Parti Québécois (PQ) finishing third in its worse showing in the popular vote since 1970.

Many political commentators are viewing the results as the end of the sovereignty movement in Québec and, combined with the unexpected 25% performance of the federal Conservatives during the 2006 federal election, as a major rightward shift of the Québec electorate. However, like many others, I believe that last Monday’s vote is the result of a far more complex convergence of circumstances whose impact has yet to sink in.

Particularly striking is the divide between the island of Montréal and the rest of Québec. Not only did the ADQ not win a single seat on the island, but it also obtained only half the popular vote that it received elsewhere in the province. However, this “big city versus elsewhere” phenomenon is not exclusive to Québec, although like just about everything else regarding Québec, the flavour of this divide in that province is distinct. Here in Nova Scotia, the political divide between Halifax versus the rest of the province is equally apparent. Similarly, in the last federal election, we saw how Canada’s three largest cities — Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver — did not elect a single Conservative (until Vancouver Kingsway MP David Emerson defected to the Conservatives shortly after being elected as a Liberal).

Equally if not more significant in Monday’s results in Québec is the electorate’s distaste for the dichotomy in which it has been forced for more than 30 years. By most accounts, the PLQ’s performance in government in the last four years was lacklustre. However, there was no taste for returning the PQ to power with its promise to hold another referendum on sovereignty which most agree would meet with failure. Tired of a simplistic either/or choice, the people of Québec saw in the ADQ’s autonomist position — vaguely defined as it is — as a safe place to park their vote, not to mention that the populist edge the PQ once enjoyed has now gone to the ADQ. For let’s be frank here: even though sovereignty is the PQ’s main plank, not everyone who ever voted PQ did so because they wanted “leur propre pays”. Recall that after the Yes side scored only 40% in the 1980 sovereignty referendum, the PQ went on to form a massive majority government the next year with about 49% of the popular vote.

Simply and uneloquently put, the judgement of the people of Québec last Monday was a blunt Fuck You to the two parties that have dominated provincial politics for over the last three decades. They needed to tell the PLQ that they thought it sucked lemons in the last four years, but they didn’t want to register their protest by ushering in a government fixated on sovereignty. I believe they voted for a change in the political paradigm; I’m not convinced they suddenly decided to embrace the ADQ’s (half-articulated) right-wing policies. But given that most polls showed the ADQ below the 30-percent mark and that it entered this election with only 5 seats at the dissolution of the legislature, many saw a vote for the ADQ as a safe vote: one that would express their dissatisfaction with the status quo, but one that was unlikely to lead to the ADQ forming the government.

Monday’s surprise is perhaps that more voters than expected followed the above line of reasoning once at the ballot box. Or, as some have suggested, perhaps many ADQ-leaning individuals who were polled stated they were undecided because they didn’t feel it “respectable” to say out loud that the favoured the ADQ. Others still are pointing out that an inherent flaw with phone polls today is that they only reach people with a land line.

As you may have guessed, though, given that I am a staunch supporter of proportional representation, I believe Monday’s surprise would have been lessened had PR been in place in the last decade. Unlike what Monday’s results seem to suggest, the ADQ did not come out of nowhere. In fact, by refusing to grant the ADQ official party status after the 2003 election because it hadn’t achieved 20% of the popular vote, the PLQ and PQ have arguably been the architects of this misperception. However, now that elections are three-way races in Québec, Monday results are pretty close to proportionality. In the past, Québec has had grossly overweighted majority governments, and as recently as 1998, it had a huge PQ majority when in fact the PLQ had won the popular vote. The way I was able to recalculate the 1998 results, there should have been a PQ minority at best (which admittedly demonstrates that even a proportional system would be imperfect, although certainly not as flawed as our current FPTP system).

Notice that ADQ support has gone from 11.8% in 1998 to 18.2% in 2003 and 30.8% in 2007, for a net gain of 19%. For the PLQ, the downward difference between the 2003 and 2007 vote is about 13%. For its part, however, the PQ has dropped more than 14% between 1998 and 2007, and the ADQ gains over the years have been at the expense of both the PLQ and the PQ. The existing FPTP system has been hiding the trends that have been evident over the last decade when viewed through other lens.

Some may take issue with the allocation of 2 seats to the Greens (PVQ) and 1 seat to Québec Solidaire (QS) in 2007 given that they achieved less than 5% of the popular vote province-wide. However, it matters to bear in mind that the D’Hondt formula for proportional representation — which I explained several times before, most notably in this post — would divide a total geographical area into regions, with regional seats to be distributed by region. Hence the ADQ in Montreal/Laval, which obtained only 15.16% of the popular vote in 2007, would be awarded 4 regional seats instead of being shut out as it was on Monday, but the PVQ and QS, with 6.74% and 6.32% respectively in that region, would receive their regional seats for being well above the widely accepted 5% threshhold. Besides, surely 300,000 out of nearly 4,000,000 votes should yield more than nothing in the assembly.

Once again, I don’t pay much attention to naysayers of proportional representation whose chief arguments against it are that it would almost always lead to minority governments and would place more importance on parties for regional seats. It matters to look at the whole schematics (i.e., how regional seats would be assigned, fixed election dates, and the removal of confidence votes that would precipitate an election). In fact, to me, the strength of PR yielding mostly minority governments is that it would cease to hide the real trends under the veil of artificial majorities and be more stable than nearly seismic shifts to which FPTP is prone, all the while better expressing the will of the people.

March 31, 1998, fell on a Tuesday. I used to teach on Tuesday afternoons and Thursday mornings. But that’s not why I remember it so well; it’s because I remember the weather record that was shattered in Halifax: fuelled by a strong El Niño, the temperature that day went up to 25C when the seasonal average at that time is 6C. Also, 1998 was the first of two consecutive years when the leaves on the trees were completely out a full three-and-a-half weeks earlier than usual.

The “real” winter started very late here this year. It only started at the end of January. But notwithstanding a few exceptions, it’s been below zero or just marginally above zero every day since. That gets to me after a while.

If you look back in the archives of aMMusing as far back as 2004, you’ll find musings about Web development generally and standard-compliant coding in particular. The arguments in favour of relying on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are still very compelling, and I’m currently working on gradually changing all the templates of the websites I help manage to be compliant.

Yet here we are, 9 years after I read my first book on CSS and 5 years after I decided not to “go completely compliant,” and I realize that producing something as ubiquitous as a three-column layout is still a source of major headaches. Someone thinks he’s found the Holy Grail, and in no time others point out how it doesn’t work in [insert name of a common browser] or behaves one way in one browser but a totally different way in the next. A simple, lightweight HTML table just to set out the columns and otherwise being standards-compliant would not only take a mere 5 minutes to bang out, but it would also work all the time; however, if one were to dare making this suggestion to standard-compliant purists, an interminable exchange of nasty barbs is bound to follow.

In 2007. No exaggeration. I’ve seen/read it today. There’s been next to no progress.

However, a guy named Andrew Banks has dared. He argues — convincingly, I think — that using an HTML table to set the relationship among the elements of a template — banner and footer, navigation aids in the left and right columns and the main content in the larger middle column — would still achieve the goal of separating content from presentation just as well if not better than CSS, provided that we restrict the use of the reviled HTML table to that task and to otherwise real “tabular data.”

His conclusion is practical:

Am I saying we go back to lots of nested tables, spacer GIFs, and font tags? No. What I hope to do is free some web designers from being too legalistic, and even wrong, about what the table can be used for.

Even though I am a long-time believer in “the right way is often the harder way,” I also think that constant difficulty may be a sign of a bad fit. If for years you\’ve failed to jam a round peg into a square hole, while a square peg slides in ever so easily, maybe it\’s because the square peg belongs there.

I guess now I’m torn more than ever on the issue, especially when I see huge dynamic websites like cbc.ca managing to switch to full compliance. But think of the budget the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has compared to my clients.

Like Banks, I’m wondering if the zealots of standards compliance have missed a point along the way. I’m more than prepared to respect S.C. whenever humanly possible and would certainly accept some differences among browsers. But after spending a good part of this weekend trying to make compliant a simple three-column template and realizing that we’re still not there yet — at least not without a gazillon mind-boggling hacks and fixes — I’m starting to wonder if we’ve become unable to distinguish the trees from the forest. As a Web developer, would I really deserve to be brought to the pasture and shot for suggesting that we should always favour standard-compliant code except in the odd instances when it just can’t be done?

There are many things to like about Halifax and it isn’t an entirely unpleasant city where to live. I would still prefer Montréal, but then, summers here can be so exquisite. But one thing I don’t like about Halifax is how the people here can be bipolar about its size and importance. At times, the city’s entertainment weekly, The Coast, has referred to Halifax as “Canada’s biggest small town,” while, after the city hosted the G8 Summit in 1995, the mayor in office at the time started dreaming of Halifax eventually hosting the Olympic Games. With a population of about 360,000 according to the 2001 census — and that’s taking in all of Halifax County which is now the “Halifax Regional Municipality,” a land area as large as Prince Edward Island — this city is major for this end of the country, but hardly a metropolis.

While I’m not hugely interested in big sporting events, I must say, though, that I didn’t view unfavorably Halifax’s bid to host the 2014 Commonwealth Games. If a smallish Canadian city like Victoria could pull it off in 1994, surely Halifax could as well, and it would be a far more realistic goal than the former mayor’s delusions about the Olympics. So, ever since Halifax earned the right last year against Hamilton and York Region to become Canada’s bid city against Scotland and Nigeria, I’ve cautiously been hoping Halifax would be chosen for 2014. Like most people, I didn’t want the city and the province of Nova Scotia to replicate the financial fiasco that were the Montreal ’76 Olympics, but surely that would be possible. And not only would Halifax draw more international attention, but it would also build for itself a much-needed infrastructure.

But apparently those plans were too rich for the city and the province, so Halifax has pulled out of the race. I’m sure that like just about everyone, I was shocked when I heard the news on Thursday.

I’m sorry, but that decision is bound to hurt Halifax. Canada, for sure, will be called upon again to bid for major international sporting events, but Halifax has killed its chances for at least 20 years if not longer. No city can pull a stunt like that and expect the international community won’t laugh it out of the room if it dares to suggest in the near future that it wishes to host another huge event like the Commonwealth Games. Indeed, Halifax has effectively ensured that it will remain Canada’s biggest small town for a long, long time.

I was in the middle of a client call Wednesday afternoon when I looked out my window and saw an enormous plume of smoke about a block away.

That’s not the angle I was seeing the fire that razed the North End Pub & Diner (see also these photos while they’re still online). That’s the angle from across Halifax harbour around 4:30 that afternoon — in the middle of what was possibly the coldest day this winter due to the windchill factor.

Located across the street from the Stadacona military base, the North End Pub was popular among the military personnel, neighbours, and university students who live in this part of town. I have gone only once to the diner several years ago, and I can’t say I was awed to go back. But I know the former superintendents for my building liked it a lot and often took their family there. They’re now living in Alberta, but I wonder if they heard about the fire…

I went for my semi-annual visit to the dentist a few days before Christmas, and I don’t know why I didn’t blog about it before now.

My regular hygenist and I get along like a house on fire. Of course, I can’t speak much while I’m there because she’s busy doing what she does in my mouth, but she has no trouble filling the air time. And often she has to pull out in order to let me comment or laugh. This Cape Breton native is very good at making me laugh.

It was no different during my last visit, even though the baseline of her main story was extremely sad. Indeed, she was telling about her lifelong best friend who still lives in Cape Breton who found out just a few weeks prior that she is dying of cancer. Although my hygienist and her friend have always kept in touch regularly, lately they’ve been calling each other every day “just to talk.” Sometimes they speak only a few minutes to touch base; other times they talk for hours and go through the whole gamut of emotions from laughing hysterically to crying bitterly.

During one of their conversations, the friend confided to the hygienist that she’d been looking in her closet to figure out what she was going to wear. At first the hygienist didn’t quite understand what she meant, but then she realized her friend was thinking about what she would wear in her coffin. I think the hygienist just wasn’t ready to entertain such a morbid thought, so she deflected it with dark humour worthy of a chick flick, that got both of them laughing to tears.

“Well of course, girl,” the hygienist told her friend. “There’s nothing more important! You just got to look good in the box!”

It’s widely agreed that the split on the right flank of the political spectrum through the 1990s is what allowed Jean Chrétien to form three consecutive Liberal majority governments in Ottawa. However, while a poll this week shows the Conservatives are back at the 36% standing that earned them the right to form the current minority government, it also reveals that the Liberals are tanking at 27% and the NDP and Greens are tied at 13%. The Greens in Canada are in fact more centre-right than left, but because the environmental issue has long been associated to the left and the Liberals and NDP are focussing so much attention on the environment, we are now seeing today the same splittering on the left that we saw in the ’90s on the right (which today means “anything left of the Cons,” which isn’t too difficult).

But what is perhaps the greatest source of concern for the Liberals is how, according to this latest poll, Fortress Ontario is crumbling, with 40% saying they would vote Conservative were an election held today. With a standing like that in vote-rich Ontario and with our FPTP electoral system, a minimal majority could almost be within reach for the Conservatives. That, or another minority with a ’90s-style splintered opposition, but this time of the left.

You’ll remember that I was quite pleased when my former upstairs neighbours moved out in December. As far as I can tell, no one has moved in to replace them …or if someone has, they’re perfect neighbours because I don’t hear anything. As for the kids downstairs, they haven’t been around for a while. So I’m happy.

Two weekends ago, I found out well after the fact that Halifax’s arguably most famous drag queen had died. I admit that, in the past, I’ve made no secret of my dislike of Halifax drag queens. And while the title of that rant might suggest I wished them dead, that would be — and is — most definitely an overstatement.

The late drag queen in question had taken to blogging last summer, but only a few weeks later s/he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I spent a while reading Chuck’s blog that evening I found out he had died; I didn’t know him at all and I probably wouldn’t have come to know him had he lived, for even though we lived in the same city, we were in different circles. Hundreds of comments poured in on his blog upon his death, and I read them all. He had touched so many people in his own way and was genuinely loved by so many, which is a huge legacy in itself.

One of the many who left a comment upon Chuck’s passing was my former upstairs neighbour. And that’s how I discovered that he, too, has taken to blogging last summer. I read through his blog and realized how I harbour so many ambivalences (if “ambivalence” can be counted). No, I wasn’t keen on him as a neighbour, but there’s definitely a part of me that respects him as an artist even though I’ve heard over time many comments from others to reinforce my less-than-enthusiastic feelings about him. Or, I wonder, is it and has it always been a case of star envy on my part? That the man’s oeuvre is acclaimed to the point of earning him a Governor General award and that he revolves in circles in which he can swing inviting the GG herself to dinner in his new home: am I jealous? envious? feeling remorse for possibly reading his character all wrong? Or is it possible that the truth lies somewhere in the middle? For let’s face it: I’m more a loner than gregarious, so dinner with the GG and her entourage would be a little slice of hell for me.

But speaking of hell, since I’ve had a bit of time to digest the news that my day job won’t be ending in 10 days, a new thought has crossed my mind. I was in Montreal a year ago at this time because I was treating myself before starting what I knew would be a year of sacrifices and few opportunities to play. That year is done now, and while I still have a shitload of work to plow through for my business, I have to think beyond. Yes, the (almost definitely taken) decision to keep Junior and saving for an uncertain future is one strand of my recent thoughts, but another one is how I need to shift the balance away from work. I’m not quite sure what exactly I mean by that other than the fact I should deem the time of sacrifices over; all I know is that thoughts of travel, beaches and raunchy men randomly come to mind.

On the latter front, it’s rather pathetic how I’ve taken to occasionally peek on my geeky but cute neighbour. When I come back to my desk after pouring myself a cup of coffee, I peek. Or if I just happen to be going by that window, I peek. I don’t go out of my way to peek, except on days like today when he’s sitting at his desk with his shirt off. That’s just too intriguing to me since we’re not in the dog days of summer and, even when we were, he wasn’t much of a sitting at the computer shirtless kind of guy. To add to the stupidity of it all, I happen to know his ex partner who used to live with him was a woman. I’ve never been one to pine over a straight guy, yet in this case I’m finding myself deep in wishful thinking that perhaps the woman is his ex because he switched teams.

And it’s when I find my thoughts stooping that low that I realize I need to get out more. Or, more precisely, that I need to shift the balance away from work. Because there’s something rather disturbing in how, when given a choice between going out or doing little more than staying at home to read with a glass of wine, I choose the latter every time. And I’m left wondering if instead of taking a big bite of the apple, I’m just letting it sit there until it rots.

I swear, if I see one more “news” item about that train wreck that was Anna Nicole Smith, I’m going to hurl. She was a nobody who aspired to be a somebody but only achieved unflattering notoriety. Surely that is sad, but it is not a tragedy.

That is all.