Of all the types of pain that I’ve been through in my life, tooth/mouth pain has to be among the worst – there’s nothing worse than feeling stabbing pain going from your jaw up your face, and there’s nothing you can do about it (I know you can relate Oilman). Last week I had the flu, and for a few days was consuming nothing but Gatorade and flat Ginger Ale – it was all my stomach could handle. After a few days of that, I noticed that I was getting some low-grade tooth pain. It wasn’t focused on a particular tooth, just a general area. I thought perhaps it was simply all the high-sugar fluids I was consuming creating some sort of sensitivity, but now that I’m back to eating regular food (more or less), the pain has gone up 100x and it’s clear I have something very wrong going on in my mouth. I spent a good part of the evening tonigh with an ice pack pressed against the side of my face. Not a great way to wrap up an otherwise nice weekend.
Category: Random
The New Floor, and New Floor Covering
A few people have asked what I ended up using on my floor, so here you go: they’re rubber/plastic tiles designed for a garage floor. I bought them at RONA, our Home Depot-type store here in Calgary. I didn’t cover quite as much space as I’d originally planned, but it’s enough for me to roll where I need to in my office. There are small bumps on the tiles, so it’s not like rolling over hardwood, but it’s not too bad. I ordered some rubber wheels for my Aeron chair, which will hopefully help further. I’m still getting things set up, so the wiring isn’t quite up to snuff. 😉
The Moment I’ve Been Dreading Has Arrived: Office Teardown
I’ve been putting this off for at least two years now, but I finally had to bite the bullet and get it done: I had to tear-down my home office and move it in order to get my floor fixed. We moved into this house in 2001, and finished the basement later that year. We put down berber carpet, which at the time seemed like a good idea because basements tend to be cold. Then we got a little puppy named Keiko – and after a few months that berber carpet was covered in stains (house-training a puppy is a messy business). It was also problematic for me to not be able to roll my office chair from computer to computer – for a while I had a custom-cut piece of Plexiglas on the floor, but over time that cracked and broke.
Not wanting to pay another $500 to replace it, and realizing it was a bit demoralizing to be working surrounded by urine stains, it was time for a renovation to my home office. In 2006 I hired a carpenter, and he sub-contracted a flooring company (Underfoot Floors in Calgary), to re-do several key parts of my office. He built a custom set of shelves for me, and the flooring company ripped up the berber carpet and installed a hardwood laminate floor. For a while, everything was great – but then I started to notice that as I rolled my chair across the floor, it would seem to catch on the floor. Over the next year, I’d find little chips of broken hardwood laminate – bit by bit, I was destroying the floor. The entire point of going with the hardwood laminate was to get something tough enough to stand up to a rolling office chair. I brought in the carpenter and the flooring company, and there was a lot of shoulder shrugging and finger-pointing.
This is what the floor looked like after a couple of years worth of my chair rolling over it.
The problem was two-fold: the underlay that Underfoot Flooring used was quite thick. I had asked for a thick underlay in an attempt to plug up some of the awful insulation problems that Bay West Homes inflicted upon us when they built the house – on a cold day, my basement would be a good 15 degrees Celsius colder than the main floor. You could hold your hand along the baseboards and feel freezing cold air blowing in. Knowing nothing about flooring, I didn’t realize that by having the thicker underlay would cause the floor to move up and down more. You’d think that the flooring professionals would have pointed this out to me, right? No such luck. The particular flooring that I selected – completely based on colour and design, because hey, what do I know about flooring – turned out to have a bevelled edge, meaning that the pieces didn’t lock as tightly together as the indestructible Pergo flooring I had back in my condo. Again, I had no clue – Underfoot Flooring knew this was going in a home office, so I trusted their advice about the flooring options I had. Continue reading The Moment I’ve Been Dreading Has Arrived: Office Teardown
Can You Hear This? The “Mosquito Ring tone” Test
I think it was 2007 when this “high pitched ring tone” craze kicked off – the idea being that older people couldn’t hear high-pitched frequencies, so younger people would put these high-pitched tones on their cell phones and they’d hear when their phone was ringing – or when they got a text message – but their teachers couldn’t. These same high-pitched tones would also be used by some businesses in an attempt to drive off younger people who were loitering in front of their establishments. I listened to one of these tones that I wasn’t supposed to be able to hear at my age, and I heard it just fine. I knew there was a scientific basis for this, but I figured since I could hear the tone my hearing was “perfect” – I’ve always gotten perfect hearing scores when I’ve had my hearing tested. I found a Web site today that shows how wrong I was about being able to hear tones I thought I could!
I cranked up my speakers and clicked on the preview buttons for each tone: I can hear the 16khz tone, but I can’t hear the 17khz tone or anything higher. I’m 34 years old, so the fact that I can hear the “30 and younger” tone means I have slightly better than normal hearing in terms of high-pitched frequencies (according to this scale at least). What about you? Where does your hearing drop off, and how does that relate to your age – are you better or worse than average? And if your hearing is worse than it should be, what band were you a roadie for in the ’80s? 😉
From Warm to Snow in the Blink of an Eye
As residents here say “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes and it will change.” On Saturday, it was bright, sunny, and quite warm at 10.5 Celsius(50.9 Fahrenheit). All the snow in my back yard was melted, and the streets were slushy with melting snow. Sunday I woke up to this:
Above: Our driveway is buried somewhere underneath all that.
Above: 45 minutes later, Ashley and I finished clearing the driveway off.
Above: The pile of snow that my neighbour and I contribute to. I suspect it won’t melt until August. 😉
Woah…I’m a Thumbnail!
Totally random, and a tad egotistical, but what the hell, it’s a personal blog. When I did the CityTV interview, I recorded it on my Windows Media Center so I could capture and convert the video file for archiving. What surprised me was seeing the image thunbmnail showing yours truly – it’s an image taken from a certain point in the program. I doubt that’s something I’ll ever see again in my life, so it was kind of neat. 😉
A Worthwhile Canadian Initiative
“Canada has done more than survive this financial crisis. The country is positively thriving in it. Canadian banks are well capitalized and poised to take advantage of opportunities that American and European banks cannot seize. The Toronto Dominion Bank, for example, was the 15th-largest bank in North America one year ago. Now it is the fifth-largest. It hasn’t grown in size; the others have all shrunk. So what accounts for the genius of the Canadians? Common sense. Over the past 15 years, as the United States and Europe loosened regulations on their financial industries, the Canadians refused to follow suit, seeing the old rules as useful shock absorbers. Canadian banks are typically leveraged at 18 to 1—compared with U.S. banks at 26 to 1 and European banks at a frightening 61 to 1. Partly this reflects Canada’s more risk-averse business culture, but it is also a product of old-fashioned rules on banking.”
– Newsweek Article by Fareed Zakaria
I’ve seen Fareed Zakaria appear on The Daily Show several times, and he always has intelligent opinions worthy of sharing – this article is a great example of that. There are things that frustrate me about our banking system, but it seems that for now at least, our sytem is in better shape than most.
Happy New Year: Here’s To A Great 2009!
A Sobering Video About the US Economy
I don’t pretend to know much about the policies of Ron Paul – I’ve heard both good and bad things about him – but when it comes to the economy, his words ring true to me. This video, which liberally quotes his words, seems almost prophetic when you look at where things are at right now.
How Old Are Your Tires? Better Check…
I’m pretty cautious about buying into Internet-hyped stories that I recieve from others over email, but this one looks quite legitimate: this 20/20 video explains the dangers of old tires. Like most people, I assumed the only danger in old tires was one of tread – as in, if your tires are so old they’re losing their tread, you shold replace them. This story explains how tires lose the elasticity in the rubber, and that can lead to some catastrophic results. I wasn’t able to find if Canada is any better than the US in terms of laws protecting consumers from buying old tires – though I did discover that Quebec has made it law that car owners put winter tires on their cars this year. The reason for this law? 38% of cars involved in winter accidents in Quebec have all-season tires on. Logic says then that if tires are the contributing factor in these accidents – and I think that’s a pretty big leap in logic – having better tires will reduce the number of accidents. I’ll be interested to see if that’s really the case. I’m in support of anything that saves lives and makes the road safer, but I’m not convinced winter tires are a magic bullet to reducing accidents in the winter months. The biggest problem I’ve seen with winter driving is simply driver idiocy: people who try to go the same 10 kmph over the speed limit regardless of the weather, and they tend to be people who drive trucks or SUVs, thinking that the heavier weight of their vehicle somehow makes them immune to the weather. Staying safe in the winter while driving is 80% driver IQ and 20% vehicle.