If I had to choose a motto for this election it would be this:  An election that no one wanted, brought on by a reason no one cared about, at a time when we cannot afford it, amongst candidates that aren’t worth our votes.

This election was not spawned by the will of the people of Canada. It was spawned because of a light at the end of the tunnel by two wanna-be big-wigs and their fellow sheep, who leapt at the slightest opportunity that may give them a hope of adding PM to their business card. I mean, let’s be honest here:  Iggy couldn’t lead an ant army to a picnic; Layton lives in a socialist dreamworld where money grows on trees and the streams flow with gold bullion; Harper’s platform is more anti-Canadian than the entire list of our enemies combined; Duceppe wants to split up our country; and May has about as much chance of changing Canada as I do getting a blowjob from Megan Fox. (Megan, if you’re reading this, I will vote Green if you do, in fact, blow me.)

And while Harper being our Prime Minister may leave a horrible taste in most of our mouths, it is certainly better than him having a majority government and wreaking his particular brand of havoc like George W did for his 8 years on the global scene.

On top of it all, we are still in the middle of an economic crisis.  People seem to have forgotten that because we weren’t ‘as bad off’ as the US or UK, and because it isn’t exciting news. So, Sun and CTVGlobeMedia have relegated the story to the business section, which no self respecting ignorant Joe Blow reads anyway.  Elections cost around $300 million.  That’s $300 million less that the government can do something with.  To put that in perspective; the Conservative budget, which Layton and Iggy both said they would vote against, offered $300 million to low income seniors as part of the Guaranteed Income Supplement program!  So what they basically said was that they’d rather pay for an election, which by all rights should result in the same government, than give money to your grandmother. If this isn’t abuse of power, I don’t know what is!

What these guys seem to forget is they work for us. Given that 165 of 308 seats house didn’t go to Harper last time around, it’s pretty clear that he isn’t the Prime Minister of choice for over half of the country, but that doesn’t mean we should have an election every 18 months to try again!

Now, I am not surprised about that. What I am surprised by is some of the debates I have read. In one of the debate essentially a Care Worker for rape victims argued that his free speech allowed him to call for boycotts, apologies,  and ultimately eradication of something if he doesn’t agree with it.

Correct me if I am wrong, but the idea of free speech is not to limit the availability of potentially offensive things from existence. It is to understand that things exist which you may not agree with. Freedom is choosing what to agree with and what not to. And as long as no one is forcing you against your will to change your opinion, your freedom is unaffected.

Eradicating everything that has the potential to be offensive is absurd! The world would be pretty empty if we removed anything that potentially could offend people.

I am not saying the joke isn’t offensive and isn’t hurtful to a significant group of rape victims and their friends and relatives, but what I am saying is that that doesn’t mean the joke shouldn’t exist.

Recently some American religious fundamentalists decided that burning a Qur’an might be a fun thing to do. And almost everyone up to and including the President of the United States condemned it. I say almost, because one particularly public figure actually made the most sane argument of all:

In a strange way I’m here to defend his right to do that. I happen to think that it is distasteful. … But the First Amendment protects everybody, and you can’t say that we’re going to apply the First Amendment to only those cases where we are in agreement. … If you want to be able to say what you want to say when the time comes that you want to say it, you have to defend others no matter how much you disagree with them - Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City

It is exactly what should have been said of the situation. Finding something disgusting is not a reason for it not to exist. Potentially putting lives at risk is not a reason to not do something. You know what else puts people’s lives at risk? A war in Afghanistan…

Similarly, opposing  a mosque being built near the former World Trade Center site because it happened to be Muslims who were responsible for the attacks is like banning black trench coats in Highschools because the Columbine Attackers happened to wear them. It might be considered sympathetic and kind for the church leader to abandon their plans, but it certainly isn’t a necessity.

Without sounding cliché: Can’t we all just get along?

Sometimes there is a compromise. Like censoring arbitrary swear words on shows like ‘The Late Late Show’ which airs at 12:30am! But as far as I am concerned, if you are up at that time of the night and offended, go to fucking bed! I love how sitcoms now use douchebag like it’s a definite article, but we still can’t get over fuck and shit. Who decided a noun referring to a piece of cleaning equipment is somehow less offensive than a synonym for sex and a noun meaning feces?  Apparently some douchebag.

If you don’t like 30 Rock, don’t watch it (Similar to my unalterable hatred of the ridiculous waste of 22 minutes an episode that is ‘Two and Half Men’). If you don’t think burning the Qur’an is productive, don’t burn one. But don’t, whatever you do, tell me I can’t watch 30 Rock because you find its content offensive, or tell me that I cannot destroy any object I own, regardless of the meaning it may or may not have to you or someone else, no matter how distasteful or disgusting you find my preferences.

And if you hate the word fuck for some reason other than somehow society is convinced that the devil spawned the word himself, don’t use it.

The articles I have read have used this as an excuse to bash the practice of “1 password for all sites” and the use of easily guessed security questions like “hometown” or “mother’s maiden name” which are ubiquitous it seems in the land of web sign up sheets. It’s almost as if some assmonkey whose only knowledge of security was the aluminum key that locked his pansy-ass diary decided one day it would be great if we could secure our most personal data using such totally secret, impossible-to-find-out data such as our pet’s name or the street we live on! Yeah, no one would be able to penetrate that code!

But I don’t so much have a beef with this. It’s security practices in general, both corporately and personally that are appalling! We focus so much energy on enforcing ridiculous rules that are absolutely unsubstantiated and yet no energy on the flaws in the human logic of password selection.

Here are the fallacy’s behind my favourite policies:

1) Change your password every 3 months & don’t use the same password for 10 changes

The genius that came up with this should be shot in the chest simply because it is now become the most ridiculous belief since the Hayley’s comet morons killed themselves to ride it to utopia. Would you change the lock on your house or your car doors every 3 months? Hell! Most people don’t change them when they move or sell their car! How many previous owners have a key to your house do you think? I have never figured out the logic behind this absolute waste of time policy that does about as much good as putting duct tape over your monitor to stop UV radiation. If someone finds out your password, they aren’t going to wait for 3 months then go, “drat, foiled again!” when it fails. It only takes a few minutes to download the entire contents of your harddrive, so by the logic of preventing data theft we should change our password every 5 minutes, right? If anything this helps hackers, because people are not random! We get lazy and append a number or capitalize a different letter to form our new password, so a hacker can guess for months on end and, once he has “your pattern”, will perpetually have access to your account. And this is the reason why not using the same password for 10 changes makes no sense! If anything this encourages using mypassword0 through mypassword9.
I also love the idea of “3 months” and “10 changes” seemingly being industry standards. What possible study could have resulted in these numbers being determined as the “optimal” values?
I love policies that seem picked out of a hat and then spoken about like they are a gospel to the industry. As if 91 days is a magic number for a criminal to guess your password, so better change it before day 90!

2) Password strength monitors and post-its

“Don’t tell anyone your PIN”, “Never write down your password”, “We will never ask for your password in an email”. BUT what we will do is analyze every character and tell you if your password is “strong” enough. Strong enough for what? To knock out Superman? To cut a diamond? We are talking about basic mathematics here. A password of length 5 made up of all small letter only has about 12 million combinations, throw in one capital and it is about 60 million combinations. Throw in a number somewhere on top of that and you are now at 3.5 billion combinations! That is a pretty big number. But consider most companies/websites have a 3 wrong and you’re out policy (A policy that does make sense), that is a hell of a lot of attempts on your password and if you can’t figure out after the ten thousandth time your account was locked that someone was hacking you than you deserve to be shot like the guy who proposed the stupid policy above.
The thing here is that the combination of letters, number, capitals and special characters is almost irrelevant, the most secure password is random, entirely random. I am still using a random letter combination I got generated for me by Geocities when I had my first webpage over 12 years ago. Sure, mathmatically it is probably trivial for a random generator to exhaustively guess it, most personal computers can do 1 billion+ calculations a second. But the point is it ain’t that likely! Just don’t use a simple dictionary word like “idiot” or “password” and you are probably in good shape.
I also love how secure it is that we are typing in a password that no one is supposed to know, but it can tell you “how strong” it is, meaning somewhere your password characters are analyzed. How is that different than me saying “psst, tell me your password 1 character at a time and I’ll tell you if you need more numbers or capitals, but don’t worry, my mind will forget it immediately”.
And of course this is where post its come in. The problem is not writing your password down, it is writing it down in the context of your computer and login. For instance:
Stupid: Writing your password in permanent ink on your monitor
Bad: Writing your password down and placing it in the top right drawer at the office
Less Bad: Writing it on the birthday square of your mother in a day planner you keep with you that has no reference to what that random word could mean or what login is associated with it.
Even better. Hiding it in a tattoo on your ass, written backwards and upside down. Of course you’d have 10 of them and have to re-design it every 3 months….
Writing a random word and placing it in a random location is not a bad idea at all! In fact if anything it’s a safeguard in case someone needs access to your data!

Locking all of your secrets behind a single alphanumeric combination is as logical as locking a door to a convertable or keeping your safe key hanging on the number dial. However in this day of technology we have to have something to allow us secured access to our information, and until we all scan our eyes, fingers and ass prints into a global database or want to prick our finger for DNA each time we want to read email, we are stuck with it. Be smart and just don’t fall into the trap and think that your security policies actually have as much bearing on security as they do on wasting your time. Oh and I know your mother’s maiden name and eye colour, so don’t use those as your “secret” questions.

I recall the first scam I encountered abroad was in Rome when I  visited my friend Sarah who had lived there for several months.. Along our walking tour a man offered her a rose as a gift, she declined rather poignantly and continued to walk on. I inquired shortly after why she turned down such a nice gesture. She replied that if she took the rose I would then be expected to pay for it. An interesting and simple scam that acts upon a female’s desire for something nice and a male’s inherent ego to be the provider and not wishing to disappoint his partner.(Ah conventional gender roles, is there any area of life you don’t penetrate?)

So how do we define a scam or a con? If a con is pulled off well, it may be that the victim wouldn’t even know it was a scam. Sort of like the tree falling in the woods making that inaudible sound (an oxymoron I suspect, however entirely suitable to the analogy), is it a crime if the victim doesn’t feel victimized?

For example: In Beijing I watched an artist chisel a beautiful image of the Great Wall onto a small piece of marble. I asked the price and was given a response which was well below what I would have been willing to pay for such a unique piece of work. I happily paid and continued on my way. What if the price of this was much lower in reality and he had in fact taken me for a rube? If I was willing to pay more, then really in my mind I got a great deal, all this while the artist was potentially laughing all the way to the bank.

So perhaps the definition of a scam is written by the victim and not the perpetrator. An interesting notion in that this fits my previous discussion on living in the reality that we ourselves create. Not everyone experiences the same scam the same way. Some people truly think the queen is one of the other 2 cards in a three card monte game. I pity those poor bastards.

Then enter movies such as the Die Hards, Clooney’s and originally Sinatra’s Ocean’s <insert numbers here> series. Each of these contain elaborate plans with an end goal of financial gain. Maybe the last sentence could be a definition for a con as well. But we never hear about these plots in real life. If someone attempted to pull of a Nakatomi heist or rip off the Bellagio, it would be on Twitter in real time and on CNN before Bruce Willis got in an elevator shaft.

In India the scams were not sophisticated at all. In general they were mainly just lies like: “No No, this is a gift” or “I am an employee here” or “I don’t want money”. And here in my opinion is the problem with cons: Everything could be a con. Charity donations, the moon landing, (dare I say religion?) etc. In India we met an English couple and discussed this very aspect. Because of the fear-mongering instilled in us by Lonely Planet no matter who spoke to you, there was a little voice somewhere in the back left side of the brain saying “How is this guy conning me?”.

If a tourist guide to the US outlined all the possible measures for “protection against terrorism” you’d do exactly what the American media does to their population already: Put them in a constant state of fear. A recent example is the (rather stupid idea of a) photo shoot of Air Force One in New York at low altitudes. Immediately the thoughts of NY’ers turned to 9/11, their “little voice” immediately turned to what they were programmed to turn to, a connection between low flying planes and terrorism, just as ours minds in India turned to the connection of Lonely Planet warnings and people wanting to scam us.

We are constantly scammed. We pay more money for beer in Skydome than in a pub across the road an economic scam that happens in all wakes of our consumerism (explored in The Undercover Economist, an excellent read). People get screwed on Ebay every day by “mildly used” products and P&G owns several brands of toothpaste so they can charge varying prices for each and skim all the demand it can.

Ever wonder why you can send snail mail to your MP or to the Prime Minister without a stamp? Because the government way back when invented mail as a way of communication for itself. It then decided that the public could use the service, but instead of funding it on generic government revenues, they would tax mail users on a per use basis. The fact that you paid the tax was put on your parcel in the form of a “stamp”. Nowadays we pay tax on top of the price of a stamp. We are paying a tax on a tax! Sounds like a scam to me…

They may not be scams in the traditional definition, but then again if, as I stated above, we define our own sense of scams, and if none of the above is considered a scam by you, you’re never scammed! Or, alternatively the collective human population is the most gullible group ever.

I was going to call my parents to catch up with them, but my VoIP phone needs Internet…

I wanted to write this blog entry, but… etc.

We are surrounded by Internet so much these days, that it is seemingly becoming almost a necessity of life. I tried calling an embassy the other day for information and their telephone line directed me to the website that contained the phone number I used to call them; very helpful.

While 84% of households in Canada and 74% in the USA had Internet in 2008, that is still beat by 90% of Iceland and 86% of Norway (like there is anything else to do in those countries anyway).

What else on this planet is as ubiquitous as the Internet? What else reaches so many generations and so many business verticals? Maybe driving? It is estimated that under 200 million Americans drive, so what’s that, 60%? That comes close. But then again, I have driven only a dozen times in 3 years. Which would you rather go without your car or your Internet?

With the web becoming more and more mobile, being connected is not only becoming easier, but it is becoming more inescapable. A new technology called MiFi is being advertised now in the USA. BUY THIS STOCK! This technology will be wanted by anyone who travels anywhere, ever! But this just goes to show how much we crave the Internet. We now have what is essentially a portable router to carry around so we never have to be disconnected anywhere a cellphone works, which these days is pretty much everywhere, except maybe anywhere North of Toronto or West of Thunder Bay.

The CEO of Google recently gave a speech to a group of University graduates where he told them to turn off their computers! And how rightfully so, except 5 years from now he’ll have to amend his statement to “Turn off your cellphones, toasters, coffee mugs, and iEngagementRings” in order for people to truly be disconnected.

I signed up for an account after some prodding from other fellow geeks and went on my way exploring my life 140 characters at a time. What I found out quite quickly is: My life in 140 characters is quite boring. I don’t mean to say I lead a boring life, in fact I argue far from it, but my thoughts and experiences as a whole are not sum-up-able in such arbitrarily small space (I mean even a txt message has 165 characters).

Stephen Fry, the “UK poster boy” for Twitter, tweets non-stop from what airport he is in, to what he had for lunch, to the amazing sunset he sees in Singapore. Now don’t get me wrong I am a huge fan of Stephen Fry. His brilliant comedy and sharp wit is some of the best the UK has to offer. (Watch QI for an excellent display) But I don’t really need to know about every little thing he does, especially since: a) I will never meet him to discuss those thoughts and  b) I appreciate him because of his comedy based on his life experiences, not his life experiences themselves.

Then I stumbled across Christopher Walken. How, here is a Twitter-er that actually is funny and only posted when something is necessary. Only one problem: It isn’t Christopher Walken!

This started my brain in motion. This is the Internet, and as is too often the case the hot blonde 19 year old you are hitting on is a fat 45 year old Star Trek fan trying to make it big in the “Dear Penthouse” letter writing business. Nothing on the web is real. This blog isn’t real, it is a series of 1s and 0s cleverly placed to form something we can read. You don’t really have proof that the Stoss you know and love (well…know and put up with) is writing this article. In fact you have no idea where this article is even stored! Truth be told, I am writing it and I have no idea where it is stored. I pay an amount of money to people to let me use a computer and tie that space to a memorable mnemonic. (Fellow geeks will recall the original CompuServ who thought that complex number letter combination would be memorable, yeah, not so much.)

To some extent, aren’t we all a bit thinner, a bit more built, a bit smarter and a bit more popular on the web? Think about your Facebook, do you post the 3am picture of you stumbling drunk down a back alley to piss, or do you post the one that has perfect lighting and shows a great smile with you giving the shocker to thin air? We form an online persona to escape reality and befriend people we haven’t spoken to in 15 years just for the ability to brag that we have more than 500 hundred “friends”.

We don’t show our real selves on the net for the same reason we dress a bit nicer at work, or for the theatre, or when we go out to a club: We want people we don’t know to see us the way we want to be seen, not the way we actually are. We spend all this time in public school being told “be yourself” when the truth is, in ever y area of our lives we are someone different. This is actually an area discussed in The Tipping Point a fantastic book that in one chapter discusses how our personalities are situational and mutable, not constant. You could even extend this theory to divorce, work problems etc. When the situations change, your mutate your personality, unknowingly and change the former perception of you to other parties.

This isn’t going to change, and in fact I don’t want it to change. I enjoy being my-multiple-selves and I enjoy each wake of life as much as I can, but I am also aware that “I” is not a singular word. So enjoy your life, use Twitter and Facebook and MySpace, but don’t be fooled into believing you are that person. You are who you are, not what people read about you.

These are police officers we are talking about! In most cases all they have is a knee-jerk reaction time, or a split second to make a very difficult decision. We are literally listening to a group of Monday morning quarterbacks tell us what “They would have done” and that is absolute bullshit. I have never faced a situation where a person was directly threatening my life or the life of others around me (although perhaps I should get myself in those situations, according to Die Hard 4, Transformers and most action movies all I have to do to get the hot chick is save the world), but I can certainly say that my frame of mine would not be the same as having to make a decision about über-stressful work.  Sure, hitting send on an email to an executive with the word “fuck” in it isn’t smart, but it isn’t a mistake that is going to kill me!

In the same regard, an actress recently died while skiing. A headline in the UK from this tragedy: “Natasha refuses £6 helmet”, are you kidding me?! A woman has died and before the dust settles on her grave we are starting to say that “helmet action is overdue”? The article I linked even says that 2 people who died (of the VAST 3 he talks about) were wearing helmets and still died! Dying is a risk of being MORTAL it is what makes life so much fun to live! if there wasn’t a fear of dying the X-games wouldn’t exist!

Everyday people die from smoking and car accidents, and yet we legally sell cigarettes and hand out driver’s licenses to anyone who wants them, but 1 famous woman dies and someone decides it’s time that helmets be mandated for skiing,  what happens when someone dies after that law is passed? Is the next logical step to wrap all people everywhere in styrofoam?

We are so bent on saving everyone, that we forget what rational safety is.

Skiing has been around since over 1000 years! How could we have survived that sport for so long if helmets are mandatory for it?

Taser’s have been around for 35 years, and we are just now realizing that people can be injured by injecting them with electricity?!

Wake up people, death is inevitable and no bylaw or government mandate will solve that.

What I do find wrong is how adults can extend this principal well past its overdue point.  But unlike a library book, the fee is not laughable.  Adults refuse to do all sorts of things based on nothing more than a belief: they refuse to try the brocolli.

This is the root of many major problems in our society. Racisim, gay bashing, unequal rights. If people would give certain things a chance, instead of blindly forming an opinion, then the world wouldn’t be full of insensitive babies. Plus, if this happened, the French may cease to exist…

As we age, the arguments become more unresonable. Your parents could coax you into eating Brocolli by saying, if you eat 3 pieces of it, you get dessert, once you “negoatiated” down to 2 pieces, you got dessert. However:

This is a typical coversation between a leafs fan and a Canadians fan:
Habs fan: Hey man, why do you hate the Habs?
Leafs fan: Cause they suck, man.
Hab fan: Well, historically the Habs have a better record.
Leafs fan: Fuck you.

And…. no one gets dessert… but they may get drunk.

We have problems as adults in trying or accepting new things. People can try skydiving, white water rafting etc. But we hear about two men in love and we think that the second coming of the devil is nigh.

In short, we are adults.  Act like it! You don’t have to accept things, but understand them before forming your opinion. Except of course people in hood, you just keep on shooting eachother.
By they way: For all the kids out there, eat your damn Brocolli.