Curfew?

To help reduce vandalism, people have been proposing a curfew. Presumably, the people doing the vandalism are under 18 and presumbaly, nobody under the age of 18 does anything after dark. Presumably, getting young people off the streets at night will stop vandalism.
I used to track graffiti on a university campus. The bulk of the people there were legally adults. Vandalism still happened though. Quite a lot of it was meaningless. Quite a lot of it also happened during the day. The vast majority of the minors there either couldn’t write or simply weren’t tall enough to pull off pretty much any of the vandalism that happened there.
Chances are all a curfew will do is remove the minors who are innocently hanging out in well frequented locations. We’re not going to stop the science geek doing astronomy in a soccer field at night, nor should we. We’re definately not going to stop the vandals. A lot of areas of the city, like mine, don’t usually have lots of police roaming around.
Maybe it’s a little idealistic of me, but can’t we just go after vandals the way police caught that guy vandalizing the Capital Xtra boxes in Ottawa? Identify a problem, try to find a pattern, catch the people doing the vandalism and prosecute the offender. For what it’s worth, the guy they eventually caught wasn’t a minor.

HIV – the more serious topic for tonight

There’ve been a lot of big things in the news lately, pedophiles, terrorists and the International AIDS conference in Toronto. HIV tends to be one of those big hot button topics. People are dieing because of it and there’s many conflicting views on the best way to go about fighting it. There’s also a lot of conflicting views about it.
A lot of this has to do with just how difficult it is to transmit HIV. It isn’t airborn, it doesn’t infect food, and you can’t get it from water. Instead, the vectors for the virus is the exchange of bodily fluids, typically from sex and intervenus drug use. This means that it’s highly preventable. This has created an impression that people who have the disease are either sexually promiscuious and/or homosexual or recreationally abuse drugs.
Hence I figure this is why some people have little sympathy for people who are suffering from AIDS. It seems like fairly reasonable thinking. If were were to just take precautions like test people regularly , avoid sharing needles and practice safer sex, we can still indulge in what’s generally viewed as socially irresponsible behavior without contracting HIV.
Of course, there’s a serious problem with this sentiment. I used to work at a job which was part hands on industrial stuff and part office work. I wore proper safety equipment when I felt it was needed. In the shop, it was recognized the equipment could send things flying and possibly hit your eyes, so I wore my safety glasses there. In places like the lunch room, the office, the restrooms, it was generally accepted that eye protection was unneccisary because you weren’t really at risk of eye injuries.
The people who view HIV as a disease that affects people who have sex with multple partners or inject drugs do not view themselves as being at risk of contracting HIV and thus do not take precautions to protect themselves. HIV is not like a puzzle, you don’t need to collect pieces from several different people to build the virus. It only takes one.
It really is sad that people go around with these impressions. It is a disease, it is a virus. HIV is not an insturment of morality and that mindset is becoming a problem.
As a bit of a side note, I caught the candle light vigil on TV. There was a native american smudge cerimony in it. I saw singing and fanning smoke with a feather. Maybe this is just a touchy subject, but I don’t see people jumping up and down warning us to pray for Toronto because they had a non-judeochristian cerimony out in public. Lets not read too much into that.

Lighter Note First

I just saw the end of the Gundam Seed series on YTV and I’m absolutely shocked at what they did to it. I haven’t seen the Japanese version. My issue isn’t with a westernizing things during translation or dumbing it down like a lot of complaints about anime. Rather I’m shocked that they robbed people of one of the most important scenes in the series. Usually the credits run at a certain time, it’s the same clip so YTV puts that on one side of the screen and runs an advertisement on the other side. Audio for the advertisement runs louder than the show and then it goes back. Well, I was watching the wreckage of the final great battle float by as one of the last survivors made an appeal for everyone to stop fighting. At least I got to hear the start of it before things started getting smaller and smaller and floated off to the side. Everything led up to that last part and they decided to advertise over it. I am very disappointed.

Foreign, not Stupid

I never felt sorry for kids who got a chance to go on an exchange till now. This afternoon, I was riding a train with someone showing an exchange student the town. One of the wonderful explainations I heard was “Tomorrow, train busy. Lots of people.” Then she pointed to each seat and said, “People here, people here, people here, people here.” English wasn’t her first language. Her english wasn’t really that good, but that’s still a rather strange way of explaining something. The people who go on these things are bright kids. We don’t really need to spell everything out nearly that slowly.

Back to the Grind

I just had some relatives visit me, my grandmother, an aunt, uncle and a cousin. We went on quite a few road trips out of town. This seems to be a place that people go to see all the places around it. There’s a lot of exciting stuff around Calgary if you’re into nature. My cousin isn’t so she’s been kind of bored.
That being over, I’m back to trying to find work. I’m still trying to figure out how I want to live my life. Somehow, I get the feeling that I’m more of a small town guy. I’m just sick of commuting everywhere. It would have to be somewhere that I can still reach the big city though for when I want those obscure things that really can’t be purchased just anywhere. One of the things that I miss most about Ottawa was being close to so many grocery stores that it was trivial to go out and pick up a few things. It was even trivial to go out and compare prices, but I kept a good database of that sort of stuff. I’m not close to anything like that in Calgary, but there’s places I could move in the city to have the same convience. I’m skeptical that I’ll find a job in the same area though.
There isn’t really anything for me to loose by giving it a shot, so may as well keep that in mind. Hopefully I’ll find something soon.

Configuring Firefox Yet Again

Somehow the latest software update has rendered my copy of portable firefox useless. I had to delete and reinstall. So, now I’m browsing through thousands of exentions again trying to get it back the way I had it. I have to rebuild my bookmarks after this. Anyway, I’m finding some rather humorous and superflous ones that I just might try. Getting this thing setup is a lot of hassle.

Audit this…

I didn’t get a transit pass last month, but I got one this month. Apparently I’m supposed to keep my receipt for 7 years in case I get audited. This isn’t like medical expenses where they print you a nice receipt on a laser printer or any other common tax receipt which tends to preserve well. This is a flimsy piece of thermal paper. I can put a paper clip on this and it’ll slowly develop a line. Leaving this on a car dash board will darken it and render it unreadable. I’m told I should hang on to the pass as well and it generally preserves better.
Self employed people have been keeping these things around for a while now, but this is new to me. What’s the best way to keep this sort of stuff from degrading over several years. I just scanned it for now. I wonder how many times I can scan this before it darkens. Maybe it’s time for an experiment.