I had a rather confusing experience last night that caused me to rethink a lot of the assumptions I'd made about this city.

Poesy and I had spent the evening in Chinatown's night market and were waiting at Terminal station to go our separate ways when an older gentleman appropached us and in very broken English asked us if we knew where he might find a hotel.

After some thinking on our part, we decided that the closest one we could think of was the Sandman near Stadium station and given the man's sketchy understanding of the local language as well of the area, I offered to take him there myself. It was sort of on my way anyway.

But this post isn't about Good deeds for strangers, it's about what it's like for tourists to try to experience this city and more to the point, what we can expect in 2010 when the world comes to our door.

This city is an embarrassment in the area of tourism. The transit system aside, just finding an intersection in this city is near impossible without accosting strangers, and in many cases, the strangers are hesitant to stop and help given their past unpleasant experiences with panhandlers.

There are so few wayfinding maps in Vancouver and a complete absence of them available in any other language but English. There are no tourism kiosks anywhere, especially after 5pm and all of this means that something as simple as finding a place to crash for the night becomes increadibly difficult -- even if English is your first language.

As someone who's done a reasonable amount of travelling in countries where he spoke even less of the local tongue than the aforementioned visitor, I can assure you that none of the places I visited, with the exception of Yeosu, Korea (a tiny town in a moncultural, insular country) did a poorer job of helping tourists than this one.

Now here's the kicker: the man who was curious about Vancouver and came here to experience this beautiful city but couldn't even find a place to sleep wasn't from Poland or even France. He was from this country, a little town east of Quebec City. In a nation that prides itself on having two official languages and in a city that claims to be multicultural this is very, very sad.

I'm open to suggestions here. Melanie has a plan to make wayfinding on Skytrain easier by creating (actually useful) route maps and pasting them up all over the place, but I'd like to hear some more ideas about how we could help guests like this man in the future. I'll bring these ideas to the next Mapping & Wayfinding VPSN working group.

This was the main tourist attraction near our hostel, a beautiful pagoda right next to a Buddhist temple.

The view of the courtyard from just inside the Asakusa temple.

This is a fragment of the density that is Shibuya. I've heard that Bladerunner was modelled after this.

The Meiji Shrine is really a great big part in the heart of Tokyo.

This is the present home of the Emperor of Japan. The role is purely symbolic now (unlike Canada, he isn't officially the Head of State), but he's still treated as though he is.

One of the few good shots taken of me on this trip. This is in Hama Rikyu Teien, a giant garden within walking distance of the world-renouned Tsukiji fish market.

Susan made a face for this one to be funny, so don't worry, she's not mad :-)

Susan loves ladybugs

The The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building is one of the tallest in the city and they offer a free elevator ride to the top so you can check out the skyline.

The seat of Imperial power for nearly 1000years, this is was shot in the garden of the Imperial Palace, Kyoto.

This is the closest they would let us get, but I still feel all special for being there.

As part of the lantern festival in Gion, this pagoda was illuminated.

Everything is cute in Japan, even the cookies.

The view from our lunch stop in Okinawa.

I've not been very studious about my Japan update and for that I'm sorry. Life's been a bit crazy since I returned "home" and I guess I figured that if I put up the pictures, I could put it off a bit but as the details of the whole trip are beginning to fade from memory, this is becoming more urgent.

So where shall I start? Lets start with a good one: Susan is awesome. Our relationship before the trip was a rather disconnected one. We knew each other only a little when I left Toronto, but I honestly believe that we've grown much closer as a result of this trip. It's always a risk, choosing to travel a foreign country with a friend and I'm really glad that it worked out so well. She compensated for my weaknesses and I for hers. I just thought that I might get that out first.

General

Japan is an interesting place. Though not as foreign as you may think, it's still quite different from Canada. This became quite clear to me no less than 15minutes after we landed at Narita Airport: I was fingerprinted as I came through customs. Those of you who know me know that this was quite traumatic for me. I've managed to go 29years without being treated like a criminal and here I was, at customs in a foreign country where I didn't know my rights in this regard. The man pointed at the little computer, and holding my passport he said: "Fingers. Put". I complied and it's really been bothering me ever since. I've even found myself trying to think of ways to mutilate the tips of those two fingers...

So yeah, Japanese folk seem to have fewer concerns about how much power the State has over them. This probably bothered me more than anything during my stay. A close second though would be the social acceptance of smoking over there. They still ask you: "Smoking or non?" when you enter a restaurant. Nasty. At least they can't smoke on the subway.

The subways were a bit of a disappointment really. All those stories you hear about pushers on the trains? Never saw one. In fact, the trains we were on never got any more crowded than a TTC or Seoul subway car does. From what I hear though, the JR Line trains from the surrounding areas are what started this rumour, as they support the suburbanites, but since we never went there, it never happened.

Tokyo

Transit is a good place from which to segue into Tokyo though. My gods it was impressive. Not so much the stations or the trains themselves, but the sheer number of lines and how the city manages its mass. Tokyo supports within its borders the entire population of Canada. 12million in Tokyo proper, and 33million when you include the suburbs.

But here's the kicker: you wouldn't know it. Excluding a few famous intersections, the focal points of the city are sufficiently dispersed that you don't have the "downtown" problem that plagues most North American cities. Instead of funnelling all 33million people into a single urbanised core, Tokyo supports many, many "cores", each with a mix of residential, commercial and even industrial uses. People will often live in Shinjuku and work in Roppongi, both "downtowns" in their own right, but within the same city. For the Vancouver people, imagine if Burnaby were a real destination for people, or if it wasn't unique to live in Vancouver but work in Richmond. Now imagine that all of that space were one great big city. That's Tokyo -- but with real transit.

One more note on the transit: it's massive. It's a mesh of 13 subway lines and 282 stations (not including the commuter rail (JR) lines) criss-crossing above and below ground, all different colours, sporting hard-to-remember names and managed by two different private companies. Now, imagine that even with all of that complexity, that it was super-easy to navigate: Each station is sequentially numbered and colour-coded so if you're going from A to B, you find the coloured line you're likely to take on the many free multi-lingual maps, find the start and end points and take their numbers. If you're going from 13 to 26, then you make sure that the numbers are getting bigger as you ride. If not, you're going the wrong way. Transit way-finding in Tokyo was never a problem.

Another common myth people hear about Tokyo is that it's a concrete desert, but nothing could be further from the truth. True, much of it is paved, but there are beautiful gardens everywhere, and I'm not talking about these lame Toronto-style parkettes, or these new mini parks that are popping up in Vancouver, I'm talking about acres of tended streams, trees and flowers right in the midst of the city. Some like the The Hama Rikyu Teien Gardens near the Tsukiji Fish Market cost a few hundred yen (100¥ was roughly $1.30CAD), and others like the Meiji Shrine are totally free. Beautiful landscaped public spaces nestled between the urban spaces to help keep people sane. It's really very impressive.

We only had three days in Tokyo though, so we couldn't possibly have seen everything we wanted to. Squaresoft and Joypolis would have to wait for another time. We did however see the busiest intersection in the world, in an area of town called Shibuya, visit Asakusa for its beautiful old Buddhist temple, walk through Shinjuku to see some awesome architecture as well as the Imperial Palace (though we couldn't wake up early enough to get inside the grounds). Tokyo is awesome, but expensive. You should go, but make sure that you're prepared to drop about $75CAD a day... assuming that you're staying in a hostel.

Kyoto

Like every rational country, Japan links its major cities with high-speed rail that plugs into local transit. You can take the subway from Asakusa to Tokyo station in 20minutes and without leaving the building, hop on a bullet train to a city hundreds of kilometres away. We were in Kyoto in a matter of hours.

Kyoto is pretty much the opposite of Tokyo. Where Tokyo is sky scrapers and 33million people, Kyoto is a quiet, traditional Japanese town riddled with centuries-old temples and a less-than-impressive subway system. You don't come to Kyoto for the bustle and night life, you come for the culture, history and peace.

Susan had booked us into Tani House, a hostel that bills itself as a traditional home converted for hostel living. We got a whole house to ourselves, complete with kitchen, living room, bathroom and a few bedrooms and the old woman who runs the place even made us tea when we arrived. We ate on the floor, we slept on the floor in the paper-walled bedroom and let the high-energy memory from Tokyo fade away. It's a great place to stay, I muchly recommend :-)

While digging around for a link to Tani House, I happened upon this YouTube video of the interior. Check it out if you're interested.

We didn't have a lot of time there, so sightseeing of Kyoto was rather rushed. We spent one day visiting the Imperial Palace1 complete with English language tour and acres of cherry blossoms and continued into the rest of the city to do some general sightseeing. Kyoto is divided by a massive river that the public uses for everything from jogging to picnics to makeouts. It's really quite beautiful. Have I said that enough yet? We spent an evening in Gion at a lantern festival, and we even paid a rather entertained cab driver to take us to The Nintendo Building. That's right, I can has culture.

Kyoto: Learn Your Pronunciation

One final note on Kyoto before I move on. We realised early on in our stay there that as Kyoto is overrun with beautiful old temples, the locals (and for the sake of this story, the cab drivers) usually navigate by the temple names rather than street intersections. This can be dangerous if you don't have the pronunciation down.

We'd done everything right. Susan had acquired a map of the city and directions to our hostel. We'd found the temple nearest our hostel (Daikaku-ji) and circled it on the map and after a long day of sightseeing, figured that a cab ride home was only appropriate. We handed the map to the driver, pointed at the circled portion and we were off.

It wasn't long before Susan and I both started to feel as though we weren't on the right track. The surrounding areas looked less and less familiar as the ride continued on and eventually the city began to fade away. With fewer and fewer lights on the streets outside, we started to freak out just a little. We asked the driver: "Daitoku-ji?" and he smiled, though looking a little confused and nodded. We had put all of our faith in a map and a stranger and now there was a lake coming up on our right.

30minutes and about 30 000¥ later, he pulls into a dark, deserted temple and asks for his cash. We panic. Much confusion ensues. Clearly he was sure that he'd taken us to the right place, but this was obviously not where we wanted to go. The driver figured that we did in fact want to be at this temple, we just didn't know where our hostel was from here. He turned off the meter and took us a little further into town where he proceeded to ask strangers for us regarding the location of this "Tani House" place. No luck. We got him to take us somewhere near civilisation, paid the incredibly patient man and got out. It was 10pm and we were on a strange street in a foreign country with a phrase book, an (apparently useless) map and just under about 100000¥.

It took us some time (and a few fruitless enquiries with non-English-speaking locals) to figure out that when we'd initially circled the temple on the map, we'd gotten a syllable wrong. Daikaku-ji was in the middle of nowhere. Daitoku-ji was where we wanted to be. It hadn't been a problem before because we'd followed the aforementioned directions to our hostel the first time.

So let this be a lesson to you kids:

• Get a map
• Make sure you've got the right place on that map.
• Trust the cab drivers in Kyoto, they're awesome, but feel free to second-guess yourself.
• Make sure that you have lots of cash -- just in case.

Tangent: Language

For those who already know, I apologise for stating the seemingly obvious, but since I didn't know, I must assume that I'm not the only one. Written Japanese is in fact three different character sets: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Most people know this much but what surprised and impressed me was the fact that each of these character sets have their own purpose -- ie. they're not exactly interchangeable.

Kanji for example is probably the closest thing to what Westerners often assume all Asian languages are like. Each symbol is a single character (as opposed to Korean which is a composite of symbols representing a syllable) which represents an idea or thought. "Home" has it's own symbol, as does "food" and "vehicle". These symbols are then combined into statements, often only a few symbols long that culturally mean something. "Car parkade" cannot be represented in Kanji, instead they symbol for "vehicle" and "place" are used and everyone understands.

The problem with Kanji though is that it's limiting. You can't really create full sentences with it easily. For this, hiragana is provided as the sort of "glue". The symbols are noticeably different and actually "spell out" into words rather than independently represent ideas. I don't really understand much more than this.

Lastly, there's katakana, which as my guidebook explained, is often used for foreign words. My name would be spelt with katakana as would "Vancouver" or probably even "meat loaf" as there's likely is no Japanese word for it. katakana appears deceptively similar to hiragana (for the uninitiated) so understanding signage with a little guidebook is really tough.

If there's anything that I've taken away from this trip, it's that I apparently have an aptitude for languages, or at the very least a sincere interest. I managed to pick up the basics in no time and have little touble handling navigation and simple conversation. It's fun! You should try :-)

If you're interested in finding more information about the various writing types in Japan, I found this handy site that covers not only the modern usage, but the historical roots of all three types as well.

Okinawa

Frankly, I was surprised that you can't take a train to Okinawa. Of course I knew that it was an island, but I figured that Japan of all places would have tried to run a train there :-) Sadly, this wasn't the case though, so we took a train from Kyoto station to Kansai airport in Osaka and boarded a short flight to Okinawa where we met Susan's friend Yasuko (pronounced "yes-ko") who would serve as our awesome guide for the duration of our stay in Japan.

The differences between Okinawa and either of our previous destinations are night & day. Everything from climate (tropical) to urban design (far more suburban) to culture (it's like another country) is drastically different from either Tokyo or Kyoto. Where Tokyo has skyscrapers, Okinawa has decaying low-rises, instead of subways, there are highways. The presence of Americans too is staggering. There's a US air force base within the city limits and everywhere you look you see American military types with their families. It's amazing how your personal feel for safety changes as well. In Kyoto Susan watched a girl leave her laptop on a table in a Starbucks while she went to the bathroom, but that kind of thing is much less likely in Okinawa.

But outside of the city, Okinawa is surrounded with tropical forest. Yasuko drove us all over the countryside to holy shrines and sleepy little villages where we took pictures of the flora, were eaten by bugs and enjoyed the scenery. We ate at a little place called "Pizza and Sky" with an amazing view and visited a series of cottage factories where people were making glass sculpture by hand. This is the kind of thing you just can't do on your own and Yasuko made this possible. She is awesome.

Our last big stop in our Okinawa trip was the Churaumi Aquarium a massive building on the shore that plays host to hundreds of different aquatic species. There was the traditional dolphin show as well as the biggest fish tank I've ever seen. I saw a fish that was bigger than a house dude. Crazy, crazy stuff.

Going Home

All of the above took place in the space of a week. There was more of course but as it is, this post is already way too long. Japan is just fascinating. With its mountain of cute toys (Hello Kitty anyone?), ancient culture and honourable people, it's an amazing place to experience. I'll have to go back, as I just didn't have enough time for everything I wanted to see. Next time I'll have to spend more time in Tokyo and Kyoto and be sure to visit Hiroshima as well. When I do return though, I hope that Susan will come with me too. She was fun :-)

Footnotes

1. Kyoto was actually the original seat of the Emperor from way back in the 8th Century. In fact, "Kyoto" means "capital city". It was later moved to Edo (Tokyo) in the 1800's.

For the past few months, the Vancouver Public Space Network has been holding a design competition to create a new "grand gathering place" in Vancouver – a place for festivals, markets, rallies, buskers and more -- Think Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto, Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, or even Piazza San Marco in Venice. Over 100 design teams signed up for the competition, 13 were short-listed. Now it's time to pick a winner.

Cast your ballot at online, but do it soon! Voting ends Friday May 22.

It's the most fun you’ll have with civic engagement all day :-)

If you’ve got time, come on out to Heritage Hall (Main and 15th) on May 27 (7:00-9:00pm) when the VPSN will announce the winner. It’ll be a great evening. For further reading on the reasoning behind the competition, visit WheresTheSquare.ca.

Oh, and for those who might be interested, this one is my favourite.

In the midst of one of those "because I can" moods today, I wrote a fun Python script to get my battery status and colour-code it so it could be loaded into my prompt. I'm posting it here 'cause I think it's nifty:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import re

battery = "/proc/acpi/battery/BAT0"

def getMax(path):
    return getValueFromFile(path + "/info", "last full capacity")


def getRemaining(path):
    return getValueFromFile(path + "/state", "remaining capacity")


def getValueFromFile(name, value):
    f = open(name, "r")
    for line in f:
        remaining = re.match(r"^%s:\s+(\d+)" % (value), line)
        if remaining:
            return remaining.group(1)


def isCharging(path):
    f = open(path + "/state", "r")
    for line in f:
        key = re.match(r"^charging state:\s+charging", line)
        if key:
            return True


def render(path):

    level = int((float(getRemaining(path)) / float(getMax(path))) * 100)

    colour = ""
    if isCharging(path):
        colour = "\033[1;36m" # Cyan
    elif level < 25:
        colour = "\033[1;31m" # Red
    elif level < 50:
        colour = "\033[1;33m" # Yellow
    else:
        colour = "\033[1;32m" # Green

    print colour + str(level) + "%\033[0m",

render(battery)

So it's over, and sadly, the results are much as I expected them to be. Though I'd hoped for a smaller proportion of seats for the Liberals, the punishment dealt to the NDP for their deplorable environmental platform is sufficient in my book.

From what I've seen of the results so far, my campaign went fairly well considering the amount of time/money I had to contribute and my relative inexperience from the start. A Liberal win in my riding was a near inevitability under our voting system so I'm actually quite happy with my showing.

For my part, it's really been a great experience. I've learnt a great deal about how a campaign is run, and dramatically improved on my public speaking skills. I've gained a renewed sense of confidence in my ability to represent myself in formal gatherings and I've met some really interesting people.

The people, though, that's what's been most interesting for me. Just the experience of meeting complete strangers with a unique understanding of their field, or their portion of the ecosystem was very rewarding: seniors with a serious passion about doing the Right thing by their grand-kids, and young people with that kind of passionate faith and dedication to a shared goal. This is what politics is about and I love it. If there's one lesson I am to take away from this experience, it must be no one can know everything and that there is real expertise (as well as willingness to contribute) in a variety of fields out there -- you just have to go looking for it.

Sadly, though, with the overall percentage that the Greens acquired in this race, once again we took a grand total of zero seats. And now, with STV having been defeated for its third and final time, BC will have another generation of unrepresentative politics in the Legislature.

[rant]

Joseph de Maistre said: "Every country has the government it deserves" and he was absolutely right. British Columbians have proven for the third and final time that they have no interest in better representation -- or perhaps more accurately put -- have no interest in learning about how they might be better represented.

The vast majority of anti-STV comments I've heard over the past month (with the exception of Stephen's) were largely uninformed or worse, based entirely on a combined ignorance of the subject and a disinterest in learning anything about it. BC will have exactly the government it deserves, one that operates best when the progressive majority is routinely ignored.

And for people like Stephen, who continually muddied the debate by claiming that STV wasn't as good as other options, and that the referendum needed to be more inclusive of other alternatives like MMP, thank you so much for screwing this up for the rest of us. Proportional representation is now off the table in BC for decades. Your claims that another voting system might be better might have had some merit if proposed to a minority government elected under STV, but your commitment to fear, uncertainty and doubt has ensured that this will not happen for a very, very long time.

[/rant]

The aforementioned bitterness aside, my experience has been on the whole very positive and I intend to run again if I'm still living in BC in 2013. Politics seems to suit me quite well actually -- it has, after all been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember. This whole process has been an honour and a privilege and I'm so glad to have had the opportunity to run.

It happens, especially in recessions and when it does, there's often little or no warning. You come into work on a Friday, work through the day, and at the end of the day, as you're heading out of the office, the boss comes to you and says something to the effect of: "Sorry, but you're done here."

Not long after you manage to get over your panic attack, your boss drops another bomb: you're not allowed to access your computer again. All of your personal email and/or files that you have on there are going to be backed up into hard drive somewhere and gods know what the sysadmin is going to do with it.

Now one might argue that if you're putting personal stuff on a company computer, the company owns that stuff, and legally speaking, you might be right, but morally, it's your stuff that you access at work because work takes up the vast majority of your day. It only seems fair that if they're going to give you the boot with zero notice that you have a chance to keep your emails and IM conversations with friends and family private.

So, in case you've ever wondered what might be a good way to keep your data more-or-less safe in such situations, I thought that I would post a little how-to here.

Option One

Don't put personal information on your company computer. It will save you all kinds of hassles, even if it does make life at work considerably less bearable.

Option Two

If you're going to put personal information on your company computer anyway, the best way to secure it is to have your computer continuously check a remote source (under your control) for instructions. You can then leave the instructions blank until Something Bad happens. For example, on a Linux machine:

1. Create a tiny script file (call it "remoterun" for the sake of this example) and put this in it:

         #!/usr/bin/env sh
         curl -s http://somesite.com/instructions.txt | sh

   Now make it executable.
2. Log into the server hosting somesite.com and place a file called instructions.txt in the document root. It can contain anything you want to execute on your machine. I recommend the deletion on your home directory (so long as there's no company data in there) and the removal of your personal account from the box. If you choose though, you can be a little more zealous and delete your music files, any background wallpapers you if you want. Just don't delete anything belonging to the company or they will be well within their rights to come and kick your ass in all kinds of unpleasant ways. Here's an example of a simple instructions file:

         # Delete my music
         rm -rf /opt/share/music
   
         # Delete my account
         userdel --force --remove daniel
   
         # Delete the remoterun script
         rm -f /path/to/remoterun

   This part is very important: Do not put anything in this file that you do not wish to run immediately. The above would nuke your personal data, so only put destructive instructions in the file when you actually want to delete stuff. Until then, you can just leave it blank.
3. Now that you have an instructions file, you just need to make sure that your office computer runs the remoterun script every hour or so. That way, the machine will run your instructions within an hour of you setting them up on somesite.com. In Linux, you can do this with cron:

   # crontab -e

   That will allow you to edit the crontab for the current user (be root, it's best for this kind of thing). Now you just add the crontab line:

   00 * * * * /path/to/remoterun

That's all there is to it. Every hour, your office machine will connect to somesite.com and execute whatever instructions.txt says. Windows users, I'm afraid you're on your own but the theory is the same.

Now remember kids, use your powers for Good, not Evil. I've provided the above so you can be a responsible person while protecting your private life from someone who shouldn't have access to it anyway. I hope that you will do the same.

Here it is, the end of my first political campaign. I'll have all kinds of reflections later, but for now I thought that I might invite you all to the election night party for the Greens here in Vancouver. If you supported us today, or would just like to have a few drinks with the people who are fighting the uphill battle for sustainability in this province, I encourage you to drop by Kentizen Restaurant in Tinseltown anytime between 7pm and midnight tonight.

Also, if you haven't voted yet, it's time to get out there and exercise your privilege as a Free citizen of a democracy. It took me all of six minutes this morning. If you didn't receive a voting card in the mail, you can still vote, you just need to bring a piece of valid BC id (drivers license, status card, etc.) and proof of address (like a credit card / hydro bill).

Lastly, if you voted for STV or the Greens, let me know! Text me at 778.238.6876 or find me on Twitter (@searchingfortao). It'll perk up my day :-)

I recieved an email tonight from a constituent in my riding regarding the horrible bus service she, at 50 years of age, has to endure. Given that I'm a low-profile candidate, I've not really had an opportunity to talk about my two favourite subjects in this election: transit and energy, so I was quite happy to write about it at length.

After I got it all down though, I realised that I've never done that before: written out exactly what needs to be done. So I'm posting it here, if only to use it as a checklist for my future work in this area.

I'm afraid that what I have to tell you may not be what you want to hear, but will also be true and it will be everything I know about transit and community building.

You are living in the classic North American conundrum. You've moved into a quiet neighbourhood away from the noise and traffic of the city because it's comfortable and peaceful. The air is cleaner, the pace slower and on the whole, you're happier for it. It's just that transportation in and out of the area is difficult.

The natural request for people in your position then is that if only the bus service were extended or simply had its frequency improved then life would be perfect. This line of thinking makes sense, but when you start taking into account the financials of such a plan as well as the needs of the rest of the province things start looking less and less plausible.

Low-density communities are very difficult to service not only because the residents are far apart, but because the entire community is often built with the car in mind. Residents are expected to own a car, and transit is always an afterthought: it's for those who can't drive. What's worse, if you extend transit into these areas, the land value increases and this drives sprawl further away from the centres, recreating the initial problem. For these reasons transit extensions into low-density areas are very expensive and have a low return on investment in terms of ridership achieved and carbon footprint reduced.

Now, with all of the above said, I'm not going to tell you that the Green Party has no intentions of extending transit into your area, far from it. However, I need my answer framed with the above in mind.

The Green Party is all about building healthier communities with accessible transit and lots of public space. In a perfect world, transit in the Lower Mainland would be a collection of mixed-density communities interlinked with high-speed transit corridors and independently covered in a mesh of light rail streetcar lines. You could walk from your home to a transit stop a block or two away, ride the regular line to the central hub and then hop the high-speed to wherever you need to go.

But we don't live in that world, we live in this one, and in this one your transit needs aren't being met. So I'm going to tell you what I want to do to move us closer to that ideal world while we do what we can for your situation as well.

For starters, the transit routing needs to be simplified. Straight lines, dedicated lanes and regular times are the key here. Even if the bus only comes every 20min, so long as it's predictable, people can start to see it as a viable alternative to a car.

Second, we slowly need to restructure our communities to serve as a series of hubs. From models as simple as Toronto to systems as complex as Seoul, we know that constructing your community predicated on the assumption that everyone just wants to use transit to commute to and from work is a flawed one. We visit friends and family, we go out for dinner, and see movies or walk on the waterfront, and in a community that constructs its transit primarily for commuting, all of these activities necessitate a private vehicle. Following a hub model would foster private commercial development in the transit interchanges and allow us to better plan the growth of the community by placing residential blocks near hubs or along future light rail corridors.

It should also be noted that both of these actions would require support from the municipal levels of government as well as the province.

For you, all this would mean that in the short term, your mobility should improve with regular (albeit not every 5 minutes) and that in the medium term, you should be able to get on any bus, going any direction and know that it will eventually end up at a transit hub where you'll find a library, community centre, shopping district or the Seabus.

That was a rather long-winded answer, but I hope that it's addressed your questions. It's always nice to talk to a constituent about transit, since it's one of the primary reasons I got into this in the first place. On the off chance that I don't win the seat for North Vancouver-Seymour, you can be sure that I'll continue to push for the above kind of reforms in this city because I know that it's the right way to go for us.

Thanks again for your interest and support.

...but not Star Trek.

I have just returned from the new Star Trek movie and I need to take a moment to rant. Feel free to ignore this one if you don't really care about what Star Trek is and are completely happy with this movie. I won't hold it against you... probably.

For the uninitiated, perhaps this movie was as frickin' awesome as everyone has told me repeatedly. It does, after all carry a strong cast, some decent writing and some pretty damned impressive special effects. This alone would make it an exciting movie, something to entertain and keep you excited for the duration but that alone isn't enough to call it Star Trek. This latest incarnation of the franchise is nothing more than yet another summer blockbuster -- like Terminator, or Wolverine, or Transformers the plot is simple:

• Introduce Good Guys
• Introduce Bad Guys
• Bad Guys are bad
• Good Guys kill bad guys
• Studio makes money

Generally speaking, I like mindless blockbusters. They're fun, and watchable, but Star Trek is better than that. We love the show and even some of the movies because it speaks to us at a higher level, encourages us to question abstracts in our society like morality, justice and peace. It's about exploration and the development of humanity into something Better than we are. It's about more than good guys, bad guys, and cool effects.

This was J.J. Abrams' Star Trek, which is nice for him, and for the hordes of people it will bring to the franchise, but if nothing else, this movie marks the end of Roddenberry's dream... and for someone who grew up on those Ideals, that hurts... a lot.

If only they hadn't dedicated the movie to Gene and Majel...

Margaret found this North Shore News article covering me and one of the other North Shore Greens, Ryan Windsor and I thought that I'd share it here. If you see any other coverage, (good or bad) do let me know eh?