[META] One more test

Final test of the night ...

[PHOTO] Going back to Timeline

Waiting for the 161 Rogers Road westbound last night at the Ossington TTC station, I looked up above the posted schedule to see that someone had torn off the sticker advising people of personal safety features of the bus routes to reveal a much older sticker talking about the TTC's timeline service. I had never heard of timeline before.

In January 2007, Spacing Toronto published an essay by former senior TTC member Bob Brent explaining what timeline was and why it went away. (Cost-cutting under the Harris government, it seems.)

Timeline was introduced around 1989 at a cost of $3.3 million with the Provincial government paying 75% of its cost (along with all other TTC capital spending).

For those of you unfamiliar with Timeline, you called a unique phone number found on the TTC sign pole at transfer stops and it would give you a digitized voice of the current time and the scheduled arrival time of the next three vehicles.

When I joined the TTC as a senior manager in January 1997, Timeline was an established service (about 1,000,000 calls/month) but the writing was already on the wall. It was running on obsolete technology that was literally falling apart with frequent outages and increasingly expensive service calls.

In 1998 an IT company, whose principals had been involved in the original Timeline implementation, came in to give a beta demonstration of a new Y2K-compliant Timeline customer information system running on a MS NT server. It was a mere shell than a mature application. It crashed a few minutes into their demonstration.

The alarm bells went off and tough questions were asked if it was ready for prime time. They admitted it was just a prototype shell to demonstrate what was possible. In fact, they wanted the TTC to be the guinea pig first installation and fund its commercial development in “partnership.” They estimate a stripped down version would cost $2 million.

[URBAN NOTE] "PSY, the “Gangnam Style” Guy, Comes to Toronto"

Happily, I was wrong about PSY's visit to Toronto being cancelled on account of the weather. The man behind "Gangnam Style" came to Toronto to perform a three-song set, described slightly incredulously by Torontoist's Saira Peesker.

Walking around the Kool Haus on Tuesday during PSY’s first-ever Toronto performance was sort of like walking into a bizarrely proportioned house of mirrors. Whether because it was the night before Halloween, or because some audience members just wanted to show off their tuxedos, lots of people had shown up in costume. There were tall PSYs, short PSYs, child PSYs, hipster Psys, black PSYs, white PSYs, sexy PSYs, and so on. There were also Korean senior citizens, party girls from all backgrounds, and several couples with very young children—some of whom were being pushed in strollers.

[. . .]

The Toronto show, sponsored by Korean tech giant Samsung as a way of launching its latest phone, was one of many similar launch parties held around the world. Even so, it was seemingly the only one featuring the world’s most popular Korean (now that we all agree PSY has eclipsed United Nations head Ban Ki-moon). Forget that the States had Kanye for their event. We had PSY. PSY! It was a big enough deal to draw staffers from the South Korean embassy, who—according to VIP-room gossip that we couldn’t verify—were accompanied by the president of Samsung himself.

[. . .] Wearing a blue blazer with an undone white bow tie and his signature round sunglasses, PSY took the stage. Backed by four nerdy-but-lithe dancers wearing all white (plus a whole entourage of cartoon PSYs on a huge screen behind the stage), the portly impresario packed what would prove to be less than 20 minutes on stage with entertainment and antics. At one point, he asked the crowd if they were thirsty, warned that he wouldn’t just throw water on them like Americans performers do, and proceeded to spit a big swig all over the people clamouring around the stage. It’s the Korean way, he said.

He belted out two of his previous hits, including 2010’s “Right Now.” Both were banging party jams that served to warm up the crowd for the big show.

When it was time for “Gangnam Style,” the audience was amped. Phones hoisted in the air seemed, somehow, to outnumber people in the crowd. PSY flailed, pranced, and pouted through the three minutes of magic. No matter that he wasn’t even trying to mouth along to the chorus (he did appear to be performing the verses live): the crowd was screaming, singing, and generally picking up what he was putting down.

Apparently PSY will be coming back to Toronto in January for a full concert.

[LINK] "Mayans demand an end to 2012 doomsday myth"

The Agence France-Presse article describing the sustained Mayan hostility to the myth of an impending apocalypse next month allegedly derived from their pre-Columbian calendar--incorrectly, it turns out--hits on a theme that I touched on back in April. Isn't there something terribly voyeuristic about exploiting the traditions of a historically persecuted population for your own fame of fortune, perhaps especially if the population in question doesn't benefit?

Guatemala’s Mayan people accused the government and tour groups on Wednesday of perpetuating the myth that their calendar foresees the imminent end of the world for monetary gain.

“We are speaking out against deceit, lies and twisting of the truth, and turning us into folklore-for-profit. They are not telling the truth about time cycles,” charged Felipe Gomez, leader of the Maya alliance Oxlaljuj Ajpop.

Several films and documentaries have promoted the idea that the ancient Mayan calendar predicts that doomsday is less than two months away, on December 21, 2012.

The Culture Ministry is hosting a massive event in Guatemala City — which as many as 90,000 people are expected to attend — just in case the world actually does end, while tour groups are promoting doomsday-themed getaways.

Maya leader Gomez urged the Tourism Institute to rethink the doomsday celebration, which he criticized as a “show” that was disrespectful to Mayan culture.

[. . .]

Gomez’s group issued a statement saying that the new Maya time cycle simply “means there will be big changes on the personal, family and community level, so that there is harmony and balance between mankind and nature.”

Oxlajuj Ajpop is holding events it considers sacred in five cities to mark the event and Gomez said the Culture Ministry would be wise to throw its support behind their real celebrations.

[LINK] "Group Adjourns Without Acting on Antarctic Reserve"

David Jolly's blog post at The New York Times observing the failure to establish an internationally-recognized marine reserve off the Antarctic coast disturbs me. Surely Antarctica, disturbs me. Protecting the environment of the only continent not yet colonized strikes me as important: fictional imaginings of Antarctic colonization, Argentina's real-life geopolitical games, the strip-mining of fisheries, all are very problematic for me.

Frustrating advocates, an international commission charged with overseeing the Southern Ocean took no action Thursday on a proposal championed by the United States and New Zealand to create the world’s largest marine reserve in the seas around Antarctica.

The two nations had proposed the creation of a 872,000-square-mile reserve in the Ross Sea and East Antarctic; conservationists wanted more, some 1.9 million square miles of protected area. Crucially, despite months of talks between Washington and New Zealand’s government in Wellington, the two countries went into the meeting in Hobart, Australia, with slightly different plans and had to work out a joint proposal early this week.

The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, whose members include the European Union and 24 member states, operates on a consensus principle, and the issue never came to a vote.
Gerald Leape, a marine policy official with the Pew Environment Group, said China and Russia had been the main opponents of the proposal, while Japan, South Korea and Ukraine had been lukewarm.

The Southern Ocean is one of the most important ecosystems on Earth, home to penguins, seals and whales, as well as vast populations of krill, one of the most important links in the ocean food chain.