I cried twice today.

Once when a friend was more upset than I was, and I knew my friend was the truest kind of soul.

The other was when I immersed myself in Jane Jacob's book and understood.  I know that I must find a way to explain myself clearly, with simplicity.  Without the "... plethora of subtle and complicated dogma [which] have arisen on a foundation of nonsense."

The situations are subtle.  Explanations must be clear.  Solutions must be testable and responsive.

For some ridiculous reason, this all will come full circle.  It always has, it always will.  I'm on the right path, I just have to get in sync with my environment.

A new year blows in.

It is a time for reflections, for setting goals, for renewal of your inner strengths and resolves.

I ought to be looking forward to the new year.  I ought to be loathing the old year.  I am not.  2011 was not all I wished it was.  2012 will surely come with it's own share of joys and disappointments.

As the calendar makes it's arbitrary flip, I see both change and continuance ahead.  What I value from the year gone by is the strength in my resolve to change and grow, coupled with the strength of my resolve to remain true to myself and my cornerstones.  Something happened this past year, something I don't fully understand.  I've been dragged under, beat up, hung out, let down.  I saw no options before me and fought another battle against the blackness of reckless uncaring of bureaucratic might.  But this time, I faced reason and acceptance, not the blundering stupidity of a department run on self-certitude and armed with a brush of tar a gender wide.

In what felt like my darkest of days, I rediscovered my actual darkest of days.  I reconnected the lessons I needed to survive.  I rediscovered the art of listening to the stories around me to discern the tidbits I needed to hear.  The tidbits that mean nothing to most people, but everything to me.  Loading the truck.  Skating on both sides of the ice.  Little bomb, big bomb.  The tidbits that have rebuilt and reformulated my soul.  Lessons I sometimes forget at my own peril.

One of the tidbits is "talking in your mother tongue."  One's language is primal.  When in stress or crisis or passion, one returns to one's mother tongue.  I once was assigned to watch a crumbled retaining wall through the night, to ensure no one entered the area and that it retained its structure until morning.  A woman from Quebec lived in a nearby building and brought me the tastiest coffee I've had in my life.  She was sweet, needlessly worried, and a joy to talk with to idle the time away.  I learned the lesson when I discovered she could not add in English.  She needed to see the numbers written down and then added in French.

"Talking in your mother tongue" means returning to your most primal actions.  Your visceral reactions.  When your mother tongue is to react with anger it will be the first response you turn to when you are reacting emotionally.  It will always be the first thing.  To change your primary reaction takes infinite practice and long-standing effort.

Change.  Focussed, directed change.

I don't know if a secondary language can ever become as dominant as a mother tongue.  However I know that I want a better reaction from myself than visceral anger or sullen withdrawal.  I know to be a positive force I have to keep myself in a positive place.

My new year started a while ago.  My change is continual for a while.  My continuance is to keep being a better self.  May 2012 bring along all the good bits of 2011 and build from there.

Happy Old Year.

"I kinda figured that I'd just plant myself here for the next five to ten years and not have to change."

"I enjoy that you thought you could plan that."

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This somewhat paraphrased and ill conceived (at least on my behalf) conversation is directly referring to my reluctance to change.  Ah, to be set in my ways, to have all the answers predefined, to have preplanned all the possibilities in advance and to have enumerated the probabilities of each of them occurring.

This post brought to you by the letter H -- maker of fine words such as Hubris and Haughtiness.

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Long ago I listened to Jane Jacobs speak on ideas.  It was likely the Massey Lectures, I know that Jane is well associated with them.  Jane was simply brilliant, strong in speaking and scintillating in mind to hear.  An hour vanished in mere minutes and I was rapt in the listening.  Perhaps I'll try to find them again, but not tonight.  I have too many other important tasks to do.

One of the things I intended to do over Christmas was to begin Jane's book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."  Christmas Day I was caught up in other tasks and yesterday, the other day I had no preset plans, I went for coffee with a friend instead.  So tonight, while waiting for one task to complete, I jumped in the tub, book in hand, and began reading.

The book is the 50th Anniversary edition and has two introductions.  The first is by James Epstein, Jane's publisher and friend over the years and spelled out a great deal of context that I simply did not know or understand.  Interestingly, by the time I finished James's introduction, I sincerely felt that Jane was a kindred spirit and a friend to me as well as Mr. Epstein.

Jane's introduction was utterly captivating.  She wrote it in 1992, about 30 years after Death and Life was first published.  She immediately spoke of the conflicts between what she called "foot people" and "car people" and their perspectives on city planning.  Conflicts which, to me here and now, seem silly and insignificant.  Jane's ideas seem clear and self-evident to me, not particularly insightful and I don't always agree the details, but they are apparent and well reasoned.

Towards the end, Jane dispelled the notion that her book helped stop urban renewal programs and slum-clearing.  She avers that urban renewal and the slum clearing essentially collapsed under their own weight.  They never respected the ecology of a city - our ecology as human beings.  The recycling of a city's resources into a reshaped entity that serves it's inhabitants.  She had my complete attention, I understand ecology well.

Diversity is needed to have a strong ecosystem.  What we, in our human arrogance, perceive as complexity is a fundamental necessity for forming the webs we rely upon to strengthen and enhance our entire environment and well being.

  "... when their processes are working well, ecosystems appear stable.  But in a profound sense, the stability is an illusion.  As a Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, observed long ago, everything in the natural world is in flux.  We we suppose we see static situations, we actually see processes of beginning and processes of ending occurring simultaneously.  Nothing is static."

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Nothing is static.  Change is a constant and inevitable process.

Apparently I'm in a period of life where I am accepting change, acknowledging its influence upon me, and eagerly hoping to tackle change on my own terms.

My mother and my daughter together taught me a lesson over Christmas:

What is the difference between anxiety and excitement?  Anxiety is when you look upon the unknown with negativity and a fearful outlook.  Excitement is when you look upon the same unknown with positive thoughts and hope for the changes which will come.

I'm excited about the change to come.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Funny, the more I say it, the more I think about it, the more it stays a constant around me.

Constant change is a given, and it's a continual process that happens all around each of us.  The irony is that we never change, we are always the same.

So which is the lie?

I'm a simple man, with simple wants and desires and an unbendable longing for stability and dependability.  I'm also a quester, a seeker of things new and intriguing, longing to reach for the stars that are infinitely beyond my grasp, one who is willing to throw away all my beliefs and values when they no longer serve me in search for a new morality which is more suited to who I have become as a person.

When others tell me that I will always be worthless and I will never change, it may be hurtful to hear at the time, but should I stop to think I will recognize it as a falsehood to be discounted.  When I'm told I must transform and become an entire new entity I feel overwhelmed and know that I will ultimately disappoint, because I am myself.  There is no other that I can be.

Change has a funny way of passing through one's life.  It's always present, here and now, and has always been a factor around me.  The passage of time alone necessitates change, I can no longer act as a child, nor would I want to do so any longer.  My growth as a person has exposed me to new and more interesting facts of life and as I learn more it has changed my perception of events and details I previously saw through a different lens.  Change is the only way we can truly adjust to our current circumstances, because our circumstances in the world are constantly changing in and of themselves.

Circumstantial change is adaptation to the world around us.  We do what we have to do to get by.  Directed change, now that is something that we control ourselves as we steer our course to where we want to be.  I've had more than my share of circumstantial changes, and will continue to have more than my share ahead.  I will, I shall, I can, I must, and most importantly, I want to take on those changes that await so that I stay ahead of the curve and not crushed beneath unfathomable pressure.

Directed change is so much more interesting to me right now.  There is no question, the past year or so has seen a vast change in myself.  It almost seems difficult for me to tally the differences, because in all honesty I simply haven't been trying to document them all.  I know on a more generic level I feel more connected with my local environment - my city, my neighbourhood, my work, even, perhaps, my family.  It's not that a year ago I said, "Hey, I want a new mayor and I want to be part of my community association and I'm going to change how I commute and connect with my city."  It was, strictly speaking, acting on the unease and dissatisfaction I was feeling, and the strict distaste I have for hypocrisy.  I wanted something better than the future I saw ahead of me, so I decided I needed to think and act and move.  As that great poem states, "And that has made all the difference."

Change tends to pass through my life in one of two ways.  It can rumble, wielding Thor's Hammer as a pendulum that scatters it's effects to the left and to the right.  Impactful in a very real sense, and that impact spreads it's shock with little regard for bystanders or personal feelings.  It is very much the crash course of life, the Canada's Worst Driver rehabilitation centre, the place where change is hurried because hurried change has become necessary.  The other force is through erosion, the endless, relentless wearing and grating of change.  It can batter, it can build, it can erase, it can deposit.  It can be controlled, it can be unstoppable.  Every bit as full of impact, but it's the Nenshification of my life, where one change brings about another until they cascade and I've become much more than I was a short while ago.  A short while ago that's so long in the past I can barely remember it.

No matter the force, I am fundamentally myself.  I must adapt to what I have met, and react to the changes which press against me.  There is no doubt, I am wiser, stronger, more capable than I was as a child.  There is also no doubt that it was that child that became the man, and the man who has continued to grow and to shape.  What to change in myself, how to readdress issues around me, how to respond to my new circumstance, those are decisions best made willingly, with clear purpose and full intention.  I need to choose the things which are relevant in my life, which are important in my world, which align with my values.

So I'm not a different person.  And still I have changed.  And I think I have a touch more insight into what I've been thinking about the past week or so.

You'll have to trust me, this is NOT an "End of Year Wrap-Up" blog.  This is a serious attempt to answer the question of, "How?"  How must I direct change within myself to be a better person?  How can I become more effective?  How shall I be more supportive, more communicative, more open in my intentions, more respectful in my listening?  How can I ask the question, "What do you need?" when I am not prepared to actually answer?

I thought I'd be asking if I should.  That change has already passed me.  How is a much better question to be asking anyways.

When you are driving safely, you are looking to where you want to go.

You should not look just in front of your vehicle.  Surely you want to go farther than the 20 or 30 feet ahead of you.  The faster you travel, the further you have to look ahead.  You need more time to accumulate data and you require time to process that data into good decision making.

Nor should you be fixating on your final destination.  It may not even be in sight.  You can't even focus entirely on a spot a full kilometre down the road - that's foolhardy when a hazard could be just ahead of you.

You cannot be locked into tunnel vision, staring solely ahead.  Hazards may exist in the ditches or coming out of alleys at the side of the road.  Nor can you neglect your mirrors for hazards racing up behind you.

"Look where you want to go" still holds as the primary rule of safe driving.  But it's not an absolute rule.  You need to take in data such as your speed, your direction, road signs, other drivers, pedestrians, cyclists -- the sum of your environment.

"Look where you want to go" as a life's lesson is much the same.  Recently I got all hell bent for leather on a course of action, however lunch with a friend suddenly snapped into place that I haven't finished driving my current road yet and there is much for me to do before I'm ready to switch life's highways.

When you're driving, it should be somewhat obvious where you are heading.  More or less in front of you, far enough ahead to spot obstacles and hazards, not so far ahead that you are oblivious to things that are near you.  Setting your goals and choosing one's path through life is less clear cut.  There are many directions you can choose and many goals you can set for yourself.

The choice made should, in my mind, still be somewhat obvious.  Your destination as a person needs to begin from your values.  Everyone's core values are serious, personal and valuable beyond counting.  You need to consider what your values are and how they impact you as a person.  Although I have a good standing on what my personal cornerstones are, it's clear that I can lose my focus and forget the things I most want to accomplish.  Lose that focus and it becomes much harder to achieve your goals.

Let me tie my thoughts into a circle.  If you truly value all life on earth, you must do what you can to care for life and ensure life is not taken without good cause.  Unless you are a plant or a bacterium, we must continue our existence by sacrificing life for our own sustenance, but life is not to be taken carelessly.  When that's your primary value, you ought to be driving carefully, applying what you know about safe driving each and every time you get behind the wheel.  Look where you want to go.  Travel with confidence.  Stay calm when things don't smoothly go your way.  Tenaciously practice and improve your skills and abilities.  Never stop learning.

I wouldn't consider telling you what your core values ought to be, but I highly encourage you to think about your core values and your goals and how you intend to achieve your goals while staying true to your values.

I can't help someone else until I've prepared myself.  My drive right now has to be to improve myself, but also value a bigger role which awaits me and need to simultaneously prepare myself.  I have to remain true to my cornerstones or risk losing my values.  I have to care for my health, my teeth and my jaw -- the choices over how I get there are fast becoming interesting and compelling.

In the end, you need to ultimately decide for yourself which route you shall take.  We all face the choice of Robert Frost, and regardless of the road taken our choice shall make all the difference.

Here's the blog I'm dedicating to Sly.

I loathe "Reality T.V."  From it's tenuous grasp on reality to the puffed up ego monsters that tend to be attracted as stars for their hideous 15 minutes of fame, to the ridiculous assumptions that I have to watch and I have to have an opinion about people and events I couldn't care less over.

I do, however, love Canada's Worst Driver and Canada's Worst Handyman.  The latter because I'm likely a prospective wretched renovator, and the former because I see nothing but relevance in the show for each and every driver on our roads.

I consider myself an above average driver, which is not surprising because we ALL would call ourselves above average in our driving skills.  The difference is I am comfortable driving in vehicles ranging from subcompacts to three ton grain trucks, automatic or standard transmission vehicles, with or without trailers - the trailer empty or filled with dirt, grain, furniture or a small combine.

There are skills featured on CWD that I would desperately love to try.  I could really learn something from the Eye of the Needle and I have never attempted a Reverse Flick but I think I could gain much from that level of intuitive knowledge of weight transfer between your wheels.  Until I get proper instruction at a track where it's completely safe, I'll probably never attempt it.

There are skills you can try every single time you get behind a wheel.  For instance, can you drive in a straight line?  In a real straight line?  Can you drive in a straight line with a curve in the middle?  Can you perform an S-turn?  Can you do one intuitively, without thinking?

These are skills that are essential for good driving.  They don't require special equipment.  They don't require a tunnel made from styrofoam cutouts.  You only need to turn your brain on, then pay attention to the road and your driving.

The number one rule of driving - at least according to CWD - is look where you want to go.  They can't say it enough, they can't teach it enough, it can't be emphasized and shared too much.  Look where you want to go.

You drive towards where you look, you react towards where you're looking, you are only observing the hazards where you are looking.  When you drive, you must look where you want to go.  It doesn't mean tunnel vision - you have to be aware of your entire environment.  However your eyes need to be primarily upon your target and you will head towards where you're focused.

So last week, one of CWD7's drivers, Sly, noticed a great insight.  "You know, I think that's an analogy for life.  'Look where you want to go.  Look where you want to go.'  My gosh.  One of those things that the Dalai Lama would probably say."

He's right.  It's more than just driving.  "Look where you want to go."  "Keep your eyes on the ball."  "Keep your target in sight."  "Keep your goals in front of you."  We say the same thing constantly in so many ways.

We, as human beings, need a direction.  We are best when we're striving, we are most accomplished while achieving specific goals.

You can't be a good driver if you're not looking where you want to go.  Can you be a good person when you wander through life without focus?

However, life isn't just one success after another.  We have failures, we take tangents, we go down wrong roads and sometimes travel in the wrong direction.  We have to recognize the whole of the environment around ourselves.  Success comes down to focusing those experiences into lessons that eventually guide us toward our goals.

I'm trying harder to apply it every day.

Look where you want to go.  Travel with confidence.  Stay calm when things don't smoothly go your way.  Tenaciously practice and improve your skills and abilities.  Never stop learning. 

Now that's reality.

Being driven solely by fear is a terrible feeling.  Being driven by anger is equally bad.

It is vitally important to have an understanding of both sides of the equation.  To be driven only by fear to press forward.  To be driven by only by anger to accomplish a goal.

It is also just as important to understand there is a completely other side.  To be the one to create the fear, to be the one to cause the anger that serves as the final motivation to force another to bend to your will.

I am a more than imperfect man trying to get through my world intact and whole, leaving the world a better place behind me.  Some days I feel like a rampaging beast leaving ruin and destruction in my wake.  On good days I create some good, I assist someone in need, I rise above my imperfections and accomplish something I am proud of.

My son asked why I have a blog.  This is my journal, my record.  My primary target audience is myself.  I air my thoughts and try to make them coherent.  Some days I'm vague, other days I'm blunt, but I know I've been successful when I read through my writing a month or a year down the road and realize that putting my thoughts down have helped me decide to choose the path I was destined to travel.

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I have already said that I am afraid to complete this entry.  I have good friends who may think less of me.  I have detestable persons who will point to me and say, "I told you he was no good."  I am going to discuss the people who do not know me, who have pre-judged me, who have blamed me.

This is about my anger, and how the influence of a friend I deeply trust has blunted my anger as a driving force and caused me to re-examine myself in light of my own values and my own professed cornerstones.

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To this very day, nearly one third of all the traffic that comes to this site comes for one article and one article alone.  I am shocked, terrified and amazed that my blog is on the front page when you search for "Alberta Maintenance Enforcement Program" on Google.

In the simplest of terms, I feel I was treated extremely unfairly by the program's staff.  I have been treated with contempt, treated hostilely, and unfairly subjected to harsh penalties without warning.  When I have tried to lodge a complaint, I have been told "The system is working as intended."  There was no flexibility or willingness for discussion - according to the persons I spoke with at the department my only two options were to allow MEP access to my bank account or to prepay my child support one month in advance.  The department has, in my eyes, worked towards coercing me to giving them direct access to my bank account by the continual restrictions they place towards allowable payments.  Direct payment is not acceptable, I know not all fees incurred were reimbursed.

I had to plead with my company to find a solution in extraordinary circumstances.  The only way to change this is to go into court.  I absolutely cannot afford a lawyer, so I'd be forced to go into court on my own and hope to hear a judge who will hear me with an open and fair mind.  Going to court is a crap shoot, I'm afraid, and onerous and extremely stressful for me.

How can it be that a program can be so detested by "creditor" and "debtor" together?

"Creditors" complain about a lack of enforcement, of a toothless department who do nothing to ensure collections are made.  "Debtors" like me wonder how some people get away with such outrageous behaviour while we live under constant threat of losing our driver's licences, passports and continual penalties applied.

I stand behind my words.  The program is not working for custodial or non-custodial parents.  The entire system needs to be redressed and systematically re-examined.  Complaints of mistreatment must be taken seriously.  Actually, all complaints need to be taken seriously.

When I recorded my rebuttal to Mr. da Costa's interview my father asked me, "Aren't you afraid of what they [the MEP] will do to you?"  No, they've done to me all they can.  If I am blackballed as a trouble-maker, I'm well and truly on their bad list by now.  All that is left is to try to never fall behind in payments ever again so they have no reason to act against me and to try to apply pressure so the department at large will become fair and effective in the future.

Penalties applied against me when I have struggled financially only increase the difficulty.  We may as well re-establish debtor's prisons.  Cancelling the driver's licence of someone who's struggling to make ends meet becomes counter productive when it restricts the ability to make a living.  When faced with continual threats and recriminations from the department staff, the lesson learned is don't ever get forced into needing to ever deal directly with the MEP at all.

When a custodial parent cannot collect support, it can put them in a very tough position.  When the MEP puts in little to no effort to actually collect due support it becomes aggravating because the family can be left unable to make ends meet.

So what's the fix?  My lawyer tells me the staff are overworked, the department is underfunded and the people there are left in an impossible position.  I feel sorry for every time I am forced to call with a problem, because each and every call they get is going to be one parent complaining about not having enough money.  It has to be a tough job, but that's still not an excuse for treating clients abusively.

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When I first raised the issue of the unfair way I was treated, it was to my MLA with a copy of my complaint sent to both the Minister of Justice and also to the MEP.  Only my MLA responded, but he said that my issue was raised with the minister.

This is a matter of critical importance to my life, in response to a government department who openly warned that the department has power of collection actions which are long-reaching.  If you thought fighting City Hall is something, you ain't seen nothing until you're up against the MEP.  The MEP is the single biggest source of stress in my day to day life.  I wrote a letter of complaint and heard back from one of three people I received a copy.  Rather than standing as a buffer between myself and the department and acting to facilitate communication between us I found myself receiving a list of the demands the MEP gave me from the start.  As to the abusive staff, I was told, "It is regrettable that you feel you have been mistreated by MEP staff, as they are expected to be professional, courteous and helpful to clients.  Manuel da Costa, Executive Director of MEP, has asked me to extend his apologies if this is not the standard of service you received."

I remain gobsmacked to this very day.  That could have been a 30 second hallway discussion between my MLA and the minister.  The recital of what the abusive Collections Officer said makes it appear that the points I tried to make were written off in favour of established policy.  Granted it was delivered more politely the second time around.  I do not believe any of my argument was fairly represented, I know it was never discussed with me.  It feels that I have been written off as just another whinger with an axe to grind.  I hope I'm very clear that I am much more than that.  I may be a little naive, perhaps a little too optimistic, but I also have answers that can help resolve some issues.

This is a serious problem.  It is a serious issue.  It affects about half of all marriages in Alberta.  Sure, not all of them are high conflict, but high conflict separations are common enough to be a major issue in our society.  My complaint went to my MLA, disappeared for six weeks, then came back with an unsatisfactory answer and an unbelievable apology.


I beg of you to understand this is greater than one complaint against one mistreatment.  This is a single anecdote from a single department within a single ministry of our Provincial Government.  The same is rampant in our Health Ministry, in our Education Ministry, in our Energy Ministry, seemingly in all of our government.  This top-down, controlling approach where problems are passed into a black box to either be mysteriously fixed or never seen again is more than just my story - it's the story of thousands of Albertans who are not receiving the leadership we deserve.  We need change, I have lost faith in change-from-within and am looking for change-from-without.

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So in the office where I work there was a sudden influx of people coming and going into the basement.  I was surprised when some of my newly made friends began appearing at the door when I was coming or leaving work.  There are plenty of people that have earned my immense respect over the past year.  Much to my chagrin, most of them were challenging me as to why I was sitting on the sidelines of this campaign.

I've been afraid and uncomfortable to admit that I'm still angry with Alison Redford for not seeming to act on my complaint while she was Minister of Justice and address me fairly.  I'm left in a bad position where I like much of what she says, but I'm overwhelmed with disbelief that she will respond any better as Premier than she has as a Minister.  Any time I agreed with her was diluted with the sense that I am just a little person whose opinion holds no weight whatsoever.

Ms. Redford is certainly a significant part of government that affects me directly.  Sadly, it has been a government that has completely rejected me as a Debtor with an axe to grind.  I have not had any standing whatsoever with the government for my entire adult life.  There needs to be change and the change needs to be significant.

I have decided that the best party to institute the change I am hoping to see will be the Alberta Party.  I believe the Alberta Party is most capable of giving Albertans standing in their government and is best positioned to create the dialogue Alberta needs in order to become a better Province for us all.

It's through the Alberta Party that I meet spectacular people like Tammy Maloney, who chastised me for my hypocrisy and it has bothered me ever since.  The problem with being driven by anger with the Ministry of Justice and the government at large is that I fail to live up to my values of being a force for open and communicative discussion.  Ms. Maloney clearly outlined that I am wrong to not continue to try to have a conversation and express my views with a fair and open mind, just as I expect to be heard.  It's been tough and I've been trying to amalgamate it all together.  I hope I can consider myself a friendly opponent.  I intend to be present for the remainder of Ms. Redford's political life while she will be present for the entirety of mine.

We absolutely have to have some very tough discussions in Alberta about our future direction.  We absolutely have to involve more Albertans than have been at the table lately.  We must break down the institutions within our government and bureaucracies that have been creating barriers to discussion, actively fomenting conflict, or masking accountability and transparency.  I wish Ms. Redford success because I don't believe she wants to perpetuate the problems we have discovered we're living with.

I also wish she'll walk up two flights of stairs, turn left, and ask for Mark and have a serious conversation over coffee some time.

So it's time to start drawing my thoughts together and start making sense of all the bigger thoughts I've been working on.

Let me be very up front.  I'm afraid to write this entry.

I haven't brought all my thoughts together and I haven't always been extremely explicit with a lot of the points I've been thinking about.

The first thing I have to mention is that I've really felt crushed under the stress, particularly over the past few months.  It has affected my health.  It's also affected my mindset.  I've been struggling to do my best to cope with the stress positively.

Some days #BetterYYC has been the only reason for me to get out of bed in the morning.  Trying to make a difference, trying to affect change, trying to improve myself, my family, my community, and my city.  I've been trying to consider the little things around me that I can improve instead of feeling swamped under all the crap I can't fix.

It's been tough some days.  I've been clinging to different ideas lately and discovering they are much deeper solutions than I ever had imagined.

Picture in your mind:  A young boy in Rosemary, Alberta racing his bike along the small-town roads.  In my mind, I was the fastest thing on two wheels and I had infinite freedom to travel the town over.  Well, it turns out I wasn't the fastest thing ever on two wheels and I can't ride my bike indefinitely. 

But as a grown man, I've rediscovered that exact same joy and enthusiasm I had as a boy.  I've found that riding a bike not only saves me a boat load of money, but it means much less maintenance on my car and I have a much better attitude when I've arrived at whichever destination I headed towards.  That is the deeper solution - when all the benefits come together and add up to a lot more than you expected at the outset.

I've retained my girlish figure, sure, but today I can ride much farther and faster than I ever have imagined.  My breathing is easier, my knee hurts less, I know that I am more fit and more happy than when I'm not riding my bike.  This has expressed itself time after time over the past few months.  It's a good thing, for me, and it's something I hope to make possible for everyone who would prefer to ride a bike more often.  Judging from the recent survey in Calgary, that's most of us.

We have to fix that.  What's stopping us?  Put a little cash into infrastructure up front and we'll collectively save a bundle in the long haul.  It makes sense.

Everything about cycling more makes sense to me.  Making it available to others is reasonable to me because the benefits are apparent.  It's not going to be simple, it's not going to be smooth, but we can come together and discuss who, what, where, when, why and how to make it happen.  We're having the discussion, let's make it an achievable goal.

Maybe I'm a little naive, perhaps too optimistic, but we've done a poor job of making Calgary bicycle friendly for at least 40 years while talking about how nice it would be to cycle more.  There comes a point when someone has to lead the conversation and make things happen.  There comes a point when someone has to say our current rules don't make sense, or that we've created so many harmful side effects that we have to readdress the situation as a whole.

Making a positive change.  The Albert Park Centennial Garden has made a huge difference in our community.  It's made a huge difference in my life.  I've met neighbours, I've worked with neighbours, I've felt integrated into my community through it.  I've met some fantastic friends, I've worked alongside some amazing corporate citizens.  Paul Tonnesen from Fiskars and Duncan Reith from Canadian Tire didn't just show up for the photo shoot at the end of the day, they put some serious effort into building the garden with us.  That is the kind of leadership I subscribe to - people willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work.  This isn't a pie-in-the-sky dreamland, this is a real and tangible creation that will pay off for years to come.

It's easy to destroy, it's much harder to create.  To create something good and lasting requires planning, feedback and involvement.  That's what I'm interested in helping to create.

That's why my life lately has been about so many of these ideas swirling together.  It's not just cycling, it's not just about standing up and complaining about bad laws, it's not just about building a garden or picking up garbage.  It's about creating a better life.  Fixing the harms that have been done.  Trying to be open in conversation and be able to express what I need and to hear how I can help.  Doing things properly, not just for today but for the long haul as well.

Next I'm going to have to explain the ultimate driving force behind my attitude and fix my particular hypocrisy.  I've been thinking on it for months, I can only hope I express it properly.

I'm starting to think that failure is seriously under rated.

I tried to ride my bike out to Banff on Saturday.  On Friday, just as I was planning my trip, I spoke with the neighbour who reminded me that it was a long weekend and most of the camping spots would be already occupied.  So instead of being a day trip out and camping overnight, it became a ride out and back in a single day.  Instead of getting to Banff it became going as far as I could and returning home.

I failed to make Banff.  I was 40 km short when I gave up and turned around.  After riding for four hours I decided I was going to have to stop if I was going to return in a single day.  I was rather worn out at that point anyways.

Failing to reach a goal can be a huge drag.  What's the point of setting a goal and trying to reach it when you fall short?

Riding westward I rode for 4:09:57.  My turning point was Lac Des Arcs.  I travelled 96.76 km at an average speed of 23.2 km/h.  My maximum speed was 67.3 km/h.  I like downhill.  Lots.

Amazingly, the elevation of Banff is 1383 metres while the elevation of Calgary is just 1048 metres.  There is an awful lot of hills both ways, but I would have expected the return trip to have a greater percentage of downhill runs.  Unfortunately, a south eastern wind came up and I was facing a head wind returning to Calgary.

The return trip took me 5:14:26.  The distance was very similar - 96.61 km, so my average was quite a bit slower at 18.4 km/h.  Maximum speed coming home was 56.1 km/h, which was very disappointing to me after fighting to get up Scott Lake Hill.

So on Saturday I rode 193.37 kilometres in total.  It took my 9:24:23 and my average speed was merely 20.6 km/h.

That's some failure of mine.  I can't wait to do it again.

And that's success.  Isn't it?

I went through the DBA programme at SAIT.  I'm rather proud of what I've accomplished, I only wish I got to use it a lot more.

I really love Oracle, it sings to me for a whole bunch of reasons.  The structure is beautiful.  Laying out a tablespace across spindles is the sort of thing that makes my heart cry out with joy.

Sure, it's a pain in the ass.  I particularly love the ORA-03113 error.  The fact that I didn't even have to look up the damn number says I need to get better with my tools.  The pain in the ass of Oracle is that you have to set each parameter and you have endless settings to get right.  The beauty of Oracle is that you have a gazillion parameters and settings you can tweak to get perfectly right for your particular situation.

The one thing I'm going to talk about tonight is found in many more places than just Oracle, but that's where I first encountered it.

Here's the situation:  You're entering a date into a database.  Without thinking, you just happen to type in, "22-Aug-2011."  Or maybe you typed in "22/08/11."  Or perhaps, let's go completely wild and crazy and type in "08/22/11."  You are a wild party.

Here's the thing, if Oracle is expecting a date and you're giving it a string of characters, it will look at the input and, if it makes sense, do an automatic conversion of what you typed to what it expected.  It's called an "implicit conversion" and it can figure out - in certain cases - what it got and what it expected.  "22-Aug-2011" is pretty clearly a date, so is "22/08/11" and, if you're a North American bend of mind, the same with "08/22/11."  It happens with all kinds of computer languages where the system figures out what it was supposed to be getting and just does the translation for you.

Ahh, but what if I wrote this entry ten days ago?  Then it would have been  12-Aug-2011.  No problem when I write it like that, but if I write it 12/08/11 we can already sense a problem.  Should I write that date as 08/12/11 I shifted our timeframe out by four months.  There's no way for a computer to know precisely if the date is August or December.  It could be either, depending on your convention.

So to counteract the ambiguity of the implicit conversion, we have an explicit conversion.  It's more work, but there is absolutely no doubt as to what you meant.  You hand-hold Oracle (or whatever) through the translation and you are very precise to ensure it's meaning is perfectly correct.

What's this got to do with me?

I've been suffering from a whole string of implicit conversions lately.  (No pun intended!)

I'm a very straight forward, practical guy.  I'm horribly vague, I dance around a subject a lot, but if I get confronted directly I'll take the time to at least try to explain myself.  In reality, this whole series of blog posts are one, long, run-on sentence that will culminate with one great big post that will piss someone off.  I hope.

It takes me a while to develop my thoughts.  It takes effort for me to explain myself step by step.  Much of the time I have to go back and explain twenty or thirty years of history to explain why I just made the decision I chose.  But I try to be consistent in my thought process and rational in my decisions.  It just doesn't always show through.

The other problem is when I use those "tidbit" soundbites that has a deep meaning to me but doesn't necessarily have full relevance to someone else.  I try really hard to not use those conversation shortcuts when not everyone knows what they mean, but they're often really useful to me and slip through.  You'll know when I use one - they seem strange and out of context.  I'll talk about "Loading the truck" and I'm really talking about pretending to throw my anger over my shoulder, but I'm really just throwing it into the bed of a truck I'm dragging behind me - and I can drag a dump truck, no little pickup truck for this guy!  It's a bad thing, eventually that truck has to get dumped and you don't want to be the one dumped on.  See?  Easy, short, logical, and pretty much impossible to figure out without having it explained to you.

Implicit conversions often need to be made explicit.  Implicit conversions work okay for a while, but explicit conversions leave no room for error.  They're a lot more work, it's not always worth it, but when I find I am getting misunderstood I need to go back to explicit conversations.  Explicit conversations can sometimes be risky, or hurtful, but they are worth the clarity.

So a couple of helpful hints about conversations with me:

My entire life is dedicated to meeting my cornerstones as a person.  If I'm not honest, trustworthy, fair, and respectful I am nothing as a man.  If my conversation runs counter to those principles we need to have an explicit conversation and I need to either apologize or explain myself.  And probably apologize and then explain myself.

I have an overdeveloped sense of humour, and my entire life is a huge inside joke.  If you don't get the joke, I can try to explain it but it's going to take a while.  Laugh along if you can, we'll talk explicitly about it later.

I am absolutely an unhurtful person.  If you feel hurt by anything I've said, please, let's immediately have an explicit conversation over coffee.  Hurting someone else is utterly unacceptable to me.

Apparently I'm flirty.  Yay me.  It's going nowhere.  Trust me.  For the full explanation of that one, see "This is (Really) Why I'm Single."  Oh wait, Firefox crashed and I lost that post.  Just trust me on this one for now.

Lastly, you may think I'd be fun at a party, I'm not all that much fun at a party.  You may think that I'm more fun with a couple of beers, I'm pretty much the same after a couple of beers and I'm a lightweight anyways.  You may think that I'm just a super nice guy, I'm really the same old asshole I've always been but I'm trying to be more tactful about it.

I should be exactly the guy I appear to be.  If I'm not, it is time to shift from implicit to explicit.  I'm more than willing, let's sit down and discuss it.