Vote on Monday

If you live in Canada and you're old enough then you need to vote on Monday, May 2nd, 2011. Starting in 1867, voter turn out has always been between 60-80% but in the last election it was a record low of 58.8%. I am not sure why so little of the population turned out to vote, but I really hope more people care about this election. Apparently there has been more than 2 million people vote in advance, so that is awesome.

So, my first message is "VOTE". No matter what party you are voting for, it makes sense to at least pay attention to the direction the country is going in and get involved at least enough to tick a box rather than hiding in the dark. I know it's a big country, but even if you don't think it affects you now, I'm sure sometime in the future taxes, wages, employment, healthcare, the environment and/or Canada's global reputation will matter to you.

You may notice that a lot of ad campaigns by the political parties focus on ripping apart their opponents - almost as much as they do on making promises about how they can do better. Normally I would say that this is a horrible practice and really everyone should just focus on making promises and then actually keeping them. Also, it is hard to say you will do better if you haven't actually been the one in power - you have little proof that you will do better. Now, I say "Normally" because this election I make an exception because I find the history of what has been done by those in power to be absolutely horrible. This election I urge you to please, please, PLEASE vote for anyone BUT the conservatives. That is, DO NOT vote for the conservatives. Stephen Harper has been slowly wrecking the country. There are many examples of it. But first something positive.

I am going to vote NDP, mostly because in my riding that is who will beat the conservative candidate, but as a bonus, NDP is who I usually vote for anyway. In my riding of Surrey North, the NDP candidate is Jasbir Sandhu. He is an all-around good guy who has lived in Surrey for more than 30 years, owns a small business, and has been an instructor at the Justice Institute of BC. I also agree with Jack Layton's stances, especially giving less money to oil companies and more to the environment. I do not own a car but I do have to breath the air. Yes I know oil is used for a lot more, but these are huge companies that don't need help.

Ok, so now onto what is wrong with the current conservative government. First of all, there is a ton of organizations and websites that seem to be against Stephen Harper. Like me, they seem to be more focused on getting him out of power than who replaces him. This is scary and I've never seen anything like the hatred before but looking at all they say and what is in the news, I understand and agree with them. Check out Project Democracy which is specifically gearing to helping Canadian pick the candidate in their riding that is most likely to beat the conservatives. This is to stop votes from being split between the other parties while the conservatives win.

It is not hard to find websites describing all Harper has done. The website below sums most of it up.
Which Canada will You vote for? - This site provides many comic strips about what Stephen Harper has done in power. Each strip can stand alone if you don't have time to read them all. If this were fiction it would seem ridiculous, but it's reality and it's scary.
Comics Evidence - Yes, those are just comics so how can we trust them? Well they also provide a page with a zillion links to the news stories that backup the comics.

On top of all that Harper somehow finds a way to be full of himself. Basically in the end I have a very hard time imagining anyone taking the country in a worse direction.

Life is Sweet

Life has been busy and I have neglected this blog for a couple months, so here is an update.

In the last few months, I worked hard on editing my thesis, successfully defended it and submitted an 8 page paper to a conference on my thesis work. I am done all my school requirements now and will attend the convocation ceremony on June 15th! I'm not interested in doing a PhD, so I'm all done school. I am the main developer of my research group's software though, so they are going to hire me full time to continue working on its development. Thus, my normal life will continue without the thesis stress and with more hours of software development than before. The current deadline is a demo at a conference on May 7th and 8th.

I haven't had much time for fun and games with all the thesis work, but I regularly went to drop-in ultimate and indoor soccer to stay active. Soccer is over now because it was through school but ultimate is just getting busier now that the weather is improving. Today I ran in the Vancouver Sun Run, the largest time 10km run in North America. I finished it with the same time as last year, 52 minutes. Maybe next year I'll have more time for training.

I haven't had that much time for socializing but recently I've spent more time hanging out with other grad students, as well as the usual board game nights with friends and making sushi with my siblings. I also traveled to Edmonton for a week shortly after defending my thesis to visit my friend Toni. The trip was really fun and relaxing even though I was sick the entire time. We played in the snow, went to the museum, watched a lot of movies and played many games. It was great to escape my regular life for a while, although I did do some paper editing while there.

Las Vegas

We arrived in Vegas around 7:30pm, too late to go to the opening reception for the conference. We were also exhausted.

We stayed at the Wyndham Grand Desert hotel.

We dropped our stuff everywhere in the big suite. We had the one at the end of the hall that takes up the whole width of the building but also requires you to walk the whole length of it after you get off the elevator.

Our posters had been delivered to our hotel after being printed in Vegas. Also we left a bunch of luggage there that we didn't need in the canyon.

Outside our tower was a pool and hot tub that were open 24 hours. After I checked my email in the computer room, I went in the pool and hot tub with everyone else. The hot tub had some hot waterfalls you could sit under.

The first night we went to a Chinese restaurant where we ordered some dishes to share among us all. It was a very good meal. All the meals in Vegas were quite good.

Then a couple people went back to the hotel but the rest of us wandered along the strip looking at hotels and walking through some of the casinos.

When you're on the strip everything is so big and they've also copied monuments from other parts of the world, like the Eiffel tower. The funny thing is the strip is only about 12 blocks long on one street and then the rest of Vegas around it doesn't have many high buildings, so from the air it looks really weird and also really small.

In the afternoon on the first full day of the conference was the poster viewing. I stood by my poster but even though I was #3 I was squished into a tiny aisle with a poster directly across from mine about 5 feet away. #3 means I was the 3rd person to submit a poster. For some reason, #51 was the one facing the door as you entered. I had a good chat about my poster with the one group of people who had a poster on a similar topic - decision support in the OR.

That evening we had dinner with the people from Salt Lake City because Matthias now works with us and used to work with them at the U of U. We had dinner inside the mall of the Venetian which was also the conference hotel. The mall is made to look like you are in outside Venice, or some Disney version of it. There is a perfect, lit up blue sky above you and there are canals with motorized gondolas on them. The gondoliers sing songs to their passengers as they pretend to steer the gondolas with their paddle while really steering with their foot. The Mexican place we ate it was really very good, although when we asked about the Happy Hour special which they had a sign for they said it was only for people sitting inside. As if we really were outside....under the fake sky.

That night no one really wanted to walk around and see things so I went off by myself to see the part of the strip in the other direction from the night before. The four big hotels in that direction, all around the same intersection were the MGM shown above,

the Excalibur,

New York, New York,

and Tropicana.

Here is the view of the Excalibur from my bedroom.

The next day was another full day of the conference but we decided to go see a show after the conference banquet. The banquet was quite good. It was in a club with waiters walking around with appetizers, an open bar with a limited selection (beers were pretty much just Heineken or Corona) and then a buffet of Italian-ish food. I had a good chat with some undergraduate students from UBC who were randomly at the conference and at one point confused with us because the organizers didn't know there were two groups from UBC. One of them said that another project he is working on is getting ready to install many charge stations around the lower mainland for electric cars. That is awesome.

Anyways, we went and saw the Blue Man Group after the dinner. I didn't really have any expectations. It was pretty cool. They are quite funny in how they act like children or aliens who have no idea how things work and so they play around with things in a musical art-making way. There was some audience participation which may have been planted because although the lady acted pretty normal, she was hilarious in her reaction to the blue men. Near the end of the show they basically toilet papered the whole audience, which I thought was quite the waste of paper.

I immediately thought my sisters would love the show, except that they should not visit Vegas until they are a little older. There are people on the streets everywhere trying to get you to come see naked ladies.

After the show we went to a couple different bars and walked around Vegas some more but I eventually went back to the hotel room and then for a dip in the pool before heading to bed at about 4am. I woke up a few hours later and was the only one from our group who went to a bit of the conference that morning. I took down our posters and brought them back to the hotel so we could pack up and check out of the hotel just a little late.

Our plane wasn't for a couple hours later, so we hung out in the lobby and pool area. Some guy walking by asked us what this donkey show was all about, but I have no idea.

Also in Vegas I gambled a little in the slot machines and as usual I could have won a few dollars if I'd walked away after the first 10 minutes, but instead I lost everything I put in.

Overall I was much more impressed by the Grand Canyon than Vegas. Vegas is a really weird place that I don't understand how people can live there regularly. The show we went to was pretty cool and I would like to see more shows but I think I will just catch Cirque du Soleil when it next comes to Vancouver.

Out of the Grand Canyon

The next morning we woke up bright and early, had some quick breakfast, packed up and hit the trail.

We started by going across the other suspension bridge. The sun was shining, just not making it into the inner canyon.

The trail followed the Colorado river for twenty minutes or so.

Then we were heading up a valley out of the inner canyon.

There were 3 or 4 streams we had to cross by

hopping from stone to stone or stepping on logs.

Eventually we found the sun, although we were getting a good workout and
didn't really want more heat from the sun.

We were only in the sun a little while before we rounded a corner
and went right back into the shade.

We hiked for a while just inside the shade line and stopped for a snack
at a place where we could stand above or below it.

After 2 hours of hiking we made it to the other campground where there was water.

Then began the final long leg of the journey. We basically had to hike to the level of the top of those high walls in the distance. When walking towards these walls it was a mystery to me which way we would go in order to get up them. It appeared we were walking into a dead end with steep walls all around.

The trail had a lot of switch backs and managed to wind its way
in between and around the steep parts.

Still, we never went around any large corners, we could always
look back and see how far we had come.

The trail went up through the gap in the top right.

The look back became more and more spectacular.

Because of the direction the slope faced we were in the shade until the top. After the 3-mile rest house (3 miles from the top) we passed a lot of people coming down on day hikes or couple hour hikes. Some young Japanese tourists were not wearing jackets and they were walking down along the icy trails in sneakers.

This diagram was in the 1.5 mile rest house,
which is in the hermit shale layer of the Grand Canyon.

The view of the canyon getting really close to the top.

Sometimes you have to let mules pass.

The view from the top...and my last photo of the Grand Canyon.

The hiking trip was awesome. The views were amazing and it was not crowded or hot this time of year. The thing that surprised me the most was the level of difficulty of the hike. I did not find it challenging and it only took us 4 hours to get down and 6 hours to get all the way back up. The steepness of the trails is much less than the Squamish Chief or the Grouse Grind. I suppose it needs to be so people can backpack in.

Next we drove back to Vegas for the conference...the reason I was in the US.

Into the Grand Canyon

On Jan. 10th, 2011 we arrived at the Grand Canyon at about 8pm Arizona time (7pm BC time). It was after dark and much too late to pick up our back country permits so we were forced to camp on the rim.

I went there with 4 coworkers from my hospital job. We would later attend a conference in Vegas. So anyway, it was Joanne's birthday so we had a chocolate birthday cake for her.

I slept in this 3-person tent between two other guys, which is perhaps how I survived since it was about -19C and the sleeping bag I brought said 4C on it and I had been told it was rated "comfort:11, limit:6, and extreme:-7". There was a heated washroom I could have slept in but that would have been admitting defeat. I wore many layers so just my feet were cold.

The next morning we woke up around dawn and drove and then took a bus to the South Kaibab trailhead. We hiked down the South Kaibab Trail all the way, across the Kaibab suspension bridge and over to the Bright Angel campground. The next day we crossed the other bridge and took the Bright Angel trail back up.

Here is my first view of the canyon that morning. It is hard to capture the hugeness of it in a photo. It is hard to even comprehend the hugeness of it when you're there.

For the first half of the hike there was snow near the trail and sometimes it was icy. A lot of the trail is steps but not very steep steps. Mules have to walk up and down the trails. Sometimes like this we were walking with steep slopes and a good view on both sides. There are no guard rails.

Down there is a cliff where the snow ends.

It was often easy to see very far in front of us to where we would be in 10 minutes or half an hour. The trail ahead wound around the right side of the pillar of rock past the end of the snow.

Here we are going behind that pillar. We were often on the edge of cliffs.

Some mules passed us on the trail.

We ate some lunch here, just before this gap to ascend into the inner rim.

Once through there we could see down to the Colorado river. You can see a trail way down there near the river that we hiked along the next day on our way back up.

There was more red sand at this level. The canyon has many different layers.

Here's a group photo minus Matthias who took it. I borrowed Jon's Olympics toque for the trip because mine somehow got left in my luggage at the hotel in Vegas.

Here's a view of the suspension bridge from above. It has many cables, so it isn't the kind that dips down or swings. They initially brought down all the cables on men's backs...not by mule.

This is looking back across the bridge at the short dark tunnel that got us there.

After setting up camp, we walked over to the nearby Phantom Ranch where hikers can pay to stay in cabins. They had a canteen there which we got some hot chocolate at. We also went back later and had some beers and played trivial pursuit.

There were deer that wandered right through the campsites. Also, late at night we saw a skunk and also a ringtail. There were also a few birds including a woodpecker.

There were many cacti at different levels of the canyon but the most at the bottom near the river.

I have sooo many more photos so I will probably put them up on facebook or flickr. Also, I will make another post about the hike back out.