When the Americans abandoned their embassy in Iran in 1979, they shredded thousands of classified documents with strip-cut paper shredders and left the shreddings behind in garbage bags. The assumption was that the information was secure because it would take half a million people 5 years to put it back together and that it was highly unlikely that anyone would be able to do that.

So Iran rounded up a whole bunch of carpet weavers (people used to dealing with tangles!), gave them each a roll of sticky tape and a bunch of shredded material. A few years later and they had reassembled most of the classified documents.

And then Iran published them in a series of books called Documents from the U.S. Espionage Den. So much for the US’ secrets.

Since then, more secure shredders have been developed that turn paper into very thin, short strips that mean it’s much harder to put things back together. To reduce the likelihood of someone putting the pieces back together the shreddings can be mixed up. I read somewhere that the CIA learned from what took place in Iran and turns the shreddings into pulp them before burning the pulp.

Fast forward to yesterday:

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Once again this year, I am steering a dragon boat in the Ottawa Dragon Boat Festival for the Algonquin College Singapore Slings.  And like the other teams in the festival, we’re taking part in the pledge challenge raising money that will go to support the charities selected by the Ottawa Dragon Boat Foundation. These charities do very important work in the Ottawa area and are worth supporting.

If you’d like to help my team reach its pledge target and thus help the various charities selected by the ODBF, please consider clicking here or on the link at the top of the right column, and sponsoring me.  All donations of $20 or more automatically receive a tax receipt and you can request one for donations of less than $20.

Many thanks for reading this and thinking about it.  And a special thank you if you do sponsor me. 🙂

Last week turned out to be a week of good deeds and karmic payback.

I stopped for gas on Wednesday and noticed a Starbucks card on the ground next to the pump. It had a small hole in one corner, so I expect it was attached to someone’s key ring. Sadly, a crack meant the hole was more of a notch and thus not very good at remaining attached to a key ring.

When I got to my destination, I took a picture of it and tweeted a lost-and-found message. I also asked @StarbucksCanada if they could retweet it for me. Their response was:

I sent them a direct message with the numbers and a couple of days later they sent me a Starbucks gift card via email. Hopefully the owner of the card had registered it on the Starbucks website so that Starbucks can issue them a new card.

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Regular readers will probably remember that I’ve written about the relationship between changes in air pressure and headaches on a number of occasions in the last few years, most recently in January. This morning, a friend of mine mentioned that she started the day with an optical migraine that morphed into a headache.  As it happened, I had a headache coming on at the time, so I took a quick look at Environment Canada’s website and noticed that the pressure over the last 24 hours had been steadily climbing. I took another look a few minutes ago and it seems to have peaked a couple of hours ago.

Taking a look at the surface analysis from 8am this morning, you can see a high pressure over southern Ontario. My guess is that it’s probably moved past us, which is why the pressure is starting to drop a bit. For reference, Ottawa is the red dot and the circle with X is the high pressure, just north of Lake Erie.

Anyone else plagued by headache, migraines or other things that might be caused by this?

There was a story on CBC Ottawa’s morning show Tuesday about some people in Manor Park who went from door to door in their neighbourhood trying to find out who complained to the City about their basketball nets. Apparently, the basketball nets are on the edge of the road, which is a violation of a city bylaw that doesn’t allow streets to be blocked.

Nine homeowners mustered a group of 30 adults and children who went from door to door until they discovered who complained. It turns out that the complainant is a an elderly woman who believes the nets are a safety hazard. The group had proposed putting reflective tape on the nets, but that wasn’t enough to cause her to withdraw her complaint. According to the story, if she withdraws her complaint the city will drop the matter.

The ringleader of the group, Natalie Belovic, says that the bases of the nets are filled with water or sand making them too heavy to easily move them.

This bylaw is the same one that kids playing street hockey ran afoul of a couple of years ago. In that case, the city eventually relented and passed a motion declaring children had the right to play street hockey. Belovic is quoted as saying…

“We actually would like them to take the same stand exactly as they did with the road hockey situation, which is just basically to turn a blind eye and ignore the quote-unquote problem”

And she went on to say that she still hopes that some compromise with the elderly lady can be reached, though I’m doubtful because she ran to the press immediately rather than try a bit harder to work something out.

Personally, I’m on the side of the elderly lady in this case. She called and reported a problem in her neighbourhood. The City sent a bylaw officer out to ask the people to move their nets back on to their own properties, which is the appropriate response on the city’s part. The owners don’t appear to have been given tickets for the violations (yet).

The owners’ response was to form a posse and hunt down the person and try to intimidate her into withdrawing her complaint. When the complainant stood her ground, they went to the media to try to get the court of public opinion to convince the lady to change her mind – basically more bullying.

According to the story, some of the people have already moved their nets, but Belovic and a couple of others haven’t (yet) because their properties are sloped, presumably meaning the nets would topple over.

Should the city “turn a blind eye” to the situation? No. This is not like the street hockey situation a couple of years ago for a couple of reasons. First, street hockey nets are temporary and moved when someone yells “car!” and they aren’t stored in the street. The basketball nets are, by Belovic’s admission, too heavy to be moved easily, so they’re not temporary.

Second, street hockey has been around for several generations of kids and it probably pre-dated the bylaw, while these freestanding basketball nets are a relatively new phenomenon. Growing up, I, like many kids in my neighbourhood, had a basketball net mounted over the garage door. In fact, if you watch this video that Belovic has on YouTube promoting Manor Park (she’s a realtor), you’ll see a number of houses in Manor Park have basketball nets over their garage doors. If Belovic et al. can’t have freestanding nets on their property, they could install one over their garage doors instead, or they could probably take a spade and level out a little square of dirt on the edge of their lawns, put a couple of patio stones down and have a nice, legal place to put their basketball nets. If they don’t the city should cite them, even if the complaint is withdrawn.

A tip o’ the hat to Legends of America who had the photo on their site.

I was going through all my photos from yesterday’s 5km race and I noticed that I caught three pictures of the Flash as he passed the people waiting at Pretoria Bridge. The reaction of the crowd to this speedy runner is quite amusing. In the picture to the right, you can see the people in the background laughing as he rounded the corner.

A few seconds later, he was checked out by another spectator as he ran past her…

You can make up your own captions.