An Unexpected Digital Holiday
Strange what's in a name. In Nova Scotia (a Canadian Province), there are two places that, to my uneducated Western Canadian ear, sound a lot alike: Ingonish and Antigonish. Both have timeshares and Covid left my wife and I with a pair of unused trade weeks banked. Interval International has a better chance to find you places if you give them lots of choices and lots of weeks to find you a trade. Since both were in Northern Nova Scotia, I assumed that they were more-or-less equivalent. It turned out this wasn't the case.
One is a tiny community spread for several kilometres along a bay in Cape Breton. The other is much larger (a city, in fact). Ingonish is a lovely tiny community that, like most tourist places, virtually shuts everything down in the off-season. That's where we ended up trading into.
What can I say? It was before high season so the restaurants were mostly closed. The few that were open were fantastic, though. In Western Canada, it's beef, beef, beef. We arrived just as the lobster and crab seasons were opening. We never had so much excellent seafood and at a reasonable price! I'll create a space for all the pictures my wife and I took for those that are interested.
Of course, there had to be a downside. We were told that the place had WIFI and that we were connected to the Internet. Both were true, as far as it went. Used to a 500 Mbps at home, it was a shock to end up on a network connection 2% of that speed. My wife has a number of devices that continually use the internet because of all the apps she has running. I ended up with maybe half that. I thought "Gee, she sleeps in usually. I'll work in the morning". Great idea as far as the internet is concerned.
There was no way my desktop was going to fly across country (an 6 hour flight). Too heavy, too fragile. I decided my work laptop would do just fine. I'll load all the apps I need at home and have them available for down times at the other end. Except: It was ready for greening (i.e. 4 years old) just before Covid hit. The campus decided to put greening on hold as most profs have better equipment at home than the laptops we used to use to present our lectures. So there I was, out in Ingonish, on a slow internet connection trying to use the apps I'd loaded. Photoshop wouldn't even load. Seems my laptop didn't have a video card it could recognise. Not too surprising, I guess. Even Unity seemed to take a dislike to the old beast. Move a mouse and sometimes it would take several seconds before Unity's internal routines (usually so fast that you don't notice them) would take over the screen.
So that left hiking ... Seems that most people in Ingonish take down their stairs to the beach for the winter to protect them from winter storms. It was a real challenge to get down to the beach but more of that when I post the images!
One More Item Off My Bucket List
My son and a few of his friends entered the Alberta Game Jam. Since most of the team was unfamiliar with Unity, he recruited me as the expert. I use Unity as the game engine for a course stream I teach at MacEwan University in the Computer Science stream. In case people are unfamiliar with a game jam, each team has 48 hours to design and implement a game. As a rule, when I supervise final year game capstone projects I insist the people involved have taken the game development stream.
Unfortunately, our team met with the expected results. Inexperience coupled with the usual "game making is easy" world view led to 48 hours of headache inducing, feature creeping chaos. I haven't used GIT (a project repository) in years because there are problems with non-text files. Of course, because the rest of the team only knew GIT, integration was used GIT...with the expected problems.
Needless to say, it's going to be a day or two before I get back my energy. Both my son and I have decided that Game Jams are for the much younger (and "I know everything") crowd.
Covid-19 Strikes Home
Getting to the testing centre, it was more than a little surreal. two decades ago, when I was starting my career as an educator, I taught at the South Campus of MacEwan University. I spent many noon hours in the winter running on the taped track in the gym. The same gym that was now the test centre. No monstrous lineups here. They schedule only the number they can deal with in an hour and you are given a time to show up. After pressing a doorbell (specially rigged for the purpose), you wait until the admitting nurse admits you (one person at a time). Once inside, it was strange to see chairs, spaced evenly about 2 meters apart with people on them even further apart. Though no one looked like they were afraid, I could tell there was real concern from the health staff and from those of us waiting.
Just inside the door, hand sanitizer. You didn't get to see anyone without a cleaning. Then you got to the first station and more hand sanitizer. After checking you had an appointment and your health care card, you were directed to the Registration nurse. More hand sanitization. You ended up on one of the chairs. Periodically (about every 2-3 minutes or so), a nurse in full personal protective equipment would announce a name. Hard to hear at times as a gym isn't exactly known for good acoustics. As each person follows the nurse behind the screen of the testing facility, another worker swabs down the chair and the one on either side with (my guess) a pretty effective sanitizer.
When it was my turn, everything went as I expected. I was called. The person doing seat sanitization quickly dashed up to make sure I'd left no virus bits behind. The nurse checked me against the information and I was told which seat of three to sit in. No, there was no choice. I can guess why. It meant that they'd only have to sanitize the entire alcove every three instead of after each one. More hand sanitizer. A quick swab (less than 10 seconds) and I was guided to the exit. Not out the way I'd come in. Down a back strip of the gym marked off as the direct route out. More hand sanitizer. They gave me a set of instructions (stay home until the test result comes back in a couple of days or for the full 14 days if I end up positive, basically). A final hand sanitizer at the door and instructions to use my hip to open the door and exit.
If I had had any doubts prior to this about the severity of this virus, I suspect I'd have had a change of mind right there. The front line workers were taking this far too seriously for anyone to doubt that we are dealing with something far more than a common cold or the flu. I applaud them all. It must be a huge risk, even with PPEs, dealing with all the infected (and potentially infected) day in-day out.
So now I wait, my sample bundled off to the test lab. I really do hope its negative but I won't be surprised if it is positive. I have several students that returned from China only days before travel restrictions were put in place after our Reading Week in February. Several of which I was helping early in March before the campus switched to fully online teaching. One of those students has, alas, reported positive for Covid-19.
Covid Strikes Home
We're going to slash public sector wages and tell doctors to do fewer hours. Of course, Covid will never come to Alberta, right? At the same time, they've decided to spend billions to build another tar sands plant to create more heavy oil that they already have trouble selling. Oh, and by the way, they've decided that slashing education and university budgets is a good way to attract high tech to Alberta? Incentives are usually a good idea (we were suffering a high tech boom up to this year). Of course, money is everything so the incentives vanished. But some how Kenney's Konservative Kutters figure Alberta is an attractive place to high tech to start? What with Ontario offering 20% incentives on wages, BC pretty much the same. Heavens even small provinces are trying to attract high tech. So let's try to get this straight: you slash health care so there's no benefits for the workers to even want to come here. You slash incentives so that the new startups (and established companies) can get a better deal elsewhere. You give them a few paltry percent break on income tax. And they're going to come flocking into Alberta.
Somehow, I just can't quite see the logic in that