Author: Joey deVilla

Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair at the press conference.

As I write this, Accordion City’s chief of police Bill Blair is being as by-the-book as he can be while effectively saying once and for all that the video featuring our Peter Griffin-esque is real, and that he’s seen it. In a press conference before some understandably scandal-hungry reporters, he said that:

“The Toronto Police Service is now in possession of a video digital file”

and that it contains

“images consistent with those reported in the press”

Or simply put: Gawker and the Toronto Star weren’t lying. The “Rob Ford Smoking Crack” video is real.

Toronto’s worst mayor ever and his skeevy friends became the subject of an investigation in the wake of the news about a video allegedly (how much longer will I have to write “allegedly”?) showing him smoking a crack pipe. Ford took about a week to issue a statement about the video, and when he finally did, he avoided issuing a direct denial, stating “I cannot comment on a video that I have never seen or does not exist”. With an equal degree of indirectness, the Chief of Police says that it does exist. My guess is that the next few days at City Hall will be very interesting, as will the next few days at Toronto’s rabidly pro-Ford (at least until recently) low-information-reader newspaper of choice, the Toronto Sun, and the unintentionally hilarious I Hate the War on Mayor Rob Ford Facebook page.

The press conference comes on the heels of the release of a 500-page document on Project Brazen 2, which sounds like a bad direct-to-video movie, but was actually a police investigation. Earlier, it was believed that Sandro Lisi, a skeevy friend of the mayor, was the target of the investigation, but the document seems to suggest that the true target was the mayor himself. This document, which is heavily redacted in place, covers 349 phone calls and several meetings between Lisi and Ford, one of which involved that classic movie trope, the exchange of a manila envelope.

The document also includes these surveillance photos:

Here’s the video of the press conference held by the Toronto Police Service earlier today at 11:30 a.m.:

I’ve got to hand it to Chief Blair: he’s being a consummate professional about it. He’s simply stating the facts, and reminding the public that the polcie’s job is to gather evidence, make arrests where necessary, and present their finding to the courts, and doing so fairly, or as he puts it several times, “without fear or favour”. In the meantime, the so-called journalists keep asking immaterial questions like “Are you shocked?”

This should be an interesting couple of weeks here in Toronto. I won’t be around for them, though: I’m off to San Francisco next week, and Vegas the next, but I’m sure by then, it’ll be all over the American news and fodder for late-night comedy shows.

TechCrunch broke the news: The FAA has posted a press release announcing that airlines can now allow the use of personal electronic devices (which they refer to using the acronym PEDs) throughout the flight, from gate to gate. They’re providing the airlines with a set of guidelines, and we can expect to see them put into action by the end of the year. How these changes will be put in place will vary from airline to airline, but the general idea is that you won’t have to put away your mobile device during takeoff and landing. The new guidelines should be in effect by the end of the year.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the FAA guidelines…

• Lighter handheld electronic devices, which includes smartphones and tablets, must either be held or placed in the seat back pocket in front of you during takeoff and landing.
• Heavier electronic devices, such as full-size laptop computers, will have to be stowed during takeoff and landing. It will likely be up to each airline to declare what sorts of devices are considered “heavier”. Would a MacBook Air be considered light enough to use throughout a flight?
• Cellular service must be disabled — that is, no signal bars displayed — and can’t be used for voice communications; this is based on FCC regulations that disallow airborne calls using mobile phones.
• The use of wifi is allowed if the plane offers in-flight wifi service.
• Short-range Bluetooth devices, such as wireless keyboards, are allowed.
• In rare cases where visibility is very poor and the pilots have to do an instrument landing, you may still be asked to shut off electronic devices. This is because some landing systems may not be tolerant of the electromagnetic interference from personal devices.
• You’re still expected to put down your device or other reading material during the safety briefing at the start of the flight.
• You’re still expected to turn off and put away your device if a member of the crew asks you to.

Each airline will implement them only after they’ve performed a safety assessment and have received FAA approval, but I suspect that everyone will try to fast-track the process, especially with the holiday season coming up. Delta have already posted an announcement saying that they’ve submitted a plan and you might be able to use electronic devices for the duration of the flight starting November 1. That’s tomorrow at the time of this writing.

I’ve got at least four flights scheduled this coming month, and I’m hoping they get these new guidelines into effect ASAP!

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Since my personal Great Reset, I’ve managed to pop up in San Francisco once a year.

In early 2011, it was the site of my first post-separation non-date, which started off well, but went terribly, terribly wrong…

In mid-2012, I dropped by San Francisco for a whirlwind trip to do three job developer evangelist interviews with three startups. Two said “No thanks,” at the end, and one — who had me hanging out at their offices for two days, bouncing ideas off me and picking my brains — never got around to hiring anyone for the position. I also got to catch up with Tom Purves, Michele Perras, and Adam Schwabe at Tom and Michele’s fabulous Haight-Ashbury pad for shabu-shabu and great conversation.

And now, in late 2013, I’m coming back. This time it’s for a vacation I’d planned with this lovely lady…

…and I’m there for some R&R, a little birthday celebrating, some chilling out before some really big life changes, and to see friends and family.

Are you in the San Francisco Bay Area? Do you want to catch up with us? Let me know in the usual ways: in the comments, via email, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, whatever!

They’re all low-carb options, but some are more fun than others.

I’ll explain later.

Click the picture to see it at full size.

We’re terrible at estimating risk, especially when it involves things for which we have strong emotions or biases. Consider the photo above, which was posted to Facebook. It features someone’s kid, posing in front a collection of serious firepower, with this caption:

I just wanted to take a minute and remind everyone to keep their outlet plugs in if they have small children in the house.

Poe’s Law rears its head again: it’s so ridiculous that it has to be a joke, yet there’s no shortage of people — especially in America — who are pretty certain that a gun is the most important piece of safety equipment you can keep in your home, in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

By the bye:

• I think guns are still pretty fun, but I also think they’re a privilege that’s all-too-often mistaken for a right, and
• this doesn’t invalidate what the Facebook poster says about electrical outlets.

Maybe part of it is because we’re not all that hot at teaching math to laypeople, but even those of us who took statistics and probability courses get risk estimates wrong all the time. We’re just not wired to have a good “gut sense” for what’s risky and what isn’t.

Consider sharks and vending machines. Which kill more people? (The following fun fact photos come from Buzzfeed.)

I assume that these get killed in their attempts to tip vending machines in order to get free stuff, only to be crushed to death.

Which kills more: vending machines or roller coasters?

Which kills more: roller coasters or high school football?

High school football ain’t got nuthin’ on hot dogs:

If I placed a wager on what killed more people — slipping in the tub or falling out of bed — I’d have lost my money:

Does Black Friday shopping kill this many people?

And finally…

I once joked about an idea for a mobile app that would’ve saved the lives of people like David Carradine. If you were into autoerotic asphyxiation, you’d check in with this app before commencing the jerky-choke, and then go about your business. If you didn’t check in with it again within some predetermined time (30 seconds? 60 seconds? I have no idea how long it’s supposed to take), the app would call for help. I remember thinking that even if the App Store would approve such an app, there wouldn’t be a big market for it.

I think I might be wrong:

What happens when you take the children’s classic Goodnight Moon and hand it to GWAR’s lead singer, Oderus Urungus? Probably not sleep, but at least some swear-tastic fun…

There’s swearing aplenty in the video; it may not be safe for your workplace.

It’s probably the best bedtime story session since Samuel L. Jackson read Go the Fuck to Sleep:

Let’s not forget the classic rock and roll treatment of Goodnight Moon, Goodnight Keith Moon:

Thanks to Nic Pouliot for the find!