Here’s a video from last night’s Kickass Karaoke at the Bovine Sex Club:
Kickass Karaoke host Carson T. Foster usually strips down to his skivvies by the end of the night.
Category: It Happened to Me
The trash pile at Bermondsey Transfer Station.
Accordion City — in addition to adding a new “green bin” into which compostable trash should go — has switched to a once-every-two-weeks garbage collection schedule. This is workable for my household most of the time, except for a couple of weekends ago, when a combination clean sweep of the house and king-sized birthday party attended by about 100 left me with ten bags of trash and six bags of recyclables. I had one week to wait until trash pick-up time and already the raccoons had made a mess of the garage (where the bags were being stored) twice.
My old tactic of taking the bags to Spadina Avenue, the busy street half a block west of my house, and tossing in my refuse with the trash of some business would no longer work. The garbage collectors will now only collect specially marked yellow City of Toronto bags, which businesses have to procure (I have no idea whether these are free or cost some nominal fee). I remember grumbling to myself “Rat bastards! I want my Tragedy of the Commons back!”
I decided to look at the Toronto trash and recycling calendar and found that a number of 24-hour dumps were scattered throughout the city. The schedules are such that residential trash can’t be brought in during business hours on weekdays; in fact, the ideal time to bring in your house trash is between midnight and 8 a.m.. For a night owl like me, that’s nothing.
I figured that the easiest place to get to that would also take trash and recyclables would be the Bermondsey Transfer Station, which is just off Eglinton Avenue, just east of the Don Valley Parkway. With the CR-V back seats folded down and the cargo area carpeted with newspapers and stuffed with bags of trash and recyclables, I motorbootied to the dump.
Bermondsey Road is a nondescript street filled with buildings devoted to light industry. The Bermondsey Transfer Station is easy to miss; from the road, all you see is a City of Toronto sign bearing the station’s name. The driveway led to a toll-booth-like station with a truck scale. I was instructed to drive onto the scale and hand over a $10 deposit, after which I was given a sheet of paper and told to drive down the road and into the main building.
An old guy with a long grey beard manned the station at the main building. He took the paper that the guy at the guard station had given me and directed me to back my car near the large trash heap.
The main building is a concrete cavern housing what looks like a minature air traffic control tower, bulldozing equipment and a hill made entirely of trash, whose height varied from two to five times that of my car.
I added my trash bags to their pile, after which I took some pictures and even shot some video of a bulldozer in action. I then returned to the “toll booth”, where I stopped the car on the exit scale and got $8 of my $10 deposit back.
Getting rid of the recyclables required a return trip to the “toll booth”, where I got another piece of paper to hand to the old guy at the building. He directed me to a smaller pile in the back corner of the building, where I unloaded my clear bags of recyclables. Unlike trash, there is no charge for getting rid of recyclables.
Bermondsey is one of seven dumps in the city [PDF file]:
- Bermondsey (188 Bermondsey Road, North York)
- Commissioners (400 Commissioners Street, Central)
- Disco (120 Disco Road, Etobicoke)
- Dufferin (35 Vanley Crescent, North York)
- Ingram (50 Ingram Drive, North York)
- Scarborough (1 Transfer Place, Scarberia)
- Victoria Park (3350 Victoria Park Avenue, North York)
There you go: a how-to on getting rid of excess trash. Who says blogs don’t tell you anything useful?
It may sound strange, but I recommend travelling to the dump, if only to get a sense of the waste material we produce (and often send to Michigan).
Bonus reading material: National Post writer John Geiger whines about having yet another container into which to sort trash, “Chief Dan George-type philosophy espoused by the solid waste bureaucracy” and about how our current trash situation is the fault of the “garbage bureacracy’s” bungling in the search for a new landfill. It’s all “I want my Tragedy of the Commons back!” and “What have future generations ever done for me?”
[This has been cross-posted to The Farm]
There’s just too much interesting stuff to do, and as a result I’ve
been over-caffeinating and under-sleeping. The end result is that
although I’m spending more time coding or learning some new
programming
tools and techniques (and with closures, Laszlo, Cocoa, all kinds of
ideas for Blogware and so on, there’s no shortage) as well as doing
some non-geeky reading, I’m actually getting less coding and learning
done.
I already knew that getting a good night’s sleep was essential to
being
productive, but it really hit me while reading the foreword to Aaron
Hillegass’ book, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS
X.
In it, he offers a bit of advice that I’ve never seen in any other
programming book: that getting eight hours’ sleep is important. He
goes
so far as to say that when learning something new and complex, one
should get ten hours’ sleep. He caps off the advice with a fact that
many of us know, but ignore:
Caffeine is no substitute for
sleep.
So that’s my plan for the next little while: to stop fighting the urge
to read “just one more chapter” or “just one more web site” or do
“just
one more thing” and get some proper shut-eye. I’ve been doing it for
the past couple of days and already feel a little sharper.
Categories
Life Imitates "The Onion"
Dan, when you read the Onion article Housemates Reject Third-Roomate Debt-Relief Plan, do you burn with shame?
I can think of 6500 reasons why you should.
Categories
3rd Anniversary
It’s been such a busy time that the third anniversary of The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century — Wednesday, November 10th — completely slipped past me!
I’m glad to report that 3 years and 3,338 articles later (3,339
including this one), it’s still fun. Like the accordion, the blog has
paid off in ways I never could’ve imagined. When I started back in
2001, I thought it would just be a creative outlet and something to
pass the time as my job responsibilities as OpenCola were being
whittled down (in the end, all I was responsible for was building the
installer and the “About” box for our software). Instead, it expanded
my social circle, gained me a little internet notoriety and a handful
of newspaper and TV appearances, landed me a job, saved my bacon from a girl who wasn’t who she said she was and played a part in my meeting my fiancee. Hooray for unexpected uses of technology; as William Gibson once wrote: “The street finds its own uses for things.”
Or in my case, “The street musician finds his own uses for things.”
Categories
The Sacred 37
Dave “Dave’s Picks” Polaschek informs me that the my age — the number 37 — is sacred in the numerology of the Hells’ Tunas Motorocycle Club.
Categories
Accordionizing the Eschaton
I was busy cleaning up the house and getting ready for the arrival of Wendy and her parents (2:20 this afternoon) when someone came to the front door. Normally, I’m not bothered by door-to-door “spammers”; I’m usually safe from them at the Tucows offices. I’m glad that my house has a front door intercom with which I can screen out door-to-door salesleeches, Jehovah’s witnesses and the like.
I hit the “talk” button and the conversation went like this…
Me: Hello?
Guy: Hi, I was going door-to-door — I tried to reach your neighbours but they weren’t home — and I wanted to talk to you about The Rapture and the Great Tribulation…
Me: I’m very sorry, but I’m on my way out the door. Look could you, er, come by later?
Guy: Sure. I was wondering if you…
Me: Oh, I know about the Last Days. I read Left Behind, see, and I fully expect to be pulled away in The Rapture. I think that with everything the way it is in the world right now, it could happen really soon; the signs are there! Maybe you could come by for coffee later and we cou…
…and that’s when I let go of the intercom’s “talk” button.
He buzzed three more times, each buzz growing in length and sounding more desperate, but by then, I’d started scrubbing the toilet.
To the poor fella out there: Thank you for the opportunity to indulge in a little birthday prankery. Best present so far!
To those of you who were wondering if there’s a Chick tract on the topic: of course there is! You get bonus points for correctly guessing that it contains a reference to the Catholic church as “The Whore of Babylon”.
And to to my Evangelical friends: Real Rapture believers don’t buy green bananas!