dansblv blog

Biking on my way to work this morning I almost got into an accident. I was coasting up to the intersection and as the light turned green I began peddling again. Just as I did that the crankset on the bike, basically the front gear that's attached to the pedals and pulls the chain, literally came apart. My chain flew off, and being that my bike has a coaster break - i.e. I need my chain to break, for a moment there it looked like I was going to crash into the curb. Luckily I have a back up front break that saved the day.

After the adrenaline died down I was left to deal with the inconvenience of some how figuring out how to get my bike fixed and still get to work on time. I knew it wasn't an easy repair that I could do myself. However, there was no bike shop around that I knew off, and besides it was before 9AM and with exception of the exellent Urbane Cyclists all the other ones don't open until 10.

This got me thinking of a business idea: CAA for bikes. It would've been great if there was a bike shop that I could've called which would've then came and picked my bike up. Better yet, I could've locked my bike up, went to work, they could've then picked up my keys from my work, gotten my bike and repaired it.

And since in most cases simple repairs on a bike don't require many tools or a ton of space I could even forsee a travelling bike repair van of some sorts.

Let me know what you think.

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So 9 days after my initial letter to the 4 major candidates running in the St.Paul's by-election only 2 have responded, Liberal candidate Dr. Eric Hoskins and the NDP candidate Julian Heller. So what I'll do is examine the Dr. Hoskins' response in this post and then save Mr. Heller's response for another day.

To be honest I'm actually quite surprised that only two have responded. The questions pretty soft ball and relatively "trendy" in terms of what going on in Ontario and North America. But, oh well.

I should also point out that neither of the candidates so far actually responded in person, it was just some person from their campaign, which is I think to be expected. So this is the first response that I got from Dr. Hoskins' camp:

Dan;

Thanks for contacting the campaign.

On the first question, about the Green Economy, I would refer you to the recent activities surrounding the Green Energy and Green Economy Act: http://www.greenenergyact.ca/. The Ontario Power Authority (OPA) has also re-launced our Feed-in Tariff program by which we are procuring green electricity and thereby working to build the industry: http://www.powerauthority.on.ca/FIT/. As a local producer of solar panels, ARISE will benefit from these efforts as will other future local producers.

On your second question, I will have to make some inquiries and get back to you.

Hope that helps (for now),
rob.

This was kind of disappointing. I expected a more in-depth point by point response instead of a couple of links to some websites. To make matters worse the Green Energy and Green Economy Act website was pretty hard to navigate. I couldn't actually find what the Act was going to do, there were vague promises of "improving the environment and the economy of investing in green jobs ... blah ... blah." However, I didn't see anything concrete in terms of a plan or a list of projects that were going to be accomplished.

So I wrote them back saying this and asking them to outline some of the specific projects/incentives/investments that the OGEA will be making.
They responded back with:

Dan;

We are still in the regulatory stage of the Green Energy Act. The goal is for the the Green Energy Act to accomplish three things:

1. Smart grid - A network that can accomodate the multiple, distributed sources of energy.
2. Right-to-grid - Ensuring that if you produce the energy we will buy the energy.
3. Feed-in-tariff - Paying prices for renewable energy that encourage more people in to produce it.

The regulations being written will be to support these initiatives.

Hope that helps,
rob.

A bit better, but again no specifics AND they completely ignored my second question on the topic of The Internet & The Government. Overall, I wasn't that impressed by Dr. Hoskins' response, he gets marks for speed of response and follow up, but that's about it.
Final score — 2/5.

Check back soon for a look at how Julian Heller form the NDP handled the questions.

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Just wanted to give you an update. So far, after 4 days, only the Liberal candidate Dr. Eric Hoskins has replied. I'll wait a while longer to see if I get anymore replies and then I'll post them here with my thoughts/analysis. Check back soon.

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I live in the center of the universe and my particular corner of the universe is having a by-election.

Our last MPP quit 'cuz he got a better paying job, but then he hit and killed a bicyclist, so things are looking a bit iffy for him. However, since he quit the people of my 'hood need to elect a new person who will represent us in the Provincial Parliament of Ontario. So the election is scheduled for September 17th and the candidates, as far as I'm aware of and in no particular order, are:

• Chris Chopik (the Greens)
• Dr. Eric Hoskins (the Libs)
• Sue-Ann Levy (the Tories)
• Julian Heller (NDP)

I wanted to pick their brains a little bit so I sent all of them an email.

RE: Questions about the Sept 17th elections

Hello {name},

My name is Dan, I live in the riding of St. Paul's where you are running in the September 17th election. I just wanted to get you opinion on 2 areas of interest to me:

"New Green Economy"

There's recently been a lot of hype surrounding the "green" economy. Multiple levels of government have touted the importance of creating a sustainable future by balancing both job creation and the protection of our environment.

This emphasis has also been present in the speeches of the U.S. gov't. In fact, this week U.S. Vice President Biden announced funding to a solar panel maker Sylandra as part of their "Investing in Renewable Energy" program.

What will you do to attract, retain and foster companies like Canada's own ARISE Technologies and others involved in the "green" economy?

"The Internet & the Government"

This area is personal to me since I work in the Internet industry. Looking at our neighbours down south I can't help but feel inadequate.

From whitehouse.gov to recovery.gov to their gov'ts wholehearted embracement of popular social networking sites like Flickr, Facebook, Vimeo, MySpace and YouTube the current U.S. administration has done an amazing job using the Internet to increase citizen participation and gov't transparency.

By contrast the current Ontario gov't site is boring, hard to navigate and uses the old top-down approach -- "we talk, you listen".

What will you do to finally get the Ontario gov't in the 21st century and get citizens involved by leveraging social media, user-generated content and the plethora of available Internet tools to allow people to monitor, contribute and discuss gov't policy?

Cheers,
Dan

Stay tuned to the replies.

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Well ... it's about time I got a blog. I'm tired of having arguments in my head with no one, so I think I'll jump on the bandwagon and get web log.

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