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RE: The Good Life, v13 i13

While Ms. Behrens makes some good points, I’d have to argue with her choice of Nick Tosches as an authority on the art of wine tasting. She says “Tosches wonders how a nose sophisticated enough to detect in “‘a bottle of rancid grape juice…”‘. That’s the first problem. If Tosches believes wine is made from “rancid” grape juice, he’s not just a cynic, he obviously doesn’t like wine. As a proud “pseudo-connoisseur” of commercial wines and maker & judge of home-made wines, I know that the end-product reflects your ingredients. I call myself a pseudo-connoisseur, not for the reasons Toches gives, but because I, too, won’t spend a fortune for a good bottle of wine.

Ms. Behrens quotes: “A true wine connoisseur, if there were such a thing, would taste the pesticide and manure above all else.” Well, I know a good number of vineyard owners, and none of them use manure. However, choose a good Burgundy and if you don’t smell a little manure in there, you probably aren’t trying. Generally, viticulturists don’t use a lot of pesticides, for exactly the reason Toches gives. However, most of the noticeable faults in wine are related to sulfur compounds, and these can all be caused by overuse of sulfur sprays, too close to harvest. Yes, we do notice these things!

On the question of whether “expensive” equates to “better”, I’d say that it’s covered by the law of diminishing returns. Expensive wines are often better than cheap ones. But, do I get 10 times the enjoyment out of a $100 bottle of wine than a $10 one? Certainly not, if I drink it myself. I have, though, drunk bottles of $200 Burgundy, Chateau Neuf du Pape and Vega Sicilia, shared with up to a dozen other people, and I’d say my share was well spent.

I’ll quibble with Ms. Behrens on another matter – you can’t make fine wine from Concord grapes… you’re not even allowed to use Concord grapes for [commercial] wine in Ontario. How one can believe that “handcrafted cheeses, cold pressed olive oil, and good quality imported balsamic vinegar” are requirements, but wine made from jam grapes is “good enough” is beyond me.

For reasonably priced, quality wines, try Argentina and Uruguay for reds, a new crop of reasonably priced whites from South Africa, and Spain for Rose. Check out “Trapiche” (Argentina), under $10; the “Oak cask” label is well worth the extra $3-$5. From South Africa, try the “Tribal Sauvignon-Blanc/Colombard” – $7 in Ontario, 2004 Spanish roses in May or June, or the Chivite “GRAN FEUDO ROSÉ” (the 2003 is $11 in Ontario, but it’s getting a little old – wait for the 2004, it’ll be worth it).

Cheers,
Derek Broughton – Musquodoboit Harbour, NS

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RE: Editoral, September 15, 2004 – v12 i36

As a staffer on the “Virtual Helpdesk”, I thank you for some of your points about email, but I have to disagree with others. Certainly a full description of the problem, from an email address that we can reach, would be helpful.

I absolutely agree about the frustration of having a perfectly good fix for a student’s problem, and not being able to tell the student about it because the email address used was invalid. However, putting an email address in a signature seems very odd to me. In the first place, some of those addresses we couldn’t reply to were in the body of the email in the first place. You’re right that sometimes information gets lost when email is forwarded, but this isn’t the fault of the originator. The etiquette here should be to _never_ forward a mail without CCing the person who sent it. Then both the sender and the new recipient have each others addresses and don’t need to work through an intermediary. Anyway, many email programs do not include [a signature] when forwarding or replying.

“Believe it or not, many people write formal letters to their tutors or other professionals with this kind of email address [cutiepie@emailservice.org]! Do you think the tutor even opens that email?” I should certainly hope so! I open every single email that arrives at vhelpdesk@athabascau.ca – even the ones I’m not responsible to answer – and I expect that of anybody who is being paid to respond to emails. As I pointed out to a professor, who once suggested we should block hotmail accounts, if you need to contact AU from work, and you’re either behind a heavy firewall or are banned by your employer from using your company email address for personal business, you may have no choice but to use a hotmail or yahoo account. [Ed. Is there a reason you could not use your home account through webmail for this purpose?]

Unfortunately, “large organizations … use spam reducing services and ‘black hole’ lists to reduce unsolicited email.” Yes, they do, and usually wrongly. If, instead of “quarantining” spam and making it necessary for the recipient to jump through hoops to find out what was in it, they simply refused to accept anything (a) with an unverifiable return address; and (b) that looks like spam; the sender would know immediately that nobody was going to read it (technically, their mail program would receive a message informing the user it couldn’t be sent, and why). This is quite within the realm of current anti-spam software, but AU didn’t choose to do it. [Ed. Therein lies the problem.]

I hadn’t heard that tutorial services was advising against using hotmail. Now I’m going to have to write to complain to them. [Ed. Actually, they are not advising people not to use it, but are notifying students that Hotmail and other free services may be less reliable than a home account]

Derek Broughton

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Response to Debbie Jabbour’s Counsellor Liability
March 24, 2004
http://www.ausu.org/voice/articles/articledisplay.php?ART=2696

Debbie Jabbour argues that a court ruling on counsellor liability has school counsellors worried, “with good reason”. I don’t disagree that they should be worried, but the tone of the article was that this was a bad thing. As near as I can tell from Debbie’s article, Heather Crerar was given bad advice – and nobody disputed that. So somebody must be responsible.

The telling paragraph was “Crerar’s lawyer, argued that her client had received a “string of bad advice” and that although she had filed an academic grievance with the college, her appeal failed, leading her to take the case to court.” The whole issue here is not that counsellors are expected to be infallible, but that when they gave bad advice – no matter whose ultimate responsibility it was – the college fell back on procedure instead of making an attempt to solve the problem. If the college had taken an active interest in the case, they may well have convinced U Lethbridge that they’d made a mistake. Instead they told Ms. Crerar to take a running jump.

Further, the article states that Ms. Crerar’s lawyer ‘compared college counsellors to lawyers and accountants, who, … “are responsible for their advice.” This bothers me on several levels. I don’t think I’ll even touch the notion that lawyers and accountants take responsibility for their advice – I’ve not seen consistent evidence of that.” That’s a low blow of the sort that can only be leveled at lawyers and accountants. The statement actually said nothing about lawyers “taking” responsibility for their advice, but that they are “held” responsible. Which is entirely true. You can sue a lawyer or accountant for giving bad advice. As near as I can tell from this article, you still can’t sue a school counsellor – only the school.

Derek Broughton
( B.S. CIS – maybe this year!)
Musquodoboit Harbour, NS

Am I the only person who is getting tired of hearing how Canada has relinquished our defense of our own borders and should be thankful that the Americans are willing to do it for us? The most recent statement I have heard to this effect was from Tom D’Aquino, president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (and how exactly, did that organization arise? Someone said, “D***, the courts won’t let us keep the women and lower races out of our gentleman’s clubs, what are we going to do?” The result was a merit-based club, where the membership criteria restricted all the same people but without once mentioning gender or race).

Just what is it that America is defending us from? In the 50s and 60s it was supposed to be communism. Yet, at no time did the USSR ever threaten to attack us. Why, really, did the US build the DEW line on Canadian soil? Not to protect us – any warning it gave us would be neither distant nor early – but to ensure that any war fought between the two superpowers would be on and over Canadian territory, not American. Thank you Uncle Sam!

What are we threatened by now? Terrorism that is not directed specifically at us, but at America and it’s allies. America does not defend us – our alliance actually puts us at risk! I don’t mean to advocate pulling out of NATO or other alliances to increase our safety. I happen to agree that stopping terrorism (or the Soviet brand of “Communism”) is a good thing. I merely point out that we are not the deadbeat spongers of American welfare that the hawks would claim. If we had done nothing else than allow America use of our land and airspace during the cold war they would still owe us an eternal debt of gratitude, but we go further. Whenever Uncle Sam calls, we step up. We don’t bring much in the way of numbers or funds, but we’re always there. We were there in Korea. We were there in the Gulf War – because it was right to defend Kuwait, which is more than can be said of America’s reasons. We were there when they invaded Afghanistan. Where were they when we needed them in 1939?

In an interview with CBC Radio’s “As It Happens“, D’Aquino said that we needed to lower our borders with America. He said that we needed to establish rules that would let us have a single commerce system. When Mary Lou Finley pointed out that we have NAFTA and we still have a problem with softwood lumber he said that that was “just one example” and that we have a great deal of trade that works well under NAFTA. I agree. Unfortunately, America operates under American rules. They don’t care about international treaties. As long as NAFTA works for Americans they will abide by it. As soon as something comes up that operates against American self-interest, they will discard it. Remember the Anti-ballistic missile treaty? For decades, we were told it was preventing nuclear war. Now, powerful military interests in the US think they can make a lot of money providing missile defense shields and America tears it up. Strange, that when North Korea sees no benefit in continuing to observe international treaties everybody cries for enforcement. The US has a long history of supporting and arming terrorists – Osama bin Laden for one – yet they must stop Iraq from doing the same (not that they’ve ever shown us how Iraq was supporting terrorism). North Korea must be stopped from supporting terrorists but the US, in a clear act of piracy, seized arms they thought were going to a legitimate struggle against occupation in Palestine, but gave them back when it was discovered they were going to Yemen (a notably stable regime!).

We don’t need to lower our borders with America – we need to raise them. It’s time we realized that, much as we rely on our trade with the US and share many common concerns, we are not American and don’t share all of our values with them. We can afford to maintain our distinctness, and if it costs us some trade, so be it. We are the peacekeepers and negotiators, not schoolyard bullies.

My colleague said the other day, as I recounted my recent problems with my alternative energy system, “Sometimes I can’t tell whether you’re High Tech or Third World”. At which point I realized that sometimes it takes just a few minutes to go from one to the other.

I’ve learned some important lessons recently about solar power. When we moved into our new cottage I wanted to keep it off-grid. Knowing that getting power delivered to our home by Nova Scotia Power would cost between ten and twenty thousand dollars, I felt that we could do a lot with that money. We began by having a 24V DC well pump installed with a 100W photovoltaic panel and 400 amp-hours of battery backup. The cook stove, water heater and fridge all run on propane and our heat is provided by an oil stove. Since we had 24V available, I ran it into the household wiring (not yet needed for AC) and hooked up lighting using dual 12V fixtures. This worked well for a while.

The trouble began when my brother-in-law – possessed of a million pieces of exotic electronica, most of which he will never get around to using – offered me a free, large capacity, UPS that he thought I could use as an AC inverter.

Lesson #1: look gift horses in the mouth – especially if you don’t understand how they work.

When I tried to test it out, without any AC load, my wife suddenly started yelling something about a fire: It turns out (I’m told) that a UPS scavenges power – when input voltage gets too low, it starts to draw higher and higher current. This is exactly the wrong thing to do with a solar power system. When voltage drops too far you need to disconnect load to save your batteries.

The US National Electrical Code requires manual disconnects and fuses for DC power systems – including solar systems. I don’t know what the Canadian code requires because you can find the US NEC online, but in Canada you have to pay money for a large (and largely unreadable) book to get this sort of important safety information.

Lesson #2: Whether it’s required or not, you need manual disconnects.

Disconnecting an arcing battery cable, while using the fire extinguisher with your left hand, is almost certain to leave you with burns. Fortunately, mine were inconsequential.

Once I got the fire out, I learned:

Lesson #3: always have a spare charge controller.

Buying a new one on a Sunday will cost you $200+ – and it will still be Wednesday before you get it. Waiting until you can find what you need on eBay, you can get it for about $50. In fact, I got a much better one for $75 with shipping. eBay is a wonderful place to shop for solar power products. I recently got two 175W panels for US$1500 (with shipping) which is significantly less than the California renewable power rebate of $4.50/watt (I had thought that the cost of PV panels would never be any lower than the available rebates).

At this stage, we had arrived in the third world, with no water and no lights. I plugged the well pump directly into the solar panel and that gave us intermittent water. When the new charge controller arrived we started recharging the batteries but they had discharged below the “load disconnect” point, so they still couldn’t be used to run the pump or lights at night. It took two days with a backup generator to get them up to full charge.

Lesson #4: keep your mandatory loads separate from your discretionary loads.

The only thing we absolutely need to have electricity for is the well pump. Our new AC system is going to run off a separate bank of batteries and panels, but some of the solar panels will be switchable to the DC system to increase the charging rate on that system. If things get really bad, we can switch battery banks.

The AC system is now almost complete, the batteries are on the way.

Lesson #5: you can buy local (at least here in Nova Scotia).

My batteries are made by Surette in Springhill and actually cost less than alternatives I’ve priced. When it’s operational I’ll publish the designs.

The Kyoto Accord is “dead as a Dodo”, largely because certain powerful western governments that can well afford to implement the protocol are taking a shortsighted approach and caving in to pressure from corporations that are even more shortsighted. What some politicians are feeding us is a totally different kind of do-do, and pretty soon we’ll be in it up to our necks.

Ralph Klein’s up on his soapbox, ranting about Alberta’s need for some kind of separate treatment because of their dependence on fossil fuels. First of all, he wants everything delayed for a few years so that we can develop clean-burning technology for coal. Hey, Ralph! Don’t you remember the Seventies? We’ve been trying to develop “clean-burning technology” for at least the last 30 years, so what makes you think it’ll come about by 2012?

Then he wants to get credit for Natural Gas sold to the US and eastern Canada. Credit? Here’s a simple chemical formula – it’s been simplified for politicians who didn’t learn any chemistry in law school, but it’s close enough to reality for purposes of Kyoto:

CH4 + 2(O2) = 2(CO2) + 2(H2O)

Natural gas is mostly Methane (CH4), and when Methane is burned it produces Carbon Dioxide and Water. Do you even have a clue what the greenhouse gases are, Ralph? Carbon Dioxide is number one. Guess what? Methane is number two! So for every litre of natural gas removed from the Earth, between one & two litres of greenhouse gases are produced (depending whether the gas actually gets burned). At least unburned coal isn’t contributing to greenhouse gases, though the burning of coal and oil will add to the other greenhouse gases (Nitrous Oxides, Fluorocarbons and Sulfur Hexafluoride). By the way, Ralph, even natural gas combustion produces all of these, but in smaller quantities than coal.

George W. Bush and Ralph Klein apparently see entirely eye-to-eye on this. Somehow, burning more fossil fuels is supposed to be an even better solution to global warming than energy conservation. They say we can’t afford to meet the reductions required. Why not? It’s been calculated that light-detecting switches that would turn off office lights that weren’t necessary – because they were close to well-lit windows – could save the US as much energy as could be produced by the gas fields Dubya wants to tap in the Arctic wildlife preserve. When I was a kid in England, most in-town delivery vehicles were electric (except for the horse-drawn ones:). Why aren’t there more electric vehicles in North America? I understand that they wouldn’t be very useful for long hauls, but they’re ideal in places where diesels would usually be idling.

I have an off-grid home. All of my electricity comes from solar panels. I do use some propane, so I’m not a zero-polluter yet, but it’s cost me much less so far to install solar than it would to get grid-power delivered. I’ll be putting the difference into more panels and a wind-generator to give me the sort of lifestyle Canadians expect while eliminating my household contribution to greenhouse gases. It isn’t necessary to bankrupt ourselves, or to lower our standard of living, to live green.

Still, Ralph, unless you smarten up, I’m going to have to take advantage of my neighbour’s offer to sell me the hill behind my oceanfront home. If the rising water doesn’t get me, the do-do will.
For the text of the Kyoto Protocol, see:
http://www.carleton.ca/~tpatters/teaching/climatechange/kyoto/kyoto1.html

If you agree with me, write. If you disagree with me, write louder! I can be reached at dbroughton@netcom.ca.