Be humble

The Barn – Stratford, PEI

I keep staring at this display which compares the amount of money spent per person against life expectancy.  The display is from The National Geographic.

Just had an 8 second power outage.  My brandy new UPS (Christmas present from son) kept everything running perfectly.  Two monitors,box, DSL modem, Meraki and router sucked 2% of my battery in 8 seconds.  Now set to do a graceful shutdown in 60 seconds if it should reoccur. 

From Environment Canada:

Saturday:Flurries. Low minus 4. High zero.

Left knee looks at right knee rolling eyes.. “big snow coming!  Deep and lots of wind.  Probably power outages”.  Right knee agrees.

Over numerous tests, my medium-speed Internet access results:

Download comparison:

Upload comparison:

Since the Hydra gave Minister Valarie Docherty permission to confirm that by year-end, there would not be one square inch of PEI that did not have high-speed Internet, many rural islanders have been waiting.  ..and waiting …and waiting. Of course this promise was repeated by many Ministers of the Provincial Government, including The First Minister.  The CBC is now reporting that some residences will never see ‘wired medium-speed’, rather they will be able to use the Bell-Aliant Turbo Stick – at significant additional cost.  Yet, the paragon of pricing transparency has stated:

Bruce Howatt, vice-president of regional services for Bell Aliant, said average internet users will not be affected by the 1 GB threshold. He also suggested the premium for heavy use of Turbo Sticks could be temporary.

This, of course, is pure nonsense.  I am an average Internet user and I monitor my usage.  My usage in the past 23 days is:

There is a second computer in our residence that is used  by Herself and her usage is not included in the above.  She has used 44 megs in the past 24 hours.

Bell-Aliant (vicariously, our gommit) is stating that 100-200 homes will never have wired access.  My sources tell me that the number is closer to 1,000 and that is all that is being admitted.

I had an opportunity to try the Turbo Stick a few days ago.  It worked, sort of.  Latency was awful.  The Turbo Stick works off the cell towers and I am close to a tower.  The person who was using the device told me that when it worked correctly it worked well, but that it was susceptible to weather induced degradation.

I just checked the Bell-Aliant web site to see if I am eligible for medium-speed Internet.  The result of my inquiry is:

When I check my Bell-Aliant account I see that I am listed as being on the waiting list.

Oh, I have Bell-Aliant medium-speed Internet access.  It was ‘turned on’ earlier this month.

CBC News - Prince Edward Island - Some P.E.I. homes to pay extra for internet

As we the people are hiring one, guess we should know what we are getting:

The International Sommelier Guild (ISG) offers an education in food and wine, as well as an accreditation program for sommeliers. The accreditation program lasts for six months and meets one day a week for eight hours. In addition, the ISG offers a Grand Sommelier Diploma, for which a student must complete a combination of elective and mandatory courses from one of 24 specialties.

The Court of Master Sommeliers is an internationally recognized organization that trains sommeliers. The first step in the process of becoming a master sommelier is the Introductory Sommelier Course. This is followed by the Certified Sommelier Exam, the Advanced Sommelier Course and the Master Sommelier Diploma Exam. Admission to the Court of Master Sommeliers is by invitation only, for those who have already become Master Sommeliers.

Sommeliers are not just wine-lovers who have taken a couple of extension courses in wine tasting. Many sommeliers are highly trained professionals who have refined their knowledge of wine through dedicated study.

I have been cleaning out my office and I came across some of my father’s papers. I came across a book that was published in 1897 which carried the caption title. The book was written by Ralph Waldo, M. D. Ralph Waldo was a gynaecologist at Lebanon Hospital in New York City. He was chairman of its medical board and instructor of gynaecology at the post-graduate medical school.

His preface reads:

“I have never known an instance where a young man has followed the life of a libertine and has not contracted one or more varieties of venereal disease; and, unfortunately for their families later in life, these diseases are in many instances not completely cured, but are transmitted to their wives, and not infrequently to their children. Self-pollution is most harmful. From the above facts as positively revealed by modern science, every intelligent parent is called upon to teach their boys and girls that chastity is the only course for them to follow, especially as it leads to good health and in no instance produces disease.”

The book commences with various commendations. One of the commendations is by Adm. J. W. Philip. Philip was an Adm. in the United States Navy, the illustrious commander of battleship Texas in the naval engagement at Santiago in which Cervera’s Spanish fleet was destroyed. Philips commendation reads:

“What a young man ought to know impresses me as a volume of such serious importance in such a skilful handling of a delicate subject that I have placed it upon the reading table at the desk of the Cob Dock Library in this yard (Navy Yard, Brooklyn, New York) with the expression of the hope, written on the fly-leaf, that many sailor men will pick this book up and read it.”

My interest was immediately drawn to chapter 8. Chapter 8 is titled, right relationship to women. From the narrative:

In order that a young man may sustain a proper relationship to women, it is necessary that he should correctly understand the nature and character of woman. Thousands of people think they understand something about human nature, when they have only the perverted ideas which are created in the mind by reading novels. Whether such characters are pure or impure, moral or immoral, they are ideal characters and not real characters. The only proper study of man is man. The only way to arrive at the correct knowledge of human nature is by a study of human nature. There are many giddy, silly, empty-handed girls and women, but they are by no means all belonging to that class. There are some who are deficient in moral character, integrity and purity of life, but such constitute a somewhat smaller proportion.

In order that he may sustain a right relationship to women, he should have exalted ideal of the character of woman. He should know and appreciate the fact that the great majority of women are unapproachable and irreproachable. The woman who aspires rises higher than man, a woman who desires may descend to such depths of moral degradation as not possible to man. When a man tells you women are all of easy virtue, and that none of them can be trusted, you should avoid him as you would avoid one with a lonesome contagion. Such a man, unless he simply reflects the opinions of others, is always a vicious, licentious,thoroughly  corrupt, both in his mind and life, and often times both his flesh and bones are reeking with moral and physical rottenness.

There are three classes of vicious man whose vices and crimes entitle them to a perpetual place in the penitentiary. 

They are more dangerous than thieves and robbers. The man who robs a bank, or the burglar who enters your house at night, is guilty of a petty crime which compared with the vicious man who despoils young women of their virtue, who robs husbands of the affections of their wires, or who walks among them a moral leper, spreading disease and death along life’s entire journey.

The first class of vicious men are those who give themselves up to a life of vice, and who frequent houses of shame in order to secure the gratification of their lustful passion with women who are as degraded and polluted as themselves. These men may undertake, and for a time successfully run the gauntlet of disease, but the same result, with only rare exceptions, eventually comes to them all.

Another class of vicious man, fearing contagion and disease, if resident in a large city and possessed of sufficient means, supports a private prostitute. While such a man in some measure protects himself from the probability of disease, yet he is sure to suffer perpetual torment from the fact that he is constantly liable to exposure. He has an ever-present consciousness that such a woman, if her exacting demands are not complied with, or if angered by any cause, may at any time disclose his course of life to his family, to the social or business world with which he stands connected, or, if he were to deny her exacting and increasing demands for money, might levy blackmail upon him and us ruining him financially. Such men, while escaping one risk, assume another, which, if a man has one spark of manhood or a conscience, will convert his life into a prolonged torment.

The third class consists of those who were not able to support a private prostitute, and who are restrained by the feared disease from going with bad women promiscuously, and who undertake to secure the gratification of their essential passion by seducing innocent and unsuspecting young girls. The man who despoils a pure girl of her honour, and a robs her of her virtue, for a momentary gratification, deposes her from a place in the estimation of society which can never be regained, and pollutes her thought, and sends her headlong into a path of ruin and vice,-such a man deserves no less to be hanged as a man who deliberately, or a moment of anger or passion, takes the life of his fellow man. 

While none of the three paths of vice may attract to their ruin the large class of young men, yet there is another temptation more subtle, more seductive and enticing to which even the purest and best are exposed, and safety is best secured by an intelligent understanding of the danger, and by an abiding moral purpose, previously formed, never to yield to such a seductive and sinful temptation.

We refer to the danger to which a purer-minded young man and young woman are exposed during a period of courtship, and especially after an engagement of marriage has been formed. No young man who is without a strong moral purpose, or who lacks the strictest regard for the proprieties of speech and conduct, may be esteemed as sufficiently safe from a course of conduct which is alike disgraceful and immoral, and liable to bring reproach and disgrace upon both parties concerned.

If you were capable of such a crime how could you expect a woman to respect and love her own seducer, even though he should subsequently marry her and duly become her husband? How could you look in the years after, without profound regret, look into the faces of your children and remember that you were the criminal despoiler of their mother’s virtue? Remember that by your own act you break down the sense of honour and integrity which in the after years should be the seal and security of your wife’s purity and fidelity. How shall you be able to trust one whom you have yourself taught to be untrue and unfaithful to her sex, to herself, to her parents, to her friends, and to her God? Think of the probable disclosure of only a few months of the humiliation, of the shame, all the self-loathing! Think of the sorrow which for a momentary gratification of your lustful nature you are bringing alike upon your parents and upon her parents, upon your brothers and sisters and upon her brothers and sisters, upon your relatives, your associates in business, all your acquaintances, and upon men class whose honour you sully and deface.

Think of her friends, companions and acquaintances, and ask yourself what you would feel like inflicting upon one who should debase and disgrace your own sister, or even a relative or friend! To say the least, how can you expect afterward to have the respect and esteem of those whom you have disgraced?

That you are not severely rebuked or resisted, or even if consent was indicated by a passivity, remember that you are never less the criminal betrayer of one whose confidences you have gained, but whose respect you deliberately sacrifice, and whose name and reputation you sully, and whose character you seriously mar. Even though she should by her own consent prove herself as debased and degraded as Potithar’s wife, your own sense of honour and manhood should enable you to say, like Joseph, “how can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God”? Flee from such a woman. To make such a woman your wife would be deliberately to blight your life, to blast your happiness, and render impossible the happiness and blessing that would probably and reasonably be yours if married to a purer-minded and virtuous woman.

No man who has in him the spirit of true manhood can betray the confidence reposed in him by a pure-minded, confiding woman without a subsequent sense of shame and dishonour which time will not obliterate, but which will surely deepen into remorse as the coming years advance.

Associate only with a pure. Be careful to maintain a strictly proper relation, and at all times avoid familiarity. Be suspicious of the woman who receives promiscuous attentions. “Where the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together.” If your life is impure you may rest assured that this truly as there is a God in heaven conscience will lash you relentlessly, and even in this world you will suffer remorse and mental torment. The beginning which leads to such a result is paved with little but improper familiarities of speech and conduct, and only the young man and young woman who carefully and conscientiously avoid the beginnings are likely to escape the end.

…and all this time I thought it was complicated!

My telephone service disappeared sometime on Christmas Eve day.  I have a cell phone, so did not bother to call Bell-Aliant until Boxing day.  The call centre I reached at at 0600 on boxing day answered on the first ring.  I was speaking to a delightful lady with a Newfoundland accent.  I explained my problem and she scolded me for waiting so long.  (with a laugh).  We had a great chat and she had me laughing.  She was so good at what she does that I was not even irritated when I was told that the first appointment available was Tuesday and that we would have be be present between 0800 and 1600.  She thanked me for my patience and bid me a belated Merry Christmas.

I was surprised to hear a knock on the door Sunday and to find a young man from the telco.  He mentioned that they were trying to get any service issues sorted out early, so that they could get back to hooking up DSL customers because of a year-end deadline.  Good for him and for Bell-Aliant.

He found my problem back at the switch 3 KM away.  Good service.