The device has generated many, many words even before being properly leaked, let alone announced, and more still after the January 27, 2010 announcement.

I’m not here to tell you the iPad is missing features, or underpowered, or overpriced. Features are relative to requirements, power is relative to needs, and price is relative to everything. It might be underpowered and overpriced for some, but others it will be just right. Poking fun at lack of USB ports or multitasking or Flash is cheap, easy, and popular, but it’s totally been done a thousand times over. Personally, I am intrigued by the slate form factor — just not the Apple implementation.

I’m here to tell you the Apple iPad makes me uneasy. Very uneasy.

Much of the more insightful commentary following the iPad announcement focused on the philosophy underlying the device, and not without reason.

I don’t have that much of a problem with iPad the movie watching slate or iPad the game console or iPad the ebook reader: iPad, the appliance.

I do have a large problem with iPad, the future of computing.

Apple seems very intent on expanding the deployment of iPhone OS. It’s spread from a smartphone, to a handheld device to a media slate. This from a company now calling itself a mobile device company. Of course, they should have an interest in expanding iPhone OS’s popularity: it’s likely cheaper and easier to develop and cheaper and easier to run, hardware-wise. I’m all for leaner, user-friendlier software. It probably doesn’t hurt Apple gets 30% of all the (official) software sales.

You will have no problem finding people to tell you the iPad is the future.

Many have commented on the tinkering, exploration, and play angles of the iPad Question; of those, Alex Payne’s and Mark Pilgrim’s posts caught my particular attention.

(Alex’s verdict: disturbing. Mark’s: a real loss.)

The general idea is that by encouraging playing, tinkering, and messing with things, computers of yore allowed their users to develop creativity, analytical thinking, and curiosity. Appropriately, for both the writers, the computers in question were made by Apple.

I have similar experiences — not on Apple computers, there weren’t a lot of those in Poland in mid-to-late 90s — but the personal stories are not the point here.

One of the responses to those arguments, by Faruk Ateş, charged:

When these men became programmers, they didn’t do so because tinkering was “so much fun”; they did it because there was no other way. [emphasis original]

He and many others manage to impressively miss the point.

Children don’t tinker because they want to become programmers, because they want to learn to program or learn anything else. Children tinker because it’s fun. There is no ultimate goal. They do not, at least initially, kick a football around because they want to be on Manchester United’s first team. They do not play in the kitchen because they want to become world-famous chefs, nor do they play with LEGO because they want to become mechanical or civil engineers. They play and tinker because they are curious and that is what children do.

Luckily, they do develop very important skills while tinkering, trying things out, pushing the boundaries, breaking things occasionally. This is a side effect — a very important and happy side effect, but a side effect nevertheless.

The iPad is a LEGO set that can only be assembled into what’s drawn on the box.

The iPad is a microwave. You can’t realistically do whatever you please with a microwave, and most people won’t expect to. But the future of food delivered from microwaves — quick, easy, user-friendly, one-button — is a bleak future. No one will become a world-famous chef by playing with making food in the microwave when they’re 12. The stove presents much more opportunity to mess up and spend hours cleaning up the aftermath, or even burn down the place. It also presents an opportunity for expression and exploration that just cannot be realized in the limited nature of the microwave oven.

It looks like Apple would really, really like it if more people would get rid of their stoves and only use microwaves.

The “it’s either secure, user friendly, easy to learn, or it’s tinkerable” line of thinking commonly used against these arguments is a false dichotomy. Mac OS X comes with a command-line terminal and a variety of other ways to mess with and, yes, break your system. Compared against the iPhone OS, the primary reason OS X might be considered more difficult is not because it’s easier to break; it’s because it’s more overwhelming with its functionality.

As Cory Doctorow wrote in a recent post that was otherwise less than pointed:

Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

This isn’t about us not understanding a paradigm shift. This isn’t about us not understanding how the new world moves. We understand it — and we are very afraid it will lack supremely important features of the old world.

Here’s to tinkering.

Very interesting culture on the streets, at least downtown. I think we were crossing boulevard René-Lévesque when, upon seeing a car turning right all but drive over the heels of crossing pedestrians, my friend described Montreal drivers as aggressive. And yet it’s not that. They’re certainly assertive, but the turning driver was never going to hit anyone, and you could see the pedestrians knew it. We do our thing and you’ll do yours.

The entire four and a half days in Montreal I’ve only heard a single honk. A cyclist attempted to run a red on an evening Ste-Catherine across, if I remember correctly, de la Montagne in their clubland. An SUV which had the green took exception to being forced to stop rather rapidly. It ended there. During the four days, I’ve seen pedestrians and drivers live together at countless right turns; I’ve seen drivers tolerate others doing a late left turn on yellow; I’ve seen intersections get blocked when traffic ahead doesn’t move as fast as the drivers think it will and the very pointless but very common honk never materialized. Because what would be the point?

I came back to Kitchener-Waterloo and within an hour I heard someone honk after a left turn on late yellow from King onto University. What was the point?

It’s a weird city. They have, in places, forbidden turns for the first few second of a green so that pedestrians can enter their crossing and establish a number superiority, but also countless intersections with no pedestrian signal at all. (Thankfully, very few with that supremely anti-pedestrian system which doesn’t activate the pedestrian crossing even on relevant green unless you’ve pressed the button). They have bike paths, separated from the rest of the road, with dedicated signals and even a proper bike left-turn system (on Street View, too) at Berri and Cherrier, and probably more I don’t know of, and also drivers that know what they deserve, when they deserve it, and aren’t shy to go and take it — no honking required. They have lights which go straight from yellow for one direction to green for the other, and seemingly manage not to have a million collisions.

They have jaywalkers. Oh, the jaywalkers. I’ve jaywalked before, and like to pretend that my experience from a couple of days each in Paris and Rome at ages 12 and 13 respectively give me an obligation to uphold a jaywalker’s image. Needless to say, I was delighted by downtown Montreal. Wikitravel describes it as risking life and limb, but it’s really nothing but — it’s deliberate, not blind; assertive, not aggressive. Walking across the cross streets to Ste-Catherine is particularly fun; there’s just so many people around doing the exact same. As long as the nearest car visible won’t get to the intersection in the time it will take you to walk across, you walk. If there are no cars, you walk. If there are cars, you let them go. After a while, you stop looking at the lights downtown, because it doesn’t really matter except for the wide arteries, where the self-preservation instinct does kick in (cough, aforementioned boul. René-Lévesque). We do our thing and you’ll do yours.

Technically speaking, this is called normalization of deviance. Practically speaking, this is called nothing short of amazing.

A friend and I went to Montreal for four and a half days in September before classes started. My first visit to the city, though with any luck it won’t be the last. Here are some random thoughts collected by the end of the week. Not a proper blog post, but spamming all of this on Twitter would have been excessive. I have pictures; they will make their way to Flickr eventually.

Note that this uses “Montreal” to mean roughly “river to Jean-Talon, Beaudry to Atwater with a T-bias along Ste-Catherine and St-Denis plus Olympic and Expo parks”. Yes, I know.

• Very pretty old town. I’m sure helps that it is out of the way these days, just off downtown, by the river, a perfect place to trap and milk tourists. But it is pretty, and despite the occasional horse shit smell (and I say that as appreciatively as possible), it is very nice to walk around in even as a stingy student not at all intent on $50 meals or $100 art pieces.
• Less of a waterfront; they try, and I haven’t seen all of it, but the part beside old town is held back by being in active use more recently and the correspondingly higher piers. The stretch along Lachine Canal is nice, but nothing extraordinary. Perhaps I’ve looked in the wrong places, but I didn’t see anything on the level of Harbourfront.
• Very interesting culture on the streets, at least downtown. I observed and thought so much, this had to be split out into a separate post which is coming shortly. For now, suffice to say Montreal seemed nothing short of amazing.
• This might be more generally a large-city thing, but it seemed like there were a lot of people out and about around us. I don’t think I’ve seen that much in Toronto, let alone Waterloo. Ste-Catherine Ouest is a delight around the clock (or at least between noon and midnight), and we had curious experiences like the Métro being positively clogged on a weekday at noon for some random reason (admittedly around Berri, but nevertheless).
• The local bilingualism can only be described as a uniquely Montrealian mix of pure awesomeness, hilarity, and adorableness. Officially, the language is French; in addition to French, the city also has a lot of English history. This leads to such charming street names as rue Bishop and rue Peel, to say nothing of rue City Councillors.
• Just to confirm we are in Montreal, there is a Square Victoria, named after the queen, lending its name to Station Square-Victoria on the Montreal metro, name announced with stress on last syllables, with one of the entrances adorned by a Paris Métro staircase.
• We went to see a concert; confusion about availability of doors tickets was only exacerbated when one of the bouncers spoke to us in French. (Success in not looking like obvious tourists!) I replied in English (a possibly rude but, as I’ve learned by then, definitely viable strategy), and he switched to perfectly fine English; we got in. A pair of girls behind us spoke to the bouncer in French; once in, they talked English to each other.
• Perhaps it’s just a case of grass being greener on the other side, but the universities seem so pretty. On a late summer day, McGill’s quad (with trees!) surrounded by university buildings (but not overbuilt!) and city skyscrapers beyond looked lovely. Université de Montréal is on the wrong side of the mountain, but apart from that, it enjoys awesome views of north Montreal and some amazing sunsets. Coming back was a struggle.
• As an aside, I am pretty sure whichever building houses the anthropology department at Université de Montréal has only one exit and it is the one we walked in through. Eventually we had to retrace our steps back out through the law building. We found another exit which, as far I could tell, was marked as “will sound alarm if opened between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m.” It wasn’t 11 p.m., but I wasn’t quite prepared to test my French knowledge. (t)
• I apologize, but as I saw it, the underground city has nothing on PATH. It might be longer in total, but the gaps and the missing connections make the much needed northwest PATH exit out of Union chill out and take a vacation on Gran Canaria and the Dundas-to-Bloor gap look like one of the many cracks in the Berkeley Stadium. Of course this is partially since the development downtown is older, but still.
• The semi-enclosed mall along St-Hubert has at least 15 bridal stores along four blocks of storefronts. Not quite sure why. Also featured: creepy dolls, very ’80s–looking decor. (t)
• Honoré-Beaugrand, Angrignon, Côte-Vertu, and Montmorency all have meanings now. Snowdon and Saint-Michel somewhat less so. Longueuil–Université-de-Sherbrooke even less so, because who wants to go there anyway? (I kid. The Expo islands are nice. The casino is massive.)
• Of course Line 3 doesn’t exist.
• The subway trains were noticeably narrower at first, but I got used to them pretty fast. On rubber, there is no squeal/whine while turning, and perhaps accordingly the lines do have more turns. I found the trains surprisingly loud anyway – I think it’s whatever they are using for a ventilation system. Also, surprisingly bumpy.
• STM got their buses spec’d with narrow doors. Why? No idea.
• The Biosphere has a major hard-on for Buckminster Fuller (even accounting for the fact he designed the thing), and features a massive greenwashing theme.
• The Olympic Stadium Tower was built on an angle which takes away best view onto downtown. I realize viewsighting wasn’t the first priority, and I guess it was already enough of a disaster without trying to accommodate photo-hungry tourists like moi. (t)
• Seeing the RF transit pass card (OPUS) in use was more than enough to convince me to shell out $3.50 for one. Beeping through the turnstiles by placing wallet on top was more than worth it. TTC, please get on this.
• Cross-platform transfers are pretty cool (hello, Lionel-Groulx). Ending up on the wrong side of a cross-platform transfer is somewhat less cool (hello, UdeM to downtown via Snowdon).
• Amazing weather all the way through. This was mostly luck, but the first time it got cloudy was the morning we were about to leave. I gambled and didn’t take anything heavier than a t-shirt; it paid well off.

He’s the Scrawny Seventeen-year-old Conscript. He’s the type you conscript when you’re desperate in a war, or when your military doctrine calls for use of lots of cannon meat. The USSR found itself in both situations, and so the Scrawny Seventeen Conscript makes up one half of the vanguard flag-bearers posted by the company on the north roadway of University Avenue just east of Westmount Road today.

Why does University Avenue have two roadways during World War II, why it looks exactly the same as it does now, or indeed why it is called University Avenue, I do not know.

I couldn’t tell you why товарищ Сталин himself is in command of the company either, but that much is indisputable, and he is firmly planted on the southern roadway, calling out orders.

The American force is visible, easily; the vanguard placed a little past Minota Hagey, with main group slightly further back.

You can tell the Scrawny Seventeen Conscript is not comfortable here. He would much rather be someplace safe, or at least safer. He has the look of negative anticipation on him; the one when you hope an exam you’ve understudied for will be easy, or when you hope your evaluation will go better than it really should.

Unfortunately, everything seems to point to exam being worse than you hope it won’t be. After unambiguous preparations, a perfectly clear order to charge ahead sounds.

The Scrawny Seventeen Conscript, pressure and fear finally driving him over the edge moments after the order, plugs Stalin with three bullets.

Stalin is indifferent; he would rather get shot than retreat. Americans are winning the war, and have to be stopped. He is hurt, of course, badly, but the attack would go on.

The second flag-bearer is not afraid; whether it is machoism, adrenaline, or actual skill, he is not affected by the shooting and the subsequent scuffle as the Scrawny Seventeen Conscript is subdued. He was ordered to charge, and he does.

Why are flag-bearers leading the charge in 1940s, I do not know.

Befitting (European) military strategy circa 1410, the American vanguard counter-charges at her opponents. She is a young woman; this is unsurprising.

After very brief scuffle, the Brave Flag-Bearer breaks the American’s wooden standard, which she considers very improper and offensive. We are shown a picture of the broken standard. The link is a direct JPG URL of a Facebook picture.

The battle continues in the background.

We find out all of Stalin, the Scrawny Seventeen Conscript, and the Brave Flag-Bearer survived.

Apart from the Lechistan call-out (a name which I will always think of fondly due to a story I was told in grade school); the standard Eurabia stuff, which has been rebutted so many times surely I of all people don’t need to; and the mixed peoples note, which I can only applaud; we have:

The information revolution means that attempts to ban corrupting influences in the media are fairly pointless; those mobile phone-sized things have so much memory and power that it is as if you could carry all of today’s Internet in your pocket. But the availability of so much information, paradoxically, has led to many people paying much less attention to things electronic, and information from these sources is regarded rather as fast food, burgers etc. are treated today, i.e. insufficient, plastic, diversionary, dubious. The written word is the source of authority; calligraphy is once more a valued skill.

Is it going to happen? Whose opinion would you value more, your good real-life friend, or that of one of your 600 Facebook “friends” or 300 Twitter “followers”?

But will you think of a hand-written letter more than of an email?

I also cannot get caller ID — an integral feature of the network since the first GSM standard, something that actually takes Rogers effort and costs money to disable — without paying an extra $10 each month for some insane cable-network-inspired value pack which in addition to fundamental GSM features includes a lot of crap I don’t care about. (It’s $10 because getting just the texting would be $5 and getting 500 MB of BIS data is $25. That’s a subject for another day.)

This is on top of my $57.45 (legally advertised as $50) regular monthly fee for some number of minutes and 500 MB of data and BIS access.

But wait! Rogers Wireless ends system access charge, a September Toronto Star headline triumphantly proclaims. So my bill will only be $50.50, right?

System access charge, in case anyone doesn’t know, is the marketing-produced gimmick in which a company claims to charge a fee for system access on top of your other fee for system access and gets to advertise only the second fee. Just like you pay $20,000 for a $20,000 Benz, and $40,000 to drive it off the dealer’s parking lot.

Only, to sweeten the deal in addition to dropping its $6.95 a month system access fee, Rogers will add a “government regulatory recovery fee” in the amount of “$2.46 to $3.46″ (presumably, $2.46 to those who worship to a makeshift Rogers shrine, $3.46 to others), as well as raise the “base price” of its plans — that’s the advertised one — by $5.00. Congratulations, your price to sign up for a $50 plan just went down from $56.95 to $57.46 plus worship (plus more additional fees).

Of course, the Canadian wireless industry is well-known for pampering its customers. For instance, they’re reducing your local-calling area to serve you better. Of course, the very concept of long-distance calling has stopped existing sometime in 1980s, but who’s keeping score?

Mine is the best deal in Canada I was able to find in January 2009 coming with my own unlocked GSM BlackBerry (carrier subsidy = $0). Even that required a 1 year contract.

I’d say it’s a pretty healthy industry.

I shape it. It shapes me.

It obeys the laws of physics. Unless supported by a horizontal surface, it descends to the floor. I have never lived in a room that had quite enough horizontal surfaces.

I try to contain it. This never happens. I make plans to clean it up properly. This also never happens.

Every now and then, an assignment or a project causes me to concentrate specific parts of the mess in one area. I pretend this helps me focus. It works, kind of. After the project, the collected mess is immediately released back into the global mess pool. It might be swapped out for another mess concentration for use on the next project.

It defines me. And I define it.

My vision of heaven is a room lined with wide, horizontal shelves, with lots of wide, long tables.

The OpenOfficeMouse was announced today. I’m pretty sure it’s fake, but whether it’s real is actually far less interesting than how easily people became convinced it is real.

Engadget fell for it, as did the vast majority of their commenters. John Gruber fell for it, not that anyone was expecting anything else; John Gruber would fall for a press release announcing the bankruptcy of Microsoft Corporation on April 1. A PC World blog fell for it, quoting much of the page verbatim. Thankfully, preserving our collective sanity, Slashdot seemed pretty reserved, and the commenters actually had something resembling an interesting discussion.

Let’s be serious. I own and use several ThinkPads, my phone is BlackBerry, I use Opera. I’m pretty geeky and I generally enjoy things that don’t put form over function and that might look a little ugly but work. It took me about two minutes to figure out this had to be a joke, evidently a pretty elaborate joke, but a joke nevertheless. It doesn’t matter who perpetrated the joke, or whether the mouse shown in the press release is an actual working device. Francesco Poderico and T Beale, of United Kingdom and Switzerland respectively, may well have registered for a large conference, promising to present a revolutionary multi-button application mouse during a 45 minute presentation.

But I’m pretty sure the official affiliation with OpenOffice.org ends there.

No group actually capable of shipping an office suite is insane enough to believe an 18 button mouse that looks like that is a good idea. Not even experts from the OpenOffice.org User Experience project think it is a good idea for the general public or even the average OpenOffice.org user. No one seems to have taken the time to check out one of only two names given in the press release, “mouse designer Theodore Beale”. Otherwise, they may have paused over the fact Theodore Beale is a WorldNetDaily writer and author of The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens who is on the record as saying calling a feminist a feminazi is an insult to National Socialism. He is also a musician, a game designer, and an entrepreneur, but mouse design, or residence in Switzerland, seems to be lacking from his résumé.

Even if the OpenOfficeMouse does turn out to be real down the line, the willingness of so many to believe an announcement of this mouse, with this press release, and those quotes is pretty interesting in and of itself. It’s an OpenOffice.org related product – so the worse it seems, the more real it appears. Cue the open source sucks, design by committee, and a good metaphor for Linux and OSS comments.

To be sure, the OpenOffice.org interface is not the greatest. It is also nowhere near as bad as most people think it to be. It can’t, considering it is as close of a copy of pre-2007 Microsoft Office as anyone can get without being sued.

People believe the OpenOffice.org interface is bad, so it is bad. This is the same problem Microsoft was facing with Windows Vista; it wasn’t so bad, really, but nearly everyone thought it was bad. How do you fight against that? You can’t run ads saying we are, in fact, reasonably awesome, because everyone is convinced you suck so much, what you think is awesome by definition isn’t. You can’t run ads saying we aren’t as bad as you think, because that’s just pathetic. You can’t keep on doing what you are doing – at least outwardly – because everyone thinks, knows it sucks.

Microsoft got around it by fixing up a few (admittedly well-chosen) things in Vista and pushing a “new” release out the door. How will OpenOffice.org? Radical overhaul of the UI is one way, but copying Office 2007′s ribbon will inevitably cause the “like Microsoft Office, only worse” label to stay firmly on. Anything new would probably be evaluated with extreme prejudice, as it came from the same open-source hippies people that brought us such a terrible interface in the old OpenOffice.org.

So, how to fix this? I’m not sure. I think a simplifying redesign coupled with a name change might stand a chance. Really, “OpenOffice.org” is not doing itself any favours appearing non-complicated. I don’t know what the name might be; the good ones, “Office” and “Works” are taken by the incumbent, although one of them might be freeing up. Apple’s taken the next obvious ones, “iWork” with “Pages” and “Numbers”.

One of the reasons the success of Firefox is so remarkable is that it came from a decidedly hippie open-source environment – Mozilla, of all of them – with a name that didn’t actually describe what the program does (cf. “Internet Explorer”, or even “Netscape Navigator”). Will OpenOffice.org be able to pull off something similar?

Updates: The mouse is apparently real, and the designer really is Theodore Beale a/k/a Vox Day. OpenOffice.org claims they’ve never given permission to use the name; Beale says they have, but they’ll change the name to “OOMouse” anyway. The status of John McCreesh quote in the press release was not expanded upon. I’d assume it’s a real quote, though I’d question how much of it is real. [Working] closely with experts from the OpenOffice.org User Experience project might in reality end up just using their data.

A October 15 mailing list message from Elizabeth Matthis, member of the User Experience team for OpenOffice.org, called a proposal for the mouse [v]ery exciting stuff and said Thank you for this innovative addition to OOo, though how much this was anything than generic praise to keep people motivated and interested in working with an open source project, I do not know. (I heavily suspect not very much.)

In the end, I was wrong in calling this an elaborate joke. Perhaps there is a new internet law modeled after Poe’s law waiting to be formulated here: without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of open source culture that someone won’t mistake for the real thing… and vice versa.

I’d like to think the willingness to believe that press release, the lack of research into the mouse’s author and not bothering to confirm with OpenOffice.org still form a pretty decent basis for my claims in the latter part of the post. But even I can see the ground got significantly shakier. Live and learn.

The Grand River Transit, in their infinite wisdom, has scheduled evening buses headed from a large university to an area heavily populated by students at one every half an hour. This term, that has been proving grossly inappropriate. The load level on the buses I’ve taken ranged from high, through very common instances of crush load, onto downright dangerous.

Beyond the obvious problem of lack of comfort, this also slows the system down and makes buses late as they sit at the stop for two or three minutes trying to squeeze people on. “Passengers must remain behind white line” and the driver’s visibility to their right and through the right mirror turn into cruel jokes.

I cannot blame the drivers for this. Most I’ve encountered were beyond nice in trying to fit as many students as humanly possible. But still people get left behind.

This will only get worse as the weather gets increasingly seasonal and more people opt to try and take the bus rather than walk or bike. As term goes on, more people will also study until late and try to take one of the evening buses.

There is an obvious solution, and that is to run more buses. The conventional way is clearly to schedule every 15 minutes from 9 to 11 PM or midnight as required by load. If necessary, make these the already established short run from King St to Highland Hills. Hope there will be some people will show up early as possible and be rewarded with a less crowded ride, and then the “main”, previously scheduled run will no longer be critically packed.

To avoid the bureaucracy associated with officially creating new runs, GRT could just run double for buses that pack in reliably. For simplicity, run the extra bus on a King-to-Highland routing, just make sure the short turning bus arrives at UW ahead of the one doing the whole route. GRT is familiar with the concept, and they’ve been doing it along Keats Way in the mornings after the load got truly ridiculous, though still haven’t quite nailed it. They also obviously have buses necessary, as 9 PM is far away from any peak. The only reason I can think of as to why they haven’t done anything is because they don’t know of the problem, but I find it hard to believe the drivers wouldn’t report it.

Alternatively, listen to my tongue-in-cheek advice and buy a couple of Ikarus 280s from Moscow or Warsaw. Not the highest tech, but they do fit a lot.

GRT is in an interesting situation here. In winter 2007, UW undergraduate students voted in favour of a negotiated bus pass agreement. The deal was at pretty cheap ~$45 a term (four months) for a pass mandatory for all students. Previously, an opt-in pass was $140 a term or so. At an average well over 10,000 undergrads per term, this is pretty serious commitment for GRT, and they’ve delivered some improvements.

Nevertheless, at least with the services I am familiar with (along Keats), they are toeing the capacity line during mornings and evenings, not the least because of some interesting decisions. In the morning rush, they’ve moved up a route 29 run that used to go through a few minutes before the route 12 and relieve the load a little. Now the 29 is relatively underused while a pair of 12s pack in like sardines. Why? So that the 29 could cutely interline with the newly established route 31.

Further service improvements might be hard to justify since due to the mandatory pass, they would result in very few or none extra income, but here’s an extra snag:

“Do you support a Universal Bus Pass (U-Pass) at a cost of $41.08, plus an administration cost of not more than $9.50, subject to increases due to inflation and student demand, to be paid by each full-time undergraduate student per academic term, scheduled for implementation in September 2007, and which will be reviewed in three years?”

The term shall commence on or before September 1, 2007, and continue in effect for a period of three (3) years (the “Initial Term”). Extension of the Initial Term shall be conditional upon written agreement of all parties by March 1, 2010.

Both quotes are from the Feds’ Universal Bus Pass at the University of Waterloo report (PDF, 261 kB). The referendum question used the rather unspecific “reviewed”, but in my mind it is entirely possible that there will be a student-wide referendum, if not out of Feds’ initiative then forced by petition. The timing required indicates this would probably be during the winter term.

I don’t care about having to walk occasionally; I can do it, in fact I probably should do it more often, and so far I’ve yet to suffer the fate in truly inclement weather. Others might disagree, by choice or by necessity; safety issues with walking home alone on late evenings come to mind. When heading to class, a packed bus skipping your stop might be an annoyance; to a test, a problem; to an exam, a disaster. Excessively bad service, especially in winter, might end up causing the university and GRT to find themselves apart once more, and that would be most unfortunate.