Gold for Feds: Early Decision in Olympic Spend-a-ton

Hands up for those who think that the Canada Line is a waste of money. You raised your hand, good for you! You have what it takes to be rational during the almighty Olympic Spirit.

The Canada Line is supposed to be the crown jewel of VANOC, engulfing $2 billion. Intended to demonstrate a non-existent rapid transit system, it gives the sudden explosion of guests in our town a wrong impression of the superior Vancouver transit system. Pretending at its best.

Yes, the transit in Vancouver works. Its rapid system can whisk you from your home to your work place within days.

The new Skytrain tracks of the Canada Line bring the people of Richmond to the City of Vancouver, so is the myth. Whatever you think of that – and I think it’s a lie – the main aficiodos are – drumroll please – travelers. People, who decided to leave the Best Place on Earth behind.

I don´t know how you feel about that, but it puts my stomach into knots that some people just take off fast enough. Even more disturbing, the federal government used tax money to help whisk them away even quicker.

Of course, one might say that people also touch down at the airport to embrace this beautiful city and especially in February, the Olympic Spirit. With the jovial spirit in mind, the federal government, the provincial Pooh-Bahs, Translink echelons and top tiers of the City of Vancouver decided single-handedly to welcome our Olympic visitors appropriately and built them the best shuttle into town, ever. Wow, isn´t that gracious? Before you cheer with your red Hudson Bay mittens, consider that they used your money. When was the last time you bought a Mercedes to shuttle your guests? Well, if you would BE Canada and embracing the Olympic Spirit completely, you would have done so.

And you would go big. So big that you even dwarf Bangladesh´s six kilometer multi-purpose bridge over the river Padma, the largest infrastructure project in history in the seventh largest country in the world. For demographobes: Bangladesh is a city-state of an estimated 162 million people. The City of Vancouver and Richmond together are just short of 800,000 dwellers. Clearly, officials and corporate friends went way over board. But, VANOC, provincial echelons and IOC president Jacques Rogge are very courteous hosts.

“Son of Rage and Love” is one of the less generous hosts. The angry commuter vents on the CBC online webpage that “[a]nyone who has ever taken mass transit in Vancouver knows it’s (sic) a joke“. He senses the corporate conspiracy behind the Canada Line: “The Canada Line is the power elite needing a way to get their friends to the games and what better way than getting the masses to pay for it. All the while making it look like they were doing it for us. “

Mind you, the official, may I say, corporate version sticks with the advantages for you my paying friend, the average commuters from Richmond. But if we crunch the numbers – my specialty – then we will see the heavyweight of the stops in other parts of the city. With 9 stops in Vancouver and only four in Richmond, Richmonians definitely get the shorter end of the stick.

Speaking of things that don´t add up. My grandpa gave me a lesson when I was a little boy that always works: “If it is not broken, don´t fix it”. TransLink echelons and their rich friends were fixing a working SkyTrain technology when they decided that Rotem, a division of the Hyundai Motor Group, would built the new trains, putting the existing technology of the Bombardier trains on the sidetrack and sky-rocketing the bill for the project.

Someone has to pay for all this: From YVR to Waterfront in 16 stops. Embrace the Olympic Spirit for as long as you can, because eventually, your jolly smile might turn into a bare-teeth grimace when you get the bill.

Are You a Technophiliac?

“Check out my new wireless PDA -mp3 player-coffee maker-garage door opener!” If you have friends like that, chances are they are obsessed with new gadgets, toys and software. They possess (or are possessed by) technological gems such as Mp3-playing toaster ovens, double-display optical pens with 6 gigabyte memory capacity or the latest software to fix something very complicated.

But before you socially ostracize your geeky friends, behold. This short “how-to-identify a technophile guide” will help you to understand the strange world of technophelia.

Technophelia is the obsession with technology, gadgets or software applications. The permanent fixation of technophiliacs revolves around the bits and bytes, wires and circuits, as well as screens and displays.

With the information age booming and social network era rising, people became intensively involved into technology, networking as well as advancing gadgets. A fatal combination of cultural degradation and electrical domination sucked people right into the realms of computers, computer games and social networks. The result was the obsession with these technologies.

But just as in any other obsession, technophiles have different grades of obsession or “geekness levels”, as I call them.

The first geekness level is the game and facebook technophile. This early stage of a technophile is characterized by a slight, but typical predomination of computer games and very active “social networking”.  The internet gives the technophiles the opportunity and the ulterior demand to be connected with other people all the time and share each second of “digital quality time” with the rest of the world. People who spend several hours daily playing World of Warcraft or who obsessively check their facebook page every minute are typical first graders.

Level two of geekness is getting more serious. Here we find people, who not only master online gaming, chatting and such, but also possess fancy tools and gadgets that supposedly make their digital life easier for them. They buy new equipment or software packages that help them dealing with their daily flood of information or challenges of the technological age. If your friend or relative has GPS-digital camera with direct uplink to online web-albums, he or she is in that group.

But beyond the level of making things easier is geekness level type three. The main characteristic is that people start to suffer through lack of technology in other areas. That is possible. When the obsession with technology becomes all-devouring and consuming, the third-level-type of technophiliac actually complains that technology hasn´t taken over all parts of living. They appreciate and demand the advantages of up-to-speed gadgets, but want more in order to be completely happy. People who have the new 3G-S iphone with approximately 400 different applications and who complain that they don´t have an “app” for cooking their Kraft-dinners are suffering of level 3 geekness.

And then there is the final stage: the alpha-geek. He is the digital 800-pound gorilla in his technological environment. The alpha-technophiliac is beyond suffering or running behind trends. They are the setting them through their posts on social networking sites like “digg” or their plethora of YouTube clips. These guys are seldom and hard to find. And if you would meet one, you probably wouldn´t understand them because all they speak is binary code. You would say “hi”, and they respond “1001000 01001001”. Impressive, you think? Alpha-geek resumes read under the section language skills: fluent in C++, html and flash.

Now you ask yourself: “Wow. That is so cool. How can I become an alpha-technophiliac?” Spend some time with your geeky friends. You will have the chance to rank up in the geekness ladder and you technophile friends will hopefully appreciate the human language again. It is a win-win.