All posts by Carl Green

I love my wife

i love my wife. Even when she takes me shopping for shoes. Shoes at the Outlet stores in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Shoes that she checked out online before we set off. Shoes that, it turns out, they don’t actually have in stock.

Shoes that, the lady at the store says, are only available through the web site. So Nikki can’t try them on for size. And these shoes  can’t be delivered to a Canadian address. That would be too easy. Oh no, these shoes must be ordered online and delivered to a U.S. Address.

Then, she says, we can queue to go over the border to collect them. Paying tolls, gas money and import duty on them. Of course, with a wink, my wife could put them on and wear them on the way back.

And they wonder why this store is empty.

2014: A Year in Review

As 2014 draws to a close I look back over the accomplishments from this year with, I think, a justifiable sense of pride.

42,149 views of my medical technology blog at Sigmund Software. And that is just on Google Plus. That’s over 100 people per day following what I write. Or to put it another way, over 850 readers per article. On a highly targeted subject like behavioral health, that’s reaching a lot of medical professionals. That’s pretty good. Add in the hits from Twitter, Reddit and Facebook, as well as those following the blog on RSS, and I’m one very happy camper.

I also placed a dozen print items on the pages of some national publications, reaching several million more. These ads also went out in e-blasts across the USA, one of which set new records for ‘open’ rates (according to the vendor, and he should know). And these numbers represent just one of the five companies in the Group for which I run the social media and web sites.

We did good. I did good.

Separately from the day job

2014 was also the year I moved into Event photography. In 2014 I shot four weddings, one 50th wedding anniversary, a music concert and several parties, and I already have bookings for next year.

This is a great way to spend evenings and weekends and I love being invited to take part in these special occasions. My main focus as a photographer is to capture emotions, to freeze forever those fleeting moments of pure happiness. My clients to date have without exception told me I do it very well.  The customer is always right, they say. I’m not going to argue the point…

I am increasing my service offerings in Event photography to include online photos, photo books and video. To this end I am pleased to announce the launch of a dedicated web site, where guests and families can now view photos from the event of the day, and even download them or have prints made for the coffee table or the wall. I will be adding to this site over time to include unique artwork for sale. I am going to show my creative side. Watch this space.

As well as providing opportunities to cherry-pick your very own wall-mounted and framed art from your own event, those that did not attend may simply view the photos from the happy day, and feel as though they were a part of it. Great for out-of-country relatives, just send them the link to your personal album!

I am very excited to be able to offer this particular service to my brides and grooms, and hope to expand this even further over time.

Dear reader, I would welcome the opportunity to be a part of your own special event. Take a look at these shots from the portfolio. If you like my style, contact me to discuss your needs. Let’s talk.

I also managed

to keep a couple of dozen commercial web sites running without interruption. The busiest of these, the News in Port Colborne and Wainfleet, is a Niagara peninsula based online community newspaper which I took control of last year. Since then, the numbers have gone through the roof.

Pulling in visitors from the entire Niagara peninsula and the Golden Horseshoe, we are fully accredited members of the Ontario Press Council, and yes, I have a press pass. The site has so far this year reached 403,000 viewers, 33,000 in December alone. I live in a small community of just over 19,000, so I will consider this a huge success.

I only handle the technology behind the site and keep it running, taking care of the practicalities of ad management, updates, backups, security, and bandwidth management. The bandwidth requirement for this site has grown exponentially since January, which saw me having to juggle servers three times during the Summer, and throw ever more resources in, just to keep us online and operational: We have a lot of visitors, growing every day.

Though I write an infrequent column, the lion’s share of content is supplied by Heidi, the founder. She keeps the content flowing and her hard work keeps people coming flooding back. Whether you enjoy her style or not, it is highly effective. The results show it.

Our December bounce rate is 0.76%. That is an amazing number for those that understand it. According to Google, fewer than 6% of sites achieve a bounce rate below 25%, placing us squarely in the top one percentile of web sites. Globally. Fewer than one in a hundred visitors click away without reading further.

Which makes this site a gem of an opportunity for advertising. If you operate a business in the Niagara peninsula, please consider throwing some of your marketing budget in this direction. You will find it a great return on your investment. This is not a sales pitch, but if you do want to consider it, please contact me direct to discuss your options. I can answer all your questions, and get your ad up and running quickly. Again, let’s talk.

That’s enough, I think

I have written about a few of the professional highlights of the year just gone. There have been plenty of others, too many to list in full.

I created a 10’ by 12’ trade show booth, several promotional videos and three rolling attract mode ads. I graduated college. As a member of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals I received an Honorable Mention’ for a piece I submitted, and I contributed to a couple of their seminar/webinars. Not the least of my accomplishments is simply keeping up with the software learning curve, from Photoshop to Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Dreamweaver, Muse… It’s a very long list and a lot of hard work went into staying on top of the game. But that’s just part of the deal, if you want to play this game. And I do.

In closing this review of 2014, I want to point out one personal highlight: My one year anniversary with Nikki. She and I are looking forward to bigger and better things every year, both personally and professionally. We have Plans with a capital P.

We look forward to riding the roller coaster of 2015, and beyond. We hope to share the ride with those of you reading this.

Get ready to scream. In a good way.

Dutch Engineer Develops Unusual Ambulance Network

As some of you know, when I am not designing graphics or running web sites I write for a series of medical technology blogs. As part of that, I research. And as part of that, I came across this amazing story.

This is the story of Alex Momont, a design engineer at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands. He recently graduated by presenting his Master Thesis, a research project that we will come to later. You should know that Alex is one of only five people ever to achieve a maximum grade during the fifty years that the University has been open. What he worked on is spectacular. No other word does it justice.

Background: In the European Union, around 800,000 people per year suffer a cardiac arrest. Ambulance response times vary, but average at ten minutes from first call. Irreversible brain death occurs at around 4 to 6 minutes after the heart stops beating. First responders know before they even turn on the ambulance siren that 8% of cardiac arrest victims will need to be pronounced dead on arrival. Enter Alex.

Alex developed what is technically called an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or UAD. In regular speech, a drone. But not just a drone. Alex developed a network of drones. A network of lifesaving drones. Drones that can be on site with any patient inside a 12 square kilometer (5 Sq. Mile) radius in under 1 minute. Drones that incorporate two-way video and audio, and which are supported by 112 human operators and first-responders. Drones that, with this human backup, can walk lay people through how to use the flying defibrillators they carry.

The statistical average success rate for untrained lay people using an AED (defibrillator) is 20%. That means that even if you happen to have to hand a convenient defibrillator (they are not exactly hanging on every wall), 4 in 5 cardiac victims will still die. With the drones’ built-in audiovisual feedback from trained operators, the lay person success rate increases. Dramatically. We are talking 90%. 9 out of 10 victims will survive.

Drones are not subject to traffic delays. They take direct line of sight paths to their patients, guided unerringly to the exact GPS coordinates of the phone being used by the person calling in. Human operators can input destinations manually if required. Currently the ambulance drones move at up to 100 kph (60 mph). Work is already under way to increase that to 160 kph (100 mph). Which in many cases will bring the response time down to under thirty seconds.

Imagine this fleet of lifesaving worker bees navigating rush hour New York. Or a crowded subway platform. Or a rural farm, an hour from the nearest hospital. Or the top of a bridge, or the bottom of a cliff. Think of all the places an ambulance either cannot go or will take too long. Then imagine you are the one on the ground.

I for one would welcome the buzz of an approaching ambulance drone. Response time under 1 minute? Where do I sign?

Think this sounds like science fiction? Then why not watch the video.

True Tales of Technology

In the week of the OPEN MINDS conference on technology, which focuses in part on the future of data security and breach protection, this next item seems highly relevant. It is a story which shows how easy it can be to be the unwitting source of a data breach.

First, let me say this. I have worked in various sectors of the computer industry for many years. So has my lovely and talented wife. This is her story, one she shared with me about an event earlier this week. With her kind permission, I now share it with you. It goes like this…

A wholesaler regularly purchases consignments of returned electrical equipment from a well-known outlet chain. Now, like any consignment purchase, some things are good and some are not, and you don’t know which is which until you unpack the skid. My wife is on a retainer to go through anything computerish (a technical term curiously absent from most spell checkers) and see what still works, and whether it can be fixed. She restores computers to default, resets routers, tests printers, leaps tall buildings in a single bound, that kind of thing. Did I mention, she is talented?

In this particular consignment was a 1 Tb hard drive, which had been returned because it was apparently no longer working. Dead. Using her suite of diagnostic tools, my wife was easily able to identify the problem and fix the drive within thirty minutes, ready for resale. Job, as they say, done.

What she discovered once the drive was functional is of more interest. This once dead drive now leapt to life and divulged the full contents of every file and folder. Those contents consisted of over 350 Gb of business and personal tax accounts going back several years. For the original owner, an accounting firm, had used this drive for making backups of their client data. And all of this highly sensitive data, including addresses and SIN numbers, was now at our feet. Now you see why I am naming no names.

Being ethical and honest, my wife immediately destroyed the data, running several passes and a few formats to ensure complete shredding of every single byte of data, before passing this now harmless drive back to the aforementioned wholesaler. That unnamed accounting firm can rest easy and are blissfully unaware of the potential disaster they narrowly avoided. However, a less ethical person, gaining possession of such a hard drive, would have been in a very good position to leverage all that unsolicited data in all kinds of ways, none of them good.

So here, finally, is the point. Security is often about the things that you don’t think you need to worry about. I am certain the original drive owner had no fears about the data on this drive. They gave no thought to what could happen if it fell into the wrong hands. It was dead, right? Clearly not. Fortunately, this drive landed in the hands of someone that takes such things in their stride as part of their everyday work and knows how to handle it. This is not, I regret to say, the first time something like this has happened.

I have written before about the possible security problem of the hard drive sitting innocently inside your office printer right now. Today I write about a seemingly dead backup drive. The take away here is that any hard drive may still contain data which could source the next data breach headline, and take your business with it.

If your business involves personally identifiable health information, or any other sensitive data for which you are legally and ethically accountable, a breach of which you would not like to see emblazoned in three-inch high letters across your Sunday newspaper, you would be well advised to treat physical security precautions seriously and add them into the rotation for your next security risk analysis.

So, before throwing it away, returning it to the outlet, or even selling your printer, make absolutely certain that you have taken every step you can to ensure that any drives contain zero data. Even the dead ones. And that goes double for any computer upgrades, too, by the way.

Even if you have to disassemble it physically (with, say, a hammer). Even if you have to keep the drives locked in a cupboard, forever. Never underestimate the power of a good computer technician to revive dead equipment, or even to forensically analyse and rebuild files you think securely deleted. After all, many companies make a legitimate living by specializing in data recovery services. In the right hands, almost any drive can be resurrected. She is really talented.

And so are many others. That this drive found itself in the tender care of my tender beloved was a matter more of luck than of any advance planning. In hindsight, I hope we can agree that this is clearly not something anyone would want to leave to chance.

Think about that before you send back or throw away any hard drives. Please.

Quite A Week at Work

After a much needed week away from computers, during which I devoted myself to spending time with wife and family, I returned on Monday to find everything ticking over nicely. No missed deadlines, no broken web sites, no panic e-mails and no problems. Nice. I cleared my desk well before I left for vacation, clearly.

Still, there were some items on the table that needed cleaning up by the end of this week.

A graphic for a three-panel 10 foot by 10 foot trade show booth. Complimentary table skirt and two tablet stands. One attract mode video to loop on the monitor during the event (I really like what I did for this one). One broadcast e-blast announcing the upcoming trade show next week in Vegas, shared across our social media channels.

Also, two 16 inch by 20 inch posters for the Executive sit-rep meeting on Tuesday. Four medical technology articles for three blogs. Backed up, upgraded databases and security tested all web sites (end of month schedule). Research and development, learned a little 3D goodness in Blender and pushed some pixels around in Photoshop developing a few new concepts to put in the bank for future use. Plus the usual incidentals as required. All good.

And it’s not even Friday yet.

Tomorrow, I have a 2-page hardware brochure to turn out, I want to firm up an appointment to shoot some corporate video on-site with the client and I need to talk more to the boss about graphics for another booth for the next trade show in Montreal at the beginning of November.

I have no plans for after lunch. I’m keeping that free, just in case something comes up.

Fun With WordPress Templates

Today, I changed the layout of this site. I was frustrated by the template I was using, so I just threw it out and started again.

Changing WordPress templates is actually easier than it looks. Select from your choice of installed template and hit Activate. It’s that easy. And once you wrap your head around Child themes, it gets even easier. Why? Because, you can customize everything about a template, without changing anything at all. Huh?

A Child theme is basically a copy of your chosen template. You only ever make changes to the copy, leaving the original untouched. The child references the original, but overrides it wherever you tell it to. That’s where the parent-child thing comes in. Parents always think they know best, and kids always ignore them and do their own thing.

With this method, any updates to the original template code which may be released by the authors do not affect your modified child template. You get all the benefits of upgrading (new features, code improvements) without overwriting your favourite background image or chosen color scheme. So you no longer have to avoid updates (potentially dangerous from a security standpoint), or redo them all from scratch every few weeks, which is a pain in the proverbial for many web developers. Very cool.

It can be as simple as creating a new folder in your Themes directory and creating a single file called ‘style.css’ inside it. That stylesheet file must reference the original stylesheet, and it will pull the majority of layout info from there. But whatever you place inside the new custom stylesheet takes precedence and will override the original. Sweet. Here’s how it works.

The child style theme requires certain parameters. Create your blank ‘style.css’ file in the relevant folder, and paste in the following section:

/*
Theme Name:     OriginalTemplate – Child Theme

Theme URI:      http://www.whatever.com/
Description:    Child Theme based on the Default template, which is OriginalTemplate for this example
Author:         Carl Green
Author URI:     http://www.gystservices.com/linktoyoursiteifyouwantit
Template:       OriginalTemplate
Version:        1.0.0
*/
@import url(“../responsive/style.css”);
/* =Theme customization starts here
——————————————————- */
.site-description {color:#ffffff; font-size: 1.2em;}

Modify the above to suit your own situation and need. The last line is optional and can be removed. It is there for demonstration purposes only.

The most important items above are ‘Template’ and ‘@import url’. Both are case sensitive. Get it right or your site will break. The first is the reference to the Parent template. The second is a reference to the style.css file within the folder structure of that template. The other items are mainly informational, except the part below the ‘theme customization starts here’ line. That’s where it gets interesting.

The original template had the attribute site-description set in CSS as a mid-gray. This did not fit my needs, so I changed the color and size to make the text stand out more for this child theme. See? Easy.

Once you have set up the folder structure and file on your site, go to Themes. You should see a new entry there, which uses the name you set in your style sheet as ‘Theme Name’. From there, you should be able to figure it out as you would any other theme, and you can always fall back to the original in case of emergency. Preview, configure and Activate. Again, it’s as easy as that.

You can go down a rabbit hole with this and change everything about your original template. Depending on how complex the original is, that will be more or less difficult, of course. The pattern to follow always remains the same. Any file that needs to be changed in the original template should instead be copied into the child folder, using the same file and folder names and directory paths. You customize the copy in the Child folder and leave the original untouched. As long as they match (and remember they are case sensitive), the child theme will use your customizations instead of the originals.

One caveat, if you modify some of the deeper functionality within your chosen template, for example the underlying coding or PHP, then you will not benefit from any security patches to the original template, as your customizations will override the update. This is unlikely to affect anyone, but I would be remiss if I did not address the possibility.

For our purposes, we just found an easy way to make sweeping changes to a web site without having them overridden every time the site automatically updates itself. Isn’t that grand?

iPhone 6 Owners, Beware!

An interesting piece about the iPhone 6 crossed my desk today. It was about a new phone feature which allows owners to charge their devices wirelessly by ‘Wave-Charging’ it. The idea is that the sensors in this phone can detect microwave emissions. The oscillations they induce in the sensors will charge the phone. All you do, is place your iPhone into the microwave and turn it on for a couple of minutes. There was a video and everything. Cool, eh?

No. This is not a good idea. There is no such feature. The story revolves around a fake Apple ad which went viral. That means that people shared this story without knowing whether it was true or not, or even thinking about it sensibly. But don’t get me started on that subject just yet. Moving on…

Please do not under any circumstances place your iPhone into a microwave and turn it on. Not only will your phone melt, the metal innards may even cause your microwave to explode. Literally, and potentially fatally.

Even if it doesn’t, do you really want to see the smirks on the faces of those assistants when you try to return your now melted and fused table art for a refund? I’m pretty sure the warranty doesn’t cover putting metal into microwaves.

Which brings me to the other side of the coin. Apple are famous for bringing out new technology and amazing devices, which can each do more than the one that came before it. I can see why people are unsurprised when the next fantastic feature is announced. In some ways it is a testament to Apple’s innovation and design skills that nobody questions this anymore. It is Apple. That is all we need to know.

But a microwave is a microwave. Really. You don’t put metal in a microwave. Who doesn’t get that? Well apparently quite a few new iPhone owners got their fingers burned on this tall story. Some, again, literally.

iphonemicrowaveWith great computing power comes a small requirement for some personal responsibility. Also, there is an expectation that owners will have a certain amount of basic technical knowledge. After all, you can’t realistically just walk in to a store and walk out with a hideously complex and expensive piece of modern technology and start waving it around in the parking lot. Oh. Wait. You can.

OK, let’s look at that again. Even if you didn’t read the iPhone manual (which explicitly warns about microwaves), I must believe that the majority of people out there know not to put forks and spoons into a microwave. They were taught that in grade school, along with not sticking a fork into a toaster. And no, you also categorically cannot charge your iPhone by putting it in a toaster. Let’s just squash that idea right now, before it goes viral.

What makes people think they can charge an iPhone in a microwave? The Internet.

Back to my previous point, don’t believe everything you read. Just because it is viral does not make the story true. Use a modicum of common sense. Don’t retell a story you have doubts about. And keep your iPhone in your pocket. It will last a lot longer.

Happy 1st Anniversary

One year ago today I married Nikki Myhill. Nikki, an otherwise intelligent woman, agreed to marry me for love. That worked well, because I am always skint (look it up).

We chose the Butterfly Conservatory in Niagara Falls as our venue. Nikki arrived late, as is the prerogative of brides. A wardrobe malfunction (a broken zip) had her careening around to the dress maker for emergency repairs. She was literally sewn back into her dress. The dress maker gave her an early wedding present for me: A stitch ripper. Once Nikki arrived everything went smoothly. She was given away by son David. Maid of Honour was BFF Jackie and Best Man was my brother Andy. Ring bearer (looking spectacularly unlike a Hobbit) was Anthony, though when it came to it he didn’t want to cooperate and ran in the other direction. All part of the fun.

During the vows my brother, who was standing directly behind me, kept gently blowing down the back of my neck. I ignored him and just kept smiling. Nice try, ‘bro. I had set up the camera to record the wedding video, but was under instruction from Nikki not to touch it during the event or suffer confiscation of aforementioned stitch ripper. I left the camera alone.

After the ceremony there was much shaking of hands and hugging before we all headed off to the Skylon Tower for a buffet meal, where Nikki and I shared our first dance. We even managed to score some free birthday cake for sister-in-law Jean, for indeed it was her birthday. Note, September is a hard month for us to arrange events, because it is so full of birthdays and other anniversaries. Mom on the 6th, daughter Vicky on the 7th. Various deaths, and of course Jean. I chose not to conflict with Vicky’s birthday, and as the 21st was the only other Saturday available, Jean has from now on to share her birthday with our anniversary. All good.

From the Skylon we went into Niagara Falls. Specifically, Margaritaville. Bad idea. We chose a night where two other wedding parties were in, and 50% of the bar staff had called in sick. End result, Nikki, still wearing her wedding dress, had to wait at the bar for 45 minutes before being served. Really, a woman in an actual wedding dress should get a little priority, don’t you think? This kind of put a dampener on the festivities, so we slid next door to the adjoining hotel instead. It had a bar. A bloody expensive one, but at least we could get served.

A few drinks later the night was over and we all slipped back to our rooms. There was no stitch ripping. There was sleep. Followed the next morning by a full fried breakfast with the family before we all wound our weary ways home, Nikki and I electing to crash on the couch and head off on honeymoon the next morning. Honeymoon being a 5,381km road trip, we wanted to be fresh. Our thinking was this: If we can survive a two week road trip, stuck in a car together, then we are going to be fine.

We not only survived it, we enjoyed it. Taking in Quebec, Montreal, and the joys and sights of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton we saw a little of everything that makes the eastern Canadian seaboard so beautiful. But that, as they say, is another story. This one is over and in closing, I have only one thing to say. Happy Anniversary, my love.

Elections: An Inside Story

The 2007 provincial election was a lot of fun for me. As we are rapidly approaching another election I thought an insight behind the scenes could be interesting. After being duly sworn in in August 2007, I and my IT Coordinator colleagues went through some intensive residential training before being released back into our respective communities. Shuffling back home with our 600 page manuals, we were tasked with managing the electoral database, computer systems, security, and the data entry teams for our respective Returning Offices. In my case, that meant the Welland Riding, at the Returning Office on Hagar Street.

Here are some bullet points.

Ontario is broken down into 107 Ridings, Welland being one. Multiply everything from here on by 107 and you begin to get some idea of the sheer scale of a provincial election. And Ontario is only one Province. Think Federal…

In Ontario alone the Electoral database contains over 8.3 million names, addresses and dates of birth. 82,537 of them lived at that time in the Welland Riding. Since the last election people have moved, died, married, divorced, and come of age. New streets and subdivisions have been built, demolished, renamed or merged. Boundaries have moved. All this needs adding, updating, verifying, and cross-checking. Electors then need to be allocated to polling stations and voting cards must be issued. 12 hours per day, 7 days per week, I and my team worked diligently for two months to get as much done as we could in that time and fix some of the problems we encountered. Data entry was a moving target, the forms change several times at each stage of an Election. They did extremely well and I was very proud of them. Thanks, guys.

I trained the management team and data entry staff on the computer systems, made sure everything was hooked up and kept working, monitored security and oversaw data entry, as well as verifying and reporting back to Elections Ontario, liaising with candidates and printing out the actual ballots. Beyond my scope, all field revision staff and more than 1000 polling day officials plus emergency standbys were trained in shifts, including weekends and evenings.

2007 Election Ballots ready to rollOver 70 venues played host to 283 polling stations. Leases must be signed for each. All need insurance. Furniture. Staff. Training manuals, ballot boxes, maps, direction signs, braille guides, magnifying lenses, sealing envelopes and stationery, toiletries…The simple truth is the logistics involved are phenomenal. From the first delivery truck to the last that collects everything for return to Toronto, this is one hell of a roller coaster ride.

Advance Polls were open at 7 locations for 13 days. Over 100,000 Ballots were secured in my locked office, one per Elector (you are not a Voter until you have actually voted). Every sequentially numbered piece of paper had to be signed and accounted for both in, out and on return to the building on Election Day. Times two: We had a referendum, so double the ballots. And don’t get me started on the amount of printing we did. Daily reports, internal memos, bulletins, candidate materials, Lists of Electors…not including what was farmed out locally. Two printers went through 7 cartridges between them and a small forest of paper.

If you wondered why you didn’t vote where you used to vote, here’s your reason. Elections Ontario Geography Division works year round to keep their maps up to date, right down to house and lot numbers for every street and road. Polling boundaries are allocated by population density. As population density changes, so do the boundaries. We aim for an optimal 350 electors at each polling station. That’s a manageable number for officials and venues, and you don’t have to queue around the block as you would if there were 3,500 instead. If a new condo or subdivision was built, that may get you bumped into the next polling station over, to balance the numbers as best we can. Balancing the numbers and allocating electors to polling stations was another job for my team and I. Blame me, I verified the data. I crunched the numbers. I allocated. I sent out the voting cards.

On Election Day everyone is at battle readiness. From 6:30 a.m. the polling stations are preparing. All are coordinated through the Returning Office and checked off on a screen as they announce they are ready to open the doors. We have teams of trained standbys on call to cover any last minute staffing problems: If we don’t have a full staff we cannot legally open the doors. Tension mounts as drivers are despatched to ferry replacement staff around the region as needed. Eventually, we have green lights across the board. We’re ready. And the doors open.

Calls come in throughout the day as issues arise. People go to the wrong polling station. Some are not on the voters list. Some live in Windsor but want to vote here. Some didn’t bring their voters card and have to be looked up in the huge Provincial electoral list printout which each polling station was issued with. Some didn’t even bring their ID and are turned away. Why? Because every year some people try to vote at multiple locations, and we’re ready for that, too. Everything has been prepared for, as much as humanly possible. The day winds on and we weather the storm, running on pure adrenaline. By the end, we’re all dead on our feet. But when the polls close, that is when it gets really interesting.

The ballot boxes are locked, tagged, and thrown into vehicles before everyone heads back to base at top speed. In case you ever wondered why it is called the Returning Office, now you know. All ballot boxes return here. The polling station staff can go home now, their work is done. Most, however, stay for the main event. The count.

Ballot box seals are confirmed untampered, then passed to waiting teams of ballot counters. Each ballot in each box is counted and results tallied and totalled. That box is passed to another team, and they recount it. If the numbers match, it is considered a good count and they go to the next box. If not, they do it again. And again, if necessary.

Once verified, the counts are passed to the Results Entry team that I hand-picked. Five individuals, their job is to enter these numbers to a database and cross-check until all polling stations and their counts are accounted for. We have our own dual-entry verification process, and I check the numbers myself for triple-redundancy. If the numbers add up, we move on. If not, we do it again. And again.

While we were collating the early counts I had to physically throw an over-inquisitive journalist out of my office. He was lucky I was in a good mood, I could have had him arrested. Literally. I considered it. The candidates representatives and every media outlet in the region were on the phones every few seconds. Everyone wanted an early indication of how things were going. The runners were dashing backwards and forwards with slips of paper. Ballot boxes and ballots were flying around like an explosion in a paper factory. The place was generally in quietly frantic uproar. Organized chaos.

Instead, I locked the office door and only let in the runners bringing me the results, after having given strict instructions not to speak to or even glance at any of the massed journalists. As fast as counts came in they were entered, checked and rechecked until all polling stations but one were accounted for: The ballot counters couldn’t agree and were on their fourth recount. And that’s fine. We want it to be right. And, eventually, it was. We were there until 1:30 a.m. before I could confirm the final results and pass them to the Returning Officer, who announced the initial results to the waiting media and assembled election workers.

The next day, per election rules, we did another recount to confirm the preliminary results. I am pleased to say they matched exactly, well done my team. The official results were announced at 1:00 p.m. that day and were co-signed into the history books by the Returning Officer and I. Peter Kormos had won by a clear margin.

Post-election clean up takes another couple of weeks, give or take. It involves taking all the issues encountered on Election Day (people who had died, immigrated, emigrated, married, moved or come of age during the election, for example) and updating the electoral database one final time before uploading it to Elections Ontario on Rolark Drive, a task which is done in every Riding across Ontario as the closing act of an election.

And then the trucks arrive. The furniture is returned first. Most of it was on loan or hired locally. The tables and chairs, the desks and kitchen equipment. The computer equipment goes into a specially built trunk, roughly ten feet by four by three. All the data entry workstations, the laptops, the printers, the cabling, the manuals, the network equipment. The equipment fills the trunk neatly: It was custom-built to fit neatly. The trunk is locked one last time by me, and the driver signs for trunk and key before all three go up the loading ramp together. All that equipment still contains software and confidential information which needs to be securely wiped when it gets back home.

But that is a job for someone else. My job is done. Time for me, too, to go home.

New content added to the web site

Wow! I finally got around to doing it!

Been so busy over the summer, with my day job and weekend work shooting weddings and such that I haven’t added anything to either this blog or the web site in quite some time. Well, today that changed.

I’ve added a new section to the site which features some of my Photoshop work. I called it Before and After, because it features a selection of images showing the original photos and how they looked when finished. A slider overlay lets you compare the two on top of each other. Pretty nifty. I may expand this section, as there are many good photographers, and there are many good Photoshop artists, but for some reason the two skill sets come together rarely. I think I may be on to something here, especially when I also have the skills to put finished artwork on to a wall mural, car decal or coffee table photo book. Which brings me nicely to the second thing I added today…

I’ve added a selection of photos from a wedding I shot in June (thanks to Aaron and Kat for their permission) to a new page in the Photography section, which can be found HERE. Click any image to see it closer. I shot over 700 photos that day, and as you can imagine they took some time to work through. These are some of my personal favourites. I also made a photo book for the happy couple, and hard and soft covers are available for viewing or purchase using the links below. When I gave the newly-weds their hardcover photo book I also presented them with a framed 16 x 20 poster of them walking smiling back down the aisle. The poster has already been given pride of place on their main wall. I know, because they sent me a photo of it.

It’s been a busy summer. Nice to have time to get back to what passes for normal around here. Now, I probably should get to work on my own wedding photos, it’s only four weeks to our first anniversary…

Hardcover: http://blur.by/1uoN5p8     |     Softcover: http://blur.by/1qFZeCs