12:45 a.m. - 2002-11-29
Map Maker
I had written about rumours of major layoffs in the works at the beginning of November. They played out today. One major oil company and one of the railroad outfits. I still am waiting for the other shoe to drop - I think the oil company will be taken over in the next little while.
More news about the company I just left. They just paid several million in cash to acquire some new properties - hmmmm. Given their quarterly report, something just isn't quite right. I'll have to think on it.
Met with my co-worker from the last project for a bowl of soup. She had brought the vanilla she had picked up for me while on her cruise and an album of photos. The ship had stopped in Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, and Cabo San Lucas. Her shots of the ocean and the shoreline were beautiful. She is doing some translations in Spanish for some upcoming work in the Southern Hemisphere for one of the senior staff.
Met my Dad after that. I thought we were just going to do a little of his Christmas shopping, but he seemed disposed to want to sight see a bit. We went and looked at some show homes in the area we had been in last trip and then checked out more of the development in the Federal constituency I administer. I have wanted to move out of my house since my sons' Dad left - just too many bad memories and bad "tapes" running through my head. When I asked my guys at that time, if that was acceptable to them they said no, that they wanted to stay with their teachers and friends. Given what I knew about children caught in divorce, it was the best choice for them at the time. Besides who, in their right mind, would have rented to a single mom with six school aged boys, especially in a tight rental market. Staying in the house was financially and for parenting reasons one of the smartest choices I made. But, for my own state of mind I need to get out. Maybe soon it will be my turn, but not this time. The show homes were an attraction because the price was good - not much more than what I own now and bigger - but the construction and finishing in the units was very poor. When the time is right I'll know.
Got a call from Elections Canada shortly after I walked in the door. Would it be possible to send them maps of the newest development, with the demographics annotated, that we had discussed yesterday? The supervisor would like to integrate as much of the data as possible into the system now. Qui bono? Well me and, more importantly, the electors moving in to their new homes.
When I was working with the automated electors' list in the spring, I found that electors who lived on new streets didn't show up on the voters' list even though they were in the database, because the link into the list is the street address. If new street names aren't added, then the names of any voters living on that street can't be searched or printed. The data is there but not accessible; suppressed if you will. When I added a new street name into the database, that whole string of electors was brought up into the list - the missing link!
In the book "The Third Wave" by Alvin Toffler, this very process is discussed with reference to it being a means to "stuff" electronic ballot boxes. The practice was called the "trap door". The book's author gave a very detailed description of how votes could be tampered with. I know electronic balloting has been discussed in Canada, and it has a great deal of merit, but I hope all the security features are failsafe first. One of the other reasons I caught the problem was because I had seen a "trap door" hacker's work in an assignment I had while doing a data management project. In that instance, someone in the department wanted to limit who had access to certain documents. Power thing I guess. They went into the database we had created, as commissioned by the company, and deleted the search link that allowed the data to be displayed. The only way to retrieve it was if one was aware the documents existed, knew their precise labelling, and knew where the "trap door" was that the person(s) had built for their own use. Clever, because it meant they couldn't be accused of destroying anything and it could be blamed on our programmers' "incompetence" if it was detected. The only miscalculation was that someone was looking for some of those documents and I knew they had been entered into the database. A search of the tables uncovered the process used to delete the links.
Anyway, back to Elections Canada's request. Yes of course! Bien sur. Can they have everything in three days - by Monday? I guess there's a reason I'm not working right now, eh? I couldn't pull that off otherwise. The almighty works in mysterious ways - guess I'll have to have faith that the income I need to pay my bills is going to come through the same form of divine intervention. I spent this evening printing off the data I needed that was stored on the computer during the last assignment. Then I went digging through the box of paperwork that was generated in the Spring assignment to pull the balance of the materials I'll need together - map making stuff. First thing tomorrow I'll be off to Silly (City) Hall to pick up my working materials. I had planned to spend the day sending out resumes and applying (on-line) for unemployment benefits but I guess that will have to wait a bit - City Hall isn't open on the weekends.
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