For those interested, you can find new transit routes here:

[Click the above image to see a larger version]

Good news: Express bus service on Scott Expressway Blvd should start on March 8th (all-day will follow in September). 

The route should be Main Street –> Scott Blvd (going South) –> Dymott (going West) –> Savoline (going North) –> McDougall (going East) –> back up on Scott (North) and then Main. 

I am one step closer to selling my second car.

I got ready to go to the 7:30pm Council meeting today. At 7:10pm the babysitting deal fell through.  It’s the third Council meeting I had to miss because I could not find babysitters (my wife has classes on Monday nights this semester). 

How hard can it be to stream these meetings online?  Put a $500 camera connected to a computer and stream the video.  Heck I will go set it up for the town. 

It’s 2010!  I was video chatting with family ten years ago.  Talk about being antiquated!

Here are some charities taking online and / or phone donations. I have not investigated efficiency of all these charities yet (as a policy, I do not donate to charities unless at least 70% of my donations reach the victims. Some charities have huge "administrative costs" where most of your contributions end up in forms of salaries and advertisement. Sad but true).

I am personally going with Doctors Without Borders. 

The Canadian Red Cross 1-800-418-1111
Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders) 1-800-982-7903.
Unicef Canada 1-800-567-4483.
World Vision Canada.
The Humanitarian Coalition.
The Mennonite Central Committee 1-888-622-6337.
Save the Children.
Plan Canada 1-800-387-1418.
The Salvation Army in Canada 1-800-725-2769.

Another offbeat post.  If you can spare some money for Haitians, Ottawa will match your donations dollar-for-dollar.  Another reason to give. 

More than 100,000 people may have died in the Haiti Earthquake. I am not pushing any specific charity, but please consider donating some money to people in Haiti.  They are in desperate need of our help. 

Two pillars of accountability are answerability and enforcement. 

Answerability requires public officials to provide information about their actions and justify them to the public.  This requires both accessibility and transparency.  Some public officials tend to be inaccessible.  Very few ever state their values in writing.  If they are not both accessible and transparent, then they do not wish to be answerable. 

Enforcement implies that an institution responsible for accountability can sanction the offending party or individual.  Often this is absent as well. Except in extreme cases, voters have to wait until the next election.

Democracy cannot function without true accountability.  Even if there is a democratic process, without accountability it’s not a real democracy.  

I am committed to completely accountability.

A web feed (news feed, RSS feed, syndicated feed) allows users to subscribe to frequently updated content. All blogs, all news sites and most personal websites have feeds readers can subscribe to.  It takes the need to frequently check the site away.  You get notified when there’s new content.

Why does milton.ca not have feeds for every subsection (it does for the main page.  Even if you are in a sub-section, you only get RSS for the main page)?  I want to see the list of all registered candidates for the 2010 municipal election. I do not want to have to check the document every day. Instead, I want to be able to subscribe to the feed, so I get notified in my RSS reader (I use Internet Explorer for it) whenever they change that page. 

[Shameless plug: you can subscribe to my RSS feeds by either clicking the feed icon in your browser or by clicking this link, if you use an external application.]