braking up the wrong icicle

I had intended to subject this post with, as the starting word, 'barking'.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I mistook last night for being next Wednesday; I planned my post work time and evening to head out to the church for Ash Wednesday service, walked the fourteen minutes to get there to see that it was dark and closed when it ought not to have been. I opened my mobile device only then to check my calendar and found I was six days early. It was a very pleasant evening for a walk, so I walked home in a circuitous route.

The Superbowl takes place this weekend; I have been invited to go to someone's house to watch this game between the Chiefs and 49ers. I do not have a preference as to which team wins; if there is one of the two teams that has a quarterback who makes a 50+ yard pass to a receiver for a touchdown - that is the team I would root for. I had been rooting for Baltimore, but they couldn't manage to get past the Chiefs in the semi-final.

There was a summit yesterday in Ottawa to discuss the growing concern with respect to car theft that is ballooning, especially in Ontario and Quebec. It seems a large portion of these stolen cars are being put into shipping containers and then sent to Africa or the middle East on ships out of the port of Montreal. On Wednesday evening the federal government announced 28M$ of funding to go to CBSA (Canada Border Services Agency) inspectors to increase their number in the ports and to give them better technology to scan shipping containers to locate cars within. I worry for the safety of these inspectors if the port workers who move these stolen car containers are also part of the organized crime network making all of this happen.

One of the ways that thieves steal cars is to use a receiver/amplifier that they put against the door or wall of a house that can pick up the signal from the car's key fob and transmit it to the car to unlock and start it. I read about a family whose car was stolen, and they found there was a special box they could buy that would block the signal from being picked up by these receiver/amplifiers. So thus far their replacement car has not been stolen. If this faraday box or bag works to prevent thievery, perhaps it ought to come as a product with the car when the car is purchased.

Given I do not own a car, none of this is a concern to me.