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May 27, 2005
Surreal: Pedestrian killed right outside my work..
This was going to be another lovely day, in a series of days blessed with lots of sunshine, ribbon blue skies, ... if not for the tragic event that took place at around 10:40 am.
This Thursday, I came in to work as usual at 7am. By 10:40 am, I was already set to devour my lunch. The morning hours spent debugging some of my earlier code went by very fast. If not for unusual commotion in front of our office windows, I would have easily discounted sounds of fire engine sirens heard a couple minutes earlier for nothing serious. Working in the heart of a busy city, you get used to the sirens.
This time, however, it was nothing ordinary..
.. glancing through my second floor window facing the intersection of Seymour and Robson, I witnessed a gut wrenching sight of a handful of emergency personnel administering CPR to a pedestrian sprawled motionless on the pavement below. The victim was wearing a new pair of jeans and white sports shoose. From my elevated view, I caught a glimpse of the victim's face: all bloodied and incomprehensible. At that moment I couldn't determine the victim's gender. Not until later did I learn from the news media that the victim was a lady in her early 30es.
A coworker pointed me towards a red car parked at the curb and a seemingly distraught man crouched nearby. There I also noticed a white flat back truck some 30 feet away from the fallen pedestrian. It seemed obvious: the distraught man was the driver of the truck that hit the pedestrian at the crosswalk.
Momentarily, an ambulance had arrived and medical personnel sprang to action. But there was very little they could do at that point. One medic reached for the victim, checked some vital signs, stood up and proceeded to the ambulance visibly upset and digested. The fire crew personnel attending to the victim followed suit, lifted to their feet, tossed their gloves to the ground and stood silently in a circle, as if observing a somber vigil. They too were visibly disappointed and exhausted.
Momentarily, the medic returned with a white blanket which they used to hastily cover up the body of the deceased pedestrian. Only a few feet away from the victim, another heartbreaking scene was unfolding. Witnessing that the victim was now most assuredly dead, the driver lost it all. He began to cry uncontrollably and shake like a leaf. Comforted by a passerby, he reached out for a cup of Blentz coffee at his feet and tried disparately to take a few sips. His hands, now shaking wildly laboured to lift the cup and guide it to his lips. Before barely touching his lips, his hands slumped and he brought the cup back to rest on the curb, almost spilling the contents. A stranger kept caressing his shoulder in an attempt to calm him down. In the mean time, a police officer approached the driver and tried to talk to him. The driver seemed to respond and began gesturing, trying to explain the accident.
Meanwhile, there were still a handful of pedestrians milling around, passing the dead body only a few feet away, seemingly oblivious to the plight of another human being that was no more. What striked me was that having spent at least 20 or 30 minutes at the scene, the cops didn't properly seal off the area of the accident. Thankfully, the authorities did come to their senses shortly thereafter. The roads leading up to the intersection were sealed off and a wide area around the scene of the accident was cordoned off with a yellow police tape.
At that point, I ventured outside, figuring I would stop at the front desk of the main entrance lobby and inquire on the initial events leading up to the tragic accident. A security guard told me that he was outside, walking towards the entrance at the very instant when the truck striked the pedestrian. Facing in opposite direction, he didn't see how it actually happened. He only heard the sound of screeching breaks and the agitated driver.
Shortly after I stepped outside to catch some fresh air, I was approached by a TV crew. They asked me a few questions and I obliged to reply. You can view some of the interview at the CTV Channel 9 site. In the video, I'm the guy wearing a blue striped shirt and black pants. This is definitely the wrong way to get "famous" ...
Posted by vladb at 02:16 PM | Comments (0)
May 25, 2005
Google "slashdotted" ...
Unless you've been living out in catacombs in the past few weeks, chances are you've heard about Google's new (and beta!) "portal" site http://www.google.com/ig. The whole thing isn't really a novel idea and really seems like a natural extension of what Google is. However, all that genius that must have went into conceiving and building the "portal" apparently wasn't enough to guarantee that embarrassing mistakes would be avoided.
On my personalized Google page, for example, slashdot box looks just ... wrong..
What did Google folks do to pee /. off so bad!? Don't they simply query /.'s RSS feed every once in a while, index the data on their side and feed it back to their users? I suppose they do just that but a notch more frequently than /. would let them.
Regardless, this is going to remain a humorous historical tidbit. Enjoy!
Posted by vladb at 11:05 PM | Comments (0)