For about 48 hours after the government of Canada’s throne speech, a whole crap ton of people–yes, including me–were up in arms over consideration being given, after this long with it being exactly the way it is with no uproar from anyone whatsoever, to change a part of Canada’s national anthem to make it more gender neutral. Instead of just rewriting that part of the anthem, and then later on rewriting the parts to do with everything from religion to the fact it’s not some peoples’ native land, I have a perhaps not unoriginal solution. Replace the whole thing with this video. Why? Well, it’s simple. Anne Murry is Canadian. Hockey is Canadian. The song itself is Canadian. It salutes Canada’s national symbol–the maple leaf–and doesn’t offend anyone. Or, if it does, no one’s cried about it yet. And the song is just plain awesome. It doesn’t hurt that it was sung in Maple Leaf Gardens, either, but you know.

A little background on the video: in 1999, Maple Leaf Gardens was officially closed down, and the Toronto Maple Leafs moved to what is now their new home, the air Canada center. Before the last game at the Gardens–a game in which they lost rather badly, there was quite the tribute going on in honour of it. This song, performed before what I believe–my memory fails me at the moment–was a packed house, pretty much sent the message that regardless to where the team plays, or what else ends up changing around them, the team’s still the same. And, they’re still toronto’s team. And, surprise surprise, they’re still not going to be any closer to winning the cup–because they’re still Toronto’s team, damn them.

In other words, minus the hockey references, just like this country. It’s changed a hell of a lot in 20 years, nevermind since 1867–when the original song, not this particular version, was written. But it’s still Canada, and we’ll still call it home. Even if we wouldn’t recognise parts of it from the way things were growing up. This song is Canada, plain and simple. crack open a beer, and let’s kick ass Canadian style. The maple leaf forever, damn right. Now, have a video.

Things have a nasty little habbit of happening here on 30 seconds’ notice. That kind of happened on Friday. Mom was in a fair bit of pain, and ended up going to Ottawa to get herself checked out Friday morning. There’s speculation that it may or may not be something similar to what she was dealing with in January. If it is, it’s nowhere near as severe so it can be left to either heal on its own or be delt with in a month or two if it’s not getting any better or worse. That left us free yesterday, and her particularly pain free, to spend some quality time with my nephew.

His parents were in Ottawa for their own reasons–I suspect it had a lot to do with a shopping trip and a stop off at the casino, so he belonged to us for the day. He’s almost 6 months old now, and you might argue he looks more like a 9-month-old or older. Already he’s fitting into clothes etc for up to 12 months in some cases. So yeah, spending time with him pretty much took care of the majority of the day. And, yes, was exhausting as hell–but I’ll take it.

It of course meant today was an easy day, with the only thing worth going out for being a trip to the Santa Fe Restaurant for supper–if you’re in the Pembroke area and do not stop in to this restaurant, you’re ripping yourself off. Just sayin’. They do everything from prime rib to Italian to yes, Mexican. Costs a little more than most places, but you’ll probably not be ordering dessert. Or breakfast the next morning. I’ve been home for 2 hours and I’m still stuffed.

There will be nephew pictures posted up here at some point. Most likely, later tonight. As for right now, there’s a hockey game on, caffinated things in the fridge, optionally alcoholic things to be put in said caffinated things, and a laptop that still needs to be tweeked just a little tiny bit. And I need to explode. Excuse me while I go do that.

In 2008, the majority of employees at Dell’s Ottawa call center got their walking papers. In June of 2009, the rest of them followed suit. And here in March of 2010, Convergys gets ready to feel the pinch. I wrote about it before, when I first read about it. Now, though, it looks like we’ll be seeing a pretty significant change from business as usual when a door closes in the faces of several hundred employees.

Ottawa City council passed a motion just days after the cuts were announced, urging city staff to enter talks to see what might be done to keep the jobs here.

A few days later, a conference call between city people, the Contact Centre Association of Ottawa and provincial and federal bureaucrats was held. It was decided that they needed to find out more information from the company about the skill level of their staff.

Well now. The city never offered to get involved when Dell closed, nevermind the provincial or federal governments. Although to be fair, it doesn’t sound like Ottawa center management has altogether much faith in its front-line agents in the first place, so perhaps that’s the difference.

Paul Carr, operations manager for Convergys in Ottawa, tells CTV “close to 200 people have already left Convergys. Six hundred are still here and about 200 will still be working here after the cuts.”

Carr actually expected more would have left already, but people in the contact centre say these are not the most highly-trained people and so job options are rather limited..

Now now, that wasn’t very nice, Convergys staffers. Even if it might be true–hey, I’ve seen the results of some of Convergys’s training; I get to say that. Besides, it’s my blog.

Good to know the city’s finally thinking about doing something though to at least compensate folks for, or help them to deal with, the layoffs. How why didn’t that start happening two years ago? Anyone know?

When, after roughly 10 years of service and for no apparent reason, it decides instead it likes brick form better. Such is what happened to my router on Monday, resulting in my being, well, hammered with emails and other asorted reading material that it took until tonight to finally get caught up on. I had been using one of the old D-Link routers, back in the day when wireless networking was still pretty much getting off the ground. Specificly, I was using this one–discontinued as of March 2008. I bought the thing in 2000 or 2001 or something, and used it to set up my parents’ first network–also my first experience with networking. And my first, and only–thank freaking God–experience with networking involving Windows ME.

The router, and my entire small network as a result, took a very unplanned nose dive at some point early Monday morning while I was still contemplating that whole being mobile thing. There were, from what I could tell, no warning signs or signs of sluggishness–just randomly snap, toast. Deader than Elvice. Of course, being the geek that I am, that had to encourage some troubleshooting. So when I got done with my running around for the day, I came back and devoted part of my evening to see if I can’t coax at least another 30 seconds of life out of the thing. At least long enough for me to finish the backing up of my laptop so I could finish dealing with another, unrelated technical issue–February is apparently the month for those. Of course, not happening. It was done, and there wasn’t any amount of poking and prodding short of prying the thing open and fiddling with the inner workings of it that was about to make it do anything other than sit there. Which, I might have been inclined to do, if I wasn’t lacking both the right type of screwdriver and the motivation to actually bother with it.

Now, ordinarily, such a situation–router suddenly goes sideways and absolutely no idea the cause, plus absolutely no money to immediately rectify the said situation–might have made me consider finding both motivation and screwdriver. You tend to do things like that when your geekyness is impeded by brokeness. But I was kind of forced to plan ahead about a year or two ago. Another issue cropped up, one that I’d originally thought might have been my router contemplating giving out right there–it was about 9 years old, so having it crap out on me at that point wouldn’t have surprised me. That time though it’d been the modem, which I’d only bought from my ISP, TekSavvy, about a month or two before that. fortunately, that was easier than at the time replacing the router would have been–one phone call, and done. But, knowing that I very likely wouldn’t have much longer before going completely netless if it did turn out to be my router, I’d managed to get online for the 20 minutes required to fork over the money for a spare–this was back when I actually had money to fork over for such things. Three days later, this showed up at my apartment. And a day after that, so did the new modem.

Swapping out the modem solved one connection issue. As a result, the router spent pretty much the last year or so in a box. This includes the 4 months since I’ve moved into the new place. And, on Monday evening, after some internal skepticism as to whether or not the thing would still work after it not being used save a brief testing period when I got it, it became pretty much the center of an otherwise unchanged network. Now, here’s hoping the month of technical issues doesn’t continue into March, and here’s hoping if by some twist of fate–or by some act of someone’s cruel sense of humour–it does, that it leaves this router the hell alone. I’m fresh out of spares, and money to fork over for spares. Anyone feel like donating to the Save a Geek foundation?

I’ve had a problem for the last couple years. Fortunately, it’s an easily solved one. Just about everything I’ve watched since about 2004 has been downloaded, or otherwise ripped from DVD’s borrowed or rented from elsewhere. This includes movies, TV shows, even the occasional hockey game–hey, I didn’t always have Leafs TV. The reasons are two-fold.

Movie companies have gotten incredibly sneaky with what they stick in that first track of current DVD’s. The one track you can’t actually skip/fast forward past–usually it just contains the FBI warning that says you can’t copy them. They’ve gotten good at cramming previews and other advertisements onto that first track. I’ve heard it said that some DVD’s actually have enough un-ignoreable advertising on there that you could theoretically run into the kitchen, whip up a quick snack, and come back in time to hit play. Download the movie instead, and snap. Problem solved.

TV shows have a similar problem. Only they actually make that problem slightly worse on TV. A typical hour-long show, minus advertisements, only actually lasts about 45 minutes. But they interrupt the show every 5-10 minutes for at least that long filled with commercials. It gets worse during live events, such as the olympics. I swear the advertising doubles at that point. And, as usual, they go to commercial during a semi-important portion of the said live event. Well, at least they didn’t cut off during most of the Canadian portions of the events.

My solution to both problems, except for the whole live events thing, is the almighty torrent. About 95% of everything I watch can easily be found, and downloaded, via that means–anything from CSI to Deep Space 9, and a few of the less popular shows that got me through highschool. Yeah, the MPAA may have a thing or three to say about it, but well, I have a thing or three to say about unwanted ads, too. I’d say we’re even. The only difference is, I won’t spend money to take down the MPAA. Yeah, I’m a pirate when it comes to TV shows. I also have a difficult time caring. You can blame the MPAA, and ads. I do. And I sleep just fine.

Since birth, I’ve had glaucoma, which has resulted in, among other things, my retinas being detached–a significant contributing factor to my not having sight. When I was younger, the resulting fluctuations in eye pressure glaucoma triggers made for some very insane headaches. It was discovered that those headaches were as a result of the pressure quite literally being out of controll. Several surgeries later, and they managed to fix that–I’ve gone years without having headaches to that extent or that frequently. The headaches I did get after that point were, well, no different from the types of headaches anyone else would get–and a lot more manageable.

Possibly because of my higher than normal pain tolerence, or because I’ve had and survived more powerful headaches, a typical headache usually doesn’t bother me. I can and usually do go through a normal headache day without breaking stride–anyone who wasn’t me likely wouldn’t know I was dealing with a headache. Where most folks would be reaching for the tylenol or something like it, I’d usually just turn down the TV.

Lately though, I’ve been dealing with more frequent headaches of the type I actually have to take notice of. These particular headaches, one of which I actually spent last night taking care of, usually take up residence right behind my left eye–the one that hasn’t suffered as extensive damage from my dealing with glaucoma. And, more often than not, they usually result in me having to actually take it easy for a few hours until they pass. In the event that doesn’t work, I have been known to pop a tylenol or two to get rid of the last of it.

Because I’ve had pressure issues before, and the symptoms are somewhat similar, I’m partially wondering if it may be the result of the glaucoma starting to get a little more out of controll again. It hasn’t happened since I was like 3 or 4, but that’s not to say it hasn’t started. Since my left eye has pretty much not been all too badly harmed by it, short of the detached retina and the need to replace a cornia, it might very well not be beyond logic to suggest that we might have a tiny case of reappearance in that eye.

Since I’ve been curious anyway about exactly how undamaged the optic nerve actually is in that eye, and–though I don’t know that I’d actually go through with it–if there was a way that, should the nerve still be relatively healthy, it could be put to some use in an attempt to at least give me partial sight, I’ve thought about getting myself in to see a specialist anyway. Never having had sight before, it’s not something I’m all over getting or my world will never be the same or anything, but I like knowing what my options are, should I someday decide hey, this is worth considering. In doing that, I may also bridge the headache topic with the specialist at that time, should I decide to actually go that route. Not to suggest they’re definitely related, but it would be an excuse to see one way or another. Until, if, I actually get around to doing something like that, however, it’ll be business as usual for me. Including whichever down time I need to deal with another just like it. It’s only a few hours–my day’s not completely written off as a result, so I don’t see it as a huge deal. Besides, it could always be worse–I hear migraines are hell.

It was unanimously decided back in the beginning of February that there would be 6 more weeks of winter. Here we are in mid-february, just 2 or 3 weeks later, and we’re just barely managing to stay below freezing. In fact, I hear tell tomorrow will likely go above freezing. I can’t speak for everyone, but well, I think we’ve been lied to.

Really, I wasn’t serious. Honest. When I said you were all over the place, it was really intended to be an exageration. You didn’t have to go and get all social with your buying out of Aardvark just to prove a point. Really. And this whole getting into the broadband market, too? That’s just overkill. Really, I didn’t actually mean you were everywhere–you can stop trying to be now. Or at least bring that whole broadband thing to Canada. The CRTC could use a real life example of what we *should* have up here.

Every so often, Mike will post some nifty little trick or tool he uses that makes doing X, Y or Z about a hundred times easier than some would argue it has to be–thanks for the Google Analytics pointer, by the way. So it surprised the hell out of me when he wrote this post at the beginning of the month about having to deal with comment spam. And, I had to wonder. How in the hell does a guy who’s been blogging on one platform for longer than I’ve been blogging on 3 deal with it?

In his defense, he uses Movable type, which has okay–though definitely not great–spam catching and destroying abilities. But it needs a *lot* of manual intervension to do it. Part of the reason I got fed up and switched to LiveJournal for a couple years, and then eventually to WordPres–the self-hosted version. They too used to require by default a hell of a lot of manual intervension in the spam department.

Now, though, since I’m not exactly sure which version, they make use of the Akizmet plugin for catching and either holding or deleting spam before it gets posted to the blog. Since making use of this plugin, and granted the blog’s only been around for about 3 months or so, I’ve only ever had perhaps two spam comments make themselves known in this little corner of the intertubes. For comparison’s sake, there are currently 34 comments waiting for me to boot them out of the spam queue, and a total of 129 that were caught altogether by the plugin. Compare that with my old MT blog, now sadly very very neglected and collecting plenty of spam on really old entries. In its prime, on that blog, I’d spend probably an hour a day picking spam comments out of my entries and tossing them in the pile to be later set on fire. I’d of given my first born for an Akizmet-like plugin for use on that platform. And, of course, now that I’m no longer using MT, I learn they have one. If I knew then what I know now, and all that stuff.

Movable Type made me hate spam. Wordpres made me kill it. And Akizmet’s to blame. I’m 3 months virtually spam free, and so far, I’m lovin’ it.

A goodly portion of my TV watching, at least that which doesn’t consist of hockey or baseball, is done on CTV. Usually, its Ottawa station–particularly since they were nice enough to kill news broadcasts from Ottawa’s local A Channel station.

Their Ottawa newsroom caught fire overnight last night, resulting in the temporary loss of use of that building and the possibly permanent loss of 30+ years of news and video archives. Definitely, it resulted in the permanent loss of at least 2.5 million dollars worth of computer and video technology. They get to provide their news updates during tonight’s football game–which starts in 4 minutes for anyone curious enough to watch-from the parking lot of their former headquarters. Tonight’s local update at 11:30, however, will ironically enough come from the A Channel building–the first newscast from that building since March of last year.

If you get any of your news from CTV in the Ottawa or Pembroke area, or even if you just want to help out, keep an eye pealed–there will probably be ways and means for you to do so. If you’re a Max Keeping fan and happen to have something from his time with CTV, you’re encouraged to help replace everything he’s lost in the fire this close to his retirement–info for doing so is in the article’s comments section. CTV, and the news I’ve gotten semi-used to watching from there, will probably never be the same. CTV Ottawa is dead, long live CTV Ottawa.

The Leafs being up 4 nothing in the second against Ottawa reminded me, I’m a lot closer to the game than I often times realize. Just how close, though? If we’re all connected by at most 6 degrees of separation as I’ve been told, I’m connected by 2. My cousin plays for a AA level minor league team, the Upper Ottawa Valley Aces. They recently managed the semi-finals at the International Silver Stick tournament. I heard a rumor, though my google skills do not appear to prove it, that he may have also been called up to the Ottawa 67’s at one point. Growing up, I always wondered what it’d be like to actually have a relative in the NHL–even if I haven’t personally seen that relative since before he could walk. Now, I might just get a chance to know. Just here’s hoping he doesn’t become a Senator.

Over the few months leading up to the Christmas holidays, the original cordless phone set I had for the apartment–one of those older two-handset jobs–was really starting to let go of, like, everything. I had one who’s battery might last 30 minutes, and another who’s battery might last 30 seconds. My parents, who bought me those phones a few years ago, had the exact same ones–and were having at around the same time the exact same problem. I can’t even remember what model they were, but turns out they were pretty well crap. They were promptly replaced in both households by phones made by Panasonic instead. We got our hands on one of those digital answering systems–the phones, 3 of them for my place this time, come with their own built-in answering machine so you’re not paying someone for voicemail. I didn’t exactly plan to use that, but it’s nice to know they have that option.

We got them set up, and were introduced to a rather neat little surprise. It seems, though we didn’t know this at the time, the handsets in use at my parents’ place come with the option to have call Id information read out to you via text to speech built into the individual handsets. Now, granted, you can’t use the same method for being able to go back through your history of missed calls, but this is perhaps the second model of phone I’ve actually seen it implemented on–the first, a corded model several years ago, quite frankly made me want to pitch it out the window. And the thing wasn’t even mine. Naturally mine didn’t come with that option, but it was still nice to see some of them did.

I have no idea if Panasonic is actually starting to consciously make their equipment just that much more accessible, or if it’s another example of a measure of convenience just so happening to double as something you can use without requiring the ability to actually see your phone. The naive part of me would like to think the former, but here in the real world, it’s more than likely the latter. Still, it’s a nice touch for a phone system. I wouldn’t mind seeing this end up becoming a trend for other manufacturers. For the curious, here’s one of the models with talking call ID on Amazon. I wonder if it’s too late for an exchange…

Just about everyone who watches this kinda thing’s been reporting that as of the beginning of March, Google’s officially going to shut down IE 6 support for its services. You’re strongly encouraged–well, by them anyway–to use that as an opportunity to give their new web browser a try. IE 6.0 hasn’t been supported directly by very many for quite a while–since the initial release of IE 7, really. Microsoft almost immediately dropped support for it, and now more and more sites are cropping up that strongly recommend you upgrade. If you’re a frequent user of Gmail and company, if only because your performance will benefit hugely from it, I’d strongly recommend you either consider installing IE 7 or 8, or even do what I recently did and give Firefox a shot. It’s good for your health. Or, at least, Google says it is.

Unless I’d like to devote half my small amount of spending money to cab fair, laundromat fairs and replacing half the supplies I don’t get back from the said laundromat, apparently. At the beginning of the year, I discovered this building’s dryers rather suck when it comes to actually, you know, drying. But in order to find that out, it required I first take 25 minutes to convince it that it wanted to take my money. After a long conversation that involved the temporary use of my mail key to complete payment, and actually force the thing to accept my money, I discovered I’d of been better off not bothering. Getting my clothes roughly equivalent to dry would cost just about twice what it cost me to wash the things. Instead, after having a very short conversation with the landlord, I decided my parents wanted to see me more often anyway. Now they had a reason.

And, because technological screw-ups always happen in at least twos, while not hearing back from the landlord on the building’s machines, my parents’ washing machine decided to take a permanent vacation. So now it’s temporarily laundromat or nothing for all of us, at least until their replacements get there–fortunately it shouldn’t be more than 3 days. Or, in corporate speak, whenever they get around to it. They say bad things happen in threes. well, I just ran out of laundry things to go break. Any guesses what’s next?

Roughly 12 hours from now, Jess will more than likely be a good way through taking her exam for the New York state boards, and that much closer to being a licensed massage therapist in that state. She’s pulled I don’t even know how many 13-hour days over the last year plus, and that’s not counting the hours she’s spent studying, writing papers, stressing, or doing some combination of all of the above. She’s come close to burning out, but managed somehow to keep it together long enough to finish the course. And now she’s one final examination away from having exactly what she wants. I don’t know that you’ll have time to see this before your exam, but if you do, best of luck to you. I’d be there if I could, but you’re being thought of either way. You were awesome in class, so I have on good authority, and you’ll be awesome during this exam. Look out Rochester, I hear she’s good with her hands.

I used to at least make an attempt to watch American idol every couple weeks. Mostly because I was living at home and we only had 2 working TV’s, both of which would usually be in use, but a small part of me found something about the show fascinating. It wasn’t necessarily any of the actual talent–there haven’t been all that many that I’ve seen that made me want to pick up the phone and repeatedly call in to vote, or clear my schedule the next week to see if they ended up bombing out or if they made it into the top fifty million. I thought it might have been the overall hillarity of some of these people who somehow got the judges to believe they could sing, only to have themselves booted when someone outside the actual broadcast could make the decision. Then, I figured it was the general amusement I got out of listening to people who thought they really really could sing, only to discover–not entirely too unexpectedly–they really really couldn’t. Nope, wrong again.

Why do I bother to tolerate a show like American Idol, when I’d much rather be doing just about anything else? Because at least once in a season, usually only once, you get that one particular fool who figures him or herself to be god’s gift to anything musically inclined, and there’s just nothing you can say or do short of tranking them that’ll make them shut up about it. My major complaint with American Idol? It only happens maybe once in a season. So after I see it, I no longer have any real interest in watching. So I usually skip out.

Take tonight’s show, for example. I watched it only because it was on, my mother had the remote, and I’m mommy sitting. And, admittedly, because if the show completely sucks at everything else, I can at least snicker at some of the things that come out of Simon Cowell. It didn’t disappoint on either front tonight, but now that I have no real interest in watching next week, I can make do with what I saw.

Near the end of tonight’s show, we were treated to a very stoned-sounding dood who thought, though I have no idea why–other than the fact he very well might have been stoned, that he could actually carry a tune without a half ton truck. And he chose to demonstrate his unquestionable singing ability with Amazing Grace–not exactly world’s most popular, or best really, song to begin with. That was mistake number 1. Mistake number 2, though? Actually having the nerve to be surprised when all 3 judges pretty much simultaneously decided he redefined suckitude. Mistake number 3? Insisting they were wrong and offering to give them an encore. Whether they wanted to hear it or not. The gentleman’s reward? A personal escort outside. In handcuffs. Whether he wanted to or not.

Now, why in the hell doesn’t American Idol show more stuff like that? That’d make the show about 5 times more interesting to watch. Hell, I might even manage to last through to the finals if they happened to have someone up there who, upon receiving the impression they’re god’s gift to anyone with ears, got told to go pack. Maybe I’m just abnormal, but seeing a person get all uppity like that about a few million people who all think he should be flipping burgers instead of singing would be worth sitting through the rest of the crap. My problem with American Idol really is that simple. They pretty it up too much. That’s probably why you only see maybe 3 or 4 of the people who end up going home–the others, they figure, are probably too strung out at someone having the nerve to prick their ego. And thus, there goes any entertainment value for me. Don’t get me wrong, Idol’s an okay show, if there’s nothing else on and I’m desperate. But it could be so much better. And I might walk away from a show not feeling like taking a nap.

Dear Idol producers. If you happen to be seeing something similar to this here entry, take it under advisement. I have a problem with your show. It bores me to tears. Thank you.

Also, randomly tacked on side point: I still maintain Simon Cowell should consider a career in politics. We’d then at least know what we’re getting, even if we don’t all agree with or like the guy. More than we can say now.

And it didn’t even take me banging my head against Google Reader. I’ve been looking for something portable to replace my current favourite, an RSS plugin for Outlook 2003. Mostly because, on days like today when I’m not sitting in front of my computer, as much as I love being able to have direct access to my feeds in Outlook, it helps me all of not at all at the moment. And I might have found it–at least a temporary fix, until it breaks or I find something better.

The software, written in python and running on any OS that therefore supports the language–I have it on Linux at the moment, is just called Planet. It takes one or more RSS feeds, such as the feed from this very blog, and merges them into a single HTML file. The design looks not a whole lot different from most blogs–the entries are sorted latest first, by date, and optionally by feed, with individual headings indicating the start of a new segment. It looks incredibly customizeable, although I’ve not yet actually gotten much time to play with it–a disadvantage of all my current subscriptions being, as said before, on my computer at home which is precisely where I’m not.

All the HTML, XML, and other such files are built dynamicly every update from templates. Those templates contain the raw HTML or XML code, plus a few variables understood by the program for printing things such as the feed name, entry title, when it was posted, etc. The program itself can be scheduled to run via Linux’s crontab command, or the Mac OS equivalent. Or, if you’re insane enough to have managed to get python running on Windows, you can suffer even more brain damage and update it via the task scheduler. I wouldn’t recommend it-windows has a nasty little habit of breaking task scheduler, but it’s your brain.

The only thing that would make me not recommend it for non-techy users is absolutely no problem for me–entirely manual instalation and configuration. Everything from determining how long between checks for new content–enter the crontab utility–to the addition of new feeds absolutely must be done by hand. Personally, even though it’s not really a huge problem for me, I’d still have much rathered it give you the option of just tossing it an OPML file and letting it draw the feed info from that. But then, I also have well over 100 feeds to transfer over when I get the time. Still, for what it does it looks highly promising. And, it can always go away if and when I find something better. But for now, it beats what’s currently out there for hosted solutions (No, FeedMyInbox, I don’t want to pay you $16 for the privelege of being able to have you email all my feeds to me. Sorry.). So, I’ll give it a try for a bit and either really love it or tos it out the nearest window. In the meantime, I have back entries of feeds to go through when I get home anyway, so I can take my time with the moving everything over to the new software. And it’ll definitely take its time.

There’s a very good, and very logical, reason why it is I never bother to do something as simple as make plans. Something almost always manages to show up to make things work significantly less than well. Like two days ago for example. The original plan, that is the plan we walked to the car with in our heads that morning, was to take a trip to Ottawa for dad’s doctor’s appointment, then maybe grab a little lunch and head home. After we finished with dad’s appointment, the plan changed to maybe grab lunch, then swing by Costco and then home. And by the time we got to the point where we’d have to make up our minds, the plan became a trip to the casino, then Costco, then home. We managed the trip to the casino.

Just about the time we were ready to make our way to the car to head to Costco–we even already had our jackets on and everything, mom started feeling this extreme sharp pain. Now, her pain threshold’s nearly as high as mine, so when it’s bad enough that she can barely move nevermind talk, it’d probably drive most people to either scream or break things. She could barely do either when we started for the car. We very nearly called an ambulance, except we were in Quebec and none of us could speak french overly well. We got her to the emergency room of one of the hospitals in Ottawa. And then the waiting started. And continued. And kept on continuing.

By 8:30, she’d managed only to get as far as urgent care. She’d been triaged, and… that’s about where it stopped. When I finally left at about quarter to 9, she was still sitting there. I headed to Trish’s place to grab a few hours sleep, banking on them not doing much with her overnight. Dad stuck around, banking on not getting much sleep overnight. We were both right.

At 3:00 yesterday morning, they finally got around to admitting her. They were operating on the same suspicion she was–it was a result of some kind of infection, which was producing rather painful levels of swelling. They ran bloodwork, which seemed to confirm it. Then she got to wait some more for them to get around to doing the ultrasound. That happened at about 9 yesterday morning. By then, they’d had her hooked up to an IV for antibiotics and were talking about the likelyhood of a DNC to try and remove any of the remaining swelling or scar tissue that might have been hanging around causing her additional problems. She was pain free, and we suspect infection free, when I dropped in to see her last night on the way here to dog sit and get things ready to mom sit. They hadn’t done the surgery yet, but they still had her on the antibiotics.

I got back here at about midnight, by which time it was pretty much decided she’d be going into surgery at some point today. I, along with pretty much the rest of our family, kept close to the phone for any kind of semi-significant change to the current situation.

At roughly 7:00 or so tonight, that change happened. I got the call first from my grandmother, and then from my dad, letting me know they were taking her into surgery. Apparently, the operation itself takes less time than the prep and recovery do, so we figure they’ll be able to release her before midnight tonight. Whether or not they will is another story entirely, but they’ll be able to. At the absolute latest, barring any random and unforeseen complications, she’ll be home tomorrow. As of right now, though, I have a fairly huge house and two overly affectionate dogs to myself. Anyone want an overly affectionate dog?

Before Google, we had Yahoo. And back then, Yahoo was pretty much just search. They came up with the idea for hosting email as well in the mid to late 90’s–around the same time as Hotmail was born. By then, Google was still just search. Flash forward 11 years or so, and they’re everywhere. I mean, granted Yahoo is trying to catch up, and after Microsoft’s purchase of Hotmail and the advent of its own MSN/Windows Live/Bing search engine, it’s trying to play catch-up too, but Google’s still got a hell of a head start.

Now, Google runs its usual search engine. It also probably hosts your email. It hosts at least part, if not all, of your IM conversation. And, with the advent of Google Voice for those lucky enough to be able to use it, it’s become your VoIP provider. They’ve even developed their own web browser, and two operating systems–one for computers, and one for cell phones. I’ve even heard rumours they may or may not be looking into selling electricity. And now, on top of that, they’ve gone and done something only Apple’s done to this point–come out with their own phone, running their own OS. Looking at the articles–and there are several–that pretty much trumpet the launch of what they’re calling the gPhone, also known as the Nexus 1, it just randomly occured to me. Sweet Jesus, Google’s bloody everywhere. And I wouldn’t trade that. After all, my monthly popular posts post is brought to you by Google Analytics. I’m of course still running a couple others, but, as always, that one’s pulling ahead. And why not? It’s got Google all over it. Just one more thing they weren’t doing 11 years ago.

In 2008, the Dell office in Ottawa I was working at shut down, giving its employees a bit over a month’s notice. In early to mid 2009, my father’s job with a transport company went from under him as the company itself ended up being bought up. On Friday, my mother was informed as of the moment she was told, she no longer had a job at the local hardware store. And today, I got to learn my uncle, who’d been working at a local vehicle repair shop for at least the last year or two, also no longer has a job. All of these signs the recovery we’re being told is heading our way isn’t actually here yet. fortunately, there’ll always be a demand for mechanics, for technicians of a computer and otherwise variety, for truck drivers–my father’s already found himself a better job than he had. But when of all places, losses start to hit a small-ish city like Pembroke, you know there’s problems. And at times like this, I’m reminded of something I’ve said more than a few times, even before the recession. Economics suck. Plain and simple. And sometimes, they like to remind you they do.

For the longest time while I was in school, highschool primarily, I’d always try to find something resembling an excuse to put off, avoid doing, or just plain forget about ever doing anything that vaguely resembled homework. Sure, eventually, most of it would get done anyway–not without the insistance of my parents, of course. But on a personal standpoint, I didn’t see a whole lot of point to it. You spend an hour or so in class beating a topic to death, and just when you think it can’t get any more beaten to death, the teacher throws an asignment at you that takes you an additional couple hours when you get home. And you usually don’t end up learning a whole lot more from the extra work than you did in class–or, at least, I didn’t. Now, rince and repeat the same procedure for every class you have the privelege of attending over the course of a semester. Head, meet pressure cooker. No wonder we threw small parties at the end of June.

Flash forward to my post-highschool life, and people are starting to clue into that fact. Particularly, the people running Prince of Wales Public School in Barrie Ontario, which conveniently enough is about half an hour from where I was living when I did the highschool thing. Last year, after some arm twisting, they managed to ban the asigning of homework. And, surprise of surprises, they’re noticing grades are actually going up.

“As a whole we found marks have started to go up, our Education Quality and Accountability Office data has improved since we started,” Jan Olson, the school’s principal said in an interview with CTV’s Canada AM.

He says there are also fewer behavioural issues as a result of the ban, and academic improvement was observed across the entire spectrum of students: wealthy and poor, special needs and gifted.

See, mom? I told you homework was bad for me.

There’s a report out now that’s saying the rate of failure in netbooks within the first year is significantly higher than that of laptops and desktops. Now, not having actually owned a netbook I couldn’t even start to tell you if it’s accurate or not, but having owned 2 laptops and countless desktops, I can say my personal experiences with those are surprisingly positive. They all lasted past their first year, and I only had to replace my first laptop at the 4-year mark, or thereabouts, when it quite literally began to fall apart–it was a Toshiba, what do you expect? Other than that, though, I’ve had none of my machines to this point fail on me. Would that remain the same were I to buy a netbook? I haven’t a clue. But this isn’t exactly prompting me to go and find out.

SquareTrade, an independent US warranty provider, analyzed the failure rates of more than 30,000 laptops covered by its own warranties. It found that 5.8% of netbooks malfunctioned within the first year, compared to 4.7% for regular laptops and 4.2% for premium laptops costing more than $1,000.

Sounds like my best bet would just be to buy another laptop. So who wants to go shopping with me?

So I’ll go ahead and attempt to correct that minor malfunction now. The week’s been largely uneventful. Jessica got to her bus and to rochester in one piece, as usual. I went back to Pembroke, and hung out at my parents’ place for the evening–largely because, quite simply, this apartment would have been way too quiet to come back to after spending 5 or 6 weeks with Jess. I did eventually come back here, of course. And wouldn’t you know, it didn’t take 24 hours before my usual sleep schedule reascerted itself once again. granted, that was helped by the fact I’m not used to being able to spread myself out as much in bed–another side-affect of their being one less person living here. Monday and Tuesday were pretty well written off. I tinkered with the computer a little, and tried to figure out just why it is I’ve been experiencing about the reliability of a third world phone system where my internet connection’s concerned. Come to find out I was just choking it to death–go figure, moron. I finally unpacked and set up the laptop, so now begins the saga of trying to straighten that out. As for right now? On to attempt to determine whether I’ll be waking up or sleeping. There will be hockey posts coming. And a linuxy techy geeky post. Skip at will. You had your warning.

We had to make a run into town this morning to get the birth stone ring I got Jess for her birthday resized. And, much like yesterday, we caught a nifty little helping of snow, cold, and all kinds of bad in doing so. It was below freezing all last night. It’s still below freezing now. It’ll probably get colder this afternoon–also known as way too goddamn cold. And folks are still worried about global warming. Tell ya what, I’ll make you a deal. You let it warm to the point that I don’t need 6 layers to step outside, and I’ll think about not laughing my ass off at you for bitching about the supposed threat to the environment we are by just existing. Until I get some of this global warming headed my way, let’s just agree that you’ll stuff it. Deal? Thankya.

We have wicked awesome timing. You might even say we know all too well how to have fun. We had a little of that fun last night. I’d had a little alcoholic goodness left over from a previous spin of relaxation a while ago, so we cracked it open. A little music, a little dancing, and a little drinking killed the majority of the night. There wasn’t anything else going on around these parts, so we just kicked it here. We were craving wings, Mcdonalds and a few other things, but of course, lovely little Petawawa being what it is, that lead to about… oh… not a damn thing. Still, we had all manner of crazy fun. By the time the sun came back up this morning, one of us was contemplating sleep. And the other was contemplating a personal challenge.

That challenge, mostly of a random nature, was to see if going past the official count of New years without sleep could actually be accomplished. And the one taking that challenge was yours truely. Strange, perhaps. Borderline insane, well, maybe. Crazy? Well, you be the judge. I have no idea if it’ll actually happen, or if I’ll end up passing out by 1:00 PM. If you see Jess pop up on Twitter about waking me up, you’ll know it didn’t work. As for right now? I’m going to find me some caffeine or something.