Things that happen when you go 3 weeks without updating, episode number I’m not sure how many. House hunting, of a sort, didn’t turn out to be a complete and total flop–hence the, well, nearly a month without updating this thing. Which, yes, means I’m once again nearly a month late with April’s highlights–that’s on the list. In between all the other insanity. Sandwitched between trips to see family, an entire life shift kicked me in the face. Not only has the job market actually at least done a relatively average job of not sucking, but as of 3 days ago officially, I have a location that will for the foreseeable future pretend to be a new place to live. And, surprise, it’s back in Ottawa–roughly across the street more or less from where I used to be. The apartment’s laid out pretty well like the old one was. And, to boot, it’s in the same building as–and, in fact, is directly below–the rental office that used to manage the building I moved out of.

Shane and I have had a running joke amongst ourselves since before he moved in here that I’d eventually be evicting him from my living room. So, when we first got wind we’d be landing this apartment, I wrote him an informal eviction notice–which, naturally, got blogged. It generally wasn’t received all that well by many, in spite of references to it for the majority of the 5 or 6 months he’s been living here. Still, it was mildly entertaining to those who actually had some involvement with it. And, officially official now, on the 15th of this month–yes, that’s in 2 days–I sign the papers for the new apartment, and officially evict him from my living room. Larger apartment, more space, major city, and in a decent area for getting to potential places of employment–not much could be better. Well, except for having something to do at one of those potential places of employment–but we’re working on that.

Speaking of potential places of employment, I’m encountering indications things might actually be trying very hard to return to some kind of pre-2010 level as far as job market activity goes in Ottawa. What lead me to that theory? For the first time in just about ever, Rogers, who I’ve gone rounds with before for other reasons on the customer side, has once again at least temporarily started posting openings–and I’ve applied for just about all of them. And if that wasn’t a vague attempt to possibly lull me into a false sense of getting somewhere, another potential employer I hadn’t heard from in nearly a year threw out a few positions of its own. Alcatel-Lucent, who I’ve had an interview with in the past–and who’s building is actually laid out very similar to the one Dell used to own–is, also at least temporarily, back in the hiring business–and likewise got poked with an application or two. I’m not sure what all will come from any of that, or the few job postings I responded to by more conventional means from companies I haven’t seen much of in the 3 years I’ve been looking, but hey, I can’t exactly do much worse off on the job front.

what all of this means is I’ll potentially have plenty more in-person things to comment on and/or mock rather than the occasional dumping of links that also hasn’t actually been happening in quite a while–I need to fix that–or the seemingly lacking actual coherent thought that happens to have more to it than 140 characters. Such thoughts may or may not involve version 3.0 of the pot-smelling basement. Or, they may be extremely disjointed list-type stream of consciousness “I’m sick, so have an entry” type posts–not entirely unlike this one. Or they may be little more than 140 character thoughts in blog format–at least, if Twitter keeps doing what it was doing for most of today, anyway. Still, things are trying real hard to calm down now–and will do a whole lot more of that after this weekend. Which, you guessed it, means the mockworthy comes right back to where it started. Hey, on second thought, I should go 3 weeks without updating more often. No, wait–next time something important might actually happen.

Share this:

An Ontario resident learned over the weekend he’d won himself a share of a $50 million jackpot, his share totaling we’ll call it $16 million. So what’s he do to cellebrate? He orders pizza. $16 million coming to him and he spends anywhere from $30 to $50 on pizza. His kid didn’t much agree with the prospect, apparently. Me? I’ll take mine with pepperoni, mushrooms and bacon, thanks. Talk about not living beyond your means–now, he’s not even in throwing distance.

Share this:

For the better part of the last two years, I’ve been dealing with the second career program up here in the name of trying to find a non-retail job in a town of primarily retail jobs. After going a round or two with the local college–note to self: round 3 should probably happen soon, we’ve sort of refocused our attention on the one call center in the area, Online Support. Ignoring the fact I’ve had more than one interview with these folks and haven’t exactly gotten anywhere with them, it’s not even what I’d call conducive to getting me back where I want to be–not directly, at least. Still, it’s a step up from where I’m at, and the folks over at second career seem convinced that this time I’ll get in, so on Friday, I took another run at an interview with the company. I’d been given the impression it was going to be a second interview, since I’d already gone through the initial process and they had my stuff on file, but apparently they’d switched HR folks since last time and my info ended up tucked away in storage somewhere. So, it was back to square 1. I went through their 20 questions, and pretty much recited all of their information back to them before the interviewer did–you’d think I’d done this before. It was pretty well the same old song and dance from interviews past, with one potentially noteable exception–I had brought the laptop I recently purchased with me, which prompted the interviewer to go see if she could track down their IT personnel to play their own version of 20 questions. We talked tech for a few minutes, then after some creative use of the said laptop and an iPhone for the purposes of network connectivity–note to Online Support: tell your HR people your wireless password already–I was able to simultaneously show off and complete their required assessments at the same time. we played another round of 20 questions, then I got the standard “we’ll call you” response on the way out the door–again, you’d think I’d heard that before.

It’s no secret this isn’t exactly where I planned on being, but then, it’s even less of a secret that I didn’t plan on being nearly 3 years without work either–thanks, Dell. Love ya. Really. And right around the start of a recession too. Strike 3–you’re fired. But, hey, if this slight change in interview tactics works, I’ll be pleasantly surprised. And somewhat gainfully employed–at least until such time as something more promising shows up, or these jobs go overseas. which, yeah, would be a hell of an improvement. So, I’ll just go on about my day, occasionally poke the second career folks so they don’t think I’ve fled to Mexico to join the drug trade or something, and busy myself with not holding my breath. Hey, I haven’t taken out a loan just to buy groceries–I’m good. Now, let’s see if I can perhaps possibly get a little better. Anyone want a techy? I charge reasonably.

Share this:

Say what you will about the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), it’s got people talking about the disabled which almost always can’t hurt. You didn’t usually hear more than a word out of folks in this area about it, though, in spite of the fact it’s kind of been in existence for at least 4 years or so. You are now, at least on a business front–if only in vague terms. Everything vaguely hinted to in that article is supposed to come into play by January of 2012, according to what’s over there. Everything from business level education to supposed policies specifically for dealing with people with disabilities–no, not that one based on common sense, sadly. The article doesn’t get overly specific, which kind of makes me wonder just how badly the locals up here will end up completely breaking this all over the place. Oh well. It sure as hell can’t be a whole lot worse than it is–just ask any blind person in Pembroke.

Share this:

I didn’t even know there were companies out there who’d insure a property used for growing marijuana. Or, for that matter, who’d insure the actual operation for growing marijuana. Apparently, not only are there companies that do these things, but there’s actually people who want them up here–they’re currently a US thing primarily, it looks like. Yeah, people can’t aford to pay for things they need healthwise but give them their pot insurance. And just when I thought I’d seen it all. People are messed up–but, that’s why I have the blog.

Share this:

That didn’t take long. After just over a year of actual, constant usage, the router I ended up finally putting in service last February took that very short drive off the performance cliff. Or perhaps it was a long-ish one I just didn’t really pay attention to. The problem itself took the better part of 3 days to actually narrow down–initially, we blamed our ISP, but quickly discounted that in a matter of a few minutes. The modem was the next guilty party to be blamed–I’d had a small problem with this type of modem before, so it wasn’t about to surprise me if I’d be replacing that. A few tests and diagnostics later, nope, modem’s working perfectly fine. Well hell. I was hoping I wouldn’t need to invent money for replacement parts this quick. so now my sights are set entirely on the router. Yes, the router I’d just replaced already last February. We do our usual routine with all the computers in the house save one running wireless, because that’s just how we role. Things should be flying both around the internal network and past it to the greater internet. Things didn’t end up getting out of first gear in most cases.

It made troubleshooting this issue even harder still, as the desktop I primarily use for 90% of my online work when I’m at home has been experiencing its own good attempts at dialup performance on the network. I was initially blaming the router, but during testing I was getting much better performance from the laptop than the desktop, both of which I was testing wirelessly. Yes, the laptop’s definitely a more powerful machine, but that has no baring on internet speeds these days–a dual core processor should be running just as or nearly as fast on a network set up by an OCD geek as a machine running a core i5 or i7. Well, you’d think, anyway. Testing disproved that. So now, I have a theory. A dangerous thing in my hands, but you’ll have that. The mystery of the dying router was partially hidden, or at least masked, by the compounding suspected issue of the desktop’s card tanking in 18 different directions. Nifty, with the tiny exception of not entirely. Fortunately, or not depending on your perspective, that’s the easiest thing to replace–and the cheapest. It was also the first thing I got things moving in the direction of replacing–hi, Dell technical support. Time for you to actually work for me. Considering you’re working because I’m not, and all. So one phone call later, and yes it took giving out my former Dell employee ID, troubleshooting was bypassed and hello, replacement card under warranty.

So now, we have replaced the router. I am replacing the network card in the initial problem machine. The rest of the wireless equipment? Wayyy too new to be causing problems–unless someone really wants me questioning their compitence. The only questionable piece of hardware that has yet to be gone over with a fine-toothed “don’t you dare fall over” comb is the modem. And honestly, it’s only a gigantic questionmark over here because, er, one of those already blew up in my face. The unstable network should now, barring unforseen small technological implosions, only be a myth in the house of geekery. And if it’s not, I know one ISP who’s going to get really, really tired of hearing from me. Mostly because I’m not looking forward to the next installment of “When is a router no longer a router?”.

Share this:

The parental units have found themselves with dogs for as long as I can remember. They’ve got two of them now–yeah, okay, so one’s mine, oh well. They’ve taken off for the weekend to do whatever they do when they take off for the weekend, and left me to keep the creatures from tearing the house apart in their absense. Which comes with its very own, double-edged benefit. The pups are awesome judges of the day’s weather–it could be just barely above freezing, but if it’s forecast to be into the 20′s (I’m using Celsius, for the curious reading from the US side of the border–hey, it makes more sense) at any point during the day, it’s guaranteed any outside time they get today–and they usually get a lot–won’t go quickly. Yesterday, they were in and out an average of 10 minutes. but yesterday, the weather threatened to suck out loud. So far this morning, none of the trips outside with them have been anything less than half an hour–and all of them have ended with me escentially guiding them back into the house. Hey, I gots stuffs to do, here. I’m convinced if I let them, they’ll very happily spend the day outside doing whatever they do when they’re spending the day outside. Only problem is, if they’re outside, so am I–another dog day entry for another dog day, I think. So I’m out there every hour or two, for between half an hour and an hour, until such time as the weather starts sucking again. It’s great–gives me something to do that doesn’t involve housework or draining the laptop’s battery for the millionth time. I’ll just be going ahead and changing my mailing address to be my parents’ front yard, that’s all. Hey, at least the view’s decent.

Share this:

I’ve beaten the whole piracy issue to death on this and many other blogs over and over and over again. And when I got bored, I did it a little more. I’ve written on here about other people and/or corporate entities dealing directly with the record labels up here and coming away bloody. If there’s anything more I can say that I haven’t already repeated in at least two of those entries, I can’t find it. And y’know, the harder I look, the more I see of the exact same reasons for/against the whole issue of piracy. And the more I see of national governments taking their queues from the US entertainment industry instead of looking at the actual expectations held by consumers of this overly locked down content. Still, it’s nice to see studies like this one, coming out of a partnership between the US Social Science research council and the Canadian International Development Research Center, investigating the effect the various forms of legislation actually have on piracy in developing countries as an example–none, if you’re curious.

“The failure of legal markets to provide access to goods at prices that are affordable in terms of local incomes fuels a situation in which high piracy becomes the primary form of media access,” said study editor Joe Karaganis.

According to the study, a copy of Microsoft Office is five to 10 times more expensive in an emerging economy like Brazil or South Africa, compared to prices in the U.S. or Europe.

Translate this to music, TV shows, video games that may not necessarily be available/accessible in countries outside the US, or indeed within the US if folks want to access, for instance, UK content, and it applies just as well. I don’t expect this to have much of an effect on the next attempt at Canadian copyright legislation post-election, but this is still nice to see. Not everyone’s accepting the entertainment industry’s notion that the sky is falling. Now if we could just convince the entertainment industry to stop pushing it.

Share this:

Last year, I largely ignored the existence of Earth Hour. By largely, I mean entirely. this year, I didn’t even know Earth Hour was even coming up. Can we call that ignorance on account of obliviousness? Sure, why not? In Edmonton, they did it one better–whereas it’s the politically correct thing to do to shut off anything and everything electric for a whole hour in the name of environmental friendlyness, for the purposes of allowing the Pc greenies among us to justify trippling our electricity bills, Edmontonians did exactly the opposite.

Alberta residents turned off Earth Hour by leaving their power switched on.

Edmonton saw a spike in power usage during this year’s Earth Hour when Canadians are asked to shut off all non-essential power, officials reported Sunday.

According to Epcor, the city used 1058.15 megawatts of power between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Saturday. This represented a 1.01 per cent rise over the same day and time last week. Cold temperatures may be to blame, Epcor officials said.

They may be, but they’re probably not. Now, then. Back to cancelling Earth Hour in this apartment. Go global warming–I mean cooling–I mean climate change!

Share this:

Ever since about October 2010, there’s been one major earthquake after another with the occasional minor one thrown in to spice things up. Japan itself was the not so proud recipient of two of them. I’m officially dubbing this the year of the earthquake.

And, in very slightly related news, we’re approaching the 1-year anniversary of this mildly entertaining event. Almost as a cellebration of that episode–the one I felt while doing groceries, of all things, some of us got to experience this 3.5 quake. I didn’t feel this one, but apparently it was semi-nifty. Hopefully the locals I ran into last year didn’t forget the education they were provided…

Edit: And hey look, another one–this one a week or two ago, and hitting the same area roughly as last year’s quake but significantly weaker at about 4.3. Not bad for having gone a couple years quake free in this area.

Share this:

Apparently, March is the month of moves and potential moves. Back in January, I was looking at the possibility of returning to Canada and right away diving into a move of my own. At the same time, Jessica has been building up to her own move. Mine fell through, but in this last week of February, hers is in full swing. To the tune of several dozen boxes, storage bins, and various other containerlike objects that can and will be used as packing boxes (thanks, Heather, by the way). This tiny apartment almost looks like it would be cramped with all the packing materials that have yet to actually be turned into things what contain personal belongings. It’s extremely odd to think in a week from now, most of this stuff will be exactly where it should be in the new place. And I’ll have been here to make absolute sure it gets there. I guess I’m participating in a March move after all–just not my own. Hey, whatever works. Now where’d I put that roll of packing tape?

Share this:

Okay. So. While I was out having fun last night, the Leafs related internet virtually blew up all over the place. We traded Chris Versteeg yesterday for a first rounder, a third rounder, and some guy who’s name escapes me at the moment. We know what to do with the third round pick–usually waste it on someone who’ll never see the light of day. But do we still remember what to do with the first round one? Last time we had a halfway decent pick in that round, we auctioned it off for Kessel. Which, okay, nice shot, but I dunno if we’re getting our money’s worth. I can’t even remember anything else we’ve done in recent years with picks in the first round they were that good. But we didn’t have this GM for most of those years, and he at least likes to pretend to use his brain if nothing else. Steve asked yesterday if we’d even still remember what the hell to do with it. I told him then we’d at least have time to figure it out. Thinking about it now? I just hope they don’t remember what they did with the last decent one. That didn’t work quite as well as we’d hoped.

Share this:

Part of my reasoning behind showing up in Rochester for a month, particularly this month, is the opportunity to do exactly what’s currently being done today. Sure, we don’t need a particular day to do it, but well, it’s here and we’re doing it, so draw thine own conclusions. I aranged to have a little surprise show up for Jessica at work today during a couple hours when she needed to be away from the apartment. She hasn’t had much of that done for her I don’t think, and well, it’s muchly deserved. I don’t think she disagreed, considering she showed it off apparently to a couple folks she worked with. Something else was supposed to show up for her today, but I’m going to just assume USPS decided today didn’t agree with their schedule so hopefully it’ll show up later this week. The third, now second, part of today’s activities takes place in just about an hour.

I’d seen some info on this little Italian restaurant not far from here floating around in various places, and was looking for an excuse to check it out. We’ve always had half a dozen things going on on any given day and well, the checking out of new places ends up usually getting squished off our list of things to do. So tonight, that’s being remedied. I made a place for us at Pane Vino Ristorante, which advertises itself as romantic, authentic Italian. Romantic or not, authentic or not, I’m calling it an excuse to just unwind, reset, and generally not have to actually do any work for our food. Not unlike the insanity of Saturday, except with about 10 less people. It’s a thing we try to do, usually somewhere a little more familiar than this, at least once while we’re together. This time just so happens to fall on a day when you’re theoretically supposed to do stuff like that, but oh well, whatcha gonna do? It’ll be nice, though, to actually just take an evening and be easy about it. The fact that I know it’ll help her to relax more than she already is? Added bonus. Now, back to this whole getting ready to leave thing.

Happy Valentines day to those of you who actually observe it, for whatever reason. Happy monday to everyone else. Either way, do me a favour and crack open a cold one. I’ll try and think of you while I’m drowning in pasta. Maybe.

Share this:

The piracy is evil camp’s been producing study after study the last couple months in an attempt to reinforce the idea that the world’s just chock full of evil no-good baddies with laptops and external hard drives out to find an out of the way network from which to download all manner of free and supposedly illegal content. However via Techdirt, we learn not so much. The majority of people who do their illegal downloading would much rather have a legal alternative.

All week people have been submitting variations on the news that a study commissioned by NBC Universal, and promoted by the MPAA, shows that 24% of web traffic involves “piracy.” If you look through the actual methodology, done by research firm Envisional, there are all sorts of problems with it, including the fact that they seem to bootstrap these findings based on research done by others. Another problem is that the source Envisional used, the PublicBT tracker, does not include many of the legal BitTorrent uses, meaning that they may have significantly undercounted legal usage.

Of course, the MPAA is using this data to suggest that piracy is a big problem, and governments need to step in and help (of course). Yet… if you actually look at the data, as Rob Pegoraro at the Washington Post did, you get a very different picture. It really suggests that all that movie piracy is the industry’s own damn fault for not making legitimate content available online. This is not news of course. One of the main reasons why people access unauthorized copies is because they can’t get legitimate copies. The movie industry is so infatuated with “windows” that it doesn’t seem to realize that restricting how people can access their movies only drives more and more people to unauthorized means.

Movies, TV shows, music, computer games–it all boils down to the same thing. People want to access these medias in their own way, on their own time. They don’t want to wait 6 months for it to be available in their country if it’s available in the US. They don’t want to wait to download it online if it’s available on CD now. Or, they want the option of downloading it, even if it’s available on a CD. It’s largely why I have absolutely no problem justifying my own piracy. We want to be able to access this TV show, this movie, this album, this computer game in a particular way. We may not want to wait 15-30 days for a company to ship the CD to us. We may not want to wait 6 months for this album to be available in Canada when it’s already available in the US. So we don’t. It’s available, we want it, we go get it. And that pisses the movie/music/TV/gaming industry off. Funnily enough, I don’t particularly lose a whole lot of sleep at night over it. Guess now we know why.

Share this:

So yesterday was the epic get-together of win. A dozen of us crammed into one of the local restaurants and pretty much had a table or two entirely to ourselves, and an epic server of awesome to boot. Why? Simply because we could. There was me, Jessica, Heather and a whole crap ton of others, most of whom I’d never even seen before then, sitting around a huge table, eating and generally doing all manner of cutting up. The layers of awesome just kept coming–and so did the very nearly doubling over laughing at quite probably the absolute most random crap going. The food was awesome, the friends were epic, and when I came back to the apartment last night, I honestly questioned for about 10 seconds how the hell it was I’d be fitting through the door. It’s been a small age since I saw that many people get together and no punches were thrown. And the flirtation, oh the flirtation. I’m convinced that was half the hillarity in and of itself.

Everyone was all in general agreement last night we should do that more often. Which probably means I need to start inventing money to get myself back down here for another one of these parties. And, well, hell, because I can–why not? I have all kinds of reasons to keep coming back here, and surprisingly–or perhaps not, if you’re keeping score–not all of them are Jessica-related. Just most of them. This stuff keeps happening, I’m gonna start to wonder just which of my two apartments I should be staying in. Now to get through the week so we can do something just like this all over again, except potentially with a different group of people and for possibly different reasons. This should get real interesting real fast.

Related: Heather, we’re getting you a blog. Yesterday. Because we can. Yeah, I said it. Wait for it.

Share this:

I’ve officially managed to date Jessica‘s computer. Its official age, as of right now, is older than dirt. Yesterday was an adventure in the upgrading of RAM. After finally figuring out this thing cannot keep its various periferals attached while it’s being worked on, I got to playing around with a couple 1 GB sticks I punked from Kyle while I was over there. In so doing, I think I did both Jessica and him a favour. Before me, he wasn’t sure if one of his sticks went south on him. That took all of 10 seconds to determine for absolute sure–it’s toast. As for the other? It might as well have been, at least so far as I’m concerned. This machine just plain ain’t supporting. It’s DDR2 RAM, for starters, which apparently this motherboard predates by a couple years. Add to that, I think this thing only goes up to PC2700, which well, do they even make RAM that slow anymore? So that was a fun excuse to throw open the case.

Now, it’s off to a valentine’s get together with a few friends, one of the 80 million things I love about Rochester. Mockery? Snarkery? General geekery? Yeah that’s still coming. As for now? I see food in my near to immediate future. Catch you on the flip.

Share this:

This weekend’s interesting way? Attempt to teach her html. The challenge was provoked when, while preparing to write a blog post of her own, she realized her attempt to incorporate something into it would go a few times easier with those particular skills. So now I have a weekend project. Which may have the added side-affect of also adding more content to her blog. See? There is method to the geek’s madness. Or perhaps it’s just madness. Either way, she learns html and I win. I’ll take it.

Share this:

So this has been a very entertaining week content-wise, hasn’t it just? Yeah, about that. Sorry. Those curve balls I kind of made reference to on Friday? They just keep comin’. In this week’s latest curve, hi, sick days a-plenty.

Some of you will probably recall Jessica spent most of last week sick, starting on Sunday. This includes the entire first week I spent here. She took Tuesday off, but that was about it for reasons related to the fact her bosses are personifications of different aspects of Satan. Fortunately she had Friday off anyway, so after we got our running around done that needed to happen, she could get her rest accordingly. Friday was also apparently my turn to have whatever it was she was having–that’s one meal order I could definitely live without, next time. So that thing what laid her out flat on her ass on Tuesday snuck up on me Friday, and laid me out flat on mine. So now, Friday afternoon/evening consisted of her trying very hard to get over what she had, and me trying very hard not to die from what I just picked up. I spent parts of that weekend in a sort of zombie state, which made going to visit friends on Saturday an adventure in Dayquill to be sure–sorry about that, Candi/Kyle. Next time I should be less likely to infect the little one. Still, we had an awesome time on Saturday even if we were both in various stages of recovery, and Sunday while she returned to work, I returned to being vaguely close to human solely with the assistance of Dayquill.

Monday was pretty much the easiest day so far. Even though once again it was a pill popping day. And by Tuesday, I only had to take one in order to go take in birthday cellebrations with friends at Sugar Mountain, a local cupcake place that, just for the record–and I don’t do a lot of the whole cupcake thing regularly, owns your soul twice and calls it a warm-up. I’d actually began to look slightly less like death warmed over around then, so going out–even though I was popping pills to do so–was actually enjoyable.

Today was a personal moment in admittedly short history. For the first time since this thing had knocked me on my ass, I was actually upwardly mobile at a reasonable hour this morning. And more fun, even, was I was doing it without the assistance of drugs. Not that I didn’t have any, they just for a change weren’t actually needed. I actually felt relatively close to human all day, which took some doing to say the absolute least. Unfortunately, it means the blog’s kind of sort of been lacking in updates again, but I’ve yet to perfect the android version of me who can take over things like this while I go attempt not to misplace a lung. However, now that I’m back to something vaguely resembling normal, hopefully this time I can get back to something that resembles a regular update to this thing–including, apparently, 3 or 4 hockey games I’ve up and ignored, and a whole crap ton of mockery of various shapes and sizes. Oh, and hey, Murphy? God gave you 1 day. You didn’t have to take the other 80 million. Knock it off with the curve balls already. That’d rule.

Share this:

I should have probably taken the events of last weekend as a hint that this wasn’t going to be as event free a travel year as I’m used to. Shane had to push his departure date ahead a week to deal with a whole new brand of stupid that’s, naturally, since been squished underfoot. That meant we got the pleasure of throwing together departure plans on 24 hours notice–doable, but it took creativity. On the saturday afternoon, he left Petawawa destined for Boston with his suitcase, and a backpack full of technological wonders. On Saturday night, he left Montreal destined for Boston without the afore mentioned technical wonders and little to no chance of ever actually getting them back–for the record, I think we’ve kind of declared them a lost cause. The process quickly got underway to start the replacing of the afore mentioned technological wonders. And as I was packing to leave for my own trip, that process was pretty much everything but complete. So I thought it should go smoothely from here on out. Then I got to Rochester and someone thought it’d be cute to tease me into thinking otherwise.

As I said in the previous entry, I showed up in Rochester an hour and a half late. Took a cab from the station to the apartment, where Jessica met me at the door to the building with cab money–the thing about having 80 million things to do is almost always, at least one won’t get done. I had time to pass her change off to her, and when I turned back to see if the trunk of the cab was open so I could snatch my suitcase, there was no cab and there was no suitcase. We had a pretty good idea which company the driver belonged to, and were pretty sure it wasn’t entirely intentional–that’s yet another trip related entry for when I have slightly more brain juice. So we called that company, and pretty much got no help from the dispatcher. Not figuring on giving up, the next day we called a few of the direct numbers for drivers we could dig up online. Say one thing for Rochester, there’s no shortage of cabs, be they independant or otherwise. We got a few possibles, and a few nos. The possibles eventually turned out to be very easily ruled out, but this is where it gets interesting. Every single one of the drivers we spoke to directly knew someone, or could point us in a direction of someone who did. Even if the driver was a possibility we found out didn’t have my clothes, the conversation never ended there–it was almost always “Well, I know this guy and here’s his number, see if he’s got it.”, or my second favourite, “I don’t remember driving you, but I know these 6 guys. Let me call them and I’ll get back to you.”. You don’t see a lot of that anymore, anywhere. So that the cab drivers around here were actually willing to do that was freaking amazing.

We eventually called the original cab company back and got a dispatcher that was a little more helpful. And, wouldn’t you know, we’d been right since the morning of my arival. So I got my stuff back within a couple hours of those phone calls. Meanwhile, the other drivers were keeping a lookout and while I didn’t end up hearing anything back from them, I’m pretty sure if it was still out there, I probably would have. It just amazes me how even in a city the size of Rochester, you can see stuff like this going on–and all it takes to start it is one phone call to the right driver.

So now, Shane’s getting stuff to replace what was lost, and I got my original stuff back. But I couldn’t help but laugh while all this was going on–not 2 days before I was meant to leave for Rochester, either Jessica or I had made the comment about at least Shane got to Boston with his clothes. And of course, that night, I very nearly didn’t get inside this apartment with mine. Murphy’s law hard at work, kids. Playing with your mind since the mythical day of rest.

Share this:

Hey, it only took me 4 days–considering my previous record, that’s not bad.

The trip itself went amazingly well. So did all the 80 million things I had to get done before I fled the country–with the exception of the post office, but that entry I’ll save for when I have more brain cells to devote to the topic. I’ll leave you with this regards to that, though. Not only are they inaccessible, but they’re starting to inch across the line towards incompitent. Still, we got past that and everything else went smoothely. Hit my bus on time, actually with about an hour to spare, so took it easy around the place. Got into Rochester an hour and a half late through no fault of my own–hi, people holding us up at the border, nice to slap you. That, also, gets an entry of its own when more brain power is available. Jessica has spent the majority of this week sick, so we took it wasy after getting here. She called out from work on Tuesday, and almost slept the entire day away with the exception of being awake long enough to eat and talk for a few minutes with Heather–we really need to get that girl a blog of her vary own, speaking of. Then it was bed and sleep again. She went to work yesterday, I started getting cought u on things. Got a little closer to getting caught up on things today, and she got a little closer to being back to her old self after again taking it easy last night. We’ve got some running around to do tomorrow, then it’s off to see everyone’s favourite new mom and baby on Saturday. Somewhere in between that and the rest of next week, I have a metric ton more mockery to throw up here–including a couple things I was clued in on by Shane on his blog while I was buried in everything else. Here’s a very wee tiny small sampling of the coming stupid.

• The CRTC gets a federal slapdown, and nobody elle loses much sleep.
• The next big thing in terror: toy soldiers with equally toy guns–I dunno. Thank the British.
• Surprise surprise. OC Transpo doesn’t actually have a labour plan. Told you that strike wasn’t a smart idea.
• My hockey team actually wins. Twice. It figures they be games I’m physically incapable of watching.
• Speaking of hockey, hi, Ottawa. Still sucking after the all star break, I see. Don’t worry, I have a special blog post just for you. Courtesy the Onion.
• Breaking Canada, one US politician at a time. Next on the ridiculous meter? Potential visa requirements for border crossings. Because passports just weren’t stupid enough.

There’s more, but I’m running out of brain juice and well, I do have something very slightly less than screwed up to blog about before I go fall over beside my fiance. Tiny little hint: this is not a good year for traveling if you’re us. And now, back to whatever it was you were doing before I interrupted you. I’ll be back.

Share this:

Statistics Canada’s been saying we’ve reached the end of the recovery line since mid-2010. And yeah, we have. Except for that part where we really haven’t.

Canada hasn’t recouped all the jobs lost during the recession after all, Statistics Canada said Friday in a blow to the federal government’s boast about the strength of the recovery.

They say the reasoning for the difference in overall results is they had been using census data from 2001 and had just now switched to using that of 2006. Not that the 2001 picture was looking a whole lot better, but hey, we knew this already. And yet, I’m probably one of 3 people who weren’t entirely surprised. Canada’s unemployment rate’s still up there. There’s a lot of places that no longer actually do anything–hi, former call center location in Ottawa who’s future is, I’m pretty sure, still kind of questionable. Job postings are few and far between, and decent ones are at a premium. And we’ll just not touch the fact the US is still kind of hanging out somewhere between pannicky and flatlining. Nope, recession’s not quite as over as they said it was. But who’s actually surprised? Well, besides Statistics Canada.

Share this:

Back in 2006, before I had much of an idea I’d be getting into this whole regular blogging thing, I thought it’d be kinda neat to try out this whole having your own web address thing. I did the registration process, the configuring, and after a while, I even started shoving my email over there. Hey, I was 22–that was a big thing for me. Then later on came the first incarnation of the blog, and I actually got into a sort of semi-regular habbit of at least throwing, er, something up there. Even if it wasn’t overly entertaining–it was considered my very own answer to Blogger and LiveJournal. I’d throw something at it, and maybe it’d stick. Or maybe it’d be one of the myriad useless little quizzes I’d post out of boredom. That was what it was here for. Then I got serious about it.

I still didn’t do it with the expectation of milions of readers and thousands of comments–good thing, as I think I managed maybe half a dozen at one time, but I did it because it was there for something to do. 5 years later, I still post whatever comes to mind–or across my desk via RSS feeds. And I still do it for something to do. I’m not expecting 80 million readers, though when I write something that catches on I don’t exactly shake my head at it. I do it because. And hey, sometimes, I actually offer something up that other people don’t know. And sometimes, other people drop by and I learn a thing or two. Okay, so maybe that’s why I do it.

I keep trying to invent something inciteful/witty/whatever, but I got nothin’. Not a very impressive showing for 5 years. So instead, have 5 of my favourite posts from all 3 incarnations of the blog.

• You know you’re from Pembroke when…
• The best pitcher in baseball is perfect–just not in Toronto.
• Technical support rules, the dummy’s version.
• You know when you’re from ottawa when…
• This kid trumps any 2 of yours. And she’s not even related to me. (this post gets a follow-up later today or tomorrow.)

Share this:

It just randomly occured to me, as I was plowing through various things that have been piling up while life was busy throwing us curve balls, it’s been exactly, as in to the day, two weeks since I’ve actually posted anything up here. And probably longer than that since the anything had actual content. Oops. Publishing don’t number 1, and I did it. Oh well, you’ll have that. And the worst part of it is, the two weeks in question actually stood a chance at being somewhat exciting. If by exciting you mean a small rolercoaster of fun.

Where to start. Big news in the nowheresville household, we had our eye on a larger apartment and moving back to Ottawa. Well, back to Ottawa for me–Shane has never actually had the good fortune of living there, specificly. So we had the apartment lined up–the lady showing it to us had us sold within the first 10 minutes. We filled out the application. Then, we sat around here and waited. The application ended up not going through, which made things very interesting–note to readers, if you’re looking to make a major move like this and you’ve already gone ahead and set things in motion to have services moved/activated on your moving day, watch out for that quick 180. It’s real hard to hit the off switch when they come back and say you can’t actually have the apartment. Or maybe that’s just a Rogers thing–anything’s possible. We ran into that problem when the phone call came in that we didn’t actually land the apartment. We have a pretty good idea *why* we didn’t land the apartment, and while yeah it sucks, we know for next time. Too bad, too–it was a wicked awesome apartment.

Fortunately, since we look for bright sides on this here blog when we can, the apartment falling through means it doesn’t complicate our return from yet more planned events in the past two weeks. Shane had originally planned to drop in on his girlfriend at the beginning of February, but situations ended up coming up that sort of necessitated he be down there now. I’m still on schedule for bothering Jessica, who has actually managed to update her blog more than once this month, at the beginning of the month as initially planned. We were originally going to come back from our respective vacations on the second of March and promptly pack the place up for moving, but now we have a little bit of flexibility re: when we come back, just in case things decide that falling sideways while we’re down there is the order of the day. It also gives me a bit more time, if necessary, to help Jess with her own move at the end of February without having to worry about shooting back up here for mine. And, since I like not being attached to a deadline, I can presently put a questionmark on my return date–we shall have to see how things play out.

The fun doesn’t stop there, however. In list format, with explanatory posts to come when I have more brain power. Because presently, this caffeine thing isn’t working for me anymore.

• Life decides at the worst possible time to throw one hell of a curve ball. We got smacked with one this past weekend–and are still recovering. Which reminds me, I need to move a few more things over to the replacement external HD.
• Related: Hey Dell? You can ship Shane’s laptop any freaking time, now. Seriously.
• Those guys from Toronto actually one a game or two. That should be posted about before I forget. Again.
• Sadly, they also lost a shitload. That, I wish I could forget about posting about.

Related: Mixed in with the last couple weeks’ fun helping of funness were multiple large doses of snow. And yes, an extra side order of snow. I’m selling it for cheap. Want some? Please?

Now, let’s see how many of these hockey posts I can crank out before I go fall over. And later today, or tomorrow, a metric ton of mockery. No, I’m not kidding. I’m looking at two pages of blog material over here. And now I actually have time to post it. This might get very unpretty.

Share this:

I’ve been dabbling in the more involved server admin business for the past while. One of the things we’ve been experimenting with for the better part of a month is the firewall provided by ConfigServer. It’s halfway decent for what it does, as long as you’re not trying to do anything too involved–like, say, get certain functionality native to WordPress to actually, you know, work. Like, for example, trackback/pingback functionality. So, since we had absolutely nothing else planned whatsoever tonight–hi, oh my god cold, we figured we’d either fix CSF or break Shane‘s blog. Turns out we did neither.

According to ConfigServer’s software, which I have taken to not trusting after our most recent discovery, inbound trafic on all the ports we needed to be open was possible. As was outbound. Except for that tiny little part wherein it sort of wasn’t. That lead to some pretty interesting problems in the neighbourhood of him actually being able to receive trackbacks/pingbacks. Since blogging in general, and WordPress in particular, is primarily focused on the whole community/conversation element of it all, that posed a very small problem. We fiddled off and on with it for a few weeks, and eventually for reasons of trying to scrape together a few dollars, we decided to start the process of migrating him away from that server and to my arangement over here. After breaking things in that department in all kinds of new and interesting–not to mention very very creative–ways, we thought we’d play with seeing if that fixes the outstanding issue of tracking back. Hence, if you hadn’t figured it out, the test post from earlier. And wouldn’t you know, the damn thing up and proved us both idiots. First try, it did exactly what it was supposed to. The only *really* major difference? The server the problem blog’s on isn’t running ConfigServer’s firewall–and won’t be, if I can possibly get away with it. Aside from that? Same server configuration, more or less, with a few extra mostly irrelevant bells and whistles I don’t actually use but hey, they’re cool.

The moral of the storry: If you’re running ConfigServer’s firewall, look for alternatives. If you’re not, keep it that way. It’s bad for you. Stay very, very far away from that program–particularly if you, or anyone you’re hosting/maintaining the server for, plans on running a WordPress blog. They just do not like each other and I think the relationship’s pretty irreparable. Now, the search begins for alternatives.

Share this:

some of you may have been following the developing story about the Recording Industry Asociation of America (RIAA) trying to convince ISP’s to implement a sort of 3-strikes policy that would see people the RIAA believes were involved in downloading music kicked off the internet. They’ve been threatening that for two years or more, and at a few points, it looked like they might have had some pretty intense backing to implement it. Then the ISP’s chimed in. Suddenly, the RIAA found itself summarily flipped off.

It’s been a little over two years since the RIAA dropped its strategy of suing music fans for sharing files online — a strategy that was an unequivocal disaster for the record labels. Of course, when the news came out, the RIAA suggested that the reason they had done so was because of a backroom deal with various ISPs to implement three strikes plans. And yet, here we are, two years later with no major ISP having put in place such a policy. Greg Sandoval has been following this story closely, and his contacts at most of the major ISPs indicate no interest in putting in place such policies, and a widespread recognition that the ISPs have enough lobbying clout to push back on the RIAA if necessary.

And why would they? Nothing quite says screw the customer like kicking them offline because they may, or may not, have been involved in downloading music. Particularly when the may or may not relies almost entirely on whether or not the RIAA’s getting a little suspicious–which they’ve been doing way too often, and way too easy, lately. Don’t look now, RIAA folks. But I think you’ve just struck out.

Share this: