This is what happens when life takes off at full speed. The blog tends to sit over here and do several different kinds of collecting dust. Newyears resolution: correct this malfunction, immediately. Thinga have been happening in wicked fast pace here, which naturally means I haven’t actually been even keeping up on the whole hockey thing–thanks, Shane, for at least filling me in on *most* of what I missed. Now things can calm down just in time for my team to inevitably fall apart.

The holidays are insane on a good day, which accounts for most of my time spent doing things not related to blogging. What accounts for the rest? A mutual friend of both Shane and myself came down with some pretty nifty little medical issues–some of which, some of you are already familiar with. That’s required we be a lot more not near electronics than usual around here while those get fixed and otherwise taken care of. Thankfully, she’s kind of on her way towards recovery now, which means–you guessed it–back to business as usual around here.

It’s been pretty low key on the familial front. Mother’s still working too much, dad’s still working too much, brother’s still–well, okay, nothing he does is low key but there’s not enough room in this entry for that. Oh, and–surprise of surprises–I’m single again. The reasons behind it aren’t worth going into detail publicly–again, some of you already know and the rest, well, probably have theories. But suffice it to say I kind of saw it coming. For those of you who read Jessica’s blog when she posts to it, it’ll be up again just as soon as she figures out what she’s doing with it–and if it’s actually going to get any kind of continued use. Outside of that, it’s been a pretty routine month and a bit–where routine equals anything but. but now, there’s time. And where there’s time, there’s all kinds of random. New year, which means new posting habbits, new mockery, and a new year end show to be kicked off at 9:00 tonight on Mojo Radio. Drop in, say hello, and have a listen (links are over here), while we do 2011 right–and get trashed. Look for more blog content from this corner–including my 2011 review, starting… well… later tonight or early tomorrow. Maybe. But it’s coming. In the meantime, we now return you to whatever you were doing before I distracted you.

This probably only applies to those Canadians who read this thing. For everyone else, there’s google–or just ask a Canadian.

Remember all those jokes–half of them probably not quite joking–about the way folks over in that other province not far from here like to drive? And by drive, I mean everyone else insane? I used to think those jokes were largely, well, just jokes. Yes, even having been to and through Quebec on more than one occasion. And then, I saw this.

Ontario Provincial Police say the foursome was spotted by officers on foot patrol at around 3 p.m. on Friday along the main stretch of Lake Huron’s Wasaga
Beach, about 130 kilometres north of Toronto.

Officers say the group was observed smoking marijuana on the beach; a subsequent search uncovered more of the drug, police alleged on Sunday.

The four people, all from Quebec, were charged with possession of a controlled substance and later released from custody pending an appearance in a Collingwood,
Ont., court.

Huronia West OPP said the group’s rough weekend didn’t end there.

A highway patrol officer stopped a vehicle leaving the area while travelling 104 kilometres an hour in a posted 50 km/h zone.

Provincial police impounded the vehicle for seven days and charged the driver with stunt driving.

I have at least one Royal Canadian Air Farse skit rolling around the back of my head right now. If I can find it, it will be added to this post. For right now, though, I got nothin’. Only in Quebec.

I want to start this entry off with a comment like “Only in America.” or something to that affect, but I don’t even know anymore. Still, this one’s from California, so do with it what you will. A Glendale man decided, rather than wait for a date with the nearest hospital to have a hernia taken care of, he’d do it himself–with a butter knife. Haven’t heard anything new on this since that particular story came out, but he was placed on psychiatric hold for 72 hours and promptly taken exactly where he should have been. No idea whatsoever why he decided to take the do it yourself route, but I guess being a little messed in the head’s a good enough reason about it. When they say don’t try this at home, though, I’m fairly sure they mean stuff kind of exactly like this. But, as they say in my favourite book series, it takes all kinds. This kind should just be kept far, far away from sharp objects.

I am now convinced the job market’s just playing games with me. I found a job earlier this afternoon that fit my very loose requirements nearly exactly. I could do it pretty well in my sleep, it didn’t require I already be as fluent in French as I am in English, it didn’t require a college degree, and it didn’t require 80 years’ experience. Yeah, you could probably guess I was on it like a heat seakin’ missile. Fired that application off in 5 minutes or less, and had to stop myself from grinning like an idiot in spite of the fact the only other person in here with me couldn’t see it anyway. Yeah, enthused would probably be an understatement. It didn’t pay much, but at this point, I’d flip burgers if I felt reasonably confident the act of doing so wouldn’t put half of them at least on the bloody floor. So I did the thing with the thing, sent it in, then sat back with full expectation that I’d not get much back but a form letter. Well, I got the form letter. Then maybe half an hour later, I got an actual, living, breathing human being. Or at least something that pretended to be one. Hot damn, I thought. Application’s not even an hour old yet and the folks over there are bouncing things off me. So yeah, I’m all over the email. It’s a skills assessment they want me to fill out. Wicked nifty cool. This usually takes folks a week or so to get around to sending me. And that’s if they’re going to send the thing at all. Progress indeed, right? Hell, I thought so. I wasn’t sure if I’d had the battery left on this laptop to do it right then, and me not being at home until much later than, well, now, I wouldn’t be able to just randomly switch machines. So I let the battery get pretty much dead on this thing, which subsequently takes out the battery in the phone shortly afterwards–at the moment, it’s my connection to the internet. So I get both plugged in and charging, and now have all the time in the world to do this assessment. Awesome. I pull up their page type thing, go through their “this is who I am, this is why I’m here” screen, hit start test… and get dumped into an inaccessible flash object of absolutely no real use whatsoever. Well. That was highly anticlimactic, not to mention generally not recommended. Mister quick responder got a very polite, “Hey uh, thanks for this, but she no worky with my stuff” type email from me. That he’s not as of yet been as quick to respond to, but you’ll have that. So now, the job market makes me wait, again. In the meantime, anyone have use for a slightly out of practice geek? Will work for coffee.

Just when you get to thinking maybe, just maybe, things in the cell phone market can’t reach a higher level of ridiculous, some corporate yuck’s gotta walk in and set you straight. In this case, Verizon’s more than happy to do that to me. A lady saw a miscellanious $4.19 charge for, apparently, local calls. When she called to have it explained, she was escentially told to get a lawyer and suppoena. She did one better and went solo to a judge, who escentially slappd Verizon with an order to turn over a complete and itemized bill. Oh yeah, and recommended Verizon be fined about $1000 for escentially being a collective bunch of idiots. And customers of theirs wonder why it is my default response when they tell me is I’m sorry. Wonder no more–just please for the love of anything holy, get a real carrier if such an annimal exists.

Generally speaking, I don’t buy my equipment from your typical big box store if it can be helped just on basic principle, and because you don’t have as much flexibility when doing that. But I’ve been known to on occasion. This might just change my mind. Staples has been slapped by Canada’s privacy watchdog after not completely whiping computer and external hard drives of personal data before reselling them. This leads to such wonders as having folks’ social insurance numbers, banking info, tax crap still stored on the drive when it goes out the door. Now, somebody’s gonna apply the common sense argument of “What the hell is your social insurance number doing on your external hard drive anyway?”. Good question. But regardless to what it’s doing there, or what else didn’t get removed from the drive before Staples resold it, somebody’s not doing it right. I guess I know where I’m not getting my next drive from. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go format one of mine–just in case I want to sell it.

When moving something like a WordPress blog from a server run by crooks to a server run by yourself, who is at least twice as cool, it helps to not be a moron and actually remember to move over your geekily hacked together .htaccess file along with it. Unless, that is, you want all your hard work to fall very |flat all over the bloody floor. Kinda like it just did. Oops. Sorry if you were actually trying to read anything on the site–I’ve fixed my broken, now.

You are a manufacturer of computers. Most if not all of those computers will be running Microsoft software. Yes, up to and including Internet Explorer. There are techy type folks who still use Internet Explorer–mostly because what they do doesn’t yet fully support those other browsers (damn you, industry standards). You need techy type people. Or, at least, the job advertisement that just bounced off my head says you do. The application is straightforward enough–pretty basic, for a tech company. Supporting Windows and Internet Explorer and other such M$ software is pretty much a requirement of the position. I got that in about 10 seconds. So when your application does some kind of funkyness I don’t have time to figure out that makes IE choke on it? Yeah, I get concerned. I should not have had to demonstrate my ability to stop the broken pre-hiring–particularly in a forum you wouldn’t have been able to actually see until I smacked submit. Good job. I promise, if you hire me, I’ll fix you. But you’re providing the vodka.

No love,
The techy who just had to finish your application in Firefox.

Remember this guy? Yeah, that one. US Congressman Anthony Weiner (I can’t even type that with a straight face). After being caught showing his off on Twitter, he’s been under some pressure to get help, probably resulting in some kind of medication, and give up his position–something he’s not overly inclined to do, really. I should probably leave this well enough alone, really–I mean, the guy’s already been horribly mocked, and that’s just on the blogs I follow. Well enough should be left alone, right? Except, er, um, wrong.

New lewd photos emerged of U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner on Sunday as Democratic party leaders renewed calls for him to resign over an Internet sex scandal that prompted him to seek a leave and treatment.

Bring on the next round of Weiner jokes. No, seriously. Now, it’s open season.

Edit: I fail at HTML. But what else is new?

I’ve been making a fair few changes to things on this end lately. Mostly changes aimed at preventing things from falling flat on their faces. For the past few days, though, it’s been looking mostly like things were falling all over the place anyway. It started with my finally ditching Feedburner, while at the same time playing with the latest new addition to this blog’s feature set–you’ll find it at the end of this post. Multiple issues decided it’d be fun to crop up right around then. This blog’s RSS feeds, temporarily, did the awesomest impression of a corpse, with a path that used to be acceptable to get to the feeds in question deciding to pick around then to, well, fall flat on its face. Or so I thought. On top of that, the server was quite running away with memory usage around the same time–to the tune of over 2 gigs of reserved memory last night, for what should be at most maybe 3 quarters of a gig at peek times. Nifty. Except not. I managed to track down the memory leak to my first attempt at introducing the feature you’ll find at the end of this post, after a couple days of troubleshooting. It’s since been shot in the face. But the other issue? That was the fun one. And by fun, I mean so stupidly simple I could only have figured it out after a couple beers. Fortunately, I’d had 5 tonight so was in good shape. The RSS feeds, as it turned out, weren’t quite as broken as I’d thought. WordPress just temporarily decided to forget what it was supposed to do with them. A stupid setting on the admin side of the software developed temporary amnesia and needed to be reminded how things were supposed to look. And then reminded again, because it didn’t save the first time. Thanks, WordPress. No, really. Thanks. My technology has been conspiring to sych me out. And it damn near worked. Now, to go attempt this whole sleep thing, then try and figure out what the hell caused *this* spike in memory usage. More mockery tomorrow–I’ve built up quite a bit since things started conspiring. You’ll get to read it when I’m not halfway to Zombie City. Well, okay, if I remember.

Disclaimer: If you’re not of a technical mind, or things like hard drive failures make you run screaming in the other direction, you may want to skip this post. Just a friendly warning from your neighbourhood undercaffinated geek. Particularly when the fake ones in question leave not just you, but your equally technically inclined roommate, staring at the computer as though it’s just sprouted its very own artificial-ish inteligence.

Take this weekend, for instance. I’m minding my own on a Friday evening, trying to invent the best and least hair-pulling way to introduce updates by email–and comments, by the way, not just replies–to the blog, when the desktop decides to throw not one, or two, or three, but nearly a dozen warning and critical error messages at my face. Everything from hard drive failures to RAM usage being critically high, to flat out memory failures. Now, keep in mind, this machine’s nearly 4 years old and just had its wireless card replaced–twice, mind you, so one or two failures of that nature wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility. So I’m going through the usual diagnostic steps, doing what you do when you’re under the distinct impression your primary machine’s about 30 seconds from going flatline and you’ve got absolutely no spare parts kicking around, when this innocent enough looking “Windows XP Recovery” window crops up. It helpfully informs me that Windows is suffering damage possibly related to bad sectors on the drive. This along side yet another of those dialogue boxes cropping up informing me one or more IDE/SATA drives are about ready to self-shoot.

By this point, I’m more than a little WTF-ing. I *just* meaning less than a week ago, had a Dell tech out this way to replace the network card. Was I *really* going to have to have another one out to replace at least one failing drive and lord only knows what else? Not to mention the roommate just 48 hours prior to that got the pleasure of dealing with his very own failing hard drive and the replacement of same–in fact for much of Friday evening, while I was diagnosing, the running joke was that apparently hard drive failures had now become as airborn as your common virus. But I got curious. The only Windows XP recovery utilities, particularly utilities that bare that name, are usually found on the XP CD–and certainly don’t randomly show up when Windows is loaded, though sometimes I think that might be helpful. Enter that tiny little alarm going quietly off in the back of my head while I go hunting for my usual fix me tools.

I keep 3 tools one hand for incidents kinda like this one–one spyware scanner, one virus scanner, one nuke ‘em all tool. Because I was testing a theory, and if I was right it would at least manage to nail most of it, I loaded–and fired–the nuke ‘em all tool first. Sure enough, within about 2 minutes of the utility running, Windows XP Recovery took a hike. And so did its small army of warnings and alerts and whatever else managed to show up. Yay! I’m free! Except not quite. I nuked the majority of the infection, and probably caught the source, but there was still damage. Have my desktop was toast, and I’m pretty sure I was missing things out of my start menu on top of that. Nice. Wonderful. Nifty. Easily fixed.

I ran my other two tools, which took a little longer than I’d of liked to finish–but they finished and nothing broke, so I’m happy, and removed what I think might have been the last remains of the thing. Easily delt with by a simple reboot. Now, there was just the issue of half my desktop and probably some of my start menu going completely snap all over the floor. Because I was sick and tired of fighting with it, a system restore took care of that–and then some. Yay, again. I took care of what I thought needed taking care of manually, then went on the hunt for info.

Apparently, the infection I just went around with is new. Extremely new. As in I’ve seen postings as early as May 13th, but no older so far. To the tune of every forum, blog, website etc I know to check has something on it. And still, it managed to sneak by my usually pretty solid defenses.

All told, I’d way rather have just had an actual hardware failure. Or several, to be completely honest. The fake ones were a bitch to knock out. Now, to find where I hid my emergency back-up material–just in case.

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.

You’ll remember I made mention to the fact my caseworker, who we’re still calling Wingnut, has been sort of using privacy laws as a protective shield. To the point of even if the roommate was in the room and could give permission, she wasn’t interested. I get a call from her this morning, and suddenly, she thinks she knows where the inconsistency I’m seeing might be coming from. She supposedly has the numbers right in front of her, has both my and Shane’s case file in front of her, and would be open to discussing things with us. Keep in mind, in 4 days, whether she wants to or not, we’ll be discussing it with her in person. And Shane’s caseworker–which is probably what she’s trying to avoid. She called today, she says, with the intention of saving us a trip into town. Pity the poor girl for at least coming up with a convenient excuse–or, would that be a convenience excuse. Unfortunately, we’ve already got other things bringing us into Pembroke anyway, kind of haphazardly scheduled around the fact we were going to start our day there. So she was informed, pretty much, we’ll see you Monday. Good try though, Wingnut. Now if only you’d just tried that a month ago.

Helen Staudinger clearly thought she wasn’t too old to have a little fun at the age of 92. The only problem? The intended object of her desire to have a little fun didn’t share that notion. After 53-year-old Dwight bettner refused to kiss her, which she’d apparently wanted him to do for a while, she left his house, went back home, and loaded her gun. A few bullets later, and poor, rejected Helen gets to spend time in jail. she only wanted a kiss. Now, she gets to play with handcuffs. Hell of a step forward.

The following things should, in fact, be restricted from both myself and Shane for the safety of the general public.

• Any kind of network access whatsoever
• Most forms of access to the internet, or at least the less legal portions of the internet
• Any and all versions, local or otherwise, of dropbox–this includes, but is not limited to, the Dropbox website

The reasoning behind it? Uh. We’ve just managed to find a very interesting and quite creative way of putting any and all of the above to our advantage–in quite possibly the most dangerously lethal way possible. Also known as the absolute quickest way of getting material sent to multiple directions without causing mass amounts of headaches. Clearly, we absolutely must be stopped. For our own good.

PS: Sorry, Jessica. We’ve made your computer a casualty tonight. See? Told you it was dangerous.

Oh, those whacky Italian politicians. Always getting caught in all those compromising positions. And never actually willingly being party to it. Take Italian politician Simeone Di Cagno Abbrescia, who just so happened to be using his iPad to review his material for the day, and these pictures of scantily clad women from a local escort service with some pretty otherworldly prices just, well, randomly appeared.

The Telegraph reports that Abbrescia didn’t deny the images on his iPad were, indeed, images of ladies who were scantily clad. The paper also reports that he didn’t deny that the ladies who were scantily clad were scantily clad on an escort site. Indeed, the magazine Oggi helpfully identified two of the ladies as Dollyy [sic] and Daisy, and mentioned consultation fees of 400 euros per hour, or the bargain price of 2,500 euros for a weekend.

Abbrescia, however, would like people to understand that he in no way premeditated his viewing of Daisy, or for that matter, of Dollyy. He reportedly said he simply had difficulty getting used to his iPad.

The Telegraph quoted Abbrescia as he outlined some of the horns of his dilemma:

“Normally I use my iPad to keep myself informed and to read the news agencies,” Abbrescia said. “But one can end up lingering over these sorts of, let’s say, pornographic images, which once in a while appear. It was just curiosity, I’ve never used the services of escort girls.”

Yep. Poor politician caught in compromising position. And all because of wicked evil technology making these, let’s say, pornographic images once in a while appear. I tell ya, that Steve Jobs is one evil bastard making these things do all that. It wouldn’t have anything to do with him possibly taking a queue or two from his party leader, now. Nope. It’s all the iPad’s fault. They’ve got minds of their own. Yeah, just stick with that line, Simeone. That’ll help ya.

It’s been proven, over and over again, that there’s absolutely no such thing as a smart criminal. Most if not all of them leave a little something behind, some folks call a calling card–it’s a way investigators can trace the crime back to the one committing it. There’s only one thing investigators like better than a calling card–your cell phone. And, as Cody Wilkins learned real fast, they like that a lot.

A major snow storm had gone through Silver Spring, leaving much of the area without power, two days before he thought it’d be fun to go get himself some free stuff. So he had a dual purpose for breaking into one gentleman’s home–the obtaining of free stuff, and to juice up his phone. He figured he’d have time to grab it on the way out, after he’d loaded up on what he came for. So he plugged it in, and went about his business. The owner’s son came home unexpectedly, cutting his not very well planned routine just a touch short. Wilkins promptly took off for home and, unfortunately for him, neglected to stop long enough to collect his phone, which was still happily charging when police showed up. They picked a random number, and happened to get hold of his girlfriend, who gave them Wilkins’s name. They showed up at his house to personally tell him he left his phone, and invite him to jail to talk about it. He’s now up on 10 other burglery charges besides that one. But his phone’s charged.

According to information recently released, Canada’s politicians spent over $600000 on booze over the last 4 years. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so, most of the booze money went to our very own department of national defense. Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen. I dunno about you, but I feel a lot safer with this knowledge. No really. Okay, no, not really. Defense folks? They have meetings for that.

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.

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.

The big thing that seems to be the default reaction if you live in Ottawa and don’t know something is to call 211. That also seems to be the default response if, as people have a tendancy to do in Ottawa, you simply want someone to bitch to because x isn’t happening the way you’d like it to. Glorious. Unless you were the poor bastard who got slapped with having to take the call. Suddenly, you were doing everything from listening to locals cry because OC Transpo was 10 minutes late to playing city phone book while listening to the locals cry because OC Transpo was 10 minutes late. And my guess is it doesn’t pay very well. And now, they’ve expanded to the valley. Pembroke. And Renfrew. And those little hicktowns in between. All getting a free call and bitch line. I can only imagine. No, wait–I really don’t want to. I do, however, feel even more sorry for the poor bastards taking the calls. Hope they have a love for long conversations–it’s a local rule a phone conversation can’t be less than half an hour. In 4 words, lots of coffee. Now.

Carin over at the Vomit Comet already laid good into Canada Post for this one, but since I’m procrastinating with this whole packing thing anyway and a little backup never hurt anyone, they get a friendly little reminder from me.

In December, I decided I had 30 seconds between the other 80 million things I was trying to get done that last week or two before Christmas to actually fire off some cards to family and a couple friends. You’d think an effort that’d take a grand total of 30 seconds, right? Last year, yes. The year before, definitely. This year? Yeah, no. What should have taken 30 seconds instead turned into a moment of temporary oh shit.

As part of their move to supposedly “improve the customer service experience”, Canada post had at some point late last year decided it might be fun to go all touchscreen, all the time. Their reason for doing so? It’s a requirement to deal with the new chip-equipped debbit cards. Much like Carin in her experience, postal chick and I went a round or two over that one. Not only could they have easily gone with another, more accessible model, but–in my case in particular–the unit I was staring at was stuck to the counter, which was roughly chest height for me (I’m 5’11 or so). Which meant, in simple terms, not only could the blind/low vision not do anything whatsoever with it, but lord help anyone who came rolling on up in a wheelchair. I’d of loved to see just how the local post office was going to handle that one. They weren’t doing a whole lot to handle this one, in any event.

Lucky for me, as you quite literally can’t get to 90% of what’s available in this town without wheels, I just so happened to have a pair of eyes handy. Equally lucky for me, they’re eyes I actually don’t mind knowing my PIN–hey, sometimes stuff has to get done and I’m busy. But I’d of been in much the same boat Carin was otherwise. And the explanation of such to the postal employee? Prompted the much anticipated and not at all favourable–for her–standard responses of, “You’ll just have to make sure you bring someone with you, I guess.”, and, “Well, there’s an ATM not far from here. We still accept cash.”.

As if she didn’t probably already figure she maybe shouldn’t have said that–I probably should give her a tiny benefit of doubt, here–she got a good dose of education from both myself, and my wheels. There was no actual reply, and we went on business as usual.

On my return home, I’d put together a little something and sent it via Canada Post’s less than well-organized website into, what I’m going to guess, is their customer feedback black hole. As of yet I haven’t heard or seen anything resembling a response, and when the roommate and I went to fill out a money order for the apartment that wasn’t (more on that in another entry, if I remember), things hadn’t changed. Of course, anyone who’s done this dance knows exactly what comes next–a longer letter. Which will more than likely get dropped on someone once I touch down in Rochester. And hey, this time, I’ll have a month to go find regulations with which to beat postal people around a bit. One would suspect I had too much fun doing this. And yeah, they’d be right.

The moral of the story? for the love of cheese, get with the accessibility program already. You’re a federal agency, bound by federal laws. This includes federal accessibility laws–which, I’ll admit, the actual government’s having a hell of a time following but that issue’s already been beaten to death on every blog but this one. Get your shit in order. Or, hell, better yet, hire me and Carin–we’ll do it for you. I expect this from the private sector–rant on that coming probably when I hit Rochester. After all, they don’t make much money off us blind folks. But really? Canada Post? They don’t make much money, period. Let’s half some equal playing field up in here, and maybe they’ll make a little more. In the meantimie, where’d I put my regulations?

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.

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.

From the department of IT Security 101, courtesy the Peterborough Catholic district School Board, comes this real life lesson of what happens when you don’t tripple check your security. you end up hacked by one of your own students.

John Mackle, education director at the Peterborough Victoria Northumberland and Clarington Catholic District School Board, said the Grade 8 pupil at St. Anne’s School in Peterborough’s north end found his way — via his laptop, a piece of downloaded software and the board’s internal network — into a board file server containing provincewide test results.

“To be honest, I don’t know that he would have understood what he was seeing,” Mackle said.

“The information that he was able to see wouldn’t have made a lot of sense to him.”

Mackle said the incident occurred when the server in question, which isn’t located at the school, was turned back on after undergoing a service upgrade.

“We normally have two levels of security,” Mackle said. “In this case, level 1 was turned back on, but level 2 was not. This allowed the boy to gain access.”

Security for all servers has been upgraded in the wake of the incident, he added.

By “upgraded”, does he mean “reenabled”? And, really, just what kind of security do they over at the Peterborough school board consider to be level 1? Inquiring minds want to know. If the system was secured, the kid shouldn’t have been able to access it. On second thought, I’ve come to understand the school board’s definition of secured and the rest of the world’s definition are usually two pretty different things. If given enough time to work at it, most school board security systems–at least up here–could probably be compromised with a minimal amount of effort, if someone with a problem with that school or the board really wanted to.

Let this be a lesson for aspiring IT people. Secure your shit. Twice. And for the love of chese, if you’ve got a system installed, tripple check that it comes up when the server you’re trying to protect does. I should not have to point that out.