We’ve officially been on some kind of a postal strike or something on this side of the border now for over a week. The strikes have been rotating, and they’re talking about making it a full on national strike if their demands for $millions aren’t met. They’ve already reduced delivery to 3 days a week due to the lack of actual business brought on by the strike. This whole event’s got me wondering something though. Does anyone who’s been affected by the strike actually miss getting the mail? I don’t mean the 95% of the mail that usually only goes with you as far as file 13 anyway. Is there anything you receive, either regularly or occasionally, that this strike has made more difficult? How about those of you who haven’t yet had the pleasure? If your city/town was to suffer a postal strike tomorrow, would it actually affect you? I’ll follow up later with my answer to that question, but if you’re bored, feel free to slap yours in the comments. And give the folks over at Canada Post some free advice while you’re at it–I get the impression both sides could use it.

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What do you do when you have a website with a google page rank of 2, and an absolute wealth of complete mockery building up? Why, sit on it and don’t do a whole lot of anything with it, of course. Well, if you’re me, anyway. If you’re anyone else it probably equates to about a million posts per day–but then, anyone else wouldn’t have just gone through February either. The month was largely spent recovering and dealing with personal admin stuff. And yet, I still found things to post about. And mock. And folks still found things to read. Here’s what folks were interested in last month, as always, courtesy Google Analytics.

• Earth hour was kind of a mock waiting to happen. I’ve mocked it twice on this here blog, including this past hour–when I pointed out I wasn’t going to be the only one being oblivious to the hour. Somewhere in a cold, dark corner of Canada, some PC greenie just fainted.
• We have to go all the way back to the dust-covered archives for this one. A completely random quiz I did way back in 2006 somehow made the list last month. I don’t even wanna know what the hell kinda keywords brought this puppy back from the dead. Hi, nearly 5 years ago.
• From the mocked and mocked again department, not everyone takes rejection all that kindly. Some, like the 92-year-old mentioned in this entry, get downright violent about it. I wonder how she’s fairing with the whole jail thing.
• I actually managed to go a whole month or thereabouts without posting anything here. I dunno how, and I really can’t remember exactly all of why. But I did. My first post in about a month, complete with typoes, exists over here. What I didn’t tell you in that post was it was being done from the laptop–kinda like this one is now. Hence, the typoes while I was getting used to the keyboard on this thing. I still haven’t quite gotten that down yet–I’ve just been slightly better at the whole applying of the delete key thing.
• I’ve been somewhat unfairly riding Glen Beck the last couple entries. And I’m not done yet if the news I’ve been seeing is true. But, hey, his whackyness has landed him on the popular posts list for two months in a row–you can’t blame me for that, right? Once again, his being convince there’s a gigantic government conspiracy involving Google has managed to interest, and probably amuse, folks who’ve dropped by. Okay, I’ll admit it–I’m still mildly entertained by that idea as well. That’s why I mocked it.

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And there you have it. March, or most of it, in a nutshell. And an old post to spice things up. Just when I thought my having moved things around would break me in the search engines. Clearly, I was mistaken. Now, back to finding random bits of trivial to post. Happy lerking, or something like it.

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So as any of you who’ve been reading this thing since December are aware, it’s been somewhat of an uphill fight between the Ontario disability Support Program (ODSP), Shane, and myself. We’d go a round or two, find a clue, offer it up and have it escentially kicked across the room by someone in government who thinks they know better. We’d find more information, offer it up, complete with the math that lead us to the result you’d expect to see if you actually follow their own rules, and get summarily told we were using the wrong math. Lovely. Except in every which way that it’s not. And oh, let me count the ways. So the four of us–Shane and I, and our respective caseworkers–go several rounds about that over the course of the last month or so. And in the process of doing so, come up with the fact that not only were we using a completely different math system from what our caseworkers were, but apparently our caseworkers were using completely different systems from each other–thus resulting in completely different results being pried out of completely identical documentation. Yeah, I don’t get it either. That’s government for ya.

So we spend the better part of the last month trying to work around that, and hit one very problematic road block. Both caseworkers are clinging to privacy laws like they’re on life support. In spite of the fact half the time when we call, Shane and I are 3 feet away from each other and can get a good enough idea what the conversation’s going to end up revealing just based on one side of it. And picking up the phone and saying “by the way, you have my permission to access my case file and compare with his case”? Yeah, not good enough, apparently.

In her defense, Shane’s caseworker is at least in possession of a low-level clue. Enough of one that I don’t think her information’s the source of half our problems. Mine, on the other hand, could probably benefit from some retraining in a few key areas. In theory, I could probably have told Shane’s caseworker to go ahead and look up my file and she might have. Mine? Nope. Can’t. Privacy laws. Permission doesn’t matter. So, fast forward to Monday. Shane has to be in to see his caseworker anyway for an unrelated matter, so I bounce it off him and the wheels on the way back that we find a brand new way to tackle this small little tiny minor issue. Both caseworkers, both of us, one room, A S A fuckin’ P. So we make the call Monday afternoon. Shane’s worker, we’ll call her Clue, has absolutely no problem with it. Oh, you want a meeting? Awesome. James is coming too? Okay. He’s dragging his caseworker in as well? Hey, that works. 9:00 AM? Why not? My worker, on the other hand, we’ll call her Wingnut, takes a little more twisting, turning and kicking to get her into the same meeting. Oh, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make it. We can’t have a joint conference–the other party has to be perfectly fine with it. Oh, er, he is. Well. Um. I’ll have to check with his caseworker. Oh. You did. Well, er, let me see if I’m available. Oh, crap–entire morning’s free. 9:00 AM, you say. Can I ppossibly get away with calling in sick? (Note: she didn’t actually say that last part, but you know she thought it.) Fine, fine. But I probably won’t change anything anyway.

After she ran out of excuses, we finally dragged Wingnut into the meeting schedule with the three of us. This coming Monday, sharp at 9 barring natural disasters, I have a sneaking suspicion somebody’s going to get an education in just what the hell their job involves–a little hint for those of you keeping score, it doesn’t actually involve trying your hardest to pull a fast one. So bright and early Monday, me, Shane, Clue, Wingnut, a pair of eyes of our choosing, and a small mountain of already submitted documentation will all pile into a conference room down at the place what employs ODSP peoples. A well-timed phone call could, if the need should present itself, also see she whom Wingnut and Clue report to showing up for that very same meeting.

It’s one thing for us to end up getting different results from the government. That’s kind of expected–if they can find some way to sneak it in that you don’t actually get your hands on everything you should, they’ll do so. If you don’t expect it, well, sorry. But when two government employees, handling two different case files, get slapped with the exact same supporting documentation for both case files and come up with completely different results, even from one another, Houston, we has a problem. When we can take a look at the inner math supposedly behind both cases, even after having said inner math explained to us, and still end up being sent for a loop thanks largely to the fact the results don’t even look like they *should* be close, yeah, say hello to the red flag, ladies and thinggies. Somebody’s not giving us the goods, and I have a sneaking suspicion it’s not Clue. I have an equally deep suspicion the problem will be solved, or unemployed, before this issue’s fully delt with. I hate being screwed with.

Oh, and miss permission doesn’t bypass privacy laws? Turns out that only applies if you’re not Wingnut, apparently. According to her, she and Clue had a conference re: this issue in which both our cases were discussed. Neither Shane nor I were informed of such a conference, as we would have needed to be in order to be fully in compliance with privacy laws. Clue, naturally, didn’t exactly confirm they held a conference re: our respective cases, so once again, somebody’s either lying or violating those same privacy laws she has no problem slapping us in the face with. That gets added to the list of, shall we say, topics on the agenda for Monday’s meeting. This, combined with the few months of back and forth that haven’t really gotten us anywhere, combined with the fact 90% of this issue could have probably been cleaned up if they’d either 1: actually compared notes or 2: applied just a little bit of consistency to their own procedures, is going to make for a quite interesting morning. I have a sneaking suspicion one of us is going to come away bloody. And I’ll be quite damned if it’s gonna be me.

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We’ve recently been breaking things to the nth degree. To the point of we’re still not entirely sure what’s broken. This is just one of those things we test occasionally to make sure it’s not broken. That, plus one of our abilities to outbound trackback appear to be shot. Is it mine, or Shane’s? Let’s see.

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Fans of the previously mentioned Delicious website may be entitled to a tiny little bit of cellebratory partying. According to clarifications that floated across my desk today, they’re possibly not, in fact, shutting down. Updates directly from Yahoo!, courtesy Shane’s blog, indicate they may be selling off the service instead. No word whatsoever on Yahoo’s other services that are scheduled for potential shutdown. If you’re not sure what to do after the site finds itself on the auction block, or otherwise not the delicious website it is now, try this list of alternatives, complete with yet another link to yet another list of alternatives should that one not do it for you. In the meantime, whatever happens with the site itself, at least you won’t be left completely screwed. We hope. Find a suggestion not on the previously linked list and want it promoted? Let me know, and I’ll see what I can do.

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Every so often, I’ll consider finding some new and creative way to install Gentoo, my Linux distribution of choice. And sometimes, I’ll do it in such a way that it actually doesn’t blow up in my face. I’ve been trying to convince Shane to give it a try, but he hasn’t got an extra machine he can clean out and turn into a test platform. What he did have, though, was an instalation of VMWare and lots of free time on his hands. So it was high past time to shove an OS inside an OS.

The actual instalation process, for the most part, wasn’t a whole lot different from the steps I followed to install it on the laptop. But there were a few subtle differences in what was required. And naturally, they were just tricky enough that the easiest way to implement those differences was to blow the instalation away and start over. So we did, probably two or three times. On the third try, we managed to actually get the thing mostly up and running. By this point, we were very nearly on easy street. So I decided to do the exact same thing locally.

My install required a little bit more creativity, mostly because I was also using it as an excuse at guessing which VM settings would play a little bit nicer with our instalations. I got mine up and running on the fourth try, or thereabouts, and threw the modified settings at the first attempt at a Gentoo install. Now, with both machines up and running and not threatening to explode, we could play.

Shane’s heavily into the whole beta testing thing, so we went on a dependancy hunt to trick out his install with the requirements for at least one game he’s been testing. Then, we threw Gnome at it, and while that took its time installing, we threw a small party. The new and exciting part of all this was over by now–virtual Gentoo plays just as nicely as nonvirtual Gentoo, post-install. So now comes breakage.

I had no idea exactly how hard Gentoo, even in a VM, was to break. Or how easy it was to fix when it did. We’d try this or that nifty little trick, compile something, and watch it fall over. And in about 10 minutes at best, we had the why, the when, the how, and a fix was on its way down. The two things we didn’t intentionally break are apparently fairly common, or at least, simplistic issues–apparently, kernel 2.6.36 is still way, way too knew. As in things that depend on the kernel sources being installed–hello, NVidia drivers–fail quite fantastically at the compile stage. Same with the latest current stable version of Speakup, which escentially meant if we wanted the instalation to talk at us, we weren’t about to be using that kernel version. There’s apparently such thing as *too* bleeding edge. Who knew?

Another potentially kernel-related almost failure isn’t actually what I’d call breakage, but it is kind of annoying–and equally not either of our falt, lucky for us. This is the more common/known/widely experienced issue–when you run certain commands from the console or a remote session, it throws an “Unknown HZ Value!” error. It doesn’t actually break, and I’m assuming the results you get from that command are what you’d expect to get, but the error, or notice if you’d rather, regularly makes an appearance. We traced the problem to Procps, a utility package that contains several system monitoring programs among other things. I was about ready to report it, then saw it was already taken care of–hence the more widely experienced/common-ness of this annoyance. This is not something I’ll be fixing any time soon, but the activity so far as this bug report shows indicates people far more experienced than me with Gentoo, kernel tweeking and all the fun crap that goes with have it well in hand. Or at least are faking it very well. So now, we just sit back and see what else decides to implode.

The install actually went a little easier than I was hoping, if only because hey, I needed an excuse to break things on a more permanent basis. But, oh well. The OS works, on both machines, and any lingering loose ends we can safely reject any and all responsibility for. For my next trick, I’d like to see if I can install MacOS on the VM. I’d be interested in seeing how badly that breaks. In the meantime, time to go play fix the video card. Thank god for caffeine.

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Drop the puck, and the gloves. Better than the world series–and only because Toronto hasn’t been there since 93, it’s all about that other major sport they do down there. Yeah, that one. If you’re a CBC fan, it’s about to be taken over by Toronto versus Montreal for the hundred thousandth time since the dawn of HNIC. If we do better than last year, I’ll be extatic. If we make the playoffs, I’ll be through the roof. If we make it to the finals, I’ll be just about in orbit. And if I can remember the number to my pizza joint of choice, I’ll be satisfied–at least for tonight. Hockey is here, folks. And I’ll be putting my team’s entries over here for the curious–it even has its own RSS feed. Now this is how a Canadian winter should be spent. To get you in the mood, have a video, courtesy Toronto’s last preseason game. We’ll call it practice for Montreal tonight.

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