After sitting down to watch the Montreal toronto game last Saturday, I was rendered completely speechless for pretty much the entire week. Hence, no posts up here. You know it’s bad when we can’t even win properly to help ourselves. But we had a wicked as hell chance to screw someone out of a shot at the second season. Not just anyone, either, but a team we hate only slightly more than those goddamn Senators. Montreal only needed a single point to get into the playoffs. One. single. point. All we had to do was not fall completely apart in regulation and they’d be golfing on the course right behind us. We didn’t even manage to do that. Okay, so we still won, even if it was in OT, someone will likely argue. And they’re right. It just would have been nice if I didn’t for the next week or so at least have to hear about it every time Montreal pulls off a playoff win. It’s already bad enough we have to hear about Ottawa. Oh wel. As we in Leafs nation always say, there’s always next year.
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Maple Leafs 4, Canadians 3–yes, I know, better late than never.
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My latest interest: Ghost Whisperer.
And it’s entirely my mother’s fault, too. She usually has it on in the background while I’m over there. From the IMDB info on it:
A newlywed with the ability to communicate with the earthbound spirits of the recently deceased overcomes skepticism and doubt to help send their important messages to the living and allow the dead to pass on to the other side.
That’s the basic rundown of how it proceeds. Episodes tend to touch on all kinds of situations–I’m pretty sure the main character’s helped in solving a murder or two. She was watching one yesterday wherein a victim of a kidnapper, now dead of course, pretty much helped the main character to stop that same guy from potentially killing his next victim. All of this while trying to help both dead and living come to terms with the fact they’re no longer among the living. Plots are fairly interesting, and at the very least it’ll be a distraction from my multiple episodes of CSI, SVU, Star Trek, and whatever else.
I think I’ll attempt a conversion of Jessica to watching this show while I’m at it. It’d probably be right up her alley anyway, what with the spiritual crap that gets tossed in there and all that wonderful goodness. And, hey, there’s the added bonus of the snark factor. No show can go wrong with that. So, yes. It’s officially made the pirated list. torrents are free, and free is good. Besides, I have the room. Why not?
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The newspaper called it. Social assistance programs definitely aren’t being fixed.
The Star provides a rather interesting take on why it is the province of Ontario, and indeed many other governments both in and out of Canada, are usually pretty hesitant to fix systems like welfare, or the only slightly less crippling disability support system. In a nutshell, the province views it as a case for less eligibility. If you’re not working for at least the minimum necessary to live, the article argues, you’re not entitled to at least the minimum to live. This according to the province’s mentality, anyway. Which is a rather interesting notion, when you consider many of these entities now are, supposedly, in place to help people who otherwise can’t meet those minimum standards. Minimum standards that, as one Toronto counsellor’s finding out for himself, aren’t really doing a whole lot of being met.
Toronto Councillor Joe Mihevc’s 11-year-old daughter Catherine looks at her family’s food bank ration of tinned salmon, dried chick peas and peanut butter and wonders what her friends will think when they come to her house for lunch this week.
That was one of the first reactions of 10 prominent Torontonians at the Stop Community Food Centre yesterday, as they embarked on a week of living on what thousands of people on social assistance regularly pick up from local food banks.
That’s not far from the truth. And, on the $572 welfare recipients get–again, this according to the very same “do the math” campaign, food banks are probably going to be a frequent stopping point for a hell of a lot of people. Particularly those who’d rather a roof over their head when they do grab something to eat. And, keep in mind, the $572 is just for a single person. Living in Pembroke, nevermind Toronto, I couldn’t manage to pull off being self-sufficient on that. I can barely manage that on ODSP–hence my two, and soon to be three, letters to the government on the subject.
On ODSP, a single person is entitled to only $460 more than someone on welfare. Which escentially means I can aford to live in subsidised housing and maybe buy escential groceries. It also means, even though I’m not currently in subsidised housing, I won’t flatline financially. It’ll be extremely close on a lot of days, but that’s about it. A welfare recipient, however? It’s either subsidised or nothing for them. There aren’t very many small apartments, particularly in Toronto, for less than $500 a month. If there are, they probably don’t come with anything included, thus negating total expenses still being less than $500 per month. Which doesn’t leave a whole lot of getting by money for pretty much anything else. And that’s the system the province, according to the Star, isn’t very likely to fix any time soon. Unless a whole freaking lot of us find ourselves some blunt objects and a local MPP.
H/T to Zoom, who pointed this campaign out back in February. The fact there’s interest out there from people who aren’t currently benefitting from the system might just go a ways towards helping. Or, at least, it can’t hurt. Now, about those local MPP’s.
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Rangers 5, Maple Leafs 1.
I thought about watching last night’s game. Really, I did. For all of about half a second. Instead, I turned my attention to the Bluejays (they won, by the way). As opposed to our hockey team. It was over in the first period. Indeed, it could probably be argued it was over in about the first 20 seconds. Looking for an up side here. Hmm. Let’s see. Well, Dion Phaneuf scored. Once. And that’s it. Yeah, I got nothin’. God I hope the Canadians don’t make the playoffs. Really, I do. I’d hope the same for Ottawa, but well, it didn’t do me any good before. Okay, back to following baseball.
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From the spam box: they don’t come much more random.
I just had the pleasure of being treated to a very unusually unique spam comment. This one was caught just a few minutes ago, posted to an entry I put up here a couple weeks ago. Usually, they’re a little more vague than this. And sometimes, they’re even slightly related to the entry in question. This one? I do believe someone just wanted the attention. Here you go.
lol, 50 Cent is so crazy! I love him.
Now, can someone tell me please what this entry has to do with 50 Cent? Really? Stick to general complements on my blog’s design/theme, guys. They were even making me feel good. Well, okay, so not really.
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On RSS geekery, and LiveJournal. Yes, I still use that–sort of.
One down side to my having moved away from LiveJournal and back to hosting my own blog is I have even less reason to go back and check various LJ pages. Lately, it’s included the friends page. Sort of sucks, since there are still several LJ users I want to keep up with, in spite of the fact I’m drifting away from using it myself.
A couple months back, in my quest for an RSS reader I could use from anywhere, I came across this software, which runs on a self-hosted environment. So far, it’s working out a lot better than I’d figured it would–so well, in fact, that I’ve actually set it up for Jessica to use. Now, if we can just get her using it. I’ve recently started adding the RSS feeds of various LJ people I follow, just so I don’t have to remember to pull up the friends page–I go into my RSS reader on a daily basis anyway, so they’ll be right there with everything else I read. So far, I have it set up to access all the public entries. But, thing about being on the friends list of some of these folks is that I actually like to read, you know, actual content. No such luck so far.
I tried to implement a form of basic access authentication, passing the username and password I need to give the LJ server as part of the RSS feed’s URL (example: https://me:password@you.livejournal.com). either LJ or the feed reader, though, doesn’t like that–I still only get the public entries. Trying to massage LJ’s version of digest-based authentication, which I don’t think the RSS reader likes either, gets me no farther.
LJ does some funky things with its digest-based authentication, which doesn’t lend itself to much in the way of strict URL manipulation. So I can’t, for example, do something relatively simplistic like, say, https://me:password@you.livejournal.com/rss?auth=digest and expect it to work. I mean, it should, but it doesn’t.
So, for the moment, I have some partially working LJ RSS feeds, and plenty of time to exercise my google skillz. In the meantime, so far what I’m using seems to be working fairly well. If I can just crack this digest auth issue, or find some other way to do it that doesn’t seem to be horribly broken, this thing’ll run like a dream. fortunately I have all kinds of time to do it. And I’ve been looking for an excuse to mess around with http stuff anyway. Probably just be a quick and dirty hack, but quick and dirty’s good, if it works. And this had better bloody well work.
Update. Well. It works. Kind of. Except not really, and not quite the way I was hoping. Messing around with trying to get my RSS reader to play nice with digest auth just wasn’t happening. Probably a good thing–I have too many people to be trying that on, and it’d get really freaking tedius after a while. Say, after about 5 minutes. So I did the second best thing. I cheated.
It’s quick, it’s dirty, and it may not amount to being a whole lot more than a temporary hack, but it gets the job done. Well, when it wants to. It involved snagging a copy of LJProxy, which is supposed to be able to make use of their login implementations, thus cutting my headache in half right there. It takes the LJ username/password I’m more than willing to provide it, makes use of LJ’s own client/server API–the same API any LJ client uses to do things like post entries, and grabs a list of friend groups and the friends you’ve listed in the said groups. Then, it makes easy use of their broken implementation of digest auth to nab the RSS feeds belonging to those friends. Finally, it compiles them into a single RSS feed, stored locally, that I can then plug into my feed reader–making about ten times less work for one lazy geek. Then I just slam that one feed into my reader, and away she goes.
Now, if it starts working on a regular basis, I’ll have what you might call my ideal package. There’s only one small problem. It doesn’t quite work that way yet. The instalation process was easy enough, and it does run–just not all the way through. It gets stopped before it can complete its pulling in of content and build the agrigated feed, possibly due to resource issues but even more likely due to problems staying connected to the LJ service. Currently, I’ve got 30 people in the group I’m testing it–the documentation says for best performance, keep it under 50. It’s only gotten all the way through the 30 maybe… twice. The highest I’ve personally seen it go, and stop, is 20. right now, it’s stopped at 8. How do I know it’s not a resource issue? During its second to last run so far, I pulled this from the server.
04:49:04 up 6 days, 20:36, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.00
So, during the running of the collection routine, the system’s barely being touched. That rules out being killed on grounds of causing issues with something else. So I’m leaning towards timeout issues with LJ. When I get motivated, I’ll poke around and see what I can do about maybe correcting that. But, it’s entirely possible I’m going to have to wait for the connection to improve on its own. Or, failing that, go back to the drawing board. Fortunately, on this, I’m flexible. And, in the meantime, my dream rss solution is near. And hey, it’s an excuse to break something. I can deal with that.
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Flyers 2, Maple Leafs 0.
Three periods of semi-okay play, plus three periods of decent goaltending, plus this being Toronto’s hockey team equals a toronto loss. It’s how things have gone all season, and it’s how things went last night. And it’s probably going to go the same way next year. In well over 40 years of rebuilding for another stanley cup run, it’s never been quite this painful. And by never, I mean in my admittedly not very long, comparatively, memory. Pretty sad, though, when I don’t even believe my mother was born the last time they actually made it to the cup. Yeah, we need a new team. Is Phoenix still up for sale?
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Startrek: the sequel?
Rumors continue to float into my RSS reader–thanks, Google alerts–of a possible Star Trek sequel, to be shot in early 2011 or so. Part of me–the part that’s sort of clinging to the old Trek–is kind of hoping they’re just rumors. I mean, I downloaded the first of the new movies. And, yes, for what it is, it’s good. But things like Vulcan being wiped off the map? I can’t wrap my head around that. Nevermind the other 50 billion twists away from the established Trek timeline the movie goes through. It was nice to see the older Spock back in action for maybe one last time, though. Now, to go figure out which one of them screwed with the timeline more–Enterprise, or the movie that came out after it. Anyone feel like offering an opinion? I need to find mine.
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The Ontario government tries, very hard, to explain its budget changes. And fails horribly.
At the end of March, we got a good look at Dalton McGuinty’s definition of equality. Which, really, isn’t much of a definition at all. They’ve since come out with a feel-good statement explaining how the cancelation of ODSP’s special diet allowance, which will be replaced by a thinggy to be named later, and the tiny 1 percent increase to ODSP payments is good for us.
Basicly, the statement as it stands now says two things. “People might be misusing it, so we’ll just trash the whole damn thing.”, and, “You don’t need to know what we’re replacing it with. We’ll tell you when we think you’re old enough to hear it.”. All the while, it trumpets the glorious occasion that is the oh so generous increase of 1 percent to monthly payments–the same increase I’ve already scolded them for, not that any of the ruling parties have taken the time to respond to that letter yet. Combine that with the advent of the HST, and what we have here is a failure to live up to your mandate.
On the up side, it does confirm ODSP increases won’t even be in effect until November, also known as 6 months after the HST kicks us in the face. Meanwhile, a much more significant increase to minimum wage is already in effect. Not that that’ll do much to offset the HST either, but it’ll do more than we have to work with. All things considered, I’d much rather be employed. But, since that’s not in my immediate future, I’ll entertain myself by calling out the government on a semi-weekly basis. If not on the blog, then certainly in email. And, very likely, both. And that’s the bright side. Who wants to play beat the premier?
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Bruins 2, Maple Leafs 1.
We actually played halfway decently. Outshot them, spent more time in their end than our own, and at the end of the game, we pretty much owned them like nobody’s business. Except, um, well, we didn’t. That’s the way the season crumbles. I won’t even do a last time comparison here–there is none. I mean, we beat them, but that’s about it. We didn’t play quite the same way we did on Saturday. Or maybe that’s the secret… hmm. Something to ponder during the off season, perhaps.
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