I may or may not have made reference before to folks who get it in their heads that wi-fi has this issue wherein it’s exceedingly damaging in some way, shape or form. I may or may not have indicated that camp gets its ideas from the most ridiculous of sources–like, for instance, children developing mysterious symptoms of illness while at school, and feeling perfectly fine on weekends. Now, I catch wind of word coming out of Europe that some politicians would like to see an end to wi-fi. For the children, of course. They base it off of some studies comparing wi-fi to such things as second-hand smoke. Really. I’m not creative enough to make that up. Sounds more like the biggest risk to our collective health at the moment are these politicians.
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European politicians join the wi-fi is evil camp. Go Europe!
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Popular posts (April, 2011).
At long last, it’s that time of the month again–wherein I go flipping back through last month’s notes and take measure of exactly what it is folks found interesting to read while life was going on on this side of the blog. We call it April’s most popular posts, as chosen by you, and only two or three days before I should be starting to think about May’s. Hey, it’s an improvement. Still, I blame in no particular order: moving, taxes, moving, family outings, moving, the beginning formation of wedding plans (future entry probably), moving, cleaning up after the move, moving, and oh yeah, moving. And while I was building up to this move, and finding slightly more things to mock than I expected, you folks were busy getting interested. Here’s what you liked, brought to you as always courtesy Google Analytics.
- I’ve never been a very big fan of the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP). Yes, in spite of the fact at the moment, they’re the only thing keeping me from living off my family’s already stretched budget. There’s an entire category on the site set aside for my periodic rounds with ODSP. Including when they jump off the deep end and threaten to call the police over one such blog post–they never did, for the record.
- Keeping on the ODSP theme, you asked what prompted the threat of having the police called on me courtesy ODSP. An admittedly irritatedly written post, prompted by the fact the information ODSP was handing me was pretty well clear as mud. I got a bit of an education during that conversation. And gave one back a while later.
- If you subscribe to geek theory, and it looks like a lot of you do, you know about April 21, 2011. If you read my blog, and you obviously do, you know about April 21, 2011. Here’s why, in case you’ve forgotten or ignored it. Yep, Skynet is now self-aware. We’re screwed.
- April was apparently dominated by ODSP related searches. Actually, it was dominated by ODSP searches before ODSP became an issue–only this time, the searches were actually being done by ODSP. I wasn’t the least bit surprised, particularly these days, when employers have been known to request your Facebook, Twitter, blog etc passwords. So long, privacy. You were never really here, but we pretended well.
- And just to fill you in on what started the apparent month of ODSP dominance in April, we skip back to February, when I got my first taste of ODSP math. Two months later and that post still gets pointed to. One of us isn’t doing something right like.
That’s April in a nutshell. Taken up mostly by government issues that at the end of the day, I only just shrugged out from under. Now, with only a couple days left in May, let’s see what you folks are finding interesting this month. You’ll find out later this week, unless life slaps me in the face–then later this month. Now, then. About the last remaining threads of that damned infection.
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Fake hardware failures suck almost as bad as real ones.
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.
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Things I missed about Ottawa number 4597: visiting Pembroke.
I always said Pembroke was the kind of place I loved to visit, but wouldn’t want to live there. Having lived here several times and visited several more, every time I switch I become more and more convinced of that. Which is another of the reasons I’m in love with living in Ottawa. I like Pembroke, as far as small towns go. But it’s the kind of place you go for a day or two, maybe a week if you need to. Then, it’s back home to online grocery delivery, places to walk to, potential places to work, and actual transportation. It’s weird, odd, and slightly strange, but a thing I missed about Ottawa was visiting Pembroke. I should do this more often. Or, you know, maybe not.
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Finding new and interesting ways to break the blog. this time, get updates by email!
I had planned to unleash this a long, long time ago, but hadn’t found a way of doing it that didn’t result in pieces of blog landing on my living room floor. So, during a time last night when I didn’t have a whole lot else going on–and while my desktop was undergoing minor surgery (more on that in another entry), I finally sat down and went through with it. Now, just by going over here, you can subscribe to receive everything I post by email, shortly after I post it. Wanna follow the comments that result? I’ve revamped that system a bit, too. Now, pick your post, optionally leave a comment, hit the subscribe option, and you’ll be on the email list for comments received on that post. Or, just go here and subscribe to the posts of your choice. Now, you won’t just get replies to your comments emailed to you. You want comments? You get comments. Happy conversationing!
Randomly related: I should not be left to my own devices with this blog, PHP, and a WordPress plugin library. Just an observation.
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This apartment now feels like home. Complete with the lazy approach to dishes…
In yet another example of things that didn’t happen when I lived in Ottawa last time, the company what takes my rent money every month–the same company I was with before I left the city 3 years ago–now gives you a lazy type option for doing, in my opinion anyway, the most tedius of the household chores. And, knowing my tendency towards the lazy as I do, first chance I got I was all over it. So as of this morning, mixed in amongst all the other usual stuff that goes into getting the apartment set up and getting me refamiliarized with this area of the city, I got my hands on my first apartment-sized dish washer. Yeah, okay, so it’s not exactly world’s most major. But, well, it’s kind of somewhat vaguely amusing to me–I’ve lived in 3 apartments so far, two of them in Ottawa and two of them owned by the same company, all in the span of the last 5 years–and until today, it’s been by hand with the actual cleaning of things. I still haven’t gotten my apartment-cleaning, laundry-doing, food-preparing robot, but I’ll settle for a dish washer until such a creature is perfected. Hey, these things make me happy. Proof I need something more to do? Maybe. Potential of that happening tonight? Not unless you count sleep. Eventually.
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I could teach this Googler a thing or two.
You know I have too much free time when I can pluck a random search query out of the statistics for today and turn it into a blog post. Today’s random Google question comes from this side of the border–and this province, I’d imagine.
May 25 11:15am: ODSP how can I spend it?
Oh, my poor unwitting searcher. Let me count the ways. Let’s see. first, you find an apartment in the middle of nowhere to attempt to call home. Then, you pay the nearly 50% of your maximum entitled income on rent–before luxuries like, say, electricity or phone service (which they don’t count as a necessity anyway, cheap buggers). Or maybe that’s just how I did it. For my next random search-inspired blog post, possibly, how to *save* your ODSP–the screw you over version.
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Victoria day done… well… done.
For folks over there in the US who may not know it, every year on the unofficial first long weekend of the summer, we cellebrate Queen victoria’s birthday–which, as luck would have it, would be today were she still breathing, apparently. Which, escentially, means everyone with a government contract gets to take the day off and most of Ottawa closes up shop for the day. And we, being the slackers we are, sit around Trish’s living room and play Rockband all night–in between burgers, hotdogs, and a Tim Hortons run (hey, we’re still Canadian, eh?). So last night, we did exactly that. Shot the shit, completely murdered several songs–some of which threaten to predate me, and all around had ourselves a birthday party the likes of which Queen Victoria would have probably not been caught dead at. Proof we have way, way too much fun round these parts. I think next year, I’ll just put forward a motion to rename the day. *Then* party.
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The NHL doesn’t believe in free advertising, threatens a Montreal restaurant with $90000 in damages.
I’ve never been to a shawarma restaurant. Nor have I ever had shawarma. Hell, before I moved to Ottawa I’d never even really heard of the stuff. But I’d still support a restaurant of that variety who wanted to stick up for the home team–yes, even if the home team was those bastards from Montreal. The NHL has a different take on it, apparently. One such restaurant near the Bell center thought it might be fun to hang a poster with a cartoon character in a Canadians jersey slicing shawarma with a sword, with the phrase “Go Habs go!” underneath it. The NHL sent him a letter indicating he was in violation of copyright, so the restaurant owner painted over the Canadians logo. They sent him another, indicating the phrase “Go Habs go!” was also trademarked, so he painted over that. He eventually just took the sign down. You’d think that would satisfy the NHL, right? Clearly, you don’t know comissioner Betmman. Instead of being satisfied they’d finally intimidated a local restaurant into not giving the team and the league some much needed free advertising, they rewarded him by demanding he pay $89000 to the league, or $1000 per day of the sign’s existence.
I’ll be the first to say it aughta be illegal to support the Canadians. But then, I’m a Leafs fan–I can say that. But to take it to this level, and claim copyright violations over something that would very obviously be fair use if Canada had a fair use clause, just smacks of “I don’t care”. The team was, and I have to hold my nose to type this, actually doing well, but still couldn’t be hurt by a little extra free advertising. The restaurant was in close enough proximity to the arena that supporting the team, whether or not the owner of the place is a diehard fan, makes perfect business sense for the restaurant and perfect PR sense for the NHL and the Canadians. And instead of recognising that, the NHL slaps a local restaurant in the face and sends a shakedown notice–compensation for using a logo and a phrase they say is trademarked (I’ll believe it when I see it). Now tell me Canada doesn’t need some serious copyright reform.
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Make it Seven has a brand new cause. Atlanta.
A long, long time ago, someone brought up the bright idea to try and move the Phoenix Coyotes to Winnipeg. Then there was talk of Hamilton. Then both just kind of imploded and no one heard two words about it. Until today. Now, another NHL season’s trying to limp to an end, and another failing hockey team’s being talked about in the context of being shuffled off to Winnipeg–this time, from Atlanta. Hockey fans older than I will probably remember another Atlanta-based team who was at one point being talked about in the context of being shuffled off north–they’re in Calgary now. I’ve said it before, but it can’t hurt a thing to say it again–Canada needs more hockey. At least, Canada needs it a whole lot more than the southern US appears to–based on how many of those teams can barely fill up an arena. Okay, so the whole idea of two Canadian teams actually facing off against each other for something more than a shot at 8th place sounds good, but beyond that, the league needs competition. Not just the kind of competition you’d see in Buffalo or New York–but the kind of competition you used to see in a Quebec City versus Montreal context–for the record, real hockey fans cheered for Quebec City in those games. Or a Winnipeg versus Vancouver context. I was barely old enough to remember games like that. Even now, I have to go look it up to get an idea what I just barely missed. If this attempt at a deal doesn’t come apart at the seems and do all manner of imploding all over itself, I might even be convinced to turn off a Leafs game for this. And we all know I’m attached to my Leafs games–when life stops throwing me curves I can’t hit. So, there’s your reason for putting a team in Winnipeg. Make me turn off a Leafs game. Any takers?