I should probably not be taking potential blog posting ideas from search terms. But, this might be a good idea on one of my random headache days. Hey, sometimes, I get this bored.
May 22 11:10pm: open letter to my headache
Good idea, random US googler. Hey, I already got a semi-decent start on it with the two-centence-long mini-letter at the end of this post. I’m heading somewhere.
Every time I come to Ottawa, whether it’s to live or visit, I always have this wicked huge list of things to do. And almost always, within the first week or two, I end up making a sizeable dent in that list. Which is exactly why it is they should absolutely never let me anywhere near Ottawa. Reasons this is bad for me include, but are not limited to:
If that’s a week in Ottawa, no freaking wonder the previous 2.5 years just kinda sailed by at warp speed. I know this much about Ottawa on my second time around, at least–I’ll definitely get back in shape. Now, then. Where’d I put the rest of my to-do list?
Moving is almost always a 2-week exercise in waiting. Sometimes, it’s even a 2 month exercise in waiting. There’s the waiting for the approval in the new place. There’s the waiting for the confirmation the new place won’t fall down around the previous tenant’s ears before he moves out, nevermind before you move in. There’s the waiting on things to finally cancel themselves out at the old place so you’re not paying for phone or electricity services you’re not gonna need anymore. There’s the waiting for confirmation you’ve got your vehicle of choice ready to throw your entire life into the back and hope like hell it comes off that vehicle in one piece. And there’s the waiting to see how long it takes before multiple people blow a blood vescel with the help of the company renting you the afore mentioned vehicle containing your entire life. That was escentially last weekend for me.
I finally got the approval for the apartment officially, and subsequently blogged–again–about it. Which meant in about 45 seconds, everything and its dog got cancelled, transfered, delayed until its effective cancelation date, packed in a box or otherwise done away with. So all we had to do was the easy part–pick up the UHaul trailer, load it, get it to the other end, offload it. Easy, right? Except for those parts where it wasn’t.
Because of scheduling issues with the primary driver, we had to have someone else go pick up the trailer on Friday. Now, standard procedure would be the thing passes at least one safety inspection before it’s allowed to leave the lot, nevermind any last minute checks that get done as it’s on its way out. Standard procedure. Unless, apparently, the trailer’s being rented in Petawawa. It got to my parents’ place, where it would be spending the night until we were ready to use it, initact. Well, mostly. The primary driver did his usual run around to make sure everything was appropriately glooed in place the next morning, and discovered it was obviously put through its safety inspection pre-departure by someone who just so happened to be nearly as blind as me. There were no working clearance lights on the trailer. Not overall a huge matter–they aren’t exceedingly used for a whole lot anyway. But, there were also no working break lights on the trailer. Yeah, as you could probably guess, that posed a small problem. So we were shoved 4 hours behind schedule while that got looked into. No huge dealy, really–we still got loaded that day. And the garage we took the trailer to was more than willing to bill UHaul directly for the repair work–an offer, I have to admit, at which I spent the rest of the day snickering. So we get everything to Ottawa, it’s intact, and the trailer hasn’t blown itself to pieces inexplicably. Cause for cellebration–which we did after everything was offloaded. But not before we made an attempt at taking the trailer to its final resting place–well, as far as we were concerned, anyway.
See, the thing about being in Ottawa is there’s half a million UHaul locations capable of receiving vehicles like this between here and the east side. The bad thing about living in Ottawa is there’s half a million UHaul locations who could easily decide they don’t want to let us make them this trailer’s final resting place. We were given the address of, what we would later find out was a small little convenience store type dealy or something. That convenience store type dealy just so happened to be registered UHaul location, so UHaul told us “Yeah, sure, go ahead and drop off that trailer over there. They won’t mind.”. They did. And made it very clear they did. Which prompted us sitting in their parking lot while my father, who happens to share my name and can do things like this, called up UHaul and unloaded with both barels. The end result was spending a few more minutes at $1.40 per liter driving across town to their primary drop location for the Ottawa area, and finally getting rid of that trailer.
So, we eventually got everything loaded. We eventually got the trailer tossed somewhere that isn’t attached to the back of one of our vehicles. And smartly, UHaul hasn’t as yet tried to turn around and bill me for their failed safety inspection. And all it took was the twisting of approximately 3 arms, and the smashing together of the equivalent of two heads. Not bad for a weekend. For the right price, UHaul. At this whole organization and basic covering your ass thing? UFail.
Yeah, I know. I fail this hard at updating and that’s my best title? I blame recovering from the last week, which kind of went like this in no particular order. Get moved out of the old place, into the new place, fight with our ISP to actually get online, blow my 3G data quota before getting online, spend most of the week fighting with our ISP to get online in a way that doesn’t suck, learn that’s not going to happen with this modem and as long as the routes we’re assigned keep sucking horrible, throw groceries at my fridge in ways that haven’t been done since 2008, and oh yeah, discover just having moved into this apartment means clearing out the last of the previous tenant’s, er, crap. And on top of that, the world was scheduled to end yesterday. Oopsies. Basicly, it’s been fun. And now that it’s all relatively calmed down–at least as much as it can be expected to be when back in Ottawa, actual content. But first, a moving WTF/rant/mockery thing. Next entry, assuming I don’t get sidetracked.
For as long as the blog’s been up, I’ve had a kind of open commenting policy. Any entry, posted any time, for any reason, could be commented on by those
who happened across it. Most of those, though, have ended up being everyone’s favourite excuses for target practice–yep, spam incorporated. To the tune of nearly 1300 of them at last look. So, I went tweaking. And what I came up with? The comment locker outer, of sorts. Effective as of about half an hour ago, entries older than 6 months automatically have their comments turned off. Wanna comment on an older entry? There’s probably a more recent one on the same subject–throw an opinion over there. Have something specific to that one entry? Let me know, and it may get a spot as an entry of its very own. Wanna see what else is breaking all over the place? The front page, or any of the category pages, are always a good place to start–and they all have their own RSS feeds. Spammer with an entry to bombard? I hear wordpress.com has several blogs with open commenting policies–try one of those. Welcome to housekeeping. Now, then. Where’d I go and put my spam spray?
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.
Well, okay, not really. This is more a “hey, this still exists” post. There’s at least one update coming, plus a backposting of a piece of follow-up work written and drafted by shane. But this is not it. Busy is the name of the game so far–not the least of the busy is this whole moving thing, plus that still looking for work thing. But, there’s an update coming. Just… not today. Sorry.
Author’s note: this is a follow-up post submitted with webmaster approval by a contributer. If you would like to publish a guest entry, let me know.
I posted
2 weeks ago
a letter I mailed off to pizza pizza, regarding their inaccessible iphone app, it was a little blunt, but you’ll have that.
Today, I received this in response.
——————————————————————————–
From: Pizza Pizza App Customer Support [mailto:iphone@pizzapizza.ca]
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2011 3:51 PM
To: Shane Davidson
Subject: RE: iphone app feedback.Hello Shane,
Thank you for writing to us and we apologize for the delay in responding to your e-mail.
We are currently in the process of providing an accessibility solution for our website – www.pizzapizza.ca which allows for online ordering. Once this process has been completed, we will be looking into the feasibility of carrying this over into our mobile application. At this point, we would not be able to apprise you of a time frame but we do endeavor to meet the needs of all our valued customers and we recognize the importance of this matter.
We appreciate you taking the time out to write to us about this and your valuable suggestion. We hope to have the opportunity to serve you in the future.
Regards,
Pizza Pizza Customer Support
www.pizzapizza.ca
www.pizzapizza.ca
Welcome to a response that isn’t a form letter.
We’ll see how much of that comes to pass over the coming month’s.
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.
Anyone and everyone with an ounce of geek is probably sitting in their respective corner and snickering. Today, if you follow the timeline from the Terminator movies and TV shows, is the day Skynet officially becomes self-aware. If we cling to that timeline, 48 hours from now the world will be crawling with wicked evil crazy psycho killerbots. And the surviving population of Ontario would probably fit in this room. Where they’d be coordinating a counterattack–and probably getting their asses kicked. Shit am I glad this isn’t actually the Terminator timeline. Now where’d I put my computerised brain…?