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  • All politics is local, but is all politics personal?

    written by

    james

    Today’s theme, at least for the next two entries, is of things political. Not just political, but personal. And how, in spite of the fact the one should have nothing to do with the other, just about every political event from election to debate to legislation in the House of Commons almost always comes back to someone’s supposedly personal motivations. Or, in some cases, personal dirty laundry that need not be aired.

    Take the latest kerfuffle surrounding Toronto mayoral candidate Rob Ford as a prime example. According to various media sources, he’s been previously convicted of DUI. And by previously, they mean over 10 years ago. Now, considering in spite of DUI being a federal offense in Canada the most you’ll get in several dozen cases is a very light slap on the wrist, you’d think it wouldn’t be made into a huge deal. Particularly if, as reports have been saying, it happened in 1999. But then, he wasn’t running for mayor in 1999.

    Now, okay, I can see folks sounding alarms if this guy was a real problem insofar as being well-known for having a few and then hitting the road. Or if he’d gone and did something equally stupid in the months or so leading up to, or during, his campaign. But let’s keep this semi-real, here. It happened in 1999. According to what’s publicly available, the guy’s around 30 now. Which would have made him 19, 20 at best, when he up and decided it’d be fun to have a drink or two and drive home–or wherever it was he was going after he decided to have a few. Or, as us non-political types like to put it, he was young and stupid.

    Around that time I was 16 and right smack in the middle of my own stupid decision or two. Now, 11 years later, I’m no longer in that particular situation, and probably a couple degrees smarter for it. A whole crapload’s changed on my side in 11 years–and this guy’s not a whole lot older than me. But, because he up and decided to run stupid as a teenager, back when several hundred other teenagers were all busy doing pretty much the exact same thing. And now it’s a headline in a political campaign in Toronto.

    I always figured all politics was local, but this t hing about all politics being personal? That’s new. Not altogether surprising, but new. And just one more reason you’ll never see my name on a voters’ balot–unless as a direct result of one hell of a technical glitch.

    Update: Hey look. Another Toronto candidate has some dirty laundry she, or someone else, would like you to see. This one’s also 11 years old. Hey, I know. Let’s all just scrap the political system and pick the one with the better criminal record. Yeah, that’s more fun isn’t it?

  • I am renaming August to the month of Broken.

    written by

    james

    The month is just over half over, and already things have gone and decided breaking is the thing to do. It started last week, with the near breaking of my plans to return home this past weekend–plans that were changed for other reasons, which will be elabourated on once the appropriate people have been properly hunted, nailed to the nearest wall, and my time and effort in aranging things is appropriately compensated–in blood, if necessary.

    Then, earlier this week, the old blogging stomping grounds of LiveJournal, where I still occasionally show up mostly because I’ve yet to convert all the cool people away from it to much more fun things, decided it would be fun to break my LJ RSS hack. More specificly, one of their upgrades apparently broke their own authentication mechanism. That only ended up being fixed an hour ago–and not, laughably enough, before several people who were experiencing similar problems re: their RSS feeds had decided to bring it up quite blatantly in the dev community–I should really consider watching that community, now that I think about it.

    Last night capped off the reason for renaming the month of August to the month of Broken. We needed to get laundry done. As in, like, ASAFP. Which turned out to be at just about midnight last night–hey, we never claimed to keep a normal schedule. That was around the exact same time we figured out that hey, this building’s supposed to have two working washers and two working dryers. This building has one of each. And the broken ones are broken in such a way that by the time we figure out they’re broken, we’ve wasted a dollar in each. Those are, to my knowledge anyway, still broken–we’re presently air-drying the affected articles of clothing. Sadly, my name isn’t on the lease here so I don’t get to personally scream in some poor maintenance bastard’s ear about it, but Jess will undoubtedly take amazing amounts of pleasure in doing exactly that just as soon as she can find 30 seconds to breathe.

    Well into the third week of August, and we’ve already had plenty of things go breaky smash on a technical and non-technical front–an average of one per week at this rate. I’m officially renaming the month of August to the month of Broken. Now, to go whip something real quick up to make it official on this here website.

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  • The latest health risk according to parents: your wireless network.

    written by

    james

    This probably should come as no surprise. But, well, it does. A group of parents in Toronto has apparently decided that the wifi network services provided by their kids’ schools is responsible for making them sick. They took the matter to the Ontario government, who’s just now referred it to the federal. Who, just for the record, has already provided information that says they’re safe–as has the group most likely to pull the next health crisis out of a hat, the World Health Organization (WHO). Sadly, I can see at least half a dozen studies coming out within the next few years supporting this. Be careful around your wireless router–it may give you cancer! Or, you know, not. But that doesn’t generate headlines.

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  • My parents, the non-gamer gamers.

    written by

    james

    I got a random call from my father while I was down here, with the probably fourty millionth tech question the family’s posed to me since I turned geek. Only this one with a twist. It would appear my parents, who haven’t even looked at a gaming system since I was probably 13, just grabbed themselves a Nintendo Wii. His question? How to hook it up to the network I threw together for them. Why? They thought it’d be fun to browse the web on their TV. Ladies and gentlemen, I suspect the birth of a glorified PC. For the record? I’m so not fixing this one.

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  • Now we know why they cancelled the H1N1 crisis. They’re working on a new one.

    written by

    james

    I’m usually not one of these people who sees doctors/drug companies/whatever as evil entities out to slowly and sometimes painfully kill us all after depriving us of all our hard-earned money. But sometimes, even I get a little confused. Particularly when, not even 48 hours after they officially declare an end to the H1N1 crisis that wasn’t, they’ve latched onto a new one. this one, which they’re just calling a superbug, already has global medical disaster written all over it, according to scientists in the UK among other places. Supposedly, it’s already shown up in Canada, the US, the UK, Australia and several other places in between. And, much like another superbug we all know and love, it’s supposedly resistent to most if not all current antibiotics available–I see yet another new vaccine in our future.

    Yep, on tuesday they cancelled the H1N1 disaster, and on wednesday we found out why. They now have a new one to splatter all over the newspapers. Just when you thought it was safe to come out of quarentine.

  • R.I.P., “series of tubes” guy.

    written by

    james

    Unless you’ve been under a rock all afternoon, you’re probably aware already that former US Senator Ted Stevens died in a plane crash in Alaska at 86 years. Now, being that I live in the great white north, beyond the whole “series of tubes” quotation, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about this US Senator. According to some, he was apparently quite the moron. Well, sir, you very well might have been an idiot. But you’ve provided years of hillarity among my particular geek circles with that one quote. For that, you’re awesome. And because it still makes me snort, here’s the infamous monologue in video format. Yes, brought to you by that very same series of tubes.

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  • Popular posts (July, 2010).

    written by

    james

    Holy freaking busy. And I do mean busy. For a small sampling of what I mean, have a look through previous posts. Or, wait until the popular posts for this month gets tossed up. In the meantime, here’s what caught people’s attention in July–a surprisingly way less busy-ish month, considering.

    • Right on queue, when I was thinking about possibly finding some way to bypass the US only limitations and at least try out Netflix, they go out and bring it to Canada. Well, sort of. About goddamn time we get something folks on this side of the border already have.
    • All the busy in the world doesn’t quite make up for the first week of July, part of it was spent with Jessica. It was during that week that she became my fiance. And she’s not managed to run screaming yet.
    • I effectively and officially started the ball rolling on the whole getting me into college thing around the middle of July. Naturally at that point I had no idea that ball was going to try and roll right over top of me, but it got started then. And even that took some twisting of arms.
    • I have a nasty habbit of screwing up my sleep schedule completely beyond recognission. Sometimes, it ends up resulting in 4:00 wake-up calls. And most of the time it ends up not actually staying stable, even in its screwed up state, for very long. Gotta love the flexible routine–except when it’s way, way too flexible.
    • And in slightly mock-worthy news, Sarah Palin has a thing for occasionally inventing new words, then claiming it’s because everyone else is doing it. I harass her for it as often as I can, much to the dismay of many I’m sure. But, hey, considering the couple months I’ve been having, even minor amusement/mockery can be good.

    Okay, so not as entertaining as some of the other lists. What do you want for the middle of summer? Now, back I go to the land of oh my god busy.

  • The excitement continues. Greyhound may lock out its Canadian drivers.

    written by

    james

    Just when you thought it was safe to jump across the border, someone up there’s pointing and laughing. Apparently, Ottawa’s local transit service isn’t the only one who sees a shutdown as the surest path to a contract dispute resolution. Greyhound Canada, also known as those people who will be meeting me in Toronto in order to get me the rest of the way home, is threatening to lock out its drivers on thursday. Assuming I can beat an answer out of people, and that answer is one I like, I’m due to return to the right side of the border on sunday. Houston, we have a problem.

    As it stands now, provided they do actually end up locking out, I might be able to get as far as Toronto on the ticket I just purchased. As for getting me past Toronto? Well, that may require some degree of creativity.

    Greyhound, you and I have been getting along famously this trip–I didn’t even have to fight with you over the purchase of my ticket for a bloody change. You do not want to start in with this crap now. Really, you don’t. So by all means, don’t. That would be awesome.

    Also: What is it with bus services out of Ontario? OC Transpo was talking not too long ago about a lockout at the next contract negotiation, too. Really? Did we learn nothing from the 08-09 bus strike? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

    Update: Yeah, I thought so. Greyhound, if this happens, please find yourself a nice big fire and die in it. Thanks.

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  • Well, that was unsurprising. College doesn’t like me.

    written by

    james

    Remember the assessment of doom I was studying for? The one I only had a week to get everything accomplished accessibility/preparation-wise before it was either going to make or break my attempt at further education? Yeah, that one. It broke. Badly. I got word of the proof of such brokenness last night. It was no shocker, though admittedly part of me was kind of hoping for a small miracle. I don’t think it’s very over yet, though–as I mentioned before, I did the test on a week’s notice. The test included algebra, and the extent of its accessibility after a week’s notice consisted of someone reading the questions to me, me trying to remember the equasions, going over most of them in my head and not having much ability to actually check things on my own. The chick doing the reading told me she was surprised at the result I got considering, well, I had virtually not a whole lot more than what I was allowed to bring with me–the cell phone I was planning to use for a calculator. So was I, but given a half-assed shot at doing it on my own I also know I’d of probably done considerably better.

    It’s on that thought that I decided, within about 30 seconds of getting word of that from my side of the border last night, that today would be the day heads rolled. So calls were made, and one of the names on the bottom of the denial letter got to have a very pleasant conversation with yours truely. Surprisingly, there was no yelling/screaming/what have you–I didn’t even curse, though I had plenty of them floating around in the back of my mind just in case. I informed her due to the fact it was either do it on a week’s notice or not at all, in spite of the fact I pretty much told the chick when I was speaking to her I didn’t figure anything could be done in a week’s time to make it any easier for her or me, I was pretty much a step behind from the outset. I was even nice enough to explain to the person in question, who gave me the “I’m just a lowly admissions officer” shpeel, that I asked about having it, and/or my entry date into the program, pushed back to allow for the needed time to figure a way through whatever accessibility issues should so happen to crop up.

    Since the decision supposedly came from significantly above her pay grade, she told me she’d speak to the one who ended up making the final decision. I got the slight impression she was sort of being noncommittal, but we shall see. So she said she’d see what she could do, I threw the number here at her where she, or the person(s) above her pay grade who made the decision, can reach me, and now we wait. In the meantime, I’m closing in on the deadline for getting things submitted to second career, and I still have absolutely no idea what if anything I’m about to actually be getting done.

    So, I may or may not actually have plans for September. I may or may not actually have the backing for said plans in September. And I may or may not have a bit of time left to try and twist a few arms in order to secure both. It’s a very good thing I’m not averse to doing things the hard way. I’ve a sneaking suspicion I’m about to do exactly that at full speed.

    Update: I got my phone call. And surprise, more waiting games. This time, I get to wait until next tuesday, at which point someone *else* I’ll need to get a hold of re: the mess this testing thing’s becoming will be in. If I were the overly paranoid type, I might be slightly suspicious of the fact I got that phone call after writing this. If someone’s trying to tell me something, I don’t think I’m getting the message they think I am.

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  • If you have not heard Donna the Buffalo, you are broken.

    written by

    james

    So I’ve been on the US side of the border for nearly two weeks now, and busy as all get out for most of it. Part of the busy was spending the majority of this past friday evening at the Rochester public market. We were planning to check that out anyway, Jess and I, since she’d only been there maybe once before me, and of course I hadn’t been there yet. So i cruised by where she was getting off work, picked her and Kyle–who conveniently also hadn’t been there yet–up, met Heather over there and we crashed it for a few hours. And in doing so, were treated to a free performance by Donna the Buffalo. Apparently, both Kyle and Heather have heard/seen this group live before, which left both Jess and I to experience it for the first time. Hell of an experience, really.

    From right around the first or second song, I had a feeling it’d be a pretty damn near wicked awesome performance. Of course, anyone who can perform “Ring of Fire” and not completely kill it deserves at least a shot at not making me cringe. I didn’t cringe. Instead, I find myself rather unsurprisingly in the category of those who highly approve. I don’t think any of my partners in crime were entirely all that surprised by it either–I’m looking at you, Heather.

    They only played for an hour and a half, give or take–a lot less time than I thought they’d get, but apparently the organizers decided to do the headliner thing first. Still, it was long enough for me to decide when I do return to the cooler side, I’m gonna have me some downloading. Because I don’t have some downloading right now, have a video instead. Not Friday’s performance, but a performance. I approve by this. And if you find yourself not approving, evaluate your musical tastes. Right now. Enough said.

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