Sometimes, the department of national defense really screws with my head. I think they do it on purpose. Soldiers suffering from PTSD won’t be prescribed marijuana, which the folks on the pro-legalisation and/or decriminalisation side of the issue say can and does help with situations like that among other things. But, the folks who ultimately are in charge of such things apparently have little to no problem with testing out ecstasy under the same circumstances. Yeah, we’ll just throw you in jail at worst and kick you out of the millitary at best for making use of a supposed gateway drug, but here, let us help you blow right through that gateway at warp speed. Did I skip out on logic 101, here? Am I missing something? Or has the DND finally made that left turn at Loony avenue? I honestly lost track about a paragraph into that article. I can has clue plz?
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They’ll be arrested for smoking pot, but experimenting with ecstasy’s okay.
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When the non-techy sites pick up on it, you know it’s bad.
A couple weeks ago, I made mention to the fact Canada’s only real alternative to DSL from Ontario east was taking it to their customers again, in the cleverly sneaky form of decreasing the quality of service provided and maintaining the same pricing structure. At the time, all the techy blogs were up in arms about it–and that was pretty much as far as it got. I suppose Rogers should be congratulated for finally breaking that barrier, what with the Ottawa Sun doing us all a favour and publishing their own take on it. And y’know, reading that doesn’t make me feel any less like kicking Rogers squarely in the face. But I’m still no closer to reconsidering my decision to avoid having anything to do with their internet packages for as long as I have at least one other alternative. On the bright side, at least geeks aren’t the only ones who’re about ready to slap around a Rogers employee–this was posted under the finance/money section of the Sun, for the curious. I’ll take my small moments of satisfaction where I can find them, thank you.
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How small is Petawawa? I indirectly know this guy.
As much as I bitch about small-town life, and the Pembroke/Petawawa area is actually surprisingly small, sometimes it has its awesomely cool points. Like this kid, who’s up for a CCMA in September. He’s not only done solo work, but has played with several well-known groups/singers. The kicker? My mother used to work with his sister. Hang on a second–I need to reset the nifty meter. In a way, I sort of indirectly–yeah, very indirectly–know this guy. Awesome.
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Bury the original Law & Order. It ain’t coming back.
Twenty seasons is all we’re gonna get out of the original Law & Order after shopping it around got the creators nowhere once the original network it ran on dumped it. It’s dead. Permanently. The funeral’s at 7:00 if anyone’s interested–I’ll bring the rum. And in other news, Law & Order: Los Angeles? Really? *Really*? You hollywood types could have done so much better.
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This is decidedly not the job I left 2 years ago.
I worked for Dell until mid-2008. They decided around then my job would be much better done from a call center in India. Flash forward to last week or so. One such Indian technical support agent had apparently been called up to help her find and view pictures a customer had on her hard drive, but couldn’t remember where she’d put them–I used to get calls like that all the time. They used to take maybe an hour, if you happened to have a customer who was particularly clueless when it comes to something as simple as “Now don’t touch anything for a few minutes or I won’t be able to control your computer from here.”. They used to be so simple I could do them in my sleep. And they used to still pay me at least $100 for the assistance–hey, I didn’t make the policies or force them to call me. They used to not end like this.
A woman calls Dell tech support to ask for help in locating pictures of herself on her computer. The pictures end up on a newly created Web site. She accuses the support representative of creating the site.
Would it be too cynical of me to figure the agent in question didn’t actually end up fired from the outsourcing center he works for? It’s articles like this that kind of make me very glad I don’t actually ever really have to pick up the phone for something unless they’ve already screwed it up.
Apparently, according to the article, Dell’s in the midst of a lawsuit over it. I can see this going full circle in the near future–lawsuits in New York among other places were, after all, what lead to them opening up more call centers in North America after all, for all the good it did. What was that they said about hindsight?
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Let me be clear. There was just an epic win overdose in Rochester.
It absolutely must be said, just for the record. Any event that ends with me at a bar is an evening well spent. Even if we did bail on some kind of bad concert to do it. And the getting home at late thirty? Awesomeness. That is all.
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Google Wave is finally out of its misery. Only took too damn long.
Does anyone actually even remember remotely considering doing something relatively useful with Google Wave? A few geek blogs I follow were all over it when it first opened up–hell, even Mike was singing its praises for a time. It was supposed to be the thing to replace email/twitter/facebook/what have you. How’re we doing on that? According to Google, not well. So it’s dying a slow and painful death that’ll drag out until the end of the year. I won’t say I saw it coming, but well…
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Looking for something to do this weekend? Try this.
This coming weekend is fairly important for anyone with even a moderate interest in karaoke, as the US is holding its portion of the world championship qualifications over the next few days. As I’ve mentioned before, Meka will be participating in this, the regional competition in New Mexico. If you’re one of these people with an interest in listening to awesome people covering awesome music, you should so find the nearest one to you and drop in. And if the nearest one happens to be in New Mexico, maybe even throw a hello in Meka’s direction. She’ll appreciate it. In the meantime, because they’re there and I can, have some video from her second place performance in Seattle.
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I take back every bad thing I ever said about SP3. Ever.
I have a long and complicated history with Windows XP’s service pack 3. Mostly, it consists of me installing it and it doing all manner of bad things to the machine it’s installed on–like, for instance, being partially responsible for the temporary breakage of an internet connection. Recently though, I’ve noticed a slightly disturbing trend. Machines older than mine and less stable than mine are taking SP3 with little to no problem and even less headache. And I’ve personally seen it installed on one with plenty of other problems of its own–hello, less than stable IE 8. So there was definitely something out to get me–now I had proof.
After exiling SP3 from my machine for being pretty much a complete and total failure, I’d also a while later gone ahead and got rid of Eset’s Smart Security product for a whole host of other, unrelated reasons I’ll get around to posting at some point in the maybe not too distant future. That fixed a few dozen other slightly irritating, but not ultimately hindering, problems. After seeing SP3 crop up on some of these machines and ultimately not cause mass amounts of destruction, I decided just before I came down here to install it again on mine. I took that opportunity to test IE 8 out on a non-frankenputer as well, but I’ll save that for when I figure out what about the offending machine is making it break. And, surprise of surprises, it didn’t result in extreme amounts of bloodshed, or physical damage to the computer.
So, after much of the getting pissed with Microsoft for making yet more work for me, and after confirming not once, but five times that SP3 did not, in fact, break me severely on install, I officially withdraw any cursing, swearing, or overall snarkish remarks directed at Microsoft on its behalf. Instead, I shall officially aim those remarks at Eset/Nod32, and add them to the 50 billion others I’ve had plenty of time to prepare and direct at the offending antivirus manufacturer. But don’t worry, Microsoft still has much for me to snark about–I still have to figure out in exactly how many pieces they’ve managed to break .net framework on this machine, which may or may not warrant a separate entry. But SP3, at least so far, is not as evil as it looked a few months ago. Good job, MS. Now fix your framework, goddammit.
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Leaving on a jet plane.
Ok, so it’s a bus instead of a plane. I’m still very well on my way. After Jess headed back home a couple weeks ago, we got to talking about my next visit. The plan, or what we’ll just call the plan, was to eventually get a bunch of our friends on her side of the border together for an engagement party of sorts. The next thing I knew, I had a piece of paper in hand that entitled me to a bus ticket.
Now, a month after the proposal, I’m sitting on the Toronto bound leg of my almost random road trip. And I’m still not used to the whole fiance deal. Oh well. I have ages to get there. In the meantime, so long, Canada. See you in two weeks.
PS: All y’all up in Rochester? Save me some booze. If we’re gonna get crazy, one of us won’t be sober.