Hokey.

you route some packets in,
you route some packets out,
you flap the interface,
and you get some packet loss.

You do the Hokey-Pokey
and you call up Tech Support.
That's what it's all about!

"Blog(People)Power"

The CBC strike (and to a lesser degree the Telus strike) have been somewhat radicalized by Blogs. This excites me to no end, because it is people, albeit highly media-savvy people, wrestling their media out of the hands of the corporations. In the past, people like me would have had to rely on news filtered through more corporate media. It is interesting listening to the perspectives from the people that are directly affected, without heavy editing.

The workers haven't stopped doing what they love to do, just because they can't get into the studios anymore. They are the CBC and so are we.

http://www.cbcunplugged.com/
http://thetyee.ca/News/2005/08/22/CBCUnplugged/

http://radio.blogware.com
-Lots of CBC blogs here.

Studio Zero streaming broadcast (I hate the term "Podcast")
Joe Keithley and East Van's own Geoff Berner play live on the pickets.

An interesting note on BBC's union not really liking the fact their wireservice is being pressed into scabbing.

and the whole thing deserved a mention on my favorite: Metafilter

plus there is a couple great CBC employee blogs I think deserve mention that haven't been mentioned in these sourcest: http://slushpile.blogspot.com http://cannedclams.blogspot.com -keep your chins up!

as Deb said in her Blog- just wait till hockey season for the fur to start flying.

More on Telus later- my father-in-law expects they'll be out for the rest of the year.

today at work, Salesperson phoned the other techs and asked them to escalate a firewall issue for Big Customer to the configuration group. I phoned BC and looked at the issue. Seeing nothing obviously wrong, i told them what I saw and was told to escalate as they'd been promised. i called sysadmin pager #1, no answer, pager #2, same thing. I called OnDutySysadmin at home and left two messages, no answer. I called Manager#2, next up in chain of escalation, played phone tag for a bit then was told to call Manager#2, as it is his group that deals with configuring devices , M#2 tells me to call M#1. I call M#1 and tell him I am calling his technical guy, where I leave a mesg. This guy is going to have to call M#2's technical guy to make any sense of this problem. All along, we have been asked to escalate to M#2's technical guy, who is technically on call this weekend, but the interdepartmental boundaries have to be respected.

Sometimes I think I work for the smallest byzantine bureaucracy ever invented.

I called Salesperson and told her she should be the one calling people who aren't home to do things they don't want to do.

What sucks about my job, is I am the only one who cannot refuse ownership of customer problems. I have to listen to all their bitching and I end up having to fix the problem myself anyways, with more problems piling up. Yet, senior management will never realize this, because they think I can escalate things and people will take ownership of them and then I can simply move to the next thing. When things are escalated to me, they are not recorded.
When things are escalated to me, they are not recorded. Meanwhile, people's inability to take responsibility for their own work makes my work flow appear to stop in the eyes of management.

my rubble garden

The courtyard of my townhouse is gone for repairs until at least december, when I will get a nice new courtyard. Question is, will I still be living there then?

Update: the only plants I will be allowed will be in pots, which can look nice, but are way more work. my trees (I have 6 decent-sized trees) will be gone, I will be working with the arborists to save what we can. I am such a softy that I hate to cut down a tree or other plant that is healthy unless it is a trumpet vine, which I hate passionately.

Like everyone else, I want to kick the ass of whoever designed and built this place. As much as I like renovating, I wish I was just improving my place, instead of ripping it to the guts just to make it work properly and not grow mold inside.

I just pray it gets done quick, so I can enjoy the benefits. Then I can finally start my bonsai and otherwise stunted plant garden that I've always wanted. I have some little trees in pots now that would make ideal bonsai candidates. Now hopefully I can culture them without killing them.

My cousin Traci is now a real estate agent. She's also of German and Scottish ancestry. You know what famous person is German and Scottish?

Christopher Walken.

Interesting.

Me on the other hand, I'm pretty much German with a dash of Polish, which is typical for NorthEastern Germans. I always prided myself onbeing one of the few people I knew in Canada who wasn't at least partly English/Scottish/Irish/Welsh.

Anyway, I don't know if this is real, but if he's not a total bigot, I might vote for him (if I were American, which I am not). Perhaps with Bruce Springsteen as VP. I know he's got some politics I agree with.

Walken2008.com

she's smart, she's pretty, she can write well...

Well, I'm kind of biased, I'm married to her. I think I'm pretty lucky. Now if I could get her interested in washing dishes...And I can't link her from my blog, cause she's on Livejournal and I am a Blogger man. It's like West Side Story. "oh Libelle, Libelle, wherefore art thou..."

http://www.livejournal.com/users/blaue_libelle/

She's stiltwalking tonight:

web.radiant.net/phoenix

Lay off Bono and Bob already

#1. Rock stars should shut up and sing and not have opinions.

Firstly, their hearts are firmly in the right place no matter how ridiculous things get. They are fighting what they see as the good fight and I can't see them doing it for any other reasons than they believe it's the right thing to do.

Secondly, anyone who crosses genres gets ridiculed in popular opinion, yet we have managed to eventually accept Reagan as president, Arn as the Governator, Cate Blanchett as a serious actor and David Hasselhoff as a popular singer in Germany. Well, 3 out of 4 ain't bad at least.

Thirdly, you can only sing about it so long until it becomes either boring, uncommercial or preachy-sounding. How do you write lyrics about debt relief? Eventually, you have to put down the guitar and pick up the soapbox if you consider yourself a truly political person.

#2. Rock stars should not be entitled to opinions.

And neither should politicians, journalists, pseudointellectual criminologists, right-wing pundits, church bigots, neo-nazis and other racists of any form, corporate leaders (unless talking about the corporate sphere) and anyone else I didn't vote for personally, yet I am constantly subjected to the opinions of these people wherever I go, plus a few other random bigots whose presence I can't escape for one reason or another.

I'm soft on including journalists in this list, because you can only report on other people's opinions for so long before you begin to develop your own. I just think they need to be open about the fact it is their opinion, despite illusions of neutrality taught in journalism school.

#3. Leave the opinions on making the world a better place to the politicians.

That's worked well for us so far, hasn't it?

#4. They're just the guilty idle rich.

This is the best one I've heard so far, and it comes from the far left mostly, not from the opinion columns of, or letter writers to, major newspapers. I kind of agree. Problem is, no one in society's mainstream wants to listen to the unwashed poor at all. Certain members of the educated classes fare better at getting their opinions across, because of respect, fame, or the fact that our post-feudalistic society has pretenses of being a meritocracy and values the opinions of so-called experts above others.

But rock stars? Now those guys make history. A single lyric captures a moment everyone has felt, a sense of Zeitgeist, an opinion we share. David Bowie famously and controversially called Hitler the first rock star, a fact that Marilyn Manson has played with in his live shows.

I can see how someone might want a rock star to plead their cause, I can see how a rock star might think that massive fame could be put to a use. Rest assured, behind those rock stars are people who have worked for these causes for years, whispering lines in their ears to repeat to the media.

Guilty rich bastards? Well, yeah, Bono probably earns a large portion of the Irish GNP personally, but the Prime Minister of my country owns a shipping empire. No one in the mainstream seems to mind that nearly as much, but I find it far more worrisome.

Songwriter for the working class...my ass

Explain yourself, Mr. Springsteen.

Tickets for your upcoming show, where I can go hear you perform your songs about the downtrodden American worker in a gigantic stadium are priced: CA $95.00 - CA $115.00.

So for 95 bucks I can sit in GM Place's nosebleeds and watch the E-Street ant-band play through my binoculars. Tickets go on sale monday. If I get the HOB promotional code, I can buy one today.

I really think you need to explain yourself to your fans. What would Townes VanZandt have to say about all this? What about Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck, whose tradition you follow? I guess Woody wrote corporate jingles and Steinbeck is the main tourist attraction of Salinas. Who wasn't forced to become a corporate slut? Phil Ochs seemed to maintain his integrity- and ended up committing suicide. Bruce, I would never wish that upon you.

Poet of the working class, my ass. I'll stay at home and listen to "Greatest Hits","Ghost of Tom Joad" and all the MP3s I've pulled off the internet of your newer stuff. I like the fact you are rediscovering your singer-songwriter roots, I just can't afford you anymore.

Vancouver pub/bar owners are cheap "barstards"

I could talk about current geo-politics, in light of the G-8 conference and the London bombings and the new cold war brewing between America, China and the rest of the world, but what really burns my ass today is that I pay up to $7-8 for a beer in a local pub and I would have to go to a Belgian speciality restaurant to avoid the waiter just plunking the bottle, sans cap down in front of me.

As anyone who has been to Europe knows, every beer deserves its own glass.

Not just it's own fresh, clean glass every time you drink another, but a glass specially designed for that beer, shaped to bring out the maximum potential of the brew. Not the same old sturdy, cone shaped 3-ounces-short-of-a-real-pint glass that is the mainstay of the local pub industry. Not for 8 bucks a pint.

Despite all their pretenses of serving fine beers in good surroundings, the actual presentation of what they serve bites. There are finer glasses out there: for instance, Alexander Keith's *can* come in a nice, bow-shaped glass, but rarely does. The only reason for that is that they are afraid of breaking it before they've used it to sell a million slightly short "pints" of beer in sturdy, squat, thick glasses or even better, the bottle it came in, which is pretty much disposable and doesn't require any extra effort. Vancouver pub patrons need to rise up against this cheapness, rather than have the owners pass along any improvements, whcih should be standard practice, to the consumer.

I like smoke n' lightning...Heavy Metal Thunder...

Ok, my deep dark secret is I basically grew up in Surrey, despite my Euro and urban pretensions. I was surrounded by kids with Ozzy and Iron Maiden patches on the backs of their torn jean jackets. Since metal was the music of everyone else around me, I tried to differentiate myself with other types of musical identities: Rockabilly, Mod, Goth, etc and had the music collection to show for it.

Later I discovered music of other eras, other cultures and was a big world music guy after high school. The closest I ever let myself get to heavy metal was Iggy Pop.

My latest thing has been modern classical composers. I'm bored with most mainstream and alternative genres. I'm interested in music, in composition, and everyone keeps rehashing the same old 4x4/3x4 time, three chord music in all of 3 key signatures. boring. Even the indy brit-pop and the like. If you're going to do three chords at least make it political, or say something interesting and make it raw. Or go onstage naked. or in fun fur bikinis. but i digress...I've been searching out people who were searching out a new musical direction, adding to the canon, so to speak.

I have (Re)discovered metal. I was listening to Iron Maiden's "Flight of Icarus" and "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" just this morning. I threw the horns at a co-worker who is a metal fan as he walked past my desk and he snickered. Not your typical horn-thrower I guess.

Gotta love that galloping bass line and the over-the-top operatic voice. That and the mythological themes.

For all you Homestarrunner.com fans: "And the dragon comes in the night!"

what's the big deal-it's a PLANT, people.

A big news item locally is the looming extradition of Renee Bojee, the US citizen and marijuana refugee who has a husband and child in Vancouver(http://www.reneeboje.com). Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Woody Harrelson have spoken out in support of her.

She lives in my neighbourhood, I guess, and despite how the US authorities have characterised her, probably has done nothing to worsen the local drug problem. She probably goes about her business like any other mom and occasionally goes to the odd pro-hemp/marijauna rally where people publicly smoke, like a few other moms in my neighbourhood do as well. Her only real crime, as far as I am concerned, was being born American.

I guess for me the matter is that it is a plant. The product has unexploited medical and industrial potential and it's a PLANT. Like a tomato plant, which is legal to possess and use and sell the products of. I can show you a few plants that are dangerous, but perfectly legal. Why is this one picked on? Oh yeah, it has narcotic properties. Kind of like Morning Glory seeds. Hm, bust me now, I have some of that growing right near my front door where a kid could get ahold of it. Bust my mother for the beautiful Datura that has been doing so well outdoors in the Okanagan Valley. In fact, both these plants are more dangerous narcotics than pot, since the possibilities of overdosing and the deliriant effects are far more of a risk than with marijuana. Plus, I probably possess enough perfectly legal alcohol and tobacco to kill an adult by overdose right now. Pot just makes you dopey and sometimes paranoid.

I'm not even a marijuana advocate. I don't really even like the stuff. It just made sense to me during my visit to the Netherlands that the ever-pragmatic Dutch have stopped enforcing soft-drug possession laws and concentrated their efforts on the hard drugs. We should be extraditing some of our crack dealers, not this woman. Besides, Noam said so and I'll bet he never inhaled. Moore, I'm not so sure of.

bad boys, bad boys, whatchew gonna do...

For a laugh at the misfortunes of others, check out baitcar.com. Watch meth-addicted professional car thieves go to jail for stealing vehicles that their owners clearly place too much pride in, while trying to make money to finance their habits. Watch schoolkids who think they're gangstas get jacked-up by the cops. Watch some real pros break into a start cars in the time it takes you to fumble your keys out of your handbag. Watch a hilarious scene where a Scottish-brogue speaking RCMP officer instructs some brats who stole a minivan how to exit the car at gunpoint: "Drrrrivvverrr, ye 'ar ganneh exit thay carrr first. Passenger, ye'll bay nixt. Exit thay carrr noooow"

When I see cars like the one I saw last night, stopped at a pedestrian-controlled intersection, while I, ironically, waited for the bus, I am not at all surprised we have such a healthy car-theft industry. This car had spinning mag wheels, flashing neon lights, booming audio system and FOUR TV screens! One in each sunvisor and two screens pointing out the back window, which I can only surmise, were meant to entertain those who eat your dust. All I could think about was the amazing amount of money someone had spent. ON A HONDA.

With bling-bling like that, you're just asking for some "redistribution of wealth".

the Canadian Ultra-conservative Pundit Minority and the American News Networks who love them.

Representing only a small minority segment of Canadian political opinion, our right-wing puindits are nevertheless disporportionately popular. Why is this?

Perhaps these pundits among us represent a small (miniscule) voice of solidarity in a world which is increasingly turning against the US in it's support of America's wars, sanctions, foreign policy and general boorish attitudes towards everyone else.

Perhaps these pundits allow the news networks to present an alternative point of view in newscasts, which are beginning to show nothing but a world which dislikes the current US administration. It gets boring to just hear how much everyone is angry with you, don't you know.

The latest of these pundits has been spawned (and apparently spurned) by my hometown of Vancouver, BC, rather than some Midwestern business-ville. The latest "arch-conservative in a miniskirt" (I stole that) is none other than Julia Roberts photo-imitator, blogger, public-access radio host and shameless self-promoterRachel Marsden.

In looking at the website blog entries that must be what got her the weekly National Post column (Marsden's CV seems without previous journalism experience), one has to wonder as a Canadian from a navel-gazing cultural backwater-and I agree with her definition of Vancouver in some respects, but it is still a great place to live- if she shouldn't just skip Toronto entirely and move straight to the US (do not pass "go") where her ruthless and intolerant opinions might find a more suitable home. Oh wait, they already have Anne Coulter, who makes Marsden look positively small-'l'-liberal. How many bigots in a miniskirt does one crowded pundit universe have room for?

Guess Canada is the next best place, despite all us raging commies who want to give basic human rights to all citizens. Besides, Rachel, you can join the impending conservative Church-goer takeover of the Conservative Party of Canada. Me, I'll be getting high on medical marijuana with some immigrants at a gay wedding at a church that ordains homosexual ministers somewhere back home. Good riddance.

proof some people are too arrogant to love anyone but themselves, and keep a friend for any length of time.

If the spelling doesn't make you cringe, the egotism of it will:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/logik/235631.html

Can't believe I used to work with this guy.

has anyone ever read this thing?

This is me begging for comments from strangers. Maybe it would help if I told more than two people about my online journal.

Perhaps I need to make porn and post it here. That's all people use the net for anyways. That and sending huge files to each other via email. Usually that's just porn, as well.

random thoughts

National Geographic- good to read, too interesting to throw out, too bulky to store- the ulitmate white elephant.

Sloan- the best Canadian 70s band ever. Even though they were snotnosed brats like me when the boys were in their Bright White Sportscar or Carol was having her High School Confidential or when Business was being Take(i)n Care Of.

There is a history to the ever-changing medium of the WWW- the internet wayback machine -find out what a website looked like back in 1998- ancient history in brave new world of internet.

I want to read Cyrillic.

I am still embarrased by the fact that I have to prove I can drive to the government again, cause I let my license expire. I can operate most vehicles better than most people out there AND more safely. I've extensive experience cycling and some motorcycling. You learn to look far ahead.

I'm thinking about switching to Livejournal.

I saw Dancer in the Dark. What a beautiful movie. Damn, what a sad movie. One of the best btw a rock and hard place decisions I have ever seen anyone put into in any movie. A very human story. Life is sometimes beautiful in it's cruelty. Finding that beauty makes it worthwhile. I could relate to Selma's view of the world.

What I really loved about the movie was the music she found in everyday sounds, the sounds of industry, sounds of the machinery of our society that surround us and how these sounds formed the soundtrack of the musicals in her head.

I loved how the movie criticised so many things, like musicals from Hollywood's golden age, but paid tribute to them at the same time.

The only living boy in New York

I live in a multi-cultural city, in fact today I was the only white person on the bus during afternoon rush hour. Interestingly, only me and the driver were non-asian- he was indo-canadian. I was the only whitey, though.

Sometimes parts of Vancouver feel like microcosms of Asia. We are multi-ethnic, but seem dominated by particular nationalities. In my visits to Germany, that country has always felt more truly multi-ethnic than Vancouver to me, despite the misconceptions those who have never been visited might have about it being some kind of racist, all white society. It's more mixed and no less racist than Vancouver. We just hide our intolerance better behind our outwardly multi-cultural sleeves.

Never been to Belgium

Going to Amsterdam, Brussels and touring through Germany in April/May. I may take side trips to other towns in Benelux and/or France. Exciting.

I just renewed my EU passport at the German consulate this morning. It's much easier than a Canadian. No guarantor required. Just a couple of photos and a photocopied form and $63.00. Plus the little bastard' s good for 10 years, not 5!

Good to see that 9/11 hasn't driven the whole world crazy- just North America.

a cryptic message

011101110110010101101100011000110110111101101101011001010010000001110100011011110010000001101101011110010010000001101010011011110111010101110010011011100110000101101100001011000010000001110010011011110110001001101111011101000010110101101101011010010110111001100100






hint: http://www.networkofminds.com/networkofminds/binary.cfm

arggh!

Object-oriented programming! Classes! inheritance! singleton design! I didn't ask for this! yes I did! This was only the second class!

Why does it hurt?