so the bastards laid me off, due to restructuring. they went for the some of the most senior people first and laid off 10-12 people who had been around about 5 years. they saved more money that way, since we made a few thousand a year more than a new guy. what a smart move in a knowledge-based company- a large part of my job was answering questions, training new guys and showing people how to access documentation, system resources and configure devices that they need to do their jobs.

today i noticed a problem w. my home connection and msg'ed a former coworker. they were in the midst of a major outage and 5 guys were working, all of whom were green as freshly fertilized alfalfa. the automated trouble reporting system for our newest, most complicated product was automatically creating tickets and phone calls and no one was available to take them.

another great decision on the part of the board. hope that when they start to lose customers, they see their mistake.

I'm glad I'm a man.

Because if I was a woman, and I found out I was pregnant, the first thing I would want to do is pour myself a stiff drink. And I wouldn't be able to.

Congratulations, Wendy and Paul.

Wendy must now treat her body like a temple, not that she didn't before. In fact, treat it like a golden temple, The Golden Temple at Amritsar. Nothing but curries from now on for you, the spicier the better. Make sure to use ghee and have it all with lime pickle and chapatis and a side of pickles and ...ice cream and bacon and chocolate and... cheese! and...

og.

My wife and I are guilty of pet names, inside jokes and cuteness that would probably cause a pwetty liddle bunny wabbit to want to vomit. Or anyone we knew if we did this stuff outside the home. Fortunately for you, we keep it in private. Here is an example of digusting cuteness: an email written to lisa by my alter-ego, the primitive caveman known as "Og."

og sneak out few mins early he think.
try be liberry 6 clock.
grunt

the cities of Europe have burned before, and they may yet burn again.

Apostatewindbag tells me that in Saint Gilles, Brussels, that gritty (yet nice) little multicultural district I visited him in which saw 5 cars burned by rioters monday night doesn't have the racial divides seen in Paris. In Brussels, everyone was rioting together in a collective spirit of disenfranchisement: white, black, north african.

As much as North American media would have me believe that this is the work of islamic radical terrorist-wannabes, I'm not buying it. Seems to me it is a whole bunch of poor people pissed off about being poor, some of whom are tired about not being accepted by their adoptive homeland, or even place of their birth.

Check out Apostatewindbag's posts on the European media and their spin on recent internal events. Makes me wonder what kind of press the now-heroic 68ers got over here during their days of glory.

"Hippies who hate freedom, cause widespread mayhem in drug-induced hysteria, then grow up to become the forces of government oppression themselves."

A Rough Guide to The Inevitable Casual Personality Profiling Through Place of Origin

Clinking glasses and beer spilling from pitchers. A CFL game on the ubiquitous big screens covering every wall of the sports bar, masquerading as an old english pub. Friday night beers with the crowd from work in a bar filled with other members of the downtown after-work crowd.

"So where are you from, buddy?"
Geez, here goes again. Uncomfortable looks around the table are exchanged.
"I'm from mars," he answers tiredly. Person who asked question in first place looks mildly insulted by the answer.

Jamaican: easygoing, but lazy.
Or perhaps he's African?: Sexist, politically radical. Grew up dirt-poor.

Not that ethnicity isn't important. I hate to take the perspective that ethnicity is completely unimportant, that our ethnicity doesn't affect who we are or how we see the world. How and where and by whom we are raised are important in forming who we are, but not all of who we are. Where you are from is often the smallest part of the equation, but the most loaded question to answer.

A quick look around the table revealed a motley crew of stereotypes to be had:

Greek: hot-headed, don't anger him or argue when he espouses an opinion. loyal to family.
German: outwardly artistic, inner fascist.
Whitebread, standard Anglo-WASP Canadian female: easy to get in the sack, good chances here.

Are we so pressed for conversation that we must resort to a quick judgement of personalty based on a cursory glance at one another? A quick sizing up by birthplace, ethnicity or accent (not to mention gender, height, clothing)?

Large-city Eastcoaster(New York, Toronto): pushy, overly businesslike.
Raised in small town westcoast: drinks Kokanee, likes to smoke pot and fish.
Grew up in Surrey: get him drunk and he's likely to shitkick you.

Lest I sound like a crusader of political correctness, or idealistic, easily offended proponent of identity politics, let me stop there. I just think we need to take a step back before we judge, or even ask.

And for those of noble birth, but no particular origin, other than whitey-white.
Canadian Euro-Mutt: easy to push around, nice, but a little boring.

"I'm not from Mars," he eventually said after the conversation had progressed through a few different drunken topics.

"I'm from Zimbabwe."

smelly selling agents

In househunting news, I had a place sold out from under me before I could take another look at it and decide to make an offer, and I got a look at a rotten basement in another place, since the tenant upstairs was (according to the sleazy-seeming agent) refusing to let people view the rest of the house, despite 24 hours notice given.

I walked into the basement and they hadn't even bothered to remove the old car seat, or sweep up the dirt all over the carpet, or fix anything. Walls covered in mold all along the foundation and it looked like someone had done a deep inspection for rot- with a sledgehammer. The south wall of house was rotten through from outside to the inner drywall, you could see through the holes bashed in the bathroom wall. Worse than the place I live in now and there was no telling what horrors were hidden.

The price for this prize? $438,000. Oh, and you had to bid against the listing agent, who clearly wasn't making any attempts to make the place look better, since he had a bid in himself. Bet he was offering less than $438,000. I'm still thinking about going to the real estate board with this one.

My score so far:

1. house in good neighbourhood- 2 appointments to view, stood up by listing agent both times, resident not home and when did come home, refused to let me in. house got re-listed for $20,000 more and then taken off the market.

2. good house, right price, wrong neighbourhood. if i am to live with no car, i need to be near the train. it sold quickly, anyways

3. 3 open houses in one day: 1 was awful and old and small and dirty with massive renos required, one was a horrid renovation, where the owner followed me around, trying to discourage me from looking too closely at the spray covering the ceiling tiles and other hidden evidence of water intrusions. i could hardly stand in the basement suite and I am average height. third house was nice, but actually listed at about $100,000 less than it could fetch- they were auctioning it off that tuesday, but if the reserve was met, the auction would never happen and you needed a $10,000 bank draft to join the game.

4. nice place, right location, but too expensive, considering the need for about $15,000 in basement suite renos. i thought about bidding low anyways, but the listing agent discouraged this, saying price was firm. then it got re-listed at $25,000 less and sold at midnight the day before I had my second viewing.

5. "come look at my wonderful listing for a rotten basement that looks like a former crack den and bid against me and a bunch of other realtors without having seen the entire place. did i mention my offer is being considered tonight, so don't expect to be able to make an appointment to view at a later date". i smell property flipping conspiracy.

"Bingo Jed had a light on"

The man who wrote "Big old jet airliner" the well-known Steve Miller song is dead. Paul Pena, the Genghis Blues guy passed away. I wasn't a big fan, but I has just finished reading about the tragic death of Falco- Hans Hölzel in a traffic accident in 1998 only to find out PP died immediately after.

As I mentioned, I wasn't a big Paul Pena fan but he is single-handedly responsible for one fo the best misquoted song lyrics of all time, right up there with "the ants are my friends, they're blowing in the wind", "'cuse me, while I kiss this guy", or "when a man loves a walnut" and we owe him a thanks for that alone.

I love misquoted song lyrics, I consider them on of my hobbies, along with Engrish.

I also thing Falco was brilliant- beyond just being an 80s icon, he was one of the first white rappers, without having to be a totally pompous, sexist Vanilla Ice goofball. He also wasn't copying black rappers, he just rapped because that was his style- IN GERMAN, no less. All of these horrible German gangsta rapper copycats who try to sound American have a thing to learn from old Falco.

I named my Linux server "Falco" - my wife refuses to give into my demands to name our first son "Falco", at least my server can proudly bear his name. Or maybe we can get another cool cat...

house-hunting 101

Came across this questionnaire on a website for first-time home buyers.

Wants and Needs

- Price range
$450,000 or less, if I can find it. half a million smackeroos, and I still have to fix it up. ohmigod. doesn't that get me an estate with an 8-car garage and private steambath with helipad in New Brunswick?

- Building style/design
not butt-ugly and completely surrounded by concrete, like some of the houses I've looked at.

- New construction
no. i can't afford it and why pay extra taxes to the government?

- Remodeled
no. well-kept.

- Fixer upper
yes- i want to increase the value, but not have to do major repairs or renovations.

- Minimum # bedrooms
2-3

- Bathrooms
1-2, not counting the suite downstairs, they must have their own place to poop.

- Family room
?

- Fire place
meh.

- Office/den
yes. i need somewhere to hide.

- Hardwood floors
hell, yeah.

- Swimming pool / Spa
yes. and a pleasure-garden filled with nubile young love-slaves. purely so that they can appreciate my flowers and fan me with palm fronds, of course.

- In-law quarters
if by "in-law quarters", you mean "basement suite", yes.

- Workshop
absolutely. Builder Bob be in da house! now where do i plug this reciprojigsledgamasawbigbadmofo in? wahahahaaa! ow!

- Central air conditioning
and a wet bar in every room, stocked with the finest champagnes and fine stinky unpasturized cheeses smuggled from europe in my cheese mule's secret luggage compartments.

- Parking facilities
the street is good enough for my friends. nothing but the best for the car owners in my life. more room for my pleasure garden.

- Yard size
big as possible. my own private fiefdom to fence and dig up as I please. arf!

- School district
yes. ah must edumacate my chilluns.

- Work locations
the whole damn place will be a work location until I am happy with it. you will never see me without sawdust on my clothes.

- Special zoning or location
must be zoned HCS-01 (hippies, coffee and skytrain close by).

Gronk! Hulk Smash! Ugh! Grunt!

The real destruction began this morning with sledgehammers smashing the exterior walls at 7AM. In murphy's law fashion, they began outside the bedroom and then worked their way to removing the last of the stucco around the doors around the time I was leaving for work, so I had to remove materials to open the door after realizing I'd been blocked inside the house.

shows in seattle

Many, many musicians worth seeing never, or rarely make it up to Canada. Some American artists can't, cause, well, they have "questionable character". Once upon a time, Paul Robeson was denied admission to Canada, for being too left-wing.

Today, artists are more likely to skip us, because we are more trouble than we are worth. So that means, Seattle is the closest place to see some shows that are worth seeing. A good friend of mine goes to shows in Seattle all the time and it's how he met his current girlfriend, who just escaped the land of George Bush to live with him here in Vancouver.

My friend is a music nut and I have to turn him on to the dark death-bluegrass of Gillian Welch, so that I have someone to see her with in Seattle. My friend's taste in music runs more to bands with names like: "Death Mullet".

You say FANNYPACK and I say Pants!

...let's call the whole thing off.

Apparently to British ears, the term "fannypack" sounds obscene. To my sensitive North American ears, "bumbag" sounds obsc...not right, anyways. My Quebecois coworker wears a black leather fannypack, if only he knew the awful truth.

The phrase i really, really want to steal from the Brits is "pants". Trousers are pants, so pants are something you wear beneath your pants-er, I mean, trousers. UNDERpants. I get it now. Some thing that is bad or ridiculous is pants.

I want to import that: "What? That is just PANTS! The most PANTS thing I ever heard! This place is the PANTS! Awwww, PANTS!

Let the PANTS begin!

Sincerely,

Mr. Pants

creepy, creeping, creepily

The security guard on duty last night was seriously creeping me out. I understand their job is to lurk, but everywhere I was, this guy was there. It was like he was expecting me to do something illegal.

Now maybe I have a guilty conscience, but I made it clear to him during our first encounter (right outside my home) that I live here, this is my bike and I am not the suspicious cyclist from earlier this evening. My housemates were right inside the window behind me, it was hardly suspicious to be heading to return a video at 8PM. Anyways at this point, he should have marked me as "friendly". He's not the regular guy, but he can figure out that I live there and he's not hired to watch people who live there.

Then I went to water the trees transplanted from my wrecked courtyard on the other side of the complex. There he was. He watched me water the trees. He followed me onto the sidewalk of the busy road in front of the complex were the trees were now and stood there, watching me work.

Then Chelsea knocked on my door to get me to sign something. I shut the front door to keep her cat (which follows her everywhere) outside and mine inside, since they were threatening to scrap. As we stood outside speaking, there he was at the bottom of my stairs, standing, watching us...watching...

I hurried back inside to avoid his prying eyes. I hope he's not there tonight.

True adventure can be had in your own backyard.

Cycling to Surrey.
National Geographic, Sept 2005

The first question one asks when contemplating a ride from Vancouver to Surrey is: why? There is a perfectly good rapid transit system in place which now allows you to bring your bike along. You could pack your bike into a train and ride to somewhere nice from the end of the line. Truth be told, sometimes one has to experience the urban jungle close up. Riding through the wilds of Metrotown with barely in control drivers swirling about you, one gets a chance to feel really alive that tamer places simply cannot provide. Between here and the mean streets of Surrey, there is an urban jungle into which only the most adventurous cyclists dare venture.

The next question to ask is: how to get there? The crumbling, ancient path put down by a long-gone Socred civilization that knew Grace McCarthy as Transportation Minister? Too broken up and meandering to be much use to the urban cycle warrior. A path strewn liberally with dog walkers and their feral pets, as well as treacherous hidden road crossings between the hidden temples and Mayan pyramids. Danger lurks around every corner on that path. It is far too dangerous for even this writer.

In the interests of saving time (the society grant won't last forever), the choice of simplicity has to be made. To run with the herds along the most direct route possible: Kingsway. To ride with the armoured carriages of bulbous steel, the rhino herds of motorists galloping to and from the malls and the suburbs. To experience danger firsthand, return from the shadow of death in one piece and live to tell the tale.

Continued in installment #2.

Kiss my ass, SpamBots

Word verification for comments has been switched on. That means anonymous comments can still happen, but require a real person to read a word from an image and interpret that into text. Simple for people, difficult for automated applications. Until someone writes an OCR-Bot. Hmmm...

It's amazing how much computer processing power it can take to do something people take for granted every day.

I could smell the bog fire smoke today. Hope it rains. Here's some musings on the labour conflicts happening in Vancouver right now:

In the CBC and Telus strikes we have seen corporations position themselves in an extremely advantageously long before removal of labour has occurred. At the very first inklings of labour unrest at Telus, "managers" were hired to fill positions that are typically shop-floor positions, such as installation and repair. These are the guys who wear toolbelts and come to your house to fix your phone wiring. Not a job typically done by a member of management. This in an already top-to-middle heavy corporation swelled the erranks of management. These workers were integrated into the labour force within the last year, accepted their jobs which were likely an improvement over what they were working at previously and, being used to the new economy, accepted what they got, knowing that even though they were being deliberately shut out of the union, they'd gotten themselves a better job. Most of these people probably had no idea that they would be called upon to scab during a strike and not given a choice, as they were technically management. Such an unfair position to place people in.

Scab- such an old economy, old-labour term isn't it? Like something out of an old Marlon Brando or gangster movie. Surely in this new workplace, this enterprenurial environment that is the new economy, where no one can expect the jib security and workplace solidarity of the past, "scabbing" doesn't really exist? These are just people deliberately shut out of the union organization by a company bent on saving dollars and contracting out, not people who are betraying their former coworkers, aren't they?

These poor unsuspecting pawns of the Telus conflict will likely be given the boot by their employer once this issue is resolved. Telus has been filling their war chest with capable workers for a while now, it looks like and when they get what they want, it's always the fat that gets trimmed. That's the new economy. Kind of makes you wish they could see it coming.

What's next, doctors are going to be replaced by hospital administrators trained to do surgery? Teachers forced to scrub the hallways of schools? The problem with threatening a strike these days is the bosses see it coming and damn well make sure the wheels are oiled and there's someone that knows how to make them turn.

So has the precedent been set that strikes are useless now? Hardly. But it does no benefit to the union movement to remove your labour only to see the company do far better than limp along. The media is always going to be less friendly to the union than the corporation, as cynical as it might sound. The corporate media thrives on conflict, angry faces on the picket lines make for good press. The police is there to make sure the picketers play nice. What the corporation is doing is sneaky, underhanded and as far as I am concerned, unethical, but technically legal. Not a pretty picture for the Canadian labour unions of tomorrow.

To steal an idea from a friend of mine, strikes are futile if you cannot shut the workplace down. Perhaps this is what needs to happen. Unions need to adapt to the new economy by hauling out some ideas from the old economy. Raise the level of radicalism, bring out the burning barrels and play the old economy game of shutting the place down. Totally. Doing things half-way only means people are going to lose their homes after their savings erode and strike pay no longer pays the rent or mortgage. Strike harder and shorter. At the very least, no one will be able to call unions ineffectual, bloated bureaucracies. What we are seeing today is the legalized form of early 1900s union busting, which was often violent, but now has become institutionalized. The cards are stacked in favour of the corporations more and more. It's time for a new radicalization in the union movement during this summer of labour unrest.

Fire in the Bog

To Quote David Zirin's political sports column, Edge of Sports:

"There is nothing “unnatural” about the disaster of New Orleans. When politicians smirk at global warming, when developers look at our wetlands and dream of mini malls, when billions are flushed in the name of war and tax-cuts, when issues of poverty and racism don’t even register in Presidential debates, all it takes is wind, albeit 145 mph wind, to expose a sturdy super power as a house of cards."
-------------------------------------
It makes me think about our at times short-sighted land use planning right here in BC and the tragic consequences it could have. Burns Bog would be much less likely to burn regularly if it weren't being drained at it's edges by industry and berry farming. Richmond is a bad place to build high-rises if an earthquake happens...

If we were to allow Burns Bog to function as a natural system, like it is supposed to, and clooect water instead of slowly bleeding it out through it's edges, it would reduce the fire hazard. How simple. Now if we could only stop dumping garbage on it as well.

I've hiked through Burns Bog quite a bit and it is a truly wild place to be so close to a city. Parts of it are completely inaccessible, unless you have hip waders, ropes and maybe are an olympic pole vaulter ( a method Europeans use to traverse bog landscapes). But on a walk through this private land that should be a nature reserve, park or other protected area, the impacts of humanity are constantly there, albeit often partially sunken into the peat.

Blog Spam

I've been getting spammed through my blog. I am so livid about this. This is a public statement of my intense hatred of spammers.

This post will probably get me more spam. Eff'in great.

In Soviet Russia...

BCParisTopia

I am at work right now (still at Radiant) and it is a slow day here. I have been thinking about writing/editing lately on the side. Leigh picks up extra cash by copyediting in Brussels. I figure I can specialize in high-tech/engineering/IT manual copyediting, as I have a familiarity with the language. There are some copyediting and grammar courses at SFU to help refresh my grammar and teach me writing styles other than CP style.

I spent last weekend at Leigh's parents visiting him. They are in the process of completing a home on Bowen Island on a waterfront lot. It's nice. It's a pretty regular home, sort of a modern rendition of an arts and crafts home, but the location is great and kindo of historic, as it was part of the Union Steamship Company's picnic grounds on a big resort which covered most of the lower part of Bowen. They look out on a little bay, with a weir/bridge across a lagoon which is a good 60-70 years old. Old by BC standards, anyways.

Lisa, Leigh and I launched a canoe right next to the house and paddled up-island. A few bays over, we found a spot where we could paddle out into the channel between the mainland and Bowen Island and drift back into shore almost to the rocky shore, then paddle back. We had a good supply of dark German beer tins and lime-flavoured tortilla chips. Except fothe odd ferry wake and overzealous speedboater, we had a relaxing time.

Discussing the merits of European cities versus Western Canadian cities, we imagined taking Paris, and dropping it just about where Vancouver is now. Having the culture and food of Europe, with the view of green mountains and islands we had in front of us with Paris just a ferry ride away. Does a place like that exist?

Anyways, it was a great lazy afternoon, drifting about as much as paddling

may you live in interesting...places

Just learned that Vancouver was home to the first hybrid vehicle taxi. Apparently we are very friendly to alternative-fueled vehicles here and known for it throughout the world. Ironically, we are a place where the large SUV is quite popular as well.

Vancouver is like that: home of the richest and poorest postal codes in Vancouver, some of the most conservative and most looney-left politicos, basically on opposite ends of extremes sometimes.

More later, when I figure out a point to all this.

loot.

When black people do it, it's called "looting":


http://news.yahoo.com/photo/050830/480/ladm10208301530

When white people do it, it's called "finding":

http://news.yahoo.com/photo/050830/photos_ts_afp/050830071810_shxwaoma_photo1


Why don't we pretend it's just "shopping"?

Update: Associate Press must have recieved flak for these photo captions, as I believe they removed the second one. Seems I wasn't the only one who has blogged about this.