this probably affects about 3 of you, but you’ll have that. Microsoft has decided we’re not using Messenger as of about March 15, as of last update. I’ve decided I’m taking myself off it starting, well, this morning. I barely use it as it is, what with most people either catching me on Twitter or firing emails at me–that’s not counting the folks that occasionally drop by in the comments. With Microsoft replacing Messenger with Skype, and me having virtually no use for Skype, this seems to be the right time for bowing out. I’ll leave Messenger on for a bit longer, but since I almost never look for people there and–well, see points above, don’t be surprised if I suddenly and mysteriously forget to show up online. Want to get hold of me outside of Messenger? You still can. I don’t bite–much, and provided you don’t do something completely mock-worthy. In the meantime, so long, Messenger. Been nice knowing ya.
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Windows Live messenger is going away slowly. This is your warning.
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How to be convicted of rape in 5 minutes: try and subpoena the victim’s computer records.
I’ve always believed there’s a special place in hell (note: no, not that hell) for anyone who’d mistreat a woman, be it physically or otherwise. You could be all around the nicest person I’ve ever met, but if you’ll raise a hand–or anything else–to the woman you’re with, you and I are gonna have a problem or several. And if you’ll pick someone up off a dating site, spend 5 hours escentially torturing them, then in your defense try and blame them for it, I take out a membership in the “bring back the death penalty” camp.
That was the tactic employed in the rape defense for thomas Bray, who met Jennifer Bennett through an online dating site and spent a good 5 hours ruining her life. At trial, his lawyer tried subpoenaing Jennifer’s Facebook records,, email, search engine history, and god only knows what else. They wanted the information from a month before she was attacked to a month after. Just in case there’s a something, you know, that could be vaguely interpreted to say she pretty much asked for it. It flopped. Instead of unsensored access to Jennifer’s–okay, public–personal life, the judge traded him the subpoena for 25 years in jail–where he’ll very likely spend a lot more than 5 hours on the receiving end of that torment. Consolation prize: it’s still longer than he’d have probably been handed if he’d just pled guilty. Yeah, that doesn’t do much for me either.
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Garlic ice cream, anyone?
Garlic is awesome. Ice cream, in small doses, is awesome. Put the two of them together, though? Suddenly I’m not so sure. That’s what’s being done at a restaurant in san Francisco, conveniently enough called the Stinking Rose. That recipe, just in case you completely lose your mind and decide to maybe DIY this bad idea, is online–along with a theoretically much better idea for garlic soup. Hey–at least the soup has stuff that, you know, actually goes fairly decent with garlic. If someone actually tries this, do feel free to let me know if it actually is as bad an idea as it looks on paper. I’ll be over here, taking care of a mashed potatoes and garlic craving.
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Dear winter: Nice try. Do better.
I love Ottawa. Which probably has a little bit to do with the fact I’ve been here for college once and here for grown-up reasons twice. What I find amusing, though–I can’t quite decide if I love it or wish it dead–is it seems like weather paterns up here like to play with us. The entire first half of winter, it barely dropped below freezing. And, if we got any kind of snow at all, it was that really light dusting that was just barely enough to make things go crunch and that’s about it. Also it usually took a hike a day or two later. That threatened to change near the end of December, but I’m pretty sure that was just mother nature screwing with us a little more. Doing the false sense of security thing, you know how it goes. My proof? It built up to the white smackdown of Friday and parts of Saturday.
I’m not calling the dumping we got on Friday a white smackdown–I’ll leave describing it in terms of epic badness up to the media. Why? I’ve seen a white smackdown. Lived through it. Blogged it. Then called in sick to work the next day and slept in ’til about noon or so–because, goddammit, they were right. *That* was a white smackdown. Friday? Practice. Decent try, though, considering it’s still got the first half of winter to make up for. And it did give me wicked nifty opportunities to test my ability to navigate a neighbourhood I know next to nothing about while capturing a wayward dog and dragging her home–yes, this is how I occasionally spend my mornings, okay? But it could do better. I mean, hell–I honestly expected not to be able to open my back door. Well, not without aid of a shovel, anyway.
Winter actually had me somewhat concerned. Then it happened. I’m still waiting on the snow storm. Nice try, winter. Now, do better.
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Ottawa goes for football team 3.0. Because… why?
A long long time ago, in an Ottawa far away, somebody somewhere thought Football in the capital would be a grand idea. It created the Ottawa Rough Riders. In theory, brilliant. In practice, they went bust. They came out with a sequel, and called them the Ottawa Renegades. They, also, went bust. That was 2005 or 2006. flash forward to now, and they’ve decided third time’s a charm. It’s not really a guarantee yet, but they’re pushing for it. And hard. So hard, in fact, that they’ve narrowed their choices for a team name down to 5, neverminding the fact it’s not even a sure fire thing there’ll be a team to name. and I have to wonder why there should be.
Here’s the thing from where I’m sitting. Ottawa’s hockey team’s doing, as much as it pains me to say it, relatively well. Sure, every game’s not necessarily sold out, but when the season starts, it’s Senators this, NHL that, and from day one it’s the countdown to the stanley cup–even if they have this nasty little habbit of puking about 5 miles from it. Ottawa has escentially 2 seasons. Winter, or hockey, and summer, or construction. We had a minor league baseball team here for a few years. Yet, unless you caught the sports segment of the local news station, you wouldn’t know it. They, too, packed up and moved elsewhere a couple years ago. And I don’t know very many people around here anymore who can say they’ve been to a game. Oh, and before Ottawa’s football teams decided to implode, you were hard pressed to find someone who followed them–well, unless you flipped to the sports segment of your local news. Somehow they can string together all kinds of people who’re all for even the least interesting team going. People just can’t get interested on mass in a football team. Not to the extent that one would actually be able to stay in the city. But they keep trying. Eventually, there has to come a point where they decide they’ve sunk enough money into a dead end project, yeah? So when do we get to announce we’ve reached that point? Because I hyonestly can’t help but think there’s a ton of money being thrown at redeveloping Lansdowne Park for not much. although, if football in Ottawa does collapse in on itself again, maybe they can convince the Ex to come back…
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Because macdonalds has to find *something* to do with their wifi.
Now this is an interesting take. A Macdonalds in Verginia has opted to allow customers free iPad usage while they eat. And they’re providing the iPads. apparently, the restaurant is leasing the iPads from a French company, who’ll be the ones actually in charge of their maintenance–and, presumedly, their replacement should some shmuck decide to get creative and find ways to walk off with one–they’re secured to the table, so creativity might have to be required to pull it off. I imagine anyone who does any kind of anything while mobile will probably still bring their own gear, if only because I can’t see someone checking their email on the restaurant’s iPad. But, hey, if all you want to do is shlept through the news or something while you eat, why not? The restaurant has apparently blocked Youtube, so shlepping through the news or something might be your only option if you’re borrowing one of their pads. Still, it’s an interesting thing to keep an eye on. In the meantime, it does make me wonder exactly how this conversation would have played out had our local one up here gone and done something similar. Hmm. Now I wanna test things.
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The Sun News issue, from a sports fan’s perspective: what gives, #CRTC?
You can be forgiven if you’re only now remotely aware there’s a thing called Sun News, nevermind that it has an axe to grind with the CRTC. Its issue, which is a fair one insofar as there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell the playing field will change in the near future, is it’s not on the list of TV stations that are required carried on basic cable. Other all news stations, however, such as CTV News Channel, have been required on basic cable for years. Sun News would like to have that fixed. Level the playing field, they’ll call it. Which is accurate, if in the wrong direction.
To be completely fair, I’ve never watched Sun News. I don’t even know if the service I’ll be getting next month would entitle me to watch Sun News–although, more than likely not. So I wouldn’t know if its content would or wouldn’t be worthy of being required carried on basic cable–whatever that means these days. but I do know we shouldn’t even need to be having this conversation. because there shouldn’t need to *be* required carry channels.
Let’s look at it through this lense. I don’t watch that much TV–even when I do actually pay for the service. My honest to goodness TV watching consists of Hockey Night in Canada (except for this year) on CBC,, flipping to TSN, or Sportsnet. Occasionally, I’ll swing past CTV–if, as is sometimes the case, they’re airing something I haven’t gotten my hands on yet by way of alternate means. But more often than not, if I’m watching TV, I’m not sitting in front of my TV to do it. Political stuff, when I decide to watch a debate or somesuch live, I can usually get online. Movies, TV shows and the like–well, uh, yeah. Got it covered. If you have to guess how, still, you need you some rereading of older posts. It’s just the live sports content that keeps me glooed to cable. for 3–or 4, if you want to push things–channels, Rogers wants to charge me at least $50. And that’s before you add in anything interesting, like the Gameshow Network–which we’ll need to be adding for the other one what lives with me now. And $50 is probably lowballing, only because I don’t have actual exact numbers staring me in the face. Still, $50. For half a dozen channels. Do explain?
The only reason I stick with cable for live sports is really, if we’re being realistic, even at $50 for half a dozen channels it’s still far cheaper, and far less restrictive, than the halfway offerings by the leagues themselves–which, given I follow both baseball and–maybe again in the future–hockey, would work out to costing me nearly twice as much just for those two. And again, because they like to do this to their fans, you run the risk of not being able to actually tune in the *local* broadcast of the games to boot.
In the entry linked above, I called out the leagues-with help from a writer over at Techdirt for what they’re offering–or rather, what they’re not offering. But when I flip through doing the kind of math that leads me to my cable bill for the month, even that starts to look good. When I also factor in that outside of Hockey Night in Canada, there’s not much on some of the channels I’m forced to accept in order to get the 3 or 4 I do, I really can’t help but have the very wee small suspicion that maybe I’m being just a little teeny tiny bit ripped off.
The incredibly sad part about this mess? If the CRTC was interested, they could stick a fork in debates like this with one decision. Eliminate the entire concept of channels required to be carried on basic cable. Eliminate the entire concept of cable packages–basic, or otherwise. If John Q. Busy only ever has time to flip on CTV Toronto for the news while he has himself a supper, then let John Q. Busy pay for CTV Toronto out of pocket. Does he really need TSN, YTV, Fox and the like to go along with it? It’s not like he watches them, after all. On a more personal front, I had a couple TLC channels on a package I used to have, back when I used to watch more TV. But I never watched them. In fact, I forgot I had them until somebody what had working eyes was scrolling through the channel guide one afternoon. If I’d known a friend of mine who does watch them fairly regularly back then, the outcome would have been different. But as it was, when my company left I called up the cable guys, figured out which package threw those channels at me and very nearly tossed it–until I heard it included Sportsnet. Then I asked the poor sap on the other end of the phone who in their right mind puts a Sportsnet in the same package as a TLC in the first damn place. At least make them vaguely related, guys.
Cable and satelite companies have channels you can purchase individually already. NHL Center Ice is one such. The NHL Network, which I’m pretty sure has a couple of channels, is another. Your favourite sports team probably has one. They’re not part of any package. You make a phone call, you say I want $channel, and on your next bill the $2 or $3 it’ll cost you for $channel for that month says hello. They have the technology. So why are we still paying $50 for half a dozen channels? And why is the CRTC so scared to fix that? I’d be interested in the answer to that million dollar question–preferably, without the political talking points. I’d also be interested in a lower cable bill. So, CRTC, what gives?
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And now, a Canadian conspiracy theory.
Have I mentioned that I do love a halfway decent conspiracy, if the theorist behind it puts just a teeny tiny little bit of thought into it? No? Well I have now. The problem with most theories, a la the type you’ve seen in the last few years from south of the border, is they’re pretty grounded in somebody’s imagination. They don’t even really claim any starting ground in reality, beyond whichever news story they’ve picked up on to remind folks their theory still exists. It’s how you end up with things like Sandy Hook was all about banning guns, or your various incarnations of the 9/11 inside job theory and whatever other crapola folks decided to attach to it–complete with the theory that 9/11 wasn’t actually a terrorist attack.
Not to be outdone, somebody’s decided to give “Conspiracy Theory Canada” a shot–because, you know, everything’s original up here if we just slap “Canada” on the end. And they’ve sent me my very own not so personalised copy. Up side: at least this one starts off somewhat grounded in reality. Wanna see how long it takes for the train to jump that track, though? Keep reading. Oh, and “Leon”, if this wasn’t the result you were hoping for, please feel free to try harder. A little sanity might go a long way.
Here’s the reason the supreme court found in favor of alcoholics and drug addicts as being disabled. 1. In 1995 when Mike Harris made a public statement that all ODSP recipients were lazy drug addicts and alcoholics he had to retract his statement. Now they found a way to make it real!
Hey, not bad. Relevant case law, plus the statement of the guy what provoked it. Decent starting point. Just one problem. It doesn’t exactly exist–or, at least, it doesn’t exist in any medium that can actually be referenced. Probably why you didn’t provide a reference, would that be about right, Leon? That’s okay. It happens.
2.Once the supreme court decision was made Community and Social Services Madelene Meuller what ever the F her name is was able to work with other policy makers to determine a way to help with the NWO agenda of a cashless society…they always work from the standpoint of getting the most vulnerable first. They were able to merge OW/ODSP recops and then classify all of us as being incapable of handling our own cash.
I must have missed getting that letter. Since, you know, I’ve delt with ODSP on more than half a million occasions. Still do, in fact. Yeah, they’ve got their issues–and I’ve called the now former minister of social services out a time or two for those issues (You can read everything I’ve put up here on this page). Oh, the two programs share an office in some cities, sure–for the record, that doesn’t include Ottawa based on my few visits there, but if that’s the new definition of merging I think somebody needs to call up Oxford right quick. Again, good try, but it kind of falls a little bit short.
If you noticed they brought out in 2012 the new food card to OW recips! They can only spend it at certain stores and only on food…talk about removing dignity? wtf! Then in the new year 2013 Tim Hudak piece of discriminatory scum…announces that he wants to implement the food card to ODSP recips too!
Um, waitasec. What? No. Yes, the conservatives proposed a food only debit card in 2013. But 1: it was for welfare recipients, not for ODSP. And 2: it was a trial baloon. One not too dissimilar to the foodstamps program in the US, if my reading of it’s correct–oh wait, now we’re getting into the motherland of conspiracies. I should probably point out that trial baloon’s got a snowball’s chance in hell of floating–but for much more, how you say, sane reasons. I have a few of them, but they’re for an entry where Leon doesn’t get my full attention. Sorry. Okay, next.
We will live in slums, eat GMO foods, where second or third hand clothing and basically dissolve into the Canadian governments planned and insidious genocide on disabled people.
… AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND on your left, reality’s exit sign. That didn’t take long at all. New World Order, government going all exterminator on its population for sport, the type of class warfare only really seen in the movies–all in one not very well constructed sentence. And no supporting evidence. Awesome. Also: if you’re on ODSP and can aford to buy entirely natural/organic/green/whatever the hell you call it food, you’re either getting way more than you’re supposed to be from ODSP or lying. Sorry, but that shit’s bloody expensive.
What amazes me is that; no one stops to think that many disabled people and their families paid into this system of support for decades and this is what we get when we need to collect? All I can say is; people working in government are fucked! and if we don’t look out for each other we’re fucked so there needs to be a group of ODSP recips that will get together in each area and begin to plan heavily for the time the sheep are brought to the slaughter.
That exceedingly loud sucking sound you hear is the last vestages of sanity leaving the argument entirely on its own, drifting somewhere between nonsensical and fiction–and having the door to both slammed on its nuts. Yes, yes, the government is the enemy. We hear it every 6 months or so–again, from the other side of the 49th. Thing is, they at least try to prove their point–complete with actually, you know, including some variation of verification, even if that verification comes from a fellow crackpot who’s got none of his own. All that’s missing from this mess is the class favourite–the media’s got everybody so bloody brainwashed that none of this shit’s allowed to see print, lest somebody up and get arrested, killed, or both at once. Oh, yeah, and quick everybody get your guns. But I guess some nutter stateside has a copyright on that. But copyright is government, and down with government–so come on, Leon. Where’s the blame for the media? Oh–I get it. They paid you off, right?
Yeah that must be it. Tell ya what. I’m no publisher, but I’ll see if I’ve got a contact for one. This could be a best seller. Spruce it up a little, add a bit more depth, throw in a plot twist or three, you could make millions. Then you could get off ODSP and no longer be on the government’s hit list. Or, in the alternative, you could just call the institution you ran away from and let them know you’re ready to come back home. A smart man would do that second one. I’ll see you in Chapters.
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Senderbase.org, 5 months later.
So. Here’s a thinggy for long-time readers. Remember the epic server move of August of last year? You know, the one where everything and its asociated user had to be shuffled off a server I no longer had any actual stake in inside of 5 minutes–and where I was met head on by an email blockage issue? Sure you do. But I’ll let you refresh yourself just in case you don’t. In the meantime, I’ll catch things up–because the stats tell me I’m not the only one with the issue.
In August, when I fired up this server, I was slapped with an IP address–well, several IP addresses, actually–that had a poor reputation, according to senderbase.org. Here’s the problem with that. Because they decided my reputation–which they don’t really tell you a whole lot about–was poor, several major ISP’s and a few smaller ones were permanently rejecting email sent to them with the ever so helpful message that if I believed this message was rejected in error, to please contact the recipient using alternate means. Helpful, but not really. I fought with it for a few weeks and got pretty much nowhere. Senderbase doesn’t actually have any way to contact them. No support address, or any real contact page, and the information I was able to piece together on a possible contact got me pretty much no response. A back and forth with the guys running the datacenter this server’s sitting in told me they have just as much luck with these folks. So figuring I’d deal with it later, after I finished ironing out the kinks that came with a move of this variety, I was handed a new IP address from a different block entirely. This one, at least, had a neutral reputation when I got it–and it’s supposedly only improved from there, but again, I have no idea according to what metrics.
So I set email to go out using only that IP address and pretty much forgot about it. Because it worked. so I saw no need to continue aiming guns at heads. ISP’s that used to take one look at the server and laugh their asses off now accepted email from that same server as though there was nothing at all wrong in the world. I was a happy geek. Still am, but largely because the damn thing still does what I told it to. So fast forward to this week. I’m doing a check on other things, just to make sure I don’t need to go behind the scenes and do some sort of wicked nifty cool brand of tweeking. Which, okay, is major amounts of fun–but only after generous amounts of caffeine and nearly as generous amounts of vodka. Or a vodrumoke, if one would prefer (all of 3 people might actually catch that reference, including the one what said it). So it’s during this routine scan for breakage that I decide, hey, let’s take the server’s primary IP address and run it by those bastards at Senderbase. Let’s see if they’ve wised up any. Hint: if you thought for even 2 seconds that they might have, I’m going to have to revoke your license to read this blog.
Not only did they decide the primary IP address of this server still has a “poor” reputation, but they escentially also decided to forget that I used that IP address for pretty much anything. Where before, I could get an idea of how much email has been blocked by Senderbase, so far as it’s concerned now, I’ve got nothing. Senderbase lets me ask it about my server’s IP, then sneers at me and says “Look, bud. I don’t actually know the guy, but I hear he’s no bloody good. Hey–that’s just what I hear, alright? Whatcha want?”. It can’t even tell me what the IP’s DNS reverses too, which is–well, odd and quite doable using the good IP, but hey, whatever. I just find it highly interesting that, 5 months on, it’s forgotten pretty much everything about this server except its reputation–which supposedly improves over time, but I’m still waiting. In the meantime, if you run your own mail server and actually rely on Senderbase to handle even part of your antispam policies, you’re an idiot. And if I can find some way of getting email to folks what use you and not actually have to go through you, consider it done. Now. About that vodrumoke.
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Beware corporate spying from China! … Or maybe not.
I’m going to blame the fact everything these days seems to be political when coming out of the US, even if it really doesn’t need to be. Because honestly, that’s about the only reason I can think of for a congressional committee, based on not much other than it wanted something to generate headlines, to go into an investigation having decided two Chinese telecom companies were involved in some high level spying–and improvising a report to say as much at its conclusion. The committee, investigating companies Huawei and ZTE, pretty much said the two companies were allowing the chinese government to use their equipment to hide trojan horses (escentially, software and/or hardware backdoors) that would allow the government to gain access to sensitive information, or to use that hardware to launch a cyber attack–basicly, bring down any service or website they so choose. Rather than coming up with some veriety of proof on their own, it was left to Huawei and ZTE to escentially prove they weren’t.
Leaving alone the fact it’s virtually impossible to prove the nonexistence of something–people have been trying to do that with religion for an age, and leaving alone the fact that not long after the release of this report, the whitehouse came out with its own and cleared the company, the question has to be asked. Did anyone on this committee happen to maybe consider that pretty much everything tech these days has spent at least some time in China before making it to wherever it’s now being used? Did no one maybe bring that up to the committee before they got the idea to hey, let’s go ahead with this investigation and see what sticks?
Of course it may be that, you know, being vaguely technical-minded that explanation comes far more natural to me than it would to, say, a career politician in his 50’s. But you would think that, you know, if China was actually on the lookout for ways to accomplish something like that, there’d be ample opportunity for them to do so without needing to expect that of one or two of their own companies who happen to have a market in the US. And you’d think at least one of these politicians, in their 50’s or no, would have somebody vaguely technical-minded on their staff who’d speak up about it. Of course the fact that they might not may very well be why we have things like this in the first damn place. at which point, look for one of those folks to be made aware in the near future that Apple makes pretty much all their iThings in China–well, until some point this year, anyway. I wonder how long it’d take for that investigation to unfold. Oh, wait–US companies with Chinese interests good. Chinese companies with US interests bad. I forgot that’s how these things work these days. Silly me. Oh well. The thought was fun while it lasted.