In return for spending the night at my aunt and uncle’s place on the way home from a “picnic”party, I helped my uncle “trim”his new pool deck. He’s using pavers and we must have cut and installed over 400 of the critters. First time my hands ever “craved”hand cream. On the way home I dropped into my cousin’s place to help her install a new dishwasher. Unfortunately the old 3/8”copper tubing was too short so I told her how to use stainless steel-braided hose to complete the job. Tonight I found some instructions to send her.
Yesterday I was “locked out” of my account for allegedly “logging in too many times” to my free Yahoo! Mail account. My settings say to log-in once a day. So when asked, I logged in and got this message. Cruising through the menus I managed to get the password reset and e-mailed to me. Eventually I could log in again. Of course Yahoo! “care” sends these useless auto-replies. I could tell them what the problem is/was: somebody is “upgrading” the authentication scheme and it is ignoring valid logins. Anyway, I exported my address book and bookmarks to protect that asset.
Today the same thing happened — I was locked out! Very annoyed. Tonight I paid some money to “upgrade to Yahoo! Mail Plus. Now I can complain as a paying customer. The Plus gives me the option of having POP access. I just wonder whether this locking out, getting new password is just a ploy to get people to pay for their mailbox. Well, I guess after using their free mail service for, perhaps, 6 years it is time I paid something. At least the ads have disappeared from my sent messages and there’s an option to allow you to change the From and Reply lines. Now I can send something to work and it will look like it came from work.
My younger son lowered his average by showing mediocre to poor results on some of his exams as compared to his term work. However, it looks like his overall average is still over 70 on six Grade 13 credits. This was the criteria for full acceptance. So, I think he’ll be headed off to the University of Windsor in the fall. He needs to get out in the world and get “shoved around”by his peers a bit — a process called “maturing”or “becoming an adult.''
I guess it had to happen sooner or later. I was in-line skating home along an asphalt path which winds its way through the woods. I’d been through there a couple of days ago — no problems. Today there was a stick which I went around except there were a couple of muddy patches immediately after. So, I made an unexpected road rash stop: some abrasions on my left arm and much more on my left leg (a bit like the image). I skated home, cleaned them up and smeared antibiotic ointment all over the “affected areas.”After I have a shower tonight, I’ll try out those new gel bandages you can leave on for a couple of days.
My wife and I will be singing with the Cathedral Singers of Ontario 2003 for choral evensong and Sunday services at Canterbury in August. I thought I’d better start going over the 19 pieces of music we received. Over half the pieces are Magnifcat – Nunc Dimitis combinations so the words are well known. I’m already familiar with a couple of the anthems but, prior to our rehearsals in Stratford at the end of July, I thought I would familiarize myself with the rest.
Yesterday the temperature peaked at 30°C for the first time this year. Naturally I turned on the central air, again for the first time this season. Too bad I had decided more morning’s activity was to dig a big hole in the area where I’d removed the thorn bushes and move the forsythia bush. That forsynthia, though I’ve trimmed it back over the years, had feeder roots up to an 3 cm thick. After digging around it and cutting these roots I finally managed to pry out the rootball with 6’ piece of 2''x6''. The root ball probably weighed over 30 kilos. I managed to wrestle it to the wheelbarrow on its side and then tip up the wheelbarrow and take it to the big hole. Whew! It must have taken me 3 hours, sweating buckets of perspiration, to do this job.
The afternoon was much more relaxing. We visited friends, pround parents of twins born premature in April. At one point my wife was holding one and I, the other little girl. The proud mother commented that we looked like we’re ready to be grandparents. Don’t we know it!
In the evening my dad and his fourth wife (a.k.a., stepmother 3, Helen the younger (3rd wife was also Helen)) came for a visit and I did my sonly duty. I managed to get my father out on the deck to chat with me while I cooked supper so that my wife could get to know Helen by herself. Obviously my dad hasn’t told her much about his past: At the supper table Helen was telling us about her kids (in their 20’s) who are both back living at home. She commented about her a**hole ex-husband (her words without the **) ignoring his kids and rarely having anything to do with them. Hmmm, sounds like the way my dad treated us when he left my mom. He was very quiet for the rest of the meal time. Even my son commented that Helen was nice considering his grandpa’s such a jerk sometimes.
I finally took out the rest of the thorn bushes on the park side of the fence [1], [2]. I wore sweat pants, gloves, steel toed shoes and long sleeve shirt but still managed to get stabbed by the thorns on the hands and ankles. While I was tying one bundle a mere slip of branch sproinged near my face and stabbed my lip. The nerve! I was wearing safety glasses fortunately. The thorn bush I cut to the stump last year didn’t seem to recover so I’m hoping I’ll be as lucky with these nasty ones. Shortly, I’ll move the forsythia in the side yard out to replace those thorny bushes. The former shrub just grows too vigourously for the small space it’s in.
My dearest significant other of twenty-five years suggested going out for supper so we headed over to the Outback. I had the steak “special”and she had a chicken meal whose name escapes me. Could be the large draft of Rickard’s Red I imbibed. At the end of what seemed to be a long week for both of us, it was a pleasure to chat and have someone else make the meal.
A couple of years ago Bell Canada had a caller ID promotion. I decided to try it and have kept it ever since. Very handy to screen calls. So, now here’s the choices for telemarketers:
- Show your company name in the caller ID, say
A&W WINDOWSand I won’t answer. - Block your name so that
PRIVATE NAMEshows in the caller ID. Then I’ll harass you when you call for not being proud of your company name or for not being honest enough to show the company name. I won’t even consider your product.
It’s a Catch 22 situation for your typical telemarketer. We need to have a delete key just like we do for email spammers.
I thought I would make a very small change to the company website — just change the 404 error (file not found) page email link which pointed to someone no longer working at the company. Silly me, I thought the staging server script code was the same as on the Internet web server so I made the little modification and uploaded it to the main server. Oops! The people who set up the site had embedded (30 times no less!) the username and password for the SQL server dynamic document lookup in that particular script on the Internet web site. Fortunately the home page was intact, the newly uploaded script just affected all the individual content pages showing an ODBC error of some sort. Of course this begs the question of why the script developers didn’t check for database errors in their CFML scripting. Anyway we called the web hosting company to restore the errant file. I couldn’t seem to read via ftp from the Internet site only write or upload. Turns out, way back when, our firewall only permitted passive mode ftp transfers so my environment had been set up to use only this method. I hadn’t noticed a problem until now: this provider requires active mode ftp transfers. That may be the reason I couldn’t read from the site. Suffice it say, the provider restored the script file. The company web site was back into full operation. I downloaded the entire website, checked it all in to CVS so that the whole thing is now properly backed up and under version control. Whew! I can sleep better tonight.
I have met some fine people that I only knew as talking heads at upper management presentations when we explained that there would be, ah, minor difficulties with the external website overnight. Management agrees that “something has to be done”about our web presence but there’s no budget for it. Oh well, I’ll proceed (very carefully) with some of the requested minor modifications until such time as I find billable work to do. Perhaps I’ll have time to mock up a “new and improved”website using open source tools such as Apache, PHP and PostgreSQL or MySQL.
No real harm done, just a humbling experience for yours truly.
It was a hot, hazy, humid day last June 17, 1978 when I got married and lived happily ever after. To this older and wiser (!) gentleman (?!) it doesn’t seem so long ago. Except I have two sons: the older has been out on his own living with his girlfriend for a couple of years and the younger one will start university in the fall if he can just maintain his marks during this week of exams. I guess there’s some history there. I don’t remember minute details of that day just images: a fine wedding with an uncle as a minster, a music director friend at the organ, a tenor soloist friend to sing for us, many friends and relatives in the congregation and, of course, my ravishingly beautiful bride whom I hadn’t seen for a whole day.
I remember the wedding photographer being a jerk with lame, off-colour wisecracks but the pictures turned out fine. It was great reception though I think the groom’s speech may have been a bit incoherent. As it was an open bar everyone was anxious to see that I had a drink. My father-in-law had hired a small band with great music and my only regret is that the night just wasn’t long enough for me to dance with every woman at the reception. I hope they understood but I did need to dance with my bride, too. I remember we were too exhausted to do anything except collapse into unconsciousness on the bed on our wedding night. My wife was finishing up school so we delayed our honeymoon out in the Rockies until later in the summer.
Yes, I’m still living happily ever after.
Those creative writing thangs just aren’t happening today — so there’s just a bluebird instead. Tomorrow I have a meeting with the VP of Sales and Marketing regarding our external web presence. It will be interesting to see what he wants. I’ve looked at the log files and I don’t think we’re winning any customers with triple-W method.
A certain close relative who has been away from these parts for several years is coming to town for a couple of weeks. No-one here really wants to have anything more than a brief chat, if that, with this person. This person has remarried for the umpteenth time to a much younger person whom none of us know. I’m sure this “young”person is just fine; however, the relative has hurt and trampled on the feelings of many us off and on for over thirty-five years. Now, we feel like we’re being shown off as trophies: his siblings, his in-laws, his children from former marriages which failed, for the most part, because of this person. I presume this person has never been able to understand these wrongs as he has never apologized nor sought forgiveness. I treat this person as “just a friend”— only a relative in the biological sense but not in an emotional or spiritual one. That is, there’s no love and little respect in me for that person anymore. We’ll have that “friend”and his new spouse over for supper and a brief visit out of a sense of duty. Other than that, a bunch of the relatives will get together for a party to which this person and spouse will be invited. Will this person realize how close we’ve become over the few years, nay decades, without that person’s presence? Likely not.
How apropos. The woman at the wine store where I bottled my batch last night said some customers put their wine in half size (375 ml?) bottles just so they can bring one to go with their lunch. I wonder, would it make me more productive in the afternoon or would I be caught napping?
- It’s an incentive to show up.
- It reduces stress.
- It leads to more honest communications.
- It reduces complaints about low pay.
- It cuts down on time off because you can cure hangovers, from the night before, with another drink.
- Employees tell management what they think, not what management wants to hear.
- It helps save on heating costs in the winter.
- It encourages carpooling.
- Increases job satisfaction because if you have a bad job you don’t care.
- It eliminates vacations because people would rather come to work.
- It makes fellow employees look better.
- It makes the cafeteria food taste better.
- Bosses are more likely to hand out raises when they are wasted.
- Salary negotiations are a lot more profitable.
- Suddenly, farting during a meeting isn’t so embarrassing.
- No one will remember your strip act at the Christmas Party.
From T H E . M O U T H P I E C E Friday, June 13, 2003 email.
Today was a day much like any other except for the excess rain we have been having lately. The grassy channels beside the path were actually little creeks this morning. And I wore a rain coat poncho over me and my knapsack. Its warm enough (for me anyway) to wear shorts — my legs shed water much better than pants.
It was one lady’s lucky day this evening at the train station, she huffed and puffed up from the subway just at the time the train is usually leaving the platform. Today that train was a few minutes late.
It was my lucky day, too. I bottled up a batch of Castellina, a dark, full-bodied Tuscan-style red wine I had “started”eight weeks ago. Rosa at the Mosto Vinho store gave me a better quality cork as this wine has the potential for aging to five years or more. I’ll try and lay away six bottles, though whether they’ll last five years is a story for another year.
As I was low on work and my manager asked me if I might be interested (and perhaps I had a bout of temporary insanity 
), it looks as if I might be looking after some technical issues with the company website. There seems to be lots of great content but a prospective client would have (does have) trouble “drilling down”to the service or expertise they might be looking for. So a navigation and accessibility retooling is in order. The question is: can I retain the existing tools for which the company paid serious money to do this? And of course there are a tonne of stakeholders who want it done tomorrow morning. Certainly a bit of challenge and stress keeps your mind and body sharp.
I usually scan the sender and subject lines in the Bulk folder of my Yahoo email. Sometimes my son’s or my cousin-in-law’s jokes end up there. Can’t miss the humour. Today, there was a message from my father in there. Since it was in the SPAM folder, I knew it couldn’t be a personal note about his upcoming trip out our way. Instead, it was a poem and supposed e-mail petition from MADD. There were several hundred names. (I was thinking I could write a little web scraber app. in Perl and look up several thousand names from online phone directories and add them to the list. )
A quick search on Google showed that the message is an urban legend dating back at least three years. Even MADD felt they to comment. If my Dad weren’t on the west coast and me on Lake Ontario I could show him how to use Google and save some embarassment; not to mention some net bandwidth.
A bunch of us are going over to my in-laws to help eat my nephew’s “Christmas”turkey this evening. Apparently some companies still present turkeys to their employees. What’s a single guy going to do with a big turkey? I know it’s the thought that counts but I think a grocery store voucher might be more appropriate these days. What if an employee is a vegetarian or from a culture where turkeys are sacred? Anyway I’m sure we’ll enjoy.
Some people seem to want varmints as pets. Now there’s a bunch of prarie dog owners with monkey pox. These “dogs”got the disease from a Gambian giant rat at a pet distributor in the Chicago area. Apparently you can only get it from scratches or bites from infected animals and it is a milder form of smallpox. I’ll stick to keeping cats, dogs, song birds and tropical fish, thanks. I don’t have any of these animals, by the way. I just know people who do.
While I was running my usual 10km in the late afternoon I was thinking of one thing this 48 year old body has trouble with. Scrunching. That is, I was hunched over mounting 24 spindles in an 8 foot railing section on the garage floor earlier in the day and now my back is sore and stiff. Fortunately the achy, breaky feeling goes away but I don’t remember being like this when I was younger. Oh well, at least my deck is now 1÷2 railed. I would have assembled another section this evening but it darkened considerably, thunderstormed and poured rain so that it was too dark and damp to work in the garage. I finished reading the Saturday paper instead.
- Happy Birthday
- To my Dad out in Vancouver.
- Deck Railing
- I installed my first deck railing section today on account of it was a Saturday with a) no rain and b) no other activities scheduled. It took me three to four hours to assemble and install it. After working out a system I assembled my second railing set of the same width in just two hours. I’ll install it tomorrow morning. The main slow down is in finding stuff — I put something down (say my tape measure) and then spend a few minutes looking for it again the next time I need it. Perhaps I should have an assistant to keep track of my stuff.
- Didn’t meet someone I recognized…
- I went to Rona to get a couple of things for installing the other deck railings and recognized a person. An “associate”was nearby and asked this person if he needed help. Well, I continued on, looking for the things I needed. I remembered his first name later. As I was running home I remembered his last name. So, I avoided the embarassing, “I know you but I can’t remember your name.”However, I’m ahead in this game as this person didn’t even recognize me. Perhaps it is because I had more hair and no goatee the last time he would have seen me.
“You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.''
Olin Miller
Our relay team from Kinectrics participated in the YMCA Corporate Challenge 4 × 5km relay race last night. The race results are also posted. All afternoon it had been pouring rain and it continued even as I walked up to the subway at about 6 p.m. By the time I got to the Bathurst subway station and caught the 511 streetcar to the Exhibition, the rain had stopped. We runners just had to contend with a cool east wind.
This year’s race was two laps rather than the single serpentine lap of last year. I found this much better both from a runner and a spectator viewpoint. With the one lap you were out of sight of your teammates and cheering section for most of the race. Having two laps meant you could cheer on your teammates and, if you were next, you knew about how much time it would take until you should be “on deck.”It was too cold to stand around in shorts and T-shirt for very long. Apparently last year’s one lap wasn’t quite 5km while the two laps this year are.
We didn’t win — not by any type of calculation I can imagine, though I believed I bettered my 5km time from last year. However money was raised for a good cause and I got to know some of my work colleagues just a little better outside the work setting. And, of course, there’s nothing better than beer and pizza after a hard run!
According to our relay team organizer my 5 km time was 23:38. I don’t where a watch so I’ll take her word for it.
On their 30th wedding anniversary, a couple summed up the reason for their long and happy marriage. The husband said, “I have tried never to be selfish. After all, there is no “I”in ‘marriage.’”
The wife said, “And for my part, I have never corrected my husband’s spelling.''
I was out all day Sunday…
- Picked up my youngest brother, his wife and my “cute as a button”niece in North Toronto.
- Attended a church service in Canton (north of Port Hope) wherein we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the ordination of my uncle, the United Church minister.
- Attended a dedication service for a chapel next door to the church that has been at that location since the mid 1850’s. I also sang an anthem (River in Judea) with the choir from the United Church in Welcome. A friend always thought it was just a friendly sign on the 401:
until I told him there’s actual a village north of Port Hope called Welcome.Welcome Port Hope - Ate lunch (pretty hungry by then after two church services) in the chapel hall provided by the three churches in my uncle’s pastoral charge. I especially liked the maple sugar icing on one cake.
- Visited at my uncle’s place in Port Hope chatting with my aunt and uncle, my cousins, their cousins, their aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. It was cool enough to wear a suit in the morning but I brought shorts and T-shirt for the afternoon much to the envy of some of my cousins who’d forgotten.
- Enjoyed beer in the afternoon and pizza with ceasar salad for supper.
- Drove home in the evening dropping off my brother and his family on the way back to Mississauga.
- Woke up after midnight when my wife got in from her brief holiday in Texas. She had a great time and we discussed our weekend activities for a while.
- Very tired on Monday.