cpirate

03:53 am: Westward Bound
So I'm doing like the song says, and going west for a few weeks. I leave tomorrow for Vancouver, where I spend just shy of a week, then it's on to Edmonton for the weekend for a cousin's wedding (the reason for the whole trip) where I'll get to meet up with a bunch of family and family friends, then it's off to Jasper for the remainder of the week to hang out in cabins with some of said family and friends. I return home on the afternoon of the 26th. It should be a good time; I apologize to everyone whose events I'll be missing in Montreal, but I'll be busy exploring new cities, eating awesome sushi, etc. Sorry.

And yes, I'm contemplating going mountain biking on actual mountains. No, this isn't smart.

Tags: travel

08:05 pm: Cranes In Action
So it seems the best crane-related idea I've heard in a while is coming to Montreal this summer. Now I just need to find out how much it costs, and round up 21 friends....

Edit to add: The CBC is saying that it costs "at least $20,000" to rent for a day, so even just going up for an hour might be pricey. I'll keep investigating.

Tags: cranes

03:59 pm: Cancelling Bell DSL, a Journey
3:57: Call Bell
3:57: Encounter Emily. Say "I want to cancel DSL service"
3:58: "OK, you want to cancel home phone service."
3:58: Phone rings. Get put on hold.
4:00: Phone is answered (in French) by the "Home Phone Loyalty Center". After establishing that I have no home phone, have no cable TV, and that he can't do anything at all for me, he takes my name and Sympatico user ID.
4:02: On hold
4:05: My agent comes back, checks that I'm still here, then starts talking in French to a colleague who's faintly audible on the line, apparently trying to make sure my next agent is Anglo. At least I know the call center isn't outsourced.
4:05: On hold.
4:07: Talking to the right person. Say I want to cancel. Give my name, Sympatico user ID, and address.
4:08: Explain reasons.
4:09: Silence.
4:10: Agent is presumably trying to make sense of my mangled account.
4:11: Apparently I'm on a contract until Sept 2009.
4:15: Escaping the expensive crappy contract I didn't sign will cost me $100. Money well spent. The alternative is a $5/month discount on my horribly overpriced service.
4:16: On hold.
4:21: Is there anything they can do to keep me as a customer?
4:25: No.
4:25: An extra $10/month discount for the next 6 months doesn't cut it.
4:26: My account will be cancelled on July 16. Have a good day.
4:27: Realize I could have saved $10 if I'd cancelled part of my service I won't need for the next month. Accept that $10 isn't even close to worth the hassle of calling back.

Victory! Why do I feel like I need a drink?

03:51 pm: Q Taping
For any fellow CBC Radio One addicts, Q will be in Montreal next week, and will be taping a show at the SAT next Thursday the 26th at 5:45. Tickets are free, and in addition to the usual sorts of Q entertainment, will get you performances by Joe Lovano & Hank Jones, Gregory Charles, Miracle Fortress, and Creature. Anyway, if anyone else is going, let me know.

Tags: cbc radio

04:01 pm: Fringe Notes
So if you've been wondering where I've been in the past few days, the answer, as it so often is at this time of year, is Fringing. Some notes on shows we've seen:

• Acné Japonaise: Like watching four Japanese psychological horror films in an hour. Good, but intense (and in French).
  
• Blastback Babyzap: Hilarious, as always.
• Busty Rhymes: Good songs, OK poetry, mediocre stand-up. The show was saved by some very-above-average audience participation, but it could have gone badly.
• Degrassi! The Musical: If you heard the title and said to yourself "OMG I must see it", then you must. The nostalgia factor is off the charts. Unfortunately the songs are mostly slow and dull, and the whole thing felt rather pointless.
• Dishpig: A well-performed show that's very engaging, but also felt a bit pointless at the end.
• Even Steven: Good performances, but what little comedy there was felt really out of place. This made the rest feel kind of tedious.
• Greed: A fairly strange tale, but I enjoyed it. I think the script was a lot better than the audience was giving it credit for.
• Identity Crisis: Unlike the inFlux Dance works of years past, this is only two people without as much of an overall theme. This means it's merely a good dance piece, instead of their standard super-amazing productions.
• Mating Rituals of the Urban Cougar: Charming and engaging performance poetry. The stories and such in between the poems were also very well done.
• Nile Séguin is Hondomania: Hilarious stand-up, like in his previous appearances. There were a few jokes I recognized from previous shows, but they were still well-placed and there's a lot of new material.
• Peg-Ass-Us: Enormous amounts of fun. But let's just say it's for mature audiences only.
• See Bob Run: Much darker than I was expecting, but I still liked it a lot. Very well acted.
• Teaching the Fringe: This is being hyped beyond description, mainly by The Gazette, it seems. It's still good, but just try to keep your expectations grounded.
• The Beekeepers: Dark and claustrophobic, in a good way. The tiny venue really helps here, though you'd be well advised to go on a cooler day or after sundown. You'd also be well advised to get tickets on the early side, as the tiny venue virtually guarantees sellouts.
• The Diaries of Adam and Eve: There were a few interesting scenes, but with absolutely nothing to tie them together, and no kind of overall point, the whole thing was very frustrating. The scenes also got longer and more boring as it wore on. Mercifully, it's only 60 minutes instead of the advertised 90, though all in all I'd prefer having spent 0 in there.

We don't have many more must-see shows left to cover - we still haven't seen The Cody Rivers Show, Barry Smith, T.J. Dawe, Zeppelin was a Cover Band, Die Roten Punkte, or the ever-awesome Jem Rolls, but that still leaves a lot of time for random shows. Should be fun!

04:33 pm: Monitor up for grabs
So I find myself with two things:

1. A 19" CRT monitor I don't use any more, and
2. A car until next Friday.

If anyone in town needs a monitor at all, let me know, and I can even drop it off for you. It's actually quite nice, it runs at 1600x1200 perfectly fine, and has been a total workhorse for me for years. I only got an LCD to reclaim some desk space.

12:53 am: Decline of Civilization
The scene: a sports bar.

In one room, the crowd cheers wildly as steroid- and/or silicone-enhanced "wrestlers" pretend to battle for the "sports entertainment" championships. We dub one contender "Captain Emo"; when he loses, the snarky comment is that at least he'll have something to go home and cry about.

In the other room, the wall of TVs has a variety of options, whose collective intelligence level is uninspiring at best. Memorable shows include minor-league hockey, people attempting to simultaneously kill both themselves and the planet doing stunts on snowmobiles, ads for spectacularly mindless movies, and a documentary, complete with CG visuals, showing exactly what happens when one is punched in the groin. For variety, they compare the relative effects of a hockey stick vs. a baseball bat, vis-a-vis hitting someone in the face.

At some point we realized that we were getting a front-row seat to the decline of civilization. This then inspired us to watch Idiocracy, which was funny, but hit rather too close to home.

Tags: decline of civilization

02:22 pm: Banking Fees, The Ridiculousness Thereof
A few days ago I ran across an interesting story from Britain about bank customers and consumers rights groups getting mad about some rather obnoxious banking charges. We get that here in Canada, that's fairly normal, though the banks' rationalizations are pretty spectacular here ("it's not a penalty charge, it's a fee for a service. That you can't refuse").

But in this case, they're actually taking the banks to court, and it looks like they've got a reasonable chance of winning. Why is it we never see anything nearly so successful here? Is it due to limp consumer protection laws? Is it the stereotypical Canadian niceness and non-confrontationalness that keeps us out of the courts? Do we just like to grumble rather than do anything effective?

05:33 pm: Winter Wonderland, Activities Therein
I went out cross-country skiing today for the first time this year. There's some construction or something around the cross on the mountain; this turns one of the best parts of the trail up there, a lovely longish curvy downhill, into a ludicrously short, steep, icy deathtrap. With a tree at the bottom. At least they put in an alternate route.

I also broke the spike off one of my poles, but I'm not too broken up as (a) poles are cheap, (b) one of my poles was already bent, and (c) I didn't much like my old poles anyway after they ate a pair of gloves. Maybe this time I'll get some that are slightly less cheap. Or maybe I'll be lazy and put up with a missing spike for a while.

Otherwise conditions were great, I thought I'd freeze but there was no wind so it was fine.

Other upcoming activities:

• More XC skiing, of course.
• Skating - I finally got myself some skates today, and I need to give them an on-ice test this week while I can still return them.
• Downhill Skiing - I'm thinking of organizing a trip to Mont Tremblant sometime this winter.

Anyone interested in joining me in any of the aforementioned activities should let me know.

10:35 pm: Trip Photos
For the curious, photos of my Europe trip last summer have finally made their way to my Flickr account.

Tags: travel

10:13 am: Work Update
People keep asking me about these things, so I figured I should get on top of it this time and let everyone know in advance. Having (almost, really, it's just about done) finished up some contract work I was doing for apenwarr, I'm continuing in the "I can't escape my former co-workers" theme by taking on some contract work from NITI proper. I'm told it'll be for a couple of months, though it's the type of contract where that could be a bit shorter or longer, depending on how things play out.

Tags: work

01:08 pm: Lost Luggage Solidarity Beard
Hooray! I just got a call that my lost luggage will be delivered sometime this afternoon. That's good for two reasons:

(1) I have an excuse for hermiting inside all afternoon and not going out in the cold rain, and
(2) my lost luggage solidarity beard is getting a bit out of hand - to avoid any stupid security freakouts about mysterious liquids, I packed my toiletries (including my razor) in my checked bag.

Tags: travel

06:24 am: All you need to know about my trip back to Montreal
All you need to know about my trip back to Montreal on Monday: my route was St. John's -> Halifax -> Montreal, and the last time I saw my luggage was Monday afternoon in Toronto. I guess the fog made it hard to see my bag.

Tags: travel

10:21 am: Oh goody
Air Canada's current flight schedule operational outlook:

Montreal

• Air Canada's morning operation may be impacted by forecasted winter operational conditions. Flight disruptions may result.

Halifax

• Air Canada's operation may be impacted by forecasted strong wind conditions. Flight disruptions may result.

St. John's

• Air Canada's operation may be impacted by forecasted winter operational conditions. Flight disruptions may result.

My itinerary: Montreal->Halifax->St. John's. Doh.

12:48 am: Homeward Bound
Weather forecasts you don't really want to be reading for your airline destination:

Low -14. Snow changing through ice pellets and freezing rain to rain late in the morning. Snow and ice pellet amount 5 cm. Rainfall amount 10 to 15 mm. Blowing snow in the morning. Fog patches in the afternoon. Wind southeast 70 km/h gusting to 100 becoming southwest 40 gusting to 60 in the afternoon. High 6.

Oh, Newfoundland.

On the upside, travel-wise, today I got to ride on the STM's Art Car, not even once but twice. It's insanely awesome. A shame I was only going two stops both times.

04:45 pm: Bacon Ice Cream Remains At Large
For those people reading who obsess about such things, we have the bacon-flavoured chocolate bar. The radio is telling me you can find them around town (at La Vieille Europe, or somewhere on Monkland), or apparently order them from the website.

Tags: bacon, chocolate

06:50 pm: Vista
pcolijn: Forget asking if anyone tried to use Vista on a couch with a remote. I'm wondering if anyone tried to use it at all. My new laptop came with Vista, and for a couple of reasons I left it on for a few weeks. One of the main reasons was sheer curiosity - everyone was saying it was terrible, but I couldn't believe it was all that bad. To cut to the chase, it most certainly is; I fairly quickly came to the conclusion that it was a giant step backwards from Windows XP. I don't know who in their right minds would pay to upgrade, I'd go out of my way to get XP in preference.

First of all, I have to mention the most appalling aspect, which was the speed. It was positively glacial. It could take a couple of minutes to resume from sleep, and sometimes it would just get unresponsive for a little while. It was never snappy. Now granted, a large part of this is because my laptop's hard drive is rather slow, but it had a gigabyte of ram, there's no real excuse for the amount of swapping it was doing. If I'd stuck with Vista, I'd have been basically forced to get another gig or two of RAM, whereas Ubuntu runs like a total champ with what I've already got.


Redundant DialogsThen there's just so much WTF-ery on the go with the UI that it truly boggles the mind. Here you can see the two different dialogs for changing the theme. If you use the most obvious approach to turning the fancy Aero Glass theme on and off, you get one of them when Aero is active, and the other when Aero is disabled. I can't even begin to imagine why they have the two different ones, and furthermore why they're so similar but gratuitously different in design. Then there's the whole issue of how the Control Panel changes itself around when Aero is enabled, giving you different UIs in different situations. I'm sure that's going to be a real barrel of laughs for the people trying to write step-by-step instructions.


The Thin Teal LineThen there's Aero Glass itself. It's pretty enough, I guess, if you don't mind the thumbnails for the taskbar entries being occasionally kind of garbled. Oh, and as long as you don't try to change the colour away from black or blue. If you do, you'll then notice the unchangeable teal line that borders all the Aero Glass windows. You can't really see it in the thumbnail here, but it's pretty obvious in the larger versions, and even more distracting in real life.

Other bonus craziness in this screenshot:

• This is one of the Control Panel dialogs that disappears in the Classic theme.
• I had set the desktop background to fit the whole screen, but occasionally when waking up from sleep it would resize itself as you see here.
• The battery charge display in the task bar looks pretty sickly: this is because it's mostly transparent, along with the task bar itself. If you put a white window behind it, it becomes unreadable. To be fair, this isn't Microsoft's software, it's part of Lenovo's crappy bundled Windows drivers and software.

So congratulations Microsoft. You've spent the past 5 years making an operating system that's unusably slow and completely insane. Maybe in a year or two computers will come with 4 gigs of RAM by default and it'll run at a decent speed, but even then I'm not sure you could pay me enough to ever touch it again. If you're in the position of getting yourself a new computer, save yourself a lot of hassle and get something else. Anything else. Linux is even free!

01:15 am: A Tale of Two Cell Phones
I'm in the middle of getting a new cell phone. Not that there was anything especially wrong with my old one - sure, it recently turned 6 and the battery isn't so hot, but it got the job done - it's just that Bell managed to infuriate me beyond description. Not to get into it too much, but suffice it to say that in one phone call, the guy I was talking to managed to lie to me about the DSL plan I used to have, lie about the one he was signing me up for, lie about the price, and mangle my account in their system. So about a month later I discovered that instead of owing them less than before, I owed about twice as much, and just for fun they'd sent part of my account to collections even though they had my (still perfectly valid) credit card on file. *headdesk*. Word to the wise: if you still have Bell's unlimited DSL account in Quebec, and they ask if you want to change, just say no.

So anyway, I'm in the middle of switching cell phones. Attempt #1 was with Virgin: they have by far the most suitable plans for me, generally seem to be the most coherent cell phone company, and gave me what looks to be a totally tolerable phone, but it seems that my apartment lives in the middle of a sizable hole in their coverage. This means that my phone, which is great for everything else (including outbound calls, somehow) doesn't ring in my apartment. Oops. So if you've been trying to call me, it's not me who's ignoring you, it's my phone.

On the upside, it seems just about everyone who isn't Bell gives out free voice mail to pay-as-you-go people, so you can leave a message that I'll get next time I wander somewhere where my phone can talk to the outside world. Hopefully I'll get get something working out of the remaining crappy choices by this weekend. Remind me again why cell phone service in Canada is so uniformly awful?

Tags: cell phone

03:07 am: Reply To List extension version 0.3.0 released
It doesn't come up much, but on occasion I poke at an extension to Mozilla Thunderbird that adds a Reply To List button, to make life sensible when you're dealing with mailing lists.

I've just released version 0.3.0, featuring:

• No more dependencies on any additional extensions.
• Automatic updates from Thunderbird's default auto-upgrade system.
• The Reply To List icon dims along with the icon's text when there's no list to reply to.
• New Portugese, French, and Spanish translations.

If you're interested, all the details are at the extension's home page.

But even if you're not interested, I still have a favour to ask: so far I've got translations for English, French, German, Spanish, and Portugese, but I'm always interested in more. If you feel capable of translating two very short phrases ("Reply To List" and "Reply only to the mailing list and not the sender") into any other language, please let me know. I can't offer much in return, other than a bit of credit if you want, but I think it's cool to be available in as many languages that I can't speak as possible.

[Edit 2008-07-16: Non-friend comments screened due to very strange spamming.]

Tags: replytolist

12:07 pm: Awesome silliness
It's reasonably rare that I go to plays outside of the Fringe, but angorian managed to get me to go to Clean Irene and Dirty Maxine last night. In short, it was awesome. As billed, it really does play out like a combination of Edward Gorey and Dr. Seuss. Maybe throw in a bit of Roald Dahl. It's astoundingly fun; if the sound of any of that appealed to you in the slightest, you should definitely try to check it out before Saturday.