What I’m Blogging

It seems like only yesterday. A moment of glory etched into my young brain via a ten inch black and white TV set. On this day in 1967, Toronto wins best-of-seven series 4-2 defeating the Montreal Canadiens and takes the Stanley Cup. [sigh]

Canada Office Geese

Like the swallows to San Juan Capistrano, or the hot dog vendors to the corner of Yonge & Bloor streets in downtown Toronto, nothing says spring more than the return of the Canada geese to the television station. It won’t be long until there is nesting and the pitter patter of tiny waddlers all around the parking lot.

On the downside, there is a lot of shoe cleaning to do.

I spent a year at work this March. Sure it wasn’t a linear temporal year, but somewhere in the vast universe of reality and the rest, I aged at twelve times the rate of normal. The “Bug Hunt” from the 4^Th was the catalyst for this cycle of aging, how the company and I reacted was the cause of my disappearance from the face of the earth. Objects moving faster than time do not appear in the visual spectrum, nor can they be heard. In a time warp, no one can hear you scream.

PCs were scanned; networks secured; nasty bugs terminated with extreme prejudice. It’s nice and pristine now, at least until the clever north wind blows in the next disgruntled hacker bent on mayhem.

Presently, it appears that time and I are back in sync, but technology and work stand ever ready to tear a rip in time again. The question this time is how will I react to it?

Poem: “The Art of Disappearing” by Naomi Shihab Nye from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. © The Eighth Mountain Press.

The Art of Disappearing

When they say Don’t I know you?
say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say We should get together
say why?

It’s not that you don’t love them anymore.
You’re trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven’t seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don’t start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

I hate Windows. I hate large corporations that deploy and use Windows. I hate it more when they do so without the benefits of real security and anti-virus software. And “Oh ya”, I hate people who code viruses and trojans.

…minutes, hours, days all meld together…

For the last week the team at the office has been battling an infection on a massive scale. Several of the little buggers got loose in the TV Land network and now the cries of “unclean” echo from coast to coast. Minutes, hours, days all meld together, as the task of clean up expands to fill all available time. Long days, little sleep, and an inability to perform any other activity has taken it’s toll and I spent the majority of my weekend “off” sleeping.

The Company has hired an army of contractors to patch and clean their thousands of machines. Vendors are lining up to pitch the latest and greatest security offerings. The economic fallout from it is going to be huge.

I get rotated back into the line tomorrow. Hopefully the madness will have subsided by then, but I’m, as ever, not hopeful.

It’s been fun Microsoft. From the heady days of Windows 3.1, through the rock star arrival of Windows 95, 98, Me, 2000, and XP (Home and Pro). We’ve had some times haven’t we? Remember when there were 20 diskettes for an install? But sadly all good things must come to an end.

…cash in my wallet…

You see, old friend, we’ve come along way together, but I just can’t go down this new road with you. I just can’t bring myself to put aside my completely serviceable laptop to take in this new “Vista” with you. You always seem to want more; more memory, more horsepower, more money. Well I just don’t have it. Now don’t get all upset… and no I’m not going to get one of those Apples either. Even though all the cool kids want one, they just want more too…

You go ahead into your bright future… I’m just going to stay here with what I have, my new penguin friend Linux, my old trusty laptop, and my cash in my wallet.

There’s a saying in the IT world, “The install expands to fill all available time” and my recent work experience bears evidence to the truth of the maxim. My particular install is absorbing all time around it. I’m expecting a call any moment from some institute of advanced quantum physics as there must be a rip in the space time continuum as a result.

…some ten days have passed by in the process…

It would seem to be a simple thing; install server, load OS, load application. It isn’t. The open source version of the application works on one OS, but the released version of the application doesn’t. Reboot, reformat repeat… several times.

You fiddle with it, you tweak it, and you finally get the damn thing running. It’s almost a shame to let the users at it, because you know they are just going to break it. But oh well what can one do? Then you look up from your desk, and realize that some ten days have passed by in the process. Bloody hell! How did that happen?

Time to reintegrate into what ever is left of my life…

Waiting for Spring

OK. It’s official. Winter needs to go away. Now. I know I lamented the lack of snow over the December holiday season. I know it’s a stereotypical Canadian thing to have winter. But it’s been so freaking cold for so freaking long that I’m saying “Uncle.”

The groundhog said it was coming soon. I say not soon enough. Spring or global warming, whichever comes first. OK by me.

I‘ve been meme’d. Tammi wants me to take out a contract on myself. My first thought was to invite myself to dinner, and during the conversation I’d excuse myself and go to the bathroom. There I would retrieve a cleverly hidden a revolver, placed by me earlier… imagine the surprise on my face when I returned to the table with that! It would be a good clean hit, and I’d never be expecting it. It worked in The Godfather.

…a contract of a less terminal sort…

Then I thought, maybe it’s not that kind of contract….

On closer inspection, it seems to be a contract of a less terminal sort. It seems to be a contract of putting your life’s “ducks in a row” so to speak. Less exciting than a gangland hit for sure, but certainly less messy. OK here goes.

If you get this far… consider yourself tagged to do the same

Supper Down the Pub

There’s nothing better that “Supper down the pub”. It’s happy, cheery, and harkens back to a time when even urban dwellers were social. Friends, pints and a scotch egg served over chips. What’s better than that?

There are days when you want to jump out of bed and eagerly dive into the task at hand. Sure they are few and far between, Christmas Morning comes to mind, but they are there nonetheless. There are other days, more frequent in number and going by the name Legion for they are both many and possessed by demons, when the best course of action is to stay in ones bed.

…completely loose our ability to drive once the snow arrives…

In Canada the only thing more sure than a snowy winter, is the fact that many of us completely loose our ability to drive once the snow arrives. In more politically incorrect times, the tendency would be to blame the immigrants. The “others” from foreign lands not familiar with the ways of our frosty traffic, with elderly Chinese women shouldering most of this misplaced burden of blame. I have to reject this explanation, because the sheer number of observed roadside absurdities during this recent spat of winter is quite arguably more than could be sustained by even the most liberal immigration policy. It has to be some kind of collective, frost induced, national amnesia affecting us all that prevents winter driving in excess of 10 Km per hour. Get over it people… we’re Canadians after all!

Needless to say, a journey that normally takes me forty minutes this morning took over two hours, and I’m a little bit grumpy.

Red Van in Ice Storm

When you lay down the gauntlet to Mother Nature, you had best be prepared to suffer the consequences. This morning Ontario, and much of eastern North America are in the grips of a winter ice storm. Freezing rain, snow, ice, hail; the four outriders of Jack Frost’s posse.

Freezing rain and snowfall warnings covered much of southern Ontario, with most areas expected to receive one or the other - or a combination of both - throughout the day.

The poor weather was giving thousands of school children a day off because of school buses being kept off the roads on southwestern, central and eastern Ontario.

From http://theGlobeandmail.com

Roads are a mess and the police are advising us to stay inside unless we absolutely have to be somewhere. I sit at my kitchen table, enjoying a freshly brewed cup of coffee. Guess I won’t be going anywhere work like today… You win Mother Nature.