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This is a bitchy post. Read at your own peril

Posted on By admin 13 Comments on This is a bitchy post. Read at your own peril

I am not in a happy place at the moment, for several reasons. The first would be because I haven't been sleeping well, and that's always a good way to start a downward spiral, really. The second is that it feels (and smells) like a small furry rodent has taken domicile in my mouth and proceeded to die and is now happily decomposing. Joy of joys.

Between my canadian taxes and my british landlady (mostly, but there are a slew of other little things), I am a fount of happyhappyjoyoy thoughts, which also are not conductive to restful nights.

I need a hug.

Today is one of those days I wish some of the boys were around.

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Taken from an article on hard-to-open packaging

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British researchers blame “wrap rage” for more than 60,000 injuries in this country. In 2004, a writer for The Times of London described the CD as “the crucible of wrap rage,” whose old cardboard box was replaced by a “zip strip. The answer to our unwrapping prayers! Yet 12 years later, a pull-tab torn off in hand, we are still chewing through plastic like wild dogs.”

That's so true though. Some of the stuff we buy these days, you need a chainsaw to open. Katy is always afraid I'm going to stab myself with my leatherman when I try and cut through that hard plastic clamshell…

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Weekend pictures

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More here: http://www.flubu.com/various_pics/leics25032006/

We survived the weekend, hoorah hooray. My back is killing me from sleeping in Katy's old bed in Leicester. It was mother's day here in the UK this weekend (though it's in May across the ocean) so we drove down on friday after work and spent the weekend there. Saturday was a busy day with going to Ikea to get the last of the stuff we wanted and then into town to pick up a few sundry items. We went to put flowers on Katy's gran's grave on Sunday prior to stuffing our faces full of Sunday lunch. Katy's mom was feeling under the weather because of a cold so the usual military precision of serving dinner was off and we had to play musical dinner plates a few times to ensure that everybody got the right plate. It all got sorted out in the end, after some comedy value :)

This week should be fairly sedate and hopefully we can get most of the touch-ups done to the house decor this weekend.

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Good news, bad news

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+ Katy and I went to Argos last night to replace our new TV with an even newer one that finally doesn't sound like it's clicking like a dog on a hardwood floor.

– The wall-mounting bracket doesn't fit this new TV. We'll need to get a new one. Joy

+ The meeting with our landlady wasn't as painful as it could have been

– She was still nitpicky and we don't know when we'll get the money.

+ We're going to Leicester this weekend. This means curry.

– We're going to Leicester this weekend. This means two big people sleeping in one small bed.

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At what point is a country bankrupt?

Posted on By admin 2 Comments on At what point is a country bankrupt?

WASHINGTON — With no fanfare, President Bush signed a bill Monday pushing the ceiling on the national debt to nearly $9 trillion. The measure allows the government to borrow an additional $781 billion and prevent a first-ever default on Treasury notes. It also lets the government pay for the war in Iraq without raising taxes or cutting popular domestic programs. The debt limit increase was the fourth of Bush's presidency, totaling $3 trillion. With the budget deficit near record levels, an additional increase in the debt limit almost certainly will be required next year. The measure allows the debt limit to rise from $8.184 trillion to $8.965 trillion.

Yes folks that's 9,000,000,000,000$USD. Now given the fact that at the time I'm writing this, the world population is about 6.6 billion people, this means that if you spread out the US debt across the whole friggin world (!!!), each man-woman-child would owe about 1400$. If you reduce that down to the US population, about 295 million, that comes to a staggering 30 grand!

Canada's debt per capita is a third of this amount and people are already worried the country is going to go bankrupt. But since this is the US, everything is hunky-dory…

From the I-can't-believe-I'm-actually-reading-this-shit desk:

As ridiculous as this might sound, we have real money issues right now, and the government is reluctant to give all agents and analysts dot-gov accounts.

Said an FBI spokesman on why not all agents of the FBI are allowed to have an email account…

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Do I have a sticker on my forehead that says stupid?

Posted on By admin 3 Comments on Do I have a sticker on my forehead that says stupid?

I receive tons of spam of the nature “I am the son/daughter/accountant/dog of a middle-eastern/african/russian dictator/president/general. I have a gajillion dollars just burning a hole in my pocket. Here, complete stranger that has been referred to me by my best friend's cousin's neighour's mistress' dog, have some of it.”

They're all fairly typical: poorly written ALL IN CAPS to make it look more official. My favourite bit though is always when they include an email address in the message that is different from the sender email address – which is usually their real account but they're just too stupid to masquerade it.

If I wanted to, I could probably create a more plausible scenario to scam people. Damn my morals. Anyway, I got one that made me giggle. It was telling me that I'd won a lottery (that never sold tickets) and that the draw had picked my work email (which I never give out outside of actual work functions). All I needed was to email all my personal banking details and identity information to a nice lady and she'd have the money wired into my account. How nice of her. Fairly typical scam so far. The amusing bit is that I won a UK lottery, but I need to send all my info to an address ending with sympatico.ca (for those of you who might not know, that's a Canadian ISP for home internet). Made me giggle, anyway.

I got everything I wanted to do this weekend done:

  • bought two new pair of jeans
  • sorted through the mountain of paperwork in the office
  • went to the gym on sunday

All in all, a quiet weekend.

One of Katy's friends is being a bit of a pain in the ass at the moment. She was supposed to help us clean and decorate the apartment before we moved and also help us with the actual move. We never saw or heard her. It's been 3 weeks now. We know she's still alive because she has no trouble calling and seeing common friends of Katy. Her phone is just mysteriously breaking down when we try and get in touch. I'm at the point where I don't really want anything to do with her anymore but the annoying thing is that she has some of Katy's books and CDs, and my old digital camera that she “bought” but hasn't actually paid for yet (and that's been close to 2 months now). We've now send email to those common friends to try and kick some sense into her backside so she'll get in touch with us. See what happens how.

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The course is over, yaay!

Posted on By admin 8 Comments on The course is over, yaay!

The week-long course is over. The last person left this morning. The first 3 days were brutal. We had to cover an assload of material and make sure everything worked on everybody's laptop. We'd explicitly told everybody which tools they would need, and in some cases, which versions.

Predictably, what we got was a hodgepodge of everything else. Wrong versions (either too old or too new) were a consistent problem. More insidious though were the language barriers. A few people didn't speak english as a first language, which meant that we had to do some one-on-ones to make sure they were understanding the intricacies of what we were saying. More than half (!!!) the people at the course were not java programmers. This is huge, considering that this was touted as a java workshop, with Real Live™ coding periods. That plan went out the window rather quickly, which caused us to need to shuffle the schedule on more than one occasion.

Still, all in all, it was good. The feedback and reviews they left us were quite glowing (apparently bossman said that this was some of the best feedback for a course ever). We were slavedriving them for a while, but we eased up at the end. Information overload and all…

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