Barkerburgh

It’s okay.  It’s Science.

I guess the title just says it. Except that there’s this - no, never mind.

I have recently reacquired copies of two of my favourite albums; Joni Mitchell’s 1985 album ‘Dog Eat Dog’ and Jennifer Warnes’ 1986 Leonard Cohen tribute album ‘Famous Blue Raincoat”.

Wow. Listening to these tracks after not hearing them for a few years is still visceral, still exciting and suddenly startling.

Why startling? Well, my situation is considerably different now from what it was in, say, late 2001. The music while still beautiful, means so much more. Email me and I’ll send you a breakdown. I dare you.

I’m listening to ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ as I type this. ‘Bird on a Wire’ right now, as it happens.

Ah. Cohen’s poetry and Warnes’ voice.

Kill me now.

Well, not now. But you know, let me finish listening to the albums again. And I have a week of house-sitting to do involving feeding cats, and I have a doctor’s appointment on May the 8th, and some genetic counselling and testing in July, so kill me later. We should talk.

or

“48 Hours Notice Of A Strike, My Ass, You Bastards”

Was it J. Lauren Pryor?

Was it Ayesha, She Who Must Not Be Named?

Was it Rich Hall, inventor of the snigglet?

Was it this blogger, who probably gave too much away in the title of this post?

Let us agree that he was me.

Having had a fun afternoon babysitting Simon, then staying for a fine barbecue, I left the hospitality of Peter and Leslie’s home shortly before midnight and got to Dufferin and St. Clair soon after, intending to take either the Dufferin bus or the St. Clair temporary-abomination-while-they-complete-the-new-street-car-right-of-way-along-the-Corso-Italia-and-move-on.

Kind passersby began to tell us that the Amalgamated Transit Union had voted down the new contract and had called a strike for midnight. Rrrr.

I started to walk eastbound while I waited for perhaps one last bus or streetcar but NSFL.

Even though I couldn’t really afford it, I decided I would have to take a cab, mostly because I was really tired, my foot was sore and spending two hours at the playground with Simon is an adventure and a workout.

Suddenly there were no cabs. I resigned myself to walking home, estimating it at about 2-2.5 hours, but expecting it to take longer, and to get mugged.

However, a cab came by. Along the way, I asked the driver to stop at two groups of people who were waiting for cabs on St. Clair and asked if anyone was going near Sherbourne and Bloor (which is where I asked the driver to take me). We got three more people so it didn’t cost me a whole hell of a lot really. It only took me an hour altogether to get home.

Bob Kinnear is a liar and a hypocrite, and should be caught by a tabloid photographer in a brothel wearing a red vinyl teddy, with a ball-gag in his mouth, being called ‘Service Slut’ by a faux lesbian dominatrix.

The union should be legislated back to work and the TTC should be declared an essential service.

Fuck. No weeknight Coronation Street for two months because of the hockey playoffs (and again during the Olympics), and now this.

Life sncks.

“Union officials said the strike was called immediately rather than allowing 48 hours’ notice because they feared a public backlash against transit workers.”

Bob Kinnear, president of Local 113 of the ATU, is quoted: “We have assessed the situation and decided that we will not expose our members to the dangers of assaults from angry and irrational members of the public.”

Does he not think this tactic increases the chance of a public backlash, increasing the danger to his union members?

Is his head up his ass? Don’t answer that, even though the best defense against an accusation of libel or slander is the demonstration of truth.

(that last paragraph edited by Himself, Monday, April 28, 2008)

A few weeks ago I finally got both my computers back to where they were before the Christmas Crash (sounds like a Doctor Who episode, don’t it?).

My server is restored and running Apache/PHP/MySQL again. My databases are safe and my mediawiki installations are all perking. I have Google Desktop Search installed (and it is a magnificent blessing, let me tell ya), and I have started using MS Outlook’s calendar function since my memory is just Swiss cheese and old foam rubber these days. (I’d rather use Mozilla’s Sunbird, but it really, really sucks, sucks, sucks. Really.)

I reconstructed my web technology learning plan and then sat down to start up again, after all these months and I got sad.

It was like everything was finally all ready and all I had to do was sit down and apply myself and start learning.  Easy-peasy, I do it all the time.

But nothing happened.  I was not inspired, I was in fact, bummed.

I know, I know, all I have to do is give myself a shake, take a deep breath, hike up my pants and get down to business.  I know that, and I will do it.  But part of me is just waiting for the next time something critical goes up the fubar, because it will.  The question is ‘how soon?’

Well, back to the old drawing board.

Laura invited me to join her on Thursday evening at the Princess of Wales Theatre to see “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Part I”.

It was based on/cut down from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage version of Charles Dicken’s 1838-1839 serialized novel of the same name, minus the ‘Part I’. In 1980, the RSC produced a version that “lasted more than ten hours (counting intermissions and a dinner break - the actual playing time was approximately eight-and-a-half hours)”. This play, and Part II, which I will again be joining Laura to see, were condensed out of that first grand production. Both parts together are six hours, so we didn’t lose much.

In 1982, a miniseries of the production was produced and was later broadcast on America’s PBS. I remember it being on and being interested, but I didn’t watch it, and I don’t remember why. Maybe the length…

Laura, being a big fan, had lots of background on the original production and the original novel, and I enjoyed her sharing immensely.

Being unfamiliar with the story but for the very basics, I did some research on Wednesday about the novel and the stage presentation, which I had heard of, and was intrigued and impressed.

And just so I could catch up a little, I downloaded the Gutenberg text of the novel. I hope I can be prepared for Part II.

(Sometimes when I am really impressed or moved by a show like this, including a TV show or a cinematic movie, I tend to try and replay it in my mind, to think about the language or the imagery or the story, and maybe I have cool dreams. Well, I had cool dreams last night; I just can’t remember what they were - and I really wish I could.)

I was getting so sick of switching over to CNN during commercial breaks and hearing them dissecting every little aspect of every little primary and every little caucus and every little mouth-fart and every little tic and twitch and hiccup of the candidates, their staffs, the exit-polled, and the results, that I was hoping for different news, real news - an earthquake or a tsunami, maybe.

Well, Gott sei dank, I got a metaphorical one.

You’d think, I mean don’t you think you’d think, that if you were a Democratic politician in a high position, that you won partly by claiming the moral high ground during your earlier career and your campaign, that you’d know better than to schwanz a hooker on the public’s clock. Multiple times. I mean, vey iz mir.

Next thing it’ll be CBC and the Olympics. And the Olympics. And the Olympics. And no weeknight Coronation Street.

What a world.

For the first time since I saw it at the cinema when it was released here, I saw Serenity the other night. It was on TV, I forget which channel. Wow. It was even better than I remembered. And I usually hate seeing cinematic releases on commercial TV - that is to say, if I’ve seen them recently at the movies.

Anneli saw Serenity in London, England, when she was on sabbatical abroad. I liked what she said about it, and I paraphrase shamelessly from a bad memory, “It was like a condensed second season of Firefly”, to which my reaction was something like, and again paraphrasing shamelessly from a bad memory, “Hear, hear!”

Now she sends me a link to a story about a new Firefly novel written by Steven Brust. It is downloadable under a Creative Commons license. The Future is cool.

Of course, the Brust fanbase loves it, and the Browncoats do too, but some are calling if ‘fanfic’.  Which is good since members of that last group are not as irrationally psycho-loyal as, say, hardcore old guard fandroid trekkies. Yeah, I said ‘trekkies‘.

Notes on dog-sitting Photon while PL&J were in Florida

1> She would sit, silently pining, on the deck, staring at the back gate where they take Jon in and out in his wheelchair.

2> One night, she woke me up twice by dropping her hard toy down the stairs into the basement (where I was sleeping in the guest bed).

3> Twice more the same night she woke me up by jumping up on the bed and licking my face until I woke up.

4> Around 4:00 or 4:30am that same night, I found myself in the back yard in my jammies and Peter’s Crocs playing keep-away with Photon in the snow, wondering just how the heck she tricked me into doing it.

5> Dang all, she’s cute.

6> Cobalt, her same-litter sister lives somewhere near the park but, while I’ve seen her before, I didn’t see her that week.

7> She has a sister-friend relationship with another, unrelated, Mini Aussie named Ruckus, who lives on the same street. They’ll chase each other around and wrestle for twenty minutes or a half an hour at a time, pretty much ignoring all the other dogs. And me.

8> On two different nights I woke up when she was trying to get under the covers with me. When I was a kid my dog slept with me, often under the covers at the bottom of the bed, so no problem. The first night I woke up later to find her laying right beside me. The second night she ended up on top of the covers at the bottom of the bed.

9> She has a crazy relationship with a park dog named Knowledge (yes, Knowledge), a frisbee catcher. Photon runs after her and constantly barks (which she hardly ever does, really…) but Knowledge pretty much just ignores her, running and leaping to catch the frisbee.

10> I didn’t know P&L were teaching her to fetch. I’d never seen her do it either. For the first couple of days I saw no evidence she even cared to try it. Suddenly on New Year’s Day in the park she started bringing the frisbee to me, dropping it at my feet, sitting and staring at me expectantly. At first I didn’t get it, being untrained. Suddenly I realized what she was doing, treated her, tossed the frisbee again, and thereby began to run out of treats. I’m not sure that it was just treats she wanted because if I moved away from her without throwing the frisbee, she’d pick it up, bring it to my feet again and maybe yelp. After a day or two she had me trained. “Barker to Barker; <i>throw</i> it!”

11> The Homecoming. Laura was the first one in the front door when they finally got home very early Sunday morning, after a grueling day. Photon came to the door to see who it was, stopped, stared, recognized Laura and went delightfully, ecstatically, crazy, as only a happy dog can do. (Cats have no equivalent reaction.) A few minutes later, at the back door, Jon and Peter got the same treatment.

Afterwards, an afterword:

12> While falling asleep in my own bed at home, I have hypnogogic hallucinations of a dog jumping on the bed, including the jingling of the tags. (It used to be a cat jumping on the bed, and before that it was a door slamming, but I had a psychotic landlord at the time so the door slam might have been real.)

The divine punishment problem was with my client machine and it’s more or less fine now.

After I’d finished that religious observance, I began to have problems with my server, whereon reside the WAMP family of divine servants, Apache web-server, MySQL DBMS and the delightful sprite, PHP.

Well, WAMP started to fail intermittently.  It appeared to be associated with Google Desktop Search’s indexing operations so I disabled that.  It seemed to be okay for a while.  Then it happened again.

There appeared to be a connection with Windows’ own screensaver kicking in.  When that happened, the MySQL server would fail, but not consistently.  I disabled the screensaver and the frequency of the problem lessened.  (I was testing all this from the ritually restored client machine, in case there was a networking component to the failure.)

I thought, ‘Dear Gods, screw this’ and I reinstalled WAMP, being careful to back up my databases and websites.  (For simple laziness I have taken to installing a separate instance of Mediawiki for each project; it’s easier to plan and navigate the project, the harddisk footprint is small and they all use the same MySQL, so the processor overhead isn’t all that bad.)

The reinstall didn’t help and when I restored my databases, it saw the tables but said they didn’t exist if I tried to SQL them from the management interface.  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, thinks I.  (It’s an ancient expression of dismay and concern among my people.)

I analyzed the Windows system logs, the MySQL error logs, the ini files.  I examined the database files as if they were simple text files to see if the data was there; I was terrified I’d lost it all!  Everything was where it should be, yet it wasn’t working.

Long story short, about 3:30 this morning I reinstalled WAMP again and everything worked as if there’d been no problem in the first place.  I have no idea what I did or didn’t do rightly or wrongly; it just started to work.

My people’s ancient gods at work again.