Barkerburgh

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.

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From a Reuters article on the strike:

“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)

It looks like ‘Pushing Daisies’ won’t be back until the regular fall schedule starts.

Did we even get a full first season before the strike?

Thanks to nuts, the once canceled Jericho returns with the first of several new episodes tonight.

I know none of you will be watching (and since we’re Canadian, it wouldn’t matter if you did) but after some ups and downs last season, it turned out to be a good show.

I’ll let you know how it is.

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.

Every year during the winter solstice holiday season, I celebrate my people’s ancient Sacred and Revelatory Restoration of the Crashed Operating System.

This year, as an atheist, I was planning to forgo it as outmoded and irrelevant to this, our modern world of the future.

My people’s gods are angry and petulant, capricious and heedless.  I was forced to repeat the primal, days-long ritual.

Finally, on Friday I succeeded to my gods’ satisfaction.

Again I am blessed.  For a year.

Well, you’re not going to believe this, but the Pope of the Red Space Lizards has been messing with my noggin again.

Not quite as bad as last time (remember that?) but enough.

I thought I’d misplaced my dataspud (my USB jumpdrive, if you’re uncool) and knew - in the way that Jerry Fallwell knew he was correct - that it was right in front of me somewhere.

Well, it wasn’t. It seems it had fallen out of my pants pocket when I hung them up and was precariously close to falling down behind a piece of furniture it would have been a Jovian task to move (the planet, not the god). Obviously, the Pope of the Red Space Lizards had been redirecting my karma to try and confuse and mess me up. Nice try, Pope, but NSL.

I use the dataspud all the time, it’s got my resumes on it (all backed up, of course, but still) and I felt lost and naked without it.

Now I feel found and clothed.

All hail Xenu! Hail Xenu! Hail!

Wow, it sure is ugly. What a mess.

It’s more than a little appalling that there’s artistic types all over the city patting each other on the ass and telling themselves the ROMperor’s new clothes are haute cuisine.

Either Firefox, WordPress or Youtube are screwing up my post on the Darby ‘You Suck’ Prank.

So sorry.

The bastards have cancelled ‘Jericho’ too.

Just when I was really getting into it.

‘Everybody Loves Fucking Raymond’ gets renewed for 23 years and they gang-probe us on this.

Well, I hope all their walls come a-tumblin’ down.

(Moments later: Then there’s this response from the fans. It’s in a response to a line used in the last episode based on this true story.)

30 Grams Per Week

The Toronto Star has been publishing their weekly TV magazine for decades; Star Week. Up until recently the daily TV listings were presented in narrow columns, maybe five or six to a page. New TV series often had a brief synopsis of the episode’s highlights or the plot, usually with an ‘N’ in brackets to indicate a new episode. Movies usually had a one or two person cast list, the production year, and maybe the genre. There was usually useful information along with the bare listings. It was helpful.

Suddenly they changed to a tabular format with no room for descriptions or synopses. I am not a married-to-the-past traditionalist in any way (ask anybody) and I usually take things like this on a case by case basis. This time, the old way was better.

25 Grams Per Week

A week or two after they made the change they had the gall to tell us in a short article on an inside page of the Saturday Star that people had expressed the opinion that they preferred the tabular format. (Well, nobody asked me. Harumph.) As before they have a section for daytime listing that vary only slightly from day to day, but now they only have a single page for weekday primetime, with almost no detail, then at the back, late night weekdays. Often all we know about a movie in a particular timeslot is that it is a movie, because it just says ‘Movie’, especially in the late night listings. After a few weeks - responding to kudos, I’m sure - they added a sort-of highlights box with synopses of that night’s popular shows’ episodes, maybe Gray’s Anatomy, House or Heros, but forget the others. It’s better now though.

No, it’s cheaper. In more ways than one. The new format reminds me of nothing other than those free regional ad-driven TV magazines you used to find all over the place that had no room for details because of all the ads. This isn’t quite that bad, but you can see the resemblance. It isn’t better; it’s a rip-off, a cop-out and a fuck-up. It’s an increase in the chocolate ration.

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Why the title of this post? It’s a reference to Orwell’s 1984, and Winston Smith’s task of trying to rewrite history by spinning the fact that the chocolate ration went up from 30 grams per week in 1983 to 25 grams per week in 1984.

‘Nuff said?