If only I were geeky enough to wear this T-shirt without shame. It cracks me up big time. Courtesy of Rodent Wear.
(The title was borrowed from the Economist – they used it to describe the rise of Stéphane Dion.)
The unexamined life is not worth living
I’m not sure that I agree with that antique greek’s quote; I could live quite well without next week’s exams.
Things are under control, but it is amounting to a lot of work, and relatively little activities other than sitting in my office, eating at home and having a few drinks with friends.
The only real news is that today I broke out my winter bike in honour of the start of the snowy season and the vicious road salt that accompanies that season. Oh, and I’m dipping my toe in the online dating world, but that’s not a story for this forum.
Eventually, I’ll have a story for you about the Spadina streetcar. Meanwhile, I’ve posted two pictures from the archives on Flickr.
Canada by stereotype
I just have two small anecdotes to recount, both in the “stereotype of Canada” vein.
1) I was just listening to a few more episodes of the CBC Radio 3 podcast, and I must say I loved the concept of their See Vous Play edition. The two co-hosts banter back in forth in English and French, seamlessly switching and never translating their discussion of the latest in hipster Canadian and Québécois music. Only in Canada, and only on the CBC.
2) I went to a show at the Rex on Saturday, and I still really love that place. Yeah, it’s a bit of an older crowd, and it’s jazz – given those two, it should be a stuffy, snotty affair, right? But the musicians played upbeat improvised, solo-stuffed jazz with no dull crooners, the bar was jam-packed with standing room only and the crowd was talking loudly but still really into the music. And the Rex itself is so utterly unpretentious: Labatt 50 signs on the walls, battered wooden tables everywhere, and a television with the hockey game a few feet from the bassist’s head. Lesson to the musicians: keep the crowd’s attention, or you’ll lose out to the hockey game. Lesson to Vancouver jazz bars like the Cellar: loosen up, lose the red tablecloths, and make jazz fun. Damn, I’m glad the Rex’s owners didn’t sell out to the new condo building that now occupies most of the block.
Forty days in the wilderness
On Sunday, after over a month in the info-desert, Bell Canada finally deigned to connect my apartment to the Internet. In my judgment, that called for a celebratory bittorrent.
Forty days? Apparently that’s how long it takes to get Ma Bell to notice some ill communication. Over those forty days, I think I spent six hours on the phone: on hold, repeating my problem to useless frontline tech support people, desperately trying to get someone who would acknowledge the problem and send someone to the frickin’ apartment to fix it. Their system seems pretty hopeless: frontline support people had no records of past calls I’d made, or of tech staff’s communications with me. I was told repeatedly that I’d been “escalated” and would get a call from technical staff and the problem fixed “in 48 hours,” but never got a call, let alone a fix.
In the end, it was my building’s fault: they got lazy during renovation and hooked my apartment up wrong. But it didn’t need to take Bell 40 days to figure that out.
Stay far, far away.