Last time

We might have threatened at one point to win our last game versus the Bruins. Only problem? We didn’t. Rather, we kind of tried to make it look like we were going to, and then promptly fell apart. Kind of like we did last night, giving up the lead for all but the last goal. Well, I guess what goes down must come up. Still, is it next season yet?

Last time

We shut them out in January. Then went back to sucking. Then came the multidirectional trade. And then, more sucking. Now? We’re in the league’s basement and closing in on the last game of the season. On the bright side, baseball starts up in a month. The bluejays can’t do much worse… can they?

A little background on the video: in 1999, Maple Leaf Gardens was officially closed down, and the Toronto Maple Leafs moved to what is now their new home, the air Canada center. Before the last game at the Gardens–a game in which they lost rather badly, there was quite the tribute going on in honour of it. This song, performed before what I believe–my memory fails me at the moment–was a packed house, pretty much sent the message that regardless to where the team plays, or what else ends up changing around them, the team’s still the same. And, they’re still toronto’s team. And, surprise surprise, they’re still not going to be any closer to winning the cup–because they’re still Toronto’s team, damn them.

In other words, minus the hockey references, just like this country. It’s changed a hell of a lot in 20 years, nevermind since 1867–when the original song, not this particular version, was written. But it’s still Canada, and we’ll still call it home. Even if we wouldn’t recognise parts of it from the way things were growing up. This song is Canada, plain and simple. crack open a beer, and let’s kick ass Canadian style. The maple leaf forever, damn right. Now, have a video.

His parents were in Ottawa for their own reasons–I suspect it had a lot to do with a shopping trip and a stop off at the casino, so he belonged to us for the day. He’s almost 6 months old now, and you might argue he looks more like a 9-month-old or older. Already he’s fitting into clothes etc for up to 12 months in some cases. So yeah, spending time with him pretty much took care of the majority of the day. And, yes, was exhausting as hell–but I’ll take it.

It of course meant today was an easy day, with the only thing worth going out for being a trip to the Santa Fe Restaurant for supper–if you’re in the Pembroke area and do not stop in to this restaurant, you’re ripping yourself off. Just sayin’. They do everything from prime rib to Italian to yes, Mexican. Costs a little more than most places, but you’ll probably not be ordering dessert. Or breakfast the next morning. I’ve been home for 2 hours and I’m still stuffed.

There will be nephew pictures posted up here at some point. Most likely, later tonight. As for right now, there’s a hockey game on, caffinated things in the fridge, optionally alcoholic things to be put in said caffinated things, and a laptop that still needs to be tweeked just a little tiny bit. And I need to explode. Excuse me while I go do that.

Last time

I was more excited at the beginning of February, when we shut them out 5 nothing. We’d just landed the trade for Phaneuf, and it looked like we might be staring at a slightly different–more charged up–team. Or maybe they were just fooling us. I can go either way. Right now, though? I’m leaning more towards they were just fooling us. Don’t get too excited, Leafs nation. They’re not done making you sweat yet.

Ottawa City council passed a motion just days after the cuts were announced, urging city staff to enter talks to see what might be done to keep the jobs here.

A few days later, a conference call between city people, the Contact Centre Association of Ottawa and provincial and federal bureaucrats was held. It was decided that they needed to find out more information from the company about the skill level of their staff.

Well now. The city never offered to get involved when Dell closed, nevermind the provincial or federal governments. Although to be fair, it doesn’t sound like Ottawa center management has altogether much faith in its front-line agents in the first place, so perhaps that’s the difference.

Paul Carr, operations manager for Convergys in Ottawa, tells CTV “close to 200 people have already left Convergys. Six hundred are still here and about 200 will still be working here after the cuts.”

Carr actually expected more would have left already, but people in the contact centre say these are not the most highly-trained people and so job options are rather limited..

Now now, that wasn’t very nice, Convergys staffers. Even if it might be true–hey, I’ve seen the results of some of Convergys’s training; I get to say that. Besides, it’s my blog.

Good to know the city’s finally thinking about doing something though to at least compensate folks for, or help them to deal with, the layoffs. How why didn’t that start happening two years ago? Anyone know?

• February was olympic month this year, and the resulting metal haull was kicked off in style by miss Jennifer Heil. There’s confirmation now we won’t be seeing her in future olympics. Hell of a way to go.
• This blog, and nearly everything else public-facing I’ve got my hands in, is hosted by DreamHost. Every so often, they’ll pull a very minor oopsy that leaves me kind of scratching my head. Or, in some cases, scoring a discount. Hey, not my fault I already bought what they were advertising.
• Everywhere you turn nowadays, seems something either made by or hosted by Google’s cropping up. First search, then email, then their own IM service, their own answer to MS Office online, their answer to Map Quest, you name it. I made a crack or two about Google being pretty much all over the place. And, almost as though they were just proving me right, they went out and bought Aardvark–a realtime search engine I’ve been known to use that actually forwards your questions onto other users who might have an answer. Hey, Google, I’m still sorry about that. Seriously.
• Skipping back to the olympics, because we do that, our record breaking amount of gold metals was contributed to by Maelle Ricker. I wrote about it a few minutes after it happened. And she’s still a popular–well, as popular as can be expected for a blog this size–search term.
• I live in either a very tiny city or a very large small town, depending on how you look at it. I still had no idea exactly how tiny, or how slow, we were–until I learned there are actually still places here–big places here–that don’t have DSL yet. Or cable. That they’re still stuck with dialup or nothing. That… scares me. Still.

Fortunately, the month of technical issues has also come to a very conclusive end with the month of February. Although, there’s still the pesky little issue of a laptop that doesn’t quite work the way it should. But, can’t have everything. There’s your look at what we did have in the month of February. I’d say hopefully March ends up a litle better, but I know better. STill, I’l keep blogging. Interested? Keep reading.

Last time

Different result in December. Granted, that was 3 months ago–the team’s been halfway decent and three quarters the way to craptastic since then. But, at least they won that one. Consolation for this round? At least it ended in a shootout.

In yesterday’s throne speech, it was suggested that Canada’s national anthem needs a tiny bit of reworking. Um, what? Specificly, the part that says “all our sons command”. Again, um, what? Now our very own anthem isn’t gender-neutral enough? There’s accomodation and then there’s just overkill. That, well, is just overkill.

It’s been a complete non-issue for as long as I can remember, in spite of the fact we’ve had multiple governments with their own ideas on gender neutrality come in and screw up the country in their own ways. It’s been pretty much exactly the same in that respect, too. Except in the last decade or two it’s been forced bilingual all across Canada, except maybe in Quebec–do they even still sing that one? And now, after it’d been played about 50 billion times during the olympics, there’s talk of rewriting it for gender-neutral purposes. Someone wanna tell them drugs are bad for you?

Hey, if we’re going to rewrite the thing anyway, here’s a thought. Let’s remove or modify that whole “God keep our land” section while we’re at it. Don’t want to offend the non-Christian folks either. Or, you know, we could leave well enough alone and be happy with not having to sing “God save the queen”. I would vote for that option, too. It’s the national anthem–as much a part of Canada as hockey and beer. Don’t mess with it.

Prosecutors said Paul Railton was spotted driving at low speed along a country lane in December, holding his dog’s leash through the car window as the animal trotted alongside.

Railton pleaded guilty Monday to not being in proper control of a vehicle. His lawyer, Paul Donoghue, said 23-year-old Railton acknowledged “it was a silly thing to do and there was an element of laziness” while exercising his lurcher, a type of crossbred sighthound.

Yes, I’m lazy. Sometimes, too lazy. Way, way too lazy. But even I’m not quite *that* lazy. Even if they actually wanted to give me a lisence. Say, can he also be charged with being a contender for 2010’s moron of the year?

Last time

We didn’t do any better in January either, getting beaten up on 4 2 instead of Tuesday’s 5 1. Still, at least this time we only sucked very slightly less. And Burkey pulled the trigger on a trade as a result of it. Will it help? Well… it can’t hurt.

The router, and my entire small network as a result, took a very unplanned nose dive at some point early Monday morning while I was still contemplating that whole being mobile thing. There were, from what I could tell, no warning signs or signs of sluggishness–just randomly snap, toast. Deader than Elvice. Of course, being the geek that I am, that had to encourage some troubleshooting. So when I got done with my running around for the day, I came back and devoted part of my evening to see if I can’t coax at least another 30 seconds of life out of the thing. At least long enough for me to finish the backing up of my laptop so I could finish dealing with another, unrelated technical issue–February is apparently the month for those. Of course, not happening. It was done, and there wasn’t any amount of poking and prodding short of prying the thing open and fiddling with the inner workings of it that was about to make it do anything other than sit there. Which, I might have been inclined to do, if I wasn’t lacking both the right type of screwdriver and the motivation to actually bother with it.

Now, ordinarily, such a situation–router suddenly goes sideways and absolutely no idea the cause, plus absolutely no money to immediately rectify the said situation–might have made me consider finding both motivation and screwdriver. You tend to do things like that when your geekyness is impeded by brokeness. But I was kind of forced to plan ahead about a year or two ago. Another issue cropped up, one that I’d originally thought might have been my router contemplating giving out right there–it was about 9 years old, so having it crap out on me at that point wouldn’t have surprised me. That time though it’d been the modem, which I’d only bought from my ISP, TekSavvy, about a month or two before that. fortunately, that was easier than at the time replacing the router would have been–one phone call, and done. But, knowing that I very likely wouldn’t have much longer before going completely netless if it did turn out to be my router, I’d managed to get online for the 20 minutes required to fork over the money for a spare–this was back when I actually had money to fork over for such things. Three days later, this showed up at my apartment. And a day after that, so did the new modem.

Swapping out the modem solved one connection issue. As a result, the router spent pretty much the last year or so in a box. This includes the 4 months since I’ve moved into the new place. And, on Monday evening, after some internal skepticism as to whether or not the thing would still work after it not being used save a brief testing period when I got it, it became pretty much the center of an otherwise unchanged network. Now, here’s hoping the month of technical issues doesn’t continue into March, and here’s hoping if by some twist of fate–or by some act of someone’s cruel sense of humour–it does, that it leaves this router the hell alone. I’m fresh out of spares, and money to fork over for spares. Anyone feel like donating to the Save a Geek foundation?