aMMusing

Anyone who still reads this blog will attest that my day job has changed it for the worse. I used to write on many more and much broader topics, not to mention with far greater regularity. However, after longer-than-ought-to-be days at the day job and attempts at catching up in my now part-time business, I haven’t much energy or desire to do much of anything else, be it blogging or apartment cleaning.

The latter, however, became an absolute necessity last weekend. I always do well at throwing out the trash and rinsing the dishes so that they don’t stick up the place. But, to my great shame, I admit that I can go weeks and months without sweeping the floor. And to my greater shame, I forbid all my friends to drop in on me because I don’t want them to witness my shame. I do still have my pride.

During the unusual mild spell two weeks back, all nature got out of whack. The grass was rebecoming green; a fresh crop of dandilions popped up; animals that had begun bedding down for the winter were fooled into believing that winter had come and gone already. Hence at the tail end of a call that CP [in training] was monitoring, I had to remain calm even though I was witnessing something that made my stomach turn: I could see that Herman’s fifth cousin had taken residence in the kitchen, most notably on and in the stove.

So I spent last Saturday making sure my apartment was a less hospitable host for Herman V. After much sweeping, desinfecting, mopping and generally banging around, I spotted him in the living room, looking a bit dazed and clearly trying to find his way out. And that’s the last I saw of him.

There’s evidence suggesting that, unlike Herman and Hermina five years ago, Herman V was only here for a good time, not a long time. For instance, it doesn’t look like he made it as far as the cupboards. However, after my cleaning stint, I went on Google to try to determine what exactly Herman V is/was and what would have drawn him to my place since I had thought until now that really nasty compostable trash would constitute the motherlode for a little critter like him. What I determined is that based on his size, and as a result of having had a really good look at him, he is/was a common mouse — not the kind of roommate I would want in any circumstances, mind you, but not as bad as could be. And what I learned is that those stray coffee beans between the stove and the counter would be a bit draw for a guy like him. That, as well as corn and apples, among other things. Also, someone of Herman’s ilk can squeeze through a hole as small as a quarter inch, which is extremely easy to find in an older building like this. Therefore, putting all those ingredients together — odd weather, easy access, less-than-stellar housekeeping habits, and no deterring feline residents in the apartment — is akin to a Herman open-door policy.

However, given how this building is located next to a park on one side and restaurants on another, and recalling how other residents with exemplary domestic habits received visits from other members of Herman’s family while I wasn’t being bothered despite not having great habits of my own, I’m not deluding myself into believing that all unwanted critters have left the building. And while I admit my place was alluring for a while, I sincerely doubt that I single-handedly attracted them to the building. These little guys are everywhere; we just don’t always see them in action.

I think I might need to send all my clients a service note to warn them that the increase in spam in recent months is beyond my control. Indeed, it is now being reported — in this PC World article as well as the mainstream media — that spam levels have gone up 80 percent since early October. My clients are understandably getting annoyed, and some erroneously believe it’s because those who maintain the server where their site is hosted are not doing their job.

Lately, I’ve gradually been updating the server-side mail scanning rules in selected domains to see if doing so would help. The updated, stricter rules don’t seem to be having much effect, though, and there’s now an increased risk that legitimate messages are being filtered out as spam. According to this other, earlier PC World article, the problem is that spammers are increasingly placing images in their bile, thus thwarting filtering tools which are designed to scan for text.

Another tactic on which spammers rely, according to Craig Sprosts who is quoted in that second article, is to register new domain names just long enough to send their trash and then abandon the domain name.

Of the 35 million domains registered in April [2006], 32 million were never paid for and expired after five days…… [M]any of those domains were used by spammers to send out their unsolicited e-mail during that five-day grace period…… Traditional blacklists and whitelist approaches just can’t keep up with how fast they’re registering new domains and changing the URLs in the e-mail.

Generating and countering spam has always been a game of cat and mouse, but it’s more brutal today than it ever was. It’s becoming an industry of its own on the Internet.

E-mail is not the only channel for spam. For instance, this WordPress-driven blog receives easily 10 times more spam comments than legitimate comments, thus why I’ve taken to closing comments on posts after so many days online. Fortunately, because I have WP set to queue comments from unknown addresses, messages take a while to appear on this blog so that I can manually reject all the trash comments. But it’s annoying nonetheless. Similarly, I have the phpBB bulletin board installed on one of my domains, and there too, I have set the software to require my approval before the supposedly new user becomes active on the board, thus allowing me to delete the 50 or so new users that register each week. It’s not an onerous task — I only need to select those users and delete them all at once — but it’s a source of unnecessary work. I could leave them all there since they’re effectively harmless, but it’s messy to leave them there.

I’ve been around the Internet and the Web long enough to know that spam spikes come and go. Eventually, I’m sure, the cat will find a way of countering the mouse’s latest antics and everything will be better again. Until the next round.

It’s hard to believe, but it’s already been 3 years since I replaced TextStyle1. Since I started the day job, I’ve haven’t been using it nearly as much, preferring the cheapy computer I got a year ago — the one I believe I neglected to tell you I got working once Stephanie and I — well, okay, Stephanie more than I — realized we installed the wrong kind of extra RAM. Even for my non-day-job work, I prefer the newer computer, although I believe much of that is due to where it’s located. After so many years of working in a bedroom that I designate as “my office,” I think I’ve come to see it as a form of punishment to isolate myself in a corner of the apartment. But I digress…

I’d say that since I got the new computer, a.k.a. TextStyle2, I’ve been noticing that TextStyle1 has started throwing me some attitude. Consequently, I’ve grown accustomed to handling it with care. Lately, though, it’s been getting worse.

This evening I received the notice that a new Windows update was available, so I agreed to have it installed, walked away, and promptly forgot about it. When I came back a few hours later, I saw something I never saw since I’ve been using XP, which I find remarkably stable — I’d even say surprisingly stable given we’re talking M$. That which I never saw since using XP but saw tonight was the infamous Windows Blue Screen of Death.

TextStyle1 effectively shit the bed tonight.

Mind you, it recovered well after I let do its disk scan and whatnot. I know it’s not that long ago since I defragmented the hard drive, and I know the hard drive is nowhere near being full. And I am writing this post right now from TextStyle1. But I have to recognize that 3 years is pretty much the expected lifespan of PCs. And in this case, it’s been over 3.5 years.

So, I thought I’d take a look at the Future Shop website for a computer similar to TextStyle2. After all, it’s been completely trouble-free for a year. And thus I discovered I could replace TextStyle1 for half what I paid in April 2003 and get a far more powerful machine.

I’m not going to run off this weekend and replace it, though. But I would rather replace it well before this one craps out on me. My main reason is that I need a backup for TextStyle2 at all times, but also it would be a lot easier to move data from the old to the new TextStyle1 while the former is not yet down on its knees.

I won’t deny that the thought of getting my first Mac crossed my mind this evening. However, for now, I have to banish that thought. If my reason for having two functioning computers is to have one as a backup for my day job, which is very Mac unfriendly, then I wouldn’t be helping matters. And as much as I would love to wrap my mind around the world of Macs, my capacity to learn something new that’s not directly related to my work — either jobs — is a wee bit low right now.

Some years in these parts, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to claim that summer is so short that, if you blink, you’ll miss it. The summer of 2006 wasn’t quite that bad, although it did turn coolish and autumn-like by the 20th of August. But for me this year, summer came and went and I hardly noticed it because I was so busy with work.

For the past week, however, it has been well over 10C (50F) every day. Granted, it’s been grey and rainy, but the fact it’s been — and is expected to be — 14C to 17C each day through tomorrow, I can’t help but dream that perhaps I blinked and winter has come and gone. However, where I know that can’t be, I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping this winter will be as mild and relatively snowless like last winter.

This week, British Columbia’s Lower Mainland experienced a violent storm with high winds and rain that left over 200,000 without electricity. But that was an exception rather than the norm. People often say they couldn’t live in the Vancouver area because it rains so much there. I, for one, would prefer rain over temperatures dipping far below 0C for extended periods of time.

In a country as vast as Canada, however, the thought of displacing myself to Vancouver, a city which also happens to be outrageously expensive, is not one I’m willing to contemplate because it would almost be like emigrating to another country. I have a lot of respect for people like Stephanie who make such a fundamental change in their lives, but I don’t think I’d be able to do that at this point of my life. There’s only so much change one can endure at once, and I feel I’ve had my fair share of change in the last year or so.

The image I have of myself is not one of doom and gloom, but I don’t think of myself as a cheerleader, either. However, today I found out that my colleagues at the day job see me quite differently.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you this for a while,” said CP, the trainee who’s been shadowing me a great deal in the last two weeks, “but Full Moon Marg and AnShe told me that you’re their pick-me-upper. They just love hearing from you after a bad call or during a bad day.”

Truth be told, I do love to laugh, and a benign form of levity in a job where you’re constantly dealing directly with clients is to make wise cracks about said clients. Anyone who has worked in a call centre will tell you the same. In our case, where calls to clients are outgoing and can last up to 3 hours so that we can provide product training, we end up sharing the tales about people who make us wonder how those people could ever have landed the position they hold. During one call I was leading today and that CP was monitoring, we had a spectacularly dim fellow at the end of the line — the kind who doesn’t know the difference between a colon and a semicolon …and that was just the tip of the iceberg. So at one point during the call, I zapped an e-mail to CP in which I wrote only, “I wonder whose son he is to have gotten the job he has.”

My day job has reaffirmed in my mind how the average user’s level of computer skills is much lower than what I once imagined it to be. But what frightens me is that applications that could seriously affect some individuals are being placed in the hands of people who have no idea what they’re doing: These people simply dust off a checklist from a beaten up folder once a month and follow what it says. It’s as though they don’t quite make the connection, in some instances, between the fact they’re withdrawing money from individuals’ accounts and how pissed off they’d be if another company made a mistake if it withdrew too much money from their own account. Beyond that, however, what gets to me are those who huff and puff about being knowledgeable about computers and mindful of security and best practices, but think I’m some kind of computer genius for helping them “fix” their computer woes by instructing them to empty their browser cache (without actually calling it browser cache).

I do know that I’m patient beyond most clients’ expectations and that I’m good at training over the phone. At the end of one call that lasted an hour longer than I expected due to sundry complications, I asked my customary “Are there any other questions before I leave?” and the client gushed, “I was so worried about this training and thought for sure I’d have a ton of questions, but you covered everything so well!” I thanked her for the compliment and joked, “So I guess there are still remnants of my past life as a teacher.” To which she said, “Oh well, that explains it!”

The result of doing three, four, and even sometimes five training calls a day is that I’m beyond drained at the end of the day. And to preserve my sanity, I tell my colleagues about the unbelievably stupid things I’ve heard in the course of client calls, repeating verbatim what was said with the same inflection, and that causes my colleagues to crack up. But I think what contributes to the humour is that I’m a newcomer to the world of financial services and my take is still that of a geek and outsider.

And meanwhile, somehow, the world keeps turning and it’s not on the verge of collapsing even though there’s the potential for so many screw-ups in the hands of so many people.

I have always been interested in trivia. As a consequence, as a reader, one notion I read on a page can trigger questions about completely unrelated matters. Before the Web, it was unlikely I would pursue the questioning very far, but with the Web making everything just one click away, I do. Hence I can start reading about Topic A, and 5 hours later I can find myself reading about Topic R which not only has nothing to do with Topic A but also has brought me to forget what Topic A was, although the fact I’m a big-time users of tabs in Firefox can help me jog my memory.

While eating supper last night, I happened to catch another little bit of that impossibly bad, stretched out, multipart interview with Anna Nicole Smith on Entertainment Tonight. Truth is, Anna Nicole Smith is someone about whom I have never before given a second’s thought. But something about how she comes across in this interview intrigued me: she looks like a plastic doll whose perfection renders her extremely unattractive (in my eyes), plus she strikes me as incredibly strung out and sedated if not simply a spectacularly stunned effort.

I turned off the TV and began wondering what’s all the fuss about Anna Nicole Smith since, as I mentioned, I never before gave the woman a second thought …so I went online and looked her up to satisfy my new curiosity about what all the fuss is about and if or why I should give a heck. Within minutes, I found myself on Wikipedia. For me, though, that’s an invitation to get off topic really quickly.

• While married to her second husband who was more than 60 years her senior, she had numerous love interests including Scott Baio, whom I didn’t know is a staunch conservative Republican.
• During her modelling career, she capitalized on her strong resemblance to Jayne Mansfield.
• Jayne Mansfield was killed in a car crash in June 1967 on U.S. Highway 90.
• United States numbered highways, the precursor of the American interstate, were conceived in the 1920s and follow a relatively logical pattern in terms of how they’re numbered.
• The fabled U.S. Highway 66 has long ago been decommissioned and largely replaced by Interstate 40, although many of the states through which 66 went through keep its memory alive as State Highways bearing the same number.
• The idea of the U.S. interstate system was brought forth exactly 50 years ago this year by President Eisenhower. The system was supposed to take 12 years to complete but in the end took 35 years, and some roads, like I-95 that spans the entire east coast, remain technically unfinished.
• Eisenhower appreciated what Germany was doing with its autobahn system, now known world-wide as a freeway system on which there’s no speed limit.
• Speed limits…

Okay, you get the picture.

No, I didn’t just “discover” how one can get lost reading on the Web. And you didn’t just “discover” that I’m ecclectic and nerdy, as manifested, for instance, by my nearly obsessive number-crunching propensities with regard to proportional representation. However, what I find fascinating is that when I least expect it, little bits of what I read last night will come back to me in context during some discussion or another. Sometimes we can mistakenly believe that some notion or event is a “first-of” or has been around forever (due largely to the fact it already existed when we were born). Often, when we look beyond the current-day artifice, we can often trace parallels that remind us of the extent to which humans do seem fated to repeating their own history. Yet at the same time, in other instances, we can see more clearly where significant shifts have occurred over a relatively short period of time.

Some things seem to change a lot on the surface but don’t really change that much. Other things don’t change a lot but that minute change has a far great impact. Hence, in my mind, what might seem like trivia on the surface might not be so trivial after all.

Back in early September, I wrote about how I wasn’t keeping up with my original job which I’m now doing on a part-time basis, specifically for one long-standing client. After giving the situation much thought and consulting with the Queen of Sheba, I decided to contract out the work. Contracts to implement the new arrangement were signed on October 1st and the contract worker is working out magnificently. In fact, I realized the other day that I don’t even look anymore at the e-mails I still receive and from which I used to extract material for posting, for I know it’s being taken care of …and very well at that.

But there’s always someone, it seems, who’s intent on pissing in everyone else’s corn flakes. When someone in particular pissed once too many time in mine, I finally decided to get at her and force an admission that we’re having trouble getting along instead of pretending that nothing’s wrong and letting the bad feelings continue to fester. The status quo had become dysfunctional, so if the worse that comes out of this is that we’re not to deal with each other directly, then the situation will not have worsened since it couldn’t get much worse. Interestingly, I’ve found out that I’m not alone to find it difficult to work with her, which is saying a lot because I usually work well with just about anybody. But that could be because I’ve had the good luck of working with industrious, competent people — qualities I appreciate.

There’s still a lot of work on my plate that I can’t contract out; however, this first contract will serve as a great experiment. I’m sure some things will need to be fine tuned as we go along, but this is the perfect time to experiment given my current financial situation which allows me not to rely exclusively on my original job for income.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’ve been finding that there’s a lot of crankiness in the air lately. Whether we’re talking about news columnists, my day-job clients or people in general, there seems to be an inclination to look at or think of the negative first, or to dismiss things as irrelevant or bothersome. It seems people’s fuses are short, although, most of the time, there’s not much consequence to the blowouts other than a few stray sparks.

I started thinking about this a short while back after reading back to back two rather cranky columns on the CBC News website: one by Rex Murphy, who admittedly is no font of joviality, and another one by a columnist I forget. In the former, Rex was going on about the self-importance yet hypocrisy of celebrities, citing Madonna’s adoption of an African child and Bono’s move of his production company to the tax-friendlier Netherlands. It’s not that I disagreed with Rex, but it’s his expository manner that brought me to reflect on how we collectively seem bent on transforming every bit of news into bad news. Of course, all of us, if we could rule every action taken anywhere in the world, would make it so that everything would receive full consensus and not even a hint of reproach. In a later column, Rex attempted to minimize the significance and importance of the federal Conservative government’s flip-flop on taxing income trusts by pointing to the thousand of Newfoundlanders who lined up at a job fair last week in the hope of applying for a job in oil-rich Alberta — in other words, people who rely on income trust have the luxury of whining while many of his Newfie compatriots haven’t the work to even consider the finer points of income trusts.

Similarly, as I mentioned in a previous post, many are those here in the Halifax area who find Nova Scotia Power’s “salt explanation” of the recent sporadic power failures hard to believe. And predictably, the CTV regional news found a mother with an infant to speak about the inconvenience of it all. I mean, of course it’s inconvenient and several were late for work the next day because their alarm clock got screwed up. But I guess I’m one of those odd people who marvels at how the millions of components that comprise the world we live in somehow manage to work in unison most of the time. It’s as though we expect perfection from everything and everyone, except possibly ourselves.

To be honest, I’m not sure where I’m going with this post, nor what inspired it. Maybe I’m projecting: I’m the one who’s cranky these days but I don’t want to admit it. Recall that I did speak of a sense of restlessness upon returning from vacation three weeks ago. And that’s not to be confused with unhappiness, for really I have nothing to complain in that department.

One of my original-job clients recently asked me about a feature it would like to have within the content management system I’ve been building for the last four years. It’s a really good idea that I could see my other clients finding useful: whenever people who have access to the website’s extranet change their profile, the extranet manager should receive some kind of e-mail notification. Closely related to that would be a sign-in log, which my CMS already tabulates but on which it doesn’t report yet since I haven’t had the time to implement that feature.

As I was giving some thought to what my acronym-crazy day job would call a SCR (i.e., Suggested Change Request), I determine that the feature should be CMS-side rather than website-side and began working on an interface to integrate the feature into the CMS. I quickly came to the conclusion that it would be better to make this feature as customizable as possible, thus allowing the manager of users to determine the frequency and the format of mail reports, as well as giving the manager the ability to generate quick reports on the fly. Therefore I worked on the presentation of how managers would configure their reports and mapped out on paper the database end of things. While working on the former, I found a JavaScript function that would change the subsequent pulldowns based on the radio button the manager chooses. And then I got to thinking about how this same Javascript function would be helpful in an existing website-side query form in the extranet module.

To make a long story short, the JavaScript ceased to work on that website-side form. At first I wondered if it was because the script and the pulldown options were being dynamically generated, for when I copied and saved the generated source code as a static file, it did work. I compared every line, every colon, every quotation mark on both the static and dynamic version, but couldn’t see a difference. Then I thought that perhaps the site template was the culprit (an accidentally forgotten close DIV, perhaps?), but everything was perfectly balanced. I removed section after section of code from the version that didn’t work, but still no go. Then finally, for whatever reason, I thought of viewing and comparing the two pages of static code through Internet Explorer 6 instead of Firefox, and lo and behold: both worked fine in IE! Needless to say, I was shocked given how normally IE is the “trouble browser.”

That’s when I noticed one difference in a place I take for granted to the point of not looking at it: the DOCTYPE declaration at the top of the document. It was incomplete in the version that worked but correct in the version that didn’t. I replicated it in the version that didn’t work as it appeared in the version that worked, and then looked at it through Firefox: my jaw dropped as I noticed the JavaScript now worked.

Now there’s a dilemma! If I respect standards compliance with regard to the DOCTYPE declaration, my script won’t work in Firefox, which normally is a gazillion times more compliant than IE. So straying from compliance for Firefox and Netscape is out of the question. Therefore, I looked at what I wanted to accomplish from a different angle and implemented a different script and navigational concept that works just as well and requires the same amount of work on the server side. In fact, I just had an idea — it’s always good to “sleep on it” — that would streamline the required database querying, so I’ll look into that later today. I could very well leave it as is, based on the saying that it’s good enough for the boys I go out with. But I tend to think that if I don’t do something right the first time, it’s going to come back to bite you in the ass eventually, so might as well… even if that means taking longer to reach the finish line.

Here I went for months without going to Moncton for a weekend because my two jobs kept me too busy, and now I’m looking at going to New Brunswick twice in a few days.

Some of you may remember my aMMusing co-blogger, Poupoune. Well, she called me last night to tell me that her mother had passed away just a few hours before. She had been frail for many years, and two years ago Poupoune’s family thought they were going to lose her then, but she rebound (relatively) …until last Wednesday when she had a serious heart attack from which doctors gave her less than a 10 percent chance of recovering. All her children were by her side when she died around 8:45 last night. I’ll be attending the funeral in northern New Brunswick, some three hours north of Moncton, if it occurs on Tuesday and I get permission from my day job to take the day off, but if it’s any other day this week, I’m afraid I won’t be able to go because I have commitments from which I can’t back away unless it were an immediate family member. At any rate, I should be hearing back from Poupone sometime today, at which time I’ll find out what her family wishes are with regard to flowers versus donations.

Meanwhile — and on a much happier note — I was already slated to go to Moncton this coming weekend for what’s being dubbed an “Ability Club reunion.” Back in 1981, which was the UN’s International Year of the Disabled, my oldest (in terms of years known) friend The Quad co-founded a social and activist group for the physically disabled community of Moncton. I was right there by his side through it all, even serving on the executive one year at the tender age of 16.

As difficult as it may be to imagine today, back then, the disabled were largely invisible and not integrated into society as they are now, with a few exceptions like The Quad and his Club co-founder who were always out and about. What’s more, lack of awareness back then was such that it was assumed that someone with a physical disability was also mentally challenged.

The genesis of the Club was a well-intentioned activity for disabled persons organized by the city. The eventual Club’s co-founder and president, who was a trained social worker, was rightly insulted and pissed off at the event when she was given crayons and a pair of scissors to make Valentines. However, that event is where she met The Quad, and within days they started the Ability Club.

The Club instantly grew to become one of the most active and high-profile volunteer community groups in the city. Within months of being formed, the Club entered and won first prize in what was known back then as the “Subway Paint-In.” There’s an old concrete train overpass in Moncton’s downtown, the pillars of which served as large canvasses. In the early summer through the 1970s and ’80s, the city closed off the subway to allow groups to paint their entry on the year’s designated theme, which of course was the IYD in 1981. The Club’s entry consisted of a group of people, including one in a wheelchair, all of them reading except one. So the captions read, “Q.: One of these people is not like the others,” and at the bottom, “A: The lady in the back in not reading.”

Anyway, one of those who was involved in the Club had the idea of holding a reunion on the 11th. Among the attendees will be BeeGoddessC, The Quad, and possibly a freshly minted lawyer at the time who is now a sitting judge. In some cases, I haven’t seen some of these people in 23 years, so it’ll be quite the gathering.

The rest of the weekend, I’ll spend getting Junior’s winter tires installed and spend as much time as I can with Poupoune if she’s back from northern New Brunswick. I’m not sure when my next trip to Moncton will be; I know that my mother is planning to visit my sister in Ottawa again this year over Christmas, plus I have to work between Christmas and New Year’s. And really, I’m not crazy about driving in the winter unless it’s in day light, and even there…

Addendum: I just heard from Poupoune and the funeral will be on Wednesday at the soonest, so I won’t be going.