Category: Life

Aunt Caylin isn’t real. It’s just a name I picked to protect her anonymity.

Aunt Caylin is a wonderful person. She’s always been there for me. When I was down, she was always there to stand up for me, or to console me in her way, or whatever was appropriate. If I needed a hand, she was there in a pinch – even when it meant scratching her own schedule. I’ve looked up to her my whole life.

The other day, aunt Caylin and I went out for some tea. I don’t know how it started, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the one to bring it up, but we ended up discussing same-sex marriage. Aunt Caylin knows about me and Jay, and she’s just fine with that. But she let me know that me marrying Jay would defile the sanctity of marriage. Make marriage as a whole worth something less.

This hurt me. I asked her did me being in a happy marriage with the person I love somehow make a stranger’s commitment to their partner in the Yukon something less? My sister’s commitment to her husband? It may just, she said. This hurt me more.

We agreed that a bad marriage was one where the love had vanished, if it was there ever at all. A good marriage, I argued, was one where the love remained. So how could two people, who love each other, defile the essence of marriage? No – marriage was always a man and a woman. What about a black man and white woman? Not too long ago, that too wasn’t permissible. But I made no headway.

Now the conversation wasn’t as polite as above. I used arguments that shot below the belt, and Aunt Caylin might have used a cuss word or two. I know we love each other very much. Nevertheless, when someone tells me that my dedication of love somehow lessens the worth of someone else’s relationship, that hurts.

It hurts because this person who means so much to me doesn’t believe I’m worth affording the opportunity to express a life of love with my partner, no matter how strong the love, the bond, no matter how great of a person, or a father, my partner might be. It hurts because my Aunt Caylin won’t ever be able to recognize this and change her mind, because in her view, it isn’t about that. It’s about the sanctity of marriage.

And there’s no going against that is there.

Imagine you’re flying to Cuba for a vacation. You come up to the airport in Canada, and you put your ticket in. You’re told you can’t board the plane: the Americans have barred you from the flight. But you aren’t going to the States. You’re going to Cuba.

According to new legislation (link) being pushed by the Conservative government, situations like this could soon be a reality. Any Canadian that flies over US airspace, even if they don’t land in that country, would be subject to checks against American no-fly lists.

This means that all Canadians travelling to South America and the Caribbean would be affected. As would some Canadian travelers to Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. And those lists the Americans use? They’re so faulty that among the alleged terrorists are newborns (link) and US Senators (link).

The conservative government should take a stance against this American idiocy. We have our own security and intelligence. We have our own airport security. The Americans should have no right to interfere with a Canadian passenger on a Canadian plane leaving from a Canadian airport traveling to a destination that isn’t the US.

I mean, imagine if another country was doing this. You need to fly over Sudanese airspace to get to South Africa. Should Sudan be able to dictate who goes on the flight based on faulty lists that are ridiculed the world around? There would be outrage. But because it’s the Americans doing this, we remain silent.

Befuddler is the name of my latest creation. It’s an application that’s used to modify the signature of a file, as well as its file extension, to prevent paranoid corporate/government e-mail filters from dropping your attachments (such as ZIP files.) Just pass your file through this before you send it. The recipient on the other side will also have to do the same to reverse the changes.

The program does not change the size of the file, nor does it modify the whole thing – just the first few bytes – so it runs very fast on even the largest of files. You can download a copy below. It was tested on Windows XP and Windows 7.

Download Befuddler:
Executable: Here [2MB]
Source Code: Here [22 KB]

We got a call last night letting us know that we got the apartment. It’s the second story of a house found in downtown Ottawa, within walking distance of the Byward Market. It’s also right by the transit way. The part I’m most excited about: the unit has a washer/dryer in it.

F*ck yeah! We get the place on December 1^st.