Category: Life

This post is dedicated to you guys. Yes, I’m in a sappy mood.

Jeremy and Tina: Jeremy, I first met you when we worked at Staples. We became good friends, and university partners in crime. Highlights: That time where we ran the fake candidate for the university elections. Oh, and the boat party where the idiot jumped overboard and the crew tried to keep things hush hush.

Jon and Eric: Friends dating back to high school. Eric and I had university classes together, and now work together. We frequently get up to mischief. Highlights: Jon – Getting up at 4AM to go to the Sarah Palin book signing in Rochester. Eric – not realizing that the computer had internal speakers, and accidentally blasting music in the Remote Sensing class when I pulled out my headphones.

Jason Scott: First talked to you in an uncomfortable manner to see if you were interested in giving a talk at HOPE. I look up to you, and thank you for pushing me to keep doing what I love (but sometimes forget I love.) Highlights: having to use a mic that Jello had put his ass against minutes previous.

Corie: Met you the first day of university frosh, during a campus tour. You helped me work through the tougher times of my life. Highlight: clacking our teeth together when we forced ourselves to kiss, then promptly covering our mouths in agonizing pain.

Adrian: Long-time friend. We met in grade 6, playing together almost every day. You’re a great friend and ally. Thank you. Highlight: helping you move in Montreal. May New Zealand treat you well.

Jay: My boyfriend. The last four months have been a roller coaster of awesome. Highlights: being accused of shoplifting at Walmart. Going to the Bare Naked Ladies concert. Attending the ill-fated Ann Coulter speech.

Everyone else: Thank you.

What a random weekend!

Friday night, Jay noticed that the Barenaked Ladies posted this tweet:

This is a quick one twitterverse- ticket giveaway for London, ON show tomorrow night. Coming up in 10 minutes…
9:37 PM Apr 16th via TweetDeck

Followed by:

First 4 people to respond to this with #BnLLondon gets a pair of tix. Remember, you have 5 mins to reply to the DM sent to u if you won
9:46 PM Apr 16th via TweetDeck

Jay responded accordingly. He was the third person to answer and won the tickets! Slight problem though: the concert was in London, Ontario – a town seven hours away. It was also less than 24 hours away.

We checked the train schedule. There’d only be one train that would get us there on time to see the concert, and it would leave at 6:45AM. Since that meant we had to be up by 4AM to be able to bus to the train yard on time, we decided to skip over pesky sleeping. By this point, it was already midnight.

We got up at four and headed towards the train station. I was reminded of how pleasant it is to take the train. It took only a few minutes to obtain the tickets and board. The staff were courteous and genuinely appeared to enjoy their job.

For the Toronto-London leg of the trip, we sat at a group of four seats at the back of the cab that faced a table. We sat across from a man who was drunk off of mouthwash. He was listening to music on headphones, hitting the wall to the beats, occasionally sharing undecipherable lyrics to the world and throwing empty packs of cigarettes at me.

London is such a nice city. It has half the population of Ottawa, but it feels much more substantial. It’s clean and the drivers are nicer than the ones here.

Jay thought this comment was funny:
Hotelier: So you’ll have a room with two queens?
Me: Yes, but I’d like it to have one bed.

I was oblivious. Anywho, we went to pick up the tickets. They weren’t ready, but the kind girl at the box office agreed to call us when they would come in. We walked around, she called, and we got our tix.

The concert itself was great. First up was Joel Plaskett. These guys delivered a class act. They won a Juno the night of the show!

Next up was the Barenaked Ladies. These guys were the cherry on top. To be honest, I’m not a big fan of their music. The live performance, however, was just bloody fantastic. I can’t speak highly enough of their show, and this ranks among the best concerts I’ve ever seen.

The trip back the following day was interesting. The train lost power and stopped. The lights in our cab started to flicker, and then turned off. Then those of the cab in front started to flicker, and turned off. Meanwhile, the train still had wifi + a satellite connection, so we were able to watch the hockey game live off of a pirated stream while the engineers were running around.

The fun was short lasted, and the satcom died. The train was pitch black. In the end, we would arrive two hours later than scheduled. My friend, JT Alfons author of Surrogate Stars, gave me a lift back to my place, which was much appreciated.

Odds are, if ever you’ve worked in a corporate or institutional environment, you’ve run across this lovely screen:

For the employees who are censored by it, the filtering technologies provided by Websense can significantly hamper efforts to get the job done. Take for instance the more obscure compilation errors that arise when I’m developing software. I’ll instinctively Google the problem and find how others corrected similar issues.

Unfortunately, the more relevant a search result appears to be, the higher the chances that Websense will block the site. This means that I’ll have to spend even more time on less promising sites, wasting time that could have otherwise been spent doing actual coding.

I likewise remember the time that I was asked to design software that needed to communicate through a proxy. I went to look up the specifications of the proxy – but Websense filters all sites that were categorized as discussing the issue. In the end it was easier for me to use Wireshark and reverse engineer the packets from existing (closed source) software than it was for me to find documentation online.

Over time, I’ve developed tricks to bypass the filtering. I’ll share with you the easiest trick thus far: use the Opera web-browser. Opera is one of the big names out there, alongside Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox. Primarily catering to the mobile browsing market, Opera has integrated a technology in their desktop software called “Opera Turbo.”

Essentially, using Turbo reroutes all traffic through Opera’s servers, where they compress the content and images to accelerate the web surfing experience for people with slow connections.  We can however use this to trick Websense. Because Websense filters by who you connect to, you aren’t censored: as far as it knows, you’re just constantly connected to Opera’s servers. It doesn’t censor Opera’s domains/subdomains, ergo, your web surfing proceeds unfiltered.

To enable Turbo, download and install Opera. It’s free.  Then, click on the Turbo button at the bottom of the browsing window (the green button):

That’s it! Your experience will be censorship-free.

I switched cellphone carriers this past week from Rogers to Wind Mobile, finally putting an end to my relationship with the service provider.

I wasn’t a fan of Rogers. The problem was that there wasn’t any competition to switch to. The Canadian cell phone market was controlled by the big three: Rogers, Bell, and Telus. Together, they charged rates far beyond any of their international counterparts.

With investigations into their activities by the government, the big three decided to roll out discount service providers. Telus started up Koodo, Bell went into a joint venture and created Virgin Mobile, and Rogers acquired Fido.

The competition was purely illusory. The market was still controlled by the big three, and the prices were still high. Finally, there was a wind of change: through the actions of the CRTC and government intervention, outside competition was allowed in.

Three new, entirely independent, companies are now setting up shop in Canada. I switched to Wind Mobile, the first to be available in my area.

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