I really don’t like February that much, it seems that bad things happen in February. That’s probably just because I pay more attention during the month. This time around it was particularly bad, but not for the usual reasons.

The start of the problems goes back a few years, but probably further still. Being the loveless loner that I am, I probably always disliked valentines day. But one February several years back I experienced quite the heartache. I have generally let go of that, but I still mark the day in my head. Sitting here, I can’t actually remember the specific day, but the month is known. One day maybe I’ll let the month go unremarked.

I had it happen again years later, again in a February (not that I really paid attention to the month at the time, but some time later I realized that it all happened in That Month Again). That one, if anything, was worse than the first time. It’s hard to know what to say.

So this February was probably one of the first Februaries that I actually entered feeling a sense of dread, what could happen this time? I had no personal life to speak of, so could it be one of those again?

Rather unfortunately, this time it was alllll about work. I don’t want to go into details, but work went basically about as bad as I could expect without actually being asked to resign or something (which is probably a failure of imagination on my part). It just seemed to keep coming and coming, and that took out most of the first half of the month. Valentines day came and went and didn’t improve things. The snow in Toronto made things particularly trying, having slept at work one night after staying until 2am hoping a storm would dissipate. I also failed to have a zero-fall winter.

Of course, it had to be a leap year, making the month a day longer than the common year. Things were calming down, no snow for a while, the last week was nearly done, and then found out that a co-worker, Cynthia, was leaving the company. It’s pretty sad really, she was part of what we unashamedly call the lunch-posse (but not to other people, and not to each other), and she was very nice to work with, and most importantly, patient with us QA.

And to top it off, one of my other dev friends is off on a month long vacation, I’m going to run out of people at work I can talk to… but that starts in March so I guess that doesn’t count as a Feb complaint.

And of course, the ride home was kind of sucky, as it snowed once more.

My dislike of February is in no danger of stopping.

How hard is it, exactly, to have a simple, lean, stable instant messaging client. ICQ had it for years and years, it worked quite well, but then it seemed two things happened. First people started existing on MSN alone and not in duality with ICQ (meaning I had to have both installed and running) and then ICQ seemed to make incredibly bloated and crappy versions and had no end of issues, (meaning everyone startd to migrate, mostly to MSN).

So now Messenger, now Live Messenger, is sort of a vital tool, most of my friends are on it, well, I guess I rarely use it despite being always connected, but that should mean I’m not doing ‘crazy’ stuff and it should just work, right?

Well, I’ve been having an issue on and off where the unread email count, according to messenger, was always 1. I could click on the button and go to my hotmail and see that there were, in fact, no messages, but that didn’t matter to messenger, always 1 mystery message outstanding. Over the months, I got used to it, whenever it read 2, that’s when I knew, ah, I have a new message.

So this morning, I look, and it says 4, hmm, busy night. I click on it… 2 new messages in my hotmail inbox. I read them, and now the unread count reads 2. Oh christ, it’s getting bigger.

I look online for a bit, and see many other people have had this problem, and microsoft doesn’t seem to think anything of it. Someone suggests closing out messenger completely and logging in again (I have only signed in and out at this point). So I signout and restart messenger and try to log in again…

You cannot use MSN Messenger at this time because your contact list is not available. Please try again later.
Click Help to learn more about your contact list. 81000378

What? I try again, nope. I look at the help on it, “check connectivity”, fine, I run their internal check, all pass. I check the MSN network status, apparently everything is up and running (but since it says that even during outtages that make the mainstream news, I don’t really trust it anyway) So I remote into my work computer, sign out of my work account and in again… fine. I sign out again and in as my personal account… still fine. Back at my home computer, I try logging into my work account…. same… error.

Shit, then it really is my computer.. or something, but nothing has changed. So I look at more help, people suggest all sorts of stuff, including one MS had suggested to me in the past: signing off and shutting down messenger, and clearing the caches, and signing in again. So I shut down the program, found the contact caches, killed them, and started messenger again. I sign in, no joy.

So then looking online somemore, people seem to have experienced this problem for months and Microsoft doesn’t seem to know what’s going on with that one either. One person suggested signing in through webmessenger, and then go back to the client one. Web Messenger signs in no problem, client one… 81000378. Another suggestion was to install the latest version. I already had a pretty recent version, but I thought I’d try.

I download their little downloader (I hate the trend now that users can’t be allowed to download the thing they actually want to install, but must be forced to download something that can download it for them) and it says it’s upgrading my current one. When it says it’s done, I try to login…. 81000378. Now quite angry, I just go and use Add/Remove programs (since Live doesn’t appear to have it’s own uninstaller) and uninstall Live messenger, the sign-in assistant which I never actually saw an icon or any way to run it, and of course the installation of the windows live installer, which I cannot fathom why it itself has an installation record. After it’s all gone, I go back to the msn messenger website, decline all the extra crap it would want to install on my computer for a second time, and download the downloader.

As it installs messenger again, I go to the bathroom to get ready for work. When I return, the installation has failed. For what reason? It doesn’t feel like telling me, other than that I can try again later. I click that button, and it launched a browser or something back to msn’s site. I close it all and run the installer again off the desktop, and install again, while I watch.

This time it succeeds, and launches messenger, I put in my login credentials, and finally am able to log in. It’s a pity that the new MSN looks like crap.. maybe I changed the colours on my old install. And, mercifully, 0 new emails.

Anyway, this ends the tale of me trying to get something to work at all. Join me in a couple of days when I try to install new RAM into my computer, will they turn out to be long crackers? Will my computer POST and just spin the memory check. Until next time. Same crap time. Same crap channel.

And here we are at 2008. 2007, we hardly knew you.

I put on the CityTV broadcast of the new years stuff at Nathan Phillip’s Square, as soon as it was on they played that damned Hey There Delilah song again, the one I already got sick of last summer when the radio at the cottage played it as every other song.

Most of my friends (so I assume) are at another party to which I was not part. Others are not available. I pretty well resolved to spend this one alone, but a couple people pitched gatherings at the last minute, but I started not feeling well on the 30th, I fear I may have caught something my mother had (which seemed to only result in headaches and sleep, which is what I’m stuck with). Anyway, seeing as how badly last new years went for me, being alone but still well (compared to last year anyway) is quite a boon. Being alone is both preferable, and sucky. I’m certainly still aligned with the title of this entry, and I recall the only other time I was kissed at new years, quite the impulsive misstep on the lady’s part, it was described as terrible or something akin to that, so I guess that all works itself out.

New Year’s resolutions, well, it’s pretty much down to the one, lose weight, all other priorities rescinded. All other hopes in previous years just sit and spoil, time to shed them entirely and address them once the major blockers are cleared.

Onwards to 2009, may that year bring change. I’m personally celebrating 2008 with a bottle of DIY icewine, and perhaps several more, the night is young.

Another xmas come and gone. Went home earlier than usual since for the first time in 2 years I took the critical days around Christmas and boxing day off, yet stupidly didn’t take new years eve off, but that will likely be fortuitous since I doubt I’ll do anything.

Couple of familial activities, went to Wasaga to visit grandmother and one aunt and have brunch at what will likely be the usual spot. Went to other aunt for new years eve gathering. It was actually pretty calm there for a while, right up until christmas eve day, when the dog did stupid things. He’s always pretty excited and nosy at christmas, but he managed to dig around in a bag and grab a box from yet another bag within it, and unwrap it in his own clumsy way, and eat the contents. He consumed some cardboard, some foil, two sticks of lip gloss for one young relation, some plastic from the packaging of a gift for another young relation, and the contents of that box, which was 8 chocolate truffles. Now, I knew chocolate was not altogether good for dogs, but the vet implied over the phone that it was a little more urgent that that, so we took him in. He was given eyedrops that caused him to vomit up everything, including his morning treat and some of his dinner from the night before. Then he was given charcoal stuff to drink, and spent the afternoon in a bit of a hyper stupor. The next day he acted as if nothing had happened, which is a pity since he probably learned nothing.

Christmas day itself was pretty calm, rose late, leisurely opened gifts, had a turkey dinner, didn’t have to go anywhere, or entertain anyone. And here is what I received:

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes (ISBN 0-7407-4847-5) Which is (wikipedia says) 22.5 pounds, and I would have guessed even heavier than that. It has basically everything he did for Calvin and Hobbes, so I can toss out all my previous books. Or I would, except that the collection reads like 3 giant bibles. I’ve been reading the first one, but carefully. Once finished, I’ll probably put them aside to appreciate, heh.

A trilogy, Viking – Odinn’s Child (ISBN 978-0-330-42673-2), Viking – Sworn Brother (ISBN 0-330-42674-5) and Viking – King’s Man (0-330-42675-3), I don’t actually know anything about these books yet, hopefully I’ll have time to read them sometime before next xmas, heh.)

A ipod speaker mount which is neat, though delicate looking. It also charges the ipod which I quite like since my only other option is plugging it into the computer. It appears to work well so far and has pretty good sound. It runs off AC or 4 AA batteries, but not sure how long they really last, the company says 8 hours. The main purpose was so I could listen to music in the shower, but the thing is nice enough that I’m afraid of doing that. I might try putting it in a plastic bag, heh.

Some new towels (my current ones are paper thin and falling apart at this point), some new workout clothing, some general shirts and a sweater. Some wine glasses and some general short glasses which look like they would prefer holding alcohol (and I won’t disappoint).

I also got 6 cans of soup (3 consumed so far). Basically it is the No Name (specified to Zehrs and associated stores) vegetable with pasta soup. It used to be under the Chunky brand, but they sold it off or something, so now I can only get it at Zehrs, and they appear to be forbidden from existing in Toronto. Dominion is my closest store, and they don’t have it, alas.

My brother got me a set of pots and pans which my kitchen desperately needed (1 stew pot, 2 handled pots of large and small sizes, 1 large frying pan and 1 small frying pan), and I also got a heavy-duty cutlery tray for all the new cutlery I got from my grandmother (months earlier). I also got lots of smelly stuff to mask my horrid natural aromas. I have enough cologne to last me for a couple years, which is good since the last time I ran out I started using Axe and it’s not all that good, no crazy women throwing themselves at me or nothin’.

I’d take pictures of some of this stuff, or at least my cat that’s being very cute right now, but my camera, bought for my birthday back in July, has ceased to function. The battery anyway. Completely dead, and when put in the charger, the charge-light flashes, which is supposed to indicate a defective battery. damn thing.

I think I gave out some pretty good stuff as well, including a DVD player and the Yes (Prime) Minister box set, a slew of other DVD’s and cash. I also gave a Wii to a friend, which is interesting in that I coveted one myself, but it’s always easier to be extravagant for others then to oneself, or such it is for me.

Anyway, I’m working tomorrow, and probably will stay in for my second annual not-feeling-well new years bash, except this time I have many bottles of ice-wine.

I really dislike the TTC, today was a bad day. It’s probably no different that some other people’s days, and maybe this goes on a lot, but I’m really tired of this.

First of all, the massive snowfall was supposed to screw up yesterday, not today, but today was far worse. It took me around 2 hours to get to work today, you could drive it in 20 minutes, I bet if I was driven, point to point, probably wouldn’t have taken longer than 40, but for the bus factor.

What really gets me is the ads they have for the TTC. Here’s one of their own website

Advert for TTC (the image)

Okay, so lets look at the various things it claims. First, a safe ride home.. well, perhaps, maybe, if you are an unaccompanied female between 9pm and 5am (while in the winter it’s pitch black at 5pm, so that’s pretty useful). Secondly, cleaner air for my kids, again, perhaps, but 95% dead is still dead, so until it’s a more useful service and more cars are off the road, pointless point. Ah, the third one. Getting to work before my boss (she drives). Okay, neat that they made the boss female, but I’ll say that’s cancelled out by only having white people in the add. And it’s like the advertisers couldn’t seem to work in the fact that they are comparing against a driver without making it a sort of passing exposition in the speaker’s speech balloon. But the joke is that you can beat a driver using the TTC. Maybe if you only use the subway, and only if you live on the tracks at one stop and your work is on the tracks at another stop. Here’s how riding the bus is different from driving…

When driving, you don’t have to wait outside for 45 minutes waiting for your god damned car to arrive, watching other cars that won’t take you where you want to go fly by, sometimes several of the same.. er, numbered, .. car. Whatever. Still, the only car that could take me where I wanted to go was far later than it should have been. Cars were moving, buses were absent.

When your car arrives, you don’t normally get packed in because 60 other people are using it too, nor do you have to clamber over a snowbank because no one bothered to plough the city the stop, again.

One’s car doesn’t inch along slowly letting people on and off, making personal encountered with other people’s body odours very acute.

Nor does one car suddenly decide to ditch it’s god damn 40 passenger load and become a Short-Turn car and sit you waiting for another half hour, 75% of the way to your destination, waiting for another car that will take you (which you’ve been assured is ‘right behind us’). Bullshit. They claim it’s for scheduling… we are on FS, (laughably termed Frequent Service, more aptly Fucking Slow) which is supposed to mean approx 10 minutes, but no actual times. So why not just drive? We waited forever, so will other people, don’t screw over your current customers for the sake of those unknown. But then again, it’s a monopoly, we don’t actually have a choice. People don’t take the bus because they want to.

Of course, once the other car arrives, and you stop one stop before your goal and another 30 people get on, it’s very fun to force your way to the front because there is only a 3 foot wide opening in the snowbank and guess which set of doors will open there?

A lot of the crap later was due to Brentcliffe Ave once again causing a nightmare for motorists by having it’s lights out and cops directing the traffic, one. direction. at. a. time. And losing a lane. That intersection has been hell for a while, but it can be open and fine for 3 days, and then suddenly shit again. You can’t anticipate it.

And of course, same crap happens on the way home, wait 45 minutes (from 9:15 to 10pm) for a bus, 3 go by the other way… nothing for 45 minutes, and then 3 come trendling up. Why the hell would they short turn me in the morning, but not fix it at night.

The Better Way? Better than what? Better than death? Perhaps, but not by much.

So I enjoyed a night of xmas cheer and door prizes last Saturday, as I had gone with Alicia to her company Christmas Party. Being December 1st, I guess it’s not too early. I of course was in the middle of a cold at the time, having come down with it on Wednesday, ruining my vacation days on Thursday and Friday. I made it to her place by 5:30 (half an hour early) but she actually anticipated that I’d likely arrive early. I wore my suit as is well documented. She wore a black and white dress of elegance. We chatted for a bit while waiting for a cab to take us to the venue. We wanted one for 6, but they seemed to ignore that request and sent one right away, so we asked the cab driver to take the long way. By now, the weather was merely cold, but there was no snow.

We got there just after 6 and went in. I was flummoxed at first by the non-requirement of presenting a ticket, which I guess was a good thing because they didn’t have any. The company was taking photographs of the happy couples, and as we are neither happy nor a couple, we decided to have the photograph taken anyway.

We hung about in the hallway with the 80 other odd people who were there at the time because the main hall wasn’t opened yet, so we had our first drink of the night, white wine. Our mission was to drink sufficient quantities of alcohol to induce us to dance. The bar used a ticket system, and we got 2 premium drink tickets with the invitation, but the extra tickets were kinda pricey.

Eventually we were seated and we sat with some people I didn’t know, which isn’t very hard when it’s not your company party. We were harassed occasionally by a Joan Rivers impostor for some reason. The meal was nice, consisting of a clear vegetable soup, a light salad, chicken breast, filet mignon which was unfortunately too rare to be palatable to me, and then dessert. The dessert consisted of two lines, one for traditional treats like brownies, cookies and such. The other line was for a chocolate fountain which was kind of neat to see, but it drew far too large a crowd and they ran out of fruit to dip under it.

Then the dancing began, something I’m not particularly good at. There was one slow dance, to which I entreated Alicia to join with me. She declined, thus sparing me a repeat of the zombie-like horror I committed the last time I slow danced at highschool Formal. The rest of the dance music was basically of the random-body-movement variety, but there was a battle between the stuff the younger generation preferred, and the older one.

Our drinking continued, to facilitate dancing. I think we had the same number of drinks in all. The initial glass of wine, 2 more glasses with dinner, rum and coke, rye and coke, screw driver, and Apple Sours and soda. Perhaps others, I no longer recall. In any case, the effect on me was sadly momentary and my dancing was in a painfully sober state.

The crowd thinned out very early, by 11 it was getting embarrassing to be on the dance floor. Eventually the people we had met over the course of the night and hung out with were leaving, so we decided to leave as well. That’s when we saw the blizzard. Alicia tried phoning for a cab, but she couldn’t get through, and we eventually got a lift with a coworker back to her place. It was really coming down then. Back at her place we had to be quiet since her parents were sleeping, so we chatted a bit until 2am. I never know when to leave, so I left it up to her, and 2am seemed to be her limit. Rather unfortunately, when she rang for another cab, most places weren’t taking calls. We finally got through to a place and said it would be around 40 minutes.

They weren’t kidding. She and I spent the next hour on the main floor of the house so we could see the cab, but our need for quiet, and her fatigue, made it a very quiet hour of sitting, staring at the snow building up. At 3am the cab arrived and I took my leave. The snow being quite bad made the going difficult, and we had to turn back on a few streets and try others due to the road slipping. Finally got home at 4am, carefully put away my suit for the next time it’s needed, and went to sleep. I slept pretty much through Sunday as well.

I’m still recovering from that cold, yep, attractive as ever.

Just bought the second season of Dr Katz. Neither Curtis nor Alicia understand why I like it.

That’s one example of why.

Not much has been going on actually, other than the constancy of work. Sweet constancy.

At my brother’s request, I’ll talk about my tooth. See, haven’t been to a dentist in a long while, but I managed to hurt one of my teeth a while back, clenching while at the gym, or perhaps eating something hard, not sure, but in any case, it hurt a bit. Eventually it hurt enough that I didn’t eat with the left side of my mouth, but it didn’t hurt on its own, so I sort of left it alone. After a few weeks of that, I was out to brunch with friends when I noticed a little bit of my tooth in that area was now moving about independently in a manner I wasn’t at all sure I liked. I went to the dentist the following week and discovered a filling I had forgotten I even possessed had broken away a bit. A refilling later and all was well… but then came the diagnostic (where they don’t actually fix anything, they just check to see how much money they can make off me), so I have appointments from here until 2009 I think. Also, my insurance company, though taking the forms electronically, seems less than keen to actually pay me off, so I’ll have to deal with that one.

Other than that, I’ve had to go out and get some new elements for a suit, since current elements no longer fit. Sadly. It’s for a christmas party so I have to at least not embarrass myself, so new clothes were a requirement. So my mother of course recommends going to our local George Richards, for the fat and tall (I’m there obviously because of my height), and in usual fashion, something is amiss. At Yorkdale, it is in an outer strip of the mall that isn’t connected to the main promenade, so you head outside and walk along. I remembered from the last time I was there, a year earlier, that it was right next to a similar shop for women. I saw that. And next to it, a gaping hole in the strip of stores. The store I was looking for was not merely closed for the day, or having gone out of business, it was physically gone, to be replaced with some other thing that hadn’t been constructed yet. In dismay I kept walking in a huge semicircle barricade that had been set up for pedestrians getting around the construction zone, looking at the other stores to see if I could find a clothing store at all. Luckily, down at the far side, I found the store I was looking for, it had just moved. Now, most people wouldn’t think much of this, but this kind of thing happens to me (or in the case of restaurants, to my friends) with annoying frequency.

In any case, I bought my giant dressy burlap sacks, and I shall be the beast of the ball. or somesuch

As is now well documented, I now have a dual monitor setup. Multi-monitor setups have been available since windows 98, and yet things still screw it up. But I somehow think they weren’t as prevalent, I mean, now even I have it, and I rarely do any upgrading unless it’s particularly easy or just can’t be helped anymore. And so here we have it.

Need… bigger…. desk….

But programs have to make sure they don’t screw it up. Raymond Chen in his book The Old New Thing calls this a kind of tax. There are lots of taxes that have to be paid by software that wants to play well. Like handling low battery conditions, games working with Alt-Tab, and working properly with multi-monitor setups.

I’ve discovered at least a couple of things that seem to mess up on that front.

PowerDVD, that came pre-installed on my computer, has worked for me relatively faithfully for years. However, when I try to run it on the secondary monitor, it just crashes, right out. And it’s not even using hardware overlays.

WMP seems to work okay (I should hope they pay their own taxes) but once you start playing in one monitor, you can’t drag it to the next one. It is using hardware acceleration, so I presume this is just a limitation, not terribly painful, whatever.

VLC is my new DVD playing software since it doesn’t crash. Well, it does, sometimes. It will just blank out and then die, but what is far more irritating right now is what happens when I play a file in it and have it on the second monitor. When it’s done, the gui shrinks back down to nothing, but then nestles up against the top-left of the screen (still secondary monitor). I can drag another file to it and it plays there, I can drag the window away, but when I double click the titlebar to maximize the window, it acts like a Restore, and just gets a little bigger, I have to doubleclick again to get it to maximize.

But why maximize it, why not just run it fullscreen? Well, that works, but it also creates another entry in the taskbar for VLC hardware overlay. Now if I accidentally touch the original VLC task in the bar, it will appear as an empty gray VLC window overtop of the video. I minimize it, phew.. but then if I doubleclick the fullscreen video to get it back into a window, it does, but the video is now black, and I have to stop it and start it again. I think it’s because when I minimize the parent window, it moves back to the primary display (or thinks it does anyway) and then we get back to trying to move a hardware accelerated playback between monitors. Oh well.

Another sub-tax that VLC violates is keeping dialogs close to the parent. If I put VLC on the secondary monitor and then File – Open Disc, the dialog pops up on the primary monitor… ugh.

I tried Doom3 with the new card, it seemed to be okay (but managed to crash Nvidia’s own Temperature Guage control panel applet afterwards), but since it takes over the primary monitor and drops the res, and the desktop spans, then a bunch of windows suddenly get flung to the secondary monitor. When the game ends, not all of them make it back.

I’ll explore further to see what other programs can’t cope.