Yearly Archives: 2004

Appreciating Both Sides

The days can go on with reg­u­lar­i­ty over and over, one day indis­tin­guish­able from the next.

—Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver

Every day I think that I’ll catch up on sleep at night, but I nev­er seem to get the chance. I have time here and there to write, but things don’t come out prop­er­ly when I’m tired. Even on the week­ends, when I expect to be able to sleep in, I’m always off some­where, doing some­thing. It’s such a change from how I was liv­ing last year; no school, no job, no girl­friend, with all my friends still attend­ing uni­ver­si­ty. I lost all sense of time.

I’m busier than ever at work, and it’s a great feel­ing to know that I’m respon­si­ble for so much…for meet­ing dead­lines, for com­plet­ing projects, for com­ing up with solu­tions to peo­ples’ prob­lems. It’s a lot of stress, but it’s a great chal­lenge. Being forced to work with a lack of sleep has made me more accus­tomed to think­ing while fatigued, some­thing that I nev­er thought was pos­si­ble. I used to need a prop­er eight hours a day to think, oth­er­wise I could only oper­ate at a basic lev­el. Only one day in the last month have I felt rest­ed. The fact that I’m still going and get­ting things done is a big deal to me. And now it feels like I’m final­ly work­ing towards some­thing, in my rela­tion­ships, in my career, even in my equi­ty and assets.

I remem­ber Pat telling me to enjoy my unem­ploy­ment, and I did exact­ly that. I appre­ci­at­ed every minute of it, and now I appre­ci­ate every moment that I have some­thing to do. I appre­ci­at­ed the free­dom of being sin­gle, and now I appre­ci­ate the com­fort of being with some­one.

Home For Bubble Tea

Thumbnail: Bubble tea shop

Went home for the week­end, spent it with Darren. It was a gloomy few days; cloudy, humid, and gen­er­al­ly uncom­fort­able.

At one point, Darren asked me if it felt like home, or whether my apart­ment here has tak­en the role. I could­n’t real­ly answer him at the time. I just knew that they feel dif­fer­ent. We lit up in a park that I used to play in while I was still in ele­men­tary school, and it felt odd to be stoned in a beau­ti­ful­ly emp­ty play­ground in the mid­dle of Saturday, sur­round­ed by all these upper-mid­dle class hous­es with their pools and patios. Places that aren’t com­fort­able, but famil­iar.

Fighting The Bob Comment Spam

I’ve been get­ting tons of spam com­ments from the “bob@y####o.com” address, and I’m sure that I’m not the only Movable Type user suf­fer­ing from the same prob­lem. At one point I was get­ting a dozen a day, which is much more annoy­ing than spam e‑mail because delet­ing com­ments from MT is a lit­tle more involved than delet­ing an e‑mail. Even though I use MT-Blacklist (which has been a great help), the spam URLs, and even the IP address­es keep chang­ing. The only thing that stays the same is parts of the e‑mail address, so I wrote a very sim­ple reg­u­lar expres­sion to catch the offen­sive com­ments, because no one else seems to have post­ed one on the net:

bob@y\d*o.com

I know that it’s rather basic, but I fig­ure that I’ll adapt it when­ev­er the spam­mer starts using more com­pli­cat­ed e‑mail gen­er­a­tors. So far, the only adjust­ment has been a change from catch­ing four dig­its to catch­ing any num­ber of dig­its. It’s sat­is­fy­ing to check the activ­i­ty log and see that the black­list has caught over 500 spam com­ments over the week­end, not let­ting a sin­gle one go through.

The Political Olympics

I don’t enjoy watch­ing the Olympics. The cov­er­age we get (exclu­sive­ly from the CBC), is shod­dy. There’s no pre-planned time sched­ule for match­es or events, so I nev­er know what’s going to be on when I have time to watch. There was also absolute­ly no cov­er­age of table ten­nis, which has already end­ed, most of the medals going to China. Why is this? I sus­pect because Canada basi­cal­ly had no chance of plac­ing in the top three, so why would the CBC want to show them? Well, more like­ly not even in the top five. Even Google gave table ten­nis props with one of their dai­ly ban­ners, and with 28 Olympic sports but only 16 days, 12 of those sports aren’t going to have ban­ners.

There are also so many pol­i­tics involved, with dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tions, dop­ing, judg­ing, etc., that every­thing just seems taint­ed. There’s also all the frus­trat­ing media cov­er­age in the mix, such as Perdita Felicien’s hur­dle dis­s­a­point­ment splat­tered on the front page of most papers while Ann Muenzer’s gold­en achieve­ment gets a sports sec­tion blurb. And with sports that don’t need to be in the Olympics (why have syn­chro­nized div­ing AND div­ing AND syn­chro­nized swim­ming?), there’s not much to keep my inter­est.