Author: Jason Doucette

I’m a little behind, as always, so here we go…

I was watching an infomercial on the weekend, because hey, it’s all product placement anyway, and I need to see this one again. It’s for the Euro Flo, some kind of small vaccuum cleaner. About 10 minutes in, they do some testimonials, and of course it’s all women, but there is one man in there briefly, and I need to get his name. I swear it’s the same guy that was on the Modern Meat show on Frontline the other week. He’s a lobbyist for the beef industry, and I didn’t catch his name on the infomercial, but he was billed as an “environmental consultant”, so it’s not impossible that it’s the same person. I’m not sure what it would mean if it were true… Unless it’s a sign that times are tough in the beef PR business…

I didn’t get a chance to talk about this last week – it’s a eulogy for one of the four Canadian soldiers that were killed in Afghanistan by the US bomb. I’m not going to talk about whether the war makes any sense, or if we should have an army, or anything – I’m too tired for that. I’m just going to comment on the headline – “Fallen soldier ‘as gentle as a newborn child’. This is a man who was trained to kill on demand. Nothing against him, everything against propaganda.

Just now, I got an email offering to help me start my own 1-900 business! For more information, there’s a number to call – a 1-900 number of course… Cute.

Man, it’s been an hour now, and they’re still honking outside about the Leafs’ winning the first series in the Stanley Cup playoffs. This was the only game I watched, the rest I just listened for horns to tell me how we’re doing. Wow, they’re getting louder…

…Which is fortunate, because I’ve spent the past 80 or so hours at CSS university, also known as the uncomfortable chair in front of my computer. Hey, it beats doing my taxes. I’ve been working on AngelA’s web site, which should go up in a day or two. I’m starting to get the hang of CSS, it’s actually at the point where I can do something useful to multiple pages at once now, which is nice. I ended up getting rid of all the tables that I put in at one point, and I can successfully view the site in three major browsers, so that’s exciting. Here’s a fun concept – if your resume says you know CSS, shouldn’t you consider doing your resume with it? Yeah, I was trying to steal some examples, but no luck… Now if I could only find the time to do something with this site instead of working on everyone else’s.

I did spend a few minutes in a used bookstore this weekend. I go to the BMV at Yonge & Eglinton and the one at Yonge & Edward. The Northern one has the books organized by last name of the author, but they don’t go deeper than the first letter, while the downtown one has everything fully alphabetized. No fun at all if you’re looking for a particular author – 3 seconds is all it takes to find out there’s nothing new, when you could be scanning the same shelf 3 times and finding 5 interesting books that you’ve never heard of. That’s how it happens anyway, and now I’m well read, at least on 2 or 3 letters.

I also stumbled across this book, which needs a joke, but I’m too tired. Talk amongst yourselves…

You know, the Dreamweaver-type programs almost had me.

I was getting chastised Wednesday night about my stubborn attachment to vi as my HTML editor of choice. Whatever, I’d heard it all before. Then came Thursday, when I had to work on a site for AngelA’s next art show. I spent about 5 hours messing with style sheets before resorting to tables. I almost had it, but as soon as I tried it in another browser it all went to hell, so I grabbed a beer and started writing up tables. Resumes are no fun to code in HTML. Especially artist resumes. Especially when they’ve been in 500 exhibitions. Especially when you’re reading it from a raw dump of a WordPerfect file. Yeah, and to top it off my wrists are killing me.

Anyway, it’s done, and I think I understand some of the stuff I did wrong, so maybe I’ll take a crack at the next resume using CSS. Or maybe not.

Has anyone found a way to have three images in a row with captions centered under each and have it all nice and liquid? I tried floating left and right and aligning the middle one, but it had some issues. I just found a few new tricks though, so…after the resume. Right.

Somehow I’ve managed to become the internet portal for gay dog information. At least, that’s what my access logs tell me, and Google backs me up. Maybe this is finally my ticket to dot com fame and fortune.

It turns that yesterday’s fears of science gone bad were not unfounded. I ended up clarifying things with a co-worker who told me about the morning TV news shows were talking about how diary products prevent diabetes. Actually, it wasn’t that bad, she read between the lines too. Neither of us could figure out how dairy products prevent obesity in fat people, because, you know, they’re fat, but that’s what the TV was saying, apparently. Ah, if only everyone followed the wisdom of TV Turnoff week. Actually, corporations should get behind that idea – it’d give them more opportunities to dump really bad news without fear of reprisal. Currently they have to wait for holiday weekends and stuff, but imagine if they had a whole week to play with! You’d think General Electric could really gain from a bunch of “go outside” ads on NBC…

It’s been a weird couple of days. I haven’t been paying much attention to TV Turnoff Week, which I don’t feel too bad about, but in fact I’m trying to consume and I’m being thwarted at every turn:

I tried to buy coffee at the work cafeteria the past two mornings. On Monday, they were out. Of coffee. Every carafe was empty. This is what happens when you outsource your food services – there’s only one guy working the whole place, and he can’t keep up. This morning there was some coffee, but no decaf, so I decided to wait. I don’t like waiting, but when I’m timing how long I have to wait so I can rant about it for a week, it’s not so bad. The coffee was almost done brewing when I got there, but somehow it took 10 minutes to get my dose of, um, non-caffeine.

I’ve also been on a quest for a National Geographic magazine. I’ve never bought one before, but the May issue has a bunch of stuff on food production, and we need another article for the newsletter that will never die, so I’ve been hunting for the past two days. I can’t even find one copy in the whole downtown. Finally I start asking places if they even carry National Geographic, or if it’s some kind of subscription only thing. It turns out that the April issue was some hugely popular as seen on TV kind of thing, so it sold out everywhere. The May issue that I’m looking for just isn’t out yet. I thought I had a line on a place that was getting it today, but it didn’t show up in their order, so it looks like next week at the earliest, which is too late for me to use actual facts in my article, so I guess I’ll just make a bunch of stuff up and leave it to the next editor to write a “we regret the error” bit if I’m wrong.

Journalistic integrity doesn’t really exist anymore anyway, if my latest scans of the newswires are any indication: studies that show a reduction in some of the symptoms that usually precede diabetes are being hailed as ways to prevent the disease itself, and some scientists have just discovered that starch can cause cancer, and the article says that starch is in foods like bread and rice, which “millions” of people eat every day – um, it’s “billions”, and if starch is the biggest contributor to cancer risk, I guess we’re all screwed. I’m not going to post the links, I just wish reporters would actually read reports instead of making a 300 word story out of a 100 word abstract…

Aside from all that, things are ok. I just need to find a way to get 6 more hours into my day so I can get everything done. Hey – I sleep almost that much, hmm….

Product recall alert! I know that everyone who reads this site is a huge Harry Potter fan, so you should be aware that the “Magic Potion Keychain” has been recalled. It’s some kind of bottle of “magic potion” on a keychain. I guess someone recently realized that it’s a bad idea to put hazardous liquids in the bottles, because that’s why they’re recalling them. Too bad too, because that could have solved the “what do we do with our nuclear waste” riddle.

Managed to convince a coworker to go with me to the local Vietnamese vegetarian restaurant for a celebration (I was celebrating that she was buying), which is great, because I’m getting annoyed more and more lately when I eat near carcasses. The ambiance got ruined about 10 minutes in when a group of 15 year old girls walked in with McDonald’s bags. I guess their one friend wanted to eat a vegetarian meal, so they managed to humour her or something. Thankfully the food had cooled down a lot by the time they got to the restaurant, so the smell didn’t travel. Still, it was an exercise in self control to keep enjoying my meal next to so many big bags of McDeath. Who the hell brings McDonald’s food into a vegetarian restaurant? I want to go to the “whatever the hell kind of store 15 year old girls shop at” store and read Popular Mechanics and fart a lot. Yeah, that’ll show ’em.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I have a game I play when telemarketers call. I have a timer on my phone, but it’s more of a scoreboard in these situations. My plan is to keep the caller on the line as long as I can. I figure it’s the least I can do to save someone else from being interrupted during dinner or sex (or dinner and sex). It’s time people started paying me back though, so here are a few tips.

They won’t hang up. As long as you can keep asking questions, they’ll keep answering them. Play confused. Ask for them to repeat things. Ask them what they think about the product. Get sidetracked. Tell them that what they just said reminds you about something that happened to you today. Ask them if their product would have helped in that situation. Give other opinions. Ask if you can be in their focus groups. See how many times you can get them to ask their supervisor something (my record’s three). Ask for directions to their store.

Even with all that, it’s amazing how hard it can be to rack up a good score if you’re not prepared. I used to max out at around 2 minutes, but I’m getting better. My current record is 6:30 (Bell Canada), and I would have beaten that today (UCC Canada) if my phone’s batteries hadn’t cut out at 4:04. They wanted to offer me a visitor pass so I could visit their store, which isn’t open to the general public. I had a decent thing going where I talked about how I would have power over people without the pass, and my girlfriend would respect me more now, and I was working on turning that into a discussion about class systems and communism when the phone died. Much more fun than watching Friends (is that show still on?)

I try to focus my entertainment on people who aren’t getting paid based on their sales, unless I think they’re doing a horrible job, and then I might spend some time talking to them about that. Customer service, retention calls, etc are the stuff to live for.

Wow, do I ever live a lonely life…

I love when spam tries to be legitimate: NB. This message is sent in compliance of the new email bill section 301. Under Bill S. 1618 TITLE III passed by the 105th US Congress. This message cannot be considered Spam as long as we include the way to be Removed, Paragraph (a)(c) of S. 1618. TO REMOVE: do not respond to this message. Right…

Thanks to this flash gem that The Haab told me about during a newsletter break, I’ve had the damn theme song in my head for days. You have been warned. I’m torn between that and Y2Khai, also from the enormous one. Well, I found out Saturday that Billy Bragg was in town tonight, but I decided to pay my Visa off instead. Little did I know that he apparently had a free concert yesterday. Argh. Of course, I passed out yesterday after dinner anyway, so it’s a moot point. Quick update for friends and family who I haven’t talked to in many moons – the newsletter is almost done, some minor layout tweaks and we should be shipping it off Monday, and AngelA just got a whole bunch of postcards for the 347 shows she’s doing, which means we really should finish her website. We be publishers. Finally, I should mention for the memoirs that I like my Wu name from this site better than this one. I think that’s the first “your (whatever) name” script I’ve ever run. I’m sadly underwhelmed.