Kelly and Adam. This was too good to pass up shooting ;-)

Melissa got pretty hammered that night.

I've been rather busy this weekend, but wanted to get these up in time for Kelly and friends to see them sooner rather than later.

We had a great night on Friday -- a bunch of us got together at the Gladstone for some Karaoke. Unfortunately, we were only some of about 200 people who had the same idea so we didn't get many chances to sing. We all had a lot of fun though.

What did I sing? Incubus' "Drive" -- I bombed it. I swear to this day that the DJ guy had the pitch turned up or something. Kelly was awesome on stage though, and Eden had better luck than I trying to remember how to sing "Mysterious Ways". Fun times were had regardless.

It was nice to see everyone again though. I rarely get to see Kelly, and I see Robin and Melissa even less. They're really fun people though, so I hope to see them more often.

Those interested may like to take a look at the few photos I took currently residing in my imager.

Because everyone else is doing it...

After the events of yesterday, I was just vibrating. Even after a night's sleep I woke up stressed and the idea of going back to work was not a favoured one in my mind. I couldn't skip out though -- too much still to do. So I came up with a hopeful Third Way: I smuggled my copy of Moulin Rouge into the office and played it in the corner of my screen while I worked on the servers.

You'd be surprised at the effect of something so simple. I'm not completely unwound, I'm thinking that'll take some time, but I managed to relax enough to solve two of the 3 big problems I had on my plate for today, and it's only 2:15.

Truth, Beauty, Freedom, Love. Thank you Baz.

It occurs to me at this point that using one-word titles for all of my blog posts will inevitably lead to duplicate post titles... a phenomenon I've managed to avoid thus far. Nonetheless, this is the perfect word for how I feel right now.

The past few weeks have been... difficult at best. Activism, girlfriend, promotion, x-girlfriend, raise, more responsibility, more activism, two (pro-bono) websites for two different family members, late-night meetings and little or no sleep. Hell, I haven't made dinner (save for one token evening) for over a month!

I was doing alright though. Sure dinner was kinda expensive to swing, but I was getting it done -- until this week. Ever since I've taken over the all of the office networking stuff I've felt completely overrun. It's too much. Not only that, but I honestly don't know what I'm doing in many cases. Often I find that I've setup a whole system of networking that "just works" but not completely right because no one ever showed me how to do it the Right Way. Programs I installed are spewing packets to places I know they shouldn't and things as important as DNS just don't seem to plug into the world right... ever.

It's starting to really wear me down.

I made brief mention of Dave Meslin's new project, City Idol back in February. The idea is to get a bunch of people together who want to be a Toronto Councillor and have them compete Canadian Idol style.

Well the big opening is tomorrow night and the old Music Hall on the Danforth. I'll be there, anyone wanna come with?

Here's the details:

Friday, April 28th
The Music Hall - 147 Danforth Avenue (near Broadview Station)
Doors open at 7pm
Show starts at 8pm
$4

More details can be found on the website.

Edit: Actually, it turns out that I can't go tonight. Even with all these handy calendar apps, I managed to forget that I already have other plans (sigh). So while I still think City Idol is a great Idea, I'm afraid that I won't be there for it's opening.

Coming home tonight, I found myself waiting at Dundas Square, Toronto's sad attempt at our very own Times Square. Essentially, the whole block is smattered with big screens which tend to just broadcast ad after ad. So there I was, standing there amidst the flashing I thought for a moment about how cool it would be to smash all of them. That way, if only for a few days, Dudas would be flash-free.

But then I thought: "No, that's too destructive. My mother would say 'negative'. No, a better plan would be to interrupt the signal or even repossess it.

This got me thinking. I know for a fact that one, if not all of them run Windows. (I've seen the blue screen). It makes little or no sense that these machines would be available on the public internet, but you can bet that the broadcast source is an unpatched box. How hard could it be to install a mini userpation program on a usb key and install it on the locally-running broadcasting machines? You could, theoretically have the screens display a series of pretty pictures for hours before the authorities caught on... right?

My Windows kung-foo is limited at best, and my Black Hat knowledge even more sad, but this seems as good an excuse as any to learn some of that stuff.

Now if they were networked, that might make for an even better target... Some exploratory legwork might be in order first ;-)

You can't tell, but I'm posting this from my bed on the other side of the room... with no wires! Even better, I'm watching Babylon 5 on the laptop, streaming from my NFS server on MoulinRouge! AND it's all encrypted with WPA!

I know, doesn't sound like much, but it's pretty cool.

You end up spending 14hours there.

I'm on the streetcar home, blogging on my laptop because I figure that when I get home, I won't be able to do much other than crash. We had a big server move today, we took all of our remaining servers off of the old system and put them behind my shiny new firewall. There were however, a few hitches:

• The old network used a weird system of public and private IPs on the same machines, so despite the fact that a box was behind a firewall, it still had *both* a 192.168.7.x IP as well as a routeable one. We were moving to my system which uses only unrouteable IPs so all the network configs had to be rewritten.
• The old IPs were very different from the new ones (192.168.7.x vs 192.168.0.x) so all of the machines had to be re-mapped, and, because a huge portion of the software was written by people who have a love-affair with IPs instead of names, I had to go into all the code for all the running software and re-map those IPs as well.
• MySQL replication was being stupid and didn't start up properly so we had to re-create all 40GB of data on the slave server and restart... that's a lot of data, even over the LAN, it took a long-ass time.
• I made a number of mistakes in the process that cost me a good deal of time, not the least of which was the occasional forgotten NFS share that was connected to the wrong subnet when another server tried to talk to it... not good.

Needless to say, it was not an easy night. I'm pretty worn out, but the boss was cool and said I could leave early tomorrow which works out nicely since Linuxworld is running then ;-) I have to admit though, as rough as tonight has been, it was kinda fun -- all this work, all those addresses, ports etc. and I actually knew what was going on. Pretty neat stuff ;-)

Related to my previous post, here's a great example of what I'm talking about.

Church restoration... but at what cost?

I've been thinking about my job a lot lately. I think it's because I'm beginning to feel too comfortable.

This is how I figure it works (bear with me here).

There are a wide array of, for lack of a better term, Bad Jobs in the world. These jobs are Bad in the sense that they not only provide no real benefit to the world, but often, they work against the Common Good.

Some brazen examples of this include Shell Oil, Sony, Microsoft, or Nestle etc. All "Bad" companies in the sense that they hurt society and/or the planet in the pursuit of profit, but in truth, the majority of companies in the world are not so much in the business of Doing Good, as they are in that of making making money.

I've become more at odds with this whole concept because of what I've been doing in my off hours. From 10 - 6 I work for an online advertising company, but lately I've been spending a lot of my energies helping out with the Toronto Public Space Committee, an organisation which, at it's core, stands for the concept that Public Space is for the public, and not for the advertisers. In other words, I work for the enemy by day, and by night, I moonlight as someone who gives a damn.

Now this post is not meant to start an argument about the virtues of advertising. No one is ever going to convince me that a 10-metre high ipod billboard is "good for society" -- it's not, end of story. No, this is about something one of my teachers back at VFS told me: "Now you know everything I can teach you about web development" he said, "Use your powers for Good, not Evil".

What am I doing?

More and more I feel as though my involvement with the TPSC has less to do with the fact that I want to help, and more to do with me trying to somehow offset the work I'm doing during the day.

The world does not need more ads telling us to buy things we don't need. The world needs more faith, fewer guns, patience, and an honest attempt at slowing down. Can I honestly say that I contribute to any of these things in my forty hours each week?

But this all comes back to Good jobs and Bad Jobs. The world has an abundance of vacancies in Bad jobs because the majority of people in the world want to do Right and will often jump at the chance of supporting people doing Good Things. What's worse, the more detrimental to the world a company is, the more money it tends to have and so they can afford to hire more people. All this makes it very hard to find Good Work.

I need to start looking for a Good job. I just got another raise, and here I am, complaining about my job... I guess that means that there's still hope for me.