It seems incredible that it has taken more than three weeks for the union executive to take the city’s offer to a vote, but there you go.  It only took direct action from the federal government to happen, but I will take it.  Despite the union leaders pleading with their members to reject the offer, I can’t help but think if I was in their shoes I would accept anything to get back to work.  It seems that they have finally started receiving strike pay, and it sure isn’t much ($50/week apparently).  In their shoes, this offer surely has to be looking better and better, it would to me anyway.

I heard Larry O’Brien on the radio this morning, Live 88.5, and his take on the city’s argument about the scheduling issue was brilliant.  He basically boiled it all down to a public safety issue: if the city controls the schedules, then there’s no way a senior driver could choose to be “driving a 10 ton bus for 22 hours straight on city streets”.  That may not be an exact quote, I was driving to work at the time, cue the irony.  This clear and direct media message is in stark contrast to Andre Cornellier’s catastrophic series of media appearances at the beginning of the strike.  It seems he has been banned from making any public appearances since then, which was really the only wise thing the union has done to date.

So, Thursday should be interesting, that’s the day of the vote on the city’s offer.  Have the union members had enough of Andre’s shtick?  Time will tell.

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Our friends have been hearing it for years now when we talk about Nikki staying at home with the kids:  Only a couple of years now until Nikki goes back to work.  It’s a familiar tune we have been singing for a long while now.  It was a lifeline for Nikki when the boys were really young and it was HARD to be home all day.  Really hard.  Hardest thing you can do, probably.

There was multiple sources of stress placed on her back then; stress from the kids who were very very busy and required super human patience to just make it through the day (see HurriCael and other posts about Quinn and Cael for proof of this), stress from herself when she felt that she wasn’t up to the task and guilt from just wanting to be somewhere else.  Not to mention the financial issues with having a single bread-winner (myself) on various contracts that aren’t necessarily stable.  It added up to a lot of crazy days and some really hard ones on everybody involved.

She would justifiably complain that she was too tired and wiped to really appreciate her time with the boys at home when they were really young.  It’s a catch-22 that really sucked, basically.

Now it all seems like a distant dream.  The kids all get along really well, in fact the Christmas holidays went so well we all were sad to see them over, unlike past holidays when the sense of relief when the kids go back to school ripples through the house.  They used to just need to get out of each other’s hair, but these days they all get along so well it’s a let down when the regular schedule starts again.

The struggle is for Nikki to decide how strong her desire to go back to work really is.  Things are running so smoothly now it’s a hard decision to uproot everyone’s life just to go back to work.  It’s not as much of an escape for Nikki as it used to be, there’s a sense of uprooting the house schedule for even less of a reason.

Then we look at two income households longingly, sheer earning potential aside there’s a whole lot of stability to be had when both spouses are working.  I’m pretty lucky to be working most of the time, but I probably haven’t taken more than two days off in a row for about 8 years now.  Some “paid” holidays would sure be nice now and then.  Not to mention that a job with some medical and dental benefits would certainly help out a lot.  But, we’ve made it this far, what’s another few years?  <knocks on wood-like government desk>

So there you go, it’s pretty clear:  there’s just no right answer.

I saw this article in the Globe and Mail (read it before their stupid paywall comes crashing down.  Why on earth would anyone pay to get access to articles that happened in the past?) and it sparked this post since it resonates strongly with our current position.

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The last post of the year would normally be some sort of top ten list, or perhaps some new year’s resolutions.  Not here though.  Here’s the past year of the blog, highlights and lowlights.  Mostly it’s just the stuff that jumped out at me today scanning back through the year’s posts.

First off we have perfect hindsight.  This one really smarts.  Looking back at January I was excited about the new Apple TV and thought it was ready for prime time.  Flash forward to just this past week and it seems that I am as stupid as can be.

I debated my increasing maturity because I realize I am now capable of listening to cover songs without instantly rejecting them out of hand based on some sort of naive sense of purity.  I noted that the music industry continues to die without many other signs of life, in spite of some really excellent advice available for free.

Technology was still of great interest of course, as it always will be.  The ever increasing use of social networks to keep in touch with people led to greater and more intricate knowledge of your network of friends, ambient awareness was the term coined.  It’s continuing, and the Friendfeed sidebar is a good example of how that will grow even more.  This year led to even more robots designed to assist humans live every day lives, which I noted would inevitably lead to the death of us all.

I spent quite a bit of effort trash talking Mexico and Winnipeg for their attempts to make their mark on the skating world, even thought I didn’t have to defend Ottawa all that much.  We still win.  Similarly, the LimerickDB is still the best place on the web for rhyming jokes, and we sampled a few of my favourites.  Also, we were privy to the most private thoughts of a monster, disturbing stuff though it was.  I had lots of fun with rubber truck nuts, not directly however.  It doesn’t hurt that they are silly beyond belief in the first place, but then the legislation starts and things get really weird.

It seems that a series of gun-related events cause me to post about them far more often than I normally would.  One gun post even actually resulted in a series of (gasp!) comments from actual other people.  Most often it was just me complaining about them and the people who are clearly not wise enough to be holding them, especially in public.

Speaking of people not wise enough to protect anybody, how about those TSA airport screeners?  It spawned a whole new category of posts that will no doubt continue to grow.  Similarly I particularly enjoyed myself writing about a certain monkey-smuggler who succeeded and then failed in remarkable fashion.  Also we saw a family who was too stupid to protect their dog from a hungry snake, although they had several days to do something about it.

The financial crisis and subsequent auto bailout wasn’t funny, but that didn’t stop me.  It lasted a few days, but we aren’t done with it yet since there’s more to come.  Finally the strangest news story to hit here must have been the multiple feet washing ashore in B.C. I stopped mentioning it, but the story continues to this day.  Crazy.

Finally, some of the more personal posts that kept me amused over the year, I mentioned Nikki’s growing fresh laundry addiction, just one of the hazards of staying home to watch the kids.  Similarly, I revealed how she is a heat vampire bent on freezing me solid.  She also laughed heartily at me for this little escapade with the Stratus, where I learned to use the Force to drive the car.

So there you go, it’s the past year of the blog condensed for your convenience.  Hope you had a good year, I think we did.  All the best to you and yours, see you next year.

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Christmas shopping for a nerd is not easy.

Nikki has in recent years simply asked me what I wanted for Christmas, which works out well for me of course and makes her happy since she can give me what I actually want.  This year I asked her for a Neuros OSD (which I won’t link to, so that they won’t get any Google juice from this blog, har har), which lets you store movies on your home server and play them on your TV.  I was looking at this as basically a way to box up all of the DVDs that lie here and there around the house and still have them accessible when needed.  So, I did some research and found that the Neuros was a favourite device for the nerdy set.  Open source, DRM free, it had all of the right buzz to make it seem like the perfect device to get for my needs.

So needless to say I was more than a little disappointed when it arrived and it sucked.  It sucked hard in every way.  Let me explain:

1. Firmware updates.  This was one of the main reasons to get the thing; regular infusions of developer goodness to make the thing more useful all the time.  Well, the shipped device had an old firmware (to be expected) so I kicked off an update right away.  It failed spectacularly, resulted in a non-responsive hunk of plastic.  I had to go through an “emergency firmware upgrade” process.  That got the thing working again, but still it shouldn’t have been that hard to do, and that process would have been beyond most home users.

2. It was ugly.  The interface when I plugged it into my HDTV was blurry, pixelated crap.  Nikki suggested it looked like a Commodore 64, and she was right.  That was AFTER the update to the latest firmware, it was even worse out of the box.

3. Quality. The Neuros only plays Mpeg4 files, and only has RCA-type connections which means that in general, video looks like crap even when compared to a very cheap DVD player using the same type of cables.  We watched one movie on it and I kept noticing the pixels instead of the movie, which tells me that this thing is dead in the water for any real use.

4. Ease of use.  The firmware out of the box connected to my home server without any issue, but things quickly went downhill from there.  Once I updated to the newest firmware I could no longer browse to my server and connect.  In the end I had to telnet to the thing and edit up some files to mount the samba disk at boot up.  If the last sentence made any sense to you, congratulations you may be part of the target market for this device.  That got the thing back on the network, but even then the interface is clunky in the worst way, navigating files and folders on the disk instead of displaying any artwork, or even abstracting the Linux mount point in some useful way.  Instead, playing any file (video or audio) results in at least 6 (teeth-gnashing, laggy, frustratingly slow) remote button presses.  That’s far too many, if this thing really lets me “instantly access any of your videos with the push of a button on a remote”.  Um, no.  Fail.

It’s not what anyone would call user-friendly, and this especially became the deal-clincher.  I don’t have the time to be tech support for any other device in the house, I do that all day at work, and there’s more than enough to do already at home with all of the PCs, TVs and game consoles.  I don’t want a project to work on, I want something that works already.

I can’t believe how positive all of the reviews I read were.  I really couldn’t find a review that mentioned any of the bad stuff, but a closer troll through the company’s support forums would have revealed some cracks that would have kept me away if I had known.

Sigh.

This piece of crap is going back, and I’m buying an Apple TV.

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I’m late with the Christmas post, but what are you gonna do when you are having fun and being as lazy as possible?  A good time was had by all at our place this Christmas, I hope you had a great holiday as well.  The boys got Nerf dart guns this year, and so Nikki and I thought that the whole family should be armed, you know, for self preservation.  The ensuing war lasted about 45 minutes and was clearly the highlight of the whole day.  Here’s Whit getting ready for some Nerf-style vengeance on someone, with Cael and Quinn who have her back.

You can see the results of her ill-fated attempt at a charge….

If you can’t shoot your relatives at Christmas, when can you?

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Well, another year and another VCP under our belt, we are now tireder (still) and older, but given that it was such a good time all is forgiven.  There was fewer folks than we thought, but given the blustery and snowy road conditions, I guess we got a great turnout.

There are pictures (lots of pictures) yet to be sorted through. We look for the most embarrassing, least flattering, compromising pictures to be placed on the Internet for safe keeping so they don’t fall into the wrong hands.  We have to be careful and respectful of our guest’s privacy of course.

Some special shout outs:

• everyone who brought us a bottle of wine.  Thanks so much, Nikki may never need to buy another bottle again.
• the guitar lads.  Rod and Shaun provided some excellent tunes tirelessly for the living room crew.
• PJ for bongoing along gamely, bringing a certain level of professionalism to some rather rambling tipsy guitar songs.
• Andre who actually made it to the party through the snow, flying some 3000km or so Google tells me.  Good to see the whole Dupuis clan there.
• Nikki’s fine bar tricks, showing her drop shot prowess over and over.  That was the result of some careful experimentation and breaking more than a few glasses, but it paid off.  Tracksuits and jägerbömbers (I think there should be some rock dots in there somewhere, I am probably wrong) all round.
• Wilson for bringing and sharing said Jägermeister, to the detriment of everyone’s sobriety.  I think we owe you a bottle, buddy.
• Everyone who brought food for the Kanata Food Cupboard.
• Everyone who contributed to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and signed our wall.
• Everyone who brought food, we ate it all and it was delicious.

I know I have forgotten lots of fine folks, please correct me on any unintentional slights.

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