With a tip of the hat to Bill Doskoch’s ongoing reports from the front lines of TTC ridership, I offer this saga, captured while standing at a Hamilton Street Railway (HSR) stop.

… behave nicey sweetie, ’cause Mommy’s in a friggin’ bitchy mood this morning…

… I was straightening my friggin’ hair with the iron this morning and I burned my friggin’ shoulder…

… I caught him with that girl at Tim Hortons’ being all lovey dovey and I got so mad…

… Then I seem him in the parking lot with that fat broad…

… I got my phone from Rogers and I paid my bill right at the store where I got it but they didn’t tell me that it would take twenty days for the money to get to Rogers so they cut me off…

… So I gave him a key and said get your friggin’ stuff out of my house!…

… well, he paid for the TV, so he took it…

That was in four minutes, by one person.

When I was young we used to make jokes about the local cops picking people up for “Suspicion of being under suspicion” We knew that such a thing was too ridiculous to really happen.

That was then, this is now. Check out this story from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

MINNEAPOLIS — Six friends spruced up in fake blood and tattered clothing were arrested in downtown Minneapolis on suspicion of toting “simulated weapons of mass destruction.”

Police said the group were allegedly carrying bags with wires sticking out, making it look like a bomb, while meandering and dancing to music as part of a “zombie dance party” Saturday night.

“They were arrested for behavior that was suspicious and disturbing,” said Lt. Gregory Reinhardt, a police spokesman. Police also said the group was uncooperative and intimidated people with their “ghoulish” makeup.

One group member said the “weapons” were actually backpacks modified to carry a homemade stereos and were jailed without reason. None of the six adults and one juvenile arrested have been charged.

“Given the circumstance of them being uncooperative … why would you have those (bags) if not to intimidate people?” said Inspector Janee Harteau. “It’s not a case of (police) overreacting.” Harteau also said police were on high alert because they’d gotten a bulletin about men who wear clown makeup while attacking and robbing people in other states.

Clown terrorists. Zombie Terrorists… personally I’m waiting for Vampire terrorists.

Well, actually, no we don’t…

Radio Shack has a long and colourful history. Unfortunately that history includes the knowledge that no electronics professional will rely on them for parts or advice…

In Canada there are no more Radio Shack stores. Instead they have been bought by and rebranded as The Source, by Circuit City.

The stores themselves are somewhat nicer, and the stock a little less strange, but I can report that the staff are as good as ever.

Today I needed two things: a battery for a portable phone purchased a few months ago at the local Radio Shack The Source, by Circuit City, and a wall adapter for a used scanner that I picked up.

They didn’t have the former, or at least sales geek couldn’t find it.

The specs on the latter were for 12v DC and 1.5 Amps.

He helped me to find the right adapter, the universal kind with a handful of different plugs. We walked up to the cash register.

I glanced at the packaging and realized that it said that it could handle 300 milliamps.

I repeated that the scanner needed 1.5 amps, and that perhaps 300 milliamps wouldn’t be enough power to run it.

Finally he admitted that “I don’t know how many milliamps are in an amp.”

Uh… maybe a thousand?

Bill Doskoch has been adding to this tale for some time now, and it’s one of the best reads I’ve enjoyed in ages. Harrowing too.

About this date, 10 years ago, I tried getting out of bed in Phnom Penh, Cambodia to get ready for my job as foreign editor of the Cambodia Daily. I passed out from the pain of doing so; it felt like I’d been hammered on the head with a baseball bat. I didn’t know it at the time, but I wouldn’t work again for another year.How did I end up in Phnom Penh? Read this post for the full background, but here’s how I put it to my buddies from the Regina Leader-Post over a beer at Alfredo’s, one of our most crucial watering holes:

“Imagine for a moment that I’m sitting here by myself back in early December. And some wizened, creepy little man comes up and sits down. And that he tells me this: “On Boxing Day, you will find out that Conrad Black has bought your paper. You will spend the next two months imagining the worst. Your worst fears will be realized. You will be fired, along with 88 others. For the longest time, your job hunt will be totally fruitless. You will start to fret about never working as a journalist ever again. But just when all seems darkest, you will get a job as foreign editor of the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, Cambodia!”"

Although life does throw funny curves, you have to admit that when I put it that way, it would have seem far-fetched, to say the least.

It’s a long story, but really worth the time.

For about the last seven years I’ve been trying Linux on an irregular basis. I’d like to use it, I’d like to understand it, but I simply can’t invest days and days to do simple tasks.

Which is why each time I abandoned it in frustration.

So far I’ve tried SUSE, Mandrake, Red Hat, and at least two other distros, starting at about 7 point something.

My latest attempt is with SUSE 9.2 on a pretty vanilla Pentium III machine. Until buying the Apple this was my somewhat pokey but reliable Windows machine. I know that the hardware is stable and reliable.

So I plugged in a SUSE DVD and let it boot up. Everything installed easily.. almost.

As seems to be always the case with Linux there were things that for unknown reason simply didn’t work.

In this case it was the Internet – it couldn’t find its way up the network cable, through the router, and out to the big bad ‘net.

Now this machine has had installs of Windows 98, 2000, and XP, and every one of them connected with little problem.

SUSE just sat there at the “Testing your connection” screen and said “We can’t find it.” A half hour on the SUSE site found hints, but no sure solution, so I started the install again from scratch.

When I reached the point where the set up program (YAST) got lost I started digging through sub-menus.

I’ll need to do it again to recall just what I did, but basically it amounted to finding a rather obscure checkbox at the bottom of a page that looks like it’s about something else, and checking it. And even finding that required a chance comment in a newsgroup that made it possible for me to spot it when it appeared.

Even with that clue, it amounted to trial and error.

The long and short of the story? Even though probably half of the people installing SUSE would have a router, the installer wasn’t able to figure out how to set itself up to access it.

Two other problems: the installer couldn’t figure out the resolution on my LG 787LE LCD monitor. I had to switch over to the Apple, copy down the settings, and enter them manually.

And most confusing, for some reason the mapping on the keyboard has the “@” and ” “ ” keys reversed, so typing an e-mail address gives me donald”doggy.net.

UPDATE: Since I’m Canadian I selected UK English as the language when doing the install. Turns out that that choice caused my keyboard to switch a few keys. Do British keyboards really have the quote mark and @ symbol in reverse places?

So I can at least browse the net. We’ll see how useful this is over the coming weeks.

A notice appeared yesterday in my apartment building telling us that effective immediately the Management was closing the garbage rooms in the four story building and forcing tenants to carry their trash to a giant bin behind the next door apartment building.

My immediate response was that no-one would be likely to carry their trash down four flights of stairs, out the door, back up two flights, and half way down the block to the bin.

More likely they would just dump their garbage in the stairwells and we would be inundated with mice, rats, flies, and smell.

Kudos to one neighbour though who immediately took matters into hand.

“My name is Dale, and I’m in 303. I have already called the city, and there in an inspector that is going to schedule an appointment to not only address the garbage issue, but also appraise other issues, such as the retaining wall and driveway walls on the other building.

After making a call to the city, and researching the city’s laws, I think you’ll appreciate what I heard. The city’s by-law with regard to building maintenance states that garbages rooms must be provided on every floor. DUH, as they already were for a reason!!!!

We can continue to dispose of our garbage in these rooms, as it is within our legal rights to do so.I have also made them aware of the fact that the large garbage bins, regardless of who takes the garbage out to it, must have a minimum 6-foot fence around it with a gate, and they must be kept closed at all times.

As well, the garbages in the hallways must have lids on them. And the garbage must be removed after a maximum of ten days.”

Was our absentee Toronto landlord too stupid to check the local health regulations? Did they think that none of their tenants would bother to call City Hall?

Are they incredibly dumb, or incredibly arrogant?

Courtesy of a Company called GreenLawn, whose slogan is “Barefoot Grass.”

That sounds really enticing until you look at the accompanying sign warning that the lawn in question had been drenched with poisonous pesticides.

I can’t believe that many intelligent people will be going barefoot on that lawn!

It does fascinate me to watch all of these pesticide application companies try to reinvent their image as eco-friendly.

Are we really so uninformed and gullible that we don’t see past the “green” language and wholesome promises? Do we really believe that the stuff that kills dandelions and grubs is perfectly harmless to kids and pets? (like the little girl in this picture from the Greenlawn web site!)

Or are these companies just struggling through a last gasp attempt to keep their market alive in the face of a growing belief that a couple of yellow flowers are better than dumping poison on our lawns?

Halleluiah! Without question the single greatest weakness in OS X is the essential application called Finder. Compared to Windows’ Explorer Finder seems like the very slow kid in the back of the room that eats glue and never quite makes it out of third grade.

It’s like Apple set out to do everything wrong in an effort to convince Mac users to never browse for files, just search with Spotlight.

I suppose that I can see some perceived user friendliness to that, the idea that the computer should just “find” whatever you need, but the reality is that lots of people are most comfortable with the file/folder model. They understand it.

Today I came upon an application called Path Finder, by a company called Cocoatech.

It’s like Finder designed by someone who actually gives a damn about usability. All of things that Finder does so badly, Path Finder does very well.

Plus it has dozens of little extras that I keep finding and going “Oooh! That is so handy!”

As usual this is software for the Mac, so there’s no free version, but in this case I’ll be happy to lay down $35 to replace Finder.

And, almost unheard of for the Mac, there is a full functioning trial version available that let’s you try it out for three weeks.

Ah yes, this gem from the web site of, you guessed it, a media organization.

Gotta admire someone who can manage two gross spelling errors in just one 16 word sentence.