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Actually I just wanted to drop a note regarding using Libby/OverDrive and my Kobo  device and the little journey it sent me on over the past hour or so. Basically, I had checked out a book  from the library but it simply would not sync onto my device, which had been working fine for as long as I could remember. Long story short, after much resetting, rebooting, and Googling, it turns out that the Kobo won't show you books that are not in Kobo library, regardless of whether the public library has them or not. I would've minded less if Kobo had at least informed me of this restriction so that I could avoid reading old Reddit posts for the answers. With that off my chest, I can give some quick reviews of my latest reads, in reverse chronological order. - The Unseen World (Liz Moore). While I had problems with the ending and the glossing over some of the technical details, I really enjoyed this story, a mystery of sorts. The relationship between father and daughter, of the father ...

I absolutely hate how the world is shaping up, just a frog boiling slowly in greed, misinformation, and lack of critical thought. I don't think I've said it here but as a former member, the skeptic movement has been an abysmal failure, handcuffed by the notion that one can think and live purely on logic like some alien creature, free of "human" feeling. How absolutely frustrating it is to have the right answers but not willing to use one's voice. I frankly pity and loathe them. I wrote the above back in February, when the "Freedom Convoy" was honking its way into everyone's ears, eating up media time and darling to anti-mandate-minded small business owners. And now it's March and Putin has decided to start a land war with Ukraine, threatening nukes and all, hundreds already dead, fascists looking to see how to fill in the power gaps. For once America's wolf was real, though it seems not of the mind to really do anything about it outside of sa...

Howdy. Winter still here, but a crack is there, letting light through. After that Twestival shindig, I kind of got pulled into that meta-status world of Twitter , Blip.fm , and Tumblr . Contrasting Twitter and Facebook is an interesting exercise. I mean, Twitter is more about listening in on other people's thoughts while Facebook is this claustrophobic high school with kids showing off their latest works to each other, gossipy, glossy. To the internet, everyone! Let's all soak up that brilliant glow, those heavenly emissions. See what I see and despair! Or just take note of this mundane detail I've decided to fill the dead air with, it's just me wanting to get some attention from anyone Facebook decides should hear. Toronto! Snap out of it! Facebook isn't free -- you're spending your life reading notifications, one page refresh at a time. I didn't mean for this to turn into a rant but I guess it kind of did. Me, a dinosaur of the blog/webjo age, ...

While I love tabbed browsing, I simply cannot stand the default behavior of browsers that place a little Close button on the tab. What rot is that? Right, when I click a tab I don't want there to be a chance that I can hit this button and have the exact opposite of what I want to happen -- the tab I want to see is gone and closed, with no Undo other than to hunt for it in the History or from the page it was spawned. Who thought this was a good idea? Me, I remove those buttons (when the option is available) and use middle-click to close tabs. Feeling better today, but mouth dry and gross. Plans for weekend.. eh, nothing.

Yes that's right -- I hate BOTH Bell and Rogers. Rogers, well, there are so many, many reasons to hate those guys, fumbling over themselves to snatch every penny they can shake out of you. But most recently my disgust has flared up with their iPhone offerings, a package so pricey, so draconian I wonder that they should have the gall. Yet that is not the worst of it -- the worst is that people who are already with Rogers have to buy out their old plan first and lose their old number. Oh jaded snipers and bombers with agendas, wherefore do thee not do away with these media tyrants? Please send your head-cutting psychopaths to do something useful with thine Bowie knives! Oh, and Bell? I just learned (although apparently it's been in place since January) that if you do not have an long distance plan, your LD calls are subject to an extra "LD network connection fee". WHAT THE HELL!!! Long distance calls are also charged by DISTANCE . Dudes, seriously, can we not do somet...

Whoo, I was upset today. It's just.. man, Visual Studio is such a piece of garbage. PURE GARBAGE. Actually, no, it's not that bad but there are some strange bits to it. Like, why can't I change the references (that is, where files actually reside) in a Solution file? I asked around and the answer was "Use a text editor". Uhm, is Visual Studio ITSELF not one big fancy color-laden text editor???? Albeit, with debugging as well. Anyway, I'm beginning to wish we had one of those heavy punching bags at work. What else... there was something but it has escaped me! I was mildly annoyed that the TTC raised their fare prices again, yet somehow the cash fare is the same? I was also disgusted to learn that my tickets I'd bought only a few months before now required an extra $0.15. What the hell is that all about? Is not one "Adult Fare Ticket" always one "Adult Fare Ticket"? Huh, well supposedly you can return them for a cash refund. Still.. blood...

Quickly the days they seem to pass. They sure do when you've had a few beers, as I did Friday.  Actually no, now that I think of it what I had wanted to say was that I was extremely agitated by ASP.Net, Microsoft Access and... just IIS and Microsoft and the whole kit and caboodle. At first, I was upset by one of the controls that I was using did not work -- it had a minor bug, fine. I trudged on, only to discover that the database table I had based my documentation on was tragically flawed: not only did it not have a primary key, but the data itself was actually full of duplicates. An affront to my data analysis mores, and also, most regrettably, unusable in certain ASP.Net structures (and with good reason). So, I modified my code to handle this abnormality, this flagrant transgression against all things logical, only to encounter yet another roadblock, the dreaded " Server Application Unavailable ". Oh, I'm sorry, did I tax IIS too much by asking it to serve a page? ...

So there I was, typing in Outlook like I do, oh, 10-20 times a day I guess, when my pinky slipped and I had entered the " smart quotes " zone -- double and single quotes had turned into their curly, foreign, evil replicant versions of themselves. The scary bit was that I didn't how to make it stop! I always use Plain Text, as I see anything fancier as being frivolous, and yet here they were, quotes that leaned, based on context. Trapped I was, doomed to forever send slightly arrogant replies, adorned as they were with alien characters. Isn't it odd that whenever you read about drug busts in the news, the headline is always in dollars.. like "Ecstasy worth $7 million seized"? I mean, surely the value of ecstasy is non-constant, and is prone, nay, more than prone, to market shifts and location and all those other economical factors? Not to mention the fact that an illicit good like illegal drugs has questionable value, if any, after seizure. It all seems a bi...

Wait, you mean to tell me that cellphone providers LOCK the phone so that people cannot, for example, use MP3 files as their ringtones?? That is outrageous! Oh, I am so upset by this, so very upset. I've been fiddling with my new phone and couldn't figure out how to set up new ringtones. Oh what a world, what a world that we should pay for crippled hardware!

I've been reasonably happy with iTunes thus far. Well, the iTunes SERVICE, as in buying albums and songs online has been great, convenient yadda yadda yadda. The iTunes APPLICATION of course, is another story, what with its frequent crashes, inexcusable memory usage, and lack of song queuing and global hotkeys give it a WinAmp 0.1 beta feel -- usable, but definitely needs improvement. So I've been using iTunes today to grab album artwork. Fun, ok yay. But then I tried to get the cover for Mount Sims and iTunes CENSORED THE IMAGE! Those self-righteous bastards!! I mean c'mon, if Amazon.com is willing to post the original artwork, why not iTunes? Bleah. Oh, and here's my peeve about the iTunes application -- there's no Undo! I mean what the hell? I discovered this glaring omission when I accidently hit Delete while I was in the Music library, when I really meant to delete the text in the search box. I then spent the next 10 minutes trying to figure out which song I h...