Category: Journal

One Thing I Miss About Belleville

One thing I sorely miss about Belleville when I’m living in Waterloo has to be municipal sidewalk clearning.

9:30am the morning after a spectacular snowstorm and the sidewalks are clear and easily walkable. All of them. Everywhere.

I know that by the time I’ll have to walk to work in the morning, I’ll still have to trudge across unshoveled sidewalks and risk my back (again) on the ice. It’s awful. There are people who *never* do it. I suppose I could call the by-law enforcement people on them, but honestly, they might be bed-ridden old people for all I know. Yeah, it’s their responsibility, but it’s a shitty system.

I don’t even have a sidewalk in front of my house and I think municipal sidewalk clearing is an absolutely blessing.

Go ahead, raise my taxes!

Posted from the train

I haven’t taken the train in ages. There isn’t an easy train you can get straight from Kitchener to Belleville and back (unless you want to get up very early morning and wait a couple hours in Toronto). It takes about three times as long to get home, taking delays into account, and costs about twice as much as driving (if you don’t take the cost of owning the car into account).

My mom insisted, too. It’s winter, and the weather can get pretty crappy. And since I’m going to be making the same trip back a week from now, it seemed like a good idea.

Before I got a car, I took the train home all the time. I checked my VIA frequent traveller reward thing and apparently I can get a one-way ticked to Kamloops just on points. Not that I would, of course. I’ve done that trip before. Three days on the train is pretty hard on the ass.

Sometime in the last five years, they put WiFi on the trains, and little outlets by all the seats. So I can get online and talk to people and post blog posts and all sorts of stuff. I can’t do that when I’m driving. It’s not the greatest connection, particularly since I’m connected through the VPN to work for safety’s sake, but it works, and I can check RSS feeds and stuff. YouTube eludes me, but I can live without that.

Where are we? I think we’re just leaving Oshawa… I can see the suckers on the 401 from here.

Actually, traffic’s really good.

On Canada’s DMCA

As I’m writing this, I’m listening to a CD comprised entirely of [bootleg Christmas remixes](http://www.djbc.net/santastic3/). Even under current copyright, this stuff shouldn’t exist. And while most of it’s kind of awful (but awful in a good way, I think), there are tiny bits of beautiful brilliance that *should* exist.

Today, Canadian Industry minister Jim Prentice was supposed to put forward a new Canadian copyright reform bill. The phrase “copyright reform bill” sends a chill down my spine. While Canadian copyright reform could use some reform, I’m pretty sure that the idea of “reform” in the minds of the authors of the bill will be quite a bit different than what I think would actually be useful or necessary.

As I was saying, there was supposed to be a new copyright reform bill today. But there isn’t. It’s been “delayed.”

Continue reading On Canada’s DMCA

Ice-Free Eaves

Apparently having not learned my lessons from [last winter’s leaky roof adventure](http://www.flyingsquirrel.ca/index.php/2007/02/13/leaky/), I didn’t quite get around to cleaning the leaves out of the eaves troughs before the snow came. Over the last couple weeks, ice was starting to build up again.

In my defense, there was only about a week between the leaves falling off the trees and the snow starting, and the snow hasn’t let up since. I was hoping the [Looj](http://www.flyingsquirrel.ca/index.php/2007/11/05/leaves/) would help me out, but it didn’t fit. I called some maintenance company about an estimate, but haven’t heard back.

So I was pretty much on my own. As I was saying, the it’s been looking pretty grim as the snow hasn’t let up. Until today. A Saturday.

Today, miraculously, the temperature drifted briefly above 0°C. That was my cue, and I sprung into action.

I hooked up the rubber hose to the hot water tap in the garage, got a chisel-like device, climbed up on the ladder and chunk by damp, icy chunk, removed the leaves from the eaves troughs.

They work much better now.

I only did the L-shaped section bordering the back patio. That’s the only part that’s been giving me trouble (the ice really likes to build up in the L-corners of roofs, it seems), and it was most easily accessible by ladder. I ended up very wet by the end, and my hands ended up dyed bluish-black from the gloves I was wearing. The ladder ended up a little bit icy. I’ve put the damn thing away till the spring. I hope I don’t need it again.

I’m really going to have to work on getting someone to help me out with this maintenance stuff, since I can’t seem to keep up with it all. I’m just glad I was able to get this horrible weight off me, especially since I’ll be home in Belleville the next few weekends.