I Am... Stricken?

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Please allow me to let you know, up front, what I learned yesterday:

Being on strike is stupid, and fucking sucks.

My eloquence knows no bounds, I know.

Some dick at TTC's maintenance department decided that the union wasn't really being forceful enough, and at eleven o'clock Sunday night, locked up Wilson Subway division. This douchebaggotry quickly spread to Greenwood Subway and Arrow Road Bus divisions, and by 4:40 Monday morning, when I got off work, they had the whole damn system shut down. No warning. No union sanction. I had to leave my bus on Evans Avenue. So then, I went home. And please, follow this sequence of events closely, so you can see how enjoyable my day was. Where was I? Ah, yes. Having just finished driving all goddamn night, I went home. I went to bed. I slept for not quite two hours. I then roused myself from the ambrosial unconsciousness I had so briefly been experiencing, and drove Tanya to work. Traffic wasn't truly heinous, but it wasn't cherries fucking jubilee, either. So then I went home. Slept for a further three hours, but it was bad sleep. It was the kind of sleep where you're so tired you think you'll sleep through the alarm, so you keep waking up and thinking you're late, and rolling over really fast to look at the clock. Maybe the rest of you don't do this, but TTC freaks the hell out when you're late, which I guess makes sense. So after three hours of the worst sleep since blackout curtains went out of style, I got up, had a bleary-eyed shower, did not shave, and went to work again. I get to work, and what's going on? Fuck-all. Except that instead of the usual ten or fifteen guys chilling at the division waiting for work, every single driver that ought to be on a bus is in the driver hangout area. Damn near two hundred sweaty guys. Not cool. There had been pickup baseball and soccer earlier, but this was pushing noon, and it was forty-two, with humidex. We were lucky; the streetcar guys got locked out (one of 'em got heatstroke and had to be ambulanced off the whole two hundred feet to St. Joe's). So I hung. There were two card games going, and much conversation. I talked with my buddy John, about where to get the cheapest video card that'll run DirectX 9.0 (Future shop, $75). I talked with my buddy Steve about... some stuff. I became bored. I read my book (The Vampire Lestat, and fuck you, Anne Rice is kickass). I went to Wendy's (chicken BLT salad and a chicolate frosty dairy dessert). And then we went back to work.

Legislated back, in fact. By court order. Bam! So our shop steward told us to go back, and that we wouldn't be the only division out there. This was 3:30. The other divisions started showing up around seven. Fuckers. Do you know what it's like to piss off eight hundred thousand people? It wasn't cool. I wasn't assaulted, myself, but one of the guys on the line I was working was. Feck.

This is really dumb. Maybe if there'd been some kind of warning to the public? The issues here....

Fuck the issues. Since when am I about the issues? The issues here are important and valid, yes, but I think there are better ways to go about this.

Wait, did I just make a rational, reasonable comment? Shit, what are the people who read this (all three of them) going to think? I better finish off with something wild and unpredictable.

Yeah, so I says to him, I says, "Why don't you take your War Crimes Tribunal, and stick it up yer ass!" and he says to me, he says, "Not before your, uh, momma did, um, first!" So I smacked that punk bitch up.

The End.

Beer.com Does It Again, Again!

This guy's awesome.

Anyway,

Hey, Kids!
'Nother beer.com article here.
It's for those crucial times when you really need to get yourself out of some shit, but you know you'll just get yourself in more shit if you're not careful.
Enjoy.
Ze Chuck

Beer.com does it again!

Hey.
Article #3 for beer.com, folks, right here.
chuck

Never Did No Wanderin' After All.

So check this out. My cousin finally has music on his MySpace page...

Fuck, I hate MySpace. No matter what content you plan on having up there, it's not possible to make a page that doesn't look like a squirrel ate the internet, then ate a copy of Vampire Hunter D, then ate Smartfood, then threw up on your monitor. I haven't tried to make a page, and probably won't so we won't really know. To be fair, Andrew's band's page looks pretty good because they didn't really try to do anything --and aren't twelve years old-- , and Joel's looks cool because there isn't really anything on it.

But then you scroll down.

Anyone can leave stupid comments, and their picture. And none of those pictures look good. And all the comments are bad internet english, and they all say, "Hey, thanks for adding me to your friends list. I just added you to my friends list, and I just wanted to drop in and show you some love" or some shit like that. And it all adds up and stays there, so soon you have a page that's four miles long, and takes three minutes to load (on broadband; who knows how long on dialup) and... god help you if you click on one of those friends. Probably you'll wind up on some giggling retard's homage to Jem and The Holograms, and it'll have one of those retina-raping animated backgrounds.

Wait.

I have a theory. Let's attempt to solve for W, the overall value of a website. If C stands for the actual content of a given web site, and P stands for the perceived content, and E stands for the effort involved in creating the site yourself, while $ stands for the money spent on having someone who knows what they're doing do it for you...


W= ($+C)-2PE

So, the overall value of any website is a function of the money paid for it added to the actual content, and subtracting double the product of the perceived front-page content multiplied by any involvement you had in it personally beyond asking for a web page and signing a cheque.

So, if you take an average quality web site, and don't pay any money for it (like all of myspace), slap all the content on the front page and do it yourself, while having nothing really interesting to say, you wind up with this.

But if you take a cute little flash animation, made by someone who's good at it, and attractive, functional buttons that tell you what you want to know and then take you there, and then have massive amounts of organized content in small, screen-sized bites, and access to older content with a reasonably intuitive interface, you get this.

Sorry to use that; I know it's old news and isn't the cult gem it was four years ago, but it's a good example of a well-laid-out site.

Anyway, where was I?

Oh, yeah, don't use MySpace. Unless you're a friend of mine who already uses it, in which case, um, okay.

And speaking of MySpace, go check out my cousin's band there. He's the drummer, Adam.

Right, then.