Denis Lemire's Site

The unthinkable has happened. I went to Harvey’s to satisfy my standard diet of a poutine, a coke, and a Big Harv. Imagine my absolute shock when I was informed the Big Harv was no longer with us. It has been discontinued!

What am I to do now? The Big Harv is what swayed me from the deathly habit of McDonalds to the new and meaty world of Harvey’s. Now it’s gone Instead, I had to have a Sirloin burger! A damn Sirloin burger!!!

I am unable to determine with absolute certainty who is behind this monstrosity, although I believe it to be part of a conspiracy involving the same group that have brought us such damning outrages as changing the Big Xtra packaging from a wrapper (protecting your in vehicle seat lap from the bombardment of lettuce, onions, and other various burger condiments to the now useless tiny cardboard box. I believe it’s the same group that toy with our emotions by constantly removing, and later restoring our access to the Bacon Mushroom Melt from Wendy’s.

If only I could find these horrible people, the world of soon-to-kill-ya fast food would be a much safer place. Until then, I can only hope that I may someday love another burger.

Email as a legit communications platform has become useless due to spam producing scum. After finally getting fed up with the massive pile of spam I receive at Incoherency.Net (200+ messages per day) I have implemented SPF with the strictest configuration. After recently getting a Gmail account I have forwarded my mail to Google’s servers to take advantage of their spam filtering, however I disliked the idea of not being able to fully utilize my own personal domain for receiving email directly. Instead, I’ve now taken the strict SPF route, obviously the implementation used here is not yet feasible on the networks I maintain professionally, but for my own network, for my use, until your ISP or mail provider publishes SPF records I’d rather lose your mail then receive the pile of crap I receive each day.

After some technical hurdles all at this site is back up and running. First off Telus thought it would be cute to start blocking incoming port 80 and a colorful assortment of other ports. At first I rebelled and setup all sorts of workarounds, but in short time I thought it would be even cuter to flip Telus the bird they deserve and switch to Shaw Cable. Shaw is not blocking any ports and with their new extreme package has speeds far exceeding Telus.

Slightly before the whole “down with Telus” fiasco I upgraded the server to PHP5 which broke the web mail interface. After some additional upgrades web mail is now functioning. Time to catch a movie!

Employment insurance is the biggest joke we have going in this country! Geez… you take a doctor prescribed one month stress leave during the process of your life falling apart. You’d think that’d be a cut and dry case of “gimme my @#$%~! money.” The amount of hoops one has to jump through is ridiculous!

First you go to their website and fill out their claim form online, all the while thinking to yourself that they got a clue and automated the damn thing. Afterwards you receive their lame teledac details in the mail. They give you this really awesome code that allows you to sit there on your @$$ while a rather erotic feminine synthesized voice repeats a far too verbose question twice, along with your answer for every single friggin detail they need, half of which is stuff you’re repeating from the original claim anyway.

By the time you’re done with that, you wish you had no hearing to begin with. If that wasn’t bad enough, you have to repeat the damn automated system from hell every two weeks… I’ll admit, it was my fault for letting the other one sit on my desk for so long. I just couldn’t bring myself to call that automated whore of a computer again. Finally mustered up the emotional strength to push her buttons today, only to find that its angry at me for being late.

Now I have to talk to one of their actual people during regular business hours which of course coincide with the range of time in which I could not possibly get ahold of them, unless I call them from work. Aaargh! Considering how lousy EI is setup, if given the choice I’d keep my premiums and take whatever risk it is they are supposed to be protecting me from. Don’t even get me started about this six to eight weeks thing either. In six to eight weeks I either starve or find another source of income, usually the latter.

During a period of boredom while waiting for the laundry machine to do its thing, an amusement came over me, recalling the fun that Microsoft recently allowed into the ‘net with Nimda and Code Red. I felt I might as well check how many hits I’ve received since the last time I flushed the Apache logs. This brought about the fact that this site has received more traffic from Microsoft powered zombies then legitimate visitors. After a small script writing frenzy, these hits are now displayed proudly on the front page. An excellent way to boast in regard to Incoherency.Net’s invincibility (relative to Microsoft servers).