To Infinity…..

Source:

Melodi Dushane, 25, was so frustrated that she couldn’t order chicken nuggets, because the restaurant was serving breakfast, that she attacked the member of staff serving her.

On the CCTV video, which has just been released by police, Melodi gets out of her car and appears to hit the server in the mouth.

Seconds later she smashes the window before driving off.

Welfare recipients are tapping into the system for far more than food and lodging expenses, according to a front-line caseworker.

Taking inventory of the new perks currently being offered to welfare “clients,” it becomes abundantly clear money is being handed out for far more than the bare necessities.

The whistleblower says some welfare recipients in “priority neighbourhoods” are entitled to “unbelievable” entitlements over and above the monthly welfare stipend. Examples:

* $200 for a bicycle

* $35 for “Pilates wear”

* $100 for running shoes

* $25 for a yoga mat

* $60 for a bathing suit

* $99 for inline skates

* $75 for scooters

“It’s outrageous,” she says. “I mean, $60 for a bathing suit?”

As well, she asks a question that surely demands an answer: “Why does anyone need specialized ‘Pilates wear’ to do Pilates? If only the taxpayers were to find out about this.”

But wait, there’s more.

Remember the controversy regarding special-diet subsidies, which can net a family of five an extra $15,000 a year? A special diet recipient is entitled to a $250/month expense if the person suffers from a legitimate medical condition and requires special food.

There were 5,300 special diet recipients in 2002; by 2007, there were 31,000. The price tag has jumped from $6 million to $200 million a year over the past decade, leading Dalton McGuinty to announce the province will dump the subsidy altogether and come up with a different system.

A contributing factor was surely Dr. Roland Wong, a Toronto physician who was allegedly approving any welfare recipient who asked for a special diet.

A welfare recipient could claim he was constipated, and the good doctor would rubberstamp the request.

Dr. Wong is under investigation by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, and special diet forms from this physician are no longer being accepted.

However, Dr. Wong’s previous special diet approvals are essentially “grandfathered.”

“We know these letters are fraudulent and these special diet letters are costing the province millions of dollars, yet we continue to honour those special diets,” says the caseworker. “Why not give the (Dr. Wong-approved recipients) new forms to take to another doctor for approval? Then we could find out who is legit.”

The Ministry of Community and Social Services doesn’t seem to have a problem with welfare recipients putting in claims for designer sportswear. And the ministry isn’t concerned hundreds of questionable Dr. Wong approvals are still being honoured.

Spokesman Charlotte Wilkinson notes: “Local Ontario Works administrators make decisions about eligibility for assistance.”

Wilkinson says although Dr. Wong is being investigated by the CPSO, “application forms completed by the physician have not been categorically cancelled or rejected based on the current regulations.”

So, it’s business as usual for Dr. Wong’s “patients.”

As well, Wilkinson says under the policy, payments may be provided for a wide variety of special expenses, ranging from “clothing, grooming and special equipment” to “the costs associated with obtaining a pardon.”

Given that social assistance recipients are receiving funds for designer bathing suits and bogus special diet allowances, something is rotten in the state of welfare.

As the caseworker notes: “Why should anyone leave welfare? There’s no incentive.

Somewhere in Finland, Tom’s office colleagues decided to welcome him with the most delicious office prank this side of stuffing your monitor in a giant doughnut:

A mouse and keyboard keys stuffed in jelly. The note says “Welcome back, Tom!”

An engineer took an old Organ, and reverse-engineered it into a Chipophone.

Bill #C-428 – A scary bill to be worried about.

Introduced by Ruby Dhalla (yes the slave-nanny minister), and seconded by Bob Rae, the destroyer of Ontario, bill C-428 is a move to change the requirement for OAS from 10 years to three years.

Yes, 3 YEARS!!!

So, if passed, you can sponsor your 62 year old grandmother to come to Canada, and in 3 years, she can get Old Age Security, yet she would NEVER(!!!!!) had contributed to it.

In a time where we cannot look after or vets, and citizens who have actually contributed to the OAS system, this bill is sheer lunacy.

But then, what did you expect from these two buffoons?

I’ll just leave this here, and let you figure it out.

If you can’t see it, ask a 15 year old.

Activations presented chronologically, and then retraction in reverse order.

Sorry, I had to do it.

Google Wave is no more. (or at least until the end of the year)

Some users found it to be too complex, and too hard to use.

Or, it could be this:

“At the O’Reilly Open Source Conference last month in Portland, Oregon, Google Wave developer Dan Peterson admitted, in a Wave tutorial, that early versions of the service were slow and tended to crash. Subsequent work improved performance and made the product more stable, he noted.”

Farewell Google Wave! We hardly knew you!

A struggling family facing foreclosure has stumbled upon what is considered to be the Holy Grail of comic books in their basement – a fortuitous find that could fetch upwards of a quarter million dollars at auction.

A copy of Action Comics No. 1, the first in which Superman ever appeared, was discovered as they went about the painful task of packing up a home that had been in the family since at least the 1950s. The couple, who live in the South with their children, asked to remain anonymous.

“The bank was about ready to foreclose,” said Vincent Zurzolo, co-owner of ComicConnect.com and Metropolis Comics and Collectibles in New York. “Literally, this family was in tears. The family home was going to be lost and they’re devastated. They can’t figure out a way out of this. They start packing things up. They go into the basement and start sifting through boxes – trying to find packing boxes – and they stumble on eight or nine comic books.”

Most of the comic books in the box were worth between $10 and $30 but one – dated June 1938 and depicting the Man of Steel lifting a car above his head – was extremely rare. That issue, which originally sold for 10 cents, is considered to have ushered in the age of the superhero.

“It’s a tremendous piece of American pop culture history,” Zurzolo said. The couple learned online that ComicConnect.com had brokered the record-breaking sales of Action No. 1 copies for $1 million in February and then $1.5 million one month later. They immediately texted a cell phone picture to the firm’s co-owner, Stephen Fishler.

“You couldn’t have asked for a happier ending,” Zurzolo said. “Superman saved the day.”

Most Americans aren’t so lucky. Nationwide, more than 1.6 million properties were in some stage of foreclosure in the first half of the year, according to RealtyTrac, up about 8 percent from a year ago but down 5 percent from the final six months of 2009. The couple had recently taken out a second mortgage on their home to start a new business, which failed in the uncertain economy. Mortgage payments were missed and the bank soon came after their home, which became theirs after the death of the wife’s father. Fishler had to get on the phone to convince the bank to back off.

The Internet never forgets what are you doing or thinking right now? Millions of Twitter subscribers are only too willing to share their most intimate thoughts in 140 characters or less.

Where are you? Thanks to geo-social mobile apps such as FourSquare, you can be located at hotels, restaurants or your favourite night spot.

What did you do when you got there? Your friends or even strangers are only too pleased to upload pictures of your more outrageous antics to Facebook or the video evidence on YouTube.

Statistics Canada wants to know how many bathrooms you’ve got? Well that’s none of their !#$! business.

We can almost forgive the federal agency’s intrusion because a growing number of Canadians have considerably lowered the bar on what they consider to be inside information.

This is already having an unfortunate impact on jobseekers whose reckless behaviour gets “Googled” by prospective employers. Those who survive that hurdle can get done in by online musings of boredom at the office or playing hookey that get spotted by eagle-eyed HR departments.

A recent New York Times report on the dangers of online transparency profiled a number of people and organizations pushing for the right to reputational reset. They’re angling for government legislation or the co-operation of web giants to wipe the slate clean or set content expiry dates for those seeking to escape their youthful indiscretions or that thing that happened in Vegas but didn’t stay there.

Good luck with that.

It could get a lot worse. The same article points to frightening new “social network aggregator search engines” that vacuum up your blogs, web comments and personal records, enabling others to post reviews on everything from your creditworthiness to how good a date you are.

Have you ever wondered which side of the fence you sit on?

If a Conservative doesn’t like guns, he doesn’t buy one.
If a Liberal doesn’t like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.

If a Conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn’t eat meat.
If a Liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.

If a Conservative is homosexual, he quietly leads his life.
If a Liberal is homosexual, he demands legislated respect.

If a Conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation.
A Liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.

If a Conservative doesn’t like a talk show host, he switches channels.
Liberals demand that those they don’t like be shut down.

If a Conservative is a non-believer, he doesn’t go to church.
A Liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced.

If a Conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it.
A Liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.

So, there are some simple thoughts.

What side of the fence are you on?

For all the system admins out there who fix dying servers in freezing cold server closets, rebuild broken backups, implement fast network solutions and deal with first level tech support when no one else is around: thank you!

It’s a shame that System Administrator Appreciation Day is largely only celebrated by other geeks. It’s been around for about 11 years and is celebrated on the last Friday of every July. Sysadmins are responsible for so much but recognized for so little. They’re mostly on-call all the time, 24-7; if the company network goes down or the print server goes down, who is there immediately to fix it?

So, for all those SysAdmins out there, have a Mountain Dew and Enjoy!

I have seen this a number of times, and the last one made me want to make this post.

“By the power invested in me…….”

It’s vested, not invested.

From Dictionary.com:

vested -  held completely, permanently, and inalienably: vestedrights.

invested – to put (money) to use, by purchase or expenditure, insomething offering potential profitable returns, as interest,income, or appreciation in value.

This is from a Coke ad in the 80′s. It ran in South America, but was pulled very quickly after release. Can you see why?

How about a closer look?

For some reason, the artist was fired after this was found.

A nine-year-old boy was forgotten in a Chicago airport waiting room Saturday for nearly eight hours after an airline representative failed to put him on a connecting flight, the Ottawa Citizen reported.

Julien Reid was headed home to Ottawa on a United flight after visiting his dad in San Francisco, a trip he makes about six times a year.

He left San Francisco at 6 a.m. and arrived at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport at 11 a.m. He was supposed to catch a connecting flight from Chicago to Ottawa at 1:50 p.m., which would have put him in Ottawa at about 4:45 p.m.

His mother, Genevieve Harte, checked online and saw that Julien’s flight was delayed until 5:35 p.m. When she arrived at the airport to pick him up, she noticed other passengers had disembarked but that her son was nowhere to be found.

Then she got a call from Julien, using his own pre-paid cell phone.

He said he was still at the Chicago airport in a “tiny, little room cramped with kids,” where they played the same video on a loop all day, the Ottawa Citizen reported. The only food he’d been given was McDonald’s, but Julian is a vegetarian. He said the other children were yelled at to “stop being kids.”

Harte, 36, asked Julien to put her on the phone with the United attendant who was watching the children. That’s when the attendant let it slip that no one had come to fetch Julien to put him on his connecting flight, she told the Ottawa Citizen.

The Library of Congress released some new exceptions to the DMCA in the US, making it now legal to jailbreak your iPhone.

Apple, understandably, are not too happy with this decision.

From Arstechnica:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation argued that jailbreaking one’s iPhone should be allowed, even though it required one to bypass some DRM and then to reuse a small bit of Apple’s copyright firmware code. Appleshowed up at the hearings to say, in numerous ways, that the idea was terrible, ridiculous, and illegal. In large part, that was because the limit on jailbreaking was needed to preserve Apple’s controlled ecosystem, which the company said was of great value to consumers.

That might be true, the Register agreed, but what did it have to do with copyright?

“Apple is not concerned that the practice of jailbreaking will displace sales of its firmware or of iPhones,” wrote the Register, explaining her thinking by running through the “four factors” of the fair use test. “Indeed, since one cannot engage in that practice unless one has acquired an iPhone, it would be difficult to make that argument. Rather, the harm that Apple fears is harm to its reputation. Apple is concerned that jailbreaking will breach the integrity of the iPhone’s ecosystem. The Register concludes that such alleged adverse effects are not in the nature of the harm that the fourth fair use factor is intended to address.”

And the Register concluded that a jailbroken phone used “fewer than 50 bytes of code out of more than 8 million bytes, or approximately 1/160,000 of the copyrighted work as a whole. Where the alleged infringement consists of the making of an unauthorized derivative work, and the only modifications are so de minimis, the fact that iPhone users are using almost the entire iPhone firmware for the purpose for which it was provided to them by Apple undermines the significance” of Apple’s argument.

The conclusion is sure to irritate Steve Jobs: “On balance, the Register concludes that when one jailbreaks a smartphone in order to make the operating system on that phone interoperable with an independently created application that has not been approved by the maker of the smartphone or the maker of its operating system, the modifications that are made purely for the purpose of such interoperability are fair uses.”