Tomorrow I get the joy of watching an election go by that I can't participate in. I think Sen. Obama doesn't need one more voice from me at this point, but let's look at the California propositions:

Prop 1A - High speed rail. California really needs something like this. In fact, the whole US does, and maybe they'll get it once California shows that trains really can work on this side of the Atlantic.

Prop 2 - Increasing the sizes of cages for confined farm animals. I admit that I actually don't much care about this one either. I'd probably vote yet on it, but a cage is still a cage. =(

Prop 3 - Funding Children's hospitals. Uhhh. Why does this take a ballot measure? I'd do this one. Especially if it were seen as a path to the socialisation of health care.

Prop 4 - Parental notification before termination of pregnancy. Sounds like a great way to have more teen moms dead in back alleys. People either get illegal abortions or legal ones. Legal ones are much safer. This is a no-brainer for a no. If you think the incidence rate of abortions in teens is too high, fund some sex ed.

Prop 5 - Drug treatment facilities, good. Easier parole for drug-related offenses probably also good. Increased parole for serious and violent felonies? It's not clear to me that there's an actual problem here to solve. Is there really a problem with repeat offenders here that is going to be solved by this? I'd probably skip this one because there just isn't enough info.

Prop 6 - A bunch of gang related funding and such. It seems to me that if the legislature thought this was a real problem, they'd have solved it. The US already spends a stupid amount on policing, with the result of a lot of people in jail, and seemingly not alot of reduction in crime. Sounds like throwing good money after bad, then. I'd say no.

Prop 7 - Require utilities to focus on renewable energy. My electric company is already ~50% renewable according to their pamphlets. They also already are introducing smart meters, remote power cuts for air conditioning units, and have an offset program that isn't just cutting down trees. From what I understand, getting more than what they do is problematic because of reliability of supply. I don't think legislation will solve that. This legislation is probably too soon, sadly. A reluctant no from me here.

Prop 8 - A bill to remove existing rights from citizens. If you don't know my opinion on this one, you're clearly just tuning in. "no". It did occur to me today that what people should've been doing was trying to muddy the issue and put up billboards that said "In Defense of Marriage, No on prop 8". Because I really think that a yes here lessens the value of my marriage - it means that I'll be sharing in something I can't in turn wish for everyone else. And that would be sad.

Prop 9 - Victims rights bill. I wish there were more background on this site. It's not clear that there's a problem here that people are solving. A criminal sentence is supposed to be society's version of just punishment. Just because you personally still feel like crap doesn't mean that the punishment wasn't served. I don't see what relationship a person getting out of jail has to the victim at that point either than staying away from one another. No here.

Prop 10 - Funding for alternative fuels. I'm thinking back to "Who killed the electric car?" We're not doing what we can with the technology we already have. It would've been nice to perhaps see the old requirements kicked by in of a certain amount of cars having to be zero-emission or something like that now that we *know* we can do it. There are lots of electric car options now. I'd say no here.

Prop 11 - Redistricting. Nice to see that this includes people who belong to neither party in the requirements makeup. Taking the districts out of the hands of the representatives is probably a good idea. I hope the committee will opt to do something sane like simple cluster diagrams or something. I was talking with some folks at work about polling station finding and stuff, and it sounds really miserable.

Prop 12 - Veteran's bonds. Umm, sure? Are vets particularly hard hit by the current economic crisis? It seems odd to single them out. But the US has a culture of celebrating veterans that I've never understood. At home I suspect most people just don't know any. As opposed to a pile of their schoolmates *being* veterans.

Wow. That was exhausting. Do you guys have to do this every time you go to the polls?

I just managed to chat with the nurse at the doctors office. The chest x-rays confirm Pneumonia, and I'm now on antibiotics. They've also done two throat swabs. The first came back negative for Strep Throat, but I apparently clearly have a throat infection of some sort. They also did blood work to check for mono. The rest of the lab work will come back in 48-72 hours. The antibiotics will almost certainly cover everything already, though. I should apparently be non-contagious by Wednesday and back to work then.

I'd planned to mention this a little closer to New Years, but may as well post it now: We're not the only ones who've had a crappy year. Two of the couple I know who've been together longer than Angie and I have been broke up this year. Other people have had problems with their kids, or been fighting, or been fucked by the stock market.

So I'm proposing a "Global Fuck You". At 00h15 GMT (So that folks in Brittan can celebrate New Years and then participate), I'm proposing that anyone who feels like they could've done without some piece of 2008 go out and burn something. If you feel so inclined, write the list on a sheet of paper of the items, and torch it over a candle (In the parking lot! Don't start 2009 homeless!) If you choose to burn something more creative, I probably don't want to hear about it (I'm looking at you, students in France!). =) I don't know if it'll do any good, but it will certainly feel good.

I'll post again in mid-December about this. In the meantime, tell your friends! Start a Facebook group. Or something. Next year's gotta be better.

Hugs and love, friends. Thanks for the b-day wishes. Congrats to those doing the Ubuntu release! =)

Update: On the other hand, I'm *really* glad we're not moving tomorrow anymore! =)

Tks,
Jeff Bailey

Meh. I really try not to whinge on my LJ. But I'm going to FAIL at this moment.

I've been running intermittent fevers since Sunday. Currently up to 39.4 (~103F for the Americans and Grand Parents). I called the clinic to ask them for advice at 38.8. Phoned them back when 10 minutes later I felt worse and was up to 39.4. So, fine. I feel like crap, poor me. What pisses me off, though, is me asking the receptionist for what the standard number at which I should head to emergency is rather than wait for a call back and getting the answer "We can't give out medical advice".

ARRRGH I WANT TO GO HOME.

Me asking for the best course of action to not wind up in a body bag where the answer is certainly in a first year nursing textbook is NOT medical advice. I know they'll give this info at home because that's how I found out the number in the first place. But the memory isn't doing so well right at the moment.

So I'm waiting for a call back from the doctor. *sigh*

2h45 until my birthday. Happy birthday to me. =(

</whinge>

On Saturday morning I met Steve McIntyre and Dirk Eddelbuettel, Steve took us by car to Google. Well, it was overwhelming.

For example we met there two other Debian developers, Jeff Bailey and Daniel Burrows. There are developers from all the famous projects, like git, Wine, Turbogears, Jython, ... There are still people I wanted to meet but didn't manage yesterday, need to fix that today. My plan is to get SymPy running on top of Jython, or at least do some more progress to take the advantage, that Philip Jenvey from Jython is here. Also I wanted to fix some RC bugs in Debian when Steve is here, to make some progress on my NM finally. We'll see how it goes.

There was also an excellent presentation from people behind Android. One thing I was curious if it's going to run native C applications, like Python and it seems it will happen eventually, all the sources are out there, so someone just needs to push it forward. Another very cool thing they did that I was always looking for is Gerrit for reviewing patches (see review.source.android.com for example how it looks like) -- basically a fork of Guido's codereview, but it has many nice features, like automatically applying the patch to the git repository as a new topic branch and one can then easily pull it, as well as review it over the web interface. When I get back to Prague I am going to install this for SymPy.

Umm, wow. So we extended the trip a week longer than expected to accommodate the hospitalisation, and wound up being able to finalise the house inspection, some banking, and get started on the insurance.

All of which means that the three of us have possession of our new place on December 1st!! Yay! We have to figure out if, tax-wise, a December move is the right thing for us, but I suspect it will be. The old timeframes aren't so important now, I guess. Moving still feels like the right thing to do.

The hospital bills came to about $10k for 3 days in the hospital, and one follow-up emergency visit. Our US insurance will cover this with no problem.

Thanks for all the well-wishes and support. I don't know how to reply to it in a meaningful way. Words suck and I wish I could hug you all in person. It's such a rollercoaster to have bought a place at the same time and be so excited by it.

When we have our move date, we'll probably have a wine and fruit party or something. =)

Partner to the up of posting about pregnancy is the down of posting about not being pregnant anymore.

Thursday evening, about 4:30am, Angie had a miscarriage. She was sent to the hospital for the usual checkups and all that. They kept her in the hospital for a couple of days with a uterine infection and is now back in the hotel with me and Leif in Quebec city. We're doing well, and will head back to Montreal tomorrow - probably flying back to California on Wednesday.

they were hanging out in California. Being warm. (That's Angie's comment. I'm still wearing sandals. Although I saw a Montrealer shudder at me today. That was worth it. I think I'll keep wearing them all week, even if it causes me to lose my toes)

but.. BUT! that's not the exciting part!

This is: http://www.realtor.ca/PropertyResults.aspx?Mode=5&id=1487634

This evening we accepted the counter-offer on the place.

The timeline so far: arrived Saturday, looked at places 10:30 Sunday morning. Made offer 7pm. They made a counter-office at 8:30pm. We accepted the counter-office at 6:30pm today.

Next up: Review property agreement. Find someone to sign all the paperwork for us when we're out of town. Pray that CMHC aren't rat bastards. Inspection on Saturday at 1pm.

Oh, and none of this includes going to the house party on Saturday night, the last minute finding of a hotel as our friend's place had a pipe burst where we were going to stay. Finding out that another friend had a place to stay. Me forgetting my laptop at the hotel. We saw the midwife this morning. And I went to work today.

Sometimes I think that Aikido Rondori has nothing on my life. =)

Hey - we're heading to Montreal for part of the next week on a house hunting trip. Keeping in mind that our toddler's bed time is ~19h30 and then we can't leave him, we'd love to see people for early dinners. Thursday and Friday we'll be in Quebec city for CLLAP. Back in Montreal on Saturday and flying home on Sunday. It seems this will be Thanksgiving-free year for us with the move timing.

And thinking of things to be thankful of.. How do you people in the US cope without Neo-Citron?

Hey - I usually have a personal policy of not talking about my current employer on my blog. It's why I didn't join Planet Ubuntu until after I'd left Canonical, for instance. This blog isn't theirs. I can promise you that no PR department I've ever worked for has approved the gratuitous overuse of the word "fuck".

But FUCK, this is cool: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/our-position-on-californias-no-on-8.html

My readers might remember that Angie and I spent a bunch of time writing letters to my Member of Parliament back in Canada in support of gay marriage, donated to egale, attended a church that got intervener status in support of gay marriage, and ultimately attended the senate debates where equal marriage became the law of the land.

And then, a year ago, we moved to this place. A place where this is still considered an issue. A place where people are willing to do what would never be considered back at home: They're willing to take away the rights that people have and are exercising to marry their partner of choice. And I don't have a voice. As a non-citizen, I can't sign a petition, I can't donate money to political campaigns, and I have no representative to contact and inform how important this is to me.

I was pleased to learn this afternoon that Google has decided to publicly make a stand for the rights of people in California. It's just one more thing that makes this the coolest job I've ever had.

I don't really know why I found myself looking at the gitweb for automake just now, but I noticed that they've finally committed something I've wanted for a bit (but was, of course, too lazy to code myself)[0]

AM_MAINTAINER_MODE was the subject of huge debate when it first came out. It's the bit that can set itself so that the autotools scripts won't get regenerated even if the source files for those have been touched.

The problem is that by default, that's the wrong thing to do. A developer with the source (which I assume anyone with the source is. Otherwise their distro is probably handling all their compilation needs) *wants* those updates to happen automagically. In a distro, however, it's occasionally necessary to patch the autoconf bits, which means that you're trusting the installed autoconf on either the builder or your machine to consistently do the right thing in an automated fashion. And hopefully leave you with a readable debdiff in the end.

I'm hoping that AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([disabled]) becomes a standard thing to do with autoconf-based packages.

[0] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=automake.git;a=commit;h=861c19856121d8e875e30268dee6033ded6fc7ae

Angie and I are sifting through boxes of paper that got moved to California so that we don't have to move them home. There are several trips down memory lane involved here. One in particular might be familiar to my friends from Canonical from a couple of years ago:

Shit goddamn piss mother fuck,
The meat eaters got some more duck!
The bad hotel wine,
tastes like urine of swing!
A plate of steamed vegetables... what luck!

Those were certainly fun times. Three cheers to the vegans at UDS-Paris. ;)

I was originally going to post with a rant asking Why why WHY is it that textbook authors seem to have the writing skills of a bad high school student.

In my COMP601 textbook is the phrase: "In today's computer systems, software is an increasingly critical component." ARRRGH.

And I don't think I've chosen a bad Master's program - when looking at other schools, they all seemed to have textbooks with similarly poor writing.

But then, I typed "jbailey" into my FF3 address bar, and it decided I really wanted jbaileyinc.com which has the heading: "Welcome to J Bailey Company, the Microsoft RMS experts!"

Microsoft RMS could be the only software package out of Redmond less popular than Microsoft Bob.

Roughly transcribed conversation between me and Pizza Hut customer service:

me on phone: Hi! I posted a comment on your website a week and a half ago asking how I add toppings to a pizza that a store location carries, but aren't standard across the franchise. How long does it usually take to respond?

PH rep after asking for contact details: I don't see it here in the system. It's unusual that it takes this long to get keyed in. I can enter it directly though.



PH rep: Well, since we have been experiencing issues with the website for some time, I'll send this to the web team to let them know that this is one of the issues, too. In the meantime, sir, I advice you to place the order over the phone.

Well. +1 for honesty, I suppose. =) I can't think of another way she could've resolved the issue.

...was brought to you by the letters A, O and K!

Getting the appointment with the oncologist is something we've been trying to do for months. So I'm pleased with the outcome that after the meeting and the review of the scans, she sees no need to radiation and such.

Yay!

Also in the good news category is that she's not seen a genetic component to an osteoblastoma. So while I will have to go for scans every 6 months for the next while and yearly probably forever, there's no need for the kids to do so.

(Oy. Kids. Plural. Still getting used to that...)

As always, thanks everyone for hugs, thoughts, and prayers. Next update: October, when I get an MRI, a bone scan, and have my final visit with this surgeon before the move.

Been busy with things, and for fun I will tell you about it using three song titles:

#1 "... Baby One More Time"

#2 "Don't Worry, Be Happy"

#3 "Je reviens Montr al"

Time to stock up on sleep.

Not the plastic kind, the squishy furry kinda that need to GET THE HELL OUT OF MY HOUSE.

GRRR

Yesterday was visit 4? 5? from the exterminators. We got them to lay more traps. And this morning (I love my son dearly. Especially the opportunity to cuddle him to sleep at 4am. *sigh* I'm actually mostly serious. I've only been able to hold him for a few weeks now, and weaning means that I'm getting to do a lot more with him that only auzure_skies could do before. And how long will a child let himself be cuddled to sleep? This is just mixing poorly with the jetlag from the recent trip) I had the joy of watching the mouse run out from beside where one trap is, and behind the couch where another trap is, triggering neither of them.

What I really need is a flame thrower and a forgiving insurance company.

GRRR

Yay! Now that a surprise visit to a friend has passed, I can finally post that we're in Toronto, Owen Sound, and Montreal over the next two weeks for visiting friends / attending a wedding.

Saw Bethany and Chris today, meeting Alex tonight. Somewhere in here I have some homework and dayjob work to catch up on.

... , I'm sore.

But this is a good thing. Yesterday, I got to carry around my son for the first time since mid-January.

So happy! =) (No Snoopy Dances yet, per physical therapist's orders...)

Well, tomorrow will be one week since my last of the prescription drugs, and the last Tylenol I had was on Tuesday. I think I'm finally free of these damned things.

It's worth noting that these bottles aren't all empty, but this doesn't include the ones given to me in the hospital, the various stomach things I had to take so that the steroids didn't hurt me, and the various bottles of Tylenol that I lost from being such a basket case (Everyone, especially Angie, has been so patient with me with the mood swings, the memory holes, etc. Thank-you so much!) Based on this, I'm assuming that the count probably evens out. I totalled the number of pills in these bottles: 1333.

I've heard that there's an org, "Doctors Without Borders" to which I can donate the ones that I will definitely not need again, like the steroids and such. I'll hunt them down soon.

Next update: Tuesday. I get to see the surgeon again and my movement restrictions are expected to be lifted. That means the only other visit is to the oncologist who *still* after 5 months can't manage to schedule an appointment with me. They're the ones who finally phoned a week ago to schedule one. I wanted to check with my surgeon on something, and when I went to phone them back, their call display number isn't valid. They were supposed to phone me back anyway, but I also asked my surgeon's practice coordinator to arrange it for me. Still nothing. *sigh* I'm going to take the opportunity at the hospital to go talk to them in person to see if I can get things moving. We're still at the stage where noone expects anything, but they want the tests to make sure that's actually the case.

Still, I'm excited to be this far. It's nice to finally feel like I'm thinking somewhat more clearly now.

I'm here at oscon this week - I'm 6 days into traveling after going to Colorado for work. It's really nice to see people that I missed at the events I couldn't make it to over the last several months.

In body news, I successfully dropped my pre-bed pill last night. I'm noticing it now, but think I'll be fine. We'll see how I do tomorrow. =)