Standard Mischief

I really don’t know what they’re protesting, or why. I usually find stuff like this fascinating but I really can’t spare the time right now to do the digging. But that doesn’t matter. I find the following statement highly disturbing:

“By order of the City of Pittsburgh Chief Police, I hereby declare this to be an unlawful assembly. I order all those assembled to immediately disperse. You must leave the immediate vicinity. If you remain in this immediate vicinity, you will be in violation of the Pennsylvania Crimes Code. No matter what your purpose is, you must leave. If you do not disperse, you may be arrested and/or subject to other police action. Other police action may include actual physical removal, the use of riot control agents and/or less lethal munitions which could cause risk of injury to those who remain.”

After getting hired and then promptly surviving the first round of layoffs, by default one of my hats became that of a software tester. Turns out that finding out all the stupid things people might do to your freshly coded software happens to be one of my mutant powers. I’m really good at this stuff, and that’s probably what kept me employed.

I’m pleased with the programmers, they take my bug reports as feedback and still smile. Then they ask me to write 20 line shell scripts to do the heavy lifting around the Amazon EC2 instances. Having learned an intermediate level of leet-ness with regular expressions and knowing about MySQL injection attacks hasn’t hurt either.

Then my boss tells me to upgrade to the next release of the software and beat the living hell out of it. Again.

I stumbled across this, late last night. I took it as a sign to turn in for the evening.

…We don’t get a lot of press or recognition because we’re a quiet folk who routinely go to work, pay our taxes and get raped by our government because our leaders won’t make universal healthcare a top priority…

(found here)

I checked again in the AM, and yes, I was not hallucinating. So we’ve gone 221 years under our current constitution and damn if Ben ought to have pushed for universal coverage rather than settling for just a government run postal system.

I’ve just gotten my seasonal flu vaccine two weeks ago, but I’m not even sure that the H1N1 vaccine will be available. If it is the question is would I take it?

Since each year’s seasonal normal vaccine is made of a different mix depending on what strains seem popular, in effect every year we beta test the vaccine, but the procedure they follow to create the doses are the same year to year. The question I’ve had for weeks is would the H1N1 vaccine be produced the same way?

After reading dozens of mainstream media news stories based on the same press release that go on and on about “hand washing”, I’ve finally found the info I’ve been looking for here, a page from the CDC with a date of two days ago.

Since the procedure isn’t that much different,. I suppose this is the year I’d get a second flu shot, if demand makes that even possible.

Dave Rock (of Davesfarm, my guilty pleasure on youtube) had a raid recently. Well, maybe that’s the wrong term. He had an inspection of his property by an agent of the local government for unlicensed vehicles. Of course, for the inspectors personal safety, he’s allowed police protection, and he got it. Dave says the entire Lucan Ontario police force came out for a warrentless look-see. They road-blocked the entrance and apparently fanned out and searched the place. Dave made two videos of the whole over-reaction. To the officers credit, not one got threatened with arrest, no one got tasered, and no one demanded that the video equipment be shut off.

I’m unclear of the motivation from the government here. His place is out in the middle of nowhere. His neighbours don’t seen upset, and he seems to have found a productive niche producing videos that people like to watch and he gets micro-payments in ad revenue from. There’s allegedly a “hater’s club”, that allegedly have their own page where they allegedly post highly redacted stuff with the code word “alleged” all over the place, allegedly as a remedy against being sued for libel.

It’s being reported that the Bylaw enforcement officer has been flooded with so many emails from pissed-off teenagers that he’s had to shut his address down.