WEAR IT WITH PRIDE – buy cool badges and wear them, ’cause badges are cool.
Author: chuma
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pigs and… pigs.
Two people have now written me about seeing these kinds of billboards around. I saw another ‘I Love You’ pig at Pharmacy & Sheppard in Scarborough. I haven’t seen the ‘It’s a Boy!’ one yet. Any more sightings?
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GameCube hacking
Right now Nintendo‘s GameCube is hella cheap – only $139 Canadian. Which would make it a good time to buy one. What else is interesting is that finally, someone has figured out how to run arbitrary code on the GameCube by exploiting a bug in Phantasy Star Online. Using a PSO disc, a GC network adapter, and your PC you can upload and run whatever code you want, which is cool for running emulators on your TV, dumping game discs over the network, homebrew games, etc. What’s weirder though is that the hackers-that-be are using this to write code to emulate disc accesses via the network. So you can play backups of your games from your PC’s hard drive. That’s kinda cool, and kinda crazy at the same time.
For more info, you can read all of the latest news at CubeHacker.
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i’ve been seeing things
not in my mind, but weird stuff is popping up. Like this billboard, at the corner of Church & King in downtown Toronto:
No context whatsoever. It’s not an ad. It just showed up on Monday.
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felix fixed
not that he was broken, but when a little boy cat reaches that special age of six months, it’s time… to turn him into a eunuch. Poor guy. After he came home all he wanted to do was:
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nothin’ going on
Really, nothing to see here. Move along.
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Surveys, surveys, surveys
I don’t like surveys.
There is some kind of survey going on right now with a whole bunch of retailers in my area where they will ask me what my postal code is. They don’t know why, they just say it’s some kind of “new survey”. From memory, I’ve encountered this at:
- Grand & Toy
- Michael’s
- Canadian Tire
Always, the postal code is typed in directly into the register terminal, which says to me that it is associated to the transaction. Also, they cannot complete the transaction without getting a postal code. Umm… no thanks. Being mostly wary of my privacy, and the way that information can theoretically be linked back to me, I’ve been giving out bogus codes. Usually ‘H0H0H0’ – this is the postal code that Canada Post uses for letters to Santa Claus that children send. The North Pole should be represented! Usually I’ve got no problems with this, a few times I’ve even gotten a smile from a cashier. Sometimes they’ve refused to take Santa’s postal code though. So I’ve got another idea – use a postal code for Nunavut. The postal code for Resolute, Nunavut is X0A0V0. I’m gonna go with that. Maybe I can give them pointers on polar bear safety to make it convincing.
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Artful spammers
I’m used to getting a lot of spam. The vast majority of it gets filtered out. Just now one slipped by my filter and I was about to delete it, when I highlighted it and saw it in my mail client’s preview pane. Now, usually spammers will add all kinds of junk characters to the bottom of a message to make it “unique” to try and foil spam filters. Well, at the bottom of this message was this text:
cannot help himself, and to obey promptly when he has fallen into tried to sit up, and collapsed upon my broken arm. Then Moreau appeared, saying. Prince Andrew looked silently at Pierre with an ironic smile.
What happens when I put that exact string into Google? Why, it’s Sun Tzu’s The Art of War!
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Hey US Immigration: Canadians go to Canada.
CBC News: Canadian freed from Syrian jail set to arrive in Montreal: Here’s the short form of the story:
- Canadian citizen (of Syrian origin) visits Tunisia.
- Returns to Canada by way of New York (huge N. American air hub)
- US authorities suspect he might be a mamber of al-Qaeda. Evidence or reasons given: he knew a man in Ottawa who was suspected of having links to al-Qaeda. However, the RCMP had already questioned him months before he travelled and said that he was OK.
- Unfortunately, the person in question had not renounced his Syrian citizenship, and even though he holds Canadian citizenship for over 15 years and was travelling on a Canadian passport, they deport him to Syria.
- The USA does not inform Canada that they have deported him to his country of birth until after the fact, and he was listed as a missing person for almost a month.
- Because he left Syria before serving mandatory military service there, he could have been charged, tried and convicted of being a deserter. Furthermore, Syria’s human rights record with regards to prisoners is… bad.
- Instead, they just hold him in custody, and finally Canadian officials negotiate his release.
Dear US Immigration: No one gives you the right to screw around with the citizens of other countries.