Paralympic Swimmer Crosses Lake Ontario

You can call me a sap or just straight biased towards Paralympic sport – but this immediately improves my previously shitty day.

This was just sent out by Paralympics Ontario

“Jenna Lambert, a 15 year old, with cerebral palsy, was successful in completing her marathon swim across Lake Ontario. Jenna’s crossing took place on July 18th and 19th. The 32 kilometre swim took her 33+ hours to complete. Jenna, who has no use of her legs, swam the entire course using only her upper body (arms). This marks the first time a woman, with a disability, has tried and successfully completed such an event. The swim, titled the Kid 4 Kids Marathon, is a profile event within our capital campaign to build a new pool at our YMCA. We anticipate that Jenna’s swim will raise over $100,000. Jenna (and the YMCA) is receiving national attention from this swim. She was featured last night on the “National”, this morning on Canada AM, as well as a variety of regional Canadian and U.S. based stations.

Jenna is a member of our Y Penguins swim team…a swimming team for children with physical disabilities. The program is coached by Vicki Keith, world-renown marathon swimmer. The team currently has 31 members, all with some form of physical disability.

If you get a chance, please take the time to go to www.penguinscanfly.ca and leave a congrulatory note in Jenna’s Guestbook.”

In all likelihood she’ll never ever read this page – but congratulations from us, too! Unbelievable!

J

Stream of Negativity

Here we go kids.

So I just finished lunch at Subway – which normally I love. My bread was stail and the meat smelled funny. This leaves me unhappy.

I’m doing company billing today. The program we uses only allows one person in the office to access the Billing section at once to prevent someone from altering a bill at the same time you do cuz otherwise things get fucked up and you over/under charge. I was in it all morning when someone said they needed in for 5 minutes. I said that was fine because I was going for lunch and now that I’ve returned from my (shit) lunch I find out this person has just left for her lunch and not closed the program on her computer meaning I can’t get back in and she’s not expected back for an hour. I got deadlines and people wanting to know what they owe!

Eric Hinske of the Jays is a douchebag. Last night while he was at third base he got thrown out in a suicide squeeze where the batter bunts it and runs to first, the pitchers throws it to first because he can get the batter out for sure and if he throws home the guy at third just won’t go and the batter gets to first safely. Well the pitchers gets the ball and HInske decides to not wait and runs home and the pitchers throws him out at homeplate costing us a run. Then in the bottom of the 9th with a man on he hits in to a double play, virtually killing the rally and costing us a chance to tie.

Shea Hillenbrand of the Jays is also a king sized fuck tard. He left the team (with permission) on Friday to go be with hims family as they had adopted a baby girl. He returned late Tuesday and was not put in the line-up. On Wednesday he flipped telling the media that the team was a disgrace and there was a terrible atmosphere and if they weren’t going to play him he should have just stayed home and how he wants to be traded and a pile of whiney shit. His biggest gripe, though? That no one from the Blue Jays front office called to congratulate him on adopting a baby. Does it deserve congratulations? Probably. I’m not sure what the rules are on that – but I mean come on. To call the team a disgrace if it doesn’t happen seems like a little bit of an over-reaction to me.

That is all. Continue with your otherwise pleasant day.

Barby, Look what You’ve Done!

You may not have noticed this, but we’ve added a new link to the People who make us laugh section of the links area, leading to the website of Paul and Storm. Barby, as you would say, I blame you. Because of you talking about them, I’ve started downloading a bunch of their stuff from their website, and I now have their album, Opening Band.

Man they’re a goofy bunch. Who’d ever think of singing the Miranda rights in a song? Who’d make a bunch of theme songs for movies and then sing them like Randy Newman would? Who’d think of the sickest collection of jingles possible? Who’d write a balad of the death of a urinal cake? Who’d make a very sweet-sounding love song…and then fuck it all up? They would, that’s who. And they do a bunch more. There’s a couple songs on there that are just sorta there, but most of them had me on the floor. So in the words of their Randy Newman theme songs, “Go, Paul and Storm, Go! You’re my friend! … You’ve got a reason to live…”

Boobytrapped!

Ha ha ha. I’m so corny. But I had to write about this, because I find it slightly amusing and extremely disturbing all at once.

Did you know that information that we’re led to believe should be common knowledge is locked up behind password protection by its own publishers? Let me explain. I was on the Canadian Cancer Society’s Website a while ago, I can’t even remember why. Anyway, I was zooming around, and I ended up on the breast cancer page. I found their little booklet on breast self-examinations. I thought, well gee, they say we should all know how to do this, maybe I should learn how. After all, my cousin died of breast cancer.

So I tried to read the thing. First of all, clicking on it caused adobe reader to load up. This is usually ok for most people, but sometimes, PDF’s, for one reason or another, are unreadable for blinks with our happy fun software that makes our computers talk. “Oh well, no big deal,” I thought, “I’ll just feed it through some other happy fun software that knows how to recognize images and turn them into text.” So I downloaded the thing, and opened said happy fun software package. When it tried to open the pdf, I was greeted with this message: “Enter password for breast self-exam en.pdf.” Password? Why in christ does the Canadian Cancer Society, who gives out free pamphlets, feel the need to password-protect their electronic documents? Are they afraid of tampering? If so, why? I would have to not only tamper with the file, but find a way to implant it back up on their website, which I’d think would be quite a feat. It would be easier to tamper with their print documents, I’d think. Why all the protectiveness on information that is supposed to flow freely?

It appears that the happy fun software package had other plans for their trusty password, since it just found another way to the info by taking a picture of the document and pumping it through another way. But oh somebody, if there is a somebody, has a cruel sense of humour, because after all that password-cracking and yelling, I couldn’t even understand the damn thing. Sentences like “move your hands in motions like this.” are really helpful to us blinks. I know they don’t take us into account, since we’re so few, but it just added insult to injury.

I’m going to email the Cancer Society about the password protection of this stuff, because that just baffles me. Hopefully I get an answer worth posting here. I might mention the second point while I’m at it. It probably won’t get anything changed, but if they don’t know, it is guaranteed not to change.

Interview With A Dumbass

Somebody interviewed me. NO seriously, somebody did. It’s for Salty Ham and it’s all about wrestling, and you can click here to check it out.

And before you ask, I have no idea why it looks like a continuous block of text with no paragraph or line breaks. It didn’t look that way when I sent it in, so I’m not the one you should be emailing about it.

Thanks, Pal!

Truth be told, this is Steve’s post to write. It happened to him, I was just watching. But, he’s too mad to write it, plus he’s making me lunch. So I figured the least I could do was scream on his behalf.

Everybody probably knows about PayPal, right? It’s this service where you punch in your credit card number, a bank account if ya want, and your address and stuff and then associate it with a login and from then on, you can buy stuff just by logging in, specifying how much money you want to send to another person with an account and hitting the pay button. People who use EBay love this thing, so much that EBay bought it. So what do you think PayPal’s main objectives are? From their cute little buttons that appear everywhere, they say it’s fast, free and secure. Well, I won’t question them on the secure part, that’s for sure. Here’s why.

As we’ve been saying a lot lately, well me anyway, we just moved. So, you know what happens when you move. You have to remember to tell every frickin body who sends you mail about your new address. So, among the other six zillion places we had to call and visit, we both happily went to PayPal and merrily changed our address. When we finished telling it all the new stuff, it said, “Thank you.” We assumed that meant everything went off without a hitch. Apparently, “Thank you” in PayPal speak means, “You bastards better check your account again because you’re about to get screwd.”

Skip ahead a month, to today. Steve went to buy a couple things. After he put the purchases through, he got a message that did not make him happy at all. It said, “Your sending limit is…” Actually, these few words made him practically jump through the roof. Having a sending limit meant, for some unknown reason, he had gone from being a verified user back to being an unverified user. This was especially angering since he’d had to essentially crawl through broken glass, adding a bank account he never wanted to add to his PayPal account to become a verified user just so they’d piss off about the sending limits. And now the limits were back? Why! Why! Why!

After picking apart an email, we found the problem. PayPal, in its infinite wisdom, had decided that since he had changed his address, they could not believe that this was his actual address until he confirmed it over the phone. In its even greater infinite wisdom, which is a trick, because how can you have greater infinite wisdom than infinite wisdom, but whatever, PayPal had decided to neglect to tell him this little nugget of fun info. Luckily, after we figured this out and satisfied PayPal by entering a happy fun code into their happy fun automated phone calling thing, the account was switched back to verified and all returned to being well.

Ok, I appreciate PayPal’s being super anal about security. This is money, and millions of people around the world are having their financial info and addresses kept in PayPal’s care just so they can buy stuff. For a long time, I resisted the urge to get a PayPal account just for this reason. I didn’t want some entity holding onto that sort of info. But I eventually gave in when everybody and their brother was using PayPal and there weren’t giant reports of PayPal’s members being victims of hacking and all manner of theft. What pisses me off, though, is that when he changed his address, nothing popped up or came in an email and said, “Hey! Asshole! You’re going to have to confirm this!” When a person is moving, they already have enough on their mind. You’d think the least PayPal could do is save them one frustration.

So, if you have a PayPal account that you just opened a couple of years ago, and you decide to move, remember to confirm your address. Otherwise, you’re in for a nasty surprise.