Category: Rant

US and its neighbours

I just read this article about the US and how they keep slighting if not deliberately rebuffing Canada and Mexico.

U.N. Wire | 2003.10.14 | Crossette

One thing the article doesn’t mention, but something that my parents and other Canadians mention a lot is that with 60,000 Americans being given extremely generous hospitality on Canadian soil when their planes were grounded on 11Sep01, Canadian police, firefighters and avalance rescue workers pouring across the border in any transportation they could scrounge (often paid out of their own pocket), the Canadian government offering troops and financial aid, George Bush gave a speech at Ground Zero praising the nations that had rushed to aid the US, but didn’t mention Canada even once.

And meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is still beating the drums about how lax Canadian borders let the terrorists in, in spite of the fact that not one of the terrorists did come through Canada, and that cross border trade should be stopped or curtailed until Canada beefs up her border security.

Pain

I suffer from chronic pain. I have been since 1975 or so. Yup, 28 years of chronic pain out of 42 years of life. And much of the rest of it was no picnic either. I’ve tried just about every possible treatment or cure in that time. In actual fact, the doctors are baffled by what’s causing it.

The best article I ever read about it is here but unfortunately it will cost you $3 to read it.

One of the big problems I have is that every time I try a new avenue of treatment, I tell myself over and over again not to get my hopes up. But I do, and then when it doesn’t help I get extremely depressed. As well as conventional treatments, I also get my hopes up from reading about experimental treatments, even though I know that the god damned insurance companies will never pay for any of those.

Here’s another highly experimental treatment that will probably never see the light of day. But I’m going to get my hopes up about it anyway.

Wired News: Saving Pvt. Ryan … From Pain

Can’t get started…

I’ve been staring at the same bug report for 6 days now, unable to get started on it. I often have this strange hesitation to start big projects. (Actually, it seems like it’s mostly anything that’s going to have a “main” method in it.) Fortunately I usually snap out of it and start making good progress as soon as I’ve figured out the whole thing in my head. Usually this process of figuring it out goes on while I do other stuff, like spend 6 whole days doing nothing but reading email and usenet, surfing the web and playing Palm Pilot solitare.

I shudder at the thought of having to explain this process to my boss some day. “Why yes, you did pay me $HUGENUM to play solitare for 4 days, but you got your money’s worth out of it. Honest.” Fortunately it’s never come up. And I’ve had a few little projects or things where I’ve had to help other people. Sometimes I say “Ok, that earned my pay today” and go back to checking my email, and other times I say “Damn, why can’t I get started?” as I hit refresh on Slashdot for the 18th time this hour.