douchebag redux

I discovered today while vainly scrutinizing the phrostuff analytics that not only is the act of googling "republican douchebags" both popular and brining people to phrostuff, it's also got a great new top search result!

There ya go, phrostuff is now your official clearinghouse for all republican douchebag related news and media. I've also been authorized to announce that phrostuff will be partnering with Planet Fruitbat, so all your douchebag republican updates and breaking fruitbat events will be available in one place!

Hurry, go tell a friend!

"oh, was pride this weekend?"

That's what I heard when I mentioned to some co-workers today that I'd spent some of Sunday afternoon wandering Church St and taking in the spectacle that is the Toronto Pride Parade.

"Why do they always do it so early in the summer? I can't believe I missed it again!"

Well I had no answer to that. What's one weekend got over another, really, as long as the weather behaves? Turns out there is a reason it's held on the 28th of June and a damn good one at that, it's the anniversary of a 1969 Grenwich Village riot that broke out when a bunch of police stormed a gay bar and proceeded to arrest people for cross dressing, not carrying ID, or to paraphrase; being gay in public.

"Standard procedure was to line up the patrons, check their identification, and have female police officers take customers dressed as women to the bathroom to verify their sex, upon which any men dressed as women would be arrested"

"We all had a collective feeling like we'd had enough of this kind of shit. It wasn't anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place, and it was not an organized demonstration ... "

I'd never heard of this until I perused this Toronto Star article this morning covering NYC's Pride, but after some googling I also found this New York Times piece by a writer who was present at the 69' riots which both clears up some facts and dispels some rumours about the event. He goes into more detail as to what the police were doing there in the first place and how the (then tiny) established gay community reacted.

Anyway, the wikipedia entry and both articles make for a good read if you're interested, but for the impatient I suggest you make your way to one of the many TO Pride 09' photo collections out there.

(photo lovingly borrowed from Andrew Louis / Torontoist)

Something you probably won't see at Caribana

career halting photo

Y'know how everyone says you shouldn't post pictures of yourself doing stupid things on the internets 'cuz some future potential employer may google you and see your dumb ass? Yeah well about that, this here is a picture from my birthday this year and will certainly have detrimental effects on my future career options.

(no, of course that's not a Cambodian opium pipe in my mouth!)

Thanks to Joe and Erin for being seen in public with me in this state, and every one else who came from near and far for helping me ring in my last birthday ever!

true story

I was perusing some old PA cartoons today and stumbled across this gem.


It reminded me of when I was living just across town from my mother and kid brothers a few years back, I'd often have my little brothers crash over on a weekend to stay up late and watch movies that mom doesn't approve of. What follows is as near to verbatim as I can recall ...

Vince (youngest brother, around 9 at the time): Cool you got Grand Theft Auto? Can I play it??

Me: Erm, sure but you CAN'T tell mom okay? If she asks, we were playing WipeoutXL right?

Vince: Right!

*the next day mom stops by to grab Vince*

Mom: Hi guys! Did you have fun Vinny?

Vince: MOM! I beat up a hooker with a baseball bat and took all her money!

Mom: *looks about as impressed as you'd expect*

Me: *facepalm*

republican douchebags

That's right, mass douchebaggery is not just for New Jersey any more. Today at lunch some conversation and a trip to the intarwebs revealed the truth. We were watching a CNN blurb about Newt Gingrich when this chit chat began ...

Derek: Every time I see this guy he reminds me of that other republican douchebag.

Angus: Who?

Derek: The one on the radio, y'know the irritating one.

Angus and I: *blank stares*

Derek: Ah I dunno. This is gonna bug me, just google it on your blackberry.

Angus: Google what, "Republican douchebag on the radio" !?

Derek and I laughing: YES!!

Angus: Hrm there's not much, I'll try just "republican douchebag".

results ...

Derek: Yeah, that guy!

security is our bidness

And bidness is good!

I've mentioned in the past I think, that I spend my working hours in a cubicle at a major Canadian bank. I'll leave it at; if you've ever watched Canadian TV you've heard of us. Banks (and finance in general) have been flogged a lot in public recently for stupid security screw ups and it shows no signs of slowing down. So when some nasties tried to mess about with me at work today and our guys jumped all over it I thought I'd mention it as a stroke in the Win column.

I received a message in my work email claiming to be from a facebook friend, pretty unusual right there as my facebook emails go to my personal email account and not to work. I clicked through though figuring our various firewalls and proxies would protect my dumb ass from anything too nasty, but instead I was presented with a sketchy site at some IP with no domain name and a flash video window informing me that my Adobe Flash plugin was out of date and I needed to upgrade it. I saved the unsigned 'setup.exe' that came along and figured if it was all that horrible even though it had got through the proxy my desktop antivirus would pipe up and warn me.

Nope.

So I uploaded it to virustotal and discovered that the particular antivirus software we're using doesn't detect this virus yet. So like a good little cube monkey I emailed our infosec response team to let them know we weren't protected from this particular bit of nastiness. Here's the timeline of events ...

11:39 am - I send an email to security describing what happened.
11:39 am - I receive a read receipt indicating some human is reading my email.
11:40 am - I receive a phone call from security to discuss the event.
11:45 am - The offending domain is blackholed by our firewall.

Six minutes from start to finish, not too bad if I say so myself. Canada, I can't speak for the guys in ties who've got your money, but the geeks in sneaks have got your back!