Mike DeWolfe : The Daily Edition

Why does it feel like I'm being forced to wear a pink shirt tomorrow? Shouldn't they be more laid back?

The Greater Victoria Library labour dispute has been going on for a long time. Now, it's escalated to a lock-out. Here are my two ways to bring this to a swift closure in favour of the CUPE 410. Method One: GET OFF MY LAWN! The main library branch in nestled into an atrium on Broughton. I am assuming that the atrium is provincial government property. As a taxpayer, that makes it my property. So, I say: get off of my property. Don't picket up against the doors of the library. Get out onto the street-- the Blanshard and the Broughton sides of the street. Walk the sidewalk and wave your signs of protest. Of course, that will have a side effect: Ministry of Transportation and alot of other provincial governments offices are in this complex. Their workers are union and they're trained not to cross picket lines. As long as the GVPL staff go wanting, alot of their BCGEU brothers and sisters will be staying home too. While you're at it: do the same at the Esquimalt and Commonwe...

Drowning. I have two modes: work and sick. Or so it would seem. I will sometimes hold it together to finish a job and then keel over. Three weeks ago, we launched the new server at work. Two egg timers went off: the site swapped over to the new server; I got sick. I had a miserable fever ridden weekend. I got better but my cough persisted: a dry hack that made me love my Skype mic mute function. Last week, we started to get ready to overhaul the bathroom-- beginning with a round of sanding. My cough got worse. I couldn't sleep. That was good news: my daughter was home sick, so I took the opportunity to look in on her at 2AM and 4AM; and get her fresh water at 5AM. Friday, we were into the full on reno. I was feeling dizzy, hot, confused, jolty . Friday night, I went out to the van to bring in a tin of paint and a tin of contact cement. I came in wheezing and I couldn't get past that. That night, I had a runaway fever and a humdinger hallucination so severe that I couldn't r...

My daughter had a cold today. It was a modest problem that made her needy and made me bummed out. She sat on the couch and we played Lego Star Wars. Her fever came and went. In the past year or so, when she was sick, I would juggle work and care for her; and do both poorly. Today, despite some bedlam at work, I took the day off to hang with her and tend to her. She took a long nap and I took the opportunity to try to wrestle some lousy data into shape. This legacy data involved in my job has been the bane of my existence. Alot of common rules have been busted; a lot of exploits sit there as plain as day. I honed and tried to eliminate unneccessary elements to make the query more wieldy. No dice. Try as I might, the data is too lousy to force into use. Tomorrow, one of my many tasks will be to programatically use the data. I have a saying: "If you try to slog through the mud, you may miss the hill you are climbing." I have been in the mud for more than a year. By the time 6:30...