Markus’ Blog

We are having a general meeting tonight with our strata to select one of the options to have our roof repaired. That means that some $$$$ will have to go towards that from anybody who owns a condo in the building. When we bought, we expected that the roof would last for at least another two years. Apparently, that’s not the case.

The two most promising options are:

• A full new roof (pretty expensive)
• Use a new technology to seal and protect the current roof (about half the price of the above)

The more expensive version uses proven technology and should result in a roof that lasts about 30+ years. The more affordable variant uses new technology and is supposed to last about 15 years. The only problem: it hasn’t been around for 15 years yet, so nobody knows for sure.

We’ll see what happens tonight.

Update: Looks like the “cheaper” roof type has been around for more than 15 years. The decision was unanimous: we are going with this variant.

Apparently it is already paying off that my Dad now has access to the Internet. He surprised me this morning with these two pictures which were waiting for me in my inbox. Thanks for the photos, Dad. Now you just gotta learn how to scan pictures without help from a former co-worker.

That’s me in the kitchen sink.

And that’s all three of us in the living room a few years later.

Lovely carpet and wall-paper, eh? Gotta love the seventies.

Looks like British Columbia will get new specialty licence plates pretty soon. Starting next week, ICBC will begin issuing special licence plates in honor of the 2010 Winter Olympics held in Vancouver and Whistler. The net proceeds will go to supporting the games.

Apparently, we live in The Best Place on Earth. I’m not going to disagree on that.

This morning, the next chapter in the endless bird poop story took place. Mediation at Small Claims Court. It sure was an interesting, albeit unpleasant experience. The whole ordeal took about two and a half hours.

It turns out that my assessment of the previous owner’s mind-set was pretty much accurate. No willingness to accept any form of responsibility or admit any wrongdoing (in spite of signed contracts clearly stating responsibilities that were not met).

After both parties made their opening statements, the previous owner said he would be totally open to a dialog and a discussion, but he would not be willing to pay the cleaning bill (as in “not a cent”). So what exactly do you want to talk about then? We already know that you are not thrilled about paying, ’cause otherwise you would have done it already. But we’re not going to walk away empty handed either, ’cause if we were planning on doing that, we wouldn’t have even filed the claim.

Very frustrating and annoying.

We did reach an agreement at the end, but only after we started making concessions and kept going down that path way further than we were originally planning to do. Had it not been for that, we’d actually be going to court over pigeon feces.

Our original claim was for $472. Not willing to actually take this ridiculous matter to court, we first offered to drop the court fees ($160) from our claim and settle for the pure cleaning cost ($312). His counter offer was to pay half the cleaning cost — which wouldn’t even have covered our filing and service fees at court, let alone part of the cleaning expenses. In other words, paying for the cleaning ourselves and not even bothering with court would have been cheaper. So no, that didn’t work for us.

Eventually, we settled for $235 (which is just under half of $472), but what a pain in the rear that was. He still thinks our claim is completely unreasonable. While he did apologize for not informing us about the bird nest (and have us find out by stumbling over it), he still maintains that he did nothing wrong.

To top it all of, he insisted that he would not be able to make a lump sum payment. It will be four post-dated cheques over 3x $60 and 1x $55. One for each month from May till August.

Congratulations! You have successfully managed to drag out this issue for a full year. Bloody hell!

What a ridiculous request! He makes about as much money as I do, his wife makes more. Combined, they thus have more income than we do — and he tells us he has to drag this out for another four months and that he doesn’t have two-hundred-and-a-few bucks sitting around? That’s very hard to believe.

The only good things about this agreement are:

• This is hopefully the end of it — even if it’ll drag on till August — and we won’t have to deal with it for much longer. Just wait and deposit the cheques.
• He’s pretty much as upset and pissed about the settlement as we are. Or in other words: neither party got what they wanted. Sometimes there even lies satisfaction in what you don’t get.

I just hope we don’t have to go back to court to file for a payment order, because he’s not complying with the terms of the settlement.

I learned on Friday, from my Dad, that my Grandma’s leukemia apparently took a rapid turn for the worse. She had been first diagnosed last summer, but it turned out quite quickly that her illness was quite stable and not progressing. Also, it didn’t cause her any symptoms or discomfort, except in rare instances.

I phoned her Saturday morning (Saturday evening her time) to find out how she’s doing, first hand. This is what she told me.

As her symptoms worsened, it was found that her platelet count hat dropped to 65,000, which is not good at all. One should at least have 100,000. Normal would be 120,00-130,000. (Just checked Wikipedia, and there they say a healthy person has between 150,000 and 400,000 platelets per mm³.) Now she has to go in and get several transfusions which take 7.5 hours each (because they have to drip very slowly) in an attempt to get her platelet count up to 100,000. I also found out that one such transfusion costs EUR 6,000.00. That’s CAD 9,230.49 according to XE.com. Yay for a good health care system that takes care of that kind of stuff. Once that works, it’s on to chemotherapy for her. Not much fun, for sure, but better than the alternative. If her platelet count doesn’t go up, it looks like there isn’t much that can be done.

Her routine checkup had been scheduled for this week three months ago. As it turns out, three months may have been a little long of a wait, since it got to the point where her symptoms worsened considerably the week before she was scheduled to go in.

Her physician suggested she may have been suffering from this blood disease for longer than just 8 or 9 months. It’s just, she didn’t have any symptoms, so nobody looked for a blood disease before then. It has also been found that her heart and her spleen are enlarged, which makes her abdomen hard to the touch.

I am holding my thumbs and crossing my fingers that the treatment works. She sounded calm and confident when I talked to her. She’s a tough girl.

Way to go, Grandma. — Zeig’s ihnen, Omi.

Yay! Easter Weekend! Looking forward to a long weekend, even though it’s a day shorter than my schveetie’s. (She gets Monday off, too.)

Looks like it’s going to be nice and warm out as well. I am hoping we’ll find time for a nice walk, maybe at some lake or something. Then there’s some work at home that needs to be done. Filing a pile of papers, doing up taxes, hanging up curtains. Yep, it’s really time to do that. Well, actually, it’s way past time, but we haven’t done it yet.

Finally I’ll have to help my dad doing his first steps on the Internet — as much as it is possible being some 8500km away. He’s just starting to find his way around, but he’s doing pretty well.

I just love it. It’s so easy and simple. Much simpler than having to deal with tar-balls (or ZIP files). There are no worries that extracting the archive will overwrite custom files and no worries that old, stale files will be left behind. It’s all taken care of automatically. On top of everything else it’s much faster, too, because the amount of data that needs to be downloaded is so much less. Only code that actually changed is transferred, not the whole thing all over again.

Of course, one needs shell access to the server that has Wordpress installed for this to work — and a Subversion client. Also, Wordpress needs to be installed from Subversion (rather than a ZIP or TAR archive) in order to use Subversion to upgrade later on. Luckily, there is a nice article about Subversion and Wordpress that describes how this can be done.

Once everything is in place, upgrading is a single-command procedure. Subversion will take care of removing old files, creating new files and updating those that changed.

Verify the current version:

$ svn info Path: . URL: http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.0.9 Repository Root: http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress Repository UUID: 1a063a9b-81f0-0310-95a4-ce76da25c4cd Revision: 4914 Node Kind: directory Schedule: normal Last Changed Author: ryan Last Changed Rev: 4898 Last Changed Date: 2007-02-20 11:57:45 -0800 (Tue, 20 Feb 2007)

The actual command to upgrade (a one-liner):

$ svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.0.10 U wp-login.php U wp-comments-post.php U wp-includes/default-filters.php U wp-includes/template-functions-general.php U wp-includes/template-functions-category.php U wp-includes/links.php U wp-includes/functions-formatting.php U wp-includes/version.php U wp-includes/functions-post.php U wp-includes/classes.php U wp-includes/template-functions-links.php U wp-includes/pluggable-functions.php U wp-includes/comment-functions.php U wp-includes/functions.php U wp-includes/registration-functions.php U wp-includes/template-functions-author.php U xmlrpc.php U wp-trackback.php U wp-admin/edit-comments.php U wp-admin/post.php U wp-admin/upgrade.php U wp-admin/admin-functions.php U wp-admin/bookmarklet.php U wp-admin/admin-db.php U wp-admin/import/livejournal.php U wp-admin/import/dotclear.php U wp-admin/import/mt.php Updated to revision 5176.

There were only updated files (note the ‘U’) in this case, no added or deleted files (those would show as ‘A’ for added or ‘D’ for deleted).

Now, we verify that we actually have the new version:

$ svn info Path: . URL: http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.0.10 Repository Root: http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress Repository UUID: 1a063a9b-81f0-0310-95a4-ce76da25c4cd Revision: 5176 Node Kind: directory Schedule: normal Last Changed Author: ryan Last Changed Rev: 5174 Last Changed Date: 2007-04-03 11:14:52 -0700 (Tue, 03 Apr 2007)

Looks like it.

Update the database:

All that’s left to do is go to the admin pages to see if WordPress wants to update the database. This may happen if the database format was changed for the new release. If an update is required, WordPress will say so automatically. If not, the regular admin pages will appear — together with the new version number in the page footer.

Done.

Of course, it’s always a good idea to make a backup of the WordPress directory and the database before attempting to upgrade. Even if it’s simple, things can go wrong.

Without Akismet (or similar software for other blogging platforms), I think blogging might be starting to die a slow death or at least change completely in the way it’s done (less freedom and openness).

Why? Because comment spam, which has already been quite bad, seems to have taken a huge turn for the worse over the last few weeks. Example: between 5:00pm yesterday evening and 9:00am this morning 74 spam comments were left on my blog. Mind you, all of them were caught.

74 spam and that’s just for my low-traffic, mostly unknown and therefore not really targeted blog. One can only imagine what the big sites are facing. I guess Matt Muellenweg’s spam counter (784,370 total spam rejected at the time of writing this post) gives a small indication. As a comparison, my spam rejected counter is currently at 1,862 (that’s since September 2006).

Without spam detection software that either quarantines or right out deletes “suspicious” comments, the only other choice would be to either severely limit who can leave a comment (require registration) and how to leave a comment (ask to type in a captcha), or to turn off commenting, which is an integral part of blogging, entirely.

There would simply be no other way to handle it. Sites would just be overwhelmed and turned into unwilling advertisers for all kinds of junk. Usenet pretty much went down that route. That’s were spam originated. People got fed up and stopped using it — at least for the purpose it was originally created to serve.

Let’s hope spammers won’t be able to do the same to the blogging community. For Internet-wide Akismet statistics, see their statistics page. It’s scary stuff.

Well, it’s not so much that I hate flying as such, I hate what flying entails. Yesterday’s flight back from San Francisco was a prime example. It was the exact opposite of the smooth sailing down and — unfortunately — a much more familiar experience.

When we booked the flight (in January), it was scheduled to leave SFO at 5:55pm (this is Air Canada flight 565). A week or so after booking, we were informed that it had been pushed back to 6:55pm. So far, so good.

Like every good traveller, I confirmed with Air Canada, yesterday morning, that the flight was actually scheduled to leave at 6:55pm. It was. When we got to the airport yesterday afternoon, at about 4:30pm, we went to check in. First we found out that my seat reservation (20E) could not be honored, because the plane didn’t have a 20E. Great! After all the trouble we went through to get seats next to each other (since we had to book separately), this is what happens.

The nice schematics the had up on the Internet booking sites to pre-reserve your seat showed 3 seats, isle, 3 seats. The actual plane had 2 seats, isle, 2 seats. Since my seat was the middle seat, they couldn’t guarantee where I’d end up, given that there was no middle seat. They’d try and have us sit together, they said, but they couldn’t promise anything.

Next we were told the flight had been delayed till 8:15pm, due to mechanical reasons. The plane hadn’t left Vancouver yet, as they were still trying to fix the issue.

Not the best experience, so far, but still not too bad. We had dinner (with some beer) at the airport, after which I went to check the schedule displayed at the gate. I was expecting that the flight would be further delayed than 8:15pm. What I didn’t expect was reading 11:00pm as the new departure time. What the hell?! Another three hours and a bit of delay — it only takes two hours to fly down from Vancouver!

By this point, we were 100% certain that the flight would eventually be cancelled. We’ve experienced before how this works. So, we tried to be pro-active and inquired about alternative flights on Monday (today). We were told that the first flight out that wasn’t booked solid was the 7:50pm flight Monday evening. The only other option was to pay over $1000 per person to upgrade to business class. (To top it off, they were being bitchy about even offering that option.) The only thing that went smoothly was that we did get seats next to each other (29D and 29F).

So, there we sat, with our $20 voucher (not good for alcohol, too bad), waiting and waiting some more. Soon, they pushed back the planned departure time to 11:35pm. By this time it was about 9:30pm. We went to have our free snackie, paid for with the voucher.

At around 11:00pm, the plane actually arrived. We had not really been expecting that. Instead, we were still waiting for the announcement that the flight had been cancelled. They didn’t cancel it. We boarded quite quickly, but had to sit docked at the gate for a while and again before getting onto the runway. By the time we took off it was midnight. We landed in Vancouver at 1:50am. By the time we grabbed a cab it was 2:15am. We got home at pretty much 3:00am on the dot.

Of course, this Monday morning, of all Mondays, was a very important day for my wife at work. She had to hold an orientation for new employees at 9:00am and wanted to get into work early (like 8:00am) to prepare. So three and a half hours of sleep for her, that was all she got.

I decided to go in a bit late and got myself two more hours of resting, dozing (not really sleeping). It certainly helped, though. I am feeling much more human than I expected I would after a night like this.

One thing’s for sure, though: early bed time tonight.