I rarely watch awards shows--except for the East Coast Music Awards--and while I make a point of checking out Canadian shows (that is, shows set in Canada--not so much Doc and Sue Thomas, FB Eye) I usually don't watch the Geminis either.

With Flashpoint the big nominee last night, I made an exception. The show had already won a bunch of awards at the non-televised event last month. Last night it won for best direction (Kelly Makin, for "Planets Aligned," which I think is the best thing this very good show has done) as well as best lead actor to Enrico Colantoni (beating out Hugh Dillon--who won best actor for a miniseries he'd done anyway) and also best dramatic series.
I really loved how gobsmacked and excited everyone involved with the show was.

As I may have mentioned before, I love it when the good guys win. Especially when they really are the good guys.

Post from mobile portal m.livejournal.com

Tags: flashpoint, television
Current Mood: pleased

So my office mate just directed me to a news story she apparently first saw on Twitter.

Last night, Transport Minister John Baird sent a text message to a friend (also in politics) who was in attendance at a gala dinner. The text said simply, "Thatcher has died."

Which quickly circulated amongst the Tories in attendance, sparking woe and leading to an aide to Prime Minister Harper beginning to draft an official letter of condolence...

...until someone contacted London at several levels and determined that, no, the Iron Lady is fine.

Turns out Thatcher was the name of Baird's elderly cat.

My question is--the first guy who got the original text message? And apparently forwarded it willy-nilly or at least told everyone he knew? Why the hell did he not just hit "reply" and say something like, "John, dude--what?" Especially if he (or, I guess, she, since the recipient has not been identified) was a close enough friend that Baird apparently expected him or her to know the elderly cat was ailing.

I mean, come on. Wouldn't you?

These people are running my country, you know. Argh. But also, hee!

Tags: internet silliness, politics
Current Mood: amused

Gen. Hillier, recently-retired Chief of Defence Staff, has written a book about his career and the Afghan mission. I am wondering whether my dad would enjoy it for Christmas.

Possibly because he's a Newfoundlander, General Hillier always came across as a regular guy and put a really human face on the mission. My favourite story of his was one he told on The Hour on CBC, and in fact it occurs within the first minute and a half of this video:

General Hillier talks about how returning soldiers are often so glad to get back to Canada that they sometimes literally will kiss the ground. Apparently one young man had told his friends, "I am going to kiss the first person I see when I get off this plane."

And when the ramp came down, there was General Hillier.

The soldier's comment? "Pucker up, sir."

Gen. Hillier: "So I kissed him."

I should check out a preview of this book and see what I think.

Tags: books, family
Current Mood: awake

So, I rarely watch Grey's Anatomy, but when I got home from work tonight at ten it was just coming on. I left it on while I made a snack, and by the time I came back Yang was interrogating the new cardio attending.

Yang: "Where did you go to med school?"
New attending: "UT Southwestern."
Me: "Okay, new attending, I'm on your side!"

Post from mobile portal m.livejournal.com

Tags: nostalgia, television

( In which we learn that Adam Baldwin can see into the future, and discover why Matt Mays had a cake stand onstage with him. )

Tags: adam baldwin, gigs, matt mays, music
Current Mood: happy

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

Things continue peaceful among the cats. We have occasional hisses and growls, but nothing serious. And when Bojo last tried his "I am a big tough guy, see me stalk you" deal on Spike, Spike responded by headbutting him and purring.

Man, if Coney was here, there would already be snuggling...

Post from mobile portal m.livejournal.com

Tags: cats
Current Mood: wistful

I have been enjoying the last few weeks of this show--I like dancing and this is an endearing cast.

Musical guests tonight are Michael Buble and Susan Boyle, the Britain's Got Talent lady.
Um. I am kind of sour on Susan Boyle. Not her, exactly, but the outburst of self-congratulatory finger-pointing that broke out on the Internet after it turned out she could sing. I got very tired of the bloggers lecturing about how "nobody" believed in her just because she was homely and socially awkward, and "everybody" in the TV studio was laughing at her.

Um, yeah, I saw the clips and I am damned sure I did not see everyone in the place, let alone know what each and every one was thinking. "Everyone" is a fairly sweeping overgeneralization, you know? And it wasn't like the show hadn't just turned up that tubby man who could sing like crazy, too. She wasn't even the first non-glam "discovrry" by BGT.

I have nothing against Susan Boyle, but I got tired of her being used as a stick to beat everyone else with. I'll tell you what I think, okay? Don't be putting words in my mouth.

Um. Yeah. Cranky, that's me.

Tags: silliness
Current Mood: cranky

The New York Times Arts blog wants to help come up with interview questions!

Tags: grateful dead, internet silliness, libraries, work
Current Mood: amused

I took my car in this morning for an oil change and to get the winter tires on. Which is cutting it a little fine, since tomorrow afternoon I'm heading out on a little road trip to Truro (about an hour away.)

Yeah, um, Matt Mays and Adam Baldwin are playing a show at something called the Marigold Cultural Centre. I'm meeting the same sidekicks who invited me over to PEI to see Matt that time, and with whom I saw Matt at that second Carleton show. Luckily we are all old and demonstrably harmless, because otherwise I'm sure Matt and Adam would both be all, "Oh crap, there they are again!"

Oh well, everyone needs a hobby, right?

Tags: adam baldwin, gigs, matt mays, music
Current Mood: hopeful