Julien McArdle

What a random weekend!

Friday night, Jay noticed that the Barenaked Ladies posted this tweet:

This is a quick one twitterverse- ticket giveaway for London, ON show tomorrow night. Coming up in 10 minutes…
9:37 PM Apr 16th via TweetDeck

Followed by:

First 4 people to respond to this with #BnLLondon gets a pair of tix. Remember, you have 5 mins to reply to the DM sent to u if you won
9:46 PM Apr 16th via TweetDeck

Jay responded accordingly. He was the third person to answer and won the tickets! Slight problem though: the concert was in London, Ontario – a town seven hours away. It was also less than 24 hours away.

We checked the train schedule. There’d only be one train that would get us there on time to see the concert, and it would leave at 6:45AM. Since that meant we had to be up by 4AM to be able to bus to the train yard on time, we decided to skip over pesky sleeping. By this point, it was already midnight.

We got up at four and headed towards the train station. I was reminded of how pleasant it is to take the train. It took only a few minutes to obtain the tickets and board. The staff were courteous and genuinely appeared to enjoy their job.

For the Toronto-London leg of the trip, we sat at a group of four seats at the back of the cab that faced a table. We sat across from a man who was drunk off of mouthwash. He was listening to music on headphones, hitting the wall to the beats, occasionally sharing undecipherable lyrics to the world and throwing empty packs of cigarettes at me.

London is such a nice city. It has half the population of Ottawa, but it feels much more substantial. It’s clean and the drivers are nicer than the ones here.

Jay thought this comment was funny:
Hotelier: So you’ll have a room with two queens?
Me: Yes, but I’d like it to have one bed.

I was oblivious. Anywho, we went to pick up the tickets. They weren’t ready, but the kind girl at the box office agreed to call us when they would come in. We walked around, she called, and we got our tix.

The concert itself was great. First up was Joel Plaskett. These guys delivered a class act. They won a Juno the night of the show!

Next up was the Barenaked Ladies. These guys were the cherry on top. To be honest, I’m not a big fan of their music. The live performance, however, was just bloody fantastic. I can’t speak highly enough of their show, and this ranks among the best concerts I’ve ever seen.

The trip back the following day was interesting. The train lost power and stopped. The lights in our cab started to flicker, and then turned off. Then those of the cab in front started to flicker, and turned off. Meanwhile, the train still had wifi + a satellite connection, so we were able to watch the hockey game live off of a pirated stream while the engineers were running around.

The fun was short lasted, and the satcom died. The train was pitch black. In the end, we would arrive two hours later than scheduled. My friend, JT Alfons author of Surrogate Stars, gave me a lift back to my place, which was much appreciated.

Hi [HR Person],

I was reading through our Manulife insurance policy. This is the bit where the term “spouse” is defined:

“Spouse”, means an individual under the age of 70;

a) to whom you are legally married,

b) of the opposite sex with whom you have continuously cohabitated and who has been publicly represented as your spouse for a minimum of one (1) year immediately before a Loss is incurred under the Program.

I’m in a same-sex relationship. Thus, short of marrying my partner, he would never be covered by the policy under the current wording. For me, having a work place that will cover my partner and my (future) children is very important. It impacts my decision making process when I evaluate where I want to be in five years.

I thought the policy might be worded as such because the definition of common law unions in Ontario might itself be discriminatory. But nope, common law in Ontario extends to same-sex couples as well. Thus, this discrimination against my relationship is entirely Manulife’s – there is no federal or provincial law that imposes these policies unto them.

I would like for us to ask Manulife to correct their wording. This policy is discriminatory, and I know that I’m not the only person in this office that would benefit from the inclusion of gay and lesbian couples. That said, I wouldn’t want to push this issue at the expense of having Manulife reciprocate by removing this second clause entirely. My aim is to make things better, and ending up by making things worse would defeat the purpose.

Thank you,

- Julien

Thanks for sharing this with me, Julien. Now is a good time to know these things bec we are in the process of all these [redacted]…will make sure this item is in the discussion agenda for future decisions.

Thanks and hopefully all these will be sorted out.

[HR Person]

I hope so too.

Those were the words of a twentysomething on the bus today as he passed me to disembark. I had my hands wrapped around my boyfriend and the man apparently took offense. Never you mind that he was himself displaying affection for his Gucci-clad girlfriend.

We get these sorts of comments more frequently than I care for. No one has the balls to say it in our face (with the exception of one gentleman* last week), but these comments are always vocalized in our presence. Loudly. Unmistakably for our ears.

My boyfriend has been out since he was 13, and has a thicker skin to these things. I don’t. It bothers me that such adversity still exists in a country as progressive as ours.

The odd thing is the age group of those that make comments. Older folks don’t care. Neither do kids. It always seems to be those in the 25-35 range that spurt out these idiotic remarks.

* Some friends may know him as the crazy homeless black man from the Market.

I had a neat referrer yesterday to the Rice Tea site. For those who don’t know, referrers are the address that a web browser was surfing on before they linked to your site. I keep track of these things for statistical purposes.

This was the referrer that stood out yesterday:

http://www.google.com.kw/search?num=100&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&q=torrent+Rice+Tea+Julien+McArdle&meta=&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

In other words, someone tried to find a torrent of the book. Even though I distribute it for free on my site.

It could be that the visitor wanted to save me some bandwidth by getting the torrent instead. However, what’s much more likely is that the guy saw the book listed on the Wikipedia entry for Hacker, and wanted to grab a pirated copy – not realizing I’m already giving it away for free.

Alright, so I’m a little behind on the script writing. This is a busy week, so we’ll see how much progress I achieve come next Sunday.

Like Docks, I’m striving to only write the script in a manner that I know can be shot. There are no explosions, etc. Unlike Docks, however, I don’t have outright access to the sets. With Docks, I worked out a deal to have access to the boats, kiosks, etc. that I needed. Everything I needed was right there.

With Rice Tea, things are a little different. I’ll need to work out deals with tons of different places, and that won’t be easy. Eh well – that’s what all of May and June will be for. You can download the script in its current form below.

Downloads:

Script, March 21 2010