Category: Life

I met Paul when I was working selling boat tickets years ago. He was given a hard time by other staffers, so I immediately liked him. He was an oddball, and I thought that was cool. I became his friend.

However, our friendship was plagued with frustrations. We’d plan to go out for a beer, and he wouldn’t show up. I would call up his house; his parents would tell me he had forgotten that he was working at McDonald’s. When Paul would eventually meet me, he would invent tales of what happened. His maternal grandmother died more than once. He would lie to me time after time – only to be caught in it. On the times he would show up, he was always 15-30 minutes late. Always.

Sometimes during our outings would claim to go to the bathroom – only to disappear for half an hour. He would never apologize or say anything about it. He always wanted me to spend 1.5 hours busing to his home or a pub minutes from his house, rather than meeting half-way somewhere. This despite the fact that he had access to a car, while I did not. By car, the trek was only 15-20 minutes.

By the end, I just didn’t have it in me to continue the friendship. So I stopped answering his calls. And that’s when it started. At first, he would call me from his home. Almost every day. Realizing that I was screening his calls, he would call me from the McDonald’s he works at. He’s 25 now, has a double degree, but lives with his parents and works at McDonald’s.

So I get it – he’s got other issues. But nonetheless, I had had enough. Suddenly, the calls stopped. But at the same time, I started getting calls from an unknown number. The person would stay on the line, usually for 8-10 seconds and then hang up. I got especially pissed off when the person called at 3AM. I always suspected it was Paul, but I couldn’t confirm it. He never spoke a word.

Finally today, I was looking through my phone records with WIND Mobile. They had switched their billing from showing the Caller ID, which was being shown as “Unknown”, to the ANI, the Caller ID-like service telephone companies use for billing purposes. Unlike Caller ID, ANI cannot be blocked. So I finally got to see who was calling me all these times.

It was Paul. He was blocking outbound Caller ID all this time, probably by pressing *67 before making the calls to me. The display on my phone didn’t show the number for him, but my billing record does.

For your pleasure, here’s the logs from the last month. Keep in mind, this has been going on for months. I called WIND Mobile, but they said the only thing I could do was to change my number. I’ll have to call Paul, and tell him to stop. If that fails, I’ll have to switch numbers.

The Phone Calls from Paul:

Call log updated on September 14th.

Alright, so a number of years ago, I caught the book-reading bug. Turned off by all the literature we were forced to digest in high school, I had got sick of books and had stopped reading altogether. Then I go the bug, and started reading once more.

Things changed in the last few years. Work started to mentally drain me. I would come home, and the last thing I wanted to do was to think. I just wanted to relax to some mind-numbing activity, such as reading sites like Reddit or playing video games.

I never stopped buying books, mind you, I just stopped reading them. So I would keep visit Chapters and purchase titles that interested me. Most recently, this included a splurge on math books where I bought a book on irrational numbers, another on prime numbers, and a tome on the history of algebra.

Finally, a few days ago, I caught the book-reading bug once more. I’ve been reading two books. One is a collection of real-life short stories by super-cool-lesbian-Yukoner Ivan Coyote called The Slow Fix. The other is a book on Africa that I picked up at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. I figured if the museum carried it, that it was likely the least likely title to depict things inaccurately.

*Hugs Books*

Ontario has a population of 13 million people. Yet our provincial government is 200 billion dollars in debt. The federal government’s debt, by comparison, is 540 billion dollars for the whole of the nation.

That means that every Ontarian carries $18,000 of provincial debt, plus $15,000 of federal debt. The total gets real close to the annual salary of an Ontarian. It wasn’t always this bad. From 1997-2008 the federal government managed to reduce the national debt by $100 billion dollars, before spending its way out of the recession in 2009.

Can we do a repeat? Can we find a way to reduce debt while maintaining social programs, not shedding responsibilities to lower levels of government and making it their problem, and not breaking the banks of the average Canadian? It seems that the Ontario government is trying to make headway, but the results of their actions remains to be seen. As for our federal government, they insist on raising spending while maintaining tax levels.

Nevertheless, I feel like this debt isn’t talked about enough. It’s a lot of money, and it’s a load shared by all Ontarians.

Update: As it has been noted in the comments, I should credit my significant other for bringing this news piece to my attention. +1 Credit to BF!

I was googling for the tool I created last month called hexcompare. As it turns out, someone spoke a few sentences about it, and even included a picture of it working.

I could have turned to a FreeBSD system, but instead I decided Hexcompare was probably simple enough to compile by hand. It turns out the app was really simple, and I got it running quickly.

I wasn’t expecting anyone else to ever run it, much less indicating that they did so. That someone did was a huge compliment.