so, i've got my tickets purchased. i'm going to be a little coy about when i'm leaving and coming back, other than to point out what needs to be done that day in toronto.

i need to serve the cops before i go, and i know how to do that, now, although i'll drop a hard copy off while i'm at it. when i get to toronto, i'll need to serve both the attorney general and the board. and, then i'll need to file.

i'll also need to go to the special library in toronto to get a corporate report to give me the identity of the person that arrested me. this is all quite absurd, but so be it - because i'm going to be there anyways.

this will push two of the cases forward. i may decide at the last minute to appeal the access to information, but i'm putting the human rights case aside.

i will need to serve both the board and the respondent with the appeal, as well - and the judge may very well put thing on hold, afterwards.

i was able to mitigate the lost funds by choosing a cheaper concert option and a very cheap greyhound option. it's less that november is a weak month, and more that there's not anything happening there that isn't also happening here, or at least as far as i can tell, anyways. obviously, the best option would be to pick a toronto-only show, but nothing jumped out at me right away. so, i instead picked the cheapest ticket i could find, and paired it to a show at a dive bar (that is also happening in detroit the next night). the bus ticket was $45 (both ways. $20 to get to toronto is really not bad.), the lowest option possible, and the show will be around $10, just for tickets. so, that's $95 of the $100 card - it's gone. kaput. see, i was expected bus tickets to be pushing $60 (they were $70 last time, and i *did* buy early), the search to be around $10 and the show tickets to be $20-30, and at a respectable venue. it just didn't line up that way. so, what i lost with the business search (which i was willing to pay for when i thought it was evidence that the company isn't registered) i made up with the $15 less that i spent on the greyhound and the $10-$20 i made up on the show ticket. i still want the money back, dammit. but, if i wanted to get these three things accomplished with the $100 card then i'm pretty close, actually. i didn't spend more than intended, in the end - i'm just not able to enjoy the cheap tickets.

there are a few shows here that look interesting, but the long range here is terrible, and i could very well be in for the month. i'm hoping that the temperature swings back a little for the end of the month, and especially for the first week of december (i don't want to miss plaid in a blizzard). i'm comfortable launching facebook on this machine. so, i've got the scandisk running again, and i can focus on scratching out concert listings for the rest of the month. no reviews from this machine, though...

i will need to run through everything very carefully and do a big printing run before i leave. i want the day to be very carefully planned out so that i don't forget anything. but, given the weather, and given the laptop co-operates, if this is actually my only venture outside at all this month then i should get the boost of productivity i'm craving for.

let's hope tonight is a good night. and everything works itself out well.

i've got the fax out for the refund request. hey, that's $40.

so, what did i learn here?

1) that a corporation and a company and a business are three different things, in ontario. i would essentially use those words interchangeably as virtual synonyms, and wouldn't have a lot of patience for somebody trying to correct me. even as i'm typing this, i don't actually know what the difference in these words actually is, and i'm not going to stop using them interchangeably as synonyms.

2) that you consequently can't search for a corporation in the "enhanced business search" because it's not actually a business, it's only a corporation. ?. this is despite the corporation coming up in the federal business registry....indicating that the feds think it's a business, but the province thinks it's merely a corporation. the language is not just confusing, but it's not consistent.

3) that if you want to search for a corporation, you have to either pay some lawyers an unnecessary, exorbitant fee or go to toronto and do it yourself.

as we know, i intend to go to toronto soon.

so, that's the resolution on this - i'll need to get to toronto to figure this out and send the forms off when i get home. i have 30 days from the 29th, so i'd better get there by the end of the month.

and, i'll need to send an update to the tribunal.

so, i actually called them back and asked for a refund, and they're telling me to fax them something.

so be it.

ok, so they're telling me that the search shouldn't work because i would need the name of the company, and i'll need to send a check to toronto for $12 or hire a private company to do it.

i am ideologically opposed to hiring a private company to do something that government can do. so, it may make more sense to pick it up when i'm in toronto.

but, they told me to add two zeroes to the front of it so i'm going to do some extra searching.

i mean...

if i go to one site and it tells me that the company exists, and i go to another one and fork our $40 for a bunch of different searches, and they all tell me it doesn't, and it turns out it does, i have grounds to ask for that money back, right?

ok.

so...

when i go to the ontario website, it tells me there's nothing under the name.

when i go to the canada website, it tells me that the corporation is registered, and i need to go to the ontario site to find details - indicating that i'm either doing something wrong, or the corporation was recently deregistered.

that's not going to work. the judge was clear that the cops will need to fork it over.

but, i'm going to call the service ontario office and see what they say.

ok. 

in order for me to get the form typed back up again, i'll need to get into the virtual machine on the laptop.

i have to get this up and running. but, at least it's clear that the business name doesn't exist.

and, yes, i do think that i'm owed the $32 because it's an expense i wouldn't have had to incur had they just given me the information like i asked for in the first place.

there's no business registered under either the names provided to me. and, it cost me $32 to prove it.

the plot thickens...

i'm going to have to go back to the cops.

and, i want them to give me my $32 back, too.

and, for the record.

i don't have a phone. well, i do now, but i don't use it. actually, could i load instagram onto a chromebook?

the point i'm making in this post is that, because i don't use a phone, i have never used apps like snapchat or instagram, either.

everything that i actually use is on the side. really. and, if i don't link to it from this blog, be very skeptical of it.

but, regarding that kid in new york.

is it annoying? frustrating? yes, it's all of those things. i don't seem to have much in common with this person, and i don't know why they can't come up with their own handle. he doesn't seem like he wants to be associated with a communist from canada, so i'm not sure what his angle on it actually is.

but, i'm ultimately not invested enough in the issue to really be overly concerned about it.

if you think that searching for somebody on google and finding a twitter account with a name that matches - however exotic the name - constitutes doing substantive research, then you're a sucker and you're going to fall for all kinds of nonsense, aren't you? i really can't be bothered to get myself worked up over the analysis of people with such a deficit of critical thinking skills. if that's the best you can do, i don't care what you think.

rather, i'd take the position that it is obvious that that account does not belong to me. as mentioned, i make it fairly clear that i'm from canada, so i'm obviously not from brooklyn. i identify pretty aggressively as gen x, so i'm obviously not in my late teens or early twenties. and, i've even run a vlog where i'm stumbling through the detroit/windsor area. if you think that twitter account belongs to me, you obviously haven't really read anything i've written, have you? so, why would i be concerned about your opinion of me?

again: it is annoying. there doesn't seem to be a point to it. and, i wish he'd just change his handle to something he can call his own.

but, i can't actually do anything about it.

and, nobody with basic critical thinking skills - or an opinion that matters - is going to get confused by it; it's obviously not me.

also - i can't edit posts from here, so i apologize for typos and misstatements.

obviously, the numbered company got me arrested. it didn't sue me. i'll have to wait until i'm able to log in to the laptop before i can fix that.

the whole point of using this machine is to avoid exposing my passwords, so i won't be logging into anything from here except for the dummy accounts i've set up to log into.

i guess that if i absolutely have to log in somewhere to send emails, i can use the 90s laptop.

so, the chkdsk froze twice last night. i turned it off this morning, and won't be back to it until tonight after 19:00, for reasons of electrical cost.

so, i wanted to update some liner notes last night, but my computer won't boot. what can i say? 

as mentioned, this chromebook is simply not useful as an actual office tool because the software is too primitive. it's use it's strictly as a "personal computer" for simple media-based internet applications. nor do i think the processor in it can handle splicing through documents of this size. it's really just a glorified phone. i'll have to wait.

i'm going to need to get the drive through a chkdsk at some point before i move forwards, but if it doesn't get through it tonight then that's all the time i'm giving it - i'll have to clone it, wipe it and copy it back.

i don't yet know what the exact problem is. the last time this happened, the registry was set to load a driver on startup that didn't exist, so i had to go in and turn that off.

is this a coincidence? i don't know. it could be microsoft shutting me down, it could be the cops thinking that they're going to slow me down (they're not. the document is already typed and stopping one laptop from booting isn't going to set me back much.) or it could just be legitimate corruption. we'll see what the actual problem turns out to be, and what it makes the most sense to assign it to.

for today, my laptop is inoperable; i'm on the chromebook, and i can't do any actual work on it. if this lingers on, i'll have to load up the music pc so i can launch word. but, i don't see any reason to think that is going to happen.

i need to put it aside for a few days anyway; i wanted to finish the liner notes last night, but i'd have had to stop for a few days if i only got half done, anyways. i need to prioritize the trip to toronto.

the first thing i need to do this morning is figure out how to run a corporate search on the numbered company that arrested me, to determine who owns it and what their address is.

ok, but let's think this through for a minute.

the difference is i*h-bar. h-bar is h/2*pi.

h is considered to be the smallest possible unit of measurement, and then you're dividing the smallest possible unit of measurement by 2*pi to make it that much smaller. you're then pulling this out in the direction of i.

so, the difference is

1) in the direction of the imaginary plane.

2) a factor of 2*pi smaller than the smallest thing that can be measured.

i'm not arguing with the  math as it exists, it's just that this is so small as to be indiscernible from error, which is what the physics really says - you're disturbing the system by measuring it.

and, i will hear an army of math-physics nerds yell at me "no. it's a proof. can't you see?"

a proof by a factor of h/2*pi in the imaginary plane. right. and, you call that "observable". what a farce! it would be a talented lab technician indeed that could reduce error to hbar in the imaginary direction. you'd give that technician a nobel prize....

rather, i need to ask the question - how fast is space expanding, anyways? surely fast enough that you could never get it right, to a plank length. and, what is the proper correction for the curvature of space, given that we're modeling everything in euclidean vector spaces and we know that is totally wrong?

that's something we can calculate, right?

we know that px - xp, if calculated in a euclidean vector space, should have a correction term, because the space that the particle is moving in is actually curved. that euclidean calculation should be wrong. so, what is the error term, there?

and, without bringing in string theory, what is this modulation in the i direction anyways? if space is expanding constantly in every direction, just how close can we get those measurements without having the rug pulled out from underneath us, as we're doing it? a plank length? probably not much more than it, anyways.

i know that somebody will tell me i'm grasping at straws, but we should at least have the good sense not to be building modern physics on euclidean space. we know that's a bad model. we know that's going to created warped results.

as far as i know and can tell, that kid in new york just stole my name because he thought i was cool. i'm probably his biggest hero. i have confronted him about it, but he's refused to change his handle.

i supported bernie sanders in the 2016 primary and very tentatively endorsed hillary clinton in the general, although i'm not sure, in hindsight, if that was the right choice.

i don't know anything about the imposter at all.

while i guess he's probably not in high school anymore, if he was in grade 11 in 2016 then he'd have been in grade 2 when i created the account. 

all social media accounts are on the side

ok, there are a few things that aren't there.

i have a reddit account, for example. but, i don't post there very often...

i'm not banksy. i want you to know who i am, i want you to buy my music, dammit.

specifically, i have this sneaking suspicion that people think i'm a gamer in high school from new york, despite being crystal clear that i'm a 40 year-old musician from canada.

1) i don't play video games. ever.

2) i've actually never been to new york.

3) i have only ever opened one twitter account, and it's the parody on the side panel. 

i have a reputation for typing long, rambling emails; it is easy enough to understand why i don't like twitter, and why i'd even consider the premise of it to be comical. it's something i have no use for and want nothing to do with. 

but, that doesn't stop people from getting confused.

i cannot actually vote in the united states - i do not live there, i do not have citizenship status there and i only ever go to detroit to party.

i'm from ottawa, which is where i lived from 1981-2013. death.to.koalas@gmail.com was initially created as a joke when i was working for microsoft in 2007 as a way to transfer dump files back and forth from work.

for right now, the music pc is running a chkdsk on the laptop's hard drive, and this chromebook is useless as anything besides a glorified phone.

so, i'm going to get something to eat, watch some stanford lectures and get back to it afterwards.

i wish i wasn't wide awake :\

i'm actually *not* going to be reinstalling on the drive any time soon. there's reasons for it.

i'll literally copy everything off, reformat it, and copy it back.

and, the chkdsk is picking some things up, but that's not a smoking gun.

so, seconds after i finished my last post to this blog, the computer shut off and the os wouldn't boot. what to say about that, exactly?

in the past, what's often happened is that the machine gets stuck at this stupid prompt that says "your machine didn't shut down properly last time". all you actually have to do is press enter, but i can't see that because i don't get any video until it's done booting. so, all i have to do is boot it into the music pc, shut it down properly and reboot the laptop. right now, it won't boot into the music pc, either. 

i'm running a chkdsk.....

i don't keep anything of value on the install partition, so i should be able to wipe it if i have to. and, i have several extra laptop hard drives kicking around. this won't set me back more than a few days, max.

but, it looks like i'm going to lose the night, and maybe a day or two. 

so, i'm posting from the stupid chromebook, that i actually hate because the software is terrible. i'm never going to want to use this shitty google freeware for anything. and, i don't even want to log into the thing, i'm just using it as a guest. it's better than a phone, at least.

if the chkdsk fixes the problem, i'll be back up in a few hours. if not, i'll have to launch it as an external from an xp install, clear the data off, format it and put it back on.

why is this happening, though?

well, the drive is indeed a little bit old.

but, i actually suspect that windows thinks i'm pirating the software - and i'm not. it might have shut itself off. i have a lot of corporate volume licenses of old software, and a lot of stuff i got for free from school, but i don't actually use pirated windows software.

i could switch to linux if you really want, though, bill - if you really want to get stupid about it. i mean, those are the choices. i'm not buying a vista key for a 15 year old laptop that was designed for vista and can barely even run 7 at all. if microsoft insists on shutting me down, i'm not buying a new key (i have a key!) and i'm not buying a new laptop, either. i'm going to linux.

that's not paranoid - they will actually shut you down. but, they're wrong, here. i just don't have the resources to run their "genuine checker" all of the time and turn it off when i'm not using it - because it's an old machine, and every cycle is worth saving. yet, every time they prompt me, i just turn the service on and that's that.

i don't know that that's actually the case, for sure. it might just be an old drive. and, it's a pretty old drive, too.

whatever. let's hope the chkdsk works and go from there...

so, i'm making a conscious attempt to refocus. i've been stuck in a rut and want to get back to work. so, i want to make a few notes on the condition of the various sites i have running, here, before i shift gears rather dramatically.

i think it's clear at this point that i can't do all of these things at once, that i need to do one or two at a time. attempts to do everything all at once have merely left me unable to finish anything at all. so, what am i going to be focusing on?

my focus for quite some time now has been rebuilding blogs. first, it was the politics blog and the music journal, which i had running recurrently. i spent a large amount of 2016-2017 pulling data down from the internet into a set of word documents, and almost all of 2018 rebuilding these two blogs from those word documents. these would grow to take in the vlog and other things that developed over the last few years, creating a narrative of my musical output from 2013-2017 (as well as some cursory and largely unimportant political rambling). then, i expanded these to include a review site and a travel blog, so that i was rebuilding four blogs instead of two. as an addendum to this, there were two alter-reality blogs put aside - one that would end in mid-1996 and one that would start in mid-1996. but, the actual focus - the actual thing i was doing - was building liner notes for the music site. all of the 6 blogs i have running are essentially intended as commentary for the music. they have no meaningful context, otherwise, and mean nothing to me when separated from it.

i wanted this all to converge into a period disc that i would release at the end of 2019 (on the 20 year anniversary of the end of inri, 1996-1999) and that would include final versions of my first 37 releases, the corresponding sections of each of the six blogs (but mostly the music journal + the two alter-reality blogs) and vlogs that were relevant to the construction, interspersed. this would be repeated for period 3 (the next 39 releases), to be released in mid-2023. this would be intended as a comprehensive historical document, in the form of an electronic journal. don't call it a memoir - i'm not important enough for that. but, remember - as an artist, i basically die at 30. everything since that age has been documentation. there has been and will be no new original recordings past the year 2011. so, don't call it a memoir....but call it one if you really want. i'm not upset about not having a meaningful existence past the age of 30, because i never wanted to live past 30, anyways; most people get exceedingly lame in their 30s, and downright awful in their 40s, so i'm happy enough to avoid becoming that.

unfortunately, a series of necessary legal issues around the security of my housing that have largely been outside of my control have slowed me down dramatically, and forced me to extend the release date of the period disc by an extra ten years. i do not currently have a clear resolution as to how to get over this and get back to a stable recording situation, but i'll have to get by with what i can. i really see little recourse but to try and extend the legal battles to my eventual advantage. this will allow me the space to build the alter-reality from 1989-1996 in real time, and then let me click back into what has already been written for mid-2027. so, the period one disc is now scheduled for release at the end of 2029, the period two disc is scheduled for release at the end of 2033, the period three disc will be scheduled for release sometime in mid 2037 and the period four disc will be scheduled for release around 2041. if i make it there, i'll be 60 years old. and, no - i don't plan on actually doing much concrete over the next twenty years, except finishing the documentation of the work (and the work itself...) that i created over the first thirty.

i want to publish two more journals - 12/2013 and 01/2014 - and am hoping to have this completed by dec 1, 2019 at the latest. this will bring me to the end of the "first reconstruction period", which will produce an eventual aleph (to be unnamed and unpublished until the material from 07/2003-07/2013 is fully completed).

at that point, i will be focusing on two primary projects:

1) the alter-reality, starting in late 1989. i will have to get a journal for christmas, it seems, for me to write in, and then spend the next six years typing out. this journal will include reflections of events that i experienced over the ages of 8-15, including book reports and music reviews. all attempts will be made to be as honest as i can. but, i obviously can't revert to that state (if i ever grew past it...), and i don't want to get neurotic about it. i'm going to get neurotic about it...but i have to finally start with this.

2) i'm going to get back to work on period 3, which is going to mostly involve republishing a lot of already existing records from 2003-2007. there will, however, also be some major projects worked on - a lost symphony from 2003, a matlab project from 2004, an imaginary straight-up rock record from 2005, a groundbreaking mix of electronic noise and jazz guitar from early 2006 and some foundational new demos for early 2007, to move into period 4. i do not want to plan past the completion of period 3, at this point, which is defined as the period of time between when i got back from bc in mid-2003 and when i moved into a new apartment on bronson ave in early 2007.

period 1 is from 05/96-12/99 (3.5 years), period 2 is from 01/00-05/03 (3.5 years) and period 3 is from 08/03-02/07 (3.5 years). period 4 will run until the middle of 2011, but it is not like the first three, as there were long spaces with no recording activity at all. i was 27 in january, 2008; to an extent, period 4 is a period of slow death, even if it has some major works in it. i will be approaching the narrative from this perspective, as it occurs. and, given that my maximum expected lifespan is around 60, i may be nearing my actual death, as i get there. there was no meaningful musical activity from the middle of 2011 until the middle of 2013; i was struggling badly with existing living arrangements, as i was trying to figure out how to rebuild my studio.

so, i have the rest of my life planned out, anyways. and, these are the two things i'll be focusing on - getting the alter-realty rolling and finishing period 3. if i get back to publishing the journals from 2014 forwards, it will be in spurts, and because i'm sick or some other such thing. well, until i get close in 2025-2026, anyways. i'm actually fully confident that i'll be done period 3 by then, at least.

i don't feel the time has been wasted. i've figured out a lot of things, and i've got a process in order. this needed to eventually be done, and i'll need to eventually get back to it. the time i've wasted has been wasted fighting court battles, and that's going to continue until i can find a safe, smoke-free living arrangement. this isn't it, either.

what about all these other sites?

1) as mentioned, the bandcamp site should see the most activity in the next little while; that is my primary site, and always has been.

2) the noise trade site will see decreasing levels of activity, and that activity will be mostly related to the alter-reality, for the next long while. expect journals from 1990-1996 to be the primary uploads for the next several years. i hope they allow me to reorganize the front page, soon.

3) the patreon site is still there. if you want me to stop wasting time in court and get more productive in my art, that's the way to do it. i have yet to receive a single donation over patreon.

4) the music journal will pick up with increased activity at the bandcamp site.

5) j's journal will be the primary journal site, and will start in late 1989.

6) the alter-reality will stay dormant until mid-2027, when i pick up where i left off.

7) i'm still vlogging. i haven't stopped. i have video to edit going back to mid-2017, and will need to get to it to buiild the aleph discs. but, the focus of the vlogs was to act as a set of ads for the bandcamp site, which i drew attention to through trolling, and that didn't work out (because they shadow-banned me for being an anti-american communist). i never had any interest in vlogging for the sake of vlogging, it was always meant as a gateway. my focus on the vlogs, moving forwards, is going to be for the aleph discs, rather than for youtube. yes, things will get uploaded eventually, but probably in large chunks, and it could be a very, very long time. i wouldn't expect anything to get uploaded here until i'm done period 3, at least - it could be after 2025.

8) the koala central command will continue to try to bring their fugitive to justice, but it's not clear exactly what that means. there will be music related uploads here, as they become meaningful.

9) i don't expect to spend a lot of time on music or book reviews in the near future, and may never get to it at all. my focus on reviews is mostly a 2011-2013 thing, when i had no studio to work in. so, this is at the bottom of the list, in terms of priorities. but, review information will come up in the alter-realty.

10) the travel blog was mostly a joke to start with, and it's utilization will depend on how often i'm actually posting from a distance. anything posted to this blog will end up somewhere else, in time.

11) i'm sure i'll continue to find reasons to rant.

12) my facebook pages will continue to be useful as update lists, but little else.

13) the appspot site is not dead, but it's sleeping.

14) the viability of the soundcloud site depends on whether i can get people to let me spin or not.

15) i don't and have never used twitter. i'm not going to start.

and, let's try to get the liner notes up by the end of the day.

i had to crash this morning, but i did get the facebook stuff synced properly. so, all i have left to do is the liner notes for 000, 001, 003, 016, 027, 028 and 030.

but, it hit me last night - what am i even doing?

i tend to get stuck in things and lose track of reality. where am i going with this? what are my actual goals, here?

i wanted to get this done by 2020 because the aleph disc was closing. but, now i've put the aleph disc off to 2030 - and the first demo until 2026. so, there's no longer any hurry at all...

so, what's the point of spending the winter rebuilding these blogs, if i'm not up against a deadline (that i'll never meet)?

i just feel like i'm wasting time. i feel like i'm running out of time. if it was faster, great, but it's just taking forever. i'm lost in my own world, and spinning in circles within it.

let me get through the first reconstruction phase, which is two more months. and, then i think i'm going to want to put this aside completely, for a good while. i've got the data put aside for later. there's no rush. let me get back to real work.

which means...

1) alter-reality, starting in late 1989 or early 1990. that's 30 years ago. that will be my writing project. and, i can get this journal process moving in that direction, instead.
2) period 3. let's get to it.

i have legal stuff to do this week, first. november was slow, when i wanted it to be fast, but let's hope i can pivot and get through the last two months for december 1st. these could both end up being ~50 page music archives.

what about the smell? it's better since i woke up, but i noticed it was bad on the other side of the apartment, last night. i'm starting to think that what capping the line has done is push the gas back up through the lines in the bathroom and kitchen, and i'm wondering if that's going to balance itself out. like, does it need to find a new equilibrium point, now?

is there an issue with the fixtures in the bathroom?

but, why is the gas pulling up in the first place? i think it's crystal clear that the lines need to be snaked. and, that's probably going to be what the court date ends up being about. we'll see if it betters itself or not....

right now, it seems like i'm waiting for the system to rebalance, and i'll have to go from there. no, i don't know - i'm trying to figure this out. but, that's my deduction based on what i've observed.

when can i get back to this rebuilding process, then?

why don't i get through period 3 and see. 2025, maybe?

or, maybe i'll chip away at it here and there.

but, i need to pivot out of this. i need to do something more constructive.

right now, i need to finish these liner notes and get to the legal stuff for a few more days. so, expect reposts for the 2013 releases up this afternoon.

so, the noise trade links are all up and the bandcamp site is updated, except for the liner notes.

i have to cross-reference with the music facebook timeline, which means scrolling back to the end of 2013. and, i want to get this all in at once...i want to get the data for december out, too.

i have to update some local files.

and, i'll be on to the liner notes, soon.

this last step shouldn't be lengthy. but, the scroll - which i have to do first - could take until sunrise or later. so, i'm going to stop to eat.

how about the smell? the cap has not worked, but it's increasingly clear that the actual problem is that the heater is off - i'm going to have to run the hot water.

so, here's the noise trade smashwords link for the readable version of the 11/2013 archive for this blog. it's 320 pages.

december should be a little shorter...

http://books.noisetrade.com/j/112013-dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1026614

ok, so i'm done the part of this that i wanted to complete, but i found way more errors than normal, so i'm going to double check the other documents before i move on.

that should be a bit faster.....

noise trade updates are imminent.

apparently, crickets only stink when they're dead.

they're not a health risk, though.

so, i dunno.

i haven't seen a single roach. i'd be jumping to conclusions.

so, i'm going to wait this out for the night. but it doesn't look like the fan is coming off, yet.

well...

what do crickets smell like?

it took me a few tries but i might be awake. what about the smell?

the sewage smell is perhaps slowly dissipating; it's hard to be sure of anything, but if it is actually fading then it's clear enough that i'm going to need to wait it out, and do some cleaning in here to really get rid of it. it's too early to tell if putting the cap on is a serious long term solution or not, but it seems to be having somewhat of an effect.

what that's doing, though, is separating out a component from what may in the end turn out to be a complex smell; if i were to identify the remaining odour, now that the sewage has been pulled out or otherwise minimized, i would suspect that i'm smelling american or german cockroaches. it's the saltier smell of the browner roaches, rather than the deep sewage smell of the darker ones.

...which is a little surprising, because i haven't actually seen any down here. i've seen (and heard) a couple of crickets, i've seen centipedes, i've seen spiders, i saw that one maple bug and i've seen an unusually large number of ants. i think that's it. i've yet to see a single roach...

why does it smell like roaches down here, then?

grargh.

i spent the entire evening last night struggling to stay awake, and decided a little after midnight to just stop and let myself sleep.

so, i got a good 12 hours of sleep in.

i don't know why i'm so tired...

i turned the fan off for a little while last night, and what i'm going to say is that i actually can't tell if the air quality in here has improved or not because the temperature is too low. all i can smell is the cold air coming up through the floors, which is gross enough in itself, and which i need to keep the fan running to mitigate for. if i turn off the fan, it's going to smell like a garage in here, which is a pretty disgusting thought. yuck.

if he would just turn the heat on to a normal level, so i'm not dealing with all of these cold drafts from everywhere......but, again, the guy seems to break a sweat at 22 degrees. i tend to prefer a sweater at 22-23 degrees. it's just a question of body weight - he probably weights twice as much as i do, through a combination of muscle and fat.

i've actually cut my diet in half over the last few months to prevent myself from gaining weight. when i said i wanted to gain weight, what i meant was that i wanted to grow tits (real ones. not fake silicone ones, which are gross.), not that i wanted to get fat. in the circumstances i'm in, i'd rather avoid eating altogether, because my body is just going to focus on trying to prevent me from being cold, and fuck that. i'd rather be cold than be fat.

so, i think i'm falling asleep because the cold air is shutting my metabolism down, and i'm refusing to eat. but, if that's the reality, then i'm going to sleep a lot, because i'm not putting on fat, and i don't want to waste my time doing aerobics to burn it off. obviously, the last thing i want to do is convert it into muscle.

i think what i'm learning is that if i'm going to live in somebody's basement then i want a female living upstairs, not a male. that might be the biggest lesson here - i can't deal with the kind of temperature and sanitation that men consider normal. i need a female to set the rules. i need warmth and cleanliness, and no male will ever provide for that.

so, i'm cold and i'm hungry and i'm tired and i'm going to force myself to suffer through it because i don't want to put on fat to warm up - i want somebody to turn the heat up.

so, am i awake? i don't know. i might not be. if i'm not, i guess i'll go back to sleep. but, i'm going to try to stay awake, and start the process i was doing over again from the start.

i also noticed that i lost my window with all of the tabs put aside for music review. it was 1000+ tabs of bandcamp links, facebook events, etc. it's just disappeared. it should all be in memory, so i could in theory reconstruct it, and i actually tried, but the way that firefox measures history means that you have to actually launch the site to get it to register, so that won't actually work well. i don't know what happened, but i'll have to go back through the history and pull it all out one by one and it's going to take a long time before i get around to it. i will eventually get to it...i'm sure of that....

it was going to be quite a while, as it was.

again: i don't know what happened, but it shouldn't actually stop me, it should just slow me down.

so, let's try to start the day today through a miserable haze of cold and hunger and exhaustion.

i can't promise i'll stay awake.

is the reason it's taking so long to get into subsidized housing because i'm single and families take priority?

no.

i'm only eligible for a one bedroom apartment. now, the one bedroom apartments in the system are likely to be relatively large, and the buildings are supposed to be non-smoking (a key point.), but i'm eligible for what i'm eligible for, nonetheless.

families - wherever they're from - are going to be placed into row houses, and apartments with multiple bedrooms. they won't stick five people into a one bedroom apartment.

so, these are not the people i'm competing with for spaces in the system at all. the people i'm competing with are sometimes going to be seniors (although they have specific buildings for seniors, too), but are mostly actually other disabled people. i don't even think i'm behind a lot of single refugees, as most of the refugees that come into the country are either families or not eligible for subsidized housing at all. it would be a small percentage, anyways, i would guess.

there's actually really just not enough supply to meet demand, for single people, specifically.

now, i could argue that there aren't enough units being built that are intended specifically for single disabled people, and that that's a broad oversight of the system, generally. society has a responsibility to house the disabled, and most of us are not going to end up in long term relationships or have children, because we're disabled; so long as the social responsibility to house the disabled exists, you're going to need to build one bedroom apartments for them, and that's maybe not happening because it's not seen as a priority. i'd actually consider it ideal to move into a large building that strictly houses single disabled people, but that seems to be viewed distastefully by a lot of people nowadays because it's "exclusionary", which i think is silly. i'd actually be more likely to meet friends in a building like that; i wouldn't feel ostracized, at all. so, it might be true that the focus on housing poor families has meant less resources have been directed towards housing disabled single people, and that that is an oversight that needs to be addressed, but i'm not behind a bunch of families on the list - that's not how that works.

where refugees are going to put pressure on housing poor singles is more in the private sector, and the crux of my argument has actually been that you need to get people like me out of the market in order to try to get prices down a little. i shouldn't be forced to compete for housing, like that...

so, my rest was longer than i thought, and i was woken up by a city worker that wanted to check my unit for gas. i didn't ask them to do that...

it's been better the last few days, so he didn't pick anything up; i wouldn't have expected him to, and didn't call him for that reason. i wanted the lines cleared in the front, which he's claiming isn't necessary. if he's right, that would suggest that the lines on the property need snaking.

this brought the landlord into the basement, who appeared to be baffled and embarrassed by the situation, which is actually a positive development. i got him to admit negligence. the first step is admitting you have a problem.

but, he denied my snake request; he did put a cap on the line, though, and all i can say is that he'd better hope that actually works. if we end up snaking in the end then that's going to be a costly mistake...

i got him to admit that he hasn't filed yet, and he thought he could just convince me to go, because property rights. lol. after conversing with him for a little, it really seems like he would be an easy litigation victim; he's clearly not well-informed about the legalities of the situation, and doesn't seem to be very interested in figuring it out. i am at least satisfied that he understands, now, that he has to file, but i'm not convinced that he will. i may have actually talked him out of it...he took the check.

i filed my counter-claim immediately, on the 25th.

i've mentioned repeatedly that i don't want to move right now - i'm fighting the cops, i've got a human rights case and i'm waiting on subsidized housing. if he misses the deadline to file, and the sewer issue actually gets fixed, for real, i could withdraw or otherwise halt. but, we won't know that for a good while, still.

i told him not to do that.

i took a shower when he left..

now, i think i'm alert enough to get back to work, and really want this done with soon.

where have i been? no posts in 24 hours, almost...

i spent yesterday afternoon processing what i learned from the plumber, yesterday. how am i getting sewer gas through a runoff line? is the sewer on the street combined? do the lines need to be cleared?

so i sent off an email to the engineering department, and i wrote up a letter for my landlord, asking for the lines to be snaked (and also for clarity on whether he's going to accept rent from me this month or not). i had to get to the library to print it, which stunk me up from being outside - but it also wasn't as cold as i feared.

so, i decided to get out and do groceries....and didn't get back until after 22:00. i got all of the things i need for most of the winter, meaning that remaining trips until the spring should mostly be restricted to getting perishables for immediate consumption. i got a prepaid debit for the upcoming trip to toronto, too. i made some spaghetti. i took a shower. and, i feel asleep around 2:00.

i was up a little after 8:00 and called the landlord and tenant board. they claim there's an up to three week lag between filing and processing the applications, which is a lot longer than previously. so, they don't expect to even have a date court date ready until mid november, and that date probably won't be until mid-january. that would suggest that i'll be here until march 1st at the very earliest, which gives me enough time to try and smooth the issue over - or to save some cash to get ready to move. but, i'll call again early in the week...

i got a response from the engineering department this morning, and they're claiming the lines are actually separate, which is surprising to me. most of windsor has combined lines. but, i found a schematic, and, sure enough, the lines are split.

how am i getting sewer gas out of a stormwater drain, then? something must be very wrong...

so, i've got a request into 311 to come snake the city's side of the line, in addition to the request for the landlord to snake the line from this side.

and, i haven't heard anything back from the landlord about the rent. if i don't hear anything by monday, i'll have to type him another letter indicating that i'm acknowledging his lack of reaction as refusing acceptance of the rent (and more evidence that he expects me out by the end of the year). i'll indicate that i'm willing to pay at any time, but that i won't pay interest, because he's refusing it. to be clear: what he's saying is that he'll pay me the one month's penalty by refusing november, and then give me last month's for december. but, he's not going to get a court date until january....

if i can save up a few months of rent, and then win money in a court case, it's easier than taking him to collections.

i need a short nap. but, i'm going to spend the afternoon finishing the november documents, and then get to doing the legal stuff for the weekend. the long range here is terrible, so i don't expect to be going to anything for a while unless i'm really, really keen on it. i should have the toronto trip planned by monday, hopefully...

When weeping tiles are connected to the municipal system through sanitary sewer laterals or storm sewer laterals, sewage can be forced back into the weeping tiles, resulting in possible structural damage to the home.

http://basementfloodreduction.com/theproblem

see, if it was installed properly, there should be a valve, right.

ugh.

what if what i'm smelling is the sewers on the brink of backing up? i thought it was a cleanout. it's just a hole in the floor. is there even a p-trap in there at all? when i dumped all that water down the drain, was i just thinning out the sewage?

it's starting to look like i want to get out of here, and ought to be looking for ways to maximize the payout on my way out.

so, the plumber came through this morning.

the source of the odour was coming from a line that goes to the weeping tiles rather than the cleanout, and i got conflicting statements as to whether this is connected to the sanitary. windsor is an old city, and what i learned in the last basement i was in is that most of the houses in the city have single lines rather than separate ones. i can call the city to ask if the issue becomes important, and it might be if we have to talk this out in court, but right now it's a secondary one.

so, the hole in the floor that i thought was a cleanout actually isn't a cleanout, but just a hole in the floor that goes to the drainage underneath the house, which goes to the sewer. the lines may or may not be unified on the way to the main. but, the water running through this drain comes from under the house, rather than from inside of it. the hole itself seems to exist solely to allow the heating system to drain.

if this is all actually true, which i'm not sure about, then that would seem to uphold my second hypothesis, which is that the gas is entering the unit via a heat pump in conjunction with a broken p-trap, rather than solely due to a dried p-trap or a broken stack. and, that was the hypothesis that i'd settled on for a while, now, due to the fact that the heating seems to be the dominant mitigating factor.

the plumber seemed more willing to think about the idea than the property owner, but neither of these people know anything at all about physics, and their opinion about whether i'm right or not is essentially worthless. they can scoff at me if they want, but that's just typical dumb jock anti-intellectualism. if you're a smart person, you know this feeling - when the dumb jock doesn't know how dumb he actually he is, and laughs at you when you say something intelligent. if they were more intelligent, they'd acknowledge their ignorance of thermodynamics, as i've been able to acknowledge my ignorance about plumbing systems. and, as a consequence of acknowledging my ignorance, i'm slowly learning about what i don't know as more evidence comes in, and they aren't, they're just scoffing, and languishing in their own backwardsness and stupidity.

the plumber seemed to argue that the cap just wasn't on tight enough, and to that end i would certainly not disagree with him. that hole clearly needs to be plugged, as a starting step, if not an ending one. i mentioned at the start of this that we might get to a point where we deduce there isn't an actual answer, and that's more or less what he said - his analysis was that if the line was installed correctly, then simply tightening up the line should solve the issue. meaning that if the line wasn't installed correctly then he'll need to tear the whole floor up...

i actually think that the truth is probably that the line wasn't installed correctly. but, you have to try to block the hole before you tear the floor up, even if you know it won't work.

so, i haven't heard a next step, yet. it's raining here today and all night, so i'm just going to sit and wait for a response. but, i'm expecting him to come in and plug up the hole, and i'm not expecting it to actually solve the problem.

now that i realize where the line is draining from, i also think there's likely some seepage. i've mentioned repeatedly that it seems like the smell is coming from directly under me, and that would make sense if the gas is coming up through the drainage system. i asked if a broken line under the floor could cause a smell and he said the water drains forwards, but that didn't answer the question about the gas. he just kept saying that what i'm describing shouldn't happen....if it's installed correctly.

i'm skeptical, but i have to let the process play out. and, we'll see if plugging the hole actually fixes the problem or not. don't get me wrong: i certainly hopes it does. i just don't think it will.

and, i recorded the entire thing, so he'd better actually do it.

so, i've got three of the four finalized and updated to the bandcamp site.

i'm going to stop to eat and get to finalizing the politics blog afterwards.. then, noise trade. then, liner notes - and i'll have to six to build, and may also want to update the first one.

the fifth entry in the music journal series, which is the month of november, 2013 and is 132 pages long. i am not going to summarize the story, but it is available on the web over here: musicofjessicamurray.blogspot.com/2013/11/.

this is a compilation of written correspondences that occurred around me over november, 2013. it includes facebook posts, google+ posts and emails with acquaintances and family members, in an attempt to document the first reconstruction phase of rebuilding my discography, including remastering and (re)publishing inri001, inri003, inri016, inri027, ini028 and inri029. the contents of this download are the dummy track, a word doc file and a pdf file, both written in a more readable, chronological ordering. i've also added the respective files for my other three blogs, for general interest, as well as 70 separate txt documents (all html files) that are referenced in the journal. the liner notes for inri001, inri003, inri016, inri027, inri028 and inri029 are also included.

the events documented in this journal occurred in november, 2013 and were compiled into a narrative in several stages over the years 2014-2019. journal completed, released and finalized in doc and pdf format on oct 30, 2019. doc201311.

credits

released December 1, 2013

j - editing, participant

mom - participant
the initial landlord - participant
sennheiser technical support - participant

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/11-2013-music-journal

can bernie save his ass by doing a u-turn on the gays and going back to his old self?

it's true that, for me, this is personal. but, that's not really the point.

i don't actually think that bernie, as an individual, is anti-gay at all - i don't think he cares, either way. he's not the kind of person that would. what i think is that he's taken a lot of bad political advice and made a horrific miscalculation. see, but that's even worse because this isn't coming from any deep level of conviction - it's not a belief or an ideology, for him, it's a cold political calculation that demonstrates that he's entirely willing to throw what is unquestionably the most vulnerable minority on the planet under the bus.

he likes to talk about how he's willing to stand up for people.

but, when you won't stand up for the people that need to be stood up for the most, when you instead stand with those that want to hurt the people that can least defend themselves, the entire rhetorical device gets thrown away.

so, who does bernie stand with? it seems like he stands with those it is convenient to stand with.

and, then what's the point of hearing him backtrack, if you know it's just because he's realized he's losing support?

my disinterest may fade, over time. but, he can't win me back as a supporter, which, at the moment, would appear to be something he's proud of.

this is my official response.

i appear to have turned the auto-reply on last night by accident. i apologize for the first response, which was automatic.

i do understand the ruling; the court is essentially deferring to the mfippa, in an attempt to minimize it's own reach. it agrees that asking for an order is due diligence rather than an absence of it, and is willing in principle to overrule the mfippa to get the information, but not unless it feels it has to as a last resort. so, it is instructing that i do a search first and then come back and ask again if it doesn't provide the appropriate information.

i will remind the court that i did not perform this search out of fear of getting arrested for it. that fear is not unfounded, on my behalf: the allegation in the case is that i was arrested not much more than a year ago on the orders of the defendant with the purpose of intimidating me from filing a human rights case against the defendant. the veracity of this claim is what is to be determined in the case. i was in fact then charged with stalking this person, despite not knowing their real name or their address or even their actual gender, which my request for order has made abundantly clear. i was released in the context of an order not to further communicate with the individual, directly or indirectly, until the charges were dropped, and these charges were indeed quickly dropped. had i not been arrested, i wouldn't even know the name of the numbered company that had me arrested. as such, i felt my options for performing research were limited by threats of further criminal charges - something i explained to the tribunal, in writing, on three separate occasions. and, i need to be clear on the point: i have not done anything at all to determine who this person is, and will state as much under oath as many ways as you'd like me to. i have abided by the conditions of the release, well after the charges were dropped.

so, it should be clear that the reason i opted for this approach was to ensure i didn't get arrested a second time. while conducting a corporate search may not be grounds for arrest, not having valid grounds for arrest didn't (allegedly) stop them the first time. and, i'm not convinced the justice would let me out so quickly a second time, fairly or not.

the order, here, is clear enough: i have been granted authority by the tribunal to determine this person's identity by conducting the appropriate searches, and i should not fear extra-legal or otherwise  retributive action by the windsor police for doing so. as such, i do not expect to be contacted by the windsor police about it when i do so, and will have the information available for the tribunal (or a second request for order, if it is not available) by the middle of next week at the very latest.

j

...so, if they try to arrest me over this (again.), i've got the order to cover my ass, now.

it's not the easiest or most rational approach, but whatever. it's still a step forwards.

to put it another way.

what i said to the tribunal was "maybe i could do a search, but these guys might arrest me if i do, so let's just get the information directly from the cops, instead, so they can clearly see what i'm doing and don't twist it around into further charges."

...and what the tribunal has said is "you should not be fearful of extra-legal behaviour by the windsor police. do the search.".

so, i got my order in the mail, and what they're telling me is that i have to do a corporate search before i can ask the cops. they also said that if i can't find the information then i can put in a second order, and they'll grant it. so, it's a question of process.

they're essentially deferring to the mfippa, here. they don't have to do that - they could have ordered the cops to hand over the information, that is, they could have overruled the act. but, the position they're taking is that i have to look for the information elsewhere, first, before they do that. so, they're deferring to the act to try to minimize their own authority here. ok. that's a reasonable judicial position - they would, otherwise, be overruling a statute, and what they're saying is that they are prepared to do that but they'd rather not do that if they don't have to.

the thing is that i was charged with harassing this person. the reason i did this was that i was concerned that doing that kind of research could open me up to charges - the cops could argue that i was snooping around online to try to figure out who she was. if you think that is a stretch, i'll remind you that i spent a night in jail for far less than that.

so, i'm going to interpret the ruling as providing me with the positive right to find information about this person, which is in truth still a step forwards. if the cops get on my ass about it, i'll point to the order.

and, if i can't find the information, i'll present a second order, as is appropriate.

it's going to cost me something like $30 to run a search, which isn't fair, but nobody ever claimed that the system was fair...

so, buttigieg is getting a huge bump, apparently from sanders supporters. and, it's not hard to figure out why - sanders has taken some exceedingly backwards, bigoted positions on queer issues recently. he seems perfectly happy, all of a sudden, to align himself with groups and ideologies that simply don't believe in the idea of human rights, and he seems willing to do it under the misguided belief that it is politically expedient to do so.

.....because it's increasingly clear that bernie sanders, as an individual, is an idiot. he's a dumb person, and a dumb politician. he's taken a really stupid position here, one that is uncharacteristic of his past views but increasingly characteristic of his low intelligence level, and it's starting to hurt him.

predictably, actually.

so, this is less about being pro-buttigieg. don't confuse yourself - his soft-right positions are not all of a sudden popular in the base. this is a backlash against sanders. and, stop pretending it isn't.

it remains to see if it will last, because the reality is that buttigieg is a terrible candidate. he's barely old enough to run, and he's clearly to the right of obama. his healthcare plan is something margaret thatcher would have come up with; the conservative party in canada would consider it to be too right-wing. so, if you're jumping on the buttigieg bandwagon because you're pissed off at bernie for expressing bigoted opinions about queer folks, and aligning with bigots on the issue, i'm certainly in solidarity with your outrage (which is well placed) and your scorn (which is well deserved), but you might want to think twice about what you're doing with it.

i can't support sanders anymore, but, i don't support buttigieg, either.

the primary is a disaster. i'm not going to be paying close attention; i haven't even watched the last several debates. but, i'll chime in with stuff like this from time to time...

it's a sympathy bump. and, he maybe doesn't deserve it. but, the candidates should listen to what it's saying - in 2019, democratic voters have a lot of solidarity with the gays, and not much patience or tolerance for groups or ideologies that want to go after them.

and, if you're going to run a completely out-of-touch 80 year-old that wants to run like it's 1985, don't be surprised when he sounds and acts and behaves like exactly what he is.

i think the right thing for the international community to do in response to this is to place economic sanctions on the united states.

i repeat: i am calling for economic sanctions on the united states.

this can't be tolerated.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/russia-releases-damning-evidence-u-173000250.html

ok.

the first run is done.

time to eat and shower.

politics: 320 pages
music: 132 pages
dtk: 110 pages
travel: 3 pages

i'm going to cross-reference as a finishing step, and i may add a few things to it, but i mentioned that the travel blog won't pick up until mid-2014. the politics site will slow down quite a bit moving forward into the new year, while the dtk site will pick up quite a bit - there's a bit of a tease near the end of november, but it doesn't really start up until mid-2014 when i started trolling hard. and, i have two more months to get through before the end of the first reconstruction phase. there's also six liner notes to type up, and six releases to republish.

i want this all done by the end of the month...

you have to be careful remastering something like this, because it's such a product of the (now ancient) technology. it's cleaner, maybe, but the tape reverb is a part of the song.

i just hope the original masters are still kicking around.

i'm just about done. really. a few more dtk posts at the end of the month, that's it.

i just need to remind people just how much lennon i listened to as a kid, and just how much of an influence he was on me. i just listened to this for the first time in years, and laughed....
 
it absolutely reeks in here, but the plumber is going to be here tomorrow so i'm going to let it stink the place up.

hallowe'en was always my mom's favourite holiday, and i grew up with a lot of negative memories around it. i guess that's what happens when you grow up with abusive satanist parents rather than abusive christian parents - your negative childhood memories end up attached to secular holidays like hallowe'en rather than religious ones like easter.

"no, mom, i don't want to wear that".

so, i wouldn't care much for hallowe'en on a good year. and, i never go to costume or dress-up parties. ever. i'd rather kill myself.

i felt like i was too old for hallowe'en when i was about 10. if i thought holidays were dumb in general, i always thought this one was the dumbest holiday of all of them. i'm way too old, now.

as it is, it's cold this year, and i'm feeling gross and anti-social. i have absolutely no interest in this right now, at all, whatsoever.

i wanted to be done the rebuild yesterday afternoon, but i got circled around and had to back track. i finally stopped to eat this morning, and then had to nap. i've got a few dozen posts left, max...

in case you're curious.

i turned 30 in january, 2011. i did have some part time jobs over 2011, but i don't believe i had a full time job in that space.

i worked briefly for fortinet in the spring of 2010, when i was 29. they fired me for being late to work repeatedly, and i was late pretty much every day for two weeks. it was in bells corners. this was something that pissed me off about ottawa - i wanted to live downtown, but all of the tech jobs were in places like bells corners and kanata that i'd otherwise never want to go to for any reason, ever. so, i was always late for work because all of the jobs were always in the middle of nowhere. i would have actually preferred to work fast food downtown, but i was overqualified, and i couldn't get anybody to call me back.

that was my last full time job - the spring of 2010, when i had just turned 29.

i have not had any job at all since mid-2011. at this point, i have no intention of working ever again.

so, i can't exactly claim i retired at 30. but, it was pretty close.

fwiw, i graduated with a b. mathematics in late 2006, at the age of 25. i went back to school in 2008, and dropped out of a b. sc a half credit short of a programming degree in 2010, with a pretty high gpa. i have more than 6 mathematics credits at the graduate level, as well.

so, if i graduated at nearly 26 and retired a few months after 30, and spent most of 27-29 back in school, that's a lot of "fuck working", isn't it? if i can win some serious money soon, i can really retire at 40. and, i'll say it again and again: fuck working.

also: when microsoft laid me off in mid-2007, they gave me a huge severance. so, i didn't work that summer either.

i only worked actual full time jobs from about 11-2006 to about 06-2007, and (after taking the summer of 2007 off with the severance from microsoft) from about 11-2007 to about 06-2008. i was fired for not showing up to work on canada day, 2008, because i was drinking in my friend's living room, instead. i didn't bother working the rest of the summer. i had around 10 jobs in that period, and was fired for being late or laid off due to offshoring (don't tell me it doesn't happen. i lost three jobs in a year because of it.) repeatedly. and, then my dad tricked me into going back to school...

that's really barely a year of actual working.

am i too stupid to figure it out, or too smart to get stuck in it? you tell me.

but, if i can turn the arrest into a retirement plan, you can be sure i will.

why not buy a condo now and sell it at twice the price in 20 years?

well, if i don't want to buy your 20 year old condo, why would i think somebody would want to buy mine? i mean, really. then, you have maintenance costs and property taxes...

on top of that, you're essentially betting that 1000% inflation in the cost of housing is sustainable, which is something i'm pretty skeptical about.

i'm ultimately not going to base my decisions on ways to turn a profit, so much as i'm going to base my decisions on ensuring that things work out, even in the worst case. i don't even want to put the money in the stock market. i'd rather put it in secure bonds. "but it's only 5%" isn't much of a disincentive to me when inflation in rent is restricted to 2-3% by law. i just don't want it to lose value.

will i be able to buy something new for $200,000 in 20 years? i''ll be happy to move to sudbury, if i have to. as long as there's stable internet and access to health care....

so, the hrto claims i should expect a decision on the request for an order for the police to reveal the identity of my accuser shortly. again - i don't even know what this person's real name is, but s/he was able to put me in jail for the night. that should never happen. she needs to pay up. and, i'm hoping she settles.

see, about the only thing i know about this person, who may or may not be female, is that she owns a large amount of property in the region, which would put her net worth in the millions, minimum. my understanding of the situation is that her wealth and power is how she got me thrown in jail in the first place. i filed for $100,000, which would likely not be a lot of money to her. more importantly to her is going to be that i asked for a loss of rental license, which is something i can use as leverage. if she gives me $90,000, that's enough to pay off my student loan and hit the maximum donation amount under odsp. like, i'm not going to be able to keep more than $10,00-$15,000 of this without getting off of disability, which would not be a smart choice given the amount we're talking about. how much do i need to win in a lawsuit to get off disability?

my income is currently roughly $15,000/yr and it's enough for me to live comfortably and see a show here and there. on top of that, if i save up over the winter, and get a few dollars thrown at me here and there from lawsuits or relatives, i can have more fun over the summer than i should. so, if i budget for $25,000/yr, i'm living in luxury relative to what i actually want. and, if you think it through, it's not that frugal, once you take out unnecessary expenses like cars, vacations, cell phones, televisions....and especially considering that i should be slowing down on the partying, not picking it up.

i'll be 39 in january. i know. yikes. neither my father nor his father made it to 60, although my mom's side is fairly long-lived, and the last i checked my father's mother was actually still alive. you know the cliche - who wants to live to be 70? 69 year olds. - but i'm the type that knows i'm going to hit a breaking point. it's less that i'm going to off myself in my 70s and more that i'm not going to mind being desperately poor. i'll be happy to sit and read the news with a cup of coffee on the bare minimum pension levels. because, what will have changed, right?

so, i don't even feel the need to plan for retirement, or not really. i'll be happy to live with the other poor seniors, for as long as i can drag it on.

planning for 70 is consequently reasonable, and less because i don't plan to make it there and more because it doesn't matter anymore, once i do.

if you give it to me all at once, i should be able to figure out something to do with it that beats inflation. (31 years * $25,000) = $775,000. for right now, i want to live downtown; at some point in 15-20 years, i'll want to buy a small house or condo and be less concerned about being downtown. so, if you give me a million dollars, i think i can stretch out most of the way. but, if  you give me two million dollars, then i'm sure that that's enough from now until the end of my life, more or less no matter what...

is spending a night in jail on bullshit charges worth two million dollars? probably, yeah. but, not from the human rights case. that's the constitutional challenge, which is next.

so, if i can get the order to contact her, i'm hoping that she just writes me a cheque to pay off the loan - it's pocket change to her, it acknowledges wrongdoing on her behalf and it gets me out of debt and on to the next hurdle.

the ltb is claiming that my own file hasn't been processed yet (which i find to be odd.). so, if my own file hasn't been processed, it's too early to tell if he's filed or not, yet. it's actually a good reference, though - if i call back tomorrow and my file is in the system and his isn't, it indicates he hasn't filed yet.

at the least, if he did file, he didn't file using the electronic system, meaning he either mailed it (a bad choice on his behalf.), or he got there earlier in the day. i was there about 11:00, and he was banging on my door around 9:30 (and woke me up). he could have gone very early, it is true. there were two other ltb cases before me, based on the numbering.

but, all communication i've had with him indicates that he either doesn't understand the process, or naively thinks he can just bully me into it because property. as you surely know by now, i happen to be exceedingly anti-propertarian. i'll drag him through court out of the principle of it...

we'll try again tomorrow.

for now, i want to finish the rebuild for november before i start thinking about today's meal, and planning for that overdue trip to toronto to file the appeal.

so, i slept all night; i had a roughly 28 hour day yesterday, so let's try to keep it up.

i'm going to start by making some calls, and then get back to work for the rest of the day. what's the status of the order at the ohrc? did the landlord file to evict or not?

listen...

i don't know if this guy al-baghdadi ever existed or if he was like big brother to the islamists or what. i mean, i don't know if they killed bin laden when they said they did, or if they even killed him at all.

i do know this: when they push something like this down, it signals they're changing something.

so, the facts on the ground are never clear, it is true, and there's no use in trying to figure out specifics around something that might have only ever existed in fiction. but, when these figureheads die, this thing we call al qaeda - whatever kind of cia-saudi joint operation that it actually is - tends to shift.

it seems like they're broadly abandoning syria to the syrians and the turks and the russians. maybe not all of it. but, mostly.

we'll see what happens, but the experts always said that the best way to beat isis was to pull funding.

so, i've been awake, at least - i've napped briefly a few times, but i've been awake since last night.

and, i've made it up until the end of nov 20, 2013 - not as much as i'd hoped, but a fair amount, nonetheless.

the politics archive is at 225 pages and counting, and will probably be over 300 pages. there's no single component to this.

the music file is at 85 pages and will certainly be over 100. the dominant component is bandcamp links.

the deathtokoalas document is also at 85 pages, and will also be around 100 pages. there's no dominant component here either, but it's a subset of the politics site.

the heat is now on, and the nature of the smell has shifted to burning gas, but the nature of the issue hasn't altered. i appreciate the heat, and the totality of it might be less, but i still need a plumber.

and, whether it's actually marijuana or not (i think it is), i'm more and more convinced that the smoky smell is the same smell that i smelled on him yesterday. it's him, one way or the other. - if it's pot or gas or meth or whatever else.

i haven't eaten since yesterday, either, so it's time to stop and do it. and, we'll see if this is a blip or if i'm going into the manic phase. i want some very long days, right now. if i can stay straight edge for a bit, hopefully i can have a long november in terms of being awake 22 hours a day for the whole month. i'm tired of these sleepy days...

so, eggs it is. let's get cracking...

remember this?

what happened?

https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2013/11/however-unexpectedly-strong-opposition.html

so i'm through 41 of the 70 html files. there's one more for the 3rd, and one for the 19th, but the remaining 27 run from the 27th to the 29th. so, i can put that aside for a bit.

i've already mostly cleaned up the actual music production part. that's why it took so long to build the master. and, there are dozens of uploads through mid-november, too, from 1996-2000.

the next thing is to rearrange the email communication i had with sennheiser over the 3rd-8th, roughly, which is actually the bulk of the document, because i just copied over all the forwards and stuff. i initially arranged this in the form of a conversation by condensing a dozen emails into a single exchange, but i'm going to replace this with the same kind of emails i had previously produced, as i've moved to a more detailed format.

that might take a bit, but it should be pretty fast after that.

so, he wasn't here long.

the shower issue was indeed with the handle, and it appears to have just needed to be tightened. the handle wasn't turning the actual faucet anymore. i could have done that myself, and probably would have if it weren't for the broader situation and the fact that i knew he was coming down anyways; if i had broken it, i wouldn't have had time to learn how to fix it.

upon looking at the cleanout, he seemed to realize that the issue was real, but he didn't commit to actually doing anything about it. he seemed more interested in taking pictures.

but, perhaps more instructive was that i learned that he smelled exactly like the gas i was trying to keep out of the unit. as soon as he opened the door, there was a huge whiff of it, and he stunk the place up quite a bit just by being down here.

when i got a little bit closer to him, i could put the complex smell together a little bit better - it's a combination of third-hand smoke, gasoline and rotten eggs, either from the sewer or just from farting. the gasoline was perhaps diesel-ish, which makes me wonder what he's smoking. but, if i had any previous questions about his habits, they've been cleared up - you could definitely smell it on him, enough that it actually got me coughing. i guess the other option is meth, but i couldn't identify the smell of crystal meth on a user's clothes, because i've never actually been near it (or at least not on purpose). i mean, what does an elephant smell like? you'd have to have experience with elephants, or you just wouldn't know - and, if you're like me, you just don't have that in your odour database.

so, while i'm not convinced that i'm any closer to an answer, i did learn something - either he lives in the smell without noticing it, or he's actually the cause of it, himself, through some combination of his own habits. if it's the latter, there might not be a solution to this. and, it's kind of what i was worried about.

he's a white male in his mid 40s or very early 50s with a very scottish name. i doubt it's what he's eating.

i guess if he hires a plumber, we'll go from there. otherwise, we'll talk this out in court. but, i need to think this through a little more carefully now that i realize this.

i got some fruit after he left, took a shower and passed out for a few more hours, from about 14:00-19:00. there's the remnants of that hurricane coming through, but i dunno, really. i know that i'm going to stop myself from making eggs until i can get through most of the rebuild. so, i'm keen on being focused tonight, anyways.

i fell asleep at like 20:30 and have been having difficulty staying awake since this morning.

i'm flustered and agitated and not likely to be useful this weekend at all - i'm going to sleep for days, and i know it.

*shrug*.

he might not take my rent check, which will just make it that much easier to get to toronto to file the appeal. and, i need to make a number of calls on monday morning. there should be an order on the request for the police to reveal the defendant's identity, by now.

the water to the shower appears to have been cut this morning. that's a serious offence, in ontario - you simply can't do that. he's doing an "inspection" this morning, and we'll see how he reacts.

i insist on all communication being in writing at this point, so i won't be verbally communicating with him other than to ask him to put it in writing. i will, however, be recording what he says to me, and hoping he fucks up badly.

so, am i awake? i'm not sure it matters, right now.

the legal system in ontario really needs serious reform from the bottom up.

i'm learning that.

these enforcement bodies that they've set up are awful - they think they're a part of the judicial system, and they're not.

so, i slept in a little, got out around 10:00 and filed a little after noon, after some running around. i picked up a thermometer on the way home - and it has at least warmed up here, that's a positive - so we'll see what the temperature falls off at. it's coming in right now at 21, but it feels a good five-six degrees warmer than it was last night. that's fine, the approach worked; he needs to keep it up, though.

i was home around 14:00, ate some eggs, took a shower, checked my email and came to the stark realization that the landlord does not understand that he needs to file to the board to evict me. he thinks his n12 is sufficient, and he has some kind of authority in the matter. this is not a potential problem that i'm going to let linger; i'm going to get the enforcement unit on his ass asap, and throw him in jail if required. so, i told him that, and he just continued to act as though the legal steps were not required.

so, i called the unit, and...this unit doesn't seem to actually take complaints. it's kind of a joke. i've called them before, and they think they have the power of adjudication. they won't file reports unless you have a "smoking gun", which is not how any comparable body is supposed to act. they're supposed to gather evidence, do an investigation and let the judge figure it out. the cops aren't supposed to be a part of the legal system, they're not supposed to have discretion like that - they're not trained to. it's not their job. what they're supposed to do is take complaints, lay the facts down on the table and diffuse scenarios before they occur.

what they're telling me is that i have to wait for him to actually try to evict me illegally before they'll even call him at all, or that he has to explicitly make a threat. this is actually wrong - most judges can pass a fourth grade reading comprehension exam, and put together the meaning of his statements. he doesn't need to be explicit to be convicted of anything. it's enough to be implicit. this is why we have courts.....

i mean, it's the irony of it, right?

as it is, do i think i could convict the guy at this point? yes, probably. but, that's not the intent. what i need is for somebody to call him and explain to him that he has no power of eviction. i don't want him to try to forcibly evict me and go to jail for it, i want to prevent him from trying to forcibly evict me. it says on their website that that's what this unit is supposed to do, upon receiving complaints. and, that's what cops are supposed to do, in general. they're not supposed to convict people over the phone. if the situation festers, i'll have to call the windsor police instead, and get them to do it - and if i do that, he'll be facing a t2, too. and, at the end of the day, if he tries to break in here, i'll have to treat him as a trespasser and defend myself, as is my right to do. this unit is supposed to exist to stop things like this from happening.....

i can keep trolling him, though, in an attempt to get him to say the wrong thing. i'll have to record the conversation, tomorrow. all i actually wanted was for the cops to call him to warn him that he'll end up in jail if he tries it, but if i can get him on tape, then i can press charges, instead. again: not what i want, not the most elegant solution, but if this is how the stupid system wants to stupidly organize itself...

i could in theory bring it to a justice of the peace, and i do think i'd have enough evidence as it is, but i'm not there, yet.

for now, i'm ready to get back to work for the night, and let's hope it's productive, at least.

but, i'm bracing for a physical confrontation at new year's - because i'm not going anywhere without a court order, and i'll stand my ground if he tries anything stupid.

if he hadn't sent me the eviction notice, i would have filed on the 31st with a request for maintenance. i wouldn't have asked for a rent rebate - i would have just demanded he fix the plumbing.

but, he played his cards too early and got burnt; it's a costly mistake.

you can't expect me to feel badly for him - he's trying to evict me because i'm demanding he fix the plumbing. i can't have mercy, here. that woulds be irrational.

ok.

so, that's done. let's see how much of nov 2 that i can get done with before i file this morning.

we'll see how long it takes for him to figure out how to file this. but, if he files today, we could end up doing this on the same day. if he waits, the tribunal will need to separate the issues.

i understand that it's hard to fight a personal eviction, even in a situation that is as bullshit as this. remember - i took the position last time that the ruling was flawed, but decided to drop it because i wanted to leave, anyways. i decided that the smoke in that unit was too powerful, that i needed out. i think i would have won on appeal.

given that he lives upstairs, he's going to have a more difficult argument to make to the tribunal, and i'm going to be more aggressive in pushing the statutory exceptions this time - something i didn't do enough of last time. but, i'm still at a strong disadvantage.

yet, if i win my case for $3500, and he wins his, he'll still need to pay me out $750 on top of the $3500, and give me back last month's rent, too. so, that's $5000, added up.

i'm such an anarchist, aren't i? fuck the landlord. *thunder crack*. muahahahahahahaha...

so, i want to get my case filed asap, and hope it creates enough of a delay in his own reaction that the cases get scheduled at least a week apart.

so, the claim is $3600. i can't e-file because this street is listed incorrectly in the canada post database, which is frustrating, but whatever. i'll need to do it in the morning.

*shrug*.

all i wanted was a plumber.

i'm not doing up a separate t2 for the heat, it's just an addendum to the t6.

and, i think the heat just turned on. finally. maybe we'll get some rationality in the end, after all.

so, the official response to my request for a plumber is an eviction notice, which is an intimidation attempt and subject to legal censure.

the change of plans for the night is that i'll have to do the write up to file for tomorrow morning....

the wild card here is that i'm hoping to get into subsidized housing, and if i can get a plumber in here sooner than later then it might make sense to drag him through a divisional court appeal, as i'm siphoning out a rent reduction via not paying rent.

i didn't want a legal battle, i wanted the plumbing fixed and the heat turned on. now, he's going to get ordered to pay me $3000-5000 in rent overpayment. this was the single dumbest thing he could have possibly done.

so be it.

so, when i supported trump's withdrawal, i didn't mean a half-assed withdrawal or a redeployment to protect the oil, although nobody should be surprised by this, as it is more or less what he said from the start.

shifting from "protect the kurds" to "protect the oil" just makes the existing illegal occupation that much more illegal of an occupation. they've just dropped the pretext.

so, i would call on the president to keep his promise and uphold his mandate to end the war and withdraw all of his troops from syria.

i would also call on the united states congress to pass a carbon transition plan that makes this kind of nonsense a thing of the past.

actually, she already appears to have a title of "special advisor to the prime minister". which means what, exactly?

between mclellan, carr, murray, wilkinson, sajjan and qualtrough the west seems covered, to me.

seems like a tempest in a teacup.

and, if they have to do something, the best thing to do is to appoint anne mclellan somewhere.

the west a made a choice to be in opposition.

let them live with it.

actually, i think the liberals should make it a point to exclude alberta and saskatchewan from cabinet, as a consequence of their voting choices.

alberta doesn't deserve a consolation prize, here - they voted their cabinet ministers out and should have to deal with it. and, saskatchewan just voted out ralph. what a bunch of idiots.

the west can be and should be represented via the liberals in british columbia and manitoba.

maybe they'll make a better choice, next time.

i've known people that actually smoke three grams, per average, every day.

at the height of it, they can barely tie their own shoes. i had one friend that got addicted to smoking up and jerking off.

and, there's a pattern - after a year or two, they end up born-again christians or yoga instructors or something. they go totally straight edge; they don't touch the stuff.

people will tell me things like "but, our market surveys suggested that people smoke, on average, three grams a day".

we just went over this with the bradley effect.

i think it's a pretty sad reflection of society, but i think everybody knows it's true - if you call up people on a saturday night and get them to answer your survey, they're probably going to exaggerate the amount of pot they've smoked. they don't want you to think they're a prude, or a loser, or something. as they answer your survey on a saturday night...

so, those surveys are of limited value due to the presence of an obvious bias: nobody wants to admit they don't smoke pot at all, and pretty much everybody is going to exaggerate the amount they've smoked in the past. it's sad, but it's true.

the actual sales data is far more instructive, and nobody should be surprised about the disconnect.

i ended up shivering in the blankets all afternoon before finally getting up around 15:00 and taking a good three hour shower.

did it help?

when i was in there, yes, but it didn't warm the apartment up much.

i've sent him a note reminding him of what the law says, so he can't say he got the case unexpectedly. but, the heat has not turned on. so, what option do i have but to sue?

why am i constantly surrounded by these irresponsible assholes and hopeless, lawless idiots? the law is crystal clear. this shouldn't be necessary - he should just fucking do it.

he still has a week to surprise me, but i'm not counting on it.

i slept a lot this week, when i wanted to be working. what can i do? i'm going to get up soon, make some eggs (hopefully that helps a little) and try to get to work.

but, i'm still cold.

so, i might have to take another hot shower...

yeah, if you look at the way the government approached this, the model they used was tobacco. 'cause you smoke both of them, i guess.

but, the way most people use it isn't even comparable to beer. it's more like hard liquor. smoking a joint after work isn't like having a beer, it's like having four beers - or taking a few shots.

people are going to argue that it didn't cut into the black market, and i don't have any data to argue for that one way or the other, but, based on what i saw, it was obvious that the government missed the mark on what to expect.

if you set up a system that expects people to buy it daily in large quantities and it turns out they but it monthly, or biyearly, and usually in small quantities, then, yeah, you should expect to see some major losses.

you basically can't exist in day-to-day life as a pothead; even if you binge, you have to back off fairly frequently. the major users are all kids (that can't buy legally anyways.), unemployed/disabled people or people working in illegal or unusual industries (from prostitution to sound art).

there should be an across the board re-evaluation that tries to fit the data to vodka instead of to tobacco.

https://calgaryherald.com/news/politics/cannabis-market-proving-costly-for-province-no-sign-of-turning-a-profit

well, that was a lot of sleep today - another 7-8 hours. i wanted to be productive this week, but am just shutting down and falling asleep in the cold weather. as mentioned, i'm tired of this guy's negligence and am sick of chasing him around to get him to follow the law. right now, it looks like i'm filing for an order to maintain the heat about 20 degrees, on the first.

i'm still woozy, but i think i'm at least awake.

so, let's see if i can get through the next batch of stuff. it's about 15 more html files, and then it should pick up.

it was another early crash last night - around 21:00 - after some questionable, if mild, odours from somewhere.

i was up around 2:00 and have made it through the first day of november, which was a lot of html files, and one of the more time consuming tasks.

i'm stopping to eat and making some coffee, but i think i'm destined for a more healthy nap afterwards.