Oddly enough yesterday I figured out how to get around that problem, more on that later. But earlier today, at 3:09am, I got a github message about it. It seems that someone did in fact look at my article, probably from seeing it posted on LinkedIn, and at least tried it out. Now this brings up the interesting question as to whether the Canadian federal government is outsourcing its IT work to India, because 3am is not considered “working hours” anywhere in Canada, but that’s a question for another day.

Here’s a screenshot of the message I got:

First of all, thanks for confirming it’s a bug. But it’s disappointingly lazy to say “well, it’s not my job” in response. It’s a bug that affects the usability of the site, it shouldn’t just get closed (which it did), and if it’s “not your job” it really should be passed along to the people whose job it is to fix it.

Secondly, it’s not even a difficult bug to figure out, and I know that because I figured it out by myself yesterday. And I’m not even getting paid to do this. Which is even more annoying, speaking as someone who’s been looking for a job in the IT field for 8 months now and will probably have to go work on the shop floor at Costco because the tech job market is absolute shite at the moment in Montreal (mind you, if you do have to work in a retail establishment, Costco is the gold standard there).

But, let’s get back to the matter at hand.

It’s the “candidate registration” page that’s broken. It simply will not work if you didn’t sign in to the CRA careers site before you get to it. If you go to the CRA Careers site you will see this near the top of the page:

Click on the “Sign in or register” link, sign in through your authentication partner (or CRA ID), and THEN click on the “candidate registration” link, and you will be able to fill out your candidate profile. 

The easiest way to fix this would be to disable the fields in the “candidate registration” landing page if the user is not logged in, and inform the user that they must be logged in before continuing.

However, it appears that the web dev teams at the CRA operate in silos, where each team is responsible for small individual parts of the site while remaining blissfully unaware of what the other teams are doing. Those teams are probably offshore, working for different companies, and have no clear way of communicating with one another. I don’t know what happened to the “Canada First” and “Elbows up” attitude that the Prime Minister keeps talking about, but it doesn’t seem to apply to IT work done for the federal government. That’s a shame, because there are thousands of Canadian IT workers currently desperately looking for jobs, running through their EI, and eventually forced to apply for welfare at the provincial level. If I’d been in that same situation 20 years ago I would have just looked for employment in the USA, or somewhere else in the world, but that’s no longer an acceptable (in the case of the USA) or even possible option for a guy my age.

So, CRA, I’ve figured it out for you. Fix your damned web site!

The post A follow-up on my bug report about the CRA careers site first appeared on The Clever Shark.

First, I went to the CRA web site and looked for the “careers” link.

I click on the Job opportunities link, which takes me to the careers page, where I see a Candidate Registration link, which I click.

In the resulting form I select that I’m a member of the general public, and click on the data privacy statement checkbox. So far, so good.

In this second Candidate Registration page (experienced UX writers will share my annoyance at having two consecutive pages with the same name, but let’s ignore that) I enter the appropriate data and click on the Next button.

And voila! an error message. “The session has timed out”.

But I did not let this deter me. I clicked on the Exit button, which took me back to the CRA front page, completed the process again, and this time… I now got a different error, “Our services are not available at this time”.

I shared this last error message in the LinkedIn ad for the recruiting drive and haven’t heard anything from them since. The ad appeared on Tuesday (IIRC) and the web site SNAFU is still there.

So, dear Canada Revenue Agency, if you see no submissions for your recruiting drive don’t conclude it’s because nobody wants to answer people’s questions about taxes. It’s because your web site just. doesn’t. work.

Maybe you guys should be concentrating to hiring people to make sure that your web sites are usable instead of obsessing about killing public sector jobs, because having fewer and fewer staff isn’t going to fix things on your end.

The post Canada Revenue Agency — please do better. Your web site is broken. first appeared on The Clever Shark.

Dr. Philip Low on LinkedIn

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Elon Musk “is aligned with the German neo-nazi party, opened the faucet of anti-semitism on the platform he purchased, follows neo-nazis, collaborates with neo-nazis openly, highlights neo-nazis, agrees with neo-nazi sentiment”. This has been made clear BY ELON in the posts that he’s made in Xitter, by his the moderation “policies” he’s brought to Xitter, and by his constant messing with the accounts of anyone who dares disagree with his fourth-reich ideas on the platform.
So why is anyone surprised by Elon literally doing a Hitler salute at the end of his speech on inauguration night? I’d like to say the signs were always there, but they’re not just signs, they’re fucking billboards.

The post Elon Musk has always been a Neo Nazi. first appeared on The Clever Shark.

At least in 2016 you could argue that the people didn’t know what they were getting with Trump. That’s just bullshit in 2024.

Funny that I have a very American anecdote to illustrate what this feels like, but it’s 100% true. When I moved to the USA in 1999 (Fairview NJ) a buddy of mine came along to help out and visit New York. The day after we unloaded we get out early to go to the city, and my neighbor introduced himself. Now we both had beards at the time, and the guy opened by asking us if we were “from the House of David”, which I didn’t get right away… not wanting to antagonize the guy who lived above me I mentioned we were heading to the city, he said “what do you want to go to the city for, it’s full of [n-word]s and [sp-word]s!” I froze a little bit and realized that I really, really wasn’t in Montreal anymore and that this was the kind of new reality. I don’t remember much of what went on after, besides my handling it in my socially-anxious way of being very polite and then just kind of leaving.  I vaguely remember the k-word popping up at some point in the advice he gave us. It felt almost unreal TBH. The guy was very friendly to me — he saw me as a fellow white guy — but clearly our world views were divergent, to say the least.

Today I feel largely the same way about this election as I did about that introduction to my upstairs neighbor. I really wanted to think that Eddie (not his real name) was of another generation (IIRC he was in his mid-60s) and that this kind of shocking social attitudes would change over time, But judging from the campaign that we’ve seen from Trump, the vote tells us that no, there hasn’t been any progression. There has in fact been a huge regression. And it’s not “just” a racial thing either. It’s also a victory for misogyny, transphobia and hate in general.

It’s like if you visited a friend of the family you think you’ve known all your life, but then you find out that he was secretly a klan member the whole time.

Is there a silver lining to all this? There is for me, and it’s that I’m not an American. I know that the culture will cross borders like a metastasizing tumor, but at least I know that as of January 20th my life is not likely to change in a very direct way.  If nothing else, I don’t have to look on my neighbors with suspicion, although that may well come here as well along with the culture.

It’s a pessimistic view, but a realistic view. But, what do I know? My take on things as expressed previously was so wrong it’s practically embarrassing (but I’m leaving it up).

I really wanted to believe that America was better than this.

The post Well, fuck. first appeared on The Clever Shark.

Only when you get there there’s something on your windshield… a parking ticket. At 11:35pm on a Thursday.

And then it strikes you that there is a bunch of data entered on there and do a bit of math in your head, and realize that the parking warden must have seen you wrangling with the kid, the dog and the luggage, and then swept in, issued the ticket, and disappeared again like The Flash.

That pisses me off.

I’m not saying that people should be expected to help me out when I’m struggling with something, but when it’s clear that I’m just taking care of the fam and dropping people off it seems like bad faith for some asshole to just sweep in and deliberately kick me when I’m down. And if that’s the kind of people that the City of Montreal hires to monitor street parking, well, that just sucks.

I’m really curious to see exactly who it is that would be such a jerk, so I’m thinking that maybe I should establish exactly who it is by taking and posting photos  — I have a front-facing apartment so that shouldn’t be so difficult — and maybe one day confront this person and tell them about my concerns about how they’re doing their job.

Anyway I’m still pissed off. Maybe I should let my dog poop on the City Hall lawns and not clean it up… I really feel like I need to get some retribution here, $102 worth of it. That’s potentially a lot of poop.

The post The ultimate “fuck you” from the City of Montreal first appeared on The Clever Shark.

The post This is a normal title for a political article in 2024 first appeared on The Clever Shark.

Elon Musk Keeps Spreading a Very Specific Kind of Racism (Mother Jones)

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