Category: Uncategorized

Discouraged.

I walk my dog Taz at least twice every day. Sometimes the walks are long, sometimes they’re short. We travel through interesting places in Montreal and see what’s going on. I’ve always made a point of keeping a smile on my face while we’re out.

But today… today I just couldn’t. I tried, but I can’t keep that shit up anymore.

We’re now in the month of June. For the past 5 months now I’ve been looking for a job. Everyday I go to the places where job offers used to be found, and if I find jobs for which I’m at all qualified I apply. I’ve optimized my resume for ATS’s twice now, once using Gemini, once using Claude, and although I’ve gotten 4 leads IN TOTAL from all this effort I’m still looking. And frankly it’s taking a heavy toll on me.

Last year I made the ultimate mistake of accepting a job at Bombardier for which I didn’t even apply. They lied to me about the job being remote, and overall it was a complete shit show. And the worst part was that there was a 2-month gap between the offer and the start of the job so that burned two months of EI coverage pointlessly, so that now my coverage has run out and despite cutting my expenses to the bone I’m seeing my money gradually run out. Another $1600 gone today because, well, rent.

The level of anxiety I’m dealing with is off the charts. My tinnitus was already annoying before but now it feels so loud and unrelenting I sometimes think it must be audible by other people. My depression meds feel less effective with each and every day that passes. I used to enjoy walking with Taz, but now I find myself constantly getting impatient with the poor dog.

Meanwhile, all I see around are corporations sinking BILLIONS of dollars into the monetary black hole that is AI, for the sole purpose of getting rid of human employees because they get in the way of billionaires’ greed, while they also lay off tens or even hundreds of thousands of employees, which only compounds the unemployment issue. We live in a capitalist society where one needs money just to survive. Looking to the future I really cannot see any hope.

I have 25 years’ experience in technical documentation, I’ve also worked as a developer, I’ve set up documentation infrastructures for companies, but it seems that whatever I have, in terms of capability or experience, is something nobody wants. My personal life fares no better. I am beginning to seriously question whether I fit anywhere in this world, and whether I ever have.

This has to end. And it will, one way or another.

On the passing of Scott Adams

Scott Adams passed away earlier this week. He was the author of the Dilbert cartoon strip which used to run in newspapers everywhere who, once the heyday of his creation started to fade, let his life spiral into a cesspit of bigotry and hate so awful that it completely ruined his reputation and, to some extent, his existing work.

Sometimes success goes right to someone’s head and causes an interesting feedback loop — “if I am successful then it must be that I am much more intelligent than everyone else”. I mean, we pretty much get told all our lives that the reverse is true, so it’s not necessarily outrageous to believe that. The problem comes when that person then uses that logic to validate beliefs they have for whatever reason, but which are extreme and socially unacceptable in nature.

Most successful people would take a cue from the social reaction and see that there’s a problem with the beliefs. But some of them do not. Some of them think that no, they’re right and society at large is wrong. Not only that, but because they’re clearly so intelligent — society has already validated this by making them successful! — they see it as their duty to reform the world, to set them on the right path by being as open and offensive as they can be.

And boy did Scott Adams take that duty seriously. His descent into racist, sexist, transphobic madness is well documented here if you’re not already familiar with it:

That I think is what happened to Scott Adams.

And it basically caused his death as well — he was too smart to go to an ordinary person doctor. Those people treat losers! No, he was the vanguard, the illuminati! He was too intelligent to get chemo and radiation or maybe have a tumectomy or whatever else was possible medically. No siree. He went straight to the old panacea, ivermectin, a veterinary dewormer. It was just as effective for prostate cancer as it is for anything but getting rid of worms.

Scott Adams lived by his own rules, and he died by his own rules. Truly he was the architect of his own downfall.

My daily bread

I haven’t contributed a recipe in a while, so here’s something I make almost every day.

Fluffy, tasty naan

Naan so delicious you'll want to just eat it by itself

  • Cast iron pan

Yogurt mixture

  • 1/4 cup plain kefir yogurt
  • 1 extra-large egg
  • 1/4 cup ghee or melted butter

Yeast

  • 2 tbsp honey
  • 1/2 cup hot water (40-50C)
  • 1 1/4 tsp yeast

Dry ingredients

  • 3 cup all-purpose wheat flour
  • 2 tsp table salt

Other ingredients

  • 1 tsp Avocado oil
  • 1 tbsp melted butter

Blooming the yeast

  1. Add the 2tbsp of honey into a small bowl.

  2. Add the hot water to the honey and mix well to dissolve.

  3. Sprinkle the yeast on top, and mix it into the honey solution.

  4. Let the mixture sit for 10 minutes while the yeast blooms. The yeast will rise to the top like foam.

Mix the other wet ingredients

  1. Pour the yogurt in a separate bowl.

  2. Add the egg and mix together.

  3. If you added the yogurt and egg straight from the fridge, you will need to bring up the temperature of the mixture to room temperature. This will prevent the butter from re-hardening into clumps when you pour it in.

  4. Once your yogurt mixture is warm, pour in the melted ghee/butter and mix.

Prepare the dry ingredients

  1. Put your flour in a medium-large mixing bowl.

  2. Add the 2 tsp salt and mix well.

Mix the wet and dry ingredients

  1. Once your yeast has bloomed, pour its contents into the yogurt mixture and mix them well.

  2. Pour the wet ingredients into a little "well" in the flour mixture.

  3. Mix everything together. Use a spatula at first, but when all the liquid has been absorbed just knead the dough with your hands. You need to get the point where the dough ball is slightly moist to the touch without sticking to your hand. Add additional flour if needed.

  4. Put the avocado oil on top of the dough, just enough to make sure it stays moist. If it's very humid where you live you may not need to do that, but in my well-ventilated Montreal apartment in the winter it's needed. I use an avocado oil spray for this.

  5. Cover the dough and let it rise for 1 hour.

Divide the dough

  1. After the dough has risen, knead it lightly again to get the excess air out.

  2. Divide the dough into individual pieces. How many pieces is really up to you, I used to make 8 pieces but now I make 6 because I like my naan relatively thick and chewy.

  3. Cover and let sit for 10 minutes.

  4. Warm your cast-iron pan while the dough is resting. Contrary to what you may have heard, this is done at a fairly low temperature, on an electric range use 3/10. My range uses a weird system that goes from "low" to 7 so I use small element setting 2.

Stretch out and cook your naans

  1. For each of your little balls of dough, stretch and roll it out as large as your pan will accept. It's never going to turn out exactly round, but that's the beauty of naan.

  2. Put the naan in the pan and let it cook for 90 seconds.

  3. Flip the naan over and cook it for 1 minute. As a tip, I usually use that minute to roll out the next naan, it's pretty much perfect timing for doing this.

  4. Brush the melted butter on the top side of the naan and let it cool for a couple of minutes.

  5. Put your naans away into a container that doesn't let moisture escape. Your naans will be good for about a day, after that they tend to dry up and not be so good.

This is not a diet naan. I deliberately use butter because of the taste and texture. The original recipe called for vegetable oil which would be healthier but not as delicious. Any oil with a neutral taste should do the trick, I would recommend avocado oil if you’re made of money. You may be tempted to use hemp oil figuring that its nutty taste will complement the bread taste, but I tried using it just to keep the dough moist and I found it distinctly unpleasant for reasons I don’t quite understand.

I got the idea of using honey to bloom the yeast one night when I wanted to add a little sweet taste to the bread, and it worked so well I never bloomed the yeast with just sugar again. You will taste a difference between different honeys. 

It’s important to use fine salt in the flour, as opposed to coarse salt or kosher salt. Fine salt distributes evenly through the flour with mixing, but larger grained salt doesn’t, and that makes naans that have weird salty spots.

Snack
Indian
bread, butter, naan

Laid off again…

I was laid off from my job recently.

Apparently I have lots of company there. The big tech giants all decided to spontaneously lay off thousands of people at once, so that there is now a surplus of roughly 250,000 IT professionals who “became available” all at once. Frankly if the IT industry as a whole was trying to make sure to fuck over these people as hard as possible, well, they could hardly have done better.

In previous layoffs I’ve been fairly stoic. In most cases it was easy  to see things coming — in one case I was working for a company that everyone knew was slowly but surely going out of business. In another a company I worked for was bought by a venture capitalist firm that didn’t seem to have much idea what we did or what to do with us. But this time is different. I’m not so stoic. There really was no reason to have layoffs, and the company I was working for, Microsoft, is not dying or even losing money.

In short, there was no reason for these layoffs. Microsoft just went ahead with it because other companies were doing it too.

To be honest, I feel betrayed. Only a few days before the axe came down the team I worked for was told that these layoffs were something we “didn’t have to worry about”. Well, that was clearly bullshit. It seriously leaves me with the feeling that in this last job I ended up trusting people I shouldn’t have trusted. People whom I thought had my back. Guess I was too naive to realize that they were holding knives behind theirs.

Anyway, I guess the lesson to be learned here is that IT is an industry that’s now well within the hands of parasite capitalists, amoral beasts who justify every action in terms of share prices. Employees? who cares? they’re just “human resources”.  Cannon fodder. Nothing more.

Saying Goodbye

My 14 year old dog Judi has recently crossed the rainbow bridge.

Judi was 5 when she came into my life in 2012. She was my first dog, my first pet really. I had spent quite a bit of time in the two years prior researching dog breeds and I knew that I wanted a boston terrier, and then something happened that made me decide to “pull the trigger” on this, so to speak — I suffered a third degree burn while out for the Labor Day long weekend and had to spend almost two weeks in the burns ward. I found the experience particularly trying because once you’re let into the burns ward you really can’t leave until your skin graft is in place, due to the chance of infection. A third-degree burn basically causes a hole in your skin that just lets any pathogens in.

Once I left I figured that I should get a dog now, or forget about the whole thing. I spent a lot of time on Kijiji (it’s like craigslist for Canadians) looking at adoptable dogs. I didn’t want a puppy, I wanted to adopt a grown dog, which I felt was the best approach for someone with no experience. Somehow I knew that I wanted a girl, but didn’t really know why. But when I saw Judi’s ad I didn’t think twice and made arrangements with her current owner to pick her up that same day. The ad said free but the lady called me back and said that was an error and that getting Judi would cost me $200. That’s a bit of a joke given how much dogs cost nowadays.

So I drive over and pick up my little dog. She clearly hadn’t been there that long. The lady said that Judi and her other dog, a toy poodle, weren’t getting along — probably because, as I figured out soon after, both dogs were intact females probably used for breeding. Mind you, such was my inexperience that I had no idea that Judi had recently had a litter of puppies, I learned that from an employee at a pet shop. Her claws were in pretty bad shape, no one had trimmed them for quite a long time. But she wasn’t going to be neglected anymore, not now that she was with me. For about a year I became a dog dad, going on long walks all over Montreal with Judi.

Judi moved to Halifax with me in November of 2013 and became part of the merged family I formed with Lucie and Geneva, not without a few hiccups of course, but we hit our stride. Then along came Beatrice, whom Judi seemed to fear at first, but later warmed to.

Judi seemed to especially enjoy the first apartment I moved to in Halifax. It had a fairly large backyard and we liked to give her the run of it, with our rear door open so we could monitor her. She was well-liked by the other people of the building. She wasn’t so keen on other dogs; indeed her reaction to another canine was always a toss-up. Whenever I saw another dog coming towards her I took her in a different direction. You’d be surprised how often other dog owners completely disregarded this, however. I remember being in Montreal on a grassy knoll when I spotted another dog owner walking his dog, and so I was taking Judi to another place and not being even remotely subtle about it, but the guy was probably a little thick and insisted on having his dog meet mine, and Judi snapped at the poor canine. The other dog owner asked “why did he do that?” and the explanation going way over his head. Yeah guy, your dog is friendly, but my dog isn’t, and that’s why I was trying to get away. But sadly it’s a very contemporary trait of people that they just refuse to see reality even as it unfolds before them.

It’s hard to tell whether a dog is truly happy. I hope that Judi was, although as things progressed it was clear that I could no longer give her as much time as I previously could, as I now had to take care of the humans in the house. We moved to Bedford in 2015, which Judi didn’t enjoy as much. I think she enjoyed playing with the other building tenants before that, and now she was in a place that had a postage-stamp-sized yard and only the family for company. Of course she was 9 by then and slowing down a little bit but still spry and energetic.

In 2018 we moved to our current house, a place which was (and is) full of potential, but TBH hasn’t lived up to expectations. We now had a yard… 90% fenced in but not closed, so Judi never took to it much. We lived in a dog-rich neighborhood, but Judi had started developing some problems with her hearing which left her deaf about a year after we moved, so she was not as interested in walking about as she had been before, and whatever interest she had mostly disappeared after she started getting vision problems as well. By that time I was the only one in our house actually taking her outside.

About a year ago we started noticing that she had some problems with her back legs, they weren’t working right anymore. It was fairly serious arthritis. Her muscles started wasting away. Her eye problems got worse and one of her eyes was bulging and had a broken blood vessel inside; then she started having seizures periodically where she would either slip on the floor like her four legs had no strength left, or fall over to one side. Vets didn’t have any answers for her problems. I noticed that she was sleeping more and more deeply during the day. After much soul-searching and discussions we decided that it was time to stop Judi’s suffering. We had a vet from a service called Forever Loved come to our house and help Judi cross the rainbow bridge.

It was very hard on the kids, particularly Geneva. She and Judi had become particularly close. However Judi was clearly in pain and we did not want to prolong her suffering because we weren’t ready. I don’t know what it’s like to have a pet put to sleep in a vet clinic, but it seemed to us best to do it at home, in an environment Judi knew and loved.

I think I’ll always remember bringing Judi’s body to the vet’s car. Judi hated getting picked up, even when it was needed — to get up on the couch in her last weeks, for example — but she felt so much heavier now that she was no longer struggling to get away…

It has been a little over two weeks now.

All four of us miss Judi. When you spend years and years sharing your everyday with a little creature like that they’re not “just a pet”, they’re a non-human person, they’re part of the family. We all miss her in different ways, and it’s a very personal process for each of us. We like to think that in situations like this, when we have a lot of time to prepare ourselves, we will know grief when we feel it. But we delude ourselves, especially by thinking of “grief” as something objective. It is not. It is like love in the sense that it reflects both the grieved and the griever.

The grief I feel constantly since her passage is that I feel I was not taking care of her and spending time with her as much as I should have in her last couple of years. I have suffered from major depression for decades now, and in the last few years the pressure on me has just ratcheted up to the point where I’m just dead tired by the time I’ve put the kids to bed — largely because I’m also the first one up in the morning to get them to school. I remember all the times that Judi came downstairs to see me and I was sitting in front of my monitors with a thousand-yard-stare, and just had no strength to do anything. A few pets as she came by, and that’s about it. I had no idea I would miss these little visits so much, or feel so damn guilty about them.

It’s also said that all dads should have a dog because at least it ensures that someone in the house will be happy to see them when they come home. That resonated strongly enough with me that I often told Judi that when she was visibly excited to see me; I knew she was deaf and couldn’t hear a damned thing, and as a dog she wouldn’t have understood what I had said anyway, but I never got out of the habit of talking to her. Well now I don’t have that.

I also miss her in a different way. When I came to Halifax I had already seriously reduced the amount of stuff I had (I used to have way too much stuff really). Since then I have also ditched a whole lot more things I owned; I got rid of about 95% of the physical books I had retained, almost all the DVDs I had collected over the years, most of the clothes I brought with me are gone or as good as gone (by which I mean I no longer fit into them and I’m not deluded enough to think I will ever do so again). So there’s little I still have that came with me on the 2013 move. In March 2020 the timing on my car failed — just in time for the first COVID shutdown — and since then I’ve had it towed to my house and tried to fix it, but I just don’t have the time or know-how. I remember how keen I was to get my hands dirty and fix that thing… but due to other engagements I could never give it the time I needed to give it, and now it just sits besides the house like a monument to my personal failures. I always go out the side door and can’t really ignore it.

In the 18 months it’s been sitting there I’ve come to accept that much, but many a time it struck me that Judi was the last reminder of my life before I made the decision to change it to whatever it has become now. And now she’s gone, and she’s taken a part of me with her.

Finally the grief is also, in a more general way, a statement on mortality. When I took Judi for her last walkies outside I knew it was the last time we would do this and it hit me like a ton of bricks. And earlier this week when I dropped off my daughter at school I watched her walk from the car to the school’s door and the thought struck me — one day it will be the last time for that too. As far as I know no one’s seriously ill in the family but death is the one thing that is guaranteed to all. I’m far from young, far from fit, and on the inside I often find myself consumed by anxiety, depression, anger and frustration. I don’t have any illusions that I’m going to live a very long life. That’s not my current trajectory, anyway.

So, goodbye Judi. You were loved, and you’re missed more than you could imagine.

Then and now

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” – Henry David Thoreau

You may recognize this rather famous quote. It’s from Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. I read that book as a young man, as part of a philosophy class. I remember how smug I felt at the time about that statement. I was never going to be one of those people. I was young, very well-read, and I was going to do great things in life…

I trust you can see where I’m going with this.

I don’t even know exactly how I came to think of that quote, but think of it I did. And I came to realize that, at 50, it sums up the life I lead now.

OK, “swore to destroy” is an extreme way to look at it, but back then I really felt like I didn’t want to end up like, say, my boss at the accounting firm where I worked one summer. That seemed like the worst thing. Yet when I look at the situation objectively, his situation was not exactly bad… his house was probably paid off, his minivan actually worked. It’s always hard to know these things in retrospect but as a partner in his firm he was probably quite wealthy. Partners at large accounting firms are well paid

Well, the joke’s on me. Career wise things haven’t so far gotten me where I would want to be. My car has been sitting still in my driveway for over a year now. And while my old boss probably flew down to the DR a couple of times a year for a week of R&R, it’s just not the kind of vacation schedule I can think of as realistic. Not for a while.

So, as I thought about that, I must admit that my pride took a hit.