For those of you who didn’t know, Toronto has been going through a public worker’s strike since June 22nd. Unfortunately, this affects some of the taken-for-granted services, such as garbage pickup, social services (welfare, building permit issuing, etc), some emergency services, and even some transportation services.

While waiting for the bus yesterday, I looked over and saw this advert on an overflowing garbage and recycling bin. With the strike going on, and possibly not ending soon, I found the slogan of “Half the fun is getting there!” somewhat amusing, as it would be fun trying to figure out HOW to get over to the Toronto Island. Water taxis must be making a killing.

All in all, this strike is somewhat embarrassing, as you have the unions wanting more and more (they’ve been given a sweet offer yet don’t want to give up bankable sick days; who ELSE has those!?), and the city is twiddling it’s thumbs and not doing everything it can to end this strike (how about getting the government to ORDER them back to work, or firing the lot and hiring new non-union workers? I’m sure there are plenty of people looking for work). Who ends up suffering the most? The citizens of Toronto, and the businesses they run. Ironically, we’re all still expected to pay our taxes… which go towards the services that are unavailable at the moment due to mutual greed on both sides.

Personally, I think we should get a tax-break at the end of the year. It’d be the least they could do as an apology for what they’re putting us through, and ruining our summer.

1. Explain why you started to blog.

Originally, I started it in June of 2002 as a place for me to post news articles I found interesting and comment on them, post funny images or video clips, and it also doubled as an online journal. I wrote about everything on there, and often I would write about my day before going to bed. For a time, I updated it every day. In fact, I didn’t realise until quite some time later, that a lot of people went to my site for videos and images (this was before Boing Boing, eBaum’s World, etc).

After a bit, though, some of my friends started to question what I wrote, as I pretty much talked about what I did when we hung out (within reason), so there were obviously privacy concerns. This also came back to haunt me with one of my ex-girlfriends, and I lost interest in the site for a while. Ironically, my server suffered a hard drive failure a few weeks after that and I lost everything, so all I have of my old site is what can be found in internet caches, and also this image (which also gives you an idea of the awesome projector setup I had in Calgary).

2. Do people you interact with day to day or family members know about your blog? Why or why not?

For the most part, yes. However, I haven’t been updating site as of late, and I’m sure there are a LOT of more interesting things out there to read these days. Back when I started the site, blogs were still in their infancy. Currently, I use Wordpress, and it seems almost everyone has a blog now, but back in 2002, I had to hack the crap out of a CMS (content management system) called PostNuke, which was never really designed to be a blog, but it served my needs.

3. Do you have a theme for your blog?

This latest rendition of my blog was initially set up so I could track my eating habits and my weight, as I started out at 200lbs, and I hated being that big. I had the idea that if I posted my weight and eating habits for all to see, I would shame myself into losing weight, and you know what? It worked. I got all the way down to 169.2lbs. However, Autumn came around, and I became less active, and also some other things in my life happened, so I started to lose focus, gain back some weight, and forget to update the site. Who know, perhaps I can get back on track again, and make it less about my weight, and more about things I find interesting. Gotta give the people who visit my site something new, or it’s just boring. 

4. What direction would you like to have your blog go in over the next year?

I hope to add more content about what is going on in my life, be it in the form of text, or even YouTube videos. I think I’m an interesting person, and have a unique view of life, and I find that amusing or interesting things happen to me often. Besides, I’ll have a lot of shit going on in the next year or so to keep me busy with the blogging. Just gotta get back into the swing of things. I also want to customise my theme more, which I attempted to do with a complete theme change, but that failed. Most of you hated it, and I didn’t like the fact that different browsers on different platforms displayed it… differently.

5. Pimp five of your favourite blogs.

Blogs I check out with any regularity? Alrighty:

Sparky (needs to update it more often, and YES, I can say that in this case!)
Coaxial
Kimli
Jared McAteer
Jon Ross