Goodbye number 8.

In many ways it’s hard to explain why I’m so sad at Gary Carter‘s passing. The guy played catcher for the Montreal Expos from 1974 to 1984, I was 13 when he left Montreal. That was 27 years ago. He did return for one season in Montreal in 1992. Gary Carter died yesterday from brain cancer, the same cancer that took Mado four short months ago. 

The Montreal Expos aka “Nos Z’Amours” were quite the phenomenon in Montreal. Hard to believe that at that point in time, Montreal was as much a baseball town as it claims to be a hockey town today. The Habs had Guy Lafleur, F1 had Gilles Villeneuve and the Expos had Gary Carter.

Riding around on our bicycles we all wanted to be Gilles Villeneuve. Playing hockey in the street we all wanted to be Guy Lafleur – or Maurice Richard if you were a little older. Playing baseball in the park we all wanted to play catcher and be Gary Carter.

I got to be Gary for a couple of seasons in little league.

Yes, that’s me.

So goodbye Gary. I had not seen you in over 20 years, but I’m sad. You were really one of the heroes of my childhood.

Happy Birthday Fucker! 

Today is Adam Avitable’s Birthday. I made this colour drawing way back when he visited me in Ottawa.

And for the record, it wasn’t that cold.

Happy Birthday Fucker!

Photo a day challenge – January 2012

1. You
2. Breakfast
3. Something you adore
4. Letterbox
5. Something you wore
6. Makes you smile
7. Favourite
8. Your sky
9. Daily routine
10. Childhood
11. Where you sleep
12. Close-up
13. In your bag
14. Something you’re reading
15. Happiness
16. Morning
17. Water
18. Something you bought
19. Sweet
20. Someone you love
21. Reflection
22. Your shoes
23. Something old
24. Guilty pleasure
25. Something you made
26. Colour
27. Lunch
28. Light
29. Inside your fridge
30. Nature
31. You, again

That’s awesome, unless you put all 473 email adresses in the CC field. Sure, it’s not that bad when you read the email on GMail through a regular browser:

Notice how 469 of those email addresses are somewhat hidden from you? Meaning that with just one click, I could have access to 472 new friends. Friends that I can send funny LOLCATS or motivational 7Mb PowerPoint files. Worst, there’s now potentially 472 friends that can send me funny LOLCATS and motivational 7Mb PowerPoint files.

Luckily, I didn’t use my main GMail address. Unfortunately, I first opened this email on my iPhone. Can you guess what it looks like when you open an email addressed to 473 people? It looks like this:

Actual emails, blurred because I’m a nice man. 

Fun Facts: It took me 3 minutes to do the 49 screen captures needed, and about 25 minutes to Photoshop all the pictures in one giant 16397px long strip. Even at the lowest quality setting, this image still weighs 600K.

So to summarize:

1. Avoid the CC Field when emailing to more than 10 people.
2. Scrolling on an iPhone is a pain in the ass.
3. The pain that I’ll go through to prove a point is just ridiculous.
4. This is by far the longest post I’ve ever written, although this one came pretty close.
5. This is not the dumbest post I’ve ever written. Not even close.

Stuntman Stu – #NoMoreBullies

I immediately thought that I had to something to support that campaign. Obviously writing #NoMoreBullies on my hand and posting a picture would be the easiest part. Liking the “No More Bullies” Facebook page would also be painless. What else could I do?

I decided to wait about a month before doing anything. For starters, it would give me time to reflect a little more on the whole thing and I thought that if the #NoMoreBullies movement was to slow down a little, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have people “jump in” a little later. Not that I think my meager contribution will make a big difference, but it can’t make things worst, right?

A blog post

Writing a post about bullying / stopping bullies would help spread the message. What tone to use? I try to be a funny guy, but bullying is no laughing matter. On the other hand, I gotta be me. I’m still debating this. We’ll see what will happen.

Buying some stuff

Another thing I’m good at is buying some stuff. I like t-shirts, I like mugs. Surely there must be some sort of item I can buy to support the #NoMoreBullies cause. A quick search on Zazzle tells me otherwise. No stuff with the #NoMoreBullies hashtag? That sounds like something I can definitely do.

#NoMoreBullies Stuff on Zazzle

So go ahead, and buy some #NoMoreBullies stuff, either a lovely mug or an awesome t-shirt or both if you want! I will donate all the profits I’ll make from the sale of these items to any charity StuntmanStu thinks will help the most.

I’m still thinking about that blog post. Stay tuned.

In all fairness, Mado was not a public figure. She didn’t invent cool computers and technological gadgets like Steve did.

But for her family, she did change everything.

So Rest in Peace Mado. I didn’t know you very well but you did touch my life, and more importantly my brother’s life. You were and are still loved.

The catch is, that only every other soldier is getting a rifle. The Commissars are usually saying something like “One man gets the rifle, the next man gets some bullets. The second man follows the man with the rifle, and when he is shot, picks up the rifle and carries on fighting!”

That’s exactly how I feel at work right now.

Hopefully I won’t get shot. But if I am, I hope someone will carry on fighting.

Being a recent MacConvert, I don’t have interesting stories about getting a Mac when I was 7 and becoming the envy of the geeks at my school, or how Steve touched and changed my life. The first Apple product I bought was the first generation iPod Nano, and I bought it for my LovelyWife as a wedding anniversary present.

All evening yesterday I watched my Twitter timeline as it was overflowing with an outpouring of 140-characters eulogies for a man I didn’t know. A man I never met. Why was I feeling sad at Steve’s passing? I only made one comment:

The truth is that I’m not sad at Steve’s passing. It is a sad and tragic event, everybody deserves more time with their loved ones. But just a few weeks ago I was already in “funny but slightly inappropriate mode” about Apple co-founder’s death. So why the weird feelings now? To borrow Backpacking Dad’s sentiment‘s words:

It’s crazy to be maudlin about a total stranger’s death. And it’s crazier to write so many words about him when I did not write a thing about my brother’s Mother-In-Law’s loosing battle with Cancer. I’m sure it’s transference.

My brother’s Mother-In-Law – Mado – will soon die of a brain Cancer. When she goes, people on Twitter will not spend a night Tweeting about her. They will not make graphics with her quotes, direct people to watch her videos on YouTube. In all fairness, Mado is not a public figure. She didn’t invent cool computers and technological gadgets.

But for her family, she did change everything.

So Rest in Peace Steve. I didn’t know you but you did touch my life.

To Mado’s family. To Benoit, Stéphanie, Eliott and Juliette; I love you guys.

Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates & Garfield minus Garfield

I love that show. Bring it back.

This post is about tech support. Let me present to you the life cycle of a support request.

Initial contact – 00:00 hours in the cycle

Client: “HI. I have an issue fix it NOW. THIS REQUESSSST IS URGEN! NOW FIX IT.!”

Initial reply – 00:02 hours in the cycle

Tech Support: “Hello. I need more details in order to help you. Can you provide me with (list of items to provide). Sincerely, Me.”

Follow up – 24:00 hours in the cycle

Tech Support: ”Hello. You opened help request #12345 yesterday. I am waiting for (list of items to provide). If this issue has been resolved through other channels, please let us know and I’ll close this help request. All the best, Me.”

Follow-up – 48:00 hours in the cycle

Tech Support: ”Hello. You opened help request #12345 48 hours ago. I am still waiting for (list of items to provide), and am not able to help you without that information. Please contact me by phone at your earliest convenience to resolve this matter. If your issue has been resolved through other channels, please let me know and I’ll close this help request. My direct phone number is (gives phone number). All the best, Me.”

Follow-up – 168:00 in the cycle

Tech Support: ”Hello. This is the third follow-up on case #12345. Your help request has been pending for 7 days. If I don’t hear back from you within 24 hours, I will close the incident. (Lists all contact information). Best, Me.”

Closing the incident – 192:00 in the cycle

Tech Support: ”I am closing incident #12345. I have been without any reply from you for 8 days, I will assume this issue has been solved by other channels. If this issue has been resolved, simply ignore this message. If you are still experiencing the issue described in the original request, simply reply to this email including the requested information in my initial reply. Have a nice day, Me.”

Client wakes up – 192:01 hours in the cycle

Client: “You CLOse this? Why???? Problem not fix! Crappy service! Fix problem NOW! NOOOOW! I,m getting beind in my education Bcause of U!”

Here we go again – 192:02 hours in the cycle

Tech Support: “Hello. I need more details in order to help you. Can you provide me with (list of items to provide). Sincerely, Me.”

Hit send, bang head on desk, pour drink, repeat.

+++++

Show of hands: who thinks I’m kidding?

In itself, posting a graphic on your wall is not a big deal. But let’s say – hypothetically – that you then happen to read the caption of the graphic, and it read:

Hand drawn – all rights reserved. Do not copy.

Then you clicked on the picture and saw that once it’s been embiggified, there’s a not-so-subtle watermark on it.

Of course because I can Google shit, my first thought was “bullshit!”. I’m willing to bet it was your first thought too. Unless you thought that it’s a hand drawn watermark?

But being the nice friendly Canadian I am – balanced by the huge skeptic that I am – I had to say something, but something relatively polite and mild. So I wrote this comment under the “hand drawing” that went like this:

“Hey! What graphic program did you use to create this drawing?”

This reply came less than a minute later:

It’s not from a program, it’s done by hand.

So I just let it go. I figured that who cares if that person likes to pretend that she drew a picture by hand when she really just applied a filter. What difference does it make to me? No skin off my back, right?

Wrong.

It turns out that I have a fairly obsessive-compulsive thing going on, and I’m not really able to let go of things. It didn’t help that over the following weeks, that person kept posting all kinds of new “hand drawings” that were clearly done with the help of a computer program. I became literally obsessed by those “drawings”.

I also have a background in social sciences, which unfortunately means that I really really want to help people – even the ones that don’t want to be helped.

So I did what I do best. I asked questions until I got something that could put my mind at ease. My goal was not to catch the person in a lie – even though that would’ve probably been much more gratifying in the end – but to make that person realize why I thought she was using a computer, and ultimately make her realize that people were seeing through her game. I thought that if I could at least get her to admit that I wasn’t crazy for saying her “drawings” looked like photoshop filters applied on pictures, I would call it a day and move on.

You already know that’s not going to happen, right?

For a few weeks, whenever a new “drawing” was posted, I would ask questions about it in the Facebook comment section. How long did this take you to do? What medium did you use? Would you document the work in progress? How did you scan the drawing to your computer? I took it one step further and started commenting on other stuff she posted. When she posted lyrics of a song, I commented that I too loved that signer. I tracked down movie dialogue and literary quotes she posted as her own and commented on how much I enjoyed that movie or book.

Basically, all my comments said: “I’m watching you. I know what you are doing. You may be fooling hundreds of people, but not me!”. There was also a little of “Please stop being an idiot, people know we’re related”.

Finally after 9 “drawings” and a few posts, I received this private inbox message:

Just to be clear on the hand drawings: I do use a Wacom stylus to do them. In 2005, my right middle finger was broken in 5 places so I can’t hold a regular pencil anymore. The only photoshopped part is the watermark, and that’s done to protect my work. Since I use a stylus, they are really hand made drawings.

I immediately stopped posting on the person’s wall, and sent her a polite but frank email about the “drawings”. Basically I asked her point blank to send me the .psd file of one of her “drawings”. I got this:

Maybe for the next drawings. I never keep the electronic files as they take too much space on my computer. You’re funny, it’s like you’re the drawing inspector! LOL!

I told her that I wasn’t, but that I did work with Photoshop and computers in general for the last twenty years or so, and that I was pretty sure that I could recognize a filter when I saw one. I told her that I didn’t mind if her thrill was to apply filters to pictures, but that being told that it was a hand drawing bugged me a little (but apparently not her hundreds of Facebook Friends, who only had good comments to make on her talent). I also included this graphic in my reply, telling her I took 5 minutes of my lunch break to make it.

You can make this bigger. You know you want to.

I concluded my email by saying: “Clearly, you can see where I’m coming from, right?”

Her reply came quickly.

I totally understand how you could be mistaken. Don’t you think that if I post them to Facebook saying they’re hand-drawn, it’s because I’m proud of having succeeded in making these? What would I have to gain by telling people I’m doing these by hand if I’m not?

It took me a good half hour just to think about what I was going to answer, or really if I was even bother to answer. In the end I went with a really long reply, that I will not post here. But basically, I offered these thoughts:

• Maybe it’s just something that started innocently by posting one filtered picture to your drawings folder. Then you started receiving positive feedback on your talent, so you didn’t want to disappoint your fans and basically painted yourself in a corner.
• Maybe you simply like the attention.

I then offered that this whole questioning thing had next to nothing to do with her, and all to do with me. You see, I question everything, so why not question that? However, I’m always willing to be proven wrong. So in the spirit of friendship and family, I offered to make the three and a half drive to her place with a nice bottle of wine and watch her draw for an hour or two.

I even offered to blog about how great of an artist she was, and promised to publicly apologize on her Facebook wall if she could prove me wrong.

When 24 hours passed without a reply, I figured the matter was settled. I had called her bluff and she couldn’t answer. Case closed, moving on. I refrained from any and all comments on her new “drawings” when she posted them. I had tried to help, and had failed. No sense beating a photoshopped picture of a dead horse.

See, I can totally joke about this. I even made the following images on my lunch break and had a good chuckle about it. They are some of her “drawings” overlaid on graphics I found on-line.

Well, that kept me busy for about 7 minutes.

Now flash-forward to yesterday night. I see this post in my Facebook timeline:

To all you guys who “sag” your pants and show your butt and underwear …did you know it originated in prison? It was a signal to the other MEN that you are “available”. So if you wanna keep going around looking like you’re “available” for another dude to “tap that” then keep thinking you’re cool while I think you look like a Fool!!! BTW it’s called – PBS (Prison B*tch Syndrome).LOL Pass this on to the droopy pants that you know.

Can you guess this is from the same person? So I did what I always do when I see people pass on false information or chain letters. I posted a comment basically saying “don’t post crap!” and linked to snopes.com.

That comment got deleted in less than a minute. Thinking that maybe Facebook didn’t like the included link – I had linked to a specific article – I commented again. Deleted in less than a minute once more. That made me suspicious… Sure enough, I discovered that all the comments I ever made on any posts on that person’s wall had been deleted. I could sort of understand that, saving face and all. But surely this comment was something different… Why delete it?

So I reposted my comment on my wall, tagging that person in the comment.

“For those of you who didn’t have the chance to see my comment on (person’s name)’s wall before it got deleted…”

That comment was “liked” in less than 10 seconds by that person. Interesting. Thinking that it really was a link problem – I mean why would someone delete a comment from their wall and then instantly like the same comment on my wall – I made my way to her wall to leave a simple comment without any link and was greeted with this gem of a post:

What if I post that I have blonde hair, blue skin and live in a mushroom? Would you call me out on this too? What difference does it make to you? If you don’t agree with what I post, just hang up and go to the next caller. If you’re looking for an excuse to come to my house with wine, you should be mature enough to just come over without having to make up a whole story to justify doing it.

I am now convinced this person truly believes the reality she constructs. I mean seriously, how do you go from a polite version of “I think you’re a fucking liar” to “I’m looking for an excuse to go visit you”? You that I saw last time about 12 years ago for 5 minutes when I dropped off some clothes for your kids at your place. You that in those 5 minutes, asked me for 100$ and a television set.

Delusional.

The worst part of this is that I now realize that some people are just beyond any kind of help. And honestly, isn’t this the saddest thing you’ve ever heard? I know it’s number two on my all-time list.

Because really, nothing can be sadder than learning that I’m related to La Schtroumpfette.