Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

A Likely Good-bye to Rogers Internet Service
Peter L. called into the office, saying that he was running a bit late. Turns out he'd spent a good part of last night trying to find out why his Rogers Internet connection was down (he lives in one of the far suburbs of Toronto). Turns out the friendly people at Rogers have instituted some special new convention so that people running Linux servers at home who want to network their Internet service (like Pete and myself) are screwed. Great.

When he finally got through to somebody at Rogers who knew the technical details of what was going on, and he conveyed to her the fact that Rogers would in effect be creating a lot of unhappy customers in the process, she told him “to read the fine print” of their hook-up service. Given the fact that, to my knowledge, Rogers has not announced this to anybody beforehand – giving us a chance to switch to a multiple-line service, this seems to be yet another reason (besides an increasingly flaky connection for me) to finally drop Rogers.

Will suggest to Pete that he try submitting this to /. in what would probably be the vain hope to get Rogers to change its collective mind. In the meantime he recommends signing up with BSL Canada, which will essentially provide people with Linux servers with what we want, for about the same price per month as Rogers’ Internet service.

Capt. Mondo’s Halloween 2001
A fun, though hectic Halloween. I was lucky enough to work at home today, so I got to witness a lot of the activities of the day. Erika made some Halloween cookies with Vanessa first thing this morning for her school, which was having a Halloween party. Erika also dressed Vanessa up as a ballerina, which went down very well with Vanessa. Vanessa was very excited about the fact that it was Halloween, and had been looking forward to it.

We didn’t have much in the way of decorations this year. Somehow we never got around to carving a Jack-O-Lantern, though we did dig out the little disturbing statue of Chucky that Erika got a few years ago while working on Bride of Chucky. Late last week Vanessa and Erika both decorated the front of the house with little Halloween lights, fake cobwebs and spiders in the shrubs, and some of Vanessa’s Halloween artwork.

Vanessa had a blast at school, though afterwards she was a bit sugared-out and needed a nap afterwards in order to calm down a bit. She was in a deep sleep when I woke her just after 5 o’clock, and I carried a very sleepy little girl downstairs to dinner.

After dinner, Erika dressed her up in her real costume for the night: a full-body unicorn suit that Erika had picked up several months ago, after falling in love with it at the store. Vanessa enjoyed every minute of putting it on. Erika put on her be-feathered New Orlean’s style Mardi-Gras mask picked up a month ago at Southern Accent, and went down to Martine’s place down the street so that Vanessa could team up with Maxim (who was dressed up as a Ninja – somehow appropriate ;-)

So I stayed at home, dolling out the stash of pre-packaged rice crispy-squares to all the various monsters that came to our door over the evening. I had little Annie with me, who I had to try to keep amused/happy while attending to the people at the door. Occasionally I had to take a semi-fussy Annie in my arms while dolling out the treats to passing kids, so Annie got see some very weird things – I wonder what she though of it all. ;-)

Erika came back after about an hour or so, and Martine continued the trek around the neighbourhood with Vanessa and Maxim. Erika fed a very hungry Annie, and I continued to distribute candies the gradually dwindling numbers of kids (who seemed to get progressively older too) who came to the door. Vanessa came back after about an hour-and-a-half’s worth of trick-or-treating, and came back with a hefty stash of candies. We allowed her to have a few sample candies (no chocolate though – the last thing we wanted was a tired by chocolate-powered kid), and removed the chewing gum, which we don’t really want her to have. Vanessa had even more fun it seemed running up to the door – usually with a candy of her own in hand – and giving the kids who came to the door the rice crispy squares. At around 8 o’clock we closed up shop, and I promptly put Vanessa to bed.

Erika was exhausted at this point, and she went to sleep soon after. Luckily for me, little Annie was pretty tired too – I think in part with some of the excitement surrounding her over the course of the day – and I had the lovely pleasure of having a very tired and happy little baby girl fall fast asleep in my arms about an hour later. Now that’s going to a fondly remembered Dad-moment for years to come. ;-) Funny how babies somehow seem heavier when they are really out of it. I took the prone form of Annie up to her crib, turned off my recording of that evening’s show of Ideas from CBC Radio, and climbed into bed.