I can't let you do that, Dave

Automated voice recognition menu systems piss me off. I'm calling the automatic menu system because I want to hear the options available and pick one, without having to announce what I'm doing to the rest of the office. If I have to speak into the phone, I want there to be a human on the other end, so that I can speak a full sentence and have it recognized. I especially don't want to read my phone number into the phone when there's a perfectly good keypad right there.

My response to hearing a friendly computer voice say "please tell me about your problem" or something similar is to hammer the zero button repeatedly. And to continue doing so until there is a person on the other end. Or a dial tone. Either suits me just fine at that point.

It might also be fun to talk nonsense to one of them, and record that conversation. One of these times I'll start feeding it one-liners from Star Trek. I wonder how Verizon's menu system would react to being told to arm quantum torpedoes and fire at will?

I feel a Rickroll coming on ....

First Post!

Well, it's official. I've given up.

I've been a web user since the early days, back when inline images were high-tech, and graphical browsers like Netscape Navigator were a big deal. I've been coding websites since 1994, when I first learned how easy it was. I even carved out my own little piece of internet real estate, Greg's Gallery, way back in 1995. A few font tags, some scanned images (this is WAY before digital cameras were available to the masses), and a few hours uploading my pictures, and I had my own online photo gallery to share with the world. It even had a section called "updates", where I promised my loyal readers (there were never many) that "more pictures are coming! I've just been busy!"

Well, as happened with so many websites over the years, the only page that saw significant updates was the updates page, which provided more excuses and promised further updates. But I kept it open, because it's been like my little digital playground, my sandbox, where I go and tinker around with a few tags here and there, maybe even upload another picture, change the colour of a frame, try out new technology, see what happens if I do this and that, see how it looks, see what I like. I was proud of the graphical menu I made out of a picture of myself looking out over Algonquin Park. It's stayed alive on GeoCities (now Yahoo! Geocities) for 14 years. Which I declare to be impressive.

But now, I feel it's time for some kind of new outlet. In the era of digital photography, not only do I not have time to upload pictures to an FTP server, one at a time, on my crappy Rogers connection ("it's the fastest!" my ass), but now there are so many more advanced options for photo gallery sharing online. I've been doing a lot on Facebook over the last year or so, and I've tried posting Picasa photo albums on my website but never liked how they look.

So I'm giving this a try.

Yes, I'm about 10 years behind the times here, and it's truly somewhat likely that this will become another one of the "more updates coming!" projects that I mentioned, but I think I could actually do this. Just write a few lines every once in a while, or post a few images from my travels around the city, or whatever, and if there's some people out there that want to have a read, well then I'm glad to provide my little bit of content for the world to see.

What I'm about to present the world with is the rantings and ravings of an underfulfilled and overstressed accountant working for a small company stretched out over two of the world's biggest cities. Hence the current title, "The General Ledger", because really I couldn't think of anything better that made any kind of sense. Although "Admiral Amortization" has a nice ring to it. Rolls right off the tongue. But really, at some point I'll probably think of something better, or at least less generic. What you'll find here will be whatever I feel like posting. Adventures in the city, local travel, complaining about transit riders, interesting links, LOLcats, maybe a new recipe, basically my life encoded into zeros and ones, for all to decode.

And a promise to update more often!