No Food for Thought

Le féminisme encourage généralement les femmes à se faire confiance, pour égaler les hommes. Si ce féminisme typique est bien vu, décourager les hommes serait sans doute exagéré.

C'est pourtant dans cette voie que nous amène la journaliste Noémi Merci en signant l'article « Vas-y, t'es capable! », publié dans le numéro de décembre 2017 du magazine L'Actualité, étude à l'appui.

Les inégalités entre sexes s'expliquent par de nombreux facteurs, mais si la disparité entre prétentions masculines et capacités en est un majeur, il faut maintenant se demander pourquoi l'allocation du pouvoir se laisse influencer par ces prétentions.

In the fall of 2018, British Columbia voters will be voting in a referendum on proportional representation. This is of course a threat for members of parties favored by FPTP. It is not a surprise that threatened parties oppose reform. What is surprising is to see them admit just how important disproportional representation is to them.

Not health care.
Not economic growth and prosperity.
Not the People. Nor its will.

J'ai pris connaissance de l'étude High intelligence: A risk factor for psychological and physiological overexcitabilities. Malgré les limites méthodologiques de cette étude préliminaire, je l'ai signalée à un ami extrêmement intelligent mais souffrant d'une grave allergie qui vit à l'autre bout du Canada, en lui écrivant un courriel par l'interface web de Gmail. En déclenchant l'envoi, j'ai été surpris de voir apparaître :

Curieux, j'ai relu mon message et rapidement compris que l'inquiétude de Google provenait de ma conclusion :

During fall 2015, I developed chest pain. In a matter of 2 or 3 days, pain went from null to highly disabling. I was then told I had developed costochondritis, which I had never heard about. Possibly as a result of strenuous exercise, or playing tennis.

At peak intensity, lying in the most comfortable position was painful if I didn't pay attention to my breathing. I then applied ice, took a couple sick days, NSAID, and about as fast as it had came, the pain went away.

Mostly. Unfortunately, ever since, I frequently experienced lesser pain on and around the affected rib, in particular when exercising, but also sometimes when doing everyday movements, unpredictably. This was worrying enough that I diminished/changed my exercises to avoid worsening the situation. Unfortunately, 3 months ago an acute costochondritis struck again (probably just a relapse).

This setback is quite frustrating, but on the positive side, I took it more seriously and it allowed me to study and understand what caused pain. Put simply, pain occurs when the breast is inflated. Which means that breathing is painful, but not if you breathe only with the belly. In the acute phase, breathing abdominally rather than apically will allow you to breathe without pain.

This is very simple to do once, but very hard to keep doing, since most of us don't breathe consciously. To force myself to stop breathing apically (with the top), I even strapped my chest with a lace, which can work.

Another source of pain is torsions. One thing which is very clear during the acute phase in the pain caused by rising and laying down, if you're used to doing so without using your hands (i.e., if you use your abdominals). An important lesson if you experience pain rising and lying down is that torsions are a lot less painful when your chest is deflated. But naturally, we tend to inflate the chest before rising or lying down. When you suffer from costochondritis, you should either switch positions without torsion, or go against that tendency and deflate your chest before rising or lying down.

If you exercise your abs, you should also expect pain, since most involve flexing the abdomen, and we tend to do that with the chest inflated. Exercising the abs while breathing abdominally is difficult or impossible. An alternative is to do the "plank" (static exercise on your forearms).

Good recovery

If your SMTP server on Bell is failing to send mail from a web application with an obscure/misleading error like the following, just avoiding a foreign sender address (like @gmail.com) may solve.

If you've upgraded to Plasma 5, you'll want to:

1. First get rid of the broken new default clipboard manager which is very similar to Klipper. Sorry, I forgot how I managed that, but it's possible.
2. Start Klipper
3. Finally, get Klipper to start automatically... which is also non-trivial. To achieve that, exit Klipper, and when asked whether Klipper should start automatically, obviously agree.
4. If you're like me, enable Synchronize contents of the clipboard and the selection

And that, my friend, completes the path to go back to an experience as sane as KDE 4, at least in clipboard terms... if you manage to get Ctrl+Alt+V to bring up Klipper, and accept that selecting text using the keyboard will update the clipboard.

When I found the replacement battery I needed for my laptop on Tmart.com, I verified before since I didn't know the store. The first review I found was positive, so I bought. Unfortunately, I did not realize the BBB's rate for Tmart.com is "F", and for good reasons.

As indicated here, Tmart doesn't ship you what you bought. In my case, over a month after my order, they refunded me. The reason they invoked is terrible (no, I did not request a shipment to the skies or to another planet):

The "compensation" they offer is even worst:

That's right. A 5% discount from a worthless company valid for 3 weeks.

But the worst part? They are still "offering" me the very same product, supposedly shipped to the very same impossible-to-reach location.

After I worked around the issue with Lenovo's Yoga Mode Control, my Flex 4 worked fine. But now that it was stable, it was time for me to proceed to the storage drive change I had planned.

The easy part should have been to physically switch the drives, right? Well, if you have ever opened a Lenovo Ideapad Flex 4, you will remember that is not the case with these laptops which are physically anything but flexible.

If you want to replace any part of your Flex 4-1570, sorry, but your weekly nightmare is coming. Unless you are reasonable and just give up.

Replacing anything will require you to remove the whole motherboard case. As Lenovo's Hardware Maintenance Manual shows, opening is possible. After removing 10+ screws, your are supposed to simply lift the case. As discussed in this forum thread, this apparently trivial step is in fact incredibly difficult and costly (both in time and risk of damaging the notebook).

Thanks to the instructions on the forum, I managed to open mine, but it took me an insane amount of time, and I still broke the case.

If you are extremely determined, secure:

• A good starting mood, a worthy objective and much patience.
• at least 1 hour
• at least 1 sufficiently long nail
• Several tools. I used screwdrivers with flat and very sharp heads (in addition to the electronic screwdrivers which will remove the screws).
• A surface where your laptop won't move despite great force. It should not move back nor on any side.
• Ideally, an anti-static device (of course)
• The new parts you want to install. No, really, all the new parts. You will not want to do this twice.

I managed by starting with my nails, then using a small (electronic) flat-head screwdriver, and then a regular flat-head screwdriver. In general, your should start at the front and progress towards the back, except the most difficult part is the rear half of the Ethernet port's side. I broke my case when I got to the USB ports there. It was necessary to open the back before opening the rear half of the left side.

Good luck, seriously. And if you read this before buying, buy something else. Unless you love having your up arrow key to the left of the right Shift key (what were your designers thinking, and where in hell were your testers)!

Ma mère est d'une générosité extraordinaire, c'est bien connu. À preuve, suffit de rappeler le cadeau à l'humanité qu'elle fit en lui donnant son fils.

Mais en regardant sa facture le lendemain d'un souper dans un nouveau restaurant de Sillery, elle est néanmoins restée étonnée de mesurer la générosité dont elle avait elle-même fait preuve la veille :

Générosité maternelle débridée («POURB» pour «pourboire»)

On ne peut certainement pas reprocher aux concepteurs du terminal de paiement électronique utilisé aux délices tandoori de freiner les élans les plus altruistes.

P.S. Le restaurant a bien sûr accepté une révision de la générosité de ma mère à son égard.

After the liberals announced they would break their promise to get rid of FPTP, some 130 452 Canadians protested by signing petition e-616 (thanks to the readers of this blog who have grown that number). Perhaps the fact that no other online petition to the Canadian government had gathered that many signatures compelled the government to respond.

Unfortunately, it seems the government preferred a lengthy response to a concise and focused response. If "The Government of Canada is pleased to respond to this petition.", rather than listing over a page of measures supposed to "enhance public trust in the integrity of the electoral process", it would have helped to provide a more convincing apology than...

…in particular since petition e-616 never asked for a referendum. E-616 merely requested to honor the party's promise:

In fact, the Minister's response has little to qualify it as an apology. While it may contain many excuses, it does not contain the words "apology", "apologize", "sorry", or really any terminology characteristic of apologies.

And as if this treason and this non-apology weren't enough, they didn't even take the time to fill the response form properly ("Prepare in English and French marking ‘Original Text’ or ‘Translation’" at the very top? Talk about adding insult to injury!)