Should he stay or should he go
This has been the weekend of the race that wasn’t in Quebec. After a demotion to the far back benches, the PQ ate another leader and started the process of convincing another one to step up to the guillotine. As someone at work put it, there are two jobs in Quebec that no ordinary person ever wants: leader of the PQ and coach of the Habs.
So with an empty seat, the game of musical chairs began. The music had barely started in this amazing dance when one of the two “most likely to succeed” took a look at the chair and asked the introspective question “Should he stay or should he go?” In the speediest turnaround made by any politician in recent history, he decided to find something less sticky to sit down on. We’re now back to no race, one candidate. Elsewhere, the contest would be over; here, we get pages and pages of newspaper space, and the uncertaintly continues. Methinks this party feels that any press is great press when the chips are down.
At work we survived the big email server upgrade. Back when I fired up the first system, a hybrid based on a free two-user version of Novell and an free server from New Zealand, we had about one hundred eager users. A decade later, we’re two systems newer and the thousand user mark has come and gone. Lots of people who are extremely attached to their daily dose of messages. The planning model changed suddenly on Friday afternoon, and when I arrived this morning there were voicemails that had started at just after dawn. We went to work in an organized pressure cooker environment and by early afternoon the phone calls ceased. Amazing. We now have a better web interface, more disk space, a stable server underneath and the week is only one day old.
I spread the pool cover this evening. Optimistic that we’ll have sunshine and that my chemical soup will turn the green to clear. The life of a pool guy is nothing short of a dream in the making.
