There has been a City of Ottawa crew working on Scott Street between Holland and Parkdale the last couple of days. Yesterday, it looked like they were cleaning the pipes and fussing one of the manholes. Today, they’ve erected a fence around the manhole and been using a crane to pull what looks like a piece of white cloth out of the back of a tractor trailer.

My co-workers and I were speculating about what they’re doing before lunch. Among the things we came up with included cleaning up after an oil spill or something to do with the Freon discharge from the heating plant in Tunney’s Pasture last week.

I headed out at lunch and on the way back to the office I checked out the worksite and got the lowdown on it from the crew.

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Yes, it’s time to set your clocks an hour forward (except if you live in Saskatchewan or a couple other parts of North America where they’ve come to the conclusion that daylight saving time is pointless). At 02:00 Sunday morning it will magically be 03:00. Fun, eh?

The theory is that we will save energy, but I still have yet to read anything that says this actually takes place. As I mentioned last year, I have read things that indicate that energy consumption actually goes up. And accident rates tend to be higher in the week after the clocks are set forward. Not exactly a win-win situation.

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Most people I know would not consider a dearth of Chicken McNuggets an appropriate reason to call 911 once, let alone three times. Apparently, however, a lady in Florida felt otherwise.

According to the story, she ordered 10 Chicken McNuggets and was told the restaurant was out. The cashier offered her a more expensive alternative at no additional cost, at which point the lady went what can only be called McStupid. Instead of taking advantage of this offer, she demanded her money back and was told that all sales were final.

Now, to be fair to the lady, McDonald’s policy is apparently to provide a full refund when an order can’t be filled and the customer doesn’t want an alternative. Apparently, the employee she was dealing with apparently wasn’t aware of this policy. It still doesn’t excuse that happened next.

It was somewhere around this point that she started calling 911.

She told police “This is an emergency, If I would have known they didn’t have McNuggets, I wouldn’t have given my money, and now she wants to give me a McDouble, but I don’t want one. This is an emergency.” When the police showed up and took her complaint they wrote in their report…

“Goodman maintained the attitude ‘this is an emergency, my McNuggets are an emergency’”

Her “reward” for being McStupid is an apology from McDonald’s, a full refund and a free meal courtesy of McDonald’s and a notice to appear in court on a misuse of 911 charge.

Though I’ve been blogging in one form or another for over ten years, I’ve just had my first article for another website published.

A couple of weeks ago a comment I made about an article on BlackBerryCool.com caught the eye of the chap who runs it. He emailed me asking if I would be interested in reviewing a BlackBerry application from their store. After a couple more exchanges I picked the Aerize Card Loader 2008 application and started to play with it.

I submitted my review this afternoon, which you can read at BlackBerryCool.com.

My cousin mused about poetry and Twitter, specifically haiku, in one of her recent blog entries. As I’ve recently started playing with Twitter, I decided to take up the challenge and contibute this:

Cousin has challenged
Five-seven-five on Twitter
Poetry from thumbs

Can you haiku, too?

Gadling blogger Jeffrey White wrote about a YouTube video some guys posted about their visit to Venice. In the video, the guys have bet one of their friends that he can’t jump from a dock to one of the poles that poke out of the water and back to the dock without getting wet.

The guy makes the first jump and manages to catch the pole without getting wet. And then the pole breaks under water and the guy swims back to his friends. No word as to whether he was able to claim the money his friends had anted up or if the bet was off.

It’s asshattery like this that causes American tourists to have a bad reputation with the rest of the world. Rest assured if the tables were turned and some European tourists had broken these guys’ mooring pole that they’d be pretty pissed and ranting on YouTube about the whole incident.

Oh and if you are going to post videos on YouTube, do the world a favour and don’t whine about the fact that the memory in your camera is getting low. Geez.