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For more than half my life the East Side Mario's in the (Waterloo) University plaza has been there. The fancy place we would go in school when we felt flush and the student pub was closed. The place w/ the salad of unusual depth and the weird pepper in it. The breadsticks. If you were on a limited budget you wanted quantity!

Sadly, the place has closed permanently. I'm sure this time next year it will be the worlds largest bubble tea place or another dozen shawarma places. And, while those are good, sometimes its the dingy history you want.

And that leaves Farrah's and Gino's (now Campus Pizza) as the enduring purveyors of student value.

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Its been a national and provincial embarassment to see the Canadian Forces required to assist in long term care facilities. But worse was what they found, that some of the homes appear to be not merely overrun by a surge of complexity due to Covid-19, but instead are systematically under-regulated, under-managed, under-governed.

I'm going to propose another approach. The activist shareholder approach. Those who hold shares in the companies can create a shareholder resolution, something along the lines of:

... Boilderplate about when/where/corporation
Therefore, it was resolved, that the corporation shall:

* have the executive leadership team visit a random 25% of long-term care homes each quarter,
* have the independent board of directors visit a different random 10% of long-term care homes each quarter
* that the board certify that the standard of care present matches their expectation as set out in governance policy
* that the audit committee of the board certify that they have audited the management policies and procedures
* that the executive leadership team certify that their policies and procedures are being executed according to the laws and regulations of the province, in addition to their internal controls and, that this certification be made publicly available including at a live press-conference with members of the public press.

If we want to get started, a good spot would be Sienna, publicly traded. The board of directors of Sienna is listed here. The senior leadershio team is listed here. I am willing to guess that those folks would be very diligent in their duties to their stakeholders (their patients, their families, their shareholders, their staff, the community) if they were certifying publicly that they had done so.

I understand that some of these companies have refused to answer questions to the media. Thus the shareholder resolution route could be a good one.

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/quote/SIA.TO shows the stock and value (no surprise its down). We can see the filings https://www.sedar.com/ here. I have attached their 2020 Q1 MD&A here.

I would also argue that all taxpayers are now de-factor shareholders in the companies that are receiving assistance.

If you want to see the type of agreement that is entred into legally, look here, this is the one for Rykka Care Centres for Hamliton, and here is the one for Missisauga, they operate some of the homes at the heart of the report.

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Welcome to the family the TP-Link HS220. A wifi-enabled dimmer switch. You know you can always use another WiFi switch product!

For once in the history of smart switches we have a neutral wire (the white), normally the experience is to open the existing wall plate and curse the electrician who, sometime during the ascendency of disco, saved $0.02 and skipped the traveller.

Installed. IP assigned. Discovered in Home Assistant. Working. Great!

One minor hiccup. I bought this since it would work locally (I don't want some new cloud service they'll bring in a few months). And, it does. The Kasa app does allow you to login as a guest and setup new devices without creating an account. Except for the HS220. The other switches work. Huh? Well, dummy account created, device assigned to the IOT network (which has no Internet access), and it works from Home Assistant, So, minor speedbump, the device does work without Internet.

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Earlier I wrote about the joys of Linux, fonts, snaps. Today, a new but similar challenge. Its tax form time. And, we can sign them remote. Great. What's this? A new font? CCHTaxFont? What is that?

pdffonts tax-forms.pdf 
name                            type              encoding         emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------- ----------------- ---------------- --- --- --- ---------
DEVEXP+TimesNewRoman            CID TrueType      Identity-H       yes yes yes     63  0
DEVEXP+TimesNewRoman,Bold       CID TrueType      Identity-H       yes yes yes     70  0
WPCUBE+Arial                    TrueType          Custom           yes yes no      23  0
WPCUBE+CCHTaxFont               TrueType          WinAnsi          yes yes no      27  0
WPCUBE+Arial,Bold               TrueType          Custom           yes yes no      31  0
WPCUBE+Arial                    TrueType          Custom           yes yes no      34  0
WPCUBE+Tahoma                   TrueType          Custom           yes yes no      38  0
WPCUBE+Tahoma                   TrueType          Custom           yes yes no      41  0
WPCUBE+Arial,Italic             TrueType          Custom           yes yes no      45  0

OK, no problem, I'll just Google that. Hmm. Problem. OK, let's find a way to make the embedded font in the pdf into a ttf truetype font.

$ mutool info tax-forms.pdf
PDF-1.7
Info object (78 0 R):
</Author/Subject/Keywords/Creator/Producer/CreationDate(...>>
Pages: 7
Retrieving info from pages 1-7…
Mediaboxes (1):
1 (61 0 R): [ 0 0 612 792 ]
Fonts (9):
1 (61 0 R): Type0 'DEVEXP+TimesNewRoman' Identity-H (63 0 R)
1 (61 0 R): Type0 'DEVEXP+TimesNewRoman,Bold' Identity-H (70 0 R)
2 (48 0 R): TrueType 'WPCUBE+Arial' WinAnsiEncoding (23 0 R)
2 (48 0 R): TrueType 'WPCUBE+CCHTaxFont' WinAnsiEncoding (27 0 R)
2 (48 0 R): TrueType 'WPCUBE+Arial,Bold' WinAnsiEncoding (31 0 R)
2 (48 0 R): TrueType 'WPCUBE+Arial' WinAnsiEncoding (34 0 R)
2 (48 0 R): TrueType 'WPCUBE+Tahoma' WinAnsiEncoding (38 0 R)
2 (48 0 R): TrueType 'WPCUBE+Tahoma' WinAnsiEncoding (41 0 R)
2 (48 0 R): TrueType 'WPCUBE+Arial,Italic' WinAnsiEncoding (45 0 R)
$ mutool extract tax-forms.pdf 2
$ cp *Tax* ~/.fonts

Done. Hope you enjoyed if you had to use Libreoffice to sign your forms this year. Next year I hope to convince them to use SignRequest and do it online.

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So I decided to get medieval on the purple lamp. Sadly my estimation of getting the (what seemed like plastic but in hindisght was glass) off in one piece was not so correct. Its ok, the bleeding has stopped, and the millions of razor sharp bits of glass all over my desk will be slowly sopped up into my pores!

As you can see in the above, the yellow bit came off. What is this yellow bit you ask? You see, there are 2 methods of creating white light from LED. You can go RGB (mix red/greeb/blue) light. Or, you can use a short-wavelength (blue to Ultra Violet) and run it through a yellow phosphor coating. Interestingly, some make it out as blue, some make it out as yellow. The combination makes white. Credit to Sir Isaac Newton for discovering this.

No credit for guessing which type of lamp I have now, particularly since you saw the photo above. If we zoom in, we can see 9 LED in each module, and, a yellow hat, missing on G5.

It is also this blue that is the theory behind why you wear blue-blocking glasses later in the day, the theory is the blue causes your circadian rythyms to kick in and think its morning, rather than evening. You can read more about blue led and sleep rythyms here. As to other protect-your-eyes-from-blue-light, that is bunk. Its just about sleep.