...but I love this weather. Love it! Minus ten and sunny is my favourite kind of day.* The only thing that would make it better would be half a foot of snow. I can't be the only person in this city who thinks so... can I? Help me out here.


*Really. This is not sarcasm; you can ask my friends.

Those looking to donate to the Peter Watts legal defense fund can do so in several ways. If you're electronically inclined, you can donate directly via PayPal to donate(at)rifters.com. If you're more of physical person, we're accepting donations here at the store. Cheques made out to Peter can be mailed to us at 697 Queen St. West / Toronto, Ontario / M6J 1E6. We'll accept cash donations too, of course. Just let us know it's for Peter, and we'll ensure he gets it.

Don't forget: tomorrow we're throwing our Sort-of-Annual Holiday Party. Author Paul Chafe will kick off the festivities at 1pm, with a launch for his new book Exodus: The Ark. But the fun won't stop there: the Bakka-Phoenix open house will continue til closing time. We'll have food, fun and friends, and for the duration we'll also have a 10% discount on everything in store. So be sure to drop by.

Join us. You know you wanna. And it's way better than being outside.

Holy. Crap.

Peter Watts, local SF author, was beaten, pepper-sprayed and arrested at the US border this week. He's now embroiled in a lawsuit that could cost him... pretty much everything. He's going to need some help. Boing Boing has all the details here.

We're currently talking to various folks about a fundraiser: we'll provide details as soon as we have some. In the meantime, please think about making a donation. This is serious stuff.

No, see, the thing about the first snowfall of the year is that it works better if there's snow. The first slushfall just doesn't have the same ring.

A block north of Queen on Bathurst some artistic soul has covered a row of ring-and-post bicycle racks in red and white wrapping paper. They look very cheerful.

I, too, decorated my house for the holidays this weekend. Okay, by 'decorated' I mean 'cleaned', but hey: things are all sparkly, and it only happens a couple times a year. Thus, decorated.

**FINAL EDIT Thu Dec 10 02:15:47 UTC 2009**

So there is the final update... Over the past day we have processed around 11 million jobs out of the 12 million that were in queue at that time. Please bear in mind that over this past day, more jobs for notifications are also created. So while the queue has been dropping, we are still not fully caught up at this point, due to backlog and new jobs. We have roughly 3 million jobs still pending that involve the notification system in some manner. We had hoped we could have fully cleared the queue in a day, but unfortunately we can't clear it too quickly, since we need the rest of the site to operate normally. From our current perspective on the amount of jobs that are left in queue, and how many it has processed thus far, we believe it will take around another 8 - 12 hours to process everything.

And finally some answers to some questions:

( Read More and Get Some Answers... )

After much explaining, arguing and waiting on hold, it turns out the answer is actually:
C) they didn't mean to tell us* that our pickup day had changed. Because it hasn't. It's still Thursday.

*in four separate letters