old lamps for new

Former VP Social Matt Joseph was denied a return to the BOA by the students in Common Law. Former VP Social candidate Alex Chaput was welcomed with eight sets of open arms to the job he almost earned last winter. Former Presidential candidate Tyler Steeves continues to win seats everywhere but the SFUO Exec, and he just might get the big job next year if he keeps up the reputation building he's got going on. It seems like the Socialist Party of Campus might not survive another election.

But you already know that. Other bloggers feed you news or gossip. Fed For Thought feeds you lulz and exaggerations. However, you may not know that at yesterday's meeting, two members of the CSSA Executive have tendered their resignations. In two weeks time it will be official, bringing them to five vacant positions. If you're a computer scientist looking to get involved, this looks like a good time.

Lulz: Their executive *still* consists of six members, which is half again the number of filled positions it had two years ago. Under Christopher Millward's presidency, there were merely four executive members. Also, word on the street is that all the drama down south is over a girl. Silly awkward nerd boys. You shouldn't let the vaginal sex interfere with business.

One last thing: I received an email from someone(s) calling himself/herself/themselves "Hikin," indicating that "big things are coming", and you should all "watch the horse." What horse? The Gee-Gee? The zodiac year of the horse, coming in 2014? The Rideau Carleton Raceway? The uO Equestrian Club? Some other horse entirely? Do we even have an Equestrian Club? So many questions, so few answers. I'm at least as curious as you are.

almost there

Less than one and one half hours til the nomination period for VP Social closes. How exciting...

Elections

I see why Scott Bedard uses Arpie Gee as a proxy. They're both long-winded and aggressive. He thinks the board should throw out the CEO and such since elected officials acting in these positions is undemocratic. Should he get his way and the process restart, we will not have an SFUO VP Social for the fall semester.

Update: the motion passed. Also, in an unusual turn of events, Ted Horton, notorious for abstaining last year, was the only member of the SFUO executive to vote on the motion.

Fun fact

Standing for the anthem "facilitates knee-jerk, blind nationalism."

<3 SFUO Exec

Jay-G dramas

Seamus admitted a few minutes ago in his exec update at the BOA meeting that there were interesting allegations brought forward about former VP Social John-Sofie Billy, that there was a full day of professional mediation, and that the Disciplinary Committee was called about it.

Unfortunately there were no details given out, and he asked board members to wait until the in-camera session to ask any questions.

That's a lot of drama for someone who resigned to raise a child - perhaps I was mistaken about his reasons for departure. Why was the Disciplinary Committee called? that's a pretty rare happening. I bet he ate a guy.

Jean Sofia Guillaume: A Resignation, or, Post-101 Week News

Many a word has been spoken about J. Sofia and his departure from the SFUO. Not wanting you to wonder about the gossip any further more, I readily bring to you all of the truthfacts.

Once upon a time, in early June, Sofia and David Auguste, former HSS VP Social Franco, were making sweet, sweet love while doing handstands. Sof later discovered he was pregnant with Davey's lovechild. He made an Executive decision to keep the child, and leave the SFUO so he could focus on being a good father (mother?) to the darling baby. To avoid the embarassment Ted Horton will surely face when he soon starts to show his baby belly, JSG ran long before coming to term. Dave Dave followed behind so they could get married and start a family, becoming the third VP Social this year not to complete a full term.

The first was, of course, WSSA VP Social Bethany Schock, who left the post very early in the summer due to a bad case of gingivitis. I don't really blame her; you can't run a smooth 101 Week with bad breath and swollen gums.

Thanks to all of our lovely VP Social friends, there are few student governments at uO currently not in the throes of bye-bye election. Wanting to be like all the cool kids, Catriona Czyrnyj broke free of the shackles of 101 Week and got her filthy drank on with her Chapeaus-noirs, or Survivors for the laywoman, and 101ers. Superpowered ESS President Zac Brunet summarily impeached her for it. To top it all off, CSSA VP Social Carson Wilcox was never elected, merely appointed for the summer by the executive, and has been forced to step down and run in the by-election to make things more legal. If not elected, he'll bring our total to 5 departed socials. Boo-yah.

While we're down in south campus, there's a referendum happening right now to change the current Engineering Students' Society / Computer Science Student Association structure to be CBY vs SITE. When asked to comment, a fencesitting Computer Engineer replied, "We have a students' society?"

At the last city council meeting, Moose and Rocks didn't stand up for the national anthem, Ken Joly reported. I don't have a joke here - only a plea from former US President George W. Bush for Canadians to man up and declare them terrorists.

That's all the news for now. Irregularly scheduled updates will continue as always.

skandaluz!!

If I waited til tomorrow, I could say I hadn't blogged in a month. I'm taking that away from me. I'm such a dream-killer.

Why the lack of updates you ask? The summer isn't nearly as exciting as the elections were. Probably because how little else goes on besides constant planning. Still, there's enough n00z for an update once every just-under-a-month.

Now. I blog. I write. Computers to donate words for those students scholarly reading weblogger ado in the internet. Keep Seamus in review. Type til the executif has no visible shortfall about ... it.

That was some blog poetry for pi approximation day. Now to get serial.

As you have heard from the other bloggers I am sure, our new Marketing Assistant is a CFS cultist from Sudbury, our Federation speaks English as flawlessly as they speak French, and the last BOA wasn't terribly blog-worthy except for a mild outbreak of heterosexism, which is sexually transmitted, by the way. That, and the horrible case of privatization I caught from a wild night with Larry. I'm still trying to wash that off.

What you may not have heard is the latest scandals behind the scenes.

My favourite? Ted Horton is pregnant, and doesn't know who the mother is.

He isn't the first male politician to carry a child, nor the first to have a terrible movie made about it, but he might be the first to require a maternity test. I'll have to do a little more research.

Confused? Understandably. Men don't usually carry children. But according to ancestry.com, Ted's great great great great grandfather had a child out of wedlock with a seahorse. Apparently the bastard somehow ended up human enough in appearance to attract a woman, and Ted inherited his childbearing hips from this lineage.

Until the deal to partner with the administration is finalized, Mr. Horton is the SFUO's bike sharing program. Even yours truly has to give a blood sample because I might be the other parent. Results aren't expected until mid-September, which if he decides to keep the child, will be into his second trimester.

The other major scandal of late is that Roxanne might be embezzling. At the very least she's redirecting almost half of what should be levied to the federated bodies elsewhere. The money allocated for federated bodies this year is 44% lower* than it was last year, which she attributes to a 5% decrease in the estimated number of incoming students. That doesn't even pretend to make sense. She also claims that the numbers from last year were wrong. But she was VP Finance last year too. So she either made a massive error and gave tens of thousands of dollars too many to the Fed bodies last year and perhaps should have been impeached for it, or she's making a massive error right now and, depending where it turns out that money is disappearing to, should be impeached for it. Hmm... you're making quite a mess for yourself, Roxy. We're all waiting to hear what this business is all about.

*The "44% lower" figure comes from the budget approved by the BOA, but the fed body VPs Finance are getting a lot of variance about what their numbers and levy will be. Every time she's asked she has new news for them, and usually it's that they have less money than she'd promised previously.

In other news, a BOA director is trying to take over The Fulcrum. Good thing we have all these bloggers now to keep the student politicians in line while the mainstream media has its puppet strings attached. Better thing that we bloggers have bloggers to keep us in line. But who will blog the bloggers' bloggers? Or blog those bloggers' bloggers' bloggers?

I won't say any more about the Fulcrum business though. I'll leave that to Ken Joly to better know this evil director.

I'd like to take a quick (and rare) moment of actual seriousness though to toss my sympathies out to the Fed exec and staff as many of them are close to Sunday night's tragedy. My bloggy heart goes out to you.

- AppleDave

the media's media

http://blogginbloggerz.blogspot.com/

Now we're being blogged too.

Absurd? Absolutely. So much bias against already inherently biased media (yes, including Fed For Thought) that there's little real, valuable material left? You bet your hat. Worth reading anyway? It seems like it will be.

I <3 the internets.

don't be hating

<--- LOVE this.

Im tellen on yuuu

Our little BlogoSFUO is really a-twitter with news this week! This Dave certainly didn't expect to be writing so much over the summer, but such is life. When there be things to be told, I be tellin' them to you.

Tabaret recently signed us up for ClearView Connects™, a tattle-tale service that can send all the infos of all the bad stuffs that happen on campus to the big tough administrators who will deal with the bullies for us. The idea is that employees can anonymously tell the administrators all about

"any incidents of theft, misappropriation of funds, falsification of documents, vandalism, unethical behaviour, etc."

that is occurring behind the scenes by other employees, simply by going to the ClearView website. Wait a tic... whose website? Not ours! ClearView's website!

Here are the troubles with that my friends, assembled for you in an unordered list<ul>:

• ClearView Connects™ gets all this potentially confidential info that they really shouldn't have, PIPEDA compliant or not
• As some profs have pointed out, anonymous whistleblowing is contrary to the Canadian legal system
• We're not running this on an internal server, so verification doesn't exist
  • This means that every complaint needs to be investigated, even if it's posted with no factual basis, just malice
  • ClearView doesn't (and shouldn't) have a list of employee IDs for people to post with. That'd kill the anonymity, right?
  • That also means anyone, any employee or any student or any member of the community or any Tamil Tiger or any A&W Root Bear can file a complaint about a staff member
  • The University will pay for ClearView to receive this complaint to forward it to them, and then waste their time and money investigating this farce that may have originated anywhere from Rio de Janeiro to Nairobi to Kathmandu
  • The University of Ottawa is located in none of Rio, Nairobi, or Kathmandu
• Adding any sort of login ID to this service to keep it within the University removes the anonymity, which removes the point of paying the $20000/year for it at all.
• The Administration LOVES this idea!

This fun is already in place. If you're a troublemaker, go to ClearView Connects™, type in University of Ottawa as your company, and lodge a complaint of unethical behaviour about, say, acting VP Governance Nathalie Des Rosiers. Her because she's the one pimping the system to the media. I was unable to find who brought it to the BOG in the first place.

While I don't encourage the abuse of a channel to keep things clean and friendly at our wonderful school, they're just asking for it to happen with this system, and if you're going to do it you may as well make your point and do it right.

Oh, for the curious, they talked about it at this BOG meeting in 2007.

Commercial break

We'll be right back after a quick word from our sponsors:

Sometimes I come across a picture and find it very arousing. Unsettlingly so, even. Hopefully you and I share the same taste in reproduction.

This.

-SponsorDave

runnenn away

All of the cool executives are doing it. Runnenn away, that is.

Leaderaction/Arts Retreat is good for inter-executive bondage, and for general learnins, but not for making any plans nor any progress. Student governments need to make a plan for the year, to figure out where the individuals and the unit as a whole are going and how they will get there. Without a plan, you won't really get anywhere. Some execs don't plan. Others try and do it in an exec meeting. But that's not a friendly situation inviting discussion and a desire to keep listening as your meeting drags into the late afternoon. There's a reason people complain about attending snake meetings.

Whether you go to the cottage or home of one of your executives, spend an afternoon in a city park, or pitch a tent in the woods of Navan, I'd like to ask all you execs to get out of your offices, get to know each other, relax, and then make a real plan. Do it for your students, yo. Or at the very least, do it for the good press you'll get from the bloggers. Kudos to the ESS and to the CSSA who had such planning sessions last weekend.

Executive planning retreats. It starts here.

big snaek

I made it to the asp python cobra boa on Sunday. Sorry about that confusion - I've about had it with these mother fucking snakes in these mother fucking names.

Anyway, as you might expect, shenanigans were abound. Though not nearly as many as you may have grown to expect from the BOA. My personal favourite would have to be the motion to order pizza - debated for 8 minutes, then voted down - with a roll call. Which made Seamus call Peter Flynn a communist. I didn't realize we still had cold war bigotry going on.

Nearly as good was Arpie Gee, who - imagine his audacity - brought a bottle of water to the BOA. And he's not even on the board, just proxying. Needless to say, Seamus wanted to eat him. Keep your eyes open next full moon - it still might actually happen.

Speaking of eating, during his executive update, Ted Horton informed us that he is eating well and sleeping regularly. That's certainly a load off my mind. Another relief came in these updates: VP Comm Julie Seguin and her team have finally figured out how to use the online calendar. Now we might actually see a mild amount of usefulness to the SFUO website. Maybe. There's also talk of a sweet new SFUO website on its way - I will believes it when I sees it.

Not so relieving was Seamus's idea of a good roundtable. He said in his update that the first PRT went well - there were six presidents who showed up, the meeting lasted all of a half hour, and nothing was accomplished. Seamus just told everyone what they should think about before the next meeting. Maybe that went "smoothly," but I certainly wouldn't say "well." Unless they held the meeting while chilling in an aquifer. Then you could say it went well.

Chartwells is getting rid of all styrofoam on campus. They're planning to store to-go food in sheepskin bags instead. Lots of extra animal deaths, unless they intend to start serving lots of lamb chops. But on the upside, you can grab dinner at the caf, wash the container, and eliminate the need to buy condoms. Safe for the environment and for your sexual health. Thanks, Chartwells!

Arpie had lots to say this meeting, as usual.  Before quoting Aristotle to nominate Scott Bedard for an appointment to the Policy and By-law Committee, he offended the room with angry talks of SFUO accountability and a need for better translation. How dare he. Sure, they're good, necessary things, but you don't need to bring them up at the board, douche bag! Or, less sarcastically, you could at least be a little more respectful when you do.

Nearly all of the meeting beyond exec updates was committee appointments and motions being tabled until next time. If sitting on committees was a contest, which it obviously is, the winners would be:
Most committees appointments held by a Director: Roxanne Dubois / Seamus Wolfe (5)
Most committees appointments held by a non-exec Director: Brandon Bay (4)
Most appointments to regularly meeting committees: Khadijah Kanji (3)
Most times nominated for a committee: Richard "me again" Mah (9)
Most failed attempts to get onto a committee: Dick Mah (7)
Number of Directors who sit on no committee: 7
Most cleavage: Amy Kishek (surprised?)
Sad, bored, and a sucker for punishment: Dick Mah, who actually explained that to the Board in one of his many self-nominations
Best blog: Fed For Thought

By the way, if you're looking for boring actual details of the event, check out the linked blogs to the right (and get out of mine! what do you think I am, a journalist?!).

carnival vs carnaval

'car.ni.val (n.) a traveling show; having sideshows and rides and games of skill etc.

Car.na.'val (prop. n.) a festival season which occurs immediately before Lent; the main events are usually during February and March. Carnival typically involves a public celebration or parade combining some elements of a circus, masque, and public street party. People often dress up or masquerade during the celebrations, which mark an overturning of daily life.

These things are NOT the same.

Word on the street was that Jean Guillaume, our new VP Social, was inept. While he has yet to prove he's got ept, I'm certainly giving the man the benefit of the doubt. Why? Because the street's word is based on misinformation.

Mr. Guillaume wants to plan 101 Week with a theme of Carnaval, or to use a term that might be more familiar to us North Americans, Mardi Gras. Lots of colours and masks and partying and debauchery. Those of us around the Fed who heard and did not understand spread lies on the man, saying he wanted to have a carnival-styled week.

While the rumour mill is correct that the carnival day that the Fed has tried for a few 101 Weeks has failed, and making the whole week into that style would be disastrous, turning it into a street party with masks and dancing and fireworks is not something we've tried before, and certainly worth a shot. I, for one, admire Jean's creativity and hope it plays out the way he dreams.

In other news, Roxanne Dubois is thinking of opening a new SFUO business down at the tracks, and Ted Horton is starting a campaign to liberate Quebec from those oppressive, genocidal Canadians.

nu yeer, nu blag

Hello again, Fedsters!

My time with SFUOlulz was wonderful, but times are a-changin', so here I am building a new team and a new blog.

We'll continue to cover the ups and downs of the Fed's goings-on the only way we know how - satirically.

Check in after Sunday's BOA - we should have some thoughts on it.