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This page has now been updated: best of wmtc, 2017, as chosen by Allan .

Even though I don't blog very much anymore, my editor still manages to find some highlights. Best of wmtc, 2016 edition.

Blogger has rolled out a redesigned dashboard. For those of us who write or manage blogs with comment moderation, it is decidedly not  an upgrade. And for those of us who manage multiple blogs with comment moderation, it downright sucks. Unfortunately I can't illustrate this post; I didn't know my dashboard was going to change, so I didn't screenshot the old one. Previously, when I went to Blogger , which I have set as one of my home pages, I would see -- on the same screen -- all the blogs I manage. In one glance, with zero clicks, I could see if any comments were "awaiting moderation," as Blogger calls it, on all blogs. Now when I go to Blogger, I see only one blog at a time. First I have to choose a blog. Then I have to click comments , awaiting moderation  to see if there are any comments. Then choose another blog, click comments , awaiting moderation , and so on. I did notice that when I return to the page, it has remained on the comments field, kind of like ...

I barely wrote at all last year, but my editor and partner managed to find a few (possibly) worthy of a best-of post. Thus,  this page has been udpated . I miss blogging. I love my job and I love leading our union. I love having a steady paycheque, too! But I miss my old life. #CantHaveEverything #StopWhining #YesIKnowItsAFirstWorldProblem

About a month ago, I received an email from a film producer: Netflix is making a documentary about Americans who moved to Canada for political reasons, and asked if Allan and I would be interviewed. We spent a long time chatting with her, before being told that the film is being shot in Vancouver and we're not in it. Oh well. A few days later, a writer called about a story for The Guardian , asking much the same questions. That interview resulted in this article: 'An alternative exists': the US citizens who vowed to flee to Canada – and did . This writer didn't use much of my interview, but I did get the last word! Then someone at The Toronto Star noticed the Guardian story and did a long interview with me. That story came out yesterday: Disenchanted U.S. voters look with longing eyes to Canada, but few follow through . The editors scrapped most of what I said about the differences between Canada and the U.S. I even gave them the bullet-point version: universal health ...

Every year since embarking on graduate school, then beginning to work full-time, I've thought: I have no time to write, I don't write any more. And every year, Allan chooses a sizable number of wmtc posts as best-of for that year. I'm always surprised at how much I've written. I believe 2015 will finally change that. Adding my new union responsibilities to the mix seems to have displaced this blog. This time next year, we'll see if that proves to be true. For now, this page has been updated. Thank you, as always, for continuing to read wmtc.

This month - July 11, 2014 - I have been blogging for 10 years. Ten years! I clearly remember telling Allan I was considering beginning a blog about emigrating to Canada. He thought it was a great idea. July 11, 2004. I was working weekends at my (incredibly easy, wildly overpaid) job at Most Evil Corporate Law Firm. Our applications had been submitted , and we were waiting . August 30, 2015 will be the 10-year anniversary of our move to Canada, but I felt the 10-year anniversary of wmtc was worth a mention. Thanks for being part of what I love * about blogging. * Or hate, in some cases

The wmtc greatest hits page has been updated with the best posts of 2012, as chosen by my partner and editor. About this year's picks, Allan says: "I tried to be a bit more ruthless this year. Also you should highlight our Spain trip and also the tag "what i'm reading" since so many of those are great." All right, sir! Thanks for reading and sharing my posts, and thank you always for your support.

At the suggestion of a longtime reader - someone I had never heard from before, although he's been reading wmtc for many years - I will now be tweeting wmtc posts. For some people, this might be an easy way to follow or subscribe to this blog. I've been on Twitter for a little while, under a pseudonym, mostly to follow certain feeds, and to ask the occasional question. Now I've changed my account name to @wmtcblog . I like how Twitter let me change the name but keep the account; following and followers all stay the same. I suspect following me on Twitter will be redundant with following wmtc, but if you care to, here you go .

I haven't been writing much lately, so it's good to know loyal wmtc readers are still reading every post. Well, one is, anyway. Yes folks, a full seven years after first appearing in comments on this blog in the guise of a female fan, the freak we call Mags is still spewing his bile on a regular basis. We delete most of the comments without reading, but once in a while, it's good to share. For the record, I regard every one of those (nearly) 3,000 victims of September 11, 2001, and their loved ones, among the extremely long list of victims of US imperialism. I have mourned them all. Not a one deserved their fate. I merely recognize that their numbers are dwarfed by the millions of unacknowledged victims of US imperialism and other wars the world over. And I've had my fill (and then some) of the US exceptionalism and UScentrism that fetishizes the event. I know you all know that. But some things just need to be said, even if it brings attention to the class clown that we...

In 2009, I wrote this brief history of trolls at wmtc. At that time, the sad man who calls himself magnolia_2000 had been reading and leaving comments on wmtc for about three years. Now it's mid-2013, and Mags is still reading. It's been six years.  Six years!! None of his comments is ever put through moderation. Ninety-five percent of his comments are deleted unread. But still, he continues to post. GaryStJ went away. The guy from the Naruto fan forums  went away. But not Mags. Allan says Mags is my most loyal reader, and at this point, I can't disagree.

The wmtc greatest hits page has been updated with the best posts of 2012, as chosen by my editor and second-biggest* fan. Thanks for reading, and thank you always for your support. * My mother, who else?!

My recent post about no longer voting in US elections caused some dismay and upset among some of USian readers. At least one friend interpreted that post as encouraging others not to vote. I was surprised by this - but my friend was surprised that it meant otherwise! It seemed like a clarification was in order. First of all, I would never try to convince anyone not to vote. For most of my life, the idea of not voting was anathema to me. I would have never considered it. And, in the first few presidential elections in which I was eligible to vote, I voted Democrat, and I didn't agree with people I knew who voted third-party. So I understand all the arguments about voting and about voting Democrat. I know where my USian friends are on these issues, because I've been there. What's more, the inaction of not voting is not enough. Boycotting the duopoly without working on building a new system, or educating people about alternatives, would be fairly useless. And I am certainly n...

I am SO happy! My own domain name, wmtc.ca, is once again working with the Blogger platform. URLs for this blog will now show the wmtc.ca address, as they did many years ago, and I (again) have blogspot out of the blog's URL. I registered wmtc.ca in 2006, before Blogger really supported custom domain names, and used a cumbersome FTP transfer to get Blogger and wmtc.ca to communicate. It worked, but not well. Page-specific URLs (permalinks) wouldn't publish with the wmtc.ca domain; every page showed as wmtc.ca. You could get the permalink by right-clicking, but of course no one ever did that. So when readers shared my posts, they would only link to the home page. Then, after a time, Blogger stopped supporting the FTP transfer altogether. For a while I tried switching to WordPress, but that didn't work for me for a variety of reasons (all documented under the "meta" tag ). Eventually I stopped banging my head against the wall and set wmtc.ca to forward to wmtc.blog...

Progressive bloggers, check your stats. The Statcounter for wmtc shows "multiple visits spread out over several days" from an IP address in the House of Commons, and a separate visit from the Office of the Privy Council. This visitor or visitors spent time at several of my "greatest hits" posts, information about my new career, my bio at The Mark, various essays, and a good deal of time searching for "ndp cooksville east mississauga kaminker" and "kaminker member ndp", and the like. The entry post was this: july 1 2012: national stop harper day . I noticed this post was tweeted a lot yesterday by many anti-Harper Twitter accounts. No doubt government operatives are monitoring those tweets. Sorry for the small font. There were so many, I could barely fit it in one snip. Is the Harper Government TM trying to show a connection between National Stop Harper Day and the NDP? (I have no idea if there is a connection.) Do they think "Stop Harper...

Combing through some old files, I found this lovely bit: a comment from "GarySTJ", a former troll who was obsessed with me for a time. I used to delete his comments, then paste them into posts so wmtc readers could have fun kicking him around. After being banned from wmtc, he started appearing at other blogs where I commented, hijacking the thread with insults directed at me. One blogger noted (a paraphrase), "I don't know L-girl or GarySTJ, but L-girl has an internet presence, has written a blog for several years, and is commenting on this post. GarySTJ has an anonymous profile, has never commented here before, and is posting personal attacks on another commenter. End of discussion." After that, GarySTJ must have gone into rehab, and we never heard from him again. This old email really brought me back. From: GarySTJ [noreply-comment@blogger.com] Sent: Wednesday, July 19, 2006 12:45 PM To: movetocanada@gmail.com Subject: [we move to canada] 7/19/2006 12:45:10 PM...

A reader - or at least someone who stumbled on my blog at some point - emailed me with a request. When I replied, I received this auto-reply: Your message to xxxxx was not delivered because this mailbox does not accept mail from the Gmail system. Gmail not only invades the privacy of its users, but of their correspondents. Please re-send using another service, or call or write. This is an interesting approach to Google privacy issues. It assumes that other email systems don't glean information from users the way Google does. I'm not sure we know that to be true. Unlike those old anti-spam systems that asked the sender to type a confirmation, this is just a block. Unless it's a simple auto-reply, written to appear to be a block, as a kind of protest against Google, while the email is actually received, and possibly kill-filed into trash. Either way, this person isn't too concerned with receiving email. All my email accounts are through Gmail. I have email at both my wor...

A few years ago, I used Blogger with my own domain, wmtc.ca. There was an issue with individual posts not publishing correctly. The main page, wmtc.ca, was fine. But if you clicked on a post, you still got wmtc.ca, not wmtc.ca/todayspost.html. You could get a unique URL for a post if you right-clicked, but people didn't do that, so when readers posted a link somewhere, they were using the URL from the main page. Eventually this got too annoying, and I changed to URL forwarding. I still own wmtc.ca, but it forwards to wmtc.blogspot.com (now .ca, thanks to Google deciding to aid potential government censors ). But of course I'm much rather use wmtc.ca and get the blogspot out of the address. As I said, this was quite a few years ago, and maybe Blogger has fixed this issue. I asked my DNS host, but they didn't know. Anyone? [And while you're here, would you mind answering a quick, one-question survey ? Thank you!]

I've just found out that word verification for comments has been on, even though I've turned it off. I already use comment moderation, so there's no need for verification, too. I've turned off verification repeatedly, but it keeps defaulting back to "on". If you're also having this problem with a Blogger blog, please use the "send feedback" feature on your dashboard to report it. Thanks.

The poll in an earlier wmtc post wreaked havoc on my blog, so I'm trying again. If I might beg another moment of your time, please go here to take a two-question survey about your use of social bookmarking websites . By this I mean sites like Delicious, Reddit, CiteULike, BuzzFeed, Digg, Fark, and the like. This is research for a paper I am writing about tagging. Even if you took the first survey that was posted here, please answer the questions again on the new survey. Thank you very much!