Third Spruce Tree On The Left

If you live in #Ontario #Canada and aren't a #lawyer you probably are not aware of the monumental battle going on right now in the province's legal circles. But you should be.

The Law Society of Ontario, #LSO, is the regulatory body for all lawyers and paralegals in the province. All of them: 57k lawyers, 10k paralegals. Uniquely, its one of the few provincial regulatory agencies with no government representation (why? because how can you litigate against the gov. if you're professionally regulated by it).

So they are entirely self-governing. And for the past few weeks they have been conducting their every-4-year LSO Bencher election. i.e. 20 lawyers from Toronto, 20 from outside and 5 paralegals who set the executive direction of the LSO. These are the benchers. Last day of voting is Friday.

This is one of my favourite pictures. I was sitting with my parents a few years ago at breakfast and we were talking about the house and childhood homes. I knew that my dad (1949) grew up in the east end of Toronto and that his father was had been a butcher at Dominion. His mother and aunt had owned and run the flower shop they had inherited from their father. After high school (at Riverdale Collegiate) was over in the afteroons, dad would drive over to the flower shop and make deliveries.

Curious about that I asked where the flower shop had been. The corner of Main and Danforth. Up popped this picture, courtesy of Beach Metro Community News, David Van Dyke and the Toronto Beaches Branch Public Library. “This look familiar?” I asked as I slid the tablet over. “That’s it.” he smiled, and then he laughed.

Names and emails (even Sumit’s) have been redacted to protect the innocent and the guilty. But you know who you are.

Who is Sumit B?

If you were to ask anyone who was employed at Blackberry on November 7th, 2011 this question there will most likely be a confused look on their face, like why do I know that na- and then they’ll jump up with a gleam in their eye and exclaim Of course I know who Sumit B. IS! He’s the guy.. the guy from the Reply-All thing!

Mistaken Reply-Alls to company-wide distribution lists have been happening pretty much since the invention of email. But Blackberry – or RIM, Research In Motion, is the company that invented mobile email, getting emails on your phone. You would think that they, of all companies, would be immune to the curse of company wide reply-all. And yet, Blackberry, like everywhere else, is staffed by humans, and humans are not perfect.

The saga of November 7th begins with a simple benign email. It was Sumit B’s first day at Blackberry and he needed to be added to some distribution lists. Easy enough for Sumit’s boss, Ed:

**From:** Ed  
**Sent:** Monday, November 7, 2011 4:18 PM  
**To:** Sumit B.; SAP CAB <SAPCAB@rim.com>; SAP Team <SAP@rim.com>; SAP Functional Team DL; OCS2007USERSDL 
**Subject:** Sumit B.

Please add Sumit B. to your DLs

I already have a #WordPress blog (I won't link it cause it won't be around for long). I pay $84 CDN/year (these were as of when I signed up) for the Starter plan. Another $36 for ad-free. You're already indulging me in reading the whack ramblings I put on here, I'm not gonna make you scroll past ads for bro supplements and penis pills. And then, I pay another $26 for domain registration/mapping.

WordPress has many features, but I use very few of them. I don't care about monetization, and neither am I expecting a million views a week, so I don't need an Azure cluster and a load-balancing content delivery network.

And... I pay all that and I still can't customize the stylesheet which really cheeses me off – unless I upgrade to a business tier that permits plugins (which I'd need to enable ActivityPub connection). Seriously, all I wanted to do is change the font used by my WordPress Theme for codeblocks to be an actual monospaced font. Nope, couldn't do it. That's horseshit.