Category Archives: Navel-gazing

| Navel-gazing, Opinion, Technology

My new, cheap remote control

My new remote, much like the old one

My new remote, much like the old one

Yesterday, I did something stupid.

Actually, I did many things stupid. First, I put my glass of orange juice on a table I knew perfectly well wasn’t stable. Then I wasn’t careful when I sat down, knocking the table and causing the glass to spill onto my remote controls.

Then, thinking I was brilliant, I decided to rinse the orange juice off my Videotron illico remote (taking the batteries out first to avoid short-circuits). It worked, in that the orange juice stickiness was gone. But being impatient, I put the batteries back in after only a couple of hours (the case was dry, but the internals were still soaked), and shortly thereafter started smelling the familiar scent of a blown capacitor.

So I was in the market for a new remote (I suppose I could have just tried to replace the capacitor, but I can’t open the remote without breaking it and I value my sanity). It had been hours, and not only is walking the six feet to the television a horrible idea to even ponder, but the thought of pressing the “CH+” button a hundred times to switch between CTV and the Comedy Network made me want to shoot myself in the head.

Since the Illico remote has special functions (that aren’t accessible on the box itself), I didn’t want to get a general universal remote, and lose something important like the on-screen guide navigation. Looking at Videotron’s website and that of electronics retailer Future Shop, I found both quoting a new Videotron-branded remote at $35. Thirty-five dollars for a plastic case, some buttons and an infrared transmitter. I’d blame Quebec union labour, but these things were made in South Korea.

Rather than pay that ridiculous price, I headed down to cheap electronics store Addison Electronique. They specialize in raw electronics. If you need a resistor, a switch or a breadboard, that’s where you go. They suggested a similar remote that they said was compatible with Illico boxes, and it only costs $8.

Left: Videotron-branded RT-U49C-15+. Right: Pioneer BR-360

Left: Videotron-branded RT-U49C-15+. Right: Pioneer BR-360

Though the Videotron remote is Videotron-branded, it’s hardly unique. Rogers, Time Warner and other digital cable providers use identical remote controls and boxes by the same manufacturers, with only the branding changed. The Pioneer remote is supposed to go with a Pioneer-made digital cable box, but has a similar design and uses the same codes as the one used by Videotron.

I took a chance (Addison has a no-refunds-no-exchanges-it-doesn’t-matter-if-it’s-an-empty-box-you-ain’t-getting-your-money-back policy), took the remote home and it worked perfectly once I got the AAs in.

The differences are minor. Missing on the knockoff remote are the “all” and “mode” buttons, the # button for HD zooming, the M1/M2 memory buttons and the favourite button, none of which I ever use. The device buttons don’t light up, and there are a few buttons (Menu, help, day +/-) that don’t do anything. But all the important stuff (guide, info, A/B/C, VCR-style controls for video on demand, and the usual remote functions) work fine.

In fact, I discovered the new remote had an extra feature the old one didn’t: it communicates properly with my television set, something the old one never could achieve despite hours of entering programming codes. I can now remotely turn on and off the TV (and control its volume) with the same remote I use to change the channel.

So, if this new remote does all the same functions and is essentially equivalent in every way that matters, why does Videotron’s remote cost more than four times as much?

UPDATE (Nov. 29): $8 too expensive for you? It’s only $5 at Acces Electronique on the West Island.

| Media, Navel-gazing

The Link looks at media democracy

The Link, one of the student-run papers at Concordia University, focuses this week on the challenges facing the news media in its Media Democracy special issue.

The eight-page insert is part of the weekly paper, available for free on campus or for download in this 10MB PDF file. Or you can read the stories online.

Among the articles is this interview with some know-it-all complaining about his doomed career.

Also in this section:

| Navel-gazing

pwnd.

He didn’t use that term, though his message had enough unnecessary capitalization and punctuation marks that he might as well have.

I was just finishing off my shift at work on Sunday evening when I checked my email. You might think this funny, but the first indication that something was wrong was that I’d just gotten a bunch of new Twitter followers.

Figuring some witty comment of mine had been retweeted by admiring followers, I checked, and found this, followed by a few others like it. A frantic typing of my blog’s address later, and I got the message that my blog had been compromised.

Supposedly I deserved this because of thing I’d said about Islam. I find that highly unlikely. In any case, rather than try contacting this young chap through the cool hacker email address he so helpfully provided, I’d just restore the website from a backup.

Except I had to get home first. A much more anxiety-filled metro ride at 11pm on a Sunday than I had anticipated. Part of me is glad I hadn’t found out about this at the beginning of my shift, or I might have been completely useless and/or had a heart attack.

Warning: This story has a lot of technical jargon in it.

Once I got home, I did some investigating. I could still access my account on the hosting server. Files, including all images, were still there, as was another site on the same server. Eventually I narrowed it down to two things that I had lost: the custom WordPress theme (which controls how the blog looks and how it functions on a user-interface level) and all 2,663 posts as well as a few drafts. Other information like tags and settings were still in place. But, of course, the posts make the blog.

Restoring it should have been simple: restore the database from the latest backup and reinstall the theme.

You know those sentences that begin “what kind of moron…”? Well, I was the answer to a few of those, particularly “what kind of moron doesn’t back their database up on a daily basis”. I had a copy of a relatively recent stylesheet, but thanks to WordPress’s innovative in-browser theme editor, the customizations I’d made bit by bit over the years were only on the server and were now gone.

As for the posts, my most recent database backup was two months old, and that would have meant a lot of lost data, especially comments.

I spent about an hour scouring the website of my web host. But SiteGround (yeah, I know there are better providers now, but they were cheap and easy at the time) doesn’t have contact information unless you want to buy something, and their tech support system is designed to make it as hard as possible to waste their time with your silly emergencies. It was only when I found a section that offered backup restoration – for a price – that I could get any help.

The most important help came relatively quickly once I punched in my credit card number. The database was restored to a version from about 24 hours earlier, and the posts, comments and all the other database data came back.

As for finding out the vulnerability that caused this in the first place, they weren’t too helpful, offering a form-letter sales pitch about all the things they do to secure their servers, and changing a database password in case the intruder managed to get it somehow.

Rebuilding the theme took a while, and I had to repeat some steps I’d taken before, using an old page in the Internet Archive as a guide (yes, it’s been that longer than a year since I’ve had a significant redesign).

With a full backup sitting on my computer, I was still tweaking past 4am when he struck again. Same guy, different message. I don’t even remember if it was interesting.

What followed was a bizarre, surreal cat-and-mouse game where I’d reset the blog’s administrator password, only to have him reset it back again. Eventually I decided the easiest way to deal with this for the night was to lock out my WordPress installation from its own database. That put an abrupt end to it, but also made the blog inaccessible to everyone.

(To my horror, I thought that hadn’t been enough. I replaced an authentication key – a string of random characters in a text file that’s stored used for browser cookies – only to find it being rewritten back within seconds every time. It was only the next day that I realized that in my zeal for protectionism I had set permissions on this file to disallow writing from its owner, and I was ignoring the error messages that the file editor was giving me when I’d save.)

I eventually called it quits at about 6am, lying in bed with my laptop running out of battery power. I’d planned to sleep for a full eight hours, go to work and then deal with the issue on my day off. But I woke up four hours later and couldn’t get back to sleep again, despite valiant efforts. Throwing in the towel, I opened the laptop and got back to work. Rather than try working with a potentially compromised system, I started from scratch, reinstalling a fresh version of WordPress and then working on populating it with data (50MB of text, mostly in the forms of posts and comments).

Though the posts had been restored, I kept the website inaccessible and locked down as I went to work on Monday. Better to have my blog be blank for a day than have someone potentially have free reign through my database while I’m away from my computer for 8 hours.

Word seemed to spread quickly there, and I got a lot of concerned questions from coworkers and blog fans. (Thanks everyone, by the way, nice to know people care so much about this little thing.)

After I got home, I implemented a few simple security measures (nothing my readers will notice) and changed a bunch of passwords, so hopefully this won’t happen again. After reinstalling some plugins, moving the image and other data files back into their proper directories, and a few minor tweaks, it’s back to its old self again.

Since I hadn’t written any posts over that 24-hour data gap (it’s been a busy few weeks at work, sorry), all I lost was a bit of a draft post and about a dozen comments, and even those were salvaged from elsewhere (an open browser window and email notifications, respectively). If you added a comment during the day on Sunday and it hasn’t appeared, it might have been lost. So feel free to comment again.

Now, hopefully, I can get back to my life.

Well, in theory, were I to have a life to get back to, I would be doing so now. Instead, I’ll do laundry and groceries.

| Media, Montreal, Navel-gazing, Opinion

Want to watch the city council meeting? Tough

I was invited for a short interview on the Ric Peterson Show on CJAD today. For those who missed it (which I imagine is about everyone), the audio is here: Me on the Ric Peterson Show (MP3)

Apparently Mr. Peterson finds this blog interesting and informative about local issues (joke’s on him, I’m just some moron on the Internet), so he asked me a few questions about the big city council meeting tonight and the city’s new ethics hotline. (My uneducated take in brief: it sounds cool, but experiences in other cities show such hotlines aren’t worth the cost.)

I started off the interview pointing out that even if people were interested, they couldn’t watch this meeting live. No electronic media – TV, radio or online – are broadcasting this meeting. Not even VOX, LCN, RDI, Info 690 or CJAD. There was plenty of live coverage of tonight’s preseason Canadiens game (two television networks and three radio stations, by my count), however. Gives you an idea about priorities.

Even the city’s own website doesn’t provide live streaming. The best you get are video clips posted online after the fact.

So if you want to watch the meeting, you have to be in the building. That’s kind of sad. Not that most people would sit down and watch a council meeting from start to finish (especially when there’s the season premiere of House), but you’d think we could find some space in the 500-channel universe to what news people pretend to be the biggest news story of the week.

The media is, of course, at the meeting and will report on it. The Gazette is quasi-live-blogging it. Radio and TV are providing updates as part of regular news reports.

But all of them are providing a filter on this news, instead of letting us see it for ourselves.

| Media, My articles

Can you feel the love, t.o.night?

t.o.night, the new free Toronto evening newspaper, launched on Tuesday.

Reaction has been mixed:

  • blogTO, which is a content partner with t.o.night (the paper has a page devoted to content from the blog), has a blog post with pictures of Day 1.
  • Torontoist, which is blogTO’s main competitor in the Toronto alt-blog scene, has a much more critical post which picks out all of t.o.night’s flaws (making the blog look a bit like sour grapes in the process).
  • Eye Weekly is also highly critical of t.o.night, predicting it won’t last because of its many flaws (like misspelling a word on the front page).

CBC and the Doon Valley Journal have previews of the new paper.

The Bluffer’s Guide this week in The Gazette looks at t.o.night and evening newspapers in general. It also debunks one of the arguments used by t.o.night’s backers that this concept worked in London (England) by pointing out that the free evening daily there probably won’t last another month.

| Media, Navel-gazing, Opinion

The journalist-politician

Le Soleil’s Julie Lemieux has become the latest journalist to turn to the dark side… no wait, that’s PR. The other dark side: running for office. She’s joining the party of Quebec City mayor Régis Labeaume.

Oh wait, she’s not the latest. Looks like that’s Sue-Ann Levy, the Toronto Sun city hall journalist who’s running as a provincial Tory (causing some panic on the other side of the aisle). Her column is “on hiatus” during the election campaign, which I guess means she’ll go back to being a journalist if her life as a politician fails.

The list of journalists who have turned politician is so long I could spend days compiling it. But among the highlights:

  • Bernard Drainville, former Radio-Canada host and journalist, now a PQ MNA
  • Mike Duffy, former CTV News political anchor and now a Conservative senator
  • Joan Fraser, former Gazette reporter and editor and now a Liberal senator
  • Peter Kent, former Global News anchor and now a Conservative MP
  • Christine St-Pierre, former Radio-Canada political reporter and now a Quebec Liberal MNA

The stories all sound the same. The journalists – usually on the politics beat – decide that they can do more in office than as a sideline commentator. Party leaders, desperate for some semblance of integrity and trustworthiness, prey on the journalists in order to suck out as much of it as they can in an election campaign.

In each case, there were (or should have been) serious questions: did the offers come with strings attached? Did the journalists go easy on the parties they would later join? Will they leak sensitive government documents to their journalist friends? Will they back away from critical comments they may have made about the parties they have now joined?

When I was in university, reporting on the student union for the student newspaper, I was drafted into a political position. The student union was in the middle of a political crisis and had no executive at the time, so someone thought it would be fun to appoint me as a vice-president. (I attended more council meetings than most councillors, and probably knew the issues better, so I’d be good at the job, they reasoned.) I didn’t consent to the appointment, but they didn’t seem to care. As my journalist colleagues wondered what the heck was going on, I was handed an executive key by the president, who asked for me to stay on. I didn’t. After peeking around at a few things I now had access to for the first time, I returned the key.

I’ve always thought journalists have more freedom than politicians. Compare what Bill Maher gets to say to what Barack Obama gets to say. Though it’s tempting to ponder what might happen if you actually had the power to change the system for the better, the freedom to call a spade a spade has always appealed more to me. I’m not sure which would help society more.

Of course, my job as a journalist isn’t permanent yet, and my industry is in a death spiral. So just in case, I should probably say some nice things about our political parties here.

Only I can’t think of any.

| Montreal, My articles, Pop quiz

Montreal Geography Trivia No. 49

(Updated with more hints)

This historical figure has his name everywhere. A major thoroughfare and small street in the city (with a park by the same name nearby), a street in Pointe Claire and another in Ste. Geneviève, plus dozens of streets across Quebec. His name also used to be on something that’s been in the news lately.

Who is he?

UPDATE: Dave gets it close enough below, though St. John and St. John the Baptist are two different people. It’s the latter, St. Jean Baptiste, who is the subject of this quiz. It’s the name of a boulevard in the east end (which turns into a short street near the shore), a park, and tiny streets in Ste. Geneviève and Pointe-Claire.

It’s also, according to the Commission de toponymie du Québec, the former name of Amherst St., which a city councillor has proposed be changed because Jeffery Amherst had this thing about being OK with genocide through biological warfare. Amherst and the street names are the subjects of this week’s bluffer’s guide, which points out some of the silliness of the current debate: Amherst never actually used smallpox to kill Indians, and the Jeunes Patriotes are in favour of renaming Amherst but steadfast against renaming the anti-semitic Lionel Groulx.

One factoid that was left out of the article: there are also 14 other geographic entities in Quebec that carry Amherst’s name.

Chris DeWolf also has some thoughts on this subject, and Josianne Massé points to some other reaction in the blogosphere.

| My articles

This Week in Me: The New New Democratic Party

Democratic Party / Parti démocratique

Democratic Party / Parti démocratique

Page A2 of today’s Gazette was all me again this week (it’s going to be the case for the next few Mondays as well). Below the usual Monday Calendar is a Bluffer’s Guide to the NDP’s proposed name change (they want to remove the word “New” and become just the “Democratic Party of Canada”), wherein you learn that the previous name for the NDP was, in fact, the New Party.

The NDP is meeting in Halifax this weekend and will debate the name change there.

| Media, My articles, Navel-gazing

A1

Page A1 for Monday, August 3, 2009

Page A1 for Monday, August 3, 2009

It will probably stand as the last of my firsts for at least a little while. After four years (off and on) of doing just about every other editing job at the paper, last night I sat at the desk reserved for the Page 1 editor. For the next seven hours, I would be writing the headlines that first hit peoples’ eyes the next day, the ones that they would glance at on the newsstand as they make their decision whether or not to buy it. It’s a very important job, and I’m happy to say I don’t think I screwed it up too much.

As the size of newspapers and their staffs shrink, the prestige of various jobs has diminished somewhat with it. Where a few years ago you had a staff of three working under you, now it’s the size of the entire desk working on the A section on the weekend. And their workload has increased as well. The Page 1 editor used to spend the whole shift concentrated on a single page (and not even all of it). Now they work on A2, A3 and A4.

In my case, it wasn’t so much work. A4 turned into a city news page, A3 had been mostly done in advance, and A2 had the Monday Calendar and Bluffer’s Guide, both of which were written by me (and therefore neither needed any editing, right?).

The other thing to keep in mind about this job is that there’s no real layout involved. Page 1 isn’t laid out, it’s designed by a professional page designer, who tweaks tracking and leading to make sure everything looks perfect. After a few hours, the Page 1 editor gets a page with photos and a bunch of dummy type to be filled out.

Since this was a Sunday, news was kind of light, even with the deaths of two Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and the deportation of Karlheinz Schreiber. It was quite late in the evening before the subject of the main photo was decided on (the calls for what go on Page 1 are the responsibility of the Assistant Managing Editor and the Night Editor, both of whom are usually managers). Other candidates included the Highland Games in the West Island, flooded basements in N.D.G., Schreiber being deported, or something sports-related. My passing thought about taking a picture from the water gun battle on the Plains of Abraham was nixed mainly due to the fact that we had dead soldiers on the page (juxtaposition is everything). Besides, it was a Reuters photo and we had plenty of stuff from our staff photographers. So an Osheaga photo (the second time in two days that Osheaga has been the main art on the front page), but with a playful weather element, became the centrepiece, and the inspiration for my pick of quote of the day.

So yeah, Mom, go ahead and save that page. The rest of you, go read the Bluffer’s Guide, which is on the subject of the vicious lies being told about our health care system south of the border.

| Montreal, My articles

National Post amused by our wacky cop cars

My post about Montreal’s stealth police cars prompted an article in the National Post in Wednesday’s paper (an article written by a former colleague of mine at the hippie university paper).

I mention this in its separate post not just because of the fact that the article quotes me and the Post used one of my photos on Page 3, but … uhh … [insert better reason here later].

They used this photo (though heavily cropped on the sides – I’d be outraged, but I’ve done it enough times as an editor):

Invisible cop car giving a ticket

Of course, I took this photo not thinking that a national newspaper would want to use it. I spent little effort composing the shot, took it at a low resolution (the lowest my camera goes is 1728 x 1152, fortunately that was enough to make it printable) and didn’t bother getting names or other information.

On the flip side, it’s something that happened randomly as I was out shopping. If it wasn’t for the fact that I almost always have my camera with me, I’d have never gotten the shot. Instead, I stopped, pulled the camera out of my backpack, and took a few shots before continuing on my way.

Let that be a lesson to you freelance photographers and bloggers out there: always have your camera ready, and don’t assume you know how a photo might be used later.

| Humour, My articles, Slow News Day, Video

40 years ago today

The Onion: Holy Shit - Man walks on fucking moon

Oh, and I should add a link to the Bluffer’s Guide in Monday’s Gazette, courtesy of yours truly: The moon landings: fake or fact?. Choosing a news-relevant topic was enough to get my name above the fold on Page 1 (all part of my master plan).

UPDATE: This story surfaced just after I filed that one, showing that there are indeed pictures of the moon landing sites. But, of course, those are all fakes. (Thanks Ha!)

| Business, Media, Navel-gazing, Opinion

My cable bill and Videotron’s profits

My monthly bill to Videotron passed a milestone this month, crossing the $100 barrier and sitting at $100.38 for my Internet and digital cable.

In April 2008, the bill was $94.74 a month.

Nothing has changed in the amount of service I get. The increase of $5.64 a month is due entirely to Videotron’s price hikes:

I could understand this if Videotron’s costs were going up and it needed the extra money to stay afloat, but according to Quebecor’s financial statements, Videotron makes a shitload of money. Like, $800 million in profit off $1.8 billion in revenue. Not only are those numbers higher than any other unit of the megacorporation, but the profit margin is way, way higher than Quebecor’s newspaper or broadcasting divisions.

Even if you take amortization and capital costs out of the equation, that leaves $165 million of profit for Videotron, more than enough to cover interest payments on its $1.8 billion debt.

I’m not that great with quarterly statements, so my numbers might be off here. But Videotron is making a heck of a lot of money off me and other cable subscribers.

No wonder Canada is considered to have the most overpriced broadband Internet in the developed world.

| Media, Navel-gazing, Opinion

What do I have to do to get you to stop honouring me?

The Mirror, May 14, 2009, Page 14

The Mirror, May 14, 2009, Page 14

I give up.

Last year, I asked you specifically not to vote for me in the Mirror’s Best of Montreal poll. You (or at least some of you) wilfully disobeyed me and I placed eighth on the list of best blogs.

This year, I decided to avoid the reverse psychology and say absolutely nothing about the annual readers’ survey when it came out. That failed miserably, because this year I placed No. 2 (behind Midnight Poutine, who are again humble about taking the top spot) and the paper has an interview and picture for all my friends to see (it’s at the bottom, below the giant head of Ted Bird).

The article by Lorraine Carpenter is complimentary (though “Fagstein” wasn’t a schoolyard taunt – they really didn’t need to invent a new name to make fun of me), and Rachel Granofsky’s photo – well let’s just say she took about a hundred shots of me and that was probably the best one (the best photos of me are the ones where part of my face is hidden).

The full list of most popular local blogs, for those interested:

  1. Midnight Poutine
  2. Fagstein
  3. ThriftyTable.com
  4. Mike Ward (*cough*)
  5. Pregnant Goldfish
  6. Said the Gramophone (*cough*)
  7. Nouveau Queer (*cough*)
  8. Spacing Montreal
  9. Black Sheep Reviews (*cough*)
  10. Bitchin Lifestyle (*cough*)

Honourable mentions:

It’s sad that in order to place on this list you essentially have to whore yourself out to your readers (half of the top 10 asked their readers to vote for them in this poll, though some tried to remove the evidence after the fact – I’m looking at you Mike Ward). Two others – Spacing Montreal and Pregnant Goldfish – pimped themselves last year but not this year and subsequently fell in the standings.

But hey, it’s a popularity contest, and that means Céline Dion is on the list for “Most desirable woman”, Jean Charest is on “best politician”, Global on “best TV station”, Metro on “best newspaper”, 3 Amigos tops “best Mexican” and McDonald’s places in multiple food categories.

Unfortunately, that means many high-quality candidates are left off the list. Among them Montreal City Weblog, Coolpolis, Patrick Lagacé, Dominic Arpin, Indyish and Urbania (feel free to nominate your favourite unhonoured blog below).

All that said, I’d still like to thank those who think so highly of this blog and voted for me (which, in the interests of full disclosure, I should admit includes myself – but only once!)

If you’ll excuse me, I have to go pick up a few extra copies for my mom.

| Navel-gazing

How to score a newspaper internship (I think)

I promised an aspiring student journalist I’d post this to my blog a while ago, but never got around to it. Apologies if she’s been checking this site every day since.

In March, I was invited to give a talk to a group of students from university newspapers across Quebec and Ontario at a regional conference of Canadian University Press. Unfortunately, I was up against Todd van der Heyden, so my audience was small.

I talked about a few random things, like blogging, copy editing and freelancing. I also figured these kids would like some tips on how to get a job once they graduate, so I dug up my old internship application for The Gazette.

It was the fall of 2004, and I really wanted a job at the local anglo newspaper. I collected clippings (I selected five stories that I wrote, edited and laid out myself), compiled a CV that highlighted my experience in the student press, and wrote a cover letter.

I also included this:

A page from my internship application to The Gazette

A page from my internship application to The Gazette

Since I was applying mainly to be a copy editor, I figured I needed to demonstrate my skills. I took a page from the newspaper (I went through a couple before I found one with enough errors), scanned it and pointed out things that were wrong with it. It took me hours to lay it out properly, but it was worth it.

In January 2005, when I was interviewed by then-city editor George Kalogerakis, he asked me the usual boilerplate questions (I completely bombed a question that asked me for story ideas – among my answers were “it’s winter … maybe a story about that?”). I quickly learned he hadn’t seen the special page I spent hours working on. Leafing through dozens of applications, it apparently didn’t catch his eye.

I’m not sure what bearing it had in the decision, but I got a phone call while I was at a CUP conference in Edmonton later that month offering me the summer copy editing intern position.

A few months later, when I first met my new boss (who wasn’t Kalogerakis, because he abruptly left for a job at the Journal de Montréal), she identified me as “the one with the page.” As the person in charge of copy editors, she’d clearly been more impressed.

Anyway, enough about how awesome I am. The moral of this story is that when you’re applying for a job, especially in an environment where demand is much higher than supply, you should consider thinking outside the box to get noticed. Companies get dozens of CVs for every job, and even after throwing away those with spelling or grammar mistakes, there are a lot of candidates left to choose from.

I had learned that lesson from Andy Nulman, the former Just for Laughs organizer who has since become an expert in surprise marketing (you can see him with his fly open on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on Tuesday). He had done a television segment long ago (I don’t even remember for what program UPDATE: Nulman tells me it was a five-part special for CBC Newswatch in the mid-90s) about resumés, and said candidates who want to get noticed should eschew the standard resumé for a “presumé” that stands out (within reason of course, it should still have a CV and references). He talked of a CV he’d received that was in an oversized envelope that said “don’t read this” (or something to that effect). Clearly, he couldn’t not read it.

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader how this idea can be used to apply for other kinds of jobs.