The weather this week was rather blah for the most part. I went from grey skies in ON to grey skies in BC... but the sun popped out as usual on the weekends to mock me. Nice to know some things don't change, despite being in another province 3500km away...
Sept 16 - Going Rogue
Whew! I slept in today until 11am - guess I needed it. Spent a lot of the day running around getting groceries and the like. Nice to have a car only when you need it - saves parking and repairs - thanks to the folks, such is my case. I even splurged on a new backpack from Targus, though the price made me cringe as usual - necessary though, as my other bags cannot safely carry the laptop and are falling apart besides. The thing has more pockets than the other two bags combined though, as well as many other features that make it (almost)worth the price, in all.
I logged a little while of gaming in COD4 with Dave tonight, and did surprisingly well. I seem to have found a combination of 'perks' and weapons that keep me alive long enough to claim a fair portion of team kills, which I find very gratifying. The Xbox360's controller is STILL nowhere near as accurate as a PC mouse and keyboard, but then that also means the OTHER guy is less accurate too - there's far too many headshots as it is!
One thing I also installed on the new rig is Rogue Trooper, a game based on the old 2000 A.D. comic strip that had some of the best storytelling I have seen... well, I read the Heavy Metal:War Machine issue with it in it (and stupidly loaned it to someone who lost it)so that's close enough. Authors like David Drake and Joe Haldeman are ones whose work I read avidly, as they both had brief-but-intense stints in the military that shape the course of their work even decades later. In some ways, I am quite glad that I do not live in a country where conscription is a fact of life, but when one reads about the camaraderie forged among those who have seen battle, the wise know that this is something that no other bond in the world can compare to... and also for which no other bond carries so high a price.
Sept 17 - Foul for the Environment
Back to work today for an evening shift, after my all-too-brief and all-too-busy (but in a good way) vacation last week. I am not one for long vacations, but even this one seemed just a little too short - I am used to at least a few days of total relaxation, but I suppose I can still do that; with the number of vacation days I have banked, I HAVE to take some 3 and 4 day weekends in the next few months. I hope to get a lot accomplished / caught up on those weekends... but if I do, does that not negate the fact that they are 'vacation' weekends? Again, irony raises its voice in laughter.
A strange thing: There is NO Drive Clean program here in B.C. as strange as that sounds. Cars belching copious clouds of black exhaust are far more common here than in Ontario. Which annoys the crap out of me on a personal level, as I have to suck in their fumes while climbing the hill to work every day - there's always at least one beater chugging up the hill next to me, making me stop to gasp for fresh air in a driveway or side street. It's amazing that the air can be so fresh one moment, then swimming with fumes and the stench of unburned hydrocarbons. For a province that claims the high ground in so many environmental fields, this is a glaring omission.
Sept 18 - Costumes
Halloween is coming up, and I am not sure what to do this year. I never seem to get around to costume design in time for the 31st each October, though many a great idea has stayed lodged in my head. Certainly I could shop for some great Halo3 costumes here, or even try for a matching set.
One of my friends is in the 501st Legion, a respected and well-established Star Wars costuming club. They're so popular, they have often provided security at many a convention, which of course is a sight to see - nothing like a squad of stormtroopers to settle disputes peacefully... The reason I mention this is that I recently recalled that the 2008 Canadian Action Figure Expo is coming up. I attended the 2007 show with Mike H. to sell off most of my beloved toys of years past in preparation for the move out to BC. Amazingly, someone with a camera managed to document almost every vendor present - my stuff (the table with the tall white shelf) is shown here and here, plus you can see a few shots of the 501st members who attended, including a female Royal Guard.
Which brings up the subject of female Stormtroopers, whose outfits although pleasing to the eye are somewhat impractical for battle. Heck, you can get into such topics as chainmail bikinis, female fantasy armour (or the lack therof) with some great recreations here, as well as the many stereotypes that abound in fantasy and fiction regarding barbarians and the like. One of my favourite series on the topic is the 'Chicks in Chainmail' series edited by Esther M. Friesner which has its authors exploring the many, er, cracks in the genre regarding women's stereotypes. She writes about the latest book in the series here. Of course, you could just take matters into your own hands about stereotypes, such as in comics...
Sept 19 - Pirates, yahar!
Today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day, which has several of my neighbours excited - they're big pirate fans, and I can guess fairly accurately what they're dressing up as this year. There is the Official Site, the Bus Pirates site, How To Talk Like A Pirate and even some Pirate Fonts to turn your PC into a buccaneer sailing the strange silicon seas of the internet. Plus a few more sites where you can spend yer gold on pirate booty and swag. Reminds me a little of BucCONeer'98, the World SciFi convention I attended in 1998 in Boston, whose theme (as the name implies)was piratical. Boston and pirates seemed to go well together.
One of my favourite pirates of all time is Captain Capacitor, which is odd as he is both fictional AND a CGI animated character... but that perhaps, is why I like him best. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, he was voiced by Long John Landry, whose salty tones did much to sell ol' Gavin.
Sept 20 - Don't Miss the BoobTube
It's been two months now with no TV, and I have to say I am more productive for it. It's no effort at all to pop in a DVD of my favourite series, or find something on YouTube that I've not seen in a while - despite the 10-minute limit, which is annoying for a 42-minute show, I'll grant you. One of these days I will get around to uploading ALL of my DVD's to my PC, but that will have to wait for a) the time it takes (2hrs per DVD on average) as well as b) the storage space - I figure I will beed about 5 Terabytes of storage, which is well beyond both my current finances and current tech on the market... but the gap is closing. I can recall when 1 gigabyte drives were 'too big to fill' even when installing ALL one's games, pictures and a few videos. Look for far we've come along since!
I was wiped when I got home from work, so much so that even dinner seemed a daunting task. Luck for me the microwave was invented, or I'd have had to resort to a PBJ - it's Peanut Butter Jelly time!
This week I also managed to get NWN to run on my new laptop, which was no mean feat in and of itself - Vista64 is NOT friendly to older programs, and since NWN dates waaaay back from 2002, I had little hope. Success put a smile on my face though, as now I can run the game on hot days without worrying about frying my main PC, which gets VERY toasty with no A/C nearby - I miss my office at The Prince, where I had an A/C vent pointed right at the back of the PC desk...
Sept 21 - Planes and Mechs
The Snowbirds are putting on a show today down by Dallas Rd, where nearly 25,000 people are expected to attend. Unfortunately, I am stuck working today, which I find manifestly unfair... I love seeing aerial acrobatics, and attending airshows has always been a highlight of any given year. At least I managed to catch a glimpse of one plane through a gap in the buildings to the south - sweet!
One thing I would love to do is attend Air Combat USA, where one can fly prop-driven aircraft in mock combat, complete with lasers and smoke dispensers to simulate hits. I have always liked flight simulators, so much so that I purchased one mother of a controller back in the day to play Tie Fighter - one of the greatest space combat sims ever created, for any platform. Though I did not do so well at things like Microsoft Flight Simulator, one of these days I will sit down and really learn how to fly... or at least how to avoid the ground for a good long time. Same thing, right?
This reminds me of the old Battletech Center which was located in the CN Tower in Toronto years back. This was a 'virtual world' of 16 linked 'battlepods' which simulated the interior and control layout of mechs from the Battletech universe. Each pod was linked in a network( pretty high tech stuff 15 years ago )where up to 8 players at a time could battle each other in tactical combat using the latest graphics at the time - pretty dull by today's standards, but it beat the heck out of the Nintendo64 at the time. As I recall, the whole setup was running on a Mac Quadra, which was incredibly funny to see; all these huge battlepods linked to a tiny Mac sitting in a corner that spat printouts from an old HP inkjet. The future meets the Mac - sounds like a commercial, actually!
I am using a Blog editor called ScribeFire this week, in the hopes that it will cure the annoyances that have drawn out each entry for FAR longer than it should take to enter some simple text. One thing it has done already is making links a LOT easier to enter, hence the link-heavy blog this week.
Sept 16 - Going Rogue
Whew! I slept in today until 11am - guess I needed it. Spent a lot of the day running around getting groceries and the like. Nice to have a car only when you need it - saves parking and repairs - thanks to the folks, such is my case. I even splurged on a new backpack from Targus, though the price made me cringe as usual - necessary though, as my other bags cannot safely carry the laptop and are falling apart besides. The thing has more pockets than the other two bags combined though, as well as many other features that make it (almost)worth the price, in all.
I logged a little while of gaming in COD4 with Dave tonight, and did surprisingly well. I seem to have found a combination of 'perks' and weapons that keep me alive long enough to claim a fair portion of team kills, which I find very gratifying. The Xbox360's controller is STILL nowhere near as accurate as a PC mouse and keyboard, but then that also means the OTHER guy is less accurate too - there's far too many headshots as it is!
One thing I also installed on the new rig is Rogue Trooper, a game based on the old 2000 A.D. comic strip that had some of the best storytelling I have seen... well, I read the Heavy Metal:War Machine issue with it in it (and stupidly loaned it to someone who lost it)so that's close enough. Authors like David Drake and Joe Haldeman are ones whose work I read avidly, as they both had brief-but-intense stints in the military that shape the course of their work even decades later. In some ways, I am quite glad that I do not live in a country where conscription is a fact of life, but when one reads about the camaraderie forged among those who have seen battle, the wise know that this is something that no other bond in the world can compare to... and also for which no other bond carries so high a price.
Sept 17 - Foul for the Environment
Back to work today for an evening shift, after my all-too-brief and all-too-busy (but in a good way) vacation last week. I am not one for long vacations, but even this one seemed just a little too short - I am used to at least a few days of total relaxation, but I suppose I can still do that; with the number of vacation days I have banked, I HAVE to take some 3 and 4 day weekends in the next few months. I hope to get a lot accomplished / caught up on those weekends... but if I do, does that not negate the fact that they are 'vacation' weekends? Again, irony raises its voice in laughter.
A strange thing: There is NO Drive Clean program here in B.C. as strange as that sounds. Cars belching copious clouds of black exhaust are far more common here than in Ontario. Which annoys the crap out of me on a personal level, as I have to suck in their fumes while climbing the hill to work every day - there's always at least one beater chugging up the hill next to me, making me stop to gasp for fresh air in a driveway or side street. It's amazing that the air can be so fresh one moment, then swimming with fumes and the stench of unburned hydrocarbons. For a province that claims the high ground in so many environmental fields, this is a glaring omission.
Sept 18 - Costumes
Halloween is coming up, and I am not sure what to do this year. I never seem to get around to costume design in time for the 31st each October, though many a great idea has stayed lodged in my head. Certainly I could shop for some great Halo3 costumes here, or even try for a matching set.
One of my friends is in the 501st Legion, a respected and well-established Star Wars costuming club. They're so popular, they have often provided security at many a convention, which of course is a sight to see - nothing like a squad of stormtroopers to settle disputes peacefully... The reason I mention this is that I recently recalled that the 2008 Canadian Action Figure Expo is coming up. I attended the 2007 show with Mike H. to sell off most of my beloved toys of years past in preparation for the move out to BC. Amazingly, someone with a camera managed to document almost every vendor present - my stuff (the table with the tall white shelf) is shown here and here, plus you can see a few shots of the 501st members who attended, including a female Royal Guard.
Which brings up the subject of female Stormtroopers, whose outfits although pleasing to the eye are somewhat impractical for battle. Heck, you can get into such topics as chainmail bikinis, female fantasy armour (or the lack therof) with some great recreations here, as well as the many stereotypes that abound in fantasy and fiction regarding barbarians and the like. One of my favourite series on the topic is the 'Chicks in Chainmail' series edited by Esther M. Friesner which has its authors exploring the many, er, cracks in the genre regarding women's stereotypes. She writes about the latest book in the series here. Of course, you could just take matters into your own hands about stereotypes, such as in comics...
Sept 19 - Pirates, yahar!
Today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day, which has several of my neighbours excited - they're big pirate fans, and I can guess fairly accurately what they're dressing up as this year. There is the Official Site, the Bus Pirates site, How To Talk Like A Pirate and even some Pirate Fonts to turn your PC into a buccaneer sailing the strange silicon seas of the internet. Plus a few more sites where you can spend yer gold on pirate booty and swag. Reminds me a little of BucCONeer'98, the World SciFi convention I attended in 1998 in Boston, whose theme (as the name implies)was piratical. Boston and pirates seemed to go well together.
One of my favourite pirates of all time is Captain Capacitor, which is odd as he is both fictional AND a CGI animated character... but that perhaps, is why I like him best. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, he was voiced by Long John Landry, whose salty tones did much to sell ol' Gavin.
Sept 20 - Don't Miss the BoobTube
It's been two months now with no TV, and I have to say I am more productive for it. It's no effort at all to pop in a DVD of my favourite series, or find something on YouTube that I've not seen in a while - despite the 10-minute limit, which is annoying for a 42-minute show, I'll grant you. One of these days I will get around to uploading ALL of my DVD's to my PC, but that will have to wait for a) the time it takes (2hrs per DVD on average) as well as b) the storage space - I figure I will beed about 5 Terabytes of storage, which is well beyond both my current finances and current tech on the market... but the gap is closing. I can recall when 1 gigabyte drives were 'too big to fill' even when installing ALL one's games, pictures and a few videos. Look for far we've come along since!
I was wiped when I got home from work, so much so that even dinner seemed a daunting task. Luck for me the microwave was invented, or I'd have had to resort to a PBJ - it's Peanut Butter Jelly time!
This week I also managed to get NWN to run on my new laptop, which was no mean feat in and of itself - Vista64 is NOT friendly to older programs, and since NWN dates waaaay back from 2002, I had little hope. Success put a smile on my face though, as now I can run the game on hot days without worrying about frying my main PC, which gets VERY toasty with no A/C nearby - I miss my office at The Prince, where I had an A/C vent pointed right at the back of the PC desk...
Sept 21 - Planes and Mechs
The Snowbirds are putting on a show today down by Dallas Rd, where nearly 25,000 people are expected to attend. Unfortunately, I am stuck working today, which I find manifestly unfair... I love seeing aerial acrobatics, and attending airshows has always been a highlight of any given year. At least I managed to catch a glimpse of one plane through a gap in the buildings to the south - sweet!
One thing I would love to do is attend Air Combat USA, where one can fly prop-driven aircraft in mock combat, complete with lasers and smoke dispensers to simulate hits. I have always liked flight simulators, so much so that I purchased one mother of a controller back in the day to play Tie Fighter - one of the greatest space combat sims ever created, for any platform. Though I did not do so well at things like Microsoft Flight Simulator, one of these days I will sit down and really learn how to fly... or at least how to avoid the ground for a good long time. Same thing, right?
This reminds me of the old Battletech Center which was located in the CN Tower in Toronto years back. This was a 'virtual world' of 16 linked 'battlepods' which simulated the interior and control layout of mechs from the Battletech universe. Each pod was linked in a network( pretty high tech stuff 15 years ago )where up to 8 players at a time could battle each other in tactical combat using the latest graphics at the time - pretty dull by today's standards, but it beat the heck out of the Nintendo64 at the time. As I recall, the whole setup was running on a Mac Quadra, which was incredibly funny to see; all these huge battlepods linked to a tiny Mac sitting in a corner that spat printouts from an old HP inkjet. The future meets the Mac - sounds like a commercial, actually!
I am using a Blog editor called ScribeFire this week, in the hopes that it will cure the annoyances that have drawn out each entry for FAR longer than it should take to enter some simple text. One thing it has done already is making links a LOT easier to enter, hence the link-heavy blog this week.
