Where does the day go? Away too fast, it seems....
June 15 - On Bicycling
Riding my bike to work is a choice I have made to reduce my dependence on a vehicle, especially one I would only occasionally use beyond a three-km radius from my home. Still, electric cars intrigue me, as they do a lot of people... who may have come up with a use for them as they site idle while charging. As shown by the massive power failure on the East Coast in 2003, the modern power grid in North American is going to need some serious help to keep running smoothly. Given the rising demand for alternative energy, it looks as though idle electric cars might best serve as a backup for the main grid during peak demand periods. In effect, the millions of charging car batteries can be intelligently managed by electric utilities to supplement their own systems and so help smooth out demand during events like summer heatwaves or the like.
The popularity of electric bikes is on the rise too, but I don't see the point, aside from those with mobility issues or long-distance commutes. Which I do see here on the highways of Vancouver Island; bicycles are allowed on the major highways in BC on the shoulders, which still freaks me out every time I see one there when I am driving along. I myself would not ride on the highway shoulder, ever - several people I have talked to have described close calls with high-speed vehicles that made my hair stand on end.
Getting around on my bike is not all that difficult, given that BC Transit intercity buses all have daytime bike racks. I can take the bus from Langford into Victoria and ride around the city on my bike instead of depending on the bus system, which is great. It really takes the stress out of 'needing' a vehicle to get around the area, and I hope that more people over time become less dependent on four-wheeled transport when it's not absolutely necessary. It's expensive in so many ways, and though there are car-pooling efforts and ride-share programs here, it still comes down to "Do you need a car, or just want it for the convenience?"
June 16 - Longevity and Disasters
Have you ever wondered how long something you've created will last? Fifty years? A century? A thousand years? Apart from the many dire reports about our garbage lasting centuries, I have wondered how long my own words will last, in various mediums. Some years ago I purchased a pack of CD-R's that claimed to have a 100-year lifespan... assuming someone can find a working CD-ROM to read the thing. News has come down the pipe now that scientists have created a method of recording data that will last... are you ready? A billion years. No kidding - have a look at the article. I wonder if the future will appreciate us saving those spam emails for posterity...
Then again, it could all end fairly soon. According to the Mayan calendar, the world will end in late 2012... so of course, there is a film coming out about it. And of course, it is called 2012 - the trailer is big on Day After Tomorrow effects, which makes sense as it is the same director. I think I may even see this one in theaters, just for the big-screen effect. Heck, we have an IMAX theater here in town, so who knows, it may even make it there. I just hope it has better longevity than The Day After did, which despite decent effects for the time has lost some of the scare factor in the last 25 years. Though with all the noise that North Korea has been making of late, it's still rather relevant.
I think the next place I rent might be good if it came with a bomb shelter, or at least some kind of disaster-survival room. Do you know the Eleven Steps to surviving a nuclear war? I can only name five... and not in order, apparently. Yet I can't seem to get any results from googling "Rent bomb shelter" ... ah well. I'd have to ensure it was well-stocked with DVD's and root beer anyway.
June 17th - SETI and Surgery
After work I had an appointment with my doctor to follow up on my gall bladder surgery. I am happy to say that I seem to be recovering perfectly, with no signs of complications. Now that I am free of my malfunctioning bile reservoir, I have noticed that my nausea seems to be fading, though I have to be careful to watch what I eat and how much... but establishing a baseline is something that doctor agreed with. I could still have a food allergy as-still undiagnosed, so he cautioned it is best not the jump the gun and conclude that all my problems were related to the gall bladder until some months have passed first.
My doctor today also mentioned that my surgeon is, in his opinion, the best laparoscopic surgeon on the entire West Coast, bar none. I agree wholeheartedly - I kept waiting for pain to kick in while I was recovering, but apart from some discomfort it was the best experience I could have wished for, in terms of being operated on. Chopping out bits of my original equipment is not something I ever want done more than absolutely necessary, which I think most people can agree with.
Last month, a ten-year anniversary date passed by without me realizing it. Back before the millennium, when the Y2K Bug was looming and most computers had just made the switch to Windows98, there was news about a new bit of free software that was going to take a novel approach to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Instead of trying to scrounge expensive time on supercomputers, the new idea for SETI@home was to break up the data to be searched into small packets which could be distributed to millions of home users, whose computers could be left on to analyze the data when not being used by their owners. It was the first application of distributed computer, which has exploded in popularity since - the Berkely BOINC page lists dozens of projects underway on tens of millions of computers worldwide, including many workplace groups and project associations. My own PC's have been running SETI@home fairly faithfully almost since the day it was first released in May 1999, clocking over 28,000 of hours of data searches... though nothing has been found yet, there is still the possibility. Ten years of searching is nothing compared to the age of the cosmos.
Related to SETI is the Drake Equation, which is a formula used to derive the number of intelligent civilizations out there in the Milky Way galaxy. Widely known and used by many, with a few detractors, it is interesting to plug in variables and see what numbers pop out. You can use this online version to see for yourself how many other civilizations may be out there right now... though they may be quite far away, and not around for all that long considering that the lifespan of the universe is in the billions of years.
June 18 - Words and Leaves in Summer?
Work is going well. Though we have seen a downturn in business like many other sectors, it is unlikely we will be closing stores or laying off staff, thank goodness. My doctor has ordered me to get plenty of rest after each workday, with no activity apart from walking around the house for at least another week. So no cycling, mowing the lawn... or raking leaves? The Arbutus trees hereabouts are all shedding their leaves, which apparently is quite normal for them to do in July. It is a bit early this year, due to the dry weather here on Vancouver Island, and seeing the lawn covered in rather acidic leaves is really rather odd... I am used to September leaf piles, and those being maple at that. Definitely different here.
Back in grade school, I loved history books in our library, and one of my all-time favourites was Castle by David Maccaulay released in 1977. It had had fantastic illustrations, which you can actually browse through some dozens of pages at this link from Google Books.The book describes the creation of thirteenth-century castle from the first shovel of earth dug all the way up to the whitewashing of the exterior, all done in Maccaulay's incredible line-art illustrative style. I think I will pick up a copy soon from AbeBooks.com, seeing as there are quite a few of them and the cost is almost nothing - Maccauly has sold millions of copies of his work over the years, which any author can only hope for with their work!
Books - I have a lot of them. While I have a good memory for titles, I have so many books from years of collecting that sometimes I end up duplicating a title I already have while browsing a bookstore. Since I always have my PDA on me, it has been on my mind for some time to get a list of ALL my books in electronic form, and carry it around with me thus avoiding duplicate purchases. There are quite a few software programs out there, but my thought has always been 'Can I just scan the barcode and have the rest of the data populate itself?' - having title, author, publisher and the like plucked from the 'net much like MP3 tags would save SO much time. So far, BookCAT is the front-runner, followed by Book Collector but I still have to find an inexpensive barcode scanner that's not cheap plastic crap.
No books on bacon though. Which may explain why I've never heard of Bacon Soap until today - and now, so have you. Mmm... bacon!
June 19 - Battlefield and Bots
Next week sees release of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in theaters across the country, and the anticipation is massive. It remains to be seen if it will outperform the success of The Dark Knight, which was the highest-grossing film of 2008, according to IMDB's 2008 film database - that's a half-billion US dollars, folks. I really enjoyed last week's Transformers marathon on Teletoon Retro, though a lot of it was wince-worthy from a writing standpoint - but we watch it for the giant robots battling it out for supremacy, not the nuanced character development. As if there was much of that, though the more recent Beast Wars( Beasties on YTV )CGI animated series by Mainframe( now called Rainmaker )did a stellar job tying into the Transformers mythos. Some fine writing there, I kid you not: they won a few Emmy's, which I am not surprised about. The main writer on the series was Larry DiTillo, who also did fantastic work on the He-Man revival a few years back... not to mention some work on Babylon 5. Good job, Larry!
On the topic of transforming: The first MMO game I played after leaving Ultima Online was... Battlefield 1942, which was also one of the first massively multiplayer online shooter games, akin to Quake and Unreal Tournament. Unlike those other two games, where your lifespan was measured in stretches mere seconds long, BF1942 was a blast to play, almost literally. Teams of up to 32 players would face off against each other, playing classic battlefield maps set during WWII of Americans versus the Japanese, Germans versus British, and so forth. You could run as one of various soldier classes, on foot... or jump into a jeep. Or a tank. Or a plane. Or a ship, like a destroyer, battleship or even aircraft carrier! Teamplay was critical, though the communication tools were horrible - simple text chat, which usually got you killed as you were typing, and it was hard to keep an eye on the chat messages while trying to stay alive - no voice chat in those days. It was addictive fun, with a ranking system and a ton of servers to play on. My only regret is that it was still far too easy for people to hack the game and cheat, to the point where almost every game I was in had someone doing something illegal - my frustration built to the point where I just had to stop playing. Damned script kiddies - they probably went on to become the scum who spam people's email and hack into systems to steal personal data.... I wish them long stays behind bars, the sooner the better.
*ahem* My point? It was recently announced that Battlefield:1943 will be released by year's end as a download-only game for XboxLive! - great news! From everything I have seen, it will have all the good points of the old BF1942 but updated for today's consoles... and not a hacker in sight. Sweet!
June 20th - Simple Saturday
Today I finished watching the last few episodes of Arrested Development, along with some of the extras, such as the 'Last Day of Shooting' vignette. For anyone who hasn't seen the series, I highly recommend that you do; I am only sorry that I waited as long as I did after Rene mentioned how great it was to me years ago.
Just a reminder that Dell's 10 Days of Deals continues until June 24th( the day Transformers opens! )and though I haven't seen anything I need for myself, there have been a few great deals so it's worth checking out daily - you might just see something you've been waiting to get. I enjoyed browsing through RedFlagDeal.com's listings of previous day's items from Dell.ca, which may give you an idea of just exactly how good a deal you may have already missed.
Close to bedtime, I stumbled across The Majestic with Jim Carey on TV, and fell in without meaning to. While not critically acclaimed, I found it an intriguing story about a man who loses his memory and mistakenly takes on another life, that of a small-town hero thought to have been killed some years ago in WWII. It was touching at points, a touch too maudlin in other parts but overall a decent watch that didn't have me wanting to tune out, despite being tired. The original website from 2001 is still up, surprisingly, and they have a production journal as well - pretty good for over eight years after a movie's release.
June 21 - Dad's Day
The summer solstice today, the longest day of the year. I won't go into the historical significance, but everyone can see that it is light out really, really late at night. I wish I could say I spent the evening outside, but it's been cold and very windy here the last few days - quite a change from the start of the month's heatwave.
While I was all set for Father's Day today, some dads are notoriously hard to buy for. Given the massive search capabilities of the internet, there are tons of ideas for Gifts for Dad, but I found most to be cheesy kitsch... though I did come across a nice list of ideas you might want to peruse for next year.
We watched Wall-E in the evening, which was one of several DVD's I'd bought( on sale, of course! )for my dad for Father's Day. Neither of my parents had seen the film, so we watched it on my big-screen with the 5.1 speakers and they loved it - it helped that it was such a good film, won an Oscar in 2008, in fact.
I'll leave you with a clip from the upcoming animated film 9, and it's a doozy! No Wall-E, that's for sure - it's dark, dangerous and delightful. Enjoy!
June 15 - On Bicycling
Riding my bike to work is a choice I have made to reduce my dependence on a vehicle, especially one I would only occasionally use beyond a three-km radius from my home. Still, electric cars intrigue me, as they do a lot of people... who may have come up with a use for them as they site idle while charging. As shown by the massive power failure on the East Coast in 2003, the modern power grid in North American is going to need some serious help to keep running smoothly. Given the rising demand for alternative energy, it looks as though idle electric cars might best serve as a backup for the main grid during peak demand periods. In effect, the millions of charging car batteries can be intelligently managed by electric utilities to supplement their own systems and so help smooth out demand during events like summer heatwaves or the like.
The popularity of electric bikes is on the rise too, but I don't see the point, aside from those with mobility issues or long-distance commutes. Which I do see here on the highways of Vancouver Island; bicycles are allowed on the major highways in BC on the shoulders, which still freaks me out every time I see one there when I am driving along. I myself would not ride on the highway shoulder, ever - several people I have talked to have described close calls with high-speed vehicles that made my hair stand on end.
Getting around on my bike is not all that difficult, given that BC Transit intercity buses all have daytime bike racks. I can take the bus from Langford into Victoria and ride around the city on my bike instead of depending on the bus system, which is great. It really takes the stress out of 'needing' a vehicle to get around the area, and I hope that more people over time become less dependent on four-wheeled transport when it's not absolutely necessary. It's expensive in so many ways, and though there are car-pooling efforts and ride-share programs here, it still comes down to "Do you need a car, or just want it for the convenience?"
June 16 - Longevity and Disasters
Have you ever wondered how long something you've created will last? Fifty years? A century? A thousand years? Apart from the many dire reports about our garbage lasting centuries, I have wondered how long my own words will last, in various mediums. Some years ago I purchased a pack of CD-R's that claimed to have a 100-year lifespan... assuming someone can find a working CD-ROM to read the thing. News has come down the pipe now that scientists have created a method of recording data that will last... are you ready? A billion years. No kidding - have a look at the article. I wonder if the future will appreciate us saving those spam emails for posterity...
Then again, it could all end fairly soon. According to the Mayan calendar, the world will end in late 2012... so of course, there is a film coming out about it. And of course, it is called 2012 - the trailer is big on Day After Tomorrow effects, which makes sense as it is the same director. I think I may even see this one in theaters, just for the big-screen effect. Heck, we have an IMAX theater here in town, so who knows, it may even make it there. I just hope it has better longevity than The Day After did, which despite decent effects for the time has lost some of the scare factor in the last 25 years. Though with all the noise that North Korea has been making of late, it's still rather relevant.
I think the next place I rent might be good if it came with a bomb shelter, or at least some kind of disaster-survival room. Do you know the Eleven Steps to surviving a nuclear war? I can only name five... and not in order, apparently. Yet I can't seem to get any results from googling "Rent bomb shelter" ... ah well. I'd have to ensure it was well-stocked with DVD's and root beer anyway.
June 17th - SETI and Surgery
After work I had an appointment with my doctor to follow up on my gall bladder surgery. I am happy to say that I seem to be recovering perfectly, with no signs of complications. Now that I am free of my malfunctioning bile reservoir, I have noticed that my nausea seems to be fading, though I have to be careful to watch what I eat and how much... but establishing a baseline is something that doctor agreed with. I could still have a food allergy as-still undiagnosed, so he cautioned it is best not the jump the gun and conclude that all my problems were related to the gall bladder until some months have passed first.
My doctor today also mentioned that my surgeon is, in his opinion, the best laparoscopic surgeon on the entire West Coast, bar none. I agree wholeheartedly - I kept waiting for pain to kick in while I was recovering, but apart from some discomfort it was the best experience I could have wished for, in terms of being operated on. Chopping out bits of my original equipment is not something I ever want done more than absolutely necessary, which I think most people can agree with.
Last month, a ten-year anniversary date passed by without me realizing it. Back before the millennium, when the Y2K Bug was looming and most computers had just made the switch to Windows98, there was news about a new bit of free software that was going to take a novel approach to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Instead of trying to scrounge expensive time on supercomputers, the new idea for SETI@home was to break up the data to be searched into small packets which could be distributed to millions of home users, whose computers could be left on to analyze the data when not being used by their owners. It was the first application of distributed computer, which has exploded in popularity since - the Berkely BOINC page lists dozens of projects underway on tens of millions of computers worldwide, including many workplace groups and project associations. My own PC's have been running SETI@home fairly faithfully almost since the day it was first released in May 1999, clocking over 28,000 of hours of data searches... though nothing has been found yet, there is still the possibility. Ten years of searching is nothing compared to the age of the cosmos.
Related to SETI is the Drake Equation, which is a formula used to derive the number of intelligent civilizations out there in the Milky Way galaxy. Widely known and used by many, with a few detractors, it is interesting to plug in variables and see what numbers pop out. You can use this online version to see for yourself how many other civilizations may be out there right now... though they may be quite far away, and not around for all that long considering that the lifespan of the universe is in the billions of years.
June 18 - Words and Leaves in Summer?
Work is going well. Though we have seen a downturn in business like many other sectors, it is unlikely we will be closing stores or laying off staff, thank goodness. My doctor has ordered me to get plenty of rest after each workday, with no activity apart from walking around the house for at least another week. So no cycling, mowing the lawn... or raking leaves? The Arbutus trees hereabouts are all shedding their leaves, which apparently is quite normal for them to do in July. It is a bit early this year, due to the dry weather here on Vancouver Island, and seeing the lawn covered in rather acidic leaves is really rather odd... I am used to September leaf piles, and those being maple at that. Definitely different here.
Back in grade school, I loved history books in our library, and one of my all-time favourites was Castle by David Maccaulay released in 1977. It had had fantastic illustrations, which you can actually browse through some dozens of pages at this link from Google Books.The book describes the creation of thirteenth-century castle from the first shovel of earth dug all the way up to the whitewashing of the exterior, all done in Maccaulay's incredible line-art illustrative style. I think I will pick up a copy soon from AbeBooks.com, seeing as there are quite a few of them and the cost is almost nothing - Maccauly has sold millions of copies of his work over the years, which any author can only hope for with their work!
Books - I have a lot of them. While I have a good memory for titles, I have so many books from years of collecting that sometimes I end up duplicating a title I already have while browsing a bookstore. Since I always have my PDA on me, it has been on my mind for some time to get a list of ALL my books in electronic form, and carry it around with me thus avoiding duplicate purchases. There are quite a few software programs out there, but my thought has always been 'Can I just scan the barcode and have the rest of the data populate itself?' - having title, author, publisher and the like plucked from the 'net much like MP3 tags would save SO much time. So far, BookCAT is the front-runner, followed by Book Collector but I still have to find an inexpensive barcode scanner that's not cheap plastic crap.
No books on bacon though. Which may explain why I've never heard of Bacon Soap until today - and now, so have you. Mmm... bacon!
June 19 - Battlefield and Bots
Next week sees release of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in theaters across the country, and the anticipation is massive. It remains to be seen if it will outperform the success of The Dark Knight, which was the highest-grossing film of 2008, according to IMDB's 2008 film database - that's a half-billion US dollars, folks. I really enjoyed last week's Transformers marathon on Teletoon Retro, though a lot of it was wince-worthy from a writing standpoint - but we watch it for the giant robots battling it out for supremacy, not the nuanced character development. As if there was much of that, though the more recent Beast Wars( Beasties on YTV )CGI animated series by Mainframe( now called Rainmaker )did a stellar job tying into the Transformers mythos. Some fine writing there, I kid you not: they won a few Emmy's, which I am not surprised about. The main writer on the series was Larry DiTillo, who also did fantastic work on the He-Man revival a few years back... not to mention some work on Babylon 5. Good job, Larry!
On the topic of transforming: The first MMO game I played after leaving Ultima Online was... Battlefield 1942, which was also one of the first massively multiplayer online shooter games, akin to Quake and Unreal Tournament. Unlike those other two games, where your lifespan was measured in stretches mere seconds long, BF1942 was a blast to play, almost literally. Teams of up to 32 players would face off against each other, playing classic battlefield maps set during WWII of Americans versus the Japanese, Germans versus British, and so forth. You could run as one of various soldier classes, on foot... or jump into a jeep. Or a tank. Or a plane. Or a ship, like a destroyer, battleship or even aircraft carrier! Teamplay was critical, though the communication tools were horrible - simple text chat, which usually got you killed as you were typing, and it was hard to keep an eye on the chat messages while trying to stay alive - no voice chat in those days. It was addictive fun, with a ranking system and a ton of servers to play on. My only regret is that it was still far too easy for people to hack the game and cheat, to the point where almost every game I was in had someone doing something illegal - my frustration built to the point where I just had to stop playing. Damned script kiddies - they probably went on to become the scum who spam people's email and hack into systems to steal personal data.... I wish them long stays behind bars, the sooner the better.
*ahem* My point? It was recently announced that Battlefield:1943 will be released by year's end as a download-only game for XboxLive! - great news! From everything I have seen, it will have all the good points of the old BF1942 but updated for today's consoles... and not a hacker in sight. Sweet!
June 20th - Simple Saturday
Today I finished watching the last few episodes of Arrested Development, along with some of the extras, such as the 'Last Day of Shooting' vignette. For anyone who hasn't seen the series, I highly recommend that you do; I am only sorry that I waited as long as I did after Rene mentioned how great it was to me years ago.
Just a reminder that Dell's 10 Days of Deals continues until June 24th( the day Transformers opens! )and though I haven't seen anything I need for myself, there have been a few great deals so it's worth checking out daily - you might just see something you've been waiting to get. I enjoyed browsing through RedFlagDeal.com's listings of previous day's items from Dell.ca, which may give you an idea of just exactly how good a deal you may have already missed.
Close to bedtime, I stumbled across The Majestic with Jim Carey on TV, and fell in without meaning to. While not critically acclaimed, I found it an intriguing story about a man who loses his memory and mistakenly takes on another life, that of a small-town hero thought to have been killed some years ago in WWII. It was touching at points, a touch too maudlin in other parts but overall a decent watch that didn't have me wanting to tune out, despite being tired. The original website from 2001 is still up, surprisingly, and they have a production journal as well - pretty good for over eight years after a movie's release.
June 21 - Dad's Day
The summer solstice today, the longest day of the year. I won't go into the historical significance, but everyone can see that it is light out really, really late at night. I wish I could say I spent the evening outside, but it's been cold and very windy here the last few days - quite a change from the start of the month's heatwave.
While I was all set for Father's Day today, some dads are notoriously hard to buy for. Given the massive search capabilities of the internet, there are tons of ideas for Gifts for Dad, but I found most to be cheesy kitsch... though I did come across a nice list of ideas you might want to peruse for next year.
We watched Wall-E in the evening, which was one of several DVD's I'd bought( on sale, of course! )for my dad for Father's Day. Neither of my parents had seen the film, so we watched it on my big-screen with the 5.1 speakers and they loved it - it helped that it was such a good film, won an Oscar in 2008, in fact.
I'll leave you with a clip from the upcoming animated film 9, and it's a doozy! No Wall-E, that's for sure - it's dark, dangerous and delightful. Enjoy!
