Well, I'm still working on a daily blog post; I think to start I'll try to update a few times a week and see how well Blogger.com functions with that...
Aug 10 - Space Opera and Writing
This is cool to me: a gallery of famous writer's spaces at WhereIwrite.org - images of where some of today's most creative minds do their work. I think that Joe Haldeman's space wins, if only for the fact that he writes things longhand by candlelight! How cool is that in today's age of laptops? Maybe I should take a picture of my space here on the deck, overlooking Langford Lake - after all, it's year-round that I can write there, even if it's raining as I have a nice little overhang over the hottub. Which is also great for relaxing in to break those nasty writer's block days when nothing else works.
Which brings me to Space Opera - yes, the genre that Star Wars catapulted to the forefront of popular culture from its origins in mainstream scifi's Golden Era in the pre-WWII era. While series books like The New Space Opera have been hit or miss, some other works have been coming to the market lately, including Federations, which focus on a more human perspective than other works have to date. Sharing the same spirit as video games like Homeworld, these stories take you to new worlds, new peoples... letting you Boldly Go where no couch-potato has gone before( though there's still no new B5-themed books on the horizon, darn it! ). Next thing you know, Star Trek's transparent aluminum will be available at your local Home Depot, making broken windows a thing of the past - oh wait: it almost is now!
My first day back to work... and I spent it all at the back workstation, catching up on paperwork. I was thrilled to no end to have a trainee handling things up front, so that I could plow through emails, reports and whatnot to get myself back in gear. Luckily some things were taken care of by a visiting store manager while I was away, or I would have had even more to do...
Aug 11 - Medical Superheros
This is so cool too: a real-life superman... who is only 2 years old. Liam Hoekstra has been blessed( and some say cursed )with an ultra-rare muscular condition that has given him 40% more muscle mass than the average person. Which means that he's burning a ton more energy just sitting there, as muscles use 3 times more energy than fat... and also means the kid has to eat 6 full meals a day. Luckily, he was adopted into a family that has the means to provide the food and care he needs... kinda reminds me of the Marvel Comics origin story for Colossus, whose poor Russian parents agreed to allow their son to participate in 'research' that caused him to mutate and grow into a superhero - with a massive appetite. Strange how reality starts to reflect fiction some days...
Plus, wonderful news on two separate medical fronts! Firstly for those who have been afflicted with injuries to their spines, new hope: a common blue food dye may hold the cure - can you believe it? Read the article... the discovery seems to have come out of left field, which seems to be like most major discoveries - take penicillin for example, which was just a failed experiment that resulted in millions of saved lives over the decades. The other bit of fantastic medical news? Canadian researchers have succeeded in creating stems cells from normal skin cell samples, eliminating the moral questions of using embryonic stem cells from foetuses to treat patients. As a bonus, their method does not have a high possibility of inducing additional types of cancers that previous methods risked - and to think I've only just heard about it now, when it was announced back in March 2009... seems to have flown under the radar. Great news, indeed!
I spent a good part of the day fiddling with my old workhorse colour printer, theKonica-Minolta Magicolor 2200. My laser toner refills had arrived last week while I was away, so I popped out the toner cartridges one at a time from the printer and refilled them - not as easy as it sounds. While the process was less messy than I had thought, it turns out that one critical step was omitted from the rather nice instructors packed from the eBay seller: how to properly re-seal the toner cartridges once you've refilled them. I opened the laser printer after a few hundred pages had been run, to discover the ultra-fine yellow toner coating the insides of the printer - seems the plug wasn't all that well sealed. The solution? The handy-dandy hot glue gun that everyone should keep in their crafts cupboard. A few large helpings of that around the toner plugs, and all was well. I've been printing off about 1500 colour brochures for Millstream Village, as our newly-formed Merchants Association needs them to get a leg up on getting shoppers to perceive it as a one-stop shopping solution instead of heading into Victoria. The group provided the paper supply( not cheap )and I provided the toner for the first run - seems to be working out well, though I had not counted on the fumes from the laser printer being so potent. Whew! Open those windows and crack out the fans again... because a recent study shows that prolonged exposure to toner particles may be bad for your health!
Aug 12 - Two year old Tax Troubles?
After reading this article about how Canada has the third-highest cell phone rates in the world, I've decided to put my own cell phone on 'vacation disconnect' for a few months - enough is enough. Seeing as I already have a store cell phone to use for work-related matters, plus a home phone and a Vonage 'net phone( for all those Niagara folks who never call...? )it just makes sense. I don't get out much any more, so the thing mainly gets used for calling into work and the like - a waste of the $50.00-plus a month I've managed to 'reduce' my bill to. So take that, Telus... I'll be away from the phone when you call. *grins*
I spent most of my morning gathering paperwork for the CRA, going through old bills to find those related to my moving expenses in late 2007, almost 2 years ago. I found most of them, and even managed to get WestJet to email me a copy of my ticket purchase for the flight out here - THAT was a triumph! However, I have the sinking feeling that the CRA are going to be jerks and disallow some things, though I have no idea what - their website is frustratingly vague, and when I filed with QuickTax.ca there was no disclaimer or context-help that popped up to break down what I could and couldn't claim, so I used common sense as best I could.
Bonus: for no particular reason: here is a size comparison of various movie monsters. Just because we all love monsters, except when they're corporations...
Aug 13 - Gold!
Yes, it's true... MMart is ramping up to start buying gold by the end of the month. Jumping on the same bandwagon those low-production-value TV ads blare at you about, we're going to be buying people's scrap gold. Watches, rings, bracelets, necklaces, earrings... even broken jewelery are all accepted. But first we have to learn how to tell if it's real gold or not, so that's why I was in for training today at 9:30am in Victoria. It was mostly a pleasant experience, though I was a little wary of some of the procedures and ended up needing some more practice on a few of them - other parts I grasped quite easily, I was pleased to discover. Though I had to train today, my store won't be buying gold immediately as we're an Open Concept store, meaning no glass. So no gold being handled for security reasons in-store - yet.
Also, it doesn't help that my laptop's wireless connection has been flaking out all this week, losing its grip on the DIR-655 router a few times an hour and necessitating my physically resetting the wireless each time. Very, Very Frustrating... and Gateway has been little help, as their second response to my email told me to check to see if there was a problem with my internet provider - idiots. I had told them my parent's laptop was working flawlessly on the same router and ISP connection, yet they tell me that? My third email got a response to go through this checklist to solve the problem... which annoyed me so much that I sat down and brainstormed all the things that I myself thought might be the problem... and fixed it!
Aug 14 - Gaming Goes Bust
Sadly, it seems the gold rush is over for the video game industry: sales are in freefall right now, so I guess it's a good thing I didn't decide to move to Edmonton in 2007 to try to get a job with BioWare Inc. - who incidentally were recently purchased by Electronic Arts, one of the biggest companies in the industry. Perhaps more people are finding out about sites like Good Ol' Gaming.com and buying the 'better' games of yesteryear, rather than the high-amperage low-value cheap shots that they call games today. Though I am partial to some flash-based games out there, like this one: Defense Fleet makes shooting spaceships fun again!
The big moneymakers these days are MMO's... apart from World Of Warcraft and Second Life, there's not many of them that can boast over a million members. At least, not yet. Star Trek Online should become one of the Big MMO's when it's released... whenever that is, as no date has been set even tentatively. Until that happens, Trek fans will have to content themselves with things like this glorious gallery of screenshots from the developer. Myself, I just want to see how well put-together the thing is, as the franchise has millions upon millions of fans the world over - I got a kick out of playing Klingon Academy back in the day( circa 2000 A.D. )on my old PC, simply because the ships were so beautfiully rendered... and blew up Real Nice.
News has reached me from my friends at io9.com that the sequel to The Dark Crystal has entered the pre-production stage! One of my favourite films of all time, the epic fantasy without a single live recognizably-human actor still stands as one of the landmark works of imagination put to film. I own the AnniversaryEdition DVD, and some of the extras show what an incredible amount of hard work was poured into making every detail of the film unique according to the vision of Jim Henson, may he R.I.P. - we miss ya, Jim.
Aug 15 - MS Office at long last
I stopped by Future Shop before work this morning to pick up a copy of MS Office 2007: Home & Student, which was $50.00 off this week - quite a bargain, though still not as cheap as I'd like. While I've enjoyed using OpenOffice for some time now, I haven't been able to get the spellchecker to work - at all. Cutting and pasting things to online services like Orangoo.com is cheap, sure... but time-consuming and that's something I find myself having less and less of as the summer winds to a close. So with the Legal Copy of MS:Office, I can actually install it on 3 different machines, as it comes with a 3-unit lisence - nice! I also finally scored a copy of the fifth season of Alias, which I've been wanting for some time but been unwilling to pay up to $42.99 CAN for - that's damned closed to robbery, in my books. So I've waited for a few years now, patiently, until I spotted it on sale... and thus, it was mine. Now that I can't recall what's gone on since I last watched the show, I've begun again from Season 2's midpoint... but now I can finish the run!
Work today was rather steady, which was nice to see, as my bonus as a manager only kicks in if we actually start making decent progress towards our revenue targets... things for the last while have been hard to predict and thus stressful as I try to figure out ways to get people in the door on a more regular basis. Plus, my trainee was sick today, so I didn't get much Manager Stuff done at all, as the door kept summoning me back to the front counter - it is always better to get a rush of customers, then a steady... plodding... pace... of one every 10 minutes or so. You can't get anything done: you are sitting for about a minute at the back work area when the door rings again - sigh and repeat.
Aug 16 - Call of Duty day off
Ah, at last... my weekly day off. So nice to relax... and do everything I couldn't during the week. First off: install 2 grab-bar handles by the hottub, so that my mom can actually use the thing once the weather starts cooling off. Or anytime really, when you think about it. Nice to get them @ 40% off too, a large and a small one, stainless steel both. Which made the installation harder, as the screws had rather soft heads on them, meaning it took longer to carefully get them seated in the wall and resulted in some rather impressive blisters from doing it all manually - nice start to the day.
So I took some hours off and gamed, playing COD4 with Matt, then later joined by Dave and a new friend, Steve... who also brought in some friends. I played 'Hardcore Deathmatch' for the first time... meaning no radar and much more damage per shot. So I died. A lot. I called it quits in the early afternoon for a bit, after a game where I scored 2 kills... and died 18 times - how's that for feeling frustrated, eh? I've been spending the other parts of my day recording things off my parent's DVR to make room; I managed to clear about 8 hours worth of movies like Shrek2 outta there onto recordable DVD's - those things never really caught on as much as the DVR's did, as the DVR's are so much easier to use for the average person.
The evening saw me head back to COD4 with Lucas, Dave, Bill, Steve and others... and it wasn't too bad. I put in a solid showing, though I faded towards the end - I managed to run up a few kill streaks, including several Air Strikes - not too bad considering the more difficult nature of Hardcore Mode in COD4. I still miss my Halo days though, truth be told - I guess that's why I've never traded in my copies of Halo2 or Halo3, despite the limitations of the 'outdated' gameplay modes. Hard to believe that something that was so much fun is now considered 'unplayable' by so many people, but that's technology for you: always advancing and leaving things in the dust.
I have to say, I feel much better after the vacation, though I'm still a bit tired. Seeing as I managed to 'beat the heat' by leaving Niagara when I did to head back to BC( and the weather here is going to be cool for the next long while too! )makes me all the happier - sorry folks, try to keep cool back there!
