A busy, busy week at work... which is really boring to relate, so I've refrained. Mail in your thanks!
Sept 13 - Mondaze
A part of today was relaxing, another part stressful... the third part was busy, as I clambered carefully up onto to the roof today to clean off a lot of the accumulated crap that had built up in the gutters. Annoying, as it caused water to flow into places not intended, despite the excellent gutter-covers that the place has installed - when those are themselves covered in crap, the water just sluices off the roof willy-nilly. It was surprisingly hot up there with the sun today, leading me again to respect the many roofers who come in to cash their cheques every week at work, burned brown by the sun and wrinkled by the wind. Those shingles were scorching!
Ah, progress... sometimes good, sometimes bad. In the case of the Wheel of Time series, the next book is still being written, but in the meantime a large resource has shut down: WOTmania.com has closed as of Aug. 31st of this year. Thankfully, DragonMount.com has taken over the link and has news that some of the data will be integrated into their site, but for those looking to backtrack all the nooks and crannies of the series, it's a setback. Which means that it's time to re-read the thing again... but not until after Christmas, I think. I'm just too busy with other projects, and it requires a fair commitment of time.
io9.com has been running a great series called Future Metro, which examines cities of the future in all their glory. Lots of good reading there, I mean it: there's at least 2 dozen articles about all the aspects of what it will be like to be living urban in the future... both good and bad, most of them quite solidly scifi.
Sept 14 - Golden Showers
Did I mention that we're now buying gold at MMart? Yep... haul in your old jewelery or whatnot made of real gold, and we'll hand over cash for it - a competitive amount, believe it or not. Today I had tangible proof of that: a guy came in to sell a heavy gold-link bracelet he'd bought in Korea years ago, and after all was said and done he got back nearly $600.0 CAN. Now THAT is a solid bit of change in your pocket... and it also gives me an idea on how I might be able to turn the current market for gold to my advantage, if I can determine how a few other bits might fit into a - puzzle. More on that next week.
This is kind of useful: you can look up just about anyone on the 'net using 123people.com, but I found it more entertaining to look myself up and see how many more people out there shared my name. What they do, where they are, that sort of thing - kind of like tracking down a few clones you didn't know about.
Other things you may not know about: shower heads harbouring germs? Yep, that's just one more thing to worry about... I still remember from when I was a little kid being irrationally worried about spiders in the shower head( no idea why )but now it's apparently true that showers MAY be bad for you. Only if you're not in the greatest of health, mind you, but sometimes I get a little sick of hearing how many things are bad for you these days. Maybe hermits had it right: live simply, live away from civilization, and be happy?
Sept 15 - Games and Books
In the world of videogames, there are quite a lot of tried-and-true formulas... which is good, as most work fairly well, but after a while people tend to yawn and go "Sure, it LOOKS nice, but it's the same ol' shooter/side-scroller/rpg that's been done to death already." Which is why when a game like Scribblenauts comes along, gamers sit up and take notice, because, well... it's fun! Like BrainAge and similar games for the DS, it's the unique style of gameplay that sets Scibblenauts apart: it's text-based action. While that may seem like a misnomer, it sounds like a blast and promises hours of entertainment; if you have a DS, I'd check it out... as for me, I'll have to wait for it to come out for another platform, if that happens. Darn the luck. I'm still waiting for the re-release of Mechwarrior4, which has had a recent bit of news assuring people that it IS coming... can't wait!
Oh, and this is one game I have to get: Gratuitous Space Battles, which "aims to bring the over-the-top explodiness( sic. )back into space games" - how cool is that? Stuff all that hours-long resource-gathering, the tedious buildup and the too-brief battles - this one is all about Big Explosions, as that's where all the fun is, right? I can't wait 'till it's out! Though I still miss Earth & Beyond... thankfully, a Canadian site has kept hope alive.
My bedtime reading this last week has been to dig into the rare book I found at Booksmart in Niagara, the oft-sought( and recently available on Amazon )Malevil. Originally published in 1972, the book is rather a slow-starter, as it often dives into the intricacies of French cultural mores or describing the rather indelicate familial relations of the main characters. Which in themselves are fine, for the author( Robert Merle )plainly has great knowledge of such matters - being French. Still, it is slow going; I am already 243 pages in, while finding the survivors just starting to get about the business of thinking about the necessities of such survival - no Hollywood-style action novel, this one. It is along the lines of what I find fascinating about the post-apocalyptic genre though( akin to the survival-horror zombie genre too ): what would you do if it happened to you?
Sept 16 - No More Songs
Woof, a long day. Hopped onto the bus( at the new terminal 10 minutes walk from my house )running to Victoria at 9am, and arrived a mere 20 minutes later. Plenty of time to grab a coffee and settle in for the manager's meeting, which zoomed along nicely until about 4pm... then it was back to Millstream to work the remainder of the shift. Which was deja-vu all over again, as I got a call whilst on the bus in the AM that the water cooler had leaked AGAIN, so the place was soaked. The cleanup guys had been there already, so I walked into a roaring den of noise as high-flow fans blasted air across the soaked carpets while a fridge-sized dehumidifier pulled gallons of water from the air.
I was saddened to learn today that the lady third of the popular trio Peter, Paul and Mary has passed away due to cancer today. All my life, people usually made one joke or another whenever a Paul or a Mary was around, asking where the 'third person' of the trio was hiding. How sad that now there are only 2 of those 3 singers left.
News today as well about the emergence of the internet as a movie medium: Blockbuster is closing over 1500 stores. Which isn't news to me, as it's probably been ten years since I last rented a movie - seriously. I'd rather buy the movie( on sale of course ) and take the time to enjoy it at my leisure more than a few times. While I'm not the person to talk about buying instead of renting per se in most things, I don't think that there's much of a difference between renting a new movie twice and buying it on sale at a later date. It all depends on when you want to see it( apart from the theater )and in my case, I can usually wait for some time without issue.
Going out to a movie is a nice way to spend the evening... especially if you had someone like Natalie Portman on your arm. Wow, talk about dressed to die for! Though from what I hear, the G.I.Joe movie is NOT one you want to take a date to... or see by yourself. Or rent on DVD. Maybe they should have made it an animated feature? If so, they should have done it in this style - very similar to one of my favourite animated shows, Samurai Jack, which tore down quite a few walls in animation when it came out - brilliant.
Sept 17 - Breaking the Wall
Going out to a movie is a nice way to spend the evening... especially if you had someone like Natalie Portman on your arm. Wow, talk about dressed to die for! Though from what I hear, the G.I.Joe movie is NOT one you want to take a date to... or see by yourself. Or rent on DVD. Maybe they should have made it an animated feature? If so, they should have done it in this style - very similar to one of my favourite animated shows, Samurai Jack, which tore down quite a few walls in animation when it came out - brilliant.
On walls: what the heck? I know I've made a few jokes about the Berlin Wall construction zone in St. Catharines( QEW work cutting the city in half )but get this: 1 in 7 Germans WANT the Berlin Wall BACK. How crazy is that? They'd probably say so in Copenhagen, where the car is NOT king, but the bicycle is: more than half the population rides a bicycle every day. The city has just announced plans to create a network of 'bike highways' where commuters can ride from the suburbs to the city core without crossing paths with cars in dangerous ways. Fantastic - check it out here, another victory for the two-wheeled pedal commuter, of which I'm one.
Everyone likes to think that their works will live on beyond them, that their memory will linger in the minds of those who have known of them or even their work. But what happens when tragedy or disaster strikes, leaving things undone or unsaid to those who matter most to us? I've wondered about this myself, having just begun to fill out a will( all those DVD's have to go somewhere, right? )and made out a few words for everyone who matters in my life. Yet what if I don't have a chance to leave those words in the right location? Thanks to FromBeyond2U.com, this no longer has to worry some folk - but you still have to set those words down in the first place, or they will go unsaid.
Sept 18 - Bill Me, don't Salt Me
Ah, payday at last - that day when you breathe a sigh of relief, pay some( or most, if you're lucky )of your current bills, then grab what money remains on either end and try to stretch it until the next payday. I was surprised to learn from a recent article that close to 3 in 5 Canadians live paycheque to paycheque these days, having little in the way of savings, even RRSP's. That's a lot of people with no safety net, which these days is a stinky way to live... not that most( if not all )of those 3 in 5 people would rather put away money, but living beyond our means seems to be the name of the game in modern society.
Reduction would seem to be in order, as I did( somewhat )when I divested myself of a portion of my poesessions in moving out here. Not enough, mind you, and I'm not living in a one-room basement bachelor pad either - which seems to be the problem, more or less. How can you enjoy a huge home of your own with a massive mortgage( and taxes, and utilities )which is filled with a lot of expensive things that you likely got on credit and are now slowly paying back at ruinous rates? Makes you want to change a few things, including your diet - 1 in 6 people worldwide have hypertension, of which up to 1/3 of those can be related to too much salt in their diet. Yep, that's right: too much time at McDonald's or eating pre-made meals, all loaded with sodium for 'taste and preservation' purposes. Ick.
Bacon Salt is something I have to try though - I mean, it's bacon. And salt. In moderation, it's probably part of some corner of a food group, somewhere, if you squint at it correctly. Plus, they have a great blog entry on how to start a food company for less than 5K - worth the read, as I had no idea of the ins and outs involved in getting a product to market, despite my extensive reading on entrepranuership in the last few years.
Sept 19 - Aaarrrrr, Matey! Thar be monsters in that lake!
It was International Talk Like A Pirate Day today, but I'd forgotten... so I could have spent a good portion of today Talking Pirate to people, which would have been cool. Here's a nice piratical pictoral summary from the fine folks at SuperPunch - I especially like the Pirate Squirrels, very tasteful.
Tasty fish too: a local woman spotted some kind of unusual creature in Cameron Lake, which isn't too far from here on Vancouver Island. Local mystery - I love it!
Unlike work, which was an exercise in futility where one unusual problem after another cropped up needing immediate solutions. I managed to find one each time, but before I knew it closing time had arrived and all the things I had wanted to accomplish today were only half-done. We are redoing all of our office paperwork, reorganizing it to standardize all systems across canada so that every branch has the exact same setup - a great idea, but a ton of work to enable if there's just one person doing it.
Late in the evening, I watched an interesting documentary called 'Gun Nation' about the proliferation of guns in American and its effect on their society. The cuplrit is their Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which enshrines as an unalterable right the ability of any US citizen to bear arms. What they do with those arms is the focus of the documentary, which did a credible job of looking at both the pros and cons of living in a nation with millions of guns in the hands of criminals and honest citizens alike. A good site for further information about the gun control issue in the US is GunCite.com, which has a lot of excellent material and further links.
Sept 20 - Call of TV
A beautiful day, if a bit cold in the morning( heck, that's the fall, who cares? )but it warmed up nicely by the afternoon. I spent most of the hours around lunch gaming online with Dave, Simon and later on Matt, in COD4 - with a few good games and more than a few stinkers by session's end. There was even a Griefer in one of the later games, who delighted in teamkilling people - myself and a few others reported his behaviour, but sadly there's no specific category for rampant teamkilling or just being a jackass. I just don't understand people who delight in making life miserable for others, though perhaps it arises from some twisted need for attention of any kind, even derision and scorn.
There's the usual assortment of new shows premiering this fall on TV, mostly bad, but some good. One of the more unexpected ones is The Cleveland Show, which has the character of the same name being spun off from The Family Guy into his own sitcom - different, and possible interesting. Other series I'm going to try to catch are Flash Forward( based on the novel by fave Robert Sawyer )and the remake of 'V' with those lizardly aliens we love to hate. Even Fringe is starting to grow on me, though I've not caught more than a few episodes.
After a few pleasant hours out on the deck( the sun was brillant on the lake )I finished the evening working on the blog whilst watching Ferris Bueller's Day Off, quite appropriate for today, all in all. The parade scene is one of my faves( Twist and Shout! )as is the scene where Ferris and Cameron are trying to reverse the mileage on the Ferrari...
We broke 2800 hits on the 19th - Tah-rah!
Sept 13 - Mondaze
A part of today was relaxing, another part stressful... the third part was busy, as I clambered carefully up onto to the roof today to clean off a lot of the accumulated crap that had built up in the gutters. Annoying, as it caused water to flow into places not intended, despite the excellent gutter-covers that the place has installed - when those are themselves covered in crap, the water just sluices off the roof willy-nilly. It was surprisingly hot up there with the sun today, leading me again to respect the many roofers who come in to cash their cheques every week at work, burned brown by the sun and wrinkled by the wind. Those shingles were scorching!
Ah, progress... sometimes good, sometimes bad. In the case of the Wheel of Time series, the next book is still being written, but in the meantime a large resource has shut down: WOTmania.com has closed as of Aug. 31st of this year. Thankfully, DragonMount.com has taken over the link and has news that some of the data will be integrated into their site, but for those looking to backtrack all the nooks and crannies of the series, it's a setback. Which means that it's time to re-read the thing again... but not until after Christmas, I think. I'm just too busy with other projects, and it requires a fair commitment of time.
io9.com has been running a great series called Future Metro, which examines cities of the future in all their glory. Lots of good reading there, I mean it: there's at least 2 dozen articles about all the aspects of what it will be like to be living urban in the future... both good and bad, most of them quite solidly scifi.
Sept 14 - Golden Showers
Did I mention that we're now buying gold at MMart? Yep... haul in your old jewelery or whatnot made of real gold, and we'll hand over cash for it - a competitive amount, believe it or not. Today I had tangible proof of that: a guy came in to sell a heavy gold-link bracelet he'd bought in Korea years ago, and after all was said and done he got back nearly $600.0 CAN. Now THAT is a solid bit of change in your pocket... and it also gives me an idea on how I might be able to turn the current market for gold to my advantage, if I can determine how a few other bits might fit into a - puzzle. More on that next week.
This is kind of useful: you can look up just about anyone on the 'net using 123people.com, but I found it more entertaining to look myself up and see how many more people out there shared my name. What they do, where they are, that sort of thing - kind of like tracking down a few clones you didn't know about.
Other things you may not know about: shower heads harbouring germs? Yep, that's just one more thing to worry about... I still remember from when I was a little kid being irrationally worried about spiders in the shower head( no idea why )but now it's apparently true that showers MAY be bad for you. Only if you're not in the greatest of health, mind you, but sometimes I get a little sick of hearing how many things are bad for you these days. Maybe hermits had it right: live simply, live away from civilization, and be happy?
Sept 15 - Games and Books
In the world of videogames, there are quite a lot of tried-and-true formulas... which is good, as most work fairly well, but after a while people tend to yawn and go "Sure, it LOOKS nice, but it's the same ol' shooter/side-scroller/rpg that's been done to death already." Which is why when a game like Scribblenauts comes along, gamers sit up and take notice, because, well... it's fun! Like BrainAge and similar games for the DS, it's the unique style of gameplay that sets Scibblenauts apart: it's text-based action. While that may seem like a misnomer, it sounds like a blast and promises hours of entertainment; if you have a DS, I'd check it out... as for me, I'll have to wait for it to come out for another platform, if that happens. Darn the luck. I'm still waiting for the re-release of Mechwarrior4, which has had a recent bit of news assuring people that it IS coming... can't wait!
Oh, and this is one game I have to get: Gratuitous Space Battles, which "aims to bring the over-the-top explodiness( sic. )back into space games" - how cool is that? Stuff all that hours-long resource-gathering, the tedious buildup and the too-brief battles - this one is all about Big Explosions, as that's where all the fun is, right? I can't wait 'till it's out! Though I still miss Earth & Beyond... thankfully, a Canadian site has kept hope alive.
My bedtime reading this last week has been to dig into the rare book I found at Booksmart in Niagara, the oft-sought( and recently available on Amazon )Malevil. Originally published in 1972, the book is rather a slow-starter, as it often dives into the intricacies of French cultural mores or describing the rather indelicate familial relations of the main characters. Which in themselves are fine, for the author( Robert Merle )plainly has great knowledge of such matters - being French. Still, it is slow going; I am already 243 pages in, while finding the survivors just starting to get about the business of thinking about the necessities of such survival - no Hollywood-style action novel, this one. It is along the lines of what I find fascinating about the post-apocalyptic genre though( akin to the survival-horror zombie genre too ): what would you do if it happened to you?
Sept 16 - No More Songs
Woof, a long day. Hopped onto the bus( at the new terminal 10 minutes walk from my house )running to Victoria at 9am, and arrived a mere 20 minutes later. Plenty of time to grab a coffee and settle in for the manager's meeting, which zoomed along nicely until about 4pm... then it was back to Millstream to work the remainder of the shift. Which was deja-vu all over again, as I got a call whilst on the bus in the AM that the water cooler had leaked AGAIN, so the place was soaked. The cleanup guys had been there already, so I walked into a roaring den of noise as high-flow fans blasted air across the soaked carpets while a fridge-sized dehumidifier pulled gallons of water from the air.
I was saddened to learn today that the lady third of the popular trio Peter, Paul and Mary has passed away due to cancer today. All my life, people usually made one joke or another whenever a Paul or a Mary was around, asking where the 'third person' of the trio was hiding. How sad that now there are only 2 of those 3 singers left.
News today as well about the emergence of the internet as a movie medium: Blockbuster is closing over 1500 stores. Which isn't news to me, as it's probably been ten years since I last rented a movie - seriously. I'd rather buy the movie( on sale of course ) and take the time to enjoy it at my leisure more than a few times. While I'm not the person to talk about buying instead of renting per se in most things, I don't think that there's much of a difference between renting a new movie twice and buying it on sale at a later date. It all depends on when you want to see it( apart from the theater )and in my case, I can usually wait for some time without issue.
Going out to a movie is a nice way to spend the evening... especially if you had someone like Natalie Portman on your arm. Wow, talk about dressed to die for! Though from what I hear, the G.I.Joe movie is NOT one you want to take a date to... or see by yourself. Or rent on DVD. Maybe they should have made it an animated feature? If so, they should have done it in this style - very similar to one of my favourite animated shows, Samurai Jack, which tore down quite a few walls in animation when it came out - brilliant.
Sept 17 - Breaking the Wall
Going out to a movie is a nice way to spend the evening... especially if you had someone like Natalie Portman on your arm. Wow, talk about dressed to die for! Though from what I hear, the G.I.Joe movie is NOT one you want to take a date to... or see by yourself. Or rent on DVD. Maybe they should have made it an animated feature? If so, they should have done it in this style - very similar to one of my favourite animated shows, Samurai Jack, which tore down quite a few walls in animation when it came out - brilliant.
On walls: what the heck? I know I've made a few jokes about the Berlin Wall construction zone in St. Catharines( QEW work cutting the city in half )but get this: 1 in 7 Germans WANT the Berlin Wall BACK. How crazy is that? They'd probably say so in Copenhagen, where the car is NOT king, but the bicycle is: more than half the population rides a bicycle every day. The city has just announced plans to create a network of 'bike highways' where commuters can ride from the suburbs to the city core without crossing paths with cars in dangerous ways. Fantastic - check it out here, another victory for the two-wheeled pedal commuter, of which I'm one.
Everyone likes to think that their works will live on beyond them, that their memory will linger in the minds of those who have known of them or even their work. But what happens when tragedy or disaster strikes, leaving things undone or unsaid to those who matter most to us? I've wondered about this myself, having just begun to fill out a will( all those DVD's have to go somewhere, right? )and made out a few words for everyone who matters in my life. Yet what if I don't have a chance to leave those words in the right location? Thanks to FromBeyond2U.com, this no longer has to worry some folk - but you still have to set those words down in the first place, or they will go unsaid.
Sept 18 - Bill Me, don't Salt Me
Ah, payday at last - that day when you breathe a sigh of relief, pay some( or most, if you're lucky )of your current bills, then grab what money remains on either end and try to stretch it until the next payday. I was surprised to learn from a recent article that close to 3 in 5 Canadians live paycheque to paycheque these days, having little in the way of savings, even RRSP's. That's a lot of people with no safety net, which these days is a stinky way to live... not that most( if not all )of those 3 in 5 people would rather put away money, but living beyond our means seems to be the name of the game in modern society.
Reduction would seem to be in order, as I did( somewhat )when I divested myself of a portion of my poesessions in moving out here. Not enough, mind you, and I'm not living in a one-room basement bachelor pad either - which seems to be the problem, more or less. How can you enjoy a huge home of your own with a massive mortgage( and taxes, and utilities )which is filled with a lot of expensive things that you likely got on credit and are now slowly paying back at ruinous rates? Makes you want to change a few things, including your diet - 1 in 6 people worldwide have hypertension, of which up to 1/3 of those can be related to too much salt in their diet. Yep, that's right: too much time at McDonald's or eating pre-made meals, all loaded with sodium for 'taste and preservation' purposes. Ick.
Bacon Salt is something I have to try though - I mean, it's bacon. And salt. In moderation, it's probably part of some corner of a food group, somewhere, if you squint at it correctly. Plus, they have a great blog entry on how to start a food company for less than 5K - worth the read, as I had no idea of the ins and outs involved in getting a product to market, despite my extensive reading on entrepranuership in the last few years.
Sept 19 - Aaarrrrr, Matey! Thar be monsters in that lake!
It was International Talk Like A Pirate Day today, but I'd forgotten... so I could have spent a good portion of today Talking Pirate to people, which would have been cool. Here's a nice piratical pictoral summary from the fine folks at SuperPunch - I especially like the Pirate Squirrels, very tasteful.
Tasty fish too: a local woman spotted some kind of unusual creature in Cameron Lake, which isn't too far from here on Vancouver Island. Local mystery - I love it!
Unlike work, which was an exercise in futility where one unusual problem after another cropped up needing immediate solutions. I managed to find one each time, but before I knew it closing time had arrived and all the things I had wanted to accomplish today were only half-done. We are redoing all of our office paperwork, reorganizing it to standardize all systems across canada so that every branch has the exact same setup - a great idea, but a ton of work to enable if there's just one person doing it.
Late in the evening, I watched an interesting documentary called 'Gun Nation' about the proliferation of guns in American and its effect on their society. The cuplrit is their Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which enshrines as an unalterable right the ability of any US citizen to bear arms. What they do with those arms is the focus of the documentary, which did a credible job of looking at both the pros and cons of living in a nation with millions of guns in the hands of criminals and honest citizens alike. A good site for further information about the gun control issue in the US is GunCite.com, which has a lot of excellent material and further links.
Sept 20 - Call of TV
A beautiful day, if a bit cold in the morning( heck, that's the fall, who cares? )but it warmed up nicely by the afternoon. I spent most of the hours around lunch gaming online with Dave, Simon and later on Matt, in COD4 - with a few good games and more than a few stinkers by session's end. There was even a Griefer in one of the later games, who delighted in teamkilling people - myself and a few others reported his behaviour, but sadly there's no specific category for rampant teamkilling or just being a jackass. I just don't understand people who delight in making life miserable for others, though perhaps it arises from some twisted need for attention of any kind, even derision and scorn.
There's the usual assortment of new shows premiering this fall on TV, mostly bad, but some good. One of the more unexpected ones is The Cleveland Show, which has the character of the same name being spun off from The Family Guy into his own sitcom - different, and possible interesting. Other series I'm going to try to catch are Flash Forward( based on the novel by fave Robert Sawyer )and the remake of 'V' with those lizardly aliens we love to hate. Even Fringe is starting to grow on me, though I've not caught more than a few episodes.
After a few pleasant hours out on the deck( the sun was brillant on the lake )I finished the evening working on the blog whilst watching Ferris Bueller's Day Off, quite appropriate for today, all in all. The parade scene is one of my faves( Twist and Shout! )as is the scene where Ferris and Cameron are trying to reverse the mileage on the Ferrari...
We broke 2800 hits on the 19th - Tah-rah!
