Olympics, Optometrists and Omissions

The word of the week is: ecstatic - are you, eh?

Feb 22 – Time for Books

2009 is barely dead and gone, yet it’s already time to look back and remember. Time’s Top Ten of Everything in 2009 has 50 different lists that cover everything from books to the bizarre. One thing that is on their list is The Windup Girl, a story about a near future where bioengineered flesh power has replaced all other technology as the way to run the world, which is a cool concept; it’d be cooler if I could find the book locally, but they’re sold out. Still, we live in an online world, and I’ll probably order it though Amazon.ca or Chapters.ca ... a used copy would be cheaper, naturally.

Yet there are many alternatives to the giant sellers online: AbeBooks.com helps smaller booksellers make their stock available to the world, especially the rare and out-of-print books. The Book Depository may actually be better than Amazon, as a quick comparison of book prices gives the edge to TBD and not Amazon by as much as ten dollars a title. Even though The Book Depository has FREE shipping, you have to watch for those Customs and duties charged - that’s where things can really add to the cost.

Years in the making, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter is still coming along strong... though the magic may be fading for the fan base as the years pass. I’m sure the experience may be neat for kids and die-hard fans; as for me, the deal-breaker is that Hogwart’s is a model on a hilltop. How cheap is that? No talking portraits, moving stairs or giant trolls roaming the halls... just expensive shops down below selling plastic wands and witch’s hats. No magic there, just commerce.

Feb 23 – Blurry News

Mmm... pancakes. I can’t believe I forgot that today was Pancake Day 2010, which in times past is also called Shrove Tuesday, the last day before Lent that people can eat forbidden foods. That was never part of my upbringing, as I always thought it was damned silly that people could be denied access to one’s chosen afterlife if you ate an egg too close to a date on a calendar. But then people think a lot of silly things when it comes to religion, so what’s one more thing on the list? I’ll just smile around a nice mouthful of fresh, fluffy apple pancakes, which  I’m sure will cook up really nicely on a griddle in Hades.

After work today, I went in and picked up my new glasses. They fit my head perfectly! Unfortunately, the lens in the right eye is out of focus; it’s useless for vision, and it’s not a case of my eye needing to adjust – the distance is blurred, which shouldn’t occur as the new prescription is slightly more powerful than the old. Obviously I’m upset, but WalMart has a 60-day prescription guarantee, allowing me time to get to my optometrist to see what’s gone wrong.

When I was finally home, I finished watching Stargate: Atlantis during dinner – the final episode of the final fifth season. The previous episode, Vegas, was an odd trans-dimensional story variant that I found interesting in that it actually made it to the screen, but it certainly didn’t end well. I could almost say the same for the final episode: it tried hard to have some closure, but you could tell that they were stretching to wrap up loose ends and end things if not on a high note, then a “They will all be OK” sort of note. It still felt a little cheap and cheesy, though not as surprising as learning how MUCH of what we see on TV and the web is actually done by green screens, as shown by Stargate Studios demo reel.

Feb 24 – What’s this lawn doing here?

Passing by green lawns, trees and some hardier flowers on the way to work has become a treat lately – the last week of good weather has really ‘Springed’ things up here. The local school has recently had a lot of work done to it, including roadwork... and today they laid down fresh green sod( that’s a pic! )as part of the final landscaping. Fresh grass in February, growing fine in wintertime; unbelievable anywhere else in Canada!

All right, all right... I don’t want to rant about this, or even sound like an old guy with a walker screaming at kids to Get Off My Lawn. But who actually buys those stupid Minipops albums on television? Every time I flip channels, I see the latest cutesy-kids-singing crap being hocked for a low, low price, and I wonder who the hell would even admit to owning the past twenty-whatever number of albums? Lonely grandparents whose grandkids never come to see them? People with no musical taste? Masochists?

I mentioned cheesy when talking about Atlantis yesterday, but the same doesn’t apply to a cool web series called appropriately enough Riese: The Series. I wish I could point you to something other than a trailer, but apparently Riese is now in development for release though a UK media company and that means that all current episodes have been suspended from web availability –for now. Check back soon.

Feb 25 –“ Math Is Hard” - Barbie

Math and I have never got along well, much like spaghetti and milk: we just don’t mix properly. This has pushed me more along towards the liberal arts, but I’ve always felt a lack whenever I see an old scientific calculator sitting unused in a drawer. Now there’s help for folk like me: Steven Strogatz, a Cornell professor, is writing a blog in The New York Times to help people take a second shot at ‘getting’ math. It’s simple , straightforward and written from an adult POV, and I think I’ll be checking it out over the next while.

Back to the eye doctor tonight, to get my eyes re-checked... again. After all was said and done, it turns out my prescription has changed since my visit last week, which the doctor said was very, very rare – there are checks and methods in place to ensure that a prescription IS what it’s supposed to be when prescribed. So I have to go to my family doctor, get checked out for a bunch of things including diabetes, all as a precaution to eliminate other possibilities that may affect my eyes. Then it’s back to the optometrist for another test in a few week’s time, when I hope my eyes will co-operate. Frustrating!

Because it’s all about proper functionality, right? Reminds me of why I’ve gravitated away from using FireFox, which has become slower and more bloated as time goes on. I usually have several dozen tabs open at a time: regular places I go, articles I find interesting( perhaps for the blog )and other things I find along the way. This eats up a LOT of memory over time, meaning my twice-daily laptop reboots( thanks to  Windows #$%@! 7 ... )take even longer when I restart FireFox. But not any more: I’ve finally found a truly useful plugin called BarTab, which keeps track of the websites you’ve got open in tabs, but doesn’t actually open those sites in the tab until you click there specifically. This saves a ton of memory and load times, allowing me to actually use FireFox regularly again. Huzzah for smart software design!

Feb 26 – Tax Games

Holy guacamole – it was a Crazy Friday at work today. In a word: taxes! All those T4’s are hitting the mail this week, and some who step through the door are still clutching them in unopened envelopes.  As for taxes themselves, people in general just don’t get how they work; I constantly hear “Well I PAID this much in taxes, so I get ALL that BACK, right?” – ummm, no. If taxes were that simple, Farmer Bob could let his field hands do them on the side, in between baling hay and milking the cows in the morning. While I do enjoy giving people a leg up on how taxes work, I have been referring quite a few this year to TaxTips.ca, as well as some excellent advice on RRSP’s from MoneySense.ca – really good stuff there!

After just discovering it yesterday, I’m seriously considering a monthly subscription to GameTap.com – hundreds of PC games for ten bucks a month? Quite the deal... and they have a decent enough library, though more than half are games I don’t think I’ll ever bother trying( some are just crap ). What I want to know though, is where can I buy more free time to play those games... and the ones still on my shelf. This may be the way of the future though – no more retail packages or discs, just DLC and a credit card.

Not having a physical game to collect might make it hard to find older titles in a few years, unless places like GameTap keep them around in the virtual bargain bins. Before the days of DLC or even CD-ROMs though, games were issued on tiny circuits locked inside fat plastic cartridges for systems like the Atari 2600 and the NES. Of the millions of cartridges sold, only a few have ever attained ‘collectable’ status – here are the Top Ten Holy Grails of Console Collectors. Who knows? If you’re browsing a local garage sale, you may just see one of these peeking out from under a pile of Minipops albums...

Feb 27 –  Two Tsunamis???

Living on the West Coast has a lot of benefits: great weather, lovely scenery and healthy air. But it does have it’s drawbacks: things like forest fires, high winds... and earthquakes. Today there were two tremors along faults in the Pacific, resulting in two Tsunami warnings for entire coast of BC as well as most of the Pacific Rim, causing massive evacuations in Hawaii. That lovely view across the hills to the ocean isn’t so great when there’s a five-story high wall of water racing across the horizon at you – you never hear about New York having these sorts of things happen, except in the movies. Fortunately here in BC, not so much as a ripple reached the shore.

Here’s one out of left field: Alan Rickman. Today I was struck by how many films this versatile British actor has been in, ranging from Die Hard to Galaxy Quest to Harry Potter, yet he still flies well below the Hollywood radar. There’s a very funny clip from the British TV show QI where they talk about Alan; afterwards, check out the Family Guy clip on the right listing called Alan Rickman’s Answering Machine...

I’m still considering getting my parents a Wii, to keep them active during the cooler months here, especially as my mom’s mobility keeps getting less and less every year. There’s recent evidence that Wii use helps stroke patients recover too, another reason to ensure people exercise at every age. Another reason to get a Wii: a Proton Pack!! Plus I’m STILL using a ten-year-old Logitech Marble Trackball; it’s easier than a touchpad,
and has no moving parts to break.

Feb 28 – Closing Ceremonies

Earlier in the week, Neil Gaiman posted a letter to Michael Moorcock, in which he stated that it was Michael’s fault that Neil had turned out the way he did. It’s a short but moving fan homage from one writer to another, which I find interesting because I’m only a few years younger than Neil and still developing my writer’s chops. Authors need role models, and if Neil Gaiman is one of mine, I now know that Moorcock was one of his and definitely worth checking out. I’ve only read a tiny bit of Moorcock’s work, mainly a very shortened version of Stormbringer in comic form, so yet again I’ve added him to my must-read-when-time-permits list. I think I need a few years off just to catch up with my interests!

While I was in town on Thursday , I picked up a few new books( I managed to limit myself to 5 )which included the latest instalments in the Wild Cards and The Change series, which I have been falling behind in of late. I still haven’t picked up the final instalments of the Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time  series, mainly as they’re only in hardcover and I just don’t have the room( or budget )to collect in that medium. The first of the final trilogy, The Gathering Storm, is out already and I hope it makes it to paperback soon.

Today was the last day of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, and I would be remiss as a Canadian if I did not mention them here. I am not an athlete, I do not follow sports and in general focus my personal energies elsewhere. But events like the Olympics transcend people’s lives across the world, and here in Canada they have brought the country together in celebration of the Games as little else has in recent memory.  The final Olympic Medal Count for the games shows Canada in 1^st place for Gold with 14 medals and third overall in total medal ranking – enough to bring a smile to the face of most Canadians for some time to come. Quiet pride, but that’s what we’re good at here in this country... along with hockey too, by the way. A gold medal in overtime – how’s that for finishing on a high note? Finally, I watched the Closing Ceremonies with pride and good humour, as I thought they were spot-on in showing how Canada looks at, and is seen by, the world.

Sunday was lovely outside; I spent a few hours in the early afternoon outside on the back deck. The sun was blazing, bringing the temperature into the mid-teens to where I could relax without a jacket and read as well as use the laptop. It was lovely and a definite plus – to sit so close to the still waters of the lake and listen to the wildlife peep and call to each other in the spring-like air was fantastic this time of year.