Stories, Snowballs and Sandra Bullock

The word of the week is apocryhal - don't doubt it.

March 1^st – Put off

It’s... National Procrastination Week! Yes, that’s right... now you can put off doing all those things you had on your list for this week. Officially. In my case, I DO have a few things that can’t wait, but shhh... don’t tell anyone.  Oh, and don’t forget to mark this week on your calendar for next year. Do it later on.

I wish, I wish, I could have procrastinated at work today – it was a zoo, being the first of the month, and I am by myself as usual for 10 hours on a Monday. After all was said and done, I’d ended up serving  1 person every 8 mins for 9 hours solid... plus handling phone calls and trying to get my daily tasks done. YIKES! I was beat enough by the end of the day to get a ride home, as I had no energy left. On the upside, it’s days like today when I prove to myself I can still multitask like a monkey on a banana high, and count it as 9 hours of frenetic mid-level exercise to boot. Keeps the waistline trim, it does!

As I stumbled towards sleep, I came across an interesting site called ShopSavvy. Back in the day, shopping meant that you did your research beforehand, knowing how much an item you were shopping for cost at various other places around. Then came the internet, and you could not only do your research online, but even order those same items without leaving home. Now, with ShopSavvy, you can saunter into any retailer, snap a picture of an item’s UPC, and see how much it’s listed for at local / national competitors – you can even get a map to the nearest place with a lower price! Right now it’s only for the iPhone, but expect this service to expand in the near future. Now that’s useful tech!

March 2 – Tech Tuesday

This is so, so cool: Skinput projects functional keys onto your arm! Much like the awesome Seiko “wrist halo” from the Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within movie, this may be the future of mobile tech. Or we may see things implanted under our skin, much like some ideas from the old Neuromancer and Shadowrun worlds of the cyberpunky 1980’s.

Along with catching up on a lot of things on my day off today, I also tried to save a dead laptop – without success. Emotional people and tech do NOT mix, especially when spinning hard drives and hard floors meet at high speed. Too bad that the laptop was not a later model, most of which now have accelerometers as standard-issue parts with their hard drives. Even now, SSD’s are slowly dropping in price to where they may be affordable for the average-priced laptop in five years or so. Though by then Google predicts that desktops will all but have vanished... does that mean laptops will soon after?

Another part of my day off today was spent cleaning up my files( boring but necessary )on the various drives I have scattered around my den. DiskSpaceFan came in handy with it’s lovely visuals of what’s eating up space on one’s hard drive. Getting rid of duplicate files freed up a ton of drive space for me, and it’s a good thing: now I can start backing things up again!

March 3 – Science and Arby’s

Have you ever wondered how big the Universe is? How would you measure it? A physics student in the US wants to create a new unit of measure to answer just such questions: the Hella. From slang term to universe-spanning unit in only a few years – how’s that for odd?

While I was in town today, I ate at Arby’s - there’s only 1 on Vancouver Island, which is not so strange to me as there were only two in all of Niagara. One of which I lived within walking distance of, but almost never went to because at the time my developing gallstones would remind me painfully every time I tried anything that had been near a deep-fryer. Curly fries being my favourite Arby’s offering, I had to forgo them until I had moved away to BC... and the nearest Arby’s was now a long bus ride into town.

A last... Popular Science online is finally searchable! I used to collect various issues for news on the latest tech; now I get it all instantly via the internet. One thing that doesn’t age well is tech; five years might as well be fifty at the modern pace of advancement. What I like about the old magazines is to see how well past predictions have come true, or more often how they completely missed the boat and were left behind.

March 4 – Flower Power

I have a fairly sizable collection of DVD’s here, with more and more of them sporting the dreaded trailers – oh, how I wish I could skip them! Thanks to C|net, now you can – follow the instructions there and you’ll never have to sit through fifteen minutes of ads for things you don’t want to buy or watch, ever again.

The annual Flower Count ended locally today, with a record number of spring blossoms being counted all over Vancouver island. You can find the results over at Flowercount.com – what it means is: Sweet Spring is here early! Trees here are blooming, the smell of blossoms and green grass is in the air... all this and March has barely begun! Take that, rest of Canada... and winter sports fans: don’t visit Victoria.

Dang -  last week’s blog was missing something bacon-y. So this week I’ll make up for it with Super Bacon! Yes, it’s the next generation of bacon: good for your heart, and still tastes good. Yum and yay!

March 5 – Money Truckin’

Hooray! After years of hoping and wishing, Canada is finally switching it’s currency from paper to plastic – and no, it’s not a form of debit card. We’re going to be getting polymer notes, along the lines of Australia and many other countries in the world, as early as next year. It’s waterproof, long-wearing and best of all: really, really hard to counterfeit. So maybe gas stations will start taking fifties again?

Two sites I pop back to from time to time are DateWrecks.com and CustomersSuck.com – both of which have stories to make you laugh, cry and just wonder about the human race in general. Some days it might be better for that asteroid to hit... and there’s news that there are a LOT more of those coming close to Earth than have been previously thought. Scary!

I walk a fair bit around here, when I’m not cycling, and so I see a lot of traffic pass me by on the road. So I can speak with some authority when I say: I hate pickup trucks... well, really their drivers. I’ve seen more idiots in pickup trucks doing stupid things than in any other vehicle. Running stoplights, speeding, pulling bonehead moves... not to mention the sheer numbers that belch vast clouds of dark diesel exhaust. For a province that espouses such proactive environmental policies, BC really falls down when it comes down vehicular emissions. As well as in issuing licenses to idiots in trucks. Breathing diesel stinks, I have to say – and I didn’t know that there are only TWO places in Canada that require vehicle emissions testing: Southern Ontario and the Lower Mainland of BC. Everywhere else, your vehicle can stink as much as you like...

March 6 – Happy Work Anniversary To Me

I was in town today for a blood test, to check for signs of diabetes – just a precaution given the weird eye exam results I had a few weeks back. Hopefully nothing comes of the tests, as I really don’t need something else to worry about right now. As it is, I’m wondering what exactly is going on with my eyes; my new glasses are sitting on the table next to me, useless as the right lens is totally blurred. Maddening!

It was ten years ago today that I started with MMart – who knew I’d be with them for so long? I certainly didn’t... but then I tend to stick with a job for longer than others, from what I’ve seen. What it means for me is that my vacation time increases, I get an inflated sense of well-being, and lastly a free iPod Nano – not a gold watch, but given than my last long-term employment gift was a jacket, I’ll take tech any day. First thing I’m going to load up on the Nano when it arrives? Why, StarshipSofa podcasts, of course!

Speaking of old places where I used to work: Tim Hortons announced it’s going upscale... a far cry from when I worked there when two people did the work of six. That’s where I learned to juggle tasks like a pro, as the owners( nice as they were )were always woefully understaffed. Though I did enjoy working at the first non-smoking Timmy’s in the entire region – that was a perk, along with free donuts. It almost made up for the horrible uniforms and the idiots on drive-thru(  see my note for March 5^th). I just hope Timmy’s doesn’t make the mistake of confusing upscale decor with raising prices, or they may find themselves in Starbuck’s shoes: closing hundreds of locations only a few years after opening so many.

March 7 – Finished A Story, Oscar!

I woke up at 6am today for some reason( story angst? )and fitfully tried to get some more sleep. I managed to doze on and off, with some strange effects: I dreamed of Fairuza Balk and about being trapped on a southern plantation with crooked cops, obese tourists and ATM’s with card-scanners. Very strange... might be a movie idea in there somewhere! One interesting six-degrees of Kevin Bacon note: Neil Gaiman has asked Fairuza to play the role of Death in his Sandman movie... whenever that manages to finally come together. I think she’d be perfect, though she’s perhaps been pigeonholed as playing ‘crazy’ parts. I also think Fairuza would have been a better fit than Angelina Jolie in 1999’s Girl, Interrupted, but that’s my own opinion.

I had novels on the brain today, and so I googled what the first know novel was. To my surprise, it was nothing Greek but even more ancient: Gilgamesh! Written on stone tablets, you can find a majority of the story at this excellent site. Among the fascinating details: Gilgamesh appears to have been written based on tales about a real person circa 2700 BC, and more amazing still we have the NAME of the author: Shin-eqi-unninni. Who is currently the oldest known human author – I should be so lucky to have my name remembered over four millennia after I am gone. Wow!

Just before 5pm PST, I finished off my final draft of the story The Last Playlist and sent it off to Brian. We had a long chat about the story and other things – I was pleased that he said it “Wasn’t as dry” as some of my other SF work. I’ll see about recording it this week and send the results his way; it may mean I’ll need a better mic, for which I already have one picked out( thanks for the tip, Pierre! ): The Snowball! Not to be confused with another fine podcaster, Steve Saylor, who also happens to be named Snowball... but that’s because he’s an albino. See how easily the world can confuse you...

I finished off the week by watching the Oscars. Steve Martin was the host, Avatar cleaned up, and Sandra Bullock won for Best Actress: all in all, a fairly fun and smile-inducing night. Heck, even Oprah Winfrey was on the show!