Retinas, Retro and Robbery

The word of the week is from BC:  Skookum ... that’s good!

March 29 – Shiny ‘Verse news

It’s been years since I last let anything from McDonald’s into my system, and this photo shows you just how biodegradable food from the Golden Arches is. Makes me regret my time spent lunching on the cheap there in university at times; quarter-pounder meals were well within my student budget then.

Some good Firefly news: more stories are on the way! I picked up a few canon comics last year, but this is great for those fans who want to hear more about the ‘Verse. There was news a while ago about a comic being released this November by Joss Whedon’s brother about the mysterious Shepherd’s Book. I’m hoping the same may happen with the FarScape series, which also had a fair number of comics released to continue the tales from that universe.

March 30 – Eye See

Today I heard on the local news channel that one of the worst places to live in Canada for debt was... the Niagara Region - what??? Data from a recent study found that 74.6% of homeowners in the area are paying between 50-60% of their incomes towards the cost of their homes. The maximum should be around 33-36% total. Yowch! Statistics like that scare me, as I’ve been considering a home( albeit not an extravagant one by any means )given that mortgage prices are set to rise in a few months time.

Here’s some hope for those who are without sight: the bionic eye has made major strides towards becoming a viable option for those who have lost their sight. Makes you wonder what the near future may hold – shades of FASA’s Shadowrun cybernetics, anyone?

March 31 – Spring has arrived

March was a long month; lots of hours put in at work and hours put in at home working on packing. It was good to see the sun shine more often and the flowers arrive; I’ll have to make a trip to Butchart Gardens soon to see it in the springtime. I’m glad that I’m not allergic to anything spring-related!

I’ll be replacing my parent’s laptop in the new year, I think – it’s running slow even for their needs, with Vista home on it. Upgrading it would cost almost as much as a new one anyway, even without a new CPU, so what’s the point? I’ll be sure to pop on a fair number of the excellent programs from C|Net’s Windows Starter Kit on the new one when it arrives, then I’ll figure out what to do with the old one. Maybe I’ll make it into a portable word processor and set up access to my home network remotely, so I can take it around and work on my writing while still having easy access to all of my work... hmmm.

April 1 – Eye Fool You

No jokes today; I’m too busy to think of one, but I’m sure that didn’t stop other people from taking the time to do so. Here’s a list of harmless April Fool’s Jokes you can check out for next year. But of course you’ve already checked out the April Fool’s Edition of Newt And John, right? Do it now if you haven’t!

My final eye appointment was in the morning today, and it was a solid one: the doctor said she’d rarely had such a solid set of test results in her 15 years of practice. Which meant she was able to finalize my prescription which I immediately took over to WalMart to get my new glasses order finished – should be a few weeks and then I won’t have to worry any more about my current shakily-repaired glasses failing on me. Makes me wonder about the bionic eye article in terms of replacements...?  Sounds pricey.

April 2 – Robbed on the Bus Home

Well, there’s truth in the words “No good deed goes unpunished.” I received a call at 8am from my DM asking if I could work today downtown, as the only girl left there called in almost-dead ie. sick as sick can be. I agreed, and spent the day run off my feet due to the holiday – everyone who couldn’t make it to a bank today came in to see us instead. I was very tired by late in the day as I took the bus home... which is why I didn’t notice at first that my backpack had moved from its place on the floor. I quickly spotted it tucked away under a couple of seats and dragged it out again – a quick visual revealed the top unzipped and my PDA missing. I politely questioned the guy and girl sitting in those seats, as well as managing to convince the guy to open up his bag... nothing. They left the bus at the next stop, and from all the indicators were the ones who took my PDA – but I didn’t see either of them do it, so could have done little save follow them off, which would have been foolish. I also didn’t want to make a scene that could very  possibly end in violence; he was fairly rough-looking and had another friend joining him at the bus stop. My fault for being tired and taking my eyes off my bag for a minute... but they’ll get little use out of the PDA as it was PIN-locked and had no crucial data on it apart from old documents. Perhaps they’ll call me in a few days for the reward noted on the cover of the PDA – that’s why I put it on there, but I never thought I would be putting it there for a thief to collect from me! And it could have been worse; they could have gotten away with my entire backpack...

Topping that, we had a major windstorm here all day today – it began early last night and blew through until the afternoon. The roads were littered with debris, but thankfully there were no injuries – except some bruised lawn gnomes I saw under piles of branches.

April 3 – Xbox vs. iPad

Are you as sick of reading about today’s release of the Apple iPad as I am? I don’t see the tablet as anything I would need, save as a colour book or comic reader. It is missing quite a few features that I consider ‘standard’ with modern computer technology, like being able to plug in USB devices without an adaptor  – it’s a cheesy grab for cash by Apple. While some reviews of the iPad rave about it, others are not so kind – it looks like about a fifty-fifty split right now. As for me: I’m abstaining.

My own tech arrived a few days ago: Xbox was delivered on April 1^st, and the joke is that I couldn’t play it until late tonight due to working so much – I had planned on doing it yesterday, but that didn’t work out so well as you saw above. Since Microsoft sent me a refurbished unit( and not my old one )that meant I had to re-download and re-install all of the games and files again to ‘link’ them to the new hardware; there went my evening. Everything seems to be working on the new unit though – nice! Makes you wonder what happens when one of Microsoft’s secret data centers has a glitch happen...

April 4 - Thundercats

Not much to say about today; it’s my only day off before we start moving things to the new condo on the
10^th, so I’m busy packing all day today. I did take a short break in the morning to briefly play COD4 with Lucas and Dave, but that didn’t last long at all. All too soon it was time to return to sorting through things to either pack or discard... again. This is the third time I’ve done this since moving to BC in the first place, when I had a massive yard sale to begin with to reduce things... but I can only go so far before it gets down to my books, my collectables or other things that are dear to me and nigh-impossible to replace. My thought has always been to hang onto that which I cannot replace, for when I have a place of my own with a place for everything – which may never happen, I realize. But, I can dream of such.

At 3pm today the Thundercats 24-hour marathon began on TeleToon Retro. I’m too busy packing to do more than have it playing in the background, but I am recording the whole thing on DVD for later. From what I have seen tonight, there was a fairly decent backstory that was little-used in the series concerning the history of Third Earth and the ‘Cats. To end on a Thundercat note, here’s an amusing tie-in to that with Barack Obama as well – whoda thunk?

Another week, another mighty blog hand-crafted and delivered to the waiting world full of... er, words.