Hoaxes, Hospital and Holidays

The word of the week is ignominious.

May 17 – Transforming TV’s

Every so often I pop on over to How It Should Have Ended.com to see what movie they’ve sent up lately. Having suffered again through Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in an attempt to enjoy it without letting the plot holes devour my brain, I was ticked to find it spoofed on HISHE.com – go have a look, they have plenty of other films mocked in various brilliant ways. Roll out...

Ah, technology... it marches ever on. We went from dot matrix printers to lasers to inkjets, getting cheaper all the way. The same went for televisions: from black and white tubes to colour, then from tubes to plasma and LCD. Now DuPont has married both printing and television: they demonstrated today a custom device that will print a 50-inch television in under two minutes that will last 15 years... seriously. That’s just freakin’ amazing – I mean, printing a television, folks. What’s next? TV tattoos?

May 18 – Draw, varmint!

Red Dead Redemption was released today, quickly climbing to the top of the gaming charts for its incredible depiction of the Old West. I’m a big fan of eye candy, so I’m going to wait a little bit to see how this one stacks up for replayability along with the incredible visuals. From the reviews so far, it looks to have legs – we’ll see how it runs. Or gallops, considering the game’s all about the Wild West.

Taking a vacation in the old West sounds like a great idea, since I’ve managed to schedule a week of vacation for myself in a month’s time – the first time I’ll have had more than 3 days off in a row for non-medical reasons since August of last year when I visited Niagara. S’been too long... right now I don’t have any plans save relaxing and seeing a bit more of the island on my time off. Should be enough...

May 19 – What day is it?

Have you ever wondered where the names for the days of the week come from, or are they just one of the things that you take for granted and don’t think about from day to day? Same goes for the names of the months of the year: they all came from somewhere, which is interesting to backtrack to find out how things turned out the way they did for us here in the enlightened modern age.

Sometimes in the middle of the week, you need a little fun. So hop on over to Instants, where a whole page of buttons just begs you to push a few to see what happens. I wish I could push a few buttons on a new type of ATM introduced in Abu Dhabi, one that dispenses gold. Considering that the price of gold keeps climbing, it’s a safe bet – for now. I’ll bet Chuck Norris doesn’t use ATM’s -

May 20 – Smartly Strange

Moving to Victoria was definitely a smart choice for me, and today Maclean’s Magazine backed me up with proof – they ranked Canada’s Smartest Cities and Victoria came in on top! I learned a few things about my adopted home from the article, like the fact that 100% of residents have high-speed ‘net access( sweet! )and 77% of them spent money to have that access. Bring it on, Google! What’s not smart? Well, if you’re a mugger, don’t chase down your target and end up catching them outside a ninja dojo... it probably won’t end well for you. That’s dumb, folks.

Sneaky, smart or something else? What do you think of the news about a strange creature that was ‘discovered’ in a creek in northern Ontario today? A hoax, or a shrewd plan to increase tourism for the tiny town? If it’s true, then there’s something odd swimming around in the water up there... scary?

May 21 – Med News: it lives!

Today was a day off for me, as I went into the hospital for an endoscopy to see if there’s anything there shouldn’t be in my plumbing. The exploratory itself went extremely well, though the news that my stomach was inflamed didn’t please me. Time for my doctor and me to get together to discuss more options: food allergies are my primary suspect, but malabsorbtion is a big place to start.

Some good news about an old laptop today: my parent’s old Compaq. I had thought it was irreparable after trying on and off for a few years, but I took it in to have it tested at a local shop as all else had failed... and it turns out it was a twitchy power supply. So I’ve elatedly ordered a new one via eBay, and once that’s arrived I’ll be able to reformat the thing with a few modifications for my own use – I don’t want to risk toting my expensive GatewayFX around town, but I’ll gladly do some writing and surf the ‘net on a simple box. I may pop Ubuntu onto the thing too, depending on how well the repairs go. Woot!

May 22 – What the frell...?

By the morning I was feeling quite fine and ready for work after relaxing for a good part of yesterday – nothing like catching catnaps between movies to make your day speed by. Which was a good thing, as things became very busy right after my co-worker had left at their shift-end – of course. The good weather had beaten back the clouds, so the usual crowds of people decided to take advantage of the opening and headed out To Do Things on this lovely Saturday afternoon – including seeing me. Yip.

After a busy day, I relaxed in the evening by hooking up my laptop to my widescreen TV and cuing up streaming episodes of Farscape – how cool is that? An HDMI cable, a few mouseclicks and I’m enjoying top-level sci-fi on the widescreen, for a TV series that’s been off the air for years and that I’ve yet to find on DVD for a reasonable price. Amazon.ca has it in stock, but I’m still not biting – yet. Considering how low prices have dropped for 1 terabyte hard drives now, I could easily pack my entire DVD collection onto a single media PC and serve it up fresh . All I need to do is decide on the interface( like Windows Home Server )and set it up... plus purchase a PC to run it on and install Kylo to surf on the big TV – nice!

May 23 – Left Out

It’s a double update today! First off, Brian has a new painting entitled Boatman’s Holiday, which looks stunning. It’s his second cover painting for StarshipSofa, which incidentally was nominated for a Hugo Award! Next up – a new episode of Newt and John by Mike Hogue, which is the newest in their weekly instalment of adventure. I love seeing how Two Roommates Take On The Universe!

For my day off today, I logged into Xbox Live to find everyone playing Red Dead Redemption, so I popped out to get a copy to join in( why not, if everyone has it? )only to find it was sold out – everywhere. I went to two places and called another three, but nobody has a copy right now; the next ones guaranteed to come in will be Tuesday, so I think I’ll pick it up from BestBuy as they have a ‘War Horse’ DLC that comes with it. From everything I’ve read this week, Red Dead looks like it packs plenty of open-world play, so we’ll see if it lives up to my hopes. As for the rest of my day: I spent quite a few hours sorting the last of my stuff, so now my stuff is finally put into place and I have a room that’s a refuge from stress. Nice.

Yes, it is quite relaxing now that I’ve tossed the last cardboard box into the recycling and I know where to find most everything I packed in April – a good feeling. Sleep on it.