A rare Word of the Week is... troglodytic.
June 28 – Cops and Webbers
Talk about starting the week off with a bang( almost ): there was a police take-down on the main road down from Bear Mountain on my way to work this afternoon! A late-model blue SUV was stopped about three cars in front of ours by an unmarked police car; undercover and plainclothes cops poured out of a half-dozen other vehicles, all of them armed with guns in hand. The lone occupant of the SUV, a tall male in his mid-twenties, surrendered immediately and peacefully, much to bystander’s relief. What made me boggle was that some idiot in the car in front of us got OUT of her car to walk closer - not twenty feet away from the blue SUV - for a better look. Could she not SEE all the drawn guns? Talk about Darwinism at work!!
Webisodes: not TV, not YouTube videos, but media released directly to the internet via one’s own mega-bandwidth webisode( which can cost you quite a bundle ). One series I’ve mentioned before that still has to show up as webisodes is Riese The Series, but you can check out the Top Ten Webisodes for May 2010 – June is just about to be released, I believe. IMHO, I think this is the future of media: surf for your interests and things that match your viewing tastes, and don’t bother with those 500 ‘empty and static’ cable
channels.
June 29 – Get Out, Cheaply
It’s turning out to be a fairly dull summer; living outside of Victoria on top of a mountain, combined with working long hours has rather dulled the edge of my social life. I still talk with people regularly online, deal with people at work every day and the life, but I’ve not been getting out much at all. So I’ve taken it upon myself to see that this summer I get out at least once a week to DO something, be it a movie, trip downtown, or the like. While I begrudge the time that it might take, I’ve come to realize that I have to make that time separate from pursing my other interests, which in the main revolve around my home. Come to think of it, I haven’t shown anyone a picture of my new digs so far, so look for that next week. Things look much better now that I’ve really settled in and everything is in its proper place, to so speak.
Ah, Gizmodo – I like the pictures, but I keep going back for the articles, as they say. This time it’s a great piece on The Cheapest Ways to Upgrade Your PC, which dovetails nicely into my recent resurrection of my old 2005 Compaq laptop. Sure, it works with Windows Vista on it and 2gb of RAM, but it’s... slow. One of the newest trends is buying new hardware from up-and-coming tech companies in China, who often have great deals on eBay with hardware that is the equal of many items sitting on retail shelves locally... but for less. Here’s one example from a company called KingSpec, who have ample hits for research purposes to find out how their products fare. Nice to see that some companies are still supporting older tech, allowing it to be re-purposed instead of being tossed while still working fine.
June 30 – Movie Recreations
What are Digital Dioramas, you ask? Well, in effect they are digital worlds created by talented artists for other people to enjoy touring around in – for example, someone re-created the Indiana Jones Theme Ride digitally, using the Left4Dead game engine. These sorts of things are becoming more common, especially given the popularity of places like SecondLife, where people can create virtually( hah! )any setting they so choose. Assuming that they spend all of their free time for a year on each project... like this fellow looks to have when he re-created the now-closed Adventurer’s Club from Disney World.
I don’t watch a lot of movies, or rather the ones I do watch I own, or are on TV – I remember the clerk’s look of shock the last time I was at Blockbuster, as I hadn’t been in for over 7 years... and that was probably about 7 years ago. Tonight, I caught Analyze This on TV, starring Robert DeNiro and Bill Crystal. It’s a send-up of mob movies like The Godfather, and I thoroughly enjoyed the light-hearted take it put on the subject, quite a difference from something like The Sopranos or similar movies. Good laughs, that.
July 1st – Canada Day already?
Where the heck is the summer weather? It’s been cold and overcast here all week, even worse than last week on my vacation, which was frustrating; very little outside time due to the cold winds. From what I can see of the weather across the country, the East is getting the baking-level heat while the west is quite cool and rainy. Weird. It made for a quiet Canada Day today; I didn’t feel like sitting in packed lines of traffic to make it south to the downtown core – I relaxed today and mainly tried to get rid of a headache. Not that exciting, but I’m glad that I make the schedules and could give myself today off. Seeing as I’m managing two MMart branches locally, I get headaches fairly often of late... bleh. Still FAR less often than I did in ON though, which I totally relate to the air pressure from the weather systems that move around in the east.
Today as well, I found a great article about the new USD currency being released in the USA this year – something I am keenly interested in, as I deal with spotting counterfeit currency as part of my daily job. It’s always a race between counterfeiters and government mints to see who is ahead of the curve in any given year. Earlier in the year, Canada announced plans to change our currency over to a polymer base, much akin to Australia’s bills – a great idea, as these bills are extremely difficult to counterfeit and VERY easy to train people in detecting security features on. I’ll be MUCH happier when our cotton-based bills are out of circulation altogether, and I don’t have to worry about every bill that comes over the counter.
July 2 – Ponderings
I’ve been giving a lot of thought as to what to get rid of from storage, thinking in terms of rarity, sentimental value and simple usefulness. Most of the things down there don’t really rate high on any of those three scales, apart from things that I’ll need when I’m in my own place again – sooner than you might think. While a die-cast model of the Aliens dropship really does look quite cool, it loses its charm when on display 24/7 next to one’s lava lamp, slowly accumulating dust. I think there may be good business in renting out cool collectibles to people, so that when they tire of them they can pass them on to the next deserving uber-fan of whatever genre they collect. No unicorns or trolls though, please.
Here’s something I wish I’d had about a dozen moves ago: Roomie. It’s a free web-based app that lets you create AND furnish a virtual model of the place you’re thinking of moving into – quickly and easily. Better yet, it’s completely in 3D, so you can not only see if your bed will fit in that one-bedroom apt, but see how it LOOKS as well. Amazing to see how far online software has developed, as I recall selling exactly this sort of thing ten years ago for nearly $100 CAN, and it didn’t have a tenth of the capabilities that Roomie does. Very similar to Google’s Sketchup, but very polished and focused on its target users.
July 3 – Saving up and Staying Up
Last week I mentioned retirement, as I have been thinking about it lately; the old ‘Freedom 55’ commercials from Banko Montreal came to mind a while ago. Presuming I wanted to retire at age 60, I have 23 years of investment potential to add to what I’ve already begun in the last ten years, which frankly isn’t a whole lot of time – the magic of compound interest doesn’t really start to kick in until quite a few years have passed. Some good basic advice for thinking about your own retirement can be found here, as well as what to expect based on what you’ve been planning to save / invest. You can also see where you stand compared to The Millionaire’s Retirement Plan, or just check up on how your daily finances are faring with 7 Common Mistakes We Make Every Day regarding our finances. Heck, what I liked the best was the made-in-USA How To Drive Free Cars – makes sense when you think about it!
I was quite tired today, as for some reason I couldn’t fall asleep last night – I lay awake until close to 3am, with my brain refusing to shut down. Being a manager, things are always racing through my head, mainly to-do lists that I can constantly revising and updating. Have you ever had it where your brain simply won’t stop running over things that need doing, regardless of how tired you are? I tried watching TV, playing music, reading, warm milk and all the like to no avail... good thing I was able to sleep in today. Sad thing is, I don’t want to get my sleep cycle out of whack, as going to bed around midnight has been the norm of late and I’ve been doing better in my daily energy levels. No relapses, please.
July 4 – Shooting Aliens
Hard to believe, but it’s been 14 years since Independance Day hit the big screen. The scifi tale of aliens bent on taking over the world with only Will Smith and Bill Pullman to defend us had some really, really big F/X ... plus a plucky scientist in the form of Jeff Goldblum and his Mac computer. I remember being really excited about the film, but all these years later it seems... tired, somehow. I think maybe it’s because I wanted the aliens to be smarter, if not cooler – they crossed billions of light-years and conquered untold numbers of civilizations... only to be tripped up by a mid-1990’s MAC computer virus? Yeah. Happy July 4th.
I think I spoke a little hastily in terms of weather earlier in this blog; looks like the heat is moving west this week, as our highs are looking to be in the mid-twenties the entire time. Too bad I work all five days; I hope that the trend holds until the weekend, when I can relax on the balcony and not feel like I’m in a chilly wind tunnel. Which made staying inside for a large part of the day playing COD4 with Dave, Bill, Lucas and( briefly )Simon all the more enjoyable. We played some of the Resurgence Pack maps, which I thought were very well made and very playable – the added detail and layout in each map really showed how much more polished the development team has become in making their maps really shine in COD4.
Nothing much to say as an afterword this week, save that I really want to get out in my hammock this summer – I’d love to see how relaxing( and challenging )it will be to use a laptop in such slung repose!
