Spring, Silliness and SSD's

The word of the week is chipotle - everyone needs some spice!

April 4 - Coverage

Spring is here: it’s wet and cloudy, but already the cherry blossoms are out in full force all over southern Vancouver Island. It’s at this time of year that I start to think about heading back to Niagara; this year it looks somewhat dubious time-wise, but financially it should be no problem – weird, that combination. The time has to do with scheduling at work: the earliest I can take my vacation( I have 4 weeks saved up )is in late June or early July. The bean-heads at head office keep denying requests for 1 more staff member; as it stands we’re ‘fully staffed’ which means if anyone’s sick or wants to go on vacation the whole schedule goes to hell and everyone’s miserable. In effect, we’re being held hostage to minimum outlays for labour to benefit the company, not our health. Compare that to Tim Horton’s next door, which can have over a dozen people working at any one time and my ire rises exponentially – I’ve done a few brief cost analysis charts and I believe I’m totally in the right frame of costs. No surprise there, really.

April 5 - Crappy64 is back!

What's old is new again, as the saying goes - in this case, the venerable Commodore 64 is being reborn. I wasn't lucky enough to have one( or an NES, I know, it's weird... )but I do remember playing Mail Order Monsters for hours over at a friend's house. I was impressed enough at that age to have a serious look at the Commodore Amiga that was released a few years later - which I DID buy, albeit a used one. It was the first computer I had with a hard drive - before that, I had a Coleco ADAM, a freakish low-cost home 'computer' that mated with a game console and ran on cassette tapes. It was good for its day and I enjoyed the games I played on it... but I wouldn't go back to play very many of them, even on a Coleco emulator. Well, maybe Donkey Kong. In any case, I'm not sure what market the C64 is being aimed at, in this day of handheld tablet PC's and smartphones. Nostalgia will only sell so many units...

April 6 - In Darkest Night

Green Lantern looks to be the 'must -see' comic-book film of the year, arriving soon at a theatre near you. If 

you haven't seen the trailer, take a gander and wait for your jaw to drop:

I've always liked Green Lantern, especially for the clear-cut lessons it imparts about good, evil and the power of the individual. Plus, the colour green is my favourite and those power rings are just damn cool!

April 7 - Consumerism Savings

A few months ago, I mentioned The Best Time to Buy Things 2011 list  – since we're in a new quarter, I thought I'd bring it up again, as there are a few things on there you might really save some money on. According to the list, right now TV's and laptops are looking to be moved, so hunt around for some good deals. Cruises are also looking for passengers; here in Victoria over a hundred cruise ships are expected to dock here during the Spring / Summer season, which is a LOT of business. I do also hunt regularly on RedFlagDeals.com, which is fantastic site to drop by every other day to see if you can catch wind of a deal online or locally. There are thousands of sharp-eyed consumers with connections out there who post on RFD's, so it's inevitable that there will be mention of something on there sooner or later you've been waiting to buy on sale.

April 8 - BBQ?

I'm hoping that things in Niagara are going to become spring-like soon; I remember this time of year being somewhat annoying in that it was usually quite cold and rainy right up until May. Which is not to say that one can't barbeque ANY time of the year, but it's best on warm spring / summer nights. I haven't had a barbeque( or a porch, for that matter )for over a decade now and I find I miss it. Tossing some sausages and burgers onto the grill is almost a national pastime for most guys and I find myself missing it oddly most days. Except for the sausages - I always managed to forget to drain out the juices a little and so scalded my tongue on more than a few occasions. At least my taste buds seem to have grown back...

Anyone out there have their grill going yet? Want to send me some burgers? ;-)

April 9 - SSD Arrives!

After a brief morning at work, I retired to the Bean for a few hours and then was home well before 3pm, to install my new( cheaply bought! Sale! Savings! )SSD computer drive( Solid State Drive ). It’s only 64gb, so I had to first trim down Windows Vista( boring and difficult! )then back it up( again rather boring, but Paragon Backup made it easy AND it was free! )before going on to re-install it from said backup copy( about 1.5 hours of boring )onto the new SSD. And WOW, what a difference in speed! I went from a thumb-twiddling 15 minutes of loading to... 3 minutes, which is right on where Kingston( the makers of this SSD )said the speed would be, at about 5x’s as fast as a regular hard drive, which my old 200gb is. Coupled with the annoying-but-functional 500gb hybrid Seagate SSD, I can now boot my system back and forth from Win7( for my daily tasks / games )and Vista, which I use almost exclusively for NWN, as it just doesn’t get along with Win7 – at least not on my machine. So I’m a happy camper that things went smoothly( for once )and as planned. Speedy system on the cheap... and while I was at it, I tossed in some more RAM, so I now have 16 gigs of memory to use; too bad I don’t own a copy of Photoshop. Maybe next year...

April 10 - Walking Uphill

Another half-day at work; being the manager hath its privileges, even if it’s only to leave early to save on hours( at the expense of my paycheque but to the cheers of the bean counters at head office ). As usual, I could only take the bus as far as Millstream road, then walked the 4km from there up the mountain. Today I timed it perfectly: the rain had stopped and the sun peeked out occasionally as I soldiered up the winding roadway on the sidewalk. It’s a lovely, healthy walk, with little in the way of traffic noise or other urban audio clutter to distract from the solemn beauty of the green trees receding in rows towards the distant hills. The green mosses glow bright against the rocks so soon after the rains, lending a deep-woods feel to the walk as though the road is driven through the heart of the wilderness – I didn’t spot any deer today though.

The rain held off until well into the night, but as expected it lowered the temp enough outside that it was windows-closed for me. Soon enough, I'll be able to leave the windows open for weeks at a time, weather permitting, to let in that fresh 'mountain' air here... the lack of humidity here in BC is most welcome!