Habits, Habitats and Hope

The word of the week is free!

April 2 - Deals!

I like 'free' - it's one of my favourite things in life and one that can pop up anywhere, at any time. A recent site I discovered is GiveawayOfTheDay.com, where the site hosts give away for FREE software that normally costs a fair penny - all for the sake of promotion! I also drop by BitsDeJour.com, where software also comes up on special for usually 50% off, things that almost NEVER come up for free at Giveaway. Both sites are great to drop by for 5 minutes each day… but I spend even more time sorting through RedFlagDeals.com for ALL things Dealicious( not affiliated with the site of the same name )where ALL SORTS of deals are pounced on and posted by the general public, 24/7. I have managed to score a few deals on various things over the years by being in the know BEFORE everyone else, thanks to RedFlagDeals. Check 'em all out!

April 3 - Brave

I have a weakness to confess: red hair. With the upcoming release of Disney's CGI film Brave, my weakness has been given life and hundreds of hours of work by artists to render each red strand in perfect detail… but that's not the focus of the movie. I also have a liking for strong female characters and the role of Merida is being pushed by Disney as a 'passionate and fiery' which obviously goes hand-in-hand with those of a more flame-haired inheritance. Given that my own novel depends in a large part in having a believable, likable female protagonist, I would consider Brave to be a good bit of research for comparison. Though writing a teenager would likely give me headaches…



April 4 - Vertical Forests?

Green roofs are nothing new: they're a way to take back some space in a city and put it towards better use making urban landscapes healthier. Yet for all that, the actual overall surface area of roofs in a city is rather small compared to that of concrete and asphalt which serve as roads, parking lots and the like.

So why not forget about the horizontal and go VERTICAL? That's the idea behind an initiative in Milan, Italy, where several buildings are in development that carry the green concept into the sky. Instead of walls of concrete, their exteriors are covered with trees… all the way up! It's an innovative way to put trees into a dense urban setting while sharing space needs with other uses; it's hard to turn a parking lot into a forest and still get cars in there. I applaud the out-of-the-box thinking in projects like this and hope that other similar new solutions to old urban space-usage problems come up soon for all cities!

April 5 - Habits

Habits can be good or bad; I've formed a fair deal of both over the years, though none were of levels requiring therapy… even my puns, if you can believe it. Routines are the cousins of habits and I am curious to see which new ones I will form once I have moved into a new place and settled into a new version of my life, one that I choose the pace of for the rest of 2012.

It's going to be interesting. Sometime this year I will finish my first novel and will have found a new job. Or managed to break into a new field of employment, such as freelance writing or voice acting. Each new day in 2012 will be one where I have to balance the needs of an emerging career with things like downtime and socializing, of playing games to relax and watching some of the MANY DVD's that sit gathering dust on my shelves. New habits and routines will form and I will be watching them as consciously as I can, as I want to form more of the positive-career type and fewer of the lazing-around-not-progressing kind. The last 2+ months have seen me progress little, other than moving my mental processes around to focus on ME and not my previous work habits; that's been hard and I STILL answer my phone in less than three rings. I may never cure myself of that habit, but as such things go I think I can live with that, if it means I can focus on more important things.

April 6 - Found a place, almost!

Over the last two weeks, my sister and I have looked through dozens of apartments in Victoria. For the most part, the places have been rather outdated or lacking in some major ways; the one had mouse holes in ALL the rooms and the balconies were off-limits as they were falling OFF the buildings. Many places simply hadn't been updated since they were built, just repairs and new paint and the occasional new carpet. Several buildings were under overall repair and several had new places ready to be built NEXT to them; in both situations, the noise would have been unbearable for years, so no thanks.

Today though, we settled on a place that ticked so many boxes that we felt it was a 9/10, and the building super hit it off with us right off the bat. We'd seen it earlier in the week and came back today to put in an application and put down a deposit. It's located VERY near Cook St. Village, has a decent amount of room, is in a solid quiet building… the list goes on. We'll be waiting the weekend to hear on Monday if we've been approved for the place; our fingers, toes and even eyes are crossed, hoping!

April 7 - Pillow Fight Day!

The weather today turned out to be simply GORGEOUS: temperatures in the mid-teens and barely a cloud in the calm sky. Which was PERFECT for a pillow fight! Yes, today was International Pillow Fight Day, held in cities all over the world; I found out about it earlier in the week thanks to my friend Kevin. We hustled out of Langford after lunch, picking up a few pillows on the way and arrived in Bastion Square in Victoria just as all the fun was starting! My sister recorded the action( using a nice FlipVideoCam that I'd picked up in Dec'11 )while Kevin and I wandered around the melee pummeling and whomping. We had a great time; there were over 100 people there and someone broke open a feather pillow right at the start, so those were swirling around the while time. I gave as good as I got and while the clip below doesn't show any of my ninja-like moves, I'll add a few of those clips to FBook soon enough:



It took me hours to put together the video though, as I don't own any video-editing software capable of inserting text and a soundtrack… so I improvised. I used a royalty-free tune from Incomptech.com, installed AVS VideoReMaker( NOT free! )and used several other bits of software to record FROM the AVS video window into other formats. I ended up with a 2.5gigabtye AVI file( HUGE! )which I converted into a 68 megabyte MP4 file( TINY! )which I then uploaded to YouTube. If I did this sort of thing on a regular basis, I would definitely save myself the 6 hours of work, trial and error and buy an all-in-one software suite like AVS4You. But for now, the results were worth it:

April 8 - Rainbow's End

This week, Google announced Project Glass, which in essence crams all the features and power of smartphones into a pair of wearable 'smartglasses' - which are still a ways from appearing on local store shelves. I love the idea and wonder how long it will be before people start walking into traffic with smartglasses just as they do now with handheld devices. I am reading a book right now called Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge, which is a head-hurting but fascinating look into the end results of where Google and its tech-spawn will be in fifty years or so. As an author, I am staggered by the sheer vision of the concepts that Vinge puts out in his story; if only a part of what he envisions comes about, the world will be a VERY different place in a generation or so. To be honest, I tried to read the book when it came out in 2006 and the concepts were so 'out there' that I had to stop. Now, with far more experience with Google and FBook and all the sundry social apps, it’s a much more palatable read; I originally felt that it spoke about things that had no meaning in my life but now I can see how far ahead Vinge was peering. If you want to see a glimpse of a very possible future, I recommend his book highly… and I also recommend reading it slowly to digest in small bits as you go - today I spent more than a few hours reading while I rested my wrists. And watched Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs with my family as an Easter treat!

By this time tomorrow, I will know if my hoped-for application to live at a GREAT place in Victoria will have been approved. It will be quite a change and I am working on my mild CTS / wrist pains so that when I am settled in my new place, I will have PLENTY of time AND ability to devote to my novel, which right now is a hunt-and-peck typing affair to work on. Painful on many levels, that.