Time, Talking and Trade-ins

This week's blog was delayed due to family - my sister is visiting this week, and darn it if I just did not have time yesterday to finish things up. So there. :)


April 20 - Wheel of Time(-lieness)

The news back in 2007 that Robert Jordan( nee James Oliver Rigney, Jr. )had died shocked a lot of Wheel of Time fans. The massive series, which I have been following since its inception back in 1990( wow, has it been THAT long? )has had some exciting news last month: the announcement that the final book A Memory of Light will be broken up into THREE books, totalling nearly 1 million words. Finally, an end is in sight, and it looks like one that will satisfy the many WOT fans out there. Well, most of them, anyway... those who haven't become dazed and confused somewhere along the massive journey that is the WOT series.

Thankfully, legions of fans out there have managed to create concise Plot Summaries for every chapter of every book, which you can peruse in case you haven't read any of the books in recent years. Another good place is the WOT FAQ, which has sections on almost every question you can think of regarding plot or character. You can also visit the official DragonMount Forums, where quite a few ideas are posted and being chewed over on a daily basis. The best place to go for following plot threads is Encyclopaedia WOT, where a visual 'plot thread tree' at the bottom of each book chapter list shows WHICH chapter in each book touches on a particular thread. This amazing feature means you can follow a particular plot thread through EACH chapter from book to book, start to finish... which is damned handy considering the sheer size and scope of the series.

April 21 - Mucho MMO's

Those of you who peruse this blog on a regular basis( love ya folks! Stay the course! )know that I am a fan of MMORPG's... but that I do not subscribe to any. Which is odd, as subscriptions are the basis for any successful online gaming community to succeed, making money for the company releasing it. Many an MMO has fallen by the wayside over the years, while a few such as WoW have continued to remain successful - it's a numbers game, and there aren't THAT many people out there with tons of free time to kill every week playing an elf running around collecting l00t.

MMORPG.com is a good place to go to get an idea of what's already out there and what's slated to come down the pipe in the near future. It also has a ton of info about less mainstream MMO's, of which of course I love any that are free to play. The site also contains some good blogs concerning MMO's, like Vicarious Existence, which has recently looked at how hype helps sell new MMO's. One little game I may jump into is Galaxy Online, which looks to be in the style of the old Star Control series of games for the PC, with the added strategic depth of an MMO - looks cool, may stink, in other words. Ever since the days of Tradewars( which is still online in various forms adapted for the internet )there has been a deluge of space strategy games - the most recent contenders for the crown are Jumpgate: Evolution and Eve: Online... neither of which is big on actually stepping OUT of your cool spaceship to get your feet dirty. In fact, despite its popularity, Eve is NOT a game for those who enjoy space combat - it is more about corporate trading, as this great little article explains.

April 22 - Red Versus Blue... bacon?

All right, all right... I chose the losing side in the HD-DVD( red box )vs Blue-Ray( blue box )war, I admit it. While I still believe HD-DVD was the better technology, the market decided otherwise and I have to live with my decision... and my collection that cost me some fair change. Now, there comes news that Warner has started a trade-in program for HD-DVD owners who want to go Blue-Ray - great news for people who want to jump the fence to the 'winning' side.

Not to be confused with Red Vs. Blue, which is a long-running machinima series based on a dysfunctional squad of troopers from the Halo universe. Damned funny too - you can find almost all the episodes here at Machima.com, all of which can be viewed full-screen.

Speaking of good ideas, how about this one: wrapping your iPhone in bacon. No, it's not real bacon, but a very realistic facsimile of our Fave Food in case form. Perhaps if you combined it with Bacon Spray, you could get a little closer to a non-greasy, preservative-free non-organic bacon case. Yum!

Can you tell I like bacon? *grin*

April 23 - On Blogging

Previously, I have written in this blog about, well... blogs. Coming up with new and timely postings every week is not easy without falling into a retreading rut. Unless you live a life on the run, Twittering your way though your day, getting new material for your blog is not all that easy.

ProBlogger.com has an article on how to come up with new material for your blog, so you can aspire to appearing on the Top 100 Blog List. While you may not be as popular as Neil Gaimon's blog, you can perhaps steal some eyeballs from Icanhazcheeseburger.com... and in the process give a few of them grammar lessons.

Myself, I am writing for my friends who might want to know what I am up to way out here, as well as my thoughts on various subjects near and dear to my daily life. When nothing much comes up in regards to Daily Life, I put in some Near and Dear. Which has worked fairly well, so far!

April 24 - Yo Joe!

Something of note today though: the creators of Bacon Salt appeared on Oprah today, via Skype. Talk about major celebrity endorsements... Oprah's audience of millions are already shooting the sales of Bacon Salt through the roof. I wonder if those millions know they ALSO make Baconaise?

Towards midnight, I watched G.I. Joe: Resolute on Teletoon, which was a totally new take on the much-beloved toy-driven Hasbro series from the 80's. This was not for kids however: the guns in this version missed a lot less, and the blood was front and center when they hit. I imagine it was aimed squarely at the grown-up kids from the 80's, such as myself... and I liked what I saw. Considering the long history of G.I. Joe, I hope that Resolute brings things to a new level and keeps the theme alive - considering that almost every north american male has at one time owned a G.I. Joe toy, it's a huge market.

April 25 - Ubuntu!

Another Not-Much-Save-Working Saturday, most of which I spent working the evening shift at the Colwood branch. Despite some annoyances, it was a good shift, especially since I had no last-minute doorcrashers like last week to delay me.

It seems that my old PC is not quite up to the task of running a NWN server within the parameters my project group is setting. So I spent a little time tonight putting in a spare hard drive and installing the latest version of Ubuntu, which in case you were not aware is a very popular easy-to-use version of the Linux operating system. Linux, besides being free( and open-source, meaning thousands of people around the world work on improving it on their own time )makes far better use of computer resources than any other OS, including Windows. Hopefully that extra 'leanness' will make the difference in getting things going for the project in the next few months, once it is all set up. And once I learn how to run Ubuntu... which won't be TOO long, thanks to this excellent FREE guide!

April 26 - Yard Talkin'

More yardwork today, in the lovely sunny weather. The lawn had been begging to be cut the last few weeks, but the weather had not co-operated until today. I despaired of using the massive gas-powered mower in the garage, as the fumes and noise from those things really bother me. So I went down to the local Canadian Tire and bought a reel mower, after doing some research at the LawnMowerGuide.com about some other alternatives. The mower( by Yardworks )was inexpensive and it was assembled in only a few minutes. It took me only a few passes to get the hang of it, so from there it went rather smoothly despite the bumpy nature of the lawn and was no harder to push than a regular heavy cordless or gas-powered mower. The cut was excellent too: the scissoring action is kinder to the grass tips than a duller powered blade would be, keeping the grass healthier.

I used the new version of Dragon Naturally Speaking again tonight, and really enjoyed it - it runs VERY well on my new laptop, compared to the old Blue Frankenstein of a PC I had run the previous version on. The speed is incredible, though the accuracy is still around 98% but training and correction will improve that considerably. There are a ton of other things you can do with it as well, depending on the application - I like the voice commands the best: tell your PC what to do, and off it goes! I love new tech. :-)


Well, my sister is visiting us this week all the way from Banff, AB, so I should really finish this off and close down the laptop for the evening. TTYL all!

Holgrams, Humour and Hunger

Well, we went from 5 comments the week before, to 0 comments for last week; kinda like the yo-yo stock market. Which may be good, as things go, so maybe no news is good news, in these turbulent(-ish) times. So this week's and next week's blog: minimalist. Cue applause.

Jan 12th - Sunshine and Vikings

Just a gorgeous Monday here in Victoria; sunny all day, highs around ten degrees with no snow. Of course, the lovely weather means lots of people out, and I get to see a lot of foot traffic from where I am, stuck in a glass box. Which is nicer than being stuck in a back office with no view on a sunny day, though less cruel in some ways. I really, really like the lack of snow here... makes me smile.

I almost didn't have an entry for Monday, apart from that, until I read about this movie: Outlander. It's a story that took 18 years to bring to the screen, it has vikings in it... and aliens. Looks like quite a film, as it has a ton of solid names attached to it, including John Hurt and Ron Perlman of Hellboy fame. Watch for it!

Jan 13 - Superpower Boxes

The apartment is stacked with boxes now, some of them higher than I am, due to the extreme lack of extra space. Having learned from my last moving experience, the boxes are now simply numbered with a master list kept by yours truly so as to avoid temptations for boxes labelled 'camera' to disappear en route. Fortunately it is a short move, as such things go, so I hope that the two days off I've booked will be more than adequate for everything needed to be accomplished.

No superhuman moving efforts from me this time around, as I've not the energy. Though I could wish for superpowers, sometimes having them is not all it is cracked up to be, as this blog shows us. I have a few books on second-string superheroes, which are great reading; not to be confused with sidekicks, these heroes are stand-alones whose powers are not quite up to playing in the big leagues.

I've always been a fan of the Wild Cards series, edited by George R.R. Martin, which takes the superhero and plunks the concept right down into a universe very similar to our own. If you've never read it, you owe it to yourself to pick up at least the first book in the series and have a read. S'good.

Jan 14 - 7 of 9? I wish...

Existence is a fragile thing, but usually you can get a handle on reality even if you need a few supplements to make the picture sharp. However, a new theory may blow the socks off that: researchers at a German facility studying gravity have found data that suggests the universe is in fact a supermassive hologram - no, I'm not kidding.

Maybe those researchers should call up the writers from Star Trek: The Next Generation... nobody else has greater experience with the ways of holographic life as those guys. Especially how it can go wrong.

Or maybe it doesn't matter, in a world where people are more than willing to escape to such places as Second Life, where they can craft a better reality much more appealing than their dull daily existence here.

Still, life is what you make it( heh - still life! ). Eventually you'll end up surrounded by family as you pass from this mortal coil, or the other extreme: alone in your vast mansion, surrounded by sycophants who are only there to ensure a place in your will for a piece of your vast fortune.

Either way is better than a lot of other alternatives... well, except for immortality, but nobody's quite got that figured out. Yet.

Jan 15 - Day 9 of 9 and a Visitor

Today just rolled by, as I was feeling rather beat on this, the last day of 9 in a row working. I was glad to go home and relax, despite the chaos of boxes all around. Most of my plates and cutlery are packed, with a few left for daily use, along with all my books and DVD's so entertainment is limited to the 'net and the Xbox... which will also be packed shortly.

I had an unexpected visitor at the door today, one who has been by to see me several times already. More on this next week, I hope, when I have pictures.

One nice thing is that the NWN group I game with has seen a rise in numbers since the holidays, with a surprising number of new players dropping in to see the server. I've been stunned to encounter several folk who had actually read some of my Nichneven stories, which tickled me no end, I tells ya. It's good to be 'established' in that regard, in that people arrive fresh to the server and already have a sense of 'place' when they wander around to explore. Warms m'heart, it does.

Jan 16 - Lunch on the Prairie

I was up early today( my 1st of 3 days off )to fill in my passport renewal application, which was a nice change from having to go through all the rigmarole of getting one in the first place. The office was right here in Victoria, which was also nice; it moved into the top level of the Bay Center, which makes it quite convenient to get to and as an added bonus for the employees, it is set next to the food court - lunch breaks!

I didn't have lunch there though; instead, I wound up at the Prairie Inn, a place out in East Saanich that was established back in 1859... which perhaps explains why there is no website for it. The pub decor is eclectic, the ceilings are low and the whole place has that ramshackle feel of rooms added one by one as the space ran out. But the food: that's what has kept this place open. I had a large turkey pot pie that was baked to a perfect golden brown, with just the right amount of thick gravy and a huge side Caesar salad. The chunks of turkey inside the pie were thumb-thick, perfect white meat... my parent's meals were equally generous in portions and equally perfectly cooked. We all left with take-home boxes and the feeling of being quite full.

I spent the afternoon and evening packing more boxes, thankful that I had kept all the old bubblewrap and other moving materials from the last move in my storage locker here. Makes the job easier in some ways, though as always it comes down to fill box, tape, label and repeat. When all is said and done, I expect to have over a hundred boxes all told, plus furniture and bags of various soft items like linens. One can only imagine how much easier this would be if every book I had was an eBook... fifty boxes right there, give or take.

Oh, and Battlestar Galactica had its season premiere tonight... which I didn't see, and don't plan to until after the move. For now, I will content myself with a few BSG webisodes, which may be the wave of the future: smaller, less expensive side-plots to the main show that fill in unanswered questions and such.

Jan 17 - Star Wars Nerds love bacon?

While g33k culture has flourished, the stereotypes of the geeky cousin, the nerd living in his parent's basement, remains strong in today's society. While I don't normally endorse ridicule of such unfortunates, I did come across a hilarious mockumentary of the D&D gaming nerd called Fear Of Girls, which oddly has a very spartan companion website - odd, given the series' popularity. The comic writing is spot-on, and the production quality is rather high overall, given the medium. Go have a laugh.

If you liked that, you'll snort milk from your nose when you see this: The first Star Wars Trilogy as told by someone who hasn't actually seen it... in less than 4 minutes.

And what would this blog be without mention of bacon? This week, for those of you with a BBQ gleam in your eye for the first day of spring( months hence )I present: the Bacon Explosion!

Jan 18 - Half-Life 2

While I was out yesterday, I picked up The Orange Box fairly cheaply at EB Games. I've been waiting a while to get this compilation set, simply because my old PC couldn't handle it: it contains HalfLife2, both expansion Episodes, Team Fortress2 and the award-winning Portal... well, HL2 won a bunch of awards too, you know. I played it on and off all day, in between packing various things, and eventually played it well into the late hours of the night. I have to say I loved the graphics for the characters, but the background objects left something to be desired: often ladders and such appeared, well, flat... which is bad for a 3-D game. The story is decent, and the gameplay itself is solid... there are even such notable actors as Lou Gosset Jr and Michelle Forbes, who is also voicing a character in the upcoming Chronicles of Riddick videogame. Eventually I stopped playing, due to a combination of fatigue and the onset of a headache... the high pressure system here is still hanging around, which is great for the weather bu lousy for my constitution.


More cardboardy goodness next week, as I discover where I hid those missing parts for my computer... plus tell you about my visitor. Don't forget, you can always review my past blogs from the menu on the left, by year and by month - click on the triangle / arrows to see a month-by-month listing, etc.

Planes, Pirates and Peanut Butter

The weather this week was rather blah for the most part. I went from grey skies in ON to grey skies in BC... but the sun popped out as usual on the weekends to mock me. Nice to know some things don't change, despite being in another province 3500km away...

Sept 16 - Going Rogue

Whew! I slept in today until 11am - guess I needed it. Spent a lot of the day running around getting groceries and the like. Nice to have a car only when you need it - saves parking and repairs - thanks to the folks, such is my case. I even splurged on a new backpack from Targus, though the price made me cringe as usual - necessary though, as my other bags cannot safely carry the laptop and are falling apart besides. The thing has more pockets than the other two bags combined though, as well as many other features that make it (almost)worth the price, in all.

I logged a little while of gaming in COD4 with Dave tonight, and did surprisingly well. I seem to have found a combination of 'perks' and weapons that keep me alive long enough to claim a fair portion of team kills, which I find very gratifying. The Xbox360's controller is STILL nowhere near as accurate as a PC mouse and keyboard, but then that also means the OTHER guy is less accurate too - there's far too many headshots as it is!

One thing I also installed on the new rig is Rogue Trooper, a game based on the old 2000 A.D. comic strip that had some of the best storytelling I have seen... well, I read the Heavy Metal:War Machine issue with it in it (and stupidly loaned it to someone who lost it)so that's close enough. Authors like David Drake and Joe Haldeman are ones whose work I read avidly, as they both had brief-but-intense stints in the military that shape the course of their work even decades later. In some ways, I am quite glad that I do not live in a country where conscription is a fact of life, but when one reads about the camaraderie forged among those who have seen battle, the wise know that this is something that no other bond in the world can compare to... and also for which no other bond carries so high a price.

Sept 17 - Foul for the Environment

Back to work today for an evening shift, after my all-too-brief and all-too-busy (but in a good way) vacation last week. I am not one for long vacations, but even this one seemed just a little too short - I am used to at least a few days of total relaxation, but I suppose I can still do that; with the number of vacation days I have banked, I HAVE to take some 3 and 4 day weekends in the next few months. I hope to get a lot accomplished / caught up on those weekends... but if I do, does that not negate the fact that they are 'vacation' weekends? Again, irony raises its voice in laughter.

A strange thing: There is NO Drive Clean program here in B.C. as strange as that sounds. Cars belching copious clouds of black exhaust are far more common here than in Ontario. Which annoys the crap out of me on a personal level, as I have to suck in their fumes while climbing the hill to work every day - there's always at least one beater chugging up the hill next to me, making me stop to gasp for fresh air in a driveway or side street. It's amazing that the air can be so fresh one moment, then swimming with fumes and the stench of unburned hydrocarbons. For a province that claims the high ground in so many environmental fields, this is a glaring omission.

Sept 18 - Costumes

Halloween is coming up, and I am not sure what to do this year. I never seem to get around to costume design in time for the 31st each October, though many a great idea has stayed lodged in my head. Certainly I could shop for some great Halo3 costumes here, or even try for a matching set.

One of my friends is in the 501st Legion, a respected and well-established Star Wars costuming club. They're so popular, they have often provided security at many a convention, which of course is a sight to see - nothing like a squad of stormtroopers to settle disputes peacefully... The reason I mention this is that I recently recalled that the 2008 Canadian Action Figure Expo is coming up. I attended the 2007 show with Mike H. to sell off most of my beloved toys of years past in preparation for the move out to BC. Amazingly, someone with a camera managed to document almost every vendor present - my stuff (the table with the tall white shelf) is shown here and here, plus you can see a few shots of the 501st members who attended, including a female Royal Guard.

Which brings up the subject of female Stormtroopers, whose outfits although pleasing to the eye are somewhat impractical for battle. Heck, you can get into such topics as chainmail bikinis, female fantasy armour (or the lack therof) with some great recreations here, as well as the many stereotypes that abound in fantasy and fiction regarding barbarians and the like. One of my favourite series on the topic is the 'Chicks in Chainmail' series edited by Esther M. Friesner which has its authors exploring the many, er, cracks in the genre regarding women's stereotypes. She writes about the latest book in the series here. Of course, you could just take matters into your own hands about stereotypes, such as in comics...

Sept 19 - Pirates, yahar!

Today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day, which has several of my neighbours excited - they're big pirate fans, and I can guess fairly accurately what they're dressing up as this year. There is the Official Site, the Bus Pirates site, How To Talk Like A Pirate and even some Pirate Fonts to turn your PC into a buccaneer sailing the strange silicon seas of the internet. Plus a few more sites where you can spend yer gold on pirate booty and swag. Reminds me a little of BucCONeer'98, the World SciFi convention I attended in 1998 in Boston, whose theme (as the name implies)was piratical. Boston and pirates seemed to go well together.

One of my favourite pirates of all time is Captain Capacitor, which is odd as he is both fictional AND a CGI animated character... but that perhaps, is why I like him best. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, he was voiced by Long John Landry, whose salty tones did much to sell ol' Gavin.

Sept 20 - Don't Miss the BoobTube

It's been two months now with no TV, and I have to say I am more productive for it. It's no effort at all to pop in a DVD of my favourite series, or find something on YouTube that I've not seen in a while - despite the 10-minute limit, which is annoying for a 42-minute show, I'll grant you. One of these days I will get around to uploading ALL of my DVD's to my PC, but that will have to wait for a) the time it takes (2hrs per DVD on average) as well as b) the storage space - I figure I will beed about 5 Terabytes of storage, which is well beyond both my current finances and current tech on the market... but the gap is closing. I can recall when 1 gigabyte drives were 'too big to fill' even when installing ALL one's games, pictures and a few videos. Look for far we've come along since!

I was wiped when I got home from work, so much so that even dinner seemed a daunting task. Luck for me the microwave was invented, or I'd have had to resort to a PBJ - it's Peanut Butter Jelly time!

This week I also managed to get NWN to run on my new laptop, which was no mean feat in and of itself - Vista64 is NOT friendly to older programs, and since NWN dates waaaay back from 2002, I had little hope. Success put a smile on my face though, as now I can run the game on hot days without worrying about frying my main PC, which gets VERY toasty with no A/C nearby - I miss my office at The Prince, where I had an A/C vent pointed right at the back of the PC desk...

Sept 21 - Planes and Mechs

The Snowbirds are putting on a show today down by Dallas Rd, where nearly 25,000 people are expected to attend. Unfortunately, I am stuck working today, which I find manifestly unfair... I love seeing aerial acrobatics, and attending airshows has always been a highlight of any given year. At least I managed to catch a glimpse of one plane through a gap in the buildings to the south - sweet!

One thing I would love to do is attend Air Combat USA, where one can fly prop-driven aircraft in mock combat, complete with lasers and smoke dispensers to simulate hits. I have always liked flight simulators, so much so that I purchased one mother of a controller back in the day to play Tie Fighter - one of the greatest space combat sims ever created, for any platform. Though I did not do so well at things like Microsoft Flight Simulator, one of these days I will sit down and really learn how to fly... or at least how to avoid the ground for a good long time. Same thing, right?

This reminds me of the old Battletech Center which was located in the CN Tower in Toronto years back. This was a 'virtual world' of 16 linked 'battlepods' which simulated the interior and control layout of mechs from the Battletech universe. Each pod was linked in a network( pretty high tech stuff 15 years ago )where up to 8 players at a time could battle each other in tactical combat using the latest graphics at the time - pretty dull by today's standards, but it beat the heck out of the Nintendo64 at the time. As I recall, the whole setup was running on a Mac Quadra, which was incredibly funny to see; all these huge battlepods linked to a tiny Mac sitting in a corner that spat printouts from an old HP inkjet. The future meets the Mac - sounds like a commercial, actually!


I am using a Blog editor called ScribeFire this week, in the hopes that it will cure the annoyances that have drawn out each entry for FAR longer than it should take to enter some simple text. One thing it has done already is making links a LOT easier to enter, hence the link-heavy blog this week.

Coraline, Car Wars and Colds

Seems I am playing catch-up with the Blog, yet again another entry finished on a Monday morning instead of a Sunday night. Still, it's DONE, so that's all that matters... words on a page, not a blank 'Under Construction' banner of old.

Aug 18th - Failure to Launch

The shift today was frustrating; yet again another Monday Product Launch, and for the second time in two weeks nothing worked correctly. The promo contest managed to crash the system two times out of three, and resulted in reams of wasted paper as multiple print commands were sent for every transaction. Seeing as we do not have the fastest PC's on the block either, this resulted in some rather long transactions as I had to start them over several times each, hoping for success.

On a lighter note, I was browsing around a few of my thousands of bookmarks and came across this place. I collected Playmobil as a kid, and though most of it is lost or sold off, I still fondly remember the amazing Pirate Ship I got for my eighth birthday - wish I'd had a pool to play with it in, but one can't have everything; it was still a damned cool toy. Seems something just as cool has come down the pipes again: a Roman Colosseum! Something else that I do not have the time or space for, which is a pity, as the Roman Empire was another bit of history I really enjoyed as a kid, and still do today. The chariot race in Ben-Hur still stands out vividly in my memory, despite the fact I have not seen it in many a long year. Playmobil chariots...

Aug 19th - Neil Gaiman

I was digging around YouTube, and stumbled across quite a few videos of Neil Gaiman, author of such works as "Neverwhere", "The Sandman" and the movie Stardust. Neil is a mesmerizing speaker when reading his own works, as I had the privilege of hearing at the Torcon2003 SF convention on a Sunday morning. The room was packed to the gills as he read an excerpt from "A Study in Emerald" in which Sherlock Holmes and H.P. Lovecraft merge universes in a world that seems all-too chillingly real - download the free Mp3 of the story at the bottom of the blurb here. Near the end of the Torcon reading, an usher tried to signal Neil to "wrap-up" quickly. Neil paused, looked around at the sea of rapt faces and told the usher "You had better let me finish, or they WILL kill you," he said with a gin. The usher promptly vanished as we all laughed and waited eagerly for the end of the story.

More good Gaiman News: a stop-motion version of Coraline is coming out, being done by the creative genius who did A Nightmare Before Christmas, Pete Kozachik. You can see a preview of it here - looks amazing! You can read more about Neil Gaiman here, in his own words - he keeps a daily blog. Mesmerizing!

Aug 20th - Car Wars

Evening shifts are day-eaters, in that by the time the noon-hour rolls around, one has to get ready for work - and that's the end of the day. I much prefer morning shifts, as I get home in the early afternoon and still have the evening to do as I please - I always feel rushed if I only have the morning to work with; maybe its the open-ended versus the have-to-be-at-work-by-this-time schedule thing. It's just so odd not to give specifics in this blog, but then I understand about security concerns for my workplace. Knowing that my blog is monitored is somewhat stifling, but it presents a challenge to me as a writer to convey my thoughts without compromising the security or integrity of my employer... not easy to do if you want to make it more than pablum-fare to read

Speaking of fare, it seems that the old B-movie classic Death Race 2000 is being remade. The video preview of Death Race 2008 is out, starring Jason Latham of The Transporter fame. Fans of the old tabletop Steve Jackson game Car Wars, such as myself, might wonder if this will actually be the first film to come close to capturing the phrase "Where the right of way goes to the biggest guns." Crude, but an interesting analogue to today's society. Interestingly enough, Car Wars predicted a fuel crisis in the year 2000, followed by various other disasters that resulted in an altered history in which oil-based fuels are rare, airships powered by electric fuel cells ply the skies, and the roads are ruled by cars touting machine guns and spikedroppers... are we there yet?

Aug 21st - Fleet Week and Star Wars

Another morning shift today, with the weather turning grey again. The ride to work is always showing me something new, though I really wish the one yard I walk by would stop using such large amounts of pure organic fertilizer on their flowerbeds - phew! Even under cloudy skies, the walk is relaxing despite being uphill. Homes are well-kept, unique unto themselves and surrounded by lush greenery, the result of lots of TLC and abundant rain obviously.

The annual Fleet Week down the coast in San Francisco is coming up in a few months, where the US Pacific Fleet comes back into port for its yearly stop. - the Snowbirds will be performing this year too! Apparently a very talented wag decided to make this video showcasing what would happen if the Imperial Fleet of the Empire from Star Wars made a showing instead... very well done, subtle and seamless - makes all those hundreds of Star Wars Kid videos seem cartoonish in the extreme.

Aug 22 - Getting Bugged

Worked the morning shift today, feeling a little rough. Seems I've managed to pick up a bug this week - my nose started jogging yesterday and is in full run today. Good thing I made sure to have kleenex on hand at work just in case of such things... when the facets really start to leak, the handy roll of TP just doesn't cut the mustard. Sad to say. For some reason I thought that tonight was the night for the local Jazz Festival, but apparently it is next week, or at least that was what the ticket says - go figure. So I had the evening to rest up, and I did in a big way - I practically fell over after dinner, with brief moments of consciousness until a wave of weariness carried me away well before 11pm. Erk.

Aug 23 - Sweating a cold

Glad I had the day off today, so I could spend it resting up and trying to get rid of this bug. I kept the heat theory in mind, and the apartment was a toasty 29 degrees, with the windows open just a crack for airflow - the PC and Xbox put out a lot of heat both. I ran a summer party today online today in NWN, which had been in the plans for a few weeks. So I spent most of the day around the TV, chatting with people and getting other things done in conversational lulls. It was a little odd, being home sick but at the same time talking with dozens of people as they dropped by my 'online tavern' - yet another use for the internet nobody foresaw back in its early days. A good time was had by all, and at least my online nose wasn't a kleenex-killing machine.

Aug 24 - And on the Third Day He Sneezed

I took today off as well( thanks Meaghan! )as I am still feeling clobbered - the nose is under control but the throat is touch-and-go. Still using the Heat Theory, that a little sweat is good for the soul and bad for bugs. A few games of COD4 were all I got in before several of my Niagara friends lost power due to a thunderstorm in the area which knocked them offline for the day. So I played a few games of Civ: Rev, the first ended when the game crashed, and the second was a clean sweep for Lucas - payback for a similar game I won some weeks ago. Well done.


And done is what I am, for another week. Hopefully I get my energy back enough to get some work done this week, as the weekend past was a total wash. At least the struggle with Blogger was a little easier this time, popping back and forth between Opera and FireFox seemed to do the trick; about an hour's work.

Cookies, Subway and Sadness

This blog ran a little late in being posted... see the Aug 11th entry as to why. No pictures either, but they ARE on the way. I'll let you know. :-) 300 page-views since I started the counter back in January.. amazing!

Aug 11 - Cookies and Stress

Today was a five-cookie day. Nearly ten hours of continuous stress….yeesh! We rolled out an update of one of our major products today, Victoria being the test-market for the rest of the country. Can you say ‘fiasco’ with me? Repeat ad nauseum… it was horrible. Bugs in the program meant that my first customer, who had the patience of a saint, spent 45 minutes in the lobby while I tried desperately to get the product working. It finally did, after a band-aid solution was found to work around the issues. It was like that all day long, and I finished the ten-hour-long day with my teeth gritted in a solid mass. Doesn’t do much for headaches, that – I try not to grind them, which is foolish.

I’ve noticed that stress hits me differently these days. In years past, I would wind up a bad day by ending with incredibly tense neck and shoulder muscles, to which I quickly applied a fantastic Homedics back massager ( looks like E.T. ) – made a world of difference, and I still have it for the occasional use. Now, stress tends to add up over a few days, where I will have a day where its just a struggle to get some energy and focus on things, even relaxing. Different from the end-of-a-single-day stress, and more difficult to deal with, as I don’t get anything done at the end of one of those days – staying focused at work takes it all.

Aug 12 – Reboot Revival / Zeroes2Heroes

One of my favourite shows from the 90’s is Reboot, the first computer-animated television show. It ran for three seasons, as well as having two two-hour movies, which were actually the fourth season cut down a bit when the series was nipped short. Recently, I have discovered that a ‘ReBoot Revival’ is underway. This makes me happy, as I very much enjoyed the series for its characters and its story; the third season was a non-stop thrill ride with an ending that did not disappoint at all. No ‘kiddy show’ by then, I tell you! Too bad the DVD’s are incredibly difficult to get, which I find odd.

A movie pitch was made for a ReBoot idea, on a website called Zeroes2Heroes where anyone can put up their creative ideas… with the possibility that they will be picked up and produced, in some form or another, by a major entertainment company! What I find fascinating is that anyone at all can submit their ideas or art, and the community of registered users will vote on it… to the point where it may be developed! Sure beats the heck out of trying to find an agent and getting them to add your manuscript to the massive piles of slush that are an editors cross to bear daily. Nobody likes slush piles.

Aug 13 - Subway

Work is going to be interesting in the next month, and not in a good way. With the departure of one of my co-workers earlier in the month, and the news that my other co-worker is leaving, I will be the ONLY staff member at my branch – not good. My DM has already asked me if I was willing to cut short my vacation and start working almost as soon as I return from Niagara – since this is the sort of thing that usually happens when I take vacations, I agreed, as it’s either that or close the branch for the rest of the week… seems it IS hard to get good help in a lot of sectors these days, as it’s a buyer’s market. Too many people are staying only for a few months, then hopping to ‘better’ jobs – which is good, as it indicates a strong economy, but bad for employee retention. Yep.

While having a chai tea with my neighbour over at the Cook St. Starbuck’s, I noticed something new going in just down the road: a Subway. Amazing, as that was the only thing that my neighbourhood did not already have – kind of freaky actually, like wishing for a new toy and finding it some months later by the side of the road. Well, not exactly like that, but you get the idea. Made me wonder how careful I should be about wishing for a movie theater down this end of the city… don’t want to wipe out a block of homes! A library might be nice though, as the nearest one is downtown, where I don't usually go. Too much to ask for with all the other conveniences around here, so I'll stick with my own massive book collection.

Aug 14 - Sadness at a Distance

I found out that a friend’s father passed away today, and that he had been sick for some time… damned hard news to take, especially from this far away. Coming from a large Italian family, I can remember much of my youth was spent going to funerals( or weddings )so my feelings are still quite strong on BEING there for people...

Distance and friends are always hard to juggle. Though the internet makes it easy to communicate, it can’t help when you need to BE there for someone – phone calls just aren’t the same, it’s just a voice on the line and not a shoulder to lean on.

I wonder, in this coming age of rising fuel costs, if travel will become a barrier again. I recently wrote an article for Cyberwalker about webcams and videophones, the latter being something we STILL can’t buy down at the local FutureShop as easily as we would a regular phone. You think that someone would come up with a simple, reasonably-priced unit that uses compatible standards so ANY videophone would work with any other manufacturer’s unit… but no. To date, it’s still webcams and fond wishes, which annoys the heck out of me – I had those back in the 90’s, and they’re only marginally better for the non-techie to set up and use, despite a decade of ‘progress’. At least theyr’e cheaper, and no longer suffer ‘pixel burn’ from bright light sources like sun on snow through a window… I learned THAT one the hard way during a call to Mexico one day.

Aug 15 - Writing practice and Civ

In writing this blog, I have been getting in some good practice with my word-skills, and just recently realized than on average I am writing about ten thousand words a month just for this blog alone – surprised the heck outta me, that did. It is also rather difficult to keep this blog flowing along, in terms of never retreading the same topic as well as not just creating a boring play-by-play daily journal on washing socks. No, I try to put in something different, something amusing, every week – my thoughts on various subjects, my observations about Victoria and even the occasional profound thought as it scampers pell-mell through my mind.

I played Civ:Rev for far too long this evening, trying to win the game in specific ways yet being frustrated as usual by random chance that set my plans askew. I have also noticed that the game is not as polished technically as I would have liked for a console game. Graphical glitches, slowdowns, slow access to some features and odd sound-level variances all make me wince on occasion; I hope that Firaxis Games is hard at work on a patch to smooth things out. While the glitches do not interfere with gameplay, they are annoying.

Aug 16 - Overtime and Bad Gameplay

I worked an overtime shift today at another branch, to help out. It always amuses me to work somewhere else, as the regular customers usually ask “Oh, are you new?” to which I always reply “Why, yes!” just to see what they will do. Some of the slightly sneaky ones will try to convince me that they are ‘allowed’ to do something that tries to get around our work policies… which again amuses me, as I let them go on for a bit before snapping them back to the reality of how things really work. It never fails to amaze me how people will try something with a ‘new’ person that would never do with a ‘regular’ staff member. But I guarantee they’ll never try it again when they see me next.

Surprisingly, I had a bad experience on NWN tonight, though in hindsight the stress of work this week perhaps provided a tipping point for my frustrations. Given the unstructured nature of a NWN-run gameworld, every DM running ‘quests’ is there on their own time, volunteering to run people around and tell their own story in the overall framework of things. As an aside, this usually works, but give the ‘catch-as-can’ nature of unscheduled events, some nights there aren’t a lot of people around, and other nights you can miss out on an amazing experience by but a few hours if you are unlucky – annoying, that is.

Well, in a nutshell( before your eyes glaze over )a few friends and I were out to do what seemed to be a simple rescue… but turned out to be a Mexican Standoff. I grew very frustrated at the seeming lack of options, and when the NPC ‘hostage’ was lost, despite our frantic efforts, I grew very angry – the first time that has happened to me in an online game. I quickly cooled down, but this clarified the problem that a lot of online games have compared to well-crafted single-player games: good gameplay structure with MULTIPLE means of problem resolution, most of which are NOT too difficult to distinguish – it should be hard to MAKE the choice itself, not to just SEE it initially. In any case, I logged off after chatting with both the DM and other players, to ensure this sort of thing did not reoccur and so frustrate people who would be less better able to deal.

Aug 17 - Heard the Thunder

I felt a little better about working the weekend through( again today )as the weather was nowhere near as sunny as promised earlier in the week – go figure. Again, the rain here doesn’t last, similar in some ways to rain in Florida: it rains for a few minutes and moves on, though the sky may be cloudy for most of the day. A week of get skies and rain is unheard of here, just like thunder or lightning; some people here have never SEEN lightning before, if they grew up in Victoria.

Amazing, to think that something so common in Ontario is a rare wonder here. Good thing too, as it’s damned dangerous… and that so many fools take so little note of that. I’ll never forget a violent thunderstorm that hit Niagara some years back, while I was staying at the Prince. The winds blew the rain horizontally so hard that it penetrated into the building( since sealed )and managed to cause my bedroom ceiling to partially collapse – we ended up having to move for three months while the unit was repaired, including new carpets. No, what got me was DURING that storm, a family of crazy fools was IN the pool, with lightning strikes flickering in the sky all around. They huddled for shelter, all of them still IN THE WATER and UNDER an overhanging tree as the wind and rain whipped all around. I remember shouting out the window for them to get out of the water, but the noise of the thunder and rain was too much. Incredibly lucky they were, as lucky as they were stupid! Dumbest thing I’ve seen in a long, long time, I tell you... and I work with the public.

At least I do not have an early morning tomorrow; we’ve scaled back our hours on Mondays and Tuesdays, so( for now )it’s guaranteed that I can sleep in, even to 9am, on a Monday – how many jobs can you say that for? Mind you, there’s a lot of other things that balance that out about the job, but since I rate sleep rather highly( never getting enough of it )then anything that increases sleep time is good in my books. Reminds me of someone I worked with, a long time ago: a figure skater, who told me that due to the incredible demands that that sport puts on a person, she needed to sleep at least eight to TEN hours a night before practice or performances – incredible, since I feel logy if I get more than eight hours… or less than six, which shows there’s a balance needed too.

Another week blogged and logged, and that makes TWO weeks without comments... has Anonymous given up? Or is he plotting some fiendish comment campaign the likes of which this blog has never seen before? Tune in next week for another exciting episode...

UPDATE: we have a NEW commentator... a holy figure, no less! Welcome to Comment Christ. We'll find out if he's just cross, or if he can really nail those comments in coming weeks... and thanks Jen - glad you keep coming back for more! Surprising, but welcome!!!