Bikes, Blue Bridges and Brains

The word of the week is... parsimony. So there!

Oct 5 - More on Renting

Further on the subject of Renting vs. Owning one's home: there's an excellent article here on the topic, albeit from a US-based viewpoint. The links included at the bottom of the article are also worthwhile checking out, as they include a graphical Rent vs Buy Calculator, courtesy of the NY Times, who are well known for their financial reporting prowess. Or stop by the GetRichSlowly.org site, which has a ton of good advice - for free, similar to CanadianBusiness.com but with less ads. Be sure to stop by DealHunting.ca, where you can browse through various coupons... much like RedFlagDeals.com, which lists all sorts of deals for many Canadian retailers, including a lot of online-only sales and deals, which can save you a fair bit depending on what you're in the market for. Canada's Economic Action Plan doesn't mention anything on the topic, but that doesn't surprise me.

Alternatives to home ownership? There are quite a few ways to go about it, including subsidized programs, ( I like that one). A good place to check out about alternatives to owning a home is at Ezine Articles, which might be a good place to send people from Ireland - apparently they have a home-ownership obsession. Weird, huh?

Like we're obsessed with cell phones in Canada. Three weeks from now, the ban on using cell phones while driving takes effect in Ontario - not including hands-free units or calls made to 911, that is. Having seen so many drivers pulling bonehead moves with only one hand on the wheel and half their mind( or more )taken with yakking on the phone, I'm all for it. Heck, I miss photo radar too, for that matter... though that was rather more unpopular - and it's started up again in Quebec this summer. I imagine there will be a rush on speakerphone accessories in stores in the next few weeks.

Oct 6 - Smoking Gold

It's about time: Quebec announced that it is joining several other provinces in suing tobacco companies to recover health-related costs pegged in the billions. Similar to other suits filed in the USA, it is surprising to me that it has taken this long for Canada to get is act together about taking action against the companies responsible for such a deadly product, which the WHO estimates has killed 100 million people in the 20th century. I hope that Ontario is successful in its suit, which seeks 50 Billion Dollars in damages, atop other suits from BC, NB and now Quebec. There's more about the health effects of tobacco here, but I would hope that most people reading this would already know that it kills you - slowly, or as it is better put "not quickly enough to scare people away."

Nice to see this: trading today made gold hit an all-time high, which is a bright spot in the current floppy-mushy market. Now that we are buying gold at MMart, it should help to drive even more business our way. Cash for gold is proving very popular of late, with people looking for ways to make ends meet - selling old jewelery for a decent price in an easy manner should help more than a few of them.

Privacy these days is a hot topic, given the proliferation of social networking sites right alongside reports of Identity Theft. Now there's a new twist for those of you who use Twitter, Facebook and MySpace: don't use any apps that generate your 'Porn Name.' Seems that ID thieves are using the data to better enable them to crack into people's personal accounts, as pet names and street names( as used by the apps )are prime candidates as passwords for bank accounts and the like.

Oct 7 - Pedal Power

Today is World Bike-To-Work Day... though I was feeling so tired, I got dropped off instead of walking my bike to work. Ironic, eh? Normally I enjoy the commute, but this morning the thought of tacking the hill in the middle was just too much for me. If I lived in Victoria, I could just take a bus( though it'd most likely get stuck in the Colwood Crawl )which is a cheap way of commuting. To solve the traffic woes here on the Island, the last few years have seen various transit proposals made and scrapped, with the current round asking for public input. Me, I'm for the giant-catapult-and-net idea... I never thought I'd come to appreciate the uninterrupted ribbon of asphalt that comprises the QEW and its sundry highways, which never has regular twice-daily traffic jams for its entire length.

If you plan on taking the personal pedal-powered route to work, here's 6 tips for you to follow to make your commute easier. Another great read is this blog article, about the joys that biking to work each day brings... as well as the dangers. A recent bike blitz by police here in Victoria resulted in a score of tickets, mostly for things that I've seen over and over for years: no helmet, no lights, and riding on the sidewalk( something that I've been guilty of on occasion, when traffic's nasty ). It still amazes me that so many cyclists survive with stupid things they pull, in addition to total idiocy like riding at night in dark clothes... yet there's no entry on DarwinAwards.com for anything cycle-related.

On the other hand, if you feel safer with a layer of steel and glass between you and the open road, then you should check out the Top Ten Vehicles for Urban Warfare. As one commenter mentioned, it was disappointing that the Marine APC from Aliens didn't make the list, but I thought it was a great selection of vehicles all the same. Perhaps with the exception of the Mazda GTX... and that they actually put a bicycle on there. No contest when it comes to a fight between 2 wheels and four. Though you may still have trouble parking your wheels of carnage... unless you reserve a parking spot online beforehand. Whoda thought?

In a related bit of news, the big blue Johnson Street Lift Bridge here in Victoria is nearing the end of its useful lifetime, and needs to be replaced. When recent government funding fell through, proponents of the bridge were still hopeful that the bridge can be saved. Having grown up near the giant lift bridges of the Welland Canal, I can say that Big Blue is in their class... plus, it's blue. I'd hate to see it scrapped, though all 3 of the now-unfunded design proposals looked pretty cool.

Oct 8 - Windows 7 and Ewe

Have a sweet tooth that you can't easily satisfy? Good news! The world's largest candy store is going to be opening in the Dubai Mall, so apart from the plane ticket, all you'll need to do is find a way to get all those sweets back home... the carry-on and checked luggage limit probably won't do for more than a few month's supply, at best. I myself have a penchant for chocolate chip cookies, which isn't so bad really... my teeth will last that much longer. With moderation, of course... though the thought of Bacon Cookies does set my mouth to watering!

Like candy from babies: Laptop theft happens all the time around the world( the stats are alarming! )ruining people's days as well as their insurance premiums. As a laptop owner, I'm very aware of how easily my machine and I might part ways, apart from the usual dangers such as spilled liquids and deadly drops onto hard surfaces. If a laptop is stolen, there is still hope these days thanks to software like the freebie Adeonia that allows a missing laptop to report its whereabouts to its owners - bad news for thieves, good news for owners.

Perhaps not so sweet, but still drool-inducing to g33ks is the imminent release of Windows 7 two weeks from today. My copy is already on order, so I hope it arrives by  the end of October. I've been busy backing up data, just in case... always a good idea when installing a new OS. Considering all the 'fun' I've had over the years with installing various versions of Windows, perhaps I'd better make TWO backups of everything. Sheepish.

Oct 9 - Niagara, O Roar Again!

Whew, today was one long day... I started in the early morning after 8am, and didn't get home again until after 7, well into the dusk. I was getting things finished from the week so that I wouldn't have to come in on the weekend - with four days off in a row, it was worth spending most of a day ensuring I could enjoy all of them. Mighty tired by the end of it all, having been through my second wind... but it was a good feeling that I'd accomplished everything I needed to by the time I was done.

Today was kind of like a palindrome, in a way... it started off almost like it ended: with me at work. Palindromes are fun to refer to, as they can be hidden almost anywhere at all - even in this sentence. One of my first internet handles was a palindrome, and they've grown on me since - you can find a huge archive of them here, plus a smaller surplus here. I like them because you never know if you're reading one or not...

Today was not a good day for travelers heading out for the long weekend: as I mentioned earlier, we live on an island... and that means ferries. So when one of them catches fire( slightly )and is thus out of service, it has a domino effect on the entire Island traffic scene. Ouch. Glad I don't have to travel this weekend... not that I've been to the mainland yet, but one day soon. Maybe.

Oct 10 - Why bother bidding?

Up way, way too early today at 5am, to try to get some bids in for a nice Belkin network USB-sharing device on Swoopo. Unfortunately, too many other people were of the same mind, and I gave up once bidding went past $35.00 ... at that point, people were out to win, not to save money. In the end, the unit went for close to $50.00 ... ( half of its retail cost )and meaning that all the bidders involved spent over $500.00 in their 'bidding war' ... which is how Swoopo makes their money from the unwise with deep pockets.

Here's a bit of trivia for you: in the first X-men film, several actresses auditioned for the role of Rogue, one of my favourite X-men characters. Perhaps you didn't know it, but one of them was Laura Bertram, who later starred in the 5-year run of the TV series Andromeda where she played Trance Gemini - who was also one of my favourites on TV, developing from a purple-skinned airhead into a very interesting and layered character. Good writing there, a pleasure to watch her character develop from a bit of fluff into someone intriguing, and wonderful that she was given the time and care to develop her as such.

Today was gaming day for me. I downloaded some new Xbox360 demos, and had some good sessions of COD4, CivRev and even played some Hexic. I didn't get too far with Defense Grid though, as I got hooked by Sid Meier's Pirates - the game looks gorgeous on my laptop, and is incredible fun to play. Who wouldn't want to be a pirate in this version of digital reality? Pretty good for a game that originally came out in 1987 and was re-released with updated code in 2005... it's still damn good fun!

Oct 11 - World Zombie Day

Mmmm.... brains. Today is World Zombie Day, where the undead can parade around in public and not get shot in the head for it. Most places in the world, anyway. Things zombie have been becoming more popular and mainstream in the last few years, as WZD shows - the upcoming World War Z movie looks to be particularly interesting, as does this Zombie Warning Sign gallery. Heck, even the University of Florida recently posted a plan to deal with zombie outbreaks - how's that for getting your educational money's worth?

I felt like a zombie today, getting up at 6am to try again for an auction on Swoopo... but again too much action put the kybosh on that idea. I've collected a few month's worth of data on various auctions( for free, on my own )which supported this time of day being the best chance... but a few flies in the ointment and all the best plans go for naught. Since I'm not willing to waste bids doing a throwdown against more than a couple of people, that was it for me - back to bed, then up in the hopes of COD4... but everyone was playing NHL10, so there went that idea.

Instead, I spent the day recording shows off the DVR( and onto DVD )to clear space, while perusing a few more auctions and working on my NWN project. Which is going somewhat slowly now that some members of the Dev Team are back to school( some learning, some teaching )and others are equally busy. We're all in it for the long haul though, so I'm hopeful that we'll see a turnaround early in the new year. As the saying goes: we've come too far to stop now. Though after watching Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer tonight, I wish they hadn't finished it at all...


On that note - good night! Mmm.... braaiiiins...

Servers, Salt and Scary Soviets

Ever have one of those weeks? Maybe this wasn't it, but it felt like a close second...!

Sept 21 - Dead Things

Today was a series of frustrating events at work that scotched the whole day’s plan I had, to help train a newer employee from another store – that just didn’t happen. The main disruption was our server, which has been painfully slow since I took over the store in the spring. A simple call to our HelpDesk turned into an all-day odyssey of techs trying to make sense of the mess that is our server – to no avail. By day’s end they had us back& running again( after 4 hours without being able to efficiently serve customers )with an appointment to have the thing totally replaced( finally!!! )tomorrow morning.

Dead-ish: has anyone seen the new movie Zombieland, with Woody Harrelson in it? Although reviewers compare it to the much-loved Shaun of the Dead, I also hear it's got its own flair. I'd love to see a TV series set in a zombie-infested world, and word has it that the comic series The Walking Dead is close to being picked up by AMC for development. Mmm.... brains! No, wait... that was a TV executive! Spit it out!

In the meantime I leave you with: Twisted Disney Princesses - some are zombies, some aren't... but all are brilliantly twisted. Great job by the artist, especially Ariel!

Sept 22 - Serving Coffee and Dragons

A long, long day Part 2... I was @ work an hour early, to let the tech in carrying our new server to be installed. Things thankfully went without a hitch, though we did open five minutes late; big whoop. As I had said for the last 6 months, the old server didn't have what it took to run things quickly; in fact, we never used it for anything, even just internet searches, as it was far far too pokey. Turns out that it was simply a workstation-level PC that had had a 'Server' label stuck on it as it was put in service, which was then overlooked as other stores were upgraded. The new PC is zippy, far faster and now makes it possible to serve 2 people at once in-branch - finally. It bodes well for when business picks up again.

After work, I spent a few hours a few doors down at the Millstream Merchant's meeting at Serious Coffee. Every month a group of us get together to plot and scheme to improve our business revenue, tossing ideas on the table and seeing what we can do to help each other. Tonight's meeting was somewhat subdued, as a lot of us have had quite the busy month, but those of us who started the group back in June were pleased to see quite a few new faces tonight.

Dragon Age: the next big RPG from BioWare, talked about by the folks at MMORPG.com here, even though the multiplayer part is still in development alongside the single-player game. Looks to be another huge hit from the folks who brought us Baldur's Gate... which I never played, come to think of it. I should really download a copy from Good Old Games for a few bucks... but first I need to find a site I can buy the time to play it from!

Sept 23 - You broke what...?

Ack! Today went all wacky in mid-afternoon, as my CSR from the other store put themselves out of commission with a broken hand; so much for their training this week. While I'm not sure they can work with a serious fracture, I'm pretty certain they're going to take 4-6 weeks off to recover properly, which leaves us short-staffed for the area again. At least they'll get some much-needed time off.

Seeing as I worked the morning shift, I had to stay on and close the store as well - the CSR was supposed to close, but obviously wasn't able to with only one functional appendage. That worked out to a little over twelve hours in-branch, which was nice for the O/T but not so good for the endurance, as yesterday ALSO clocked in at 12 hours of solid work-time with the MMA meeting added in. Lucky thing I'd packed some spare soup in the store cupboards for just such an event( not to mention in case of an earthquake )so I wasn't hungry when I finally made it home, but I sacked out soon after - quite the day, all in all, along with the usual work crises needing solving.

Here's a looming crisis for you( hi, Brian! ): sodium. I've checked on my own intake levels for years, but never to the extent of lowering it to what the recommended levels are - this article from the Vancouver Sun talks about the problem more in depth, worth a read. Salt - who knew something so precious could be so dangerous?

Sept 24 - Beep... beep... gold!

I managed to sleep in today, for a change, and spent a good hour of the morning on the deck enjoying the weather with a good book. Then it was off to work for the closing shift. Today turned out to be a good day overall, just being busy - which is good for revenue, which keeps me employed. Simple logic there! We've had a run of large cheques the last few weeks, so that's a bright spot indicating that the economy is slowing turning around... but we're not out of the woods yet.

Talk about luck: by now you've probably heard about the man in England who discovered a vast hoard of ancient gold in a farmer's field. Just him and a metal detector; makes you want to run around Europe to see what else may be buried and awaiting your chance discovery. But I wonder: why are we only hearing about this now, when the discovery was made months ago back in July? I wonder sometimes... but gold is pretty popular nowadays, with ads all over TV about digging in your couch for spare gold - like that ever turns up anything save a few pennies and too many stale popcorn kernels.

Maybe you could spend some of your new-found wealth on movie memorabilia... like some props from the Transformers films! Next week, over 100 items from the films are going up for auction, including the 16-foot-tall replica of Bumblebee, which is expected to fetch close to $100K in Canadian dollars - he'd make one helluva lawn ornament!

Sept 25 - Nuke Fridays!

Split shifts stink, but we've no choice today; I both opened and closed the store, with a 3-hour break in the middle that had me cycle home and back again. Which was nice, in that I spent a solid hour outside enjoying the( relative )peace and quiet. I read a good chunk of Malevil, which is slow going... good on the part of the author, who gets paid by the word, and bad for the reader, who has to slog through minute details of fictional post-apocalyptic daily life that could be done without.

Getting home in the late evening, I paused briefly then went back out to put up signs at all the nearby street-corners for tomorrow's yard sale. Yep, the neighbours downstairs were getting rid of a lot of extra material, and since the weekend weather is supposed to be superb I volunteered to help in a few small ways. Which included putting up the signs to direct early-morning( and all-day )yard-sale sniffers to the property from various major nearby roads.

What do sunglasses, the end of the world and martial arts have in common? Yes, The Matrix... but also The Book Of Eli, an upcoming film starring Denzel Washington. Looks to be very Fallout-3-esque, with a lot of great blasted-to-bits scenery as background to some crazy fight scenes. In a similar vein, there's a group of Russians who got together recently for a live-action weekend of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. which is a fairly popular post-apocalyptic RPG. Back to reality, there's a creepy picture gallery of the city of Chernnobyl 20 years after the nuclear disaster of 1989 - stark reminders of how things would look if nukes did fall; anyone seen my sunglasses...?

This disturbed me: word is, the Soviets built( and are still running! )a doomsday device... it's called Perimeter. Scary, scary stuff!!!!

Sept 26 - Yard Sale

Up before seven today to help with the yard sale on the front driveway: the downstairs neighbours had a ton( more than a few tons, actually )of stuff to sell, more than I had thought at brief glance last night. I put out a small selection of my own things in a corner, just for kicks; most of what I have is still worth keeping for future use in a place of my own. And a good thing that I put up signs last night: the local papers had misspelled the street name in the ad, so most of the people that showed up were drive-bys who had spotted the signs; kudos to me. Overall we had over a hundred people browse during the day, I was told, which was a very successful one.

What a gorgeous day for a yard sale too: brilliant sunshine, not a cloud in the sky - it looked great from inside the Colwood branch, which I was at before noon to help out at( seeing as they were short a person now, see the entry for the 23rd above )which was a steady day. I even bought a few pieces of gold, which made a few people happy at what they received back for their baubles.

Saturdays around these parts are a mixed bag for events, including cars burning up the track at the Western Speedway which is in earshot of my backyard. Much akin to the similarly-named Merritville Speedway back in Ontario, it's a rip-roaring night out full of high-octane chills, spills and thrills. Which I have no interest in, not being a NASCAR junkie, though I do like cars; I have fond memories of spending hours at car shows, as well as even more hours designing ultimate fighting vehicles for the too-few Car Wars game sessions I played in high school. Ironic that I cycle most places now...

Sept 27 - Not a day of rest

Today was my 7th day of work, and thankfully the least eventful. I was at our Colwood store on my ownsome( sic. ), which is not so good on a Friday but fine for a Sunday. Especially a lovely, sunny Sunday outside - the usual weather when I work, but nice all the same for a late September date.

Regular readers will recall that I canceled my subscription to High-Def TV channels back in the spring, as I found their content to be... lacking - especially given their cost. Which looks to have spawned a resurgance in antenna sales, as people are discovering they can pull in a few dozen free HD channels from the airwaves - what's old is new again, as they say. Unfortunately my house is in a low-lying area surrounded by hills, so I doubt I'll get more than a handful of channels - but I'm still going to give it a shot in the new year, once I find an HD-capable antenna on sale after the holidays. I'm cheap, so why not?

I'll leave you with a 'fun' little flash game: Pandemic II, which has you trying to destroy the world by creating a plague. Creepy, cartoony fun... and a lot better than some of the games I've seen out lately, like this one - now that's creepy!

A day late for this week's blog... read about why next week!

Battles, Bueller and Blockbuster

A busy, busy week at work... which is really boring to relate, so I've refrained. Mail in your thanks!

Sept 13 - Mondaze

A part of today was relaxing, another part stressful... the third part was busy, as I clambered carefully up onto to the roof today to clean off a lot of the accumulated crap that had built up in the gutters. Annoying, as it caused water to flow into places not intended, despite the excellent gutter-covers that the place has installed - when those are themselves covered in crap, the water just sluices off the roof willy-nilly. It was surprisingly hot up there with the sun today, leading me again to respect the many roofers who come in to cash their cheques every week at work, burned brown by the sun and wrinkled by the wind. Those shingles were scorching!

Ah, progress... sometimes good, sometimes bad. In the case of the Wheel of Time series, the next book is still being written, but in the meantime a large resource has shut down: WOTmania.com has closed as of Aug. 31st of this year. Thankfully, DragonMount.com has taken over the link and has news that some of the data will be integrated into their site, but for those looking to backtrack all the nooks and crannies of the series, it's a setback. Which means that it's time to re-read the thing again... but not until after Christmas, I think. I'm just too busy with other projects, and it requires a fair commitment of time.

io9.com has been running a great series called Future Metro, which examines cities of the future in all their glory. Lots of good reading there, I mean it: there's at least 2 dozen articles about all the aspects of what it will be like to be living urban in the future... both good and bad, most of them quite solidly scifi.

Sept 14 - Golden Showers

Did I mention that we're now buying gold at MMart? Yep... haul in your old jewelery or whatnot made of real gold, and we'll hand over cash for it - a competitive amount, believe it or not. Today I had tangible proof of that: a guy came in to sell a heavy gold-link bracelet he'd bought in Korea years ago, and after all was said and done he got back nearly $600.0 CAN. Now THAT is a solid bit of change in your pocket... and it also gives me an idea on how I might be able to turn the current market for gold to my advantage, if I can determine how a few other bits might fit into a - puzzle. More on that next week.

This is kind of useful: you can look up just about anyone on the 'net using 123people.com, but I found it more entertaining to look myself up and see how many more people out there shared my name. What they do, where they are, that sort of thing - kind of like tracking down a few clones you didn't know about.

Other things you may not know about: shower heads harbouring germs? Yep, that's just one more thing to worry about... I still remember from when I was a little kid being irrationally worried about spiders in the shower head( no idea why )but now it's apparently true that showers MAY be bad for you. Only if you're not in the greatest of health, mind you, but sometimes I get a little sick of hearing how many things are bad for you these days. Maybe hermits had it right: live simply, live away from civilization, and be happy?

Sept 15 - Games and Books

In the world of videogames, there are quite a lot of tried-and-true formulas... which is good, as most work fairly well, but after a while people tend to yawn and go "Sure, it LOOKS nice, but it's the same ol' shooter/side-scroller/rpg that's been done to death already." Which is why when a game like Scribblenauts comes along, gamers sit up and take notice, because, well... it's fun! Like BrainAge and similar games for the DS, it's the unique style of gameplay that sets Scibblenauts apart: it's text-based action. While that may seem like a misnomer, it sounds like a blast and promises hours of entertainment; if you have a DS, I'd check it out... as for me, I'll have to wait for it to come out for another platform, if that happens. Darn the luck. I'm still waiting for the re-release of Mechwarrior4, which has had a recent bit of news assuring people that it IS coming... can't wait!

Oh, and this is one game I have to get: Gratuitous Space Battles, which "aims to bring the over-the-top explodiness( sic. )back into space games" - how cool is that? Stuff all that hours-long resource-gathering, the tedious buildup and the too-brief battles - this one is all about Big Explosions, as that's where all the fun is, right? I can't wait 'till it's out! Though I still miss Earth & Beyond... thankfully, a Canadian site has kept hope alive.

My bedtime reading this last week has been to dig into the rare book I found at Booksmart in Niagara, the oft-sought( and recently available on Amazon )Malevil. Originally published in 1972, the book is rather a slow-starter, as it often dives into the intricacies of French cultural mores or describing the rather indelicate familial relations of the main characters. Which in themselves are fine, for the author( Robert Merle )plainly has great knowledge of such matters - being French. Still, it is slow going; I am already 243 pages in, while finding the survivors just starting to get about the business of thinking about the necessities of such survival - no Hollywood-style action novel, this one. It is along the lines of what I find fascinating about the post-apocalyptic genre though( akin to the survival-horror zombie genre too ): what would you do if it happened to you?

Sept 16 - No More Songs

Woof, a long day. Hopped onto the bus( at the new terminal 10 minutes walk from my house )running to Victoria at 9am, and arrived a mere 20 minutes later. Plenty of time to grab a coffee and settle in for the manager's meeting, which zoomed along nicely until about 4pm... then it was back to Millstream to work the remainder of the shift. Which was deja-vu all over again, as I got a call whilst on the bus in the AM that the water cooler had leaked AGAIN, so the place was soaked. The cleanup guys had been there already, so I walked into a roaring den of noise as high-flow fans blasted air across the soaked carpets while a fridge-sized dehumidifier pulled gallons of water from the air.

I was saddened to learn today that the lady third of the popular trio Peter, Paul and Mary has passed away due to cancer today. All my life, people usually made one joke or another whenever a Paul or a Mary was around, asking where the 'third person' of the trio was hiding. How sad that now there are only 2 of those 3 singers left.

News today as well about the emergence of the internet as a movie medium: Blockbuster is closing over 1500 stores. Which isn't news to me, as it's probably been ten years since I last rented a movie - seriously. I'd rather buy the movie( on sale of course ) and take the time to enjoy it at my leisure more than a few times. While I'm not the person to talk about buying instead of renting per se in most things, I don't think that there's much of a difference between renting a new movie twice and buying it on sale at a later date. It all depends on when you want to see it( apart from the theater )and in my case, I can usually wait for some time without issue.

Going out to a movie is a nice way to spend the evening... especially if you had someone like Natalie Portman on your arm. Wow, talk about dressed to die for! Though from what I hear, the G.I.Joe movie is NOT one you want to take a date to... or see by yourself. Or rent on DVD. Maybe they should have made it an animated feature? If so, they should have done it in this style - very similar to one of my favourite animated shows, Samurai Jack, which tore down quite a few walls in animation when it came out - brilliant.

Sept 17 - Breaking the Wall

Going out to a movie is a nice way to spend the evening... especially if you had someone like Natalie Portman on your arm. Wow, talk about dressed to die for! Though from what I hear, the G.I.Joe movie is NOT one you want to take a date to... or see by yourself. Or rent on DVD. Maybe they should have made it an animated feature? If so, they should have done it in this style - very similar to one of my favourite animated shows, Samurai Jack, which tore down quite a few walls in animation when it came out - brilliant.

On walls: what the heck? I know I've made a few jokes about the Berlin Wall construction zone in St. Catharines( QEW work cutting the city in half )but get this: 1 in 7 Germans WANT the Berlin Wall BACK. How crazy is that? They'd probably say so in Copenhagen, where the car is NOT king, but the bicycle is: more than half the population rides a bicycle every day. The city has just announced plans to create a network of 'bike highways' where commuters can ride from the suburbs to the city core without crossing paths with cars in dangerous ways. Fantastic - check it out here, another victory for the two-wheeled pedal commuter, of which I'm one.

Everyone likes to think that their works will live on beyond them, that their memory will linger in the minds of those who have known of them or even their work. But what happens when tragedy or disaster strikes, leaving things undone or unsaid to those who matter most to us? I've wondered about this myself, having just begun to fill out a will( all those DVD's have to go somewhere, right? )and made out a few words for everyone who matters in my life. Yet what if I don't have a chance to leave those words in the right location? Thanks to FromBeyond2U.com, this no longer has to worry some folk - but you still have to set those words down in the first place, or they will go unsaid.

Sept 18 - Bill Me, don't Salt Me

Ah, payday at last - that day when you breathe a sigh of relief, pay some( or most, if you're lucky )of your current bills, then grab what money remains on either end and try to stretch it until the next payday. I was surprised to learn from a recent article that close to 3 in 5 Canadians live paycheque to paycheque these days, having little in the way of savings, even RRSP's. That's a lot of people with no safety net, which these days is a stinky way to live... not that most( if not all )of those 3 in 5 people would rather put away money, but living beyond our means seems to be the name of the game in modern society.

Reduction would seem to be in order, as I did( somewhat )when I divested myself of a portion of my poesessions in moving out here. Not enough, mind you, and I'm not living in a one-room basement bachelor pad either - which seems to be the problem, more or less. How can you enjoy a huge home of your own with a massive mortgage( and taxes, and utilities )which is filled with a lot of expensive things that you likely got on credit and are now slowly paying back at ruinous rates? Makes you want to change a few things, including your diet - 1 in 6 people worldwide have hypertension, of which up to 1/3 of those can be related to too much salt in their diet. Yep, that's right: too much time at McDonald's or eating pre-made meals, all loaded with sodium for 'taste and preservation' purposes. Ick.

Bacon Salt is something I have to try though - I mean, it's bacon. And salt. In moderation, it's probably part of some corner of a food group, somewhere, if you squint at it correctly. Plus, they have a great blog entry on how to start a food company for less than 5K - worth the read, as I had no idea of the ins and outs involved in getting a product to market, despite my extensive reading on entrepranuership in the last few years.

Sept 19 - Aaarrrrr, Matey! Thar be monsters in that lake!

It was International Talk Like A Pirate Day today, but I'd forgotten... so I could have spent a good portion of today Talking Pirate to people, which would have been cool. Here's a nice piratical pictoral summary from the fine folks at SuperPunch - I especially like the Pirate Squirrels, very tasteful.

Tasty fish too: a local woman spotted some kind of unusual creature in Cameron Lake, which isn't too far from here on Vancouver Island. Local mystery - I love it!

Unlike work, which was an exercise in futility where one unusual problem after another cropped up needing immediate solutions. I managed to find one each time, but before I knew it closing time had arrived and all the things I had wanted to accomplish today were only half-done. We are redoing all of our office paperwork, reorganizing it to standardize all systems across canada so that every branch has the exact same setup - a great idea, but a ton of work to enable if there's just one person doing it.

Late in the evening, I watched an interesting documentary called 'Gun Nation' about the proliferation of guns in American and its effect on their society. The cuplrit is their Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which enshrines as an unalterable right the ability of any US citizen to bear arms. What they do with those arms is the focus of the documentary, which did a credible job of looking at both the pros and cons of living in a nation with millions of guns in the hands of criminals and honest citizens alike. A good site for further information about the gun control issue in the US is GunCite.com, which has a lot of excellent material and further links.

Sept 20 - Call of TV

A beautiful day, if a bit cold in the morning( heck, that's the fall, who cares? )but it warmed up nicely by the afternoon. I spent most of the hours around lunch gaming online with Dave, Simon and later on Matt, in COD4 - with a few good games and more than a few stinkers by session's end. There was even a Griefer in one of the later games, who delighted in teamkilling people - myself and a few others reported his behaviour, but sadly there's no specific category for rampant teamkilling or just being a jackass. I just don't understand people who delight in making life miserable for others, though perhaps it arises from some twisted need for attention of any kind, even derision and scorn.

There's the usual assortment of new shows premiering this fall on TV, mostly bad, but some good. One of the more unexpected ones is The Cleveland Show, which has the character of the same name being spun off from The Family Guy into his own sitcom - different, and possible interesting. Other series I'm going to try to catch are Flash Forward( based on the novel by fave Robert Sawyer )and the remake of 'V' with those lizardly aliens we love to hate. Even Fringe is starting to grow on me, though I've not caught more than a few episodes.

After a few pleasant hours out on the deck( the sun was brillant on the lake )I finished the evening working on the blog whilst watching Ferris Bueller's Day Off, quite appropriate for today, all in all. The parade scene is one of my faves( Twist and Shout! )as is the scene where Ferris and Cameron are trying to reverse the mileage on the Ferrari...


We broke 2800 hits on the 19th - Tah-rah!

Superkids, Skeksis and Spinal Cords

Well, I'm still working on a daily blog post; I think to start I'll try to update a few times a week and see how well Blogger.com functions with that...

Aug 10 - Space Opera and Writing

This is cool to me: a gallery of famous writer's spaces at WhereIwrite.org - images of where some of today's most creative minds do their work. I think that Joe Haldeman's space wins, if only for the fact that he writes things longhand by candlelight! How cool is that in today's age of laptops? Maybe I should take a picture of my space here on the deck, overlooking Langford Lake - after all, it's year-round that I can write there, even if it's raining as I have a nice little overhang over the hottub. Which is also great for relaxing in to break those nasty writer's block days when nothing else works.

Which brings me to Space Opera - yes, the genre that Star Wars catapulted to the forefront of popular culture from its origins in mainstream scifi's Golden Era in the pre-WWII era. While series books like The New Space Opera have been hit or miss, some other works have been coming to the market lately, including Federations, which focus on a more human perspective than other works have to date. Sharing the same spirit as video games like Homeworld, these stories take you to new worlds, new peoples... letting you Boldly Go where no couch-potato has gone before( though there's still no new B5-themed books on the horizon, darn it! ). Next thing you know, Star Trek's transparent aluminum will be available at your local Home Depot, making broken windows a thing of the past - oh wait: it almost is now!

My first day back to work... and I spent it all at the back workstation, catching up on paperwork. I was thrilled to no end to have a trainee handling things up front, so that I could plow through emails, reports and whatnot to get myself back in gear. Luckily some things were taken care of by a visiting store manager while I was away, or I would have had even more to do...

Aug 11 - Medical Superheros

This is so cool too: a real-life superman... who is only 2 years old. Liam Hoekstra has been blessed( and some say cursed )with an ultra-rare muscular condition that has given him 40% more muscle mass than the average person. Which means that he's burning a ton more energy just sitting there, as muscles use 3 times more energy than fat... and also means the kid has to eat 6 full meals a day. Luckily, he was adopted into a family that has the means to provide the food and care he needs... kinda reminds me of the Marvel Comics origin story for Colossus, whose poor Russian parents agreed to allow their son to participate in 'research' that caused him to mutate and grow into a superhero - with a massive appetite. Strange how reality starts to reflect fiction some days...

Plus, wonderful news on two separate medical fronts! Firstly for those who have been afflicted with injuries to their spines, new hope: a common blue food dye may hold the cure - can you believe it? Read the article... the discovery seems to have come out of left field, which seems to be like most major discoveries - take penicillin for example, which was just a failed experiment that resulted in millions of saved lives over the decades. The other bit of fantastic medical news? Canadian researchers have succeeded in creating stems cells from normal skin cell samples, eliminating the moral questions of using embryonic stem cells from foetuses to treat patients. As a bonus, their method does not have a high possibility of inducing additional types of cancers that previous methods risked - and to think I've only just heard about it now, when it was announced back in March 2009... seems to have flown under the radar. Great news, indeed!

I spent a good part of the day fiddling with my old workhorse colour printer, theKonica-Minolta Magicolor 2200. My laser toner refills had arrived last week while I was away, so I popped out the toner cartridges one at a time from the printer and refilled them - not as easy as it sounds. While the process was less messy than I had thought, it turns out that one critical step was omitted from the rather nice instructors packed from the eBay seller: how to properly re-seal the toner cartridges once you've refilled them. I opened the laser printer after a few hundred pages had been run, to discover the ultra-fine yellow toner coating the insides of the printer - seems the plug wasn't all that well sealed. The solution? The handy-dandy hot glue gun that everyone should keep in their crafts cupboard. A few large helpings of that around the toner plugs, and all was well. I've been printing off about 1500 colour brochures for Millstream Village, as our newly-formed Merchants Association needs them to get a leg up on getting shoppers to perceive it as a one-stop shopping solution instead of heading into Victoria. The group provided the paper supply( not cheap )and I provided the toner for the first run - seems to be working out well, though I had not counted on the fumes from the laser printer being so potent. Whew! Open those windows and crack out the fans again... because a recent study shows that prolonged exposure to toner particles may be bad for your health!

Aug 12 - Two year old Tax Troubles?

After reading this article about how Canada has the third-highest cell phone rates in the world, I've decided to put my own cell phone on 'vacation disconnect' for a few months - enough is enough. Seeing as I already have a store cell phone to use for work-related matters, plus a home phone and a Vonage 'net phone( for all those Niagara folks who never call...? )it just makes sense. I don't get out much any more, so the thing mainly gets used for calling into work and the like - a waste of the $50.00-plus a month I've managed to 'reduce' my bill to. So take that, Telus... I'll be away from the phone when you call. *grins*

I spent most of my morning gathering paperwork for the CRA, going through old bills to find those related to my moving expenses in late 2007, almost 2 years ago. I found most of them, and even managed to get WestJet to email me a copy of my ticket purchase for the flight out here - THAT was a triumph! However, I have the sinking feeling that the CRA are going to be jerks and disallow some things, though I have no idea what - their website is frustratingly vague, and when I filed with QuickTax.ca there was no disclaimer or context-help that popped up to break down what I could and couldn't claim, so I used common sense as best I could.

Bonus: for no particular reason: here is a size comparison of various movie monsters. Just because we all love monsters, except when they're corporations...

Aug 13 - Gold!

Yes, it's true... MMart is ramping up to start buying gold by the end of the month. Jumping on the same bandwagon those low-production-value TV ads blare at you about, we're going to be buying people's scrap gold. Watches, rings, bracelets, necklaces, earrings... even broken jewelery are all accepted. But first we have to learn how to tell if it's real gold or not, so that's why I was in for training today at 9:30am in Victoria. It was mostly a pleasant experience, though I was a little wary of some of the procedures and ended up needing some more practice on a few of them - other parts I grasped quite easily, I was pleased to discover. Though I had to train today, my store won't be buying gold immediately as we're an Open Concept store, meaning no glass. So no gold being handled for security reasons in-store - yet.

Also, it doesn't help that my laptop's wireless connection has been flaking out all this week, losing its grip on the DIR-655 router a few times an hour and necessitating my physically resetting the wireless each time. Very, Very Frustrating... and Gateway has been little help, as their second response to my email told me to check to see if there was a problem with my internet provider - idiots. I had told them my parent's laptop was working flawlessly on the same router and ISP connection, yet they tell me that? My third email got a response to go through this checklist to solve the problem... which annoyed me so much that I sat down and brainstormed all the things that I myself thought might be the problem... and fixed it!

And who the heck is Roger M. Wilcox? You tell me...

Aug 14 - Gaming Goes Bust

Sadly, it seems the gold rush is over for the video game industry: sales are in freefall right now, so I guess it's a good thing I didn't decide to move to Edmonton in 2007 to try to get a job with BioWare Inc. - who incidentally were recently purchased by Electronic Arts, one of the biggest companies in the industry. Perhaps more people are finding out about sites like Good Ol' Gaming.com and buying the 'better' games of yesteryear, rather than the high-amperage low-value cheap shots that they call games today. Though I am partial to some flash-based games out there, like this one: Defense Fleet makes shooting spaceships fun again!

The big moneymakers these days are MMO's... apart from World Of Warcraft and Second Life, there's not many of them that can boast over a million members. At least, not yet. Star Trek Online should become one of the Big MMO's when it's released... whenever that is, as no date has been set even tentatively. Until that happens, Trek fans will have to content themselves with things like this glorious gallery of screenshots from the developer. Myself, I just want to see how well put-together the thing is, as the franchise has millions upon millions of fans the world over - I got a kick out of playing Klingon Academy back in the day( circa 2000 A.D. )on my old PC, simply because the ships were so beautfiully rendered... and blew up Real Nice.

News has reached me from my friends at io9.com that the sequel to The Dark Crystal has entered the pre-production stage! One of my favourite films of all time, the epic fantasy without a single live recognizably-human actor still stands as one of the landmark works of imagination put to film. I own the AnniversaryEdition DVD, and some of the extras show what an incredible amount of hard work was poured into making every detail of the film unique according to the vision of Jim Henson, may he R.I.P. - we miss ya, Jim.

Aug 15 - MS Office at long last

I stopped by Future Shop before work this morning to pick up a copy of MS Office 2007: Home & Student, which was $50.00 off this week - quite a bargain, though still not as cheap as I'd like. While I've enjoyed using OpenOffice for some time now, I haven't been able to get the spellchecker to work - at all. Cutting and pasting things to online services like Orangoo.com is cheap, sure... but time-consuming and that's something I find myself having less and less of as the summer winds to a close. So with the Legal Copy of MS:Office, I can actually install it on 3 different machines, as it comes with a 3-unit lisence - nice! I also finally scored a copy of the fifth season of Alias, which I've been wanting for some time but been unwilling to pay up to $42.99 CAN for - that's damned closed to robbery, in my books. So I've waited for a few years now, patiently, until I spotted it on sale... and thus, it was mine. Now that I can't recall what's gone on since I last watched the show, I've begun again from Season 2's midpoint... but now I can finish the run!

Work today was rather steady, which was nice to see, as my bonus as a manager only kicks in if we actually start making decent progress towards our revenue targets... things for the last while have been hard to predict and thus stressful as I try to figure out ways to get people in the door on a more regular basis. Plus, my trainee was sick today, so I didn't get much Manager Stuff done at all, as the door kept summoning me back to the front counter - it is always better to get a rush of customers, then a steady... plodding... pace... of one every 10 minutes or so. You can't get anything done: you are sitting for about a minute at the back work area when the door rings again - sigh and repeat.

Aug 16 - Call of Duty day off

Ah, at last... my weekly day off. So nice to relax... and do everything I couldn't during the week. First off: install 2 grab-bar handles by the hottub, so that my mom can actually use the thing once the weather starts cooling off. Or anytime really, when you think about it. Nice to get them @ 40% off too, a large and a small one, stainless steel both. Which made the installation harder, as the screws had rather soft heads on them, meaning it took longer to carefully get them seated in the wall and resulted in some rather impressive blisters from doing it all manually - nice start to the day.

So I took some hours off and gamed, playing COD4 with Matt, then later joined by Dave and a new friend, Steve... who also brought in some friends. I played 'Hardcore Deathmatch' for the first time... meaning no radar and much more damage per shot. So I died. A lot. I called it quits in the early afternoon for a bit, after a game where I scored 2 kills... and died 18 times - how's that for feeling frustrated, eh? I've been spending the other parts of my day recording things off my parent's DVR to make room; I managed to clear about 8 hours worth of movies like Shrek2 outta there onto recordable DVD's - those things never really caught on as much as the DVR's did, as the DVR's are so much easier to use for the average person.

The evening saw me head back to COD4 with Lucas, Dave, Bill, Steve and others... and it wasn't too bad. I put in a solid showing, though I faded towards the end - I managed to run up a few kill streaks, including several Air Strikes - not too bad considering the more difficult nature of Hardcore Mode in COD4. I still miss my Halo days though, truth be told - I guess that's why I've never traded in my copies of Halo2 or Halo3, despite the limitations of the 'outdated' gameplay modes. Hard to believe that something that was so much fun is now considered 'unplayable' by so many people, but that's technology for you: always advancing and leaving things in the dust.

I have to say, I feel much better after the vacation, though I'm still a bit tired. Seeing as I managed to 'beat the heat' by leaving Niagara when I did to head back to BC( and the weather here is going to be cool for the next long while too! )makes me all the happier - sorry folks, try to keep cool back there!