Ruins, Redheads and R.I.P.

Did you know that Mars Canada has cut all production of green & blue Smarties? Apparently synthetic dyes are on the out, so as of now, if you have a box with those colours, save it - they're collectables!

June 22 - Old Stones

Similar to my friend friend Bob's Ruined Niagara blog, I ran across this: Abandoned Places In The World. There are quite a few cool places listed there, starting off with an abandoned Japanese industrial island that looks to be straight out of a sci-fi movie. I hope that they update soon; Bob's blog has been remiss of late, so I can only wish that he'll stumble across some new ruins soon to share with us all...

There was a news story this month that notches rather nicely into the above topic: how the St. Lawrence Seaway was a Bad Idea. Having grown up next to the Welland Canal, I was used to seeing giant cargo ships passing by majestically on their way to deliver cargoes from around the world. The article talks about how bad the Seaway is for the environment of the Great Lakes, as well as the ever-diminishing cargo loads that are traveling through it - far below the projections that the original builders had for it to accomplish by this date.

Mondays - that's about it for me. Just relaxing and recovering - the doctor said that after this Wednesday, I can go back to biking to work as long as I don't push myself. In a month I can begin regular exercises, including light abdominal workouts - I plan mainly to focus on the cardio work, and leave the rest of it until after I return from Niagara. One nice thing about working where I have been for so long is that I have a ton of vacation time saved up. Even counting my trip in a month, I'll still have over two weeks of vacation time left, and that's taking into account the week I've already used at the start of June for my operation. Sweet!

June 23 - Hee-Haw?

Way, waaaay back in the day, when computers were just stumbling out of their monochromatic phase and games were able to fit quite nicely on a single 5.25" disk, there was a game called M.U.L.E. from a tiny company called Ozark Softscape. It came out in 1983, and proposed a novel idea: what it computer games were designed to bring people together to play, instead of just being a single-player experience? This novel concept saw M.U.L.E.( which stands for 'Multiple Use Labour Element )arrive on shelves to become a classic of classics, that rare game that is fun and new every time you play it. Several clones of the game were made( including one for the Amiga! Ha! )which are listed on this very informative page entitled Subtrade. There is even some concept art for the game here - very good, for a fan-made art sheet.

Since the arrival of the internet and much better computer hardware, a few fans have managed to create AMO, which is Atari Mule Online. Yes, you heard it right: you can now download and play a game of M.U.L.E. with your friends, online... something the original designers of the game could only dream of 25 years ago. Sweet! Anybody want to play a game...?

MMO's these days seem to be taking a new path: no longer are they behemoths charging a monthly fee to play. Instead, the game is free to play... but supported through microtransactions, meaning players can augment & customize their characters through small purchases within the game world. Add a hat, a bigger gun or some fancy boots to make you faster - the more you pay, the cooler the play, or so the idea goes. The new Battlefield: Heroes is one of these games, and I will be checking it out this week, should I manage to get it working - for some reason, it just doesn't want to connect me to a server... overload, perhaps?

June 24 - Brekkie with the Bear

I had breakfast at A&W this morning, of all places - and it was good! They open at 6am, which is nice, and they're located right across the street from the plaza I work in in Millstream. The toast was perfect, the eggs were sizable and the hash brown was light and tasty. The only letdown was the bacon, which seemed to have been unwrapped from a large spool and passed close by some flames for a few seconds - underwhelming. Maybe they need a little refresher course on How To Make Perfect Bacon... ? Sure, it's not fast, but why rush perfection?

For those of you out there who like comics a lot, I have a few links for you. ComicArtFans.com is a place where comic artists and fans gather to exchange ideas, post new comic series and do all the other fun things that comic fans do when they get together. A similar place is ComicSpace.com. for those of you who enjoy comic book movies, there is always ComicBookBovie.com, where the latest and greatest in reverse are foisted on the unsuspecting world.

One comic I hope to see return to semi-regular production is The Adventures of Newt & John - Two Roommates Take On The Universe. Mike has been very busy( as usual )for some time, including work on The Jinx Project... but I hope he will find some time in the near future for an N&J update. You can read all about what he's been up to here at his blog.

June 25 - Celeb-Apocalypse

Today marks the premiere of Stoked, a new animated TV series on Teletoon brought to you by the creators of Total Drama Island and 6teen. It also happens to be a show that two of my good friends worked on very hard for the last long while: take a bow, Mike & Brian. The is about a group of young surfers who arrive at a summer camp for surfer-wannabes... and find it is not exactly what they expected. The visuals are amazing; the waves and water( way to go Mike! )look incredibly realistic, all for being realized within the Flash medium - this is hard stuff to pull off, folks.

Sadly, today also saw the demise of the King Of Pop, Michael Jackson, whose music I admit I have liked on and off over the years - I think it depends on whether Weird Al did a cover of a song before I really took a liking to it. Back in grade school, I remember being at a school gathering in the gymnasium for( I think )school fund raising by selling chocolate bars - the usual scheme. When the prizes for top sellers were announced, one of them was a large framed photo of a Michael Jackson - before all the strangeness, so he looked somewhat normal. When I asked a classmate who this guy was, they gave me That Look, as in "Boy, are you behind the latest fad..." - I remember the scene more because of that look and the feeling it engendered than anything else... like who it was exactly that I asked the question of.

On top of that, Farrah Fawcett also passed on today from cancer, which she had apparently been suffering from since 2006. Known for her mane of amazing blond hair and stunning smile, the star of Charlie's Angels will be missed by millions, myself included - few knew she had a very cutting, dry wit. I do not believe that a star loved by so many could have had any detractors from a life lived so well. Hopefully her story will raise awareness of cancer in the public, much as Patrick Swayze's own 2008 diagnosis has prompted many to take potentially life-saving tests they might have otherwise wavered on.

June 26 - Of all the... ?

One of the things I love about life is the ironies: those little things that make you scratch your head and wonder if someone out there is having us all on. Take, for example, my moving from St. Catharines to Victoria - what are the chances they both would lay claim to the title of 'Garden City' ? For the record, Victoria wins hands-down... it has more green and more flowers than anywhere I have ever seen or heard of, bar none. Another chance occurrence: I now live in Langford... right near Niagara Creek, which you can see near the center of this map - no patch on the Niagara River, but then I don't have to deal with tourists at the Falls.

The laptop I've been happily using for the last year or so is running great: it's a Gateway FX model, which apparently have been damned hard to find in stores. It's one of those ironies: a great product at a great price, but you can't find it anywhere as the manufacturer made only so many and has moved on to other product lines - I was lucky to be in Best Buy when I was last September, as they apparently sold out within a few weeks across the continent - ouch! Good news though: the new models of the FX laptop series are coming, so those of you who are looking for a helluva bargain might want to keep an eye on Besy Buy's shelves in August...

A while back I discovered a blog that covers some of the cool things to see & do on Vancouver Island. It's worth a read... and eventually I'll get to a few of the places & events myself. Darn this time-sucking day job... another irony, really. I've lived here almost 2 years now, and in some ways I'm still a tourist. Heck, I've yet to go to Vancouver, which is only a little further away than T.O. was from Niagara - without the traffic headaches, but you have to pay to take a boat there. We'll see...

June 27 - Quarter-century clue-in

Who the heck is Haviland Morris, you ask? Well, considering that I saw her in two TV movies this week, I was surprised at the answer. She played Caroline Mulford in 1984's Sixteen Candles alongside Molly Ringwald, and Marla Bloodstone in 1990's Gremlins 2 - I only put those two roles together through IMDB.com where I clued in that she had covered her glorious red hair in Sixteen Candles with a blond wig, so as not to show up Ringwald's own auburn locks. Personally, I think she could have carried the earlier film, though she also could have done without the constant cigarette in Gremlins 2 - Phoebe Cates looked rather drab in comparison, even so. For those so inclined, this site has a listing of quite a few actresses you may recall from decades past, and what they've been up to now.

Part of my evening was spent setting up my Canon ip4500 inkjet printer to be accessible over the network - basically, either of the laptops here can see and print to it wirelessly. While it sounds easy, the fact remains that modern networking hardware still makes you buy a few 'extras' to get it alk talking. Fortunately, my new Dlink DIR-655 router has a unique feature called SharePort built in - a USB port that can be shared to any computer on your network. Plug in something like, oh, a printer and voila - it's available to any computer on your network. No fuss, no muss - you can do the same with hard drives as well. The good folks over at Butterscotch.com talk about NAS( Networked Attached Storage )which is the next Big Thing in home entertainment: no more switching DVD's around from the bookshelf. Instead, all of your media( movies, pictures, autio )is contained on one ultra-reliable home server box. Simply select what you want and play, just like a PVR. Not cheap yet though... but if current flat-screen TV sales figures are any indication, it's only a matter of time.

I actually scared myself tonight while watching the HD-DVD version of Blade Runner: the Director's Final Cut. Not that the film itself scared me, but while I was watching it I was constantly pausing the DVD to do one thing or another. After a while, I switched back to regular TV to see a show... and noticed to my horror that the 'pause bar' had left a burn-in mark on the screen! Normally only of worry with plasma-based screens, I was stunned that it had happened to my LCD TV... but it faded after a few minutes of regular TV watching as the pixels shifted with the show's motion - phew! Good thing I have a 2-year warranty... and you bet I won't be pausing things for overlong with the HD player. I must say I am disappointed with both, as I never expected an LCD to exhibit burn-in, or the HD player not to initiate a screen-saving mode after a few minutes on pause.

June 28 - Leave it for the weekend

today I spent quite a few hours outside doing yard work, specifically raking leaves which is not a lot of fun in the summer. The Arbutus tree, native to Vancouver Island and the lower Mainland, sheds its dead leaves in the early summer to make way for new growth. these leaves are quite acidic and so cannot be left on the lawn as they would damage it. So we freaking hand I spent four hours of an admittedly lovely Sunday afternoon raking leaves into plastic bags for later disposal; a total of12 bags later I was quite ready to chop down a few trees to avoid doing this next year... but I stopped as they will so darn nice compared to a wretched old elm, for example. I was glad that we had a hottub here, as I really needed it after all that - my first time in for over a month now, and it was fantastic.

I was engrossed in a game of Civ:Revolution for the remainder of the evening, playing as the Mongols vying for world domination against, as fate would have it, the Chinese. I won eventually through sheer economic might, but the funniest moment of the game came when the Chinese, headed by the avatar of Mao Tse Tung, threatened to go to war with me.... unless I parted with the secret of Communism! I laughed out loud, as the avatar was waving Mao's little red book right at me as he did it! After that, I ground them into dust, but I was quite put out - one of the game's glitches caused me not to end up with an ICBM, the most powerful weapon in the game, despite the fact I had built everything correctly to receive it. Bummer - no nukes, so the endgame was somewhat anticlimactic.


As I finish off this entry, I am writing it outside on the deck... watching the leaves still falling from the arbutus trees in nearby yards as the wind gusts. Looks like I will have a lot to do next weekend, again. *sigh* No leaf blowers though - those things annoy the heck out of me, and where do the leaves go? Nowhere.

Weirdos, Writing and Weather

No mention of spiders in this week's blog... though there IS a new entry in my Nemster list...

Oct 13 - Humans... and not.

Newt and John, a webcomic by my good friend Mike, reached their 20th episode milestone today. I've greatly enjoyed their adventures so far, as their antics capture the hilarity of two roomies dealing with bizarre adventures. I should also mention that I have a great custom image of Newt, John and myself in a spaceship, that Mike made as a going-away gift for me last year when I left for B.C. - it hangs proudly by my door, so I can get a grin every time I arrive or leave my home.

Along the same vein, I give you: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. Not to be confused with Human Idiocy, or even the silly things people do when they think No-One Is Watching. One VERY early internet List I love is the Evil Overlord List, which manages to combine villainy, cliches and stupidity remarkably well... if you don't laugh, then you haven't thought hard enough about how to take over the world. You should watch a few episodes of Pinky and the Brain, just to see how NOT to go about it... especially if you're two lab mice.

Which brings up movies. Now, I've already posted about how I MUCH prefer to watch movies at home nowadays, so I won't go into that. Here, I will instead briefly blog about Things That Only Happen in the Movies... like every car explodes in a fireball when it crashes, or how locks magically vanish from doors with a few quick shots from a pistol. A show that has done its fair share of debunking movie myths is the much-loved Mythbusters, who by and large have managed credible experiments to test the accuracy of many a Myth. If you visit their site, you can see the many myths they have discussed but NOT brought to the show to test, for various reasons. I guess testing to see if humans mutate into anger-driven giant berserkers after massive gamma-ray exposure would be one of those off-air theories... darn.

Oct 14 - Hard work and gadgets

I had an interesting thought in the shower today, and it was entirely unrelated to hygiene. It occurred to me that everyone who achieves success always includes the phrase "it was a lot of hard work" - we hear it so much but it makes little visual impact. I had the image of a chain hoist pop into my head, like the ones mechanics use to hoist engine blocks. The analogy almost writes itself: the huge, complicated engine needs lots of work and know-how to run, but the initial process of GETTING to it is the hardest work. Each long pull on the chain hoist raises the massive engine a tiny bit, so long minutes of hard work are needed to raise the final product fractionally until one reaches the point where the detail work can begin. It is an analogy I like, and I hope to employ at a future date.

As for the future: I love gadgets, and one of the places I loved to go to FIND gadgets years ago was The Sharper Image, which had a store at the Walden Galleria mall in Buffalo NY. You could wander in, and on every shelf or floor display was a gadget you had never before imagined, or knew you needed, until that moment. Looking back, it is easy to see how most of it was overpriced and usually fufilled only a single, quasi-time-saving. That and Smithbooks were the two main reasons I liked to visit the Walden Galleria... as well as the fact that most of the food there seemed damned cheap compared to Canadian restaurants at the time. Lower standards or higher volume consumption? You decide.

Oct 15 - Writing, yep!

I have been plugging away at various writing projects, but progress has been slow of late - low energy and higher stress levels do not bode well for the creative spark. Still, I have been trying to keep various bits of writing advice in mind, including 'use your mood' to find different aspects of character and story that one would not find if you are feeling happy, energetic and relaxed... none of which relate to grim stories, villains or dire plot threads. So, with that in mind, I have been plugging away at outlined plot points, as well as tossing together little 'pastiche' bits to try and capture the mood at various points in my Novel Story.

One amusing place I have come across is How To Write a Best-Selling Fantasy Novel. Go see it.

Among all the great advice given, one common thread seems to be "You won't likely get rich from writing," which is fine by me... Fame, Fortune and Respect do not always go hand in hand, with J.K Rowling as the glaring platinum Ideal of Writing Success that everyone else has to try to follow. I figure if I can say what I want to say, in a way that other people want to read, and that brings in a little income, then all for the good. Like the other writers state, everyone is full of great ideas, so it is the few who learn to use the TOOLS of writing to HONE their skill, that will bring those with Talent to the top of the heap... with a little luck. *grin*

So if you cannot tell your adjectives from your adverbs, or what narrative perspective to use, or even notice why your page-long paragraphs seem to be boring people... then perhaps writing is not in your cards. So go be a professional poker player instead - from what I hear, your odds of success are much higher!

Oct 16 - Triad Thursday of Stress

Well, today COULD have been the day from hell, but it worked out nicely when all was said and done, despite a lot of unavoidable stress. Right after I opened the store, who showed up but... a company auditor! We had been warned that this week was a likely time for an audit, which they do quarterly( or more often )so I was not as dismayed as I could have been. Still, it meant I spent most of my day worrying that we had forgotten some detail that would crash our overall score - not having a manager at the branch will make you thing like that.

Adding to the joy was a visit by the head honcho for all of BC for our company, attended by our district manager. He was nice, but I got the impression of laser eyes noting every tiny flaw in the branch, and likely an unconscious urge to slip on a pair of dapper white gloves to run along the counters for dust. Still, I was busy enough that everyone stayed in the background doing their thing and not underfoot or looking over my shoulder, which was nice...

Did I mention yet that Crazy Lady came in today TOO? Yes, she managed to add to the Stress Triad today by coming in for NO reason other than to ask the most inane question I've heard YET. Apparently her sister, which she sent the money transfer to last week, is not in the UK but Zimbabwe... so she wants ME to call Western Union to ensure the transfer is 'held' ... and ALSO she did NOT want ANY calls made to HER residence about it! Apparently she is doing this on the sly... which I do not care a whit about, only that she vacate the branch and stop bothering me. Especially with inane questions and demands that I have NO ability( or desire )to fulfill, even if I wanted to. Amusingly, the Head Man from Head Office( heh )tried to break into the conversation, but backed off quickly as the Insane Gaze rolled in his direction... kind of like seeing that normal-looking dog in the park turn around to reveal the foam dripping from its jaws. Yeah.

Anyway, she left, the rest of them left... and then I left, to sprawl at home in a daze before relaxing with a few episodes of Atlantis. The second season has a commentary for almost EVERY episode, which is amazing - some of the details and directorial chatter is simply fascinating, as it shows how MUCH thought goes into every episode, and how you never catch some of it as it goes by so fast on-screen.

Oct 17 - Is it Day-ta or Dah-ta?

The morning vanished quickly getting the usual household doings done, then it was off to work. Fortunately, it was another nice day out; I have yet to run into the chill combination of very cool weather and rain, so cross yer fingers, as biking in that is no fun at all.

I found out today that the branch hours will be changing again in November, which will be for the better in several ways. Not the least of which is that I can sleep in EVERY day now, and manage to get home early enough to catch an hour or so of daylight around dinner - nice in the winter!

I've been looking at some storage options for my data for some time now, as I always like to have backups handy in case of disaster. Up to this point, that has always meant storage on an external hard drive, or putting critical files like family photos on DVD; annoying given their 'small' capacity, which meant a few years ago after a PC went wonky that I used THIRTY DVD's to back up and then restore my data. Impossible today, as I have ten times the data stored now as I did back then.

One solution may be a FREE service called aDrive.com, which gives ANYONE free online storage - 50 gigabytes worth! Their business model is based on duplication; they predict that among their entire userbase, many users will have copies of the same file, so all that aDrive has to do is determine that yes, two files ARE the same, and store just ONE copy while allowing both users to access it. In this way, the 'actual' space used by files such as MP3's or YouTube videos is greatly reduced. Nice, and if it keeps the service FREE, then I am all for it!

Oct 18 - Leafing Sunny

Cold this morning, not TOO bad at 7 degrees C, cold enough to see your breath though. The leaves are falling in small drifts along the roadside, though many trees are still quite green and leafy. I did see the most massive Canadian maple leaf today - the thing was as large as my two spread hands together! Wow! It could almost serve as a plate of sorts, though being dead and slight decayed might put a person off.

The sun is blazing outside, albeit without a lot of warmth... and people are smiling! I've always been fascinated by how people's moods and the weather are related, so today goes a long way towards adding data to that file. Without exception, every single customer today has been smiling, even the usually dour regulars, and all of them are busily scurrying about Doing Things.

It's amusing to see how quickly we get busy when the sun comes out... and odd how busy we remain when it is raining - my theory is that people don't like being 'trapped' at home on rainy days, but instead want to get out and shop or socialize at a mall or coffee shop. Group social dynamics is a fascinating field, which has elements of psychology and statisical analysis that combine in interesting and unusual ways.

Oct 19 - Sunday Harry

The third of my Month of Sundays today, and it was Not Too Bad. Relaxing, actually, as it was steady enough a flow of customers to make the clock move nicely towards closing time. I still love the fact that I have such a great view - the branch is located near a major intersection, and I have previously mentioned that a bus transfer point is next to the plaza too. Lots of activity to watch, which is great - no view of the mountains mind you, but it beats hell out of the backside of a building.

My neighbours are HUGE fans of Harry Potter, so when I ran into one of them on the stairs today, of course the topic ran to old Harry. Seems the latest film has been delayed until spring 2009, which still gives us( my neighbours )time to 'catch up' on all the previous films in HD - thanks for the sale, Amazon! I still find it odd that so many HD-DVD's are still so pricey, even six months after the annoucement that Blu-Ray had won the DVD War in early 2008. Which annoys me still, as Blu-Ray is still quite feature-sparse compared to HD-DVD; being able to pop up a scene menu WHILE still watching a movie is immensely liberating, as were other features of HD-DVD. Again, the Market Has Spoken, not the techs... too bad. My experience has always been that people will buy whatever's cheapest, and learn to live with it - hello, Dollar Stores.

Notice how the links tapered off towards the end, and the last entry had NO links at all? Ta!