Space, Sweepstakes and Sickness

Another late Monday update... my apologies, but I have been VERY preoccupied this week with my health and being damned busy besides. Still, this blog is important to me, so here we are...


Dec 1 - Overtime by the Dozen

Oi, what a day... and to think it was my day OFF too!

My first mistake was to volunteer to "help out for a few hours" at another branch in the morning. You know me, always willing to trade in my time for some O/T and help out my co-workers in the process - I hate having a day off knowing others are suffering for my lack of willingness to work.

So... that started the ball rolling. Things were going well, I worked from 10am to 2pm and decided to stay until 4pm to ensure the morning opener finished her shift on time.

Big mistake.

The computers went down at 3:55pm... hard. So hard that they were off for three hours... and this as the day suddenly got busier, which was totally unexpected.

So it was me and three other tellers, including the hapless opener, who had to deal with things. We had to do all of our transactions manually, while trying to ensure that the folks waiting to be served did not break into frenzies of impatience. Fortunately, only one customer of the whole lot had the smarm to remark "If your computers are down, why didn't you put a sign on the door?" ... at 4:30pm. I won't dignify his idiocy by recording my response here, as what I said summed up everyone's feelings remarkably well without being rude. Though it did cause the customer to roll his eyes.

After the horror show was said and done, I had worked 12 hours solid... on my day off. Most of it spent cursing our Internet provider, whose swiss-cheese service had taken even our helpdesk by surprise... and making it impossible to fix from their end of things. Yet after all that, the branch closed up and had no unusual errors in the transactions after all was said and done. Even the staff's attitude was positive, if exhausted - we'd all managed to keep each other smiling despite the stress.

Which is why I am still with this company - the people it hires are just incredible, most days, though all of us are human. Days like today show that we can all rise to the occasion by relying on each other. Though I relied on my bed to draw me quickly into a semi-coma as soon as I got home. Argh... as a sop to all those out there who hate tech support, I offer this questionnaire.

Dec 2 - Managing Things

I was rather bleary-eyed today for my 9-hour shift, no wonder given yesterday's excesses of energy-draining excitement( if you can call it that ). Still, some good news cometh:

Today I accepted the position of manager for my branch, which comes with a raise both in pay and responsibility. Given that the the corporate climate( ick, I feel dirty now )here in Victoria is MUCH more to my liking in several key ways compared to Niagara, I decided a few weeks ago to take the plunge. Our branch has been without a manager since late summer, so stepping into that role has been on my mind to take some of the stress off other managerial staff in the area. Considering that I have almost nine years experience with the company, it was an easier decision for me in some ways, though as always there is training to be done with any new position. I hope I can be as good a leader as I have been in other roles, but you can only find out these things by doing - like a weekly blog, fr'instance.

Once I fell onto the couch at home, I discovered a bit of good news: looks like the video game adaptation of Ghostbusters is finally a go! I have wanted to play a game-version of the movie ever since it game out, and have never been satisfied with all the low-budget pretenders that have shown up over the years. Considering that the entire original cast has signed on for the voice work, I have high hopes for this one to hit most of the marks... really. I do!

Dec 3 - Pick your Disease

After my usual 9-hour day, which went remarkably quickly, I headed out to another branch to help their newly-hired closer to, well, close the place up. Another few hours of O/T, which is always nice - seems to be a trend this week and for December in general. Once more thing I LOVE about B.C. is that after 8 hours of work, O/T is automatic - back in Niagara, O/T was only paid after jumping through flaming hoops while slathered in gasoline gel and while carrying road flares between your teeth. As in, not likely. Here, if the Need Is Dire, then people can actually HELP OUT and not leave their co-workers stranded knee-deep, especially during the double-whammy of busy December and Cold Season. Huzzah!

Towards the end of the evening, a middle-aged couple came in and began dealing with my co-worker. After a few minutes, she asked me to take over for her, as things got... complicated.

Turns out that the lady was in with her husband to set up an account for him again... as he was on disability for a mental condition I'd never heard of: frontio-temporal dementia, also referred to as 'Picks Disease' used to describe the common pathology.

Things like this scare the willies out of me, as they constitute some of the many blindside-horrors that life can toss at you, like cancer, car crashes or randomly falling meteorites. There is no way to prepare oneself against the random, so listening to this woman's tale sent some shivers down my back, especially the part about how her husband's friends had all abandoned him over the last few years, unable to cope with his changing personality. They could no longer see the man they knew when dealing with him, even when informed about the way the disease was affecting his brain.

I hope I never have to experience that sort of situation. What would it be like, seeing someone you've known all your life turn into someone else, and have no way of knowing if the original person was still in there somewhere? Horror, folks... it takes many forms, and that is one of them for me.

For those of you with a little time on your hands, this site is chock-full of quizzes. Perhaps you may find some in there that challenge your sense of reality, morals, or just your spelling skills. Go see.

Dec 4 - Space Sickness

I've been watching the original Star Blazers animated series this last week, one episode in the morning during breakfast before work. I have to say I am enjoying it almost as much as I did when I was a kid, back when I was six years old and would run home from school so I could catch the last ten minutes of Star Blazers... it was grossly unfair that it showed every day at 3:30pm, I thought; why couldn't they bump The Smurfs and make it so I could see ALL of this amazing program? This was in the days before VCR's, so I actually had my dad rig a cassette recorder to catch the show while leaving the TV on, just so I could hear what had happened.

I think this helped develop my imagination / mind's eye, as I would sit there and listen with my eyes closed, creating the images in my head of the episode as the tape played. I still have one or two tapes as keepsakes... that's how much I loved Star Blazers, and it has stayed with me ever since. Now that I have the series( just the first of three, and none of the movies )on DVD, I am experiencing the show in a whole new way: visually. It's been thrilling, and I catch the odd flashback from those after-school days as scenes from thirty years ago flash past my eyes...

Today started out all right physically, but by mid-afternoon I was feeling the effects of the week catching up to me: lethargy and slight dizziness crept up on me so that by shift-end I was ready to go home. You know that feeling you get after one too many beers, when you turn and it takes a half-second for the rest of the room to catch up to you? That was me by the end of today's normal 9-hour shift... ick. Not that it helped that I was feeling nauseous too... my malfunctioning gall bladder does interesting things to my digestion sometimes, enough so that things don't always go smoothly - 'nuff said on that, save that when things go awry, it makes me wish all over again that I didn't have to eat at all. Yeah.

While at home tonight, after a small dinner that thankfully decided to co-operated with the plumbing and move along quietly, I StumbledUpon a few online sweepstakes sites. While I am not one to promote what amounts to blatant advertising grabs, I am not above perusing a few search results to find the most "bang for the buck" contests out there. Seems there are plenty of places doling out prizes online, though most require you to play various time-wasting Flash-based games and the like. I'll be trying out the other variety, where you enter your info but once a day towards larger prizes of several thousand dollars( or more ). I figure in those cases, I can spend a few minutes a day typing towards a prize... and not have to spend money every week on lottery tickets at all. Not that I do anyway... and we shall see how long it takes for the first junk mail to reach my mailbox.

Dec 5 - ReBarf

I made myself a nice breakfast today: eggs, pancakes, bacon, toast. Not too much of each, but definitely a feel good meal before what promised to be another long day at work. Big mistake... as an hour after eating, things got confused in the plumbing and wanted out again, the wrong way. It was as bad as my reactions earlier in the year, but I managed to hang tough until the feeling passed, if you'll pardon the pun - considering how I felt, I wasn't laughing. I meandered through work, trying to fight the urge to go cross-eyed at various times as things... bubbled. The after-lunch nausea wasn't so bad, but I ate my meal slowly over the course of an hour, so it slipped past unnoticed perhaps. Not an easy thing, dealing with customers while trying not to turn green and run away. Which, I suppose, is not an uncommon reaction in customer service...

At home, I checked in at ReBoot.com to see how things are progressing; the latest WebComic was up, and it's tight - since the creators of ReBoot are taking a strong hand in bringing the show back, the site's production values are stellar. I am excited to see what current CGI technology can do for a new series set in the Reboot universe, given that huge value for production dollars can now be had by combining today's CGI systems with the ReBoot visual style.

Dec 6 - Immortal Puns

Up early, did my laundry before work, which was great... ate a small breakfast too, just some cereal. Which caused only a small amount of nausea, but enough things aren't working per my manual's specs that I am looking forward to a doctor's appointment on Monday. I have a feeling that it is related to my gallstone condition, I hope - I don't need news that my intestines have decided to throw me for another loop.

Home and hungry, but considering my nausea I settled for a PBJ and crackers. I watched the clock, paying attention to my internal mutterings, and was relieved that after a few discontented gurgles, my offering of food was grudgingly accepted.

I relaxed before zzzz-time by re-reading part of an old favourite series by Piers Anthony, a favourite author of mine from.... well, as far back as I can recall. He wrote the many wonderful Xanth novels, which are famous for the puns included in each book that are sent in by fans; Anthony keeps careful track of each usage and credits them in the back of the book they appear in. How cool is that? So, back to what I was reading: Wielding A Red Sword, part of the Incarnations of Immortality series that Anthony wrote, which included the more famous On A Pale Horse, which of course dealt with Death - who had really only ever been looked at originally at the time by Terry Pratchett... but I digress.

The reason I bring up Wielding A Red Sword is that in the back of the book, Piers Anthony uses quite a few pages to catch up his fans on what has happened to him, the author, since his last book... and since this is in the days before even BBS systems, long before websites, I found it fascinating. Because really, what is it other than a blog? That thought really spun my brain, because twenty years ago there was nothing really available about authors save autobiographies... but here was an author who willingly took the time to catch his readers up on events in his and his family's life in every book! Amazing!

Dec 7 - Still Sickening Sunday

Damn.... I was hoping today would track close to the forecast, but the dratted clouds skittered away to leave a bright, sunny day. Not warm by any stretch of the imagination, but still lovely as long as one did not tarry in the shade. I saw several folk who were waiting for the bus just outside the branch window think better of doing it in the building's shadow and quickly walk back into the light. Sun-day!

Dinner was a larger one, as an experiment to tell the doctor about tomorrow: turkey with gravy, squash, peas and Brussels sprouts. Not too much of each, but the largest meal I have had this week. Sure enough, about 1.6 hours after I had eaten, I got the awful feeling that things were not progressing smoothly downstairs... and that things wanted to come back up for a second opinion. After another hour of will-vs-body, the feeling of nausea went away... but I'm still quite worried. It doesn't feeling like what I am used to concerning my usual digestive ticks, especially since I pay close attention to what my body tells me after the gallstone incident four years ago.

We will see what the doctor has to say in the morning; hopefully his diagnosis is that it is not a major problem... and that he actually knows WHAT the problem IS. And that it does not require any sort of medical treatment requiring a look inside; I hate the thought of sharp skin-slicing thingies.

Just to leave things on a not-so-dreary note, we have: the Elvish Name Generator... go on, give it a try. Apparently my name is 'Golradir Fëfalas' which means nothing to me, as I do not speak Tolkien's Sindarin. Which according to the site's FAQ, this isn't really based on. Which makes me like it all the more... in addition to the fact you can generate your Hobbit Name on the site too. Cute, t'is. Indeed.


I was saddened this week to learn that Jen has put her real estate career on hold; I hope it's a temporary thing. What with all the doom and gloom nowadays, I know I am tightening my own belt while looking towards the future... not that my RRSP's will be in any decent shape anytime soon FOR that future, but one has to hope. Comments?

Time, Trips and TV

The week started off slow, but picked up steam as it went along... and only a little over a week now until Niagara - hooray! Added Aug 29th entry update on 9/3rd.

Aug 25th - Recovery in Time

Still working on recovering from my cold today, though all that remains is a total lack of energy. At least it didn't develop into any other stages; I hate coughing and sneezing. A lot. At least I had plenty to keep me occupied, though I did drift in and out of consciousness a lot more than usual today, for a day off. Waking up suddenly from the middle of a game of Civ:Rev can be disconcerting, as I tend not to fall asleep easily when feeling well.

I did manage to finish reading the third book in the Island in the Sea of Time series, entitled On the Oceans of Eternity - a massive book, as they all were, and utterly engrossing in their detail. Other favourite alternate history books of mine are the classic If the South Had Won the Civil War and The Peshawar Lancers. Some folk take it a little too far though, and examine EVERY point in history as a 'what if' - see some of the results here.

Aug 26th - Why me?

Another The Customer-Is-Always-Right day... boy, did I have a doozy today. In brief, the highlights: A woman was visiting from England, and didn't agree / understand / care about policies in Canada for money transfers. She carried on to a point where I was about to call the police to have her removed from the store - then I managed to foist her off onto Western Union, where she chewed a strip a mile wide through various levels of CSR's. After she managed to disconnect herself from them, and using my massive experience in Idiocy Deflection, I managed to get her the hell out of my store, WITH her transfer, and a fervent wish that the next foreign country she visits will have a standing policy of shooting monomaniacal foreigners who think they are Righter Than Thou, despite ignorance of a different country's rules, laws and common decency.

I only wish I could see the look on her face as they take the safety off and cock the hammer back... *sigh* Not really. But still: See Not-Always-Right.com for more amusement - I find the person asking a clerk at a dollar store how much a particular item is to be endlessly entertaining...

Aug 27th - Bananas and TV

So far, my lack of television has not made an appreciable dent in my day' schedule. If anything, I am now free to watch what I want, when I want - much as back when the VCR was introduced, followed by the PVR... anything I want to see is on the PC, on DVD, or on YouTube. In fact, I have been discovering a LOT of shows are on YouTube, some of which I had never expected to ever see again. Along with some things that perhaps are better seen once, then forgotten again... quickly.

On a side note, I received an email today which was a first: someone actually FOUND a website I had co-developed years ago both as a joke and exercise in web-building. Yet in my Inbox today sat a note that asked how one becomes a member of The Church of the Banana ... ? Well, to be honest, I'd never expected anyone to actually WANT to do more than laugh if they stumbled across the site... and frankly, I am not sure if we are going to respond, as anyone who WANTS to become One with the Great Banana kinda scares me. On several levels.

Aug 28th - Silent Voices

I did a bit of a double-take today while rooting around searching for voice actors, to add to my research about getting into that profession. To my sorrow, I found out that two actors whose work I had so admired in some of my faviorite shows had died, in both cases several years previous! Tony Jay, better known as Megabyte in ReBoot( and characters in countless other shows )passed on in August 2006. Preceding him into the Binomial Abyss was the aptly-named Long John Baldry, who also voiced several characters in ReBoot and had a solid singing career. In both cases, they had voices that were utterly distinctive and recognizable in any work they did.

There's just something that appeals to me about the voice acting. Having a good voice is a must, but one has to be flexible in many ways. Though people like Rich Little have obviously been gifted with voices and mimicry beyond almost anyone, most voice actors are still able to voice several dozen different types of characters - hence the term 'actor' you will note. Unlike some limited voice actors, or people like Sugar( formerly of YTV, whose voice is incredibly high )the whole idea is NOT to get typecast - while certain roles may be perfect for YOUR voice, they do not come along each day, so you cannot make a living doing just ONE type of voice. Heck, look at John Tesh... he's still hosting a radio show, albeit a very popular one in syndication. Plus a singing career. Hmmm....

Aug 29th - Deadly Dust

EDIT: I almost forgot - I attended BluesBash'08 tonight, with a few of my neighbours. We stopped at the Market Square for dinner first, to eat at Green Cuisine, a buffet-style all-vegetarian place. Amusingly, the most popular menu item were the fries... though I liked the veggie falafel. In any case, we settled in for a COLD evening by the water to watch Jim Byrnes, along with special guests The Sojourners. It was a great crowd, and Jim related quite a few touching stories about his long musical career and the Blues. Oh, and the music was good too. *grin*

I had to make a dash for Starbuck's though, as the concession booths only had one hot drink: coffee, and none of us drank that. So I skipped to Starbuck's at the Bay Center to pick up some drinks; hot chocolate for me, and some weird needed-a-full-page-written-on-a-napkin green drink for the others. Reminded me of hot Romulan Ale, for as Scotty would have said after a sniff: "It's ... it's green." We were the only ones there with Starbucks; my smiling charm got me past the gate guards, who could relate to the lack of hot bevvy variety at the fest. Go me!

An odd thing happened to my PC today, which scared me for about ten minutes until I ran out of creative technical swear-phrases. In short: my screen went black & white, then blank. Period. Seeing as this is my one and only machine for the vast majority of work I do apart from my day job, I understandably started to sweat bullets.

Fortunately, a little down-time seemed to fix the error, and a thorough cleaning actually cooled the blue beast down some more - dust does tend to build up in there, all too quickly. Ironically, I am writing a 'Basic PC Maintenance Guide' for Cyberwalker.com, so perhaps my own PC is trying to tell me to finish the Guide off soonest! I guess I will have to get my air cleaning going again in the main room.

Or buy a new computer. I must admit, lagging so far behind the technical edge is starting to become a bother, especially since I can only do a few things at a time before the beast overloads. *sigh* Maybe in the new year... one of these would be nice, but I would settle happily for one of these, and so would my wallet, at that!

Another reason for a new PC: Fallout 3. I have a penchant for post-apocolyptic: Mad Max, Deathlands( the earlier books are much better )and After the Bomb are all favourites of mine. Something about mutants, radiation and the fact that the customer service industry would be reduced simply to having shotguns held ready under counters as a final measure appeals to me greatly.

Aug 30th - Friendship

I had an interesting line of thought run around my brain today, as it has on occasion over the years. Whilst ruminating on the various friendships I have formed over the years, I once again thought about the vagaries of life that occur to toss people together, and tear them apart again. Childhood friends, school friends, work friends, social friends, family friends, online friends... the list of friends is as many and as varied as one can imagine - meeting people can happen anywhere, from the grocery store to in the middle of a river.

What I find interesting is how MANY of these friends that one keeps over the years, and at what level. I have known people who have few friends, but those they have are very close, like family. Other people seem transitory, changing friends every year and swapping social circles like socks. Happily, in my own case I have been very lucky to have met some fine friends early in life, and continued the trend all along. I count many dozens of people among those whom I am proud to call friend, from all walks of life and all manner of meetings.

One person who has made a study of friendships, a Prof. Dunbar, has come up with something now being referred to as 'Dunbars Number. In essence, the good prof theorizes that people are hardwired to not have more than 150 friends at any one time. The theory is mentioned in this article, which is a good read. I find it fascinating, as I am using technology to stay in touch with my far-flung friends - this blog is but one example of such.

Aug 31st - Nanaimo: not just a tasty dessert

I spent the day today traveling to the lovely city of Nanaimo, 1.5 hours north of Victoria, about the size of St. Catharines. I've enjoyed day trips on the Island, as I have not spent much time outside the Greater Victoria region - much the same as travelling to Toronto from the Niagara region. Only FAR greener, and with a LOT more mountain scenery.

We stopped along the way at the town of Chemianus, whose claim to fame are dozens of outdoor murals in the main downtown area. Apparently the local sport is Tourist Dodging, which is played much the same around the world as in Niagara Falls: dodge your car around various idiot tourists with cameras, who are looking at everything BUT the Big Dangerous Metal Things on the roads!

Lunch was at the Crow & Gate, a reproduction English Pub located way back in the country roads of Cedar, B.C. It is an authentic British Pub( built in 1972 )right down to the low ceilings, massive use of wood everywhere and the Bar Ordering System. Yes, that's right: you line up at the bar to place your order and pay BEFORE the meal, get your drinks, and then the food is brought out to you. Slow and inefficient, but it's authentic... and you get the chance to talk to your fellow line-goers in the bargain. It was a little cold to sit outside, but they had a lovely English garden surrounding the pub, including a pond with, of all things, black swans! Photo op!

Nanaimo itself was very... hilly. Everything descended to the sea from the hills, with the downtown core in an L-shape whose long end pointed away from the ocean and towards the brand-spankin' new shopping mall. Yep, all that way and we ended the trip wandering around a half-completed mall.. with a new Best Buy, the first on the island. I scored some dirt-cheap 'Grand Opening Special' SD memory cards and an Ultimate Edition of The Fifth Element, one of my all-time favourite films. Go Milla Jovovitch...! Did I mention she's starred in several apocolyptic films, like Resident Evil? And did I also mention she sings?

Sadly, I'd developed a stinker of a headache from the trip, perhaps due to the lovely sunny skies - high air pressure ya know. I am pleased to report that I have suffered FAR fewer headaches here in BC than I did in Ontario ... likely due to the much more stable barometric pressure levels that can trigger headaches in some people, such as myself. So I begged off dinner plans and sank into a Tylenol-induced snooze for a few hours, to wake feeling moderately human again, though not enough to do more than putter on the PC until snoozing.


That's a wrap - for some reason this week's blog just would NOT flow until the late hours turned into the early hours. Ah well - it's on paper, so to speak, and I can sleep.

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!!!