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.

Tickets, Timing and Terminators

What's this? An update early on Sunday night? That's what you get with a day off and a head full of things to say...

May 11 - Opportunity Missed

today did not start out so well. I was up very early in order to head into the city for an opportunity I've been thinking about for a while. I left the house at a quarter after seven and turned onto the highway... only to find a traffic jam stretching as far as the eye could see to the south. Seeing as I had an 8 AM appointment this was not a good thing, so I made good use of my local knowledge and took the first side road I could off the parking lot that had formerly been a highway. This was the first time I had ever seen traffic backed up as far as that highway exit, or as early as that in the morning. Through a minor miracle, I managed to arrive at my appointment exactly on time, only to be told that the group had already been taken inside and there is nothing to be done. Needless to say, I was devastated, but by this point in my life I have learned to take the big sucker-punches in stride, along with the little things we shouldn't worry about.

After spending a shaky half-hour in a nearby Starbuck's calming myself over a chai tea, I headed home for the rest of my day off... cursing the clear open lanes of the highway not even 2 hours gone as I traveled in the opposite direction homewards. The rest of the day was a wash, as I distracted myself from my disappointment by working on my NWN project, among other things. I soaked my cares away in the hottub twice in the evening, and went to bed early to dreams I cannot recall.

May 12 - Community Creation

I'm considering installing a method to track the various origins of visitors to my blog, which have more than tripled in number since I installed Google's AdSense last month. C|Net, that wonderful old standby of the internet, recently published a list of a dozen or so candidates, which I am reviewing right now. If anyone out there has actually used one of these programs, or can recommend another one to me, please do so - I'd really like to know where all the extra visitors are coming from!

Online communities are great, and are extensions of the old play-by-mail / penpal snail-mail groups that have existed for decades, long before BBS's and the internet came along. One such neat place is SciFi-Meshes.com, where thousands of dedicated souls design spaceships. Almost every ship that has ever existed in SciFi, be it film, book or other media, has a mesh somewhere on this site, including quite a few from my own beloved Babylon 5 series. As well as this one - a ship from one of my favourite books when I was a kid, called Spacecraft 2000-2100 AD, which had tons of cool-looking futuristic spaceships... combat ships, mostly, which were even cooler. As the author on the mesh site says, the book was very influential, with games like Homeworld( also one of my fave video games ever )and many other projects showing inspiration sourced in this book. There is even a history of the book series here, which I was fascinated to find - I learned that there were more books beyond the one I had managed to get!

Similarly, people can band together for various projects from across the globe, sometimes for profit. GetAFreelancer.com is such a place, where professionals( and amateurs too )from every country can buy or sell their skills to various projects covering almost every topic you can think of. My own NWN project is a tiny fish by comparison, but the group I am working with are all doing it for free, from our love of the game and our bond as gaming comrades... plus a little bit of performance ego too, I will bet.

May 13 - Write, Write, Write!

A friend told me today about an amazing story that he had just read called "The Old House Under the Snow" by author Rhys Huges, whose website you can check out to see his massive story list. He plans to write at least 1000 stories, and is up to 483 so far, most of which are published or in the stages of being so - nice!

There is also a nice little article about the Four Myths of writing that i found this week. While not an in-depth commentary on the craft, it does touch on four of the most common misconceptions about the writing life. I also loved a short piece called Freelance Writing Tips, which gives some excellent advice for those who are new to the field - in my case, still totally untried... so far. I think I will be browsing more often over at FreelanceFactor.com, which as you may guess is home for a large community of freelance writers - my kind of folk, in lieu of hanging around with published authors and garnering useful advice. An especially gritty site with insight( heh )on becoming an author is... Ten blindingly obvious things I've learned in my first year as an author at FreelanceWritingTips.com, another great site.

I will also be checking out the Top 10 Blogs on Writing, whose 2008 listing you can find here - tons of great info there, which I am slowly perusing for inspiration and direction in taking my own writing career out of the Stalled Bin. I would love to pursue voice acting as well, but for now I think writing is the better ticket in a down economy... from my research, voice acting is not for the faint of heart, though Steve Saylor has bravely ventured forth into that field. Mind you, he has a LOT more experience than I with media of most types, having spent time on Call for Help among other shows and generally being a very talented guy. I wish him well - make sure you take a look at his work over at The Voice-Over Chronicles.

May 14 - Wild Cards in the works

Me and my post-apocalyptic junkie-ism: I've just discovered a new show coming to TV called Day One, from the creator of Heroes. The show is set in California, and follows the adventures of a group of apartment residents who are trying to find out what happened to cause the cataclysm that ended their world. There is a preview of the action over at io9.com, which is a good place to peruse for SciFi news and other related media tidbits.

Some more SciFi goodness this week: one of my favourite shared-world series is getting a facelift. The Wild Cards universe is set in an alternate timeline starting back in the Fifties, when an alien virus causes millions of humans on earth to... change. Most die, some are horribly mutated and a very few develop super powers - the mutated are called Jokers, the supers called Aces... you can extrapolate the rest from there. I just love the fact that these stories are set in the modern age, and deal with topics and issues relevant to each decade that the stories cover. Numerous top-notch writers have contributed to the series, which was started in 1987 and I happily manage to have every single book of, despite most being long out of print and hard to find. The series creator / editor George R.R. Martin of Song of Ice and Fire fame talks about the relaunch here - I can hardly wait!

After work I came home... and worked some more, outside. The landlord had delivered a load of topsoil as promised, and I spent a happy few hours getting good exercise shovelling it all onto the front lawn. Yes, that's right: the lawn. When this place was hooked up to the municipal sewer system a few years ago, they ran the pipe under the front lawn... leaving a large speedbump most of the way across it, despite some settling. Not being one who enjoys looking out on( or cutting )a patchy, ugly lawn, I was more than happy to provide muscle power if the landlord would provide the fill. She's great, and has loved the fact that we as tenants are willing to improve the place in various ways to make it more enjoyable to live in. Very different from living in a condo or apartment - I like the exercise, the feeling that I am doing something to make my living space more comfortable, and that I am outside enjoying the lovely climate.

May 15 - Plane Ticket News!

I received some AMAZING news today, from a phone call after work. A good friend of mine, whom I have known most of my life( and will remain nameless until I get his OK to mention his generosity here )has offered to use his Airmiles to get me a ticket back to Niagara this summer, in time for Shawna & Nigel's wedding. I was floored - such generosity is so rare, especially since I have not said much at ALL along the lines of trying to afford the plane ticket on my own... I had a silly grin on my face for the rest of the night, and I still smile like a fool now whenever I think about it - things like that make me marvel again at my luck in having such fantastic people to call friends, and so darn many of them too. Makes it all the more important to live up to their examples!

For those of you who own DVR's( digital video recorders ), you may already be familiar with the one thing that can drive you crazy by owning one: running out of space. Much like computer hard drives, you may think that you have a ton of room, but all too soon though saved shows begin crowding each other and you have to decide which ones go and which ones stay. Though this is not as hard a choice in the age of DVDs, sometimes you just don't want to spend the money on buying a TV series or movie.

Happily, there is now a solution: cousins of the external hard drive, the PVR Expander has arrived. While not cheap, it means that for certain brands of PVR's, you can just plug in the external drive and breathe a sigh of relief as you can now keep far more shows... until it fills up again. unfortunately, my own PVR is not compatible with any of the current solutions on the market, which means I have been trying out various ways of recording the shows onto other media. So far, nothing has worked satisfactorily, as last week's blog entry about the Dazzle video capture device illustrates quite well. Still, it does point out that we are moving towards a point where we could choose where and how we will store our media, which more than likely means it will be on a hard drive home media server, which can be accessed by various types of devices around the house. Which also means that it won't be cheap either, at least until everybody starts wanting one like plasma TV's and netbooks.

May 16 - Invariably...

Following up on my mentioned last week about fraudulent e-mails, I bring you this week the topic of: identity fraud and theft. Again, C|net has written a great primer article on the subject, which I highly recommend everyone have a look through - knowledge is power, and protecting one's good name in economically troubled times is vitally important.

In case you hadn't heard, there's a new animated show coming out: Stoked. From the creators of 6teen and Total Drama Island, this is another flash-based animated series from incredibly talented people, including my good friend Mike Hogue who has placed a trailer for the new show on his own website - go have a look!

What really takes the cake this week though is... a cake. Not just any cake though: one made in the shape of the Millennium Falcon! This is one incredibly detailed - it looks more like a model than a cake. Too bad all that remains today are the pictures.

Work was slow today, nothing unusual there... sad to say, things do not look to be looking up anytime soon. Which makes me sad, as everything else about work has been, er, working out, of late. I am a fifteen minute bike ride from home, located in a plaza well away from any downtown weirdness, and I no longer have a glass barrier between myself and people, leading to a more relaxed attitude. Not to mention less fear of making a mistake in cash handling; the HAL 9000 cash dispenser does away with that worry, as it sits brooding like a black panther in the middle of the floor. Scary, sometimes, these machines...

Which brings me to Terminator: Salvation. Yep, it's the fourth film in the franchise, and to date I've been enjoying the Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series, though I have yet to get to the second season( there will never be a third: it was cancelled last month! No! ). Salvation looks amazing though, as it is designed as a war film - the previous films have given us a few fleeting glimpses into the future Skynet war, but the fourth installment is all about the apocalypse, baby! If it is good enough, I may put it on my Blue-Ray list... not that I have a Blue-Ray player yet, mind you, but eventually it looks like I will have to switch, market forces be damned.

May 17 - Sun_day at last!

Today was spent almost entirely outdoors from mid morning until dinnertime. It was a stunningly gorgeous day, with a clear blue sky and no wind to speak of save a gentle occasional breeze, for most of the day. I dug dirt, pulled weeds and hauled rocks around the property, focusing on the entrance drive - I will take a few pics of it to show the massive amount of work that I have done so far, mostly on my own with some help from my dad. I took breaks on and off until late afternoon, when I washed up and then spent the remainder of the beautiful day simply relaxing in my portable hammock. The lake area was serene for most of the day, even with the odd Victoria Day Weekend celebration getting a little loud here and there a few doors down.

What I wish I had was one of these - kids these days, so lucky.... all I had was a pool and a garden hose. And bugs.

And what would be a blog without bacon? Actually, it's... duck bacon. Qwack?

I spoke to Rene tonight, who caught me up on happenings in Niagara... well no, actually, we talked about most everything else but. I was most impressed by his reading lists; he manages to come up with the most interesting books, whereas I have no talent at finding anything that's not already in a list somewhere. What I should really do is compile a list of my fave authors and dig through their books at the local library - saves spending money at a time when it is tight all around. I used to visit the library a lot years ago, but as it became less convenient I stopped going... the Port Dalhousie branch was the last one I really frequented, as it was fairly close to home while I was living down that way in the late eighties. I hope it's still there!


All for now - going to go soak away my aches and head to bed, working the holiday tomorrow and all next week.