Superkids, Skeksis and Spinal Cords

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

Aug 10 - Space Opera and Writing

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

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

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

Aug 11 - Medical Superheros

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

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

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

Aug 12 - Two year old Tax Troubles?

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

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

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

Aug 13 - Gold!

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

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

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

Aug 14 - Gaming Goes Bust

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

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

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

Aug 15 - MS Office at long last

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

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

Aug 16 - Call of Duty day off

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

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

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

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

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.

Sisters, Socials and Scribing

I had such a good time resting up on Sunday that I didn't get around to finishing off the blog until tonight... plus, I was just feeling too darn tired.

April 28 - Visits

My sister arrived today from Calgary for her three-day mini vacation. we drove straight from the airport to Buchchart Gardens to see all the gardens in full bloom for the spring season. Colour was everywhere: masses of complementary and contrasting flowers were everywhere one's eye fell. Full tourist season has not hit yet, so only a fair sprinkling of local people were out taking advantage of the gorgeous weather to tour the Gardens. If I had had time, I would have walked around again to get a closer look at some sections, and to spend more time relaxing in the Japanese area too.

Late last week there was an interesting bit of news about the future of the information cyberwar: GhostNet. Apparently based in China, this was an ultra-low-profile spy network based in hundreds of computers in highly sensitive locations around the globe. It was discovered by a Canadian research lab after some lengthy sleuthing - reminds me of cyber-battles for control of millions of zombie PC's by various criminal groups around the world, seeking to gain control of such 'botnets' for their own nefarious use.

Which makes me want one of these all the more, to add to my collection!

April 29 - Social Aging

The other day I was thinking about the future, specifically about end-of-life social circles. Where do you think you will end up? Busy with family visits from many grandchildren? A full social calendar with bake sales, music rehearsals and volunteer work? Or sitting at home, working on one's memoirs? None of the above? Sitting bored in a rest home, watching TV and feeling your mind slip away a few more notches each day?

Sometimes I wonder about where I will end up, or even IF I will end up, fifty or so years from now. That's a long time, and we just don't know how medical science will change in that time. Assuming you survive the next few decades, you may find that new advances will extend your lifetime even further... hopefully the quality of life will remain high too. Some people, like Dr. Oz, are all about ensuring quality of life all the way along the line. Add in things like how the Nintendo Wii is changing the way people keep their bodies and minds active in later life, and we have serious hopes to see the human lifespan extended by decades very soon.

After work today, I went to dinner with my sister and parents at the Millstream Milestone's restaurant for their Free Date Night - for every two people in the party, one person's appetizer & dinner are free! We all met there at 4pm, right when I finished work( it's just steps away )managing to get in before the crowds arrived... when we left, there was a lineup 30 people deep. Apparently there are a lot of cheap dates out there besides myself. ;-)

April 30 - Lots!

I've added Google AdSense to the blog to see if I can scrape a few pennies from the hit counter, which surpassed 1200 hits today at 10:45pm PST - 200 hits in the last month alone. I wonder if it's because of adding AdSense, or some other reason? I will be keeping an eye on it as time goes on, especially as Google also owns DoubleClick, which I am not a fan of in any way.

Ice Ship: Project Habakkuk was on the History Channel tonight, touching on a favourite subject of mine... unusual WWII secret projects( just like last week's blog posting ). Imagine a gigantic floating island able to base hundreds of planes and house thousands of personnel... and almost the entire thing made of ice. It is like something out of science fiction - more can be found here about it all.

My sister left this morning, returning back to Calgary and lingering cold weather, with snow. It was a good week here for her: very restful and relaxing away from Alberta. I was sad to see her go, as I had not been able to spend too much time with her this week, having to work every day.

After a long day, it is wonderful to be able to soak in the outdoor hottub for a few minutes. When I was living in Port Dalhousie we had a pool and like to keep it VERY warm( ala 85F )which meant in effect we had a very large, somewhat cooler hottub to swim around in. After living in Fonthill, where the was also a hottub, I came to appreciate locating such things outside, as sitting in your basement soaking was nice but had no view. Here in Langford one can sit back in the water and look right out over the lake towards the hills to the north, steaming comfortably. Even a very windy night like tonight was comfortable, as long as you kept yourself mostly immersed - it was interesting to watch the steam coil and twist away like angry spirits in the winds that blew through the moonlit trees.

May 1 - 1.5 years in B.C.

No celebrations, but today marks 1.5 years since I left Ontario for the West. Doesn't feel like that long, but here I am... and all too soon I will stop marking the years altogether, as here I am likely to stay. At this point in my life, the solitude and quiet I have at home is enough to keep me balanced, allowing me time to work on projects I feel are important to me. Going out for a beer or to a movie just isn't in the cards anymore, especially as I have few people I can call on at a moment's notice to have a drink with( heyas Lucas! ). Moving here, especially this area in Langford, is calming in so many ways: the parkland nearby, the incredible vista of the lake in the backyard, having my own Man Cave to relax in, being only a 5 minute drive from work... all of this and so much more really takes the twist out of my spine at day's end. That's all on that subject.

In terms of time, I do love clocks as you may have guessed from some of my previous blog postings. This week, I stumbled across a really cool flash-based clock, though if you leave it running it does tend to get out of sync - really neat to look at though and it has very soothing background audio. It is very similar to the flash Industorious Clock that Lucas sent me years ago, which tells time through hand-written numbers - great stuff.

May 2 - Writing Thangz

On writing: Steve Saylor wrote( Tweeted, actually )about how much he is enjoying using Scrivener, a writer's all-in-one software masterpiece for the Mac. While I do not have a Mac myself, I have been trying out a few programs this last year( mostly free ones )to try and find one to suit me. Thanks to Steve, I now have a link page showing some new possibilities, so I will try a few more of them out. to date, the easiest has been DarkRoom, which is a clone of WriteRoom for the Mac: just a simple black background with text on it, easy on the eyes yet with all the features one needs to pop around the parts of a project. Distraction-free, in other words.

Spellchecking is a bit of a pain sometimes. For example, my install of OpenOffice doesn't seem to have the spellchecker enabled... not will it let me install a Canadian version. So I have resorted to using a nice( free! )website called Orangoo, which so far has been quick & very accurate.

All this may be in the face of massive changes in the publishing industry. The advent of blogs, the internet and eBooks is beginning to shake up the staid publishing industry in general, as this report from io9.com about SciFi publishing makes quite clear.

Still, if you have a blog you can always turn it into a book... as this person has done with their upcoming book to be released on May 12th 2009. Guess what all of her 600 blog posts were all about? Bacon, of course!

May 3 - Futurama

Though not especially warm, work outside today was comfortable in shorts and t-shirt with the added bonus of working away the winter lack of a tan. No lawn trimming this week though: instead I concentrated on the vital task of... driveway weeding. Man, things really GROW out here - the gentle almost-daily rain and warm climate means plants have a field day. I cannot count how many houses I have seen with masses of moss on their roofs, which grows wherever the tall trees let their shadows fall on a home.

in the evening I watched Bender's Big Score, the first of the Futurama direct-to-DVD releases that have followed after it was cancelled by Fox in 2003. I only found out about the DVD releases last year and picked up the first of the DVDs a few months ago at future shop on sale( of course! ). I've always been a fan the show for its wacky cast, great writing and unique visual animation style, though not nearly as big a fan as these folks are. If I could, I think I would go out next Halloween as Bender, though I would have to figure out a way to imitate the smoking cigar somehow... there are quite a few folks out there who love Bender. What's not to love?


'ta!

Terminators, Taxes and Testing

I knew I shouldn't have mentioned the lack of snow in last week's blog: you never know who is listening. Glad to hear from you too, Jen... nice to see you're still dropping by the blog!


March 2 - Monday Madness

Ergh.... man, today was BUSY at work, so much so that at the end of felt like I had jogged in place for the entire time. Which, considering I worked almost 10 hours, was really wearing on me... yadda yadda, I know, everyone has to work. When you're alone though, there's nobody to complain to, so you have to suck it up and do your best despite the crowds of people who of a sudden all decide to show up within ten minutes of each other... damned strange, that. I've also noticed that when it's sunny out, MANY people seem to let that decide them if they've been waffling on whether or not to go anywhere. "Sun's shining? Hooray, let's head out then!" And where do you think they stop first? MMart, for cash, of course... *grins* Keeps me in a job though, so that's good in MY books!

A lot of people seem to confuse Vancouver Island with the City of Vancouver, especially when told I live in Victoria( Langford now, close enough )which is on Van.Island. While Vancouver has a mild climate, I would not want to live there due to the size of the city and the increasing crime rate, including shootings. Still, some people really do seem to like the place, and I can't speak to it fully until I've had the chance to visit sometime soon.

And WOW, did we EVER get a windstorm tonight! Out of nowhere, 75km/hr winds whipped up from the north, blasting everything on the deck and nearly causing my carefully-constructed anti-cat bird saving structure to flip through the living room window. Thankfully, the plastic sheets were quite heavy to begin with and landed on the deck, only cracking the corner of one of them. T'was scary though, so have the wind rise to such a howl that it made the chimney moan like a tortured beast... and to die down again after less than half an hour. Weird weather, reminded me slightly of the time when Niagara was hit by a small twister back in the nineties... though today the sky didn't turn green and the rain didn't blast down as though from God's pressure cleaner.

March 3 - RAID Failure

The day off today was pretty good, all told. An order from Monoprice.com arrived today, so I was able to wire up my ancient laser printer finally, along with replacing the power cable for the Canon Pixma printer. While easy to find online, neither of these specialized cables are stocked by local PC retailers, so I was relieved I found them online, cheaply too. Now that I have printing capability again, I feel an odd sense of relief, especially since I can't print things at work and the local Staples charges an indecent amount for printing things like PDF docs... I mean, really, $0.49 per page for colour? Sheesh!

I also managed, after exhaustive testing, to fix my Blue Frankenstein of a computer. After running down the list of possible reasons for it NOT wanting to boot, it turns out my paranoia from years ago has paid off. Years ago after losing several former PC's to drive failure, I had installed a pair of redundant hard drives in THIS computer that mirrored each other's data - so if one went wacky, then the other would still work. Turns out that WAS the case, and unplugging one of the drives( the second choice )let the system boot happily. Which meant I spent the rest of the evening backing up all the recent data from the remaining drive to other external sources, just in case... you can't be too careful. I was really, really happy that the RAID setup worked so well, and will have to figure out a way to replace the drive ASAP - since it's a Seagate, it may STILL be under warranty. Though they recently went from 5 years to only 3, it's still best in the industry, despite recent concerns about some of their drives experiencing far higher failure rates than is acceptable for consumers.

March 4 - Talking Taxes

For those of you who are anxious about doing your taxes, take heart: aside from EasyTax at MMart, there are a ton of other solutions to juggling those numbers to take form in your favour. One I prefer over all others is QuickTax.ca, which has the added bonus of being linked to from most major banks for an additional 20% off... which means you can do your own taxes online for less than $20.00. That's assuming that your tax situation is not too complex and doesn't involve things like owning your own business or long-distance trucking mileage. And is it mileage if you live in a country that measures things in metric, like Canada? Wouldn't it be 'klickage' ? Nevermind... that's straying back into Made Up Wordz territory.

Not that I advocate making up words will-nilly, or mashing a few together to make a new one. Unfortunately, I seem to be in the minority in this regard, as evidenced by the newest media ads for the Apple iPhone... "The Funnest iPhone Ever!" - made me want to write stacks of angry letters using famous english grade-school teachers as pseudonyms. This person has also taken exception to the slow degradation of the language, much like my posting last week for Feb 23rd. Language has to evolve, but I would rather not see it delve into offshoots like Ebonics or the unusual cross-cultural effort of Esperanto, the most popular of the constructed languages to date. I also snuck a look at Sindarin, which is one of several fantasy languages derived from Tolkein's works which has several online translators and thousands of fluent speakers worldwide.

But you can't order a hamburger at your local Wendy's in it... heck, I've still got to get to the point where I can do that in french, Italian or Spanish. One of many things to do when I find the time.

March 5 - Thursday in Brief

Having grown up with syndicated reruns of the old Star Trek series, I was pleased to hear that a new 'reboot' of the show was happening. The most recent trailer looks amazing, though it obviously tries to break new ground and steer away from the campy elements of the original series.

Merchandising has always been a core part of Star Trek, though I wonder why they've recently decided to branch out into... colognes?

I miss my Babylon 5.... but things like the new Battlestar Galactica reboot have been amazing. Many fans have wondered though: what would the old series title sequence have looked like with the new cast?

March 6 - Movie Time

Today Watchmen was released in theatres, and though I really want to see it, I just can't bear to share the same space as the Massed Public Hordes for over 2 hours. Reviews of the film at RottenTomatoes.com are mixed, with the main complaints being that it's "too complex" and "slavish to the original material" - neither of which are bad things in my book.

Related to that, I've been watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles in bits and pieces over the last few months, and was disappointed to hear that tonight's ratings were rather low. Yet i09.com has posted the obvious answer: everyone was out watching Watchmen. Which is a cool way of putting it, actually...

Well, that's it for a Friday. Not much to do out here in Langford on one's ownsome, though I am working on seeing some of my Victoria friends more regularly come the spring. Perhaps I will be able to take up a few more outdoor hobbies come the summer as well, as I do miss my biking and the Galloping Goose Trail is close by.

March 7 - Da Weekend

Not so bad a Saturday, really... except it snowed four separate times today. Typical Victoria weather, changeable three times or more an hour. Snowing, then sunny skies, then snowing again; we're talking heavy clouds and masses of white drifting flakes that fortunately did little more than melt when they hit the ground.

After work today I did something different: I went out to a pub just down the street - it has a striking home page here. Christie's Carriage House Pub has been around for over a century, though the building was only turned into a pub in the late 80's. It was quite crowded when I arrived, as there was a hockey game of some kind on - I didn't bother to pay much attention, as is my wont. Instead, I dug into a turkey sandwich with fries and gravy, with two pints of Guinness to wash it down over the course of several hours as I read through Pierre Burton's The Joy Of Writing, which I've never managed( until now )to actually open and read through. It was quite enlightening, moreso as I had no idea of the sheer volume that people could produce with only ancient typewriters, pencils and steno pads. While not containing any revelations about the craft, it did emphasize to me the importance of perseverance, hard work and finding one's own style, as well as reading as much of the work of other good authors as possible.

Which also begs the question of motivation. Working as I have been for the last while has left me little energy, feeling the way I do, to put towards other things. I find myself in dire need of decompression / de-stress time, and my creative processes of late have been stretched in just trying to come to the blog each week with something new aside from purchasing new socks.

March 8 - Sunny Sunday at last!

I spent most of the afternoon attending to my Blue Frankenstein PC, backing up data to various drives before reworking the interior setup - added a video card so I can run 2 monitors at once, as well as ensuring my now-unmirrored main drive was hooked up a little differently to make room for the video card. I am surprised that now the main bottleneck in my storage setup is speed: having a sizable external drive is great, but with standard USB 2.0 speeds, it takes hours to copy massive amounts of data. One of my external drives does have an eSata connector, so I think that I will invest in some cabling to take advantage of that fairly soon - I hate waiting to copy data around.

Nice to see the sun, despite the cold outside. Sitting in the rear family room it's amazing just to bask in the evening sunshine and watch the sunset reflect on the clouds behind the hills to the northwest. The colours it creates on the lake are incredible, and I'll post some pictures soon.


Lastly: I am narrowing down possibilities in regards to my health issues, thankfully. My doctor has been very attentive, and together we've eliminated( pun intended )quite a few avenues and continue to do so with various tests. Nothing concrete yet, but allergies to gluten are a possibility, as are several other sources of indigestion, including IBS - more as I find out solid medical facts from tests.

Steebs, Sun and Savings

Fall is here...

Oct 20 - Petty Thoughts

I happened to hear on the radio that today was Tom Petty's birthday, so he was 58 today, almost the same age as my parents. Well, not quite, but the same generation. I have not heard any of his more recent things, but some of his videos are just amazing, all the more so considering that they run fully-animated for the entire length of the song - not easy and not cheap to do. Watch 'em!

I may have mentioned it before, but the main radio station here in Victoria plays a LOT of the music I like. Quite a few classic rock oldies, plus groups like Barenaked Ladies, Matchbox20 and of course, a ton of Tom Petty. When I was listening to 104.5 or 99.9 FM in Niagara, I'd be lucky to hear one Petty song a week. Here, I hear at least one a DAY, if not more - fantastic! Plus I never DID manage to get a call through for the damn ChumFM Jet vacation contest...

Oct 21 - Series-ously, folks

As I am browsing through YouTube, I keep finding myself looking up old forgotten TV shows to see how many episodes have made it onto the site from people's private archives; VHS quality still looks OK at regular YouTube resolution, despite it being an analog recording.

One series I recall with fondness is 'V' - which was really an eight-part miniseries that evolved into a not-as-good followup series. Amazingly, despite the massive budget overruns of the original series, serious consideration was being given a few years ago to doing a new take on 'V' for TV. My favourite writer, J. Michael Straczynski, even wrote a pilot treatment for the new series, which is fantastic - you can read it in its entirety here. Alien lizards, giant spaceships hovering over cities, cool laser weapons... I loved 'V' for those things and more... as well as scratching my head over things like the 'Starchild' and other gaffes that can only be attributed to bad TV Exec interference in the series. Ah well, I was a kid then... TV politics and budget realties were well beyond my scope of the world.

Speaking of things I liked as a kid, I really, really wanted one of the Imperial AT-AT walkers from The Empire Strikes Back. I was given a choice at the time though: the Milennium Falcon( the COOL new, customizable and vastly improved 2008 model is here )or the AT-AT, as a one-off birthday gift. I chose the Falcon, and in hindsight I think it was the better choice, as I got a lot more play value out of it... despite its fragility. Still, the thought has crossed my mind over the years to pick up a cheap used AT-AT on eBay or somewhere... until I saw THIS. Guess I should have opted for more Lego instead, eh? Still, I JUST discovered that someone is selling models of the alien ships from V: The Series... I always wanted one of those, since they never officially released any sort of toy versions back in the 80's. I envy kids nowadays though, when they get toys like this- but I must admit that the majority of purchasers will be collectors, who are really just kids at heart.

Oct 22 - Sketchy Steebs

A lady today, who introduced herself as a sketch artist, came back to the branch after a first visit to cash a chq, and asked if she could take my picture. I was flattered, but had to refuse due to company policy about pictures being taken in the branch. She said that she had not seen my particular combination of curly dark hair and greying goatee before, which amused me. I spotted her later on in the week while I was out and smiled, but for some reason she didn't recognize me... which means I am not all that distinctive after all. Huh. Perhaps the TV / Film career I had planned might best be put on hold, despite my proximity to Vancouver... which is ironic, as I managed to move out here JUST as both SG-1 and SG: Atlantis got canceled, both of which filmed in Vancouver. D'oh!

Once I was home, I headed out again shortly afterwards to the Cook St. Starbuck's to try and take advantage of the sunshine. I managed to get in about an hour of decent, if chilly, patio time before the light waned enough to bring on the real chills, then moved indoors for the remainder of my two ours of free internet access. I had also set up a VPN connection with my home PC, which I tested while I was there - worked like a charm! I was able to securely access any shared folders from my home PC, negating the need to carry duplicate files around with me. Getting Mp3 files to stream fast enough eluded me though, so it is a work in progress but still nice to see work... for free!

While I was on the patio though, a bit of serendipitous luck happened. An older gentleman in line had commented on my Paul McCartney Steebs card, which he had only seen once before way out east. He struck up a conversation with me again while I was out on the patio with my laptop; turns out he is from a company that designs aviation software and who are looking for a technical writer to update / expand their manual. While not comitting to anything or overstating my own qualifications, I settled with getting in touch with him fairly soon to discuss the matter. Which also meant I had to update my Soronos.com site for the first time in... 5 years? Longer? Darn it, these things sneak up on you sometimes!

Oct 23 - Free Budgets

I have been looking at various ways to stretch my savings and lower my monthly budget pain, as you may have guessed from my decision to remove cable TV from my bills - for now. I have also discovered that my computers heat the place rather nicely without any additional help, given its relatively small size, as I mentioned in previous blog posts. Given that my electric bills have been rather low, and my gas bills correspondingly small, the plan seems to be working this far; with average temperatures at night here hovering around 6 degrees and interior temperatures at around 24, with no additional heat sources, I find things are balanced quite nicely.

Another place I came across with tons of great savings ideas is The Dollar Stretcher. This site is packed with great ideas to make one's budget stretch, and does not involve anything drastic such as growing your own vegetables in the bathtub or living by flashlight once the sun goes down.

One thing I have always found exorbitantly expensive is... MS Office. Even the Student Edition is far too expensive, though it HAS come down( a little )since my university days. A fantastic FREE atlernative is OpenOffice, affectionately known as 'OOo' on the 'net. This is an open-source, community-driven alternative to MS Office that does ALL the same things... for free. Better yet, it can read and save MORE formats than MS's product can, and is constantly being updated, again for free. So if you balk( like me )at spending money every few years for MS's bloatware, give Open Office a try... I've been using it for years and can attest it works as well as MS's products. Without the cost.

Oct 24 - Here's a tip

Someone left me a tip today at work, something that has very rarely happened in all the years with the company; they are officially discouraged for various reasons which I will not get into. Despite my protests though, a gentleman left me $20.00 when all was said and done, stating that he enjoys the fact that I am "Always friendly, efficient and well-spoken" when dealing with him. I thanked him and said that if he took a comment card with him to fill out to that effect, it would make my day. Hopefully it reaches head office, where it may offset the next insane person who walks in the door... more on that concept a few paragraphs down from here.

Again on the subject of cost savings, I am debating cancelling my Vonage line in Niagara... somewhat. It sees infrequent use, with few people to date using it to call me for free way, way out here in BC. I understand everyone's busy; so am I... but for now I am still on the fence about maintaining an easy link back east, unused as it is. Ah well.

Oct 25 - Lunch? Couch?

I had lunch today at The King & Thai( pun! )in Cook St. Village with a friend of a co-worker; the Thai restaurant is part of a mini-food court at the Village that will be expanding shortly. While the prices are not cheap, the portions are good, the place has two sunny patios AND best of all: it's good food! We ended up chatting about all sorts of tech topics over at Starbuck's until well into mid-afternoon, when the sun finally arced down enough to splash Steeb's patio with some warming rays. I have to admit, I am still adjusting to the concept of 'outdoor weather' here - people seemed perfectly content to sit outside in ten-degree weather, as long as the sun was shining, even if it was without much warmth. Dressing in layers and taking advantage of every decent weather day seems ingrained in folk around here, whereas I am used to holing up somewhere warm, or dashing from home to places with good heating and back again to a warm car.

In the evening, I worked on a few projects, including a little more on what I am tentatively titling "Half Lives" which is the story idea I had this past summer. I have several outlines plotted for it, and have been searching them for clichés on the 'net to avoid retreading ground others have written already. More on this as I develop the structure and get at least five chapters solidly written out... once I decide on WHICh chapters to write as a test, that is!

Late in the evening I nodded off for a while, which was nice as I did not know I was that tired: bonus nap! I haven't done that in a while, not since we sold off the extremly Comfy Couches that we had hauled around for years. Damn, I miss those couches... light, easy to move, and very nap-friendly.

Oct 26 - Sunny day, grumpy people

The fourth Sunday in a row I have worked so far has again turned typically beautiful outside, but since I was out for so long yesterday in decent weather I feel little longing to do the same today. Aside from the usual instinct to be anywhere BUT stuck at work, that is... but we all feel that way, most days.

Days like today tickle memories at the back of my head, of school days and crisp weather with winds tossing leaf piles to and fro across the ground. Bright sunshine and autumn colours always make me smile, for like Christmas, this time of year I find it easiest to summon memories I thought forgotten.

Yesterday was supposed to be when the old Daylight Savings Time for the fall season kicked in, but with the new DST brought into play back in 2007, it won't take effect until Nov. 2nd. Nice to see that we are keeping time with the USA so easily... good old Canadian sitck-up-for-itiveness. You can check your correct local time easily at TimeAndDate.com, which is detailed enough to take into account things like those few cities in BC that do NOT use DST - yes, there ARE places like that still around.

A bit of grim elderly humour today: I heard a faint rapping coming from the front area, yet the doorbell had not gone off. Going up front, I saw an elderly man standing at the front door with a walker, tapping his keys on the door. I motioned for him to come in... and spent the next 15 minutes trying to get him to use the unlocked front door. Apparently his strength, if you call it that, was not such that he could easily open our front door... a first, in my experience, for this location. Even writing large signs on scrap paper did not help, as it turns out he could barely see. Finally, after a few well-choreographed pantomimes of pulling hard on a door, I managed to get him into the branch... where he promptly complained that if I saw him having trouble, why had I not rushed out to help? I explained the concept of a secure area, but I think he was not really interested in any answer I was giving him. I hope that if I get that feeble in my years, that I will recognize my lack of strength and take steps to ensure I never spend time tapping at open doors, waiting to be let in... grumpily.

On that note, I headed home in the dark, eagerly awaiting NEXT Sunday, when I will be able to head home in something other than total darkness. Some NWN time, as well as listening to SG: Atlantis commentaries while typing up the blog... and here we are.


It seems we have a dearth of comments of late - I can see that people are reading the blog, which is GREAT... but few comments. Is it that I cover all the bases, or are people so stunned at the end that they forget to comment? I just can't tell.

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!!!