Songs, Sandboxes and Sendoffs

The word of the week is quiescent.

April 14 - It's been awhile...

How long have you been at your current job?

It's an interesting question. I used to think that a job was something you did for 5 to 10 years, or if you are lucky it turned into a lifelong career with a solid retirement package at the end. I guess growing up when I did, I saw a lot of people who followed those patterns in traditional jobs such as teachers, doctors, lawyers, firemen, policemen and the like. Most people settled into a career path and stuck with it if they were competent or more rarely successful at it and that was the norm for the time.

Apparently things are a-changing... have a look at this:

What a change 25 years makes to redefine what 'career' means ...

Job-hopping is the new normal, at least according to data recently released by Workopolis. According to their study of more than 7 million employment history records dating back to 1995, there has been a huge shift in how long people stay at their jobs. I wonder at where the world will be like in another 10 years in terms of what people will call a career...

And: A Million Dollars, 25 years later?

Back in 1992, the Barenaked Ladies song 'If I had A Million Dollars' was topping the charts and making dreams of dollar signs dance in the eyes of fans everywhere. In those days, if you had $1 million then you truly were among the rich. Yet a quarter century later, inflation and economic changes have meant that a re-examination of what that tidy sum could buy is in order. Over at CBC.ca, a blogger took a look at what $1 million could buy you today in Canada and its rather amusing to see how things have changed into an a half decades. While there's still some things that money can't buy, the overall consensus is that… well, read the article for yourself and you may be surprised.

Still, I won't refuse a million bucks if it happens to come my way...

April 15 - A Late Start

This past weekend, I started watching 3rd season of Game of Thrones, finally.

So far, so good. I've managed to avoid any spoilers, large or small, for the last year and I'm hoping to keep it that way as I work through the third season. I know that the fourth season has begun and that's making things a bit tricky, but given that I don't have a whole ton of time right now while writing my novel, there's no choice but to soldier on. I'm really looking forward to seeing what's in store! In keeping with that theme, here's a GOT-esque( slightly dark sense of humour )work-safe parody video of Frozen:

Aaaannnnd... on another note: the new laptop is fantastic! ( Non-g33ks may tune out now ).

When I was hoping to get a laptop that would fit my needs, there was just a short list that I wanted, beck, NEEDED the thing to have. 1) Fast boot-up and recovery from sleep  2) Great multi-tasking performance  3) Small and light enough to tote around like my old ASUS tablet.

Thankfully, I can report that the Samsung 540U is all that and more! Heck, it even has a touchscreen, which makes it MUCH easier for me to switch over to from my ASUS tablet - it's far more natural for me now to tap or swipe on a screen after using my ASUS, so the Samsung is just ideal in that sense.

I'm very happy with my new novel-writing tool!

Daily usage is smooth and simple too. I flip the lid( its, not mine )open and the system wakes in a second or two, ready to do work. No waiting for a drive to spin up or the internet to connect, which just wastes my time and lets my ideas slip away before I can jot them all down. Enter notes, search a term or two, maybe check my email and away it goes; just as fast as using my phone but without the headache of cramming everything into a tiny screen.

Definitely a writing-worthy machine!

April 16 - Play

Almost every kid loves to play in sandboxes.

I know I did, though I was less enthused in later youth when I found out about how cats saw outdoor sandboxes - yuck. All the same, being able to create imaginary worlds with just a bucket and shovel and a little time was simply magical. I treasure that feeling still.

That was over 30 years in the past. Times have changed and technology has progressed. Now we have very powerful computers and virtual reality technology that we can combine with the latest in video projectors to create… a Virtual Sandbox. There are several different systems around the world that are exploring this technology and one of them is called Sandy Station. It uses a simple sandbox surrounded by sensors and video projectors to allow high-resolution images to be mapped onto the blank surface of a sandbox in real time. The sensors allow the computers to see the height and disposition of the sand particles and adjust the video images accordingly in real-time to… well, just have a look. It's too cool for words:

PS - I adjusted the audio track of the video myself to include the same piano track as Sandy Station's other video, an ethereal piece by Ludovico Einaudi. For some reason they didn't include any audio on the particular video that I liked and thanks to the internet plus a little work on my part, the video you watch above is now by far the better, if I do say so myself.

April 17 - Write On

For four days this week, I socked in five solid chapter edits, plus another batch of enhancements, including switching the name of the primary 'good-guy' weapons to one that's more accurate. Small but vital details like these each enhance the story a little more, so that the whole benefits.

It's really exciting! I know I keep saying this, but I can't wait until I can get this third draft of the novel into your hands. It may not stay in this exact form though: if it's picked up fairly quickly( I hope a year? )by a publisher, then they may insist on a professional edit which may change some details yet again.

So many books waiting to be written...

That's by no means a bad thing: a professional editor can work wonders with a story that's simply 'good' and turn it into a fantastic tale with just a few suggestions. In my case, with all the feedback I've been so graciously able to use, combined with the time I've been able to spend editing the work myself, I think that the book is well along the road towards its ultimate form and a solid start to the trilogy.

Just wait till you see what I have in store for Books Two and Three! :-)

April 18 - Weird Beer

It's safe to say, beer and I mostly have parted ways these days.

Months can go by between beers for me and I tend to forget that they're in the fridge if I do get the occasional six-pack. Bottles of wine in my place also tend to collect dust like sedentary layers forming. Not that I was much of a drinker or connoisseur - I've little appreciation for the finer kinds of alcohol - but the occasional glass of wine or a weekend beer wasn't beyond me. Red wine gives me headaches due to the tannins and I find white wine just too dry…

Which leaves beer, which I also have to be careful with, as craft beer might contain copper and that leads straight into migraines, which I can definitely do without. Tonight I pulled together a send-off party for two people from work were leaving for better things, having a total of three Guinness the whole evening myself. It was a great party with around a dozen people all told at Garrick's Head Pub, which was rather loud and had a lot of grumpy people who tried( some succeeded... ) to steal the chairs around our table with a too-small 'Reserved' sign on it. Beer flowed, nachos were consumed with smiles and laughter suffused the evening, so that everyone went home happy and feeling fulfilled.

The banner I created for tonight's farewell party - I like it!

Back to the beer fans: Some people really love their beer, I realize that. Really, really, really love their beer, so much so that they create a sci-fi anime commercial to advertise their beer. Some go whole hog and hire some of the best Japanese animators to really throw things into the next level? See for yourself how beer and the future collide:

April 19 - Rah, Rah, RPG!

It was all rush, rush, today.

Although I had a shorter shift starting after lunch today, it didn't seem that way. It was extremely busy and with our technician gone, I was given quite a lot to do in our tech center to get computers ready for customers. What I wasn't given was time: as per usual, I kept getting yanked out of the tech center to rush out onto the floor for various silly reasons.

Personally, I find it idiotic that I have to drop whatever I'm doing in order to rush out and assist a random person who's chosen this particular time and date to walk in with what's usually a simple question that gets drawn out into a 10-minute conversation. The priority that my workplace places on people who walk in the door or call by phone is too great, I think. Customers that have already paid for work to be done should be given priority over those who randomly show wanting basic things like ink cartridges, or to have questions answered about technology they could easily find out for themselves instead of taking the easy route and getting us to find their simple answers for them.

But that's what I get for working for somebody else: a lack of choice.

Six brave adventurers, sans silly unicorn, ready for battle!

Choice was what it was all about in the evening, though: I rushed from work up the highway to join another DnD game session in progress at a friend's. Playing a halfling rogue, I thoroughly enjoyed the evening, not the least because I had an excellent performance in the one combat that took place and didn't take a scratch!

In addition, I've been carefully crafting a persona of witty banter and unusual situational choices which usually results in laughter all around the table. For all I know, at this rate I'll end up as the de facto leader of the group, which would be amusing as my halfling doesn't even come up to thigh-level on most of the other characters. It's been far too long since I've sat at a table with such a wonderfully friendly and geeky group, so it's been a real treat to trade banter, g33k-references and just to role-play with their like.

A good time was had by all and I'm looking forward to the next session!

April 20 - Eggz

Happy Easter, to those of you celebrating it today. For those with a sense of humour:

Myself, I worked and it was one of the most pleasant days I've had in many months. Apart from accomplishing a lot of minor things that needed doing that have been unable to be completed due to the insane busyness of late, it was just a great day overall. People( customers and employees both )were happy, managers were fairly laid-back and coworkers were all smiles all day long. I headed home feeling a little tired( for some reason I didn't sleep well last night )but without a single iota of stress, which is very much worth noting. If all days could be like today in terms of my workplace, I could almost forget that I am not making very much and take that fantastic feeling with me throughout the week as I edit my novel.

So, to end the week with a bang: Here's highlights from the Space Battleship Yamato movie released last year in Japan. Lots of epic space-battle-boom, though the ending is a shocker:

This weeks blog really flowed together rather quickly: I'd completed it, with pictures, in less than three hours total. Maybe it's because I'm feeling more relaxed or maybe I'm just more into the floor writing these days while working on my novel; take your pick. All I know is that I'm rolling steadily along towards completing my book' s third draft and the increasing excitement I feel at closing in on that goal is a feeling like nothing else. It puts a smile on my face and a spring in my step and makes each day of late something to look forward to. Who could ask for more than that?

Torrents, Trojans and Twenty Chapters

The word of the week is obsequious.

April 7 - Approved!

All things considered, today was a pretty good day.

I was busy as all heck though! Running around during the day to get things done before heading out to Cordova Bay to get some editing done on the novel took up a goodly amount of time. Plus, I was at my writer's group Meet N'Greet around dinnertime, which went VERY well: it's hard to tell some nights if people will be more into general conversation than games but MAN, they were talkative tonight! It was hard to tear myself away from the conversation at the end, since we all had to go home, but it boded very well for the rest of the year that we have such a fun, intelligent and genial group who gather every few weeks. 

Ah, but the main thing today was: I was approved for my( second-time-around )new laptop! 

It was actually rather surprising how smoothly the process went; I was in and out of work in about half an hour or so. Papers filed, deposit paid and silly grin plastered on my face, yup. Sunny and bright, perfect weather to run around skipping for joy with a new toy... er, laptop for doing my writing with, tucked safely in my pack.

Look, it's smart enough to find my lost marbles!

Having spent hours late in the evening properly setting up my new PC, I'm really happy with the unit, with none of the knuckle-dragging the Acer S3 vex-hibited. Admittedly, the SSD storage space is pretty limited and I'll have to be careful with what I install, even with using Dropbox for my files - I can supplement my storage with flash drives, if needed.

The main thing is now having a portable computer that doesn't struggle to do what I need it to do. That's really what it's all about and in that regard this new Samsung Ultrabook is wonderful.

April 8 - Siberian Mysteries

Everyone loves a little mystery, right?

Stories about mysterious places have always peaked my interest, especially ones that involve ancient places and things that can't be readily explained even buy modern science. And where better to find a mystery then somewhere remote, like Siberia? We're not talking about ordinary mysteries here either; no, we're looking at things that defy the normal and make silly faces at reality, possibly diving right into the down right unexplainable.

Mysteries that involve inaccessible places are always the best mysteries and the deep northern parts of Russia are just that: inaccessible. Very few people live or travel there willingly and if you DO want to visit, you really have to  be prepared for a journey of epic proportions. You also have to be prepared to see perhaps a whole lot of nothing, as mysteries don't tend to draw attention to themselves, you know.

In this particular inaccessible mystery, what one would hope to see you would be strange underground domes, made of metal, that are warm as the spring breeze, even in the middle of winter:

Yes, he's riding a reindeer - no, that's not a Frozen joke.

Stories like that of ancient Atlantis, lost civilizations and even the aliens are all rolled into one with this tale and it's fascinating to read. The adventure was made by one Ivan Mackerle and his team and you can read about it here as well as see pictures from his expedition. Not that I believe every word, mind you, but it's fascinating nonetheless. With stories like these, the writer in me joins hands with my inner child and dance around the possibilities that places like this suggest about what our universe may contain.

And the truth? It's still buried somewhere deep in the permafrost in Siberia.

 

 

April 9 - Halfway Point

Novel update: Today marks the halfway point of editing my novel.

Twenty chapters have been thoroughly edited and although I don't consider the first half of the book complete, it's incredibly far along the way towards being finished. The second half of the novel still needs to be edited, of course, but that's on track with my current pace for being done by the end of May 2014. That likely includes a few weeks of tweaking and putting in little touches that make the whole better than the parts, which is all just part of the editing process. If you're curious about that, this article has a neat little summary of what an author should look for when editing their first draft; useful advice!

And then there's people who make BIG mistakes when editing...

 

In all the headlines this week was Heartbleed, a HUGE bug in the security code used by millions of websites the world over.

If you haven't read what all the fuss is about, this article is a succinct and useful summary of what Heartbleed's all about and what you need to do about it to protect yourself. Don't be complacent; go and read the article, then change your passwords - this article has a short list of the major sites affected.

If you don't, you're taking your chances that someone else will change your passwords for you.

April 10 - Diamonds for Batsy!

Batman turned 75  today.

To celebrate the singular distinction, a special animated short was created by none other than Bruce Timm, who was a cornerstone of the original Batman animated series on television in the 1990s. It's a fantastic short, done in the old 1940's serial style and you can see it in all its glory below:

To be honest, Batman's a little moody for my tastes. I much prefer Spiderman, for all of his introspective uncertainty and bigger zest-for-life then ol' Batsy has - or at least shows, anyway. Yet the enduring brilliance of Batman can be perhaps be best summed up by saying that he's an ordinary man who dedicates his life to a cause so completely that he transcends his circumstances and became something greater.

I think we can all learn a lesson from that, which may last for at least another 75 years.

 

 

April 11 - Being Punctual

Are you a Grammar Nazi or a member of the Punctuation Police?

I'm not either, but had to laugh when I stumbled across a series of photographs of terribly-punctuated signs. While I'm excellent at spelling and have a solid vocabulary, sometimes punctuation is a bit of a grey area. I can see how some people might be confused, especially if they have a not-so-great-grasp of the English language to begin with, in all it's strange and twisted convolutions of rules and exceptions. I present to you an example below:

On a related note, I've enjoyed this year of not sweating as much about being early or even perfectly on-time for work. In my previous job, I had a very narrow window of arrival and departure, no more than 5 minutes, due to the restrictions placed on us by the monitoring company. Having your DM get a phone call because you were late to work was rather stressful and while that never happened to me personally, I still stressed about punctuality. My current job has started to get that way again and that's not a good sign, I think - casual lateness is something to be discouraged, I agree, but when a workplace starts seeing the clock as some sort of holy institution, that rings warning bells in my brain.

I hope it's just a phase they're going through and will grow out of, in time.

April 12 - Driving Cloud Storage

Don't you love it when things get less expensive overtime? It's so rare...

In the tech world, that usually means things get faster and smaller, the less expensive is a relative term and tends to take a long time overall. Price points do fall: high-end laptops were $4,000 twenty years ago when I was in university and now they're $1,000-ish. Still pricey but not out of the reach of ordinary people.

Cloud storage has been somewhat pricey for a couple of years, but the whole industry got a kick in the pants this week when Google nose-dived the pricing for all of its cloud-storage plans across the board. While my own 50gb of Dropbox space runs out in September, I'll be picking up 100gb of GoogleDrive space for a mere $2.00 a month. That's right: for a Toonie a month, I'll be set for space on my mobile devices - how great is that kind of a deal? 

This week's blog was again composed on my phone by voice, which amazingly took even less time than last week. I did manage to install Dragon Naturally Speaking 11 on my new laptop, but I couldn't get the microphone working; frustration. I ended up having to download the Dragon 11 install as a torrent as I couldn't find my install disks( I own a copy )which was an adventure in itself, as I discovered that - as I suspected - torrents are rife with sneaky malware and trojans. Case in point: the torrent I downloaded was infected with a trojan botnet virus, which probably makes the torrent host a fair bit of cash from stealing valuable personal info as he 'generously' lets people the world over download and install his little backdoor bug. So you have to know how to keep yourself safe when torrenting.

Scumbags and criminals: they're only a click of a button away. Be warned!

April 13 - Rollin' LARGE

Usually I sing the praises of tiny homes, but this week I found something different: a big trailer.

A really, really BIG trailer. Take a gander:

That's a man in a white shirt by the wheel.

Now, that looks like something that can only exist where there are no bridges to go under, or cross, for that matter. I searched the 'net for anything that could relate to giant RV's, trailers or other similar massive rigs but came up empty. My closest guess as to what the thing is used for is as mobile accommodations at a massive mining facility, perhaps in Australia? I'm not sure; if anyone out there has any idea what this mobile motel / apartment is used for, please let me know.

If not, it's no... big deal.

Everyone needs a day off to catch up.

Since I'm only working two days this coming week, that leaves me five days to devote to my novel. Well, four, as today( Sunday )was again devoted to catching up on other things and getting in some relax time after a busy three days working; spring weather really seems to bring people out in droves. There was only one twit in the whole lot too, which was nice; I've seen very few idiots on a daily basis this last year, which has been wonderful... I don't think I've smiled as much in the ten years at my last job as I have in this single year at Staples, which tells you a lot. 

 

 All for now - lots of work to do this week to get at least another 5 chapters edited, at least!

Roleplaying, Recycling and Returns

The word of the week is happenstance.

March 31 - Cool News

Humanity took another big step towards reaching the stars today.

Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital have begun human trials for suspended animation. They will be testing new techniques that allow victims of accidents and violence to be put into an artificial state of low-temperature suspension in order to help the surgeons slow the loss of blood while they repair the patient's body.

If this sounds like science fiction to you, you're not far off. Up until now, there's been no method developed that would allow humans to be placed into a state of chilled metabolism that would be ideally suited to long-term interstellar travel. Up until less than a decade ago, if you froze someone, there was a vanishingly small chance you could ever revive them and even if you could, they’d likely have suffered severe brain or organ damage.

Be sure to get frozen with a good expression on your face

With the new procedures being tested, the next step of sending humans into space on journeys of hundreds or thousands of years is a little closer. Admittedly, the starships that the people would be traveling on would need to be reliable on a scale at an order of magnitude greater than any level of technology available today, but that's another story.

For now, it's thrilling to see science make a major advance like this, where people can dream of the stars and perhaps even a chance for immortality at the same time.

April 1 - Library Launch

Tonight I attended a book launch!

It was the first book launch I've ever attended, being held at the local library in Colwood. A friend of mine from my writing group wrote several stories for an anthology and had invited me to come on out to the launch. I thought it was a great idea, arriving there just a little bit after dinner time.

It was a smaller affair than I anticipated, with around a dozen people including the authors and the publishers, but it was definitely an excited group. The authors each stood up to read a piece from their work in the various books being launched this evening, excerpts of no more than 10 minutes in length. It was thrilling to see the excitement in their eyes and hear it in her voice as they read their work for the rapt audience.

If you have THIS many people at your book launch, congrats!

Afterwards, the conversations were animated and although I didn't get a chance to speak to some of the authors, one and all they were floating above the ground with having their work finally in print. Much like my own feeling of euphoria when I had the second draft copies of my book printed last summer; it was wonderful to see that same feeling reflected in the eyes of many of the people tonight.

As for my own book launch, I'm hoping that will take place within a year or two and perhaps be held somewhere more grandiose than a library, no fooling.

I'm thinking... a shuttle launch pad.

Speaking of which: for some reason my blog has received hundreds of hits this week:

Normal activity is 15-25 hits a day, so wow...

I've no idea why, but it's kind of thrilling. Who are all these people and where are they coming from? As far as I can tell, it's not some kind of bot-rush or other stat-skewing slew of pageviews, so we'll have to wait and see what the stats show in the next few weeks. I don't believe they're hackers or bots, as the stats would show known referral sites or the same address trying dozens of times, but who knows these days.

Heck, I might be getting popular... this week's post is my 333rd, after all!

April 2 - New Laptop Blues

I returned my new Acer laptop today.

I had no other choice, really. I spent too much time over the course of two days this week trying to overcome the issues I was having with the unit, with no success. The final straw was where I was forced to chat with an Acer technician via their website in order to get an answer and THAT only happened after a needlessly convoluted and protracted warranty registration nightmare that took most of a day. It was a terrible experience and extremely frustrating only to find in the end the answers I got were the ones I hadn't wanted to hear anyway.

In the end, there were two major reasons I had to return the laptop. The first was that the 'green' 5400rpm hard drive was far too slow to allow me to multitask, and so use the laptop's speedy i5 processor efficiently. I had to wait for anything to happen when browsing the web or editing documents at the same time, which is unacceptable for a modern computer. The 20gb 'SSD' drive that was advertised on the S3 turned out to be a 'cache' and not an SSD at all, useful only for quick bootups and putting the laptop to sleep - Windows runs from the slow hard drive and that is a Very Bad Thing when it comes to speed.

Seriously. It felt like this.

The second reason was that if I had wanted to open the computer's case to upgrade the hard drive, Acer would consider that to be voiding my warranty; again, unacceptable. I was especially annoyed by the second item, as some manufacturers will allow you to upgrade a laptop hard drive and not consider it as voiding one's warranty. Given the hoops I had to go through to even eke out that little bit of information from Acer, I knew that the laptop was going to be returned.

Fortunately, while I was at work today I stumbled across a serendipitous solution. Another ultrabook had come in as an online return and amazingly it was everything I wanted... And it was only $30 more costly than the Acer unit I was returning! I looked over the stats: it's  the highly-rated NP540-U3C by Samsung, with an i5 CPU and best of all, has a solid state drive inside that is 10x's speedier then the silly Acer S3 laptop. It's small and portable and powerful and I feel very, very lucky that my timing was so perfect to find it this week after making my decision to return the Acer. 

I've set the Samsung aside with my name on it until next Wednesday, when I should be able to effect the transfer of my employee computer purchase plan over to it. I'm very pleased and looking forward to using the notebook as I intended, to write what I need to when I need to and not being hamstrung by unadvertised quirks in the technology.

April 3 - Chapters Three

After a full day's work, three whole chapters were done being edited.

Overall, I'm pleased with that result this week, given the issues I had trying to get my Acer laptop 'fixed' this week. I'm also happy with the writing that resulted, as several of the chapters I edited were crucial ones, with a lot of tweaks and additional information that have now made them a much better fit into the overall story.

NEWS FLASH: one of my favorite video games of all time is coming back!

Homeworld, one of the classics of space warfare, is being remastered for release sometime later this year. This is fantastic news, as the space RTS genre has been rather lackluster in the last decade or so. Homeworld was a fantastic game, with incredible 3d visuals and a compelling storyline that, combined with fluid game mechanics, made for a game that has yet to be surpassed even today.

Put into a modern gaming system with updated graphics, I can hardly imagine how wonderful an experience it will be. I have to confess, I may end up trying it out with the 3d feature of my television, just because I want to see if that adds anything to the game. I've tried the 3dTV with a few other games of a similar nature and so far found it to be fairly gimmicky instead of useful. Here's hoping Homeworld will be different in that regard.

April 4 - You, Not Me?

I was told today I was flawed.

A very good friend of my sisters saw me at a party last week and confided to her that although he found me a fascinating conversationalist, he noted that I rarely asked questions about the people I am speaking with. He said it was something that he'd noticed about me the last several times when we were all out together socially and he felt the need to let me know, albeit in a roundabout way.

As a writer, someone who is supposed to be observing most everything going on around them, it is a major failing not to dig into the character of other people in order to discover the gems of the stories that they carry with them. Not to mention just finding out more about them, which will better inform the creation of your own characters as an author.

Plus, it's just polite.

Honest observations like this don't come along every day and I'm very grateful for my sisters friend for feeling the need to tell me about this, however obliquely. I'm hoping that I don't have too many other major shortcomings that have gone unnoticed, but don't consider this a request for all of you to write me to let me know everything that's wrong with me. Considering that most people are quite blind to their own flaws unless they have them bluntly pointed out to them, I'm pretty certain that I don't have too many other character flaws hiding inside.

Also, the thought that I may be subtly narcissistic yet not have noticed did cross my mind. I'm by no means a selfish person, but still I can't help but wonder if subconsciously I love to talk about many subjects and one of those subjects is me. However it comes up, I'll happily chat and perhaps in that mirror-like focus, I lose sight of the fact that I may be talking to someone who may be as interesting as me... or likely even more so.


April 5 - Roll 'em!

After work today: adventure!

For the first time in almost a decade, I played a game of Dungeons and Dragons using pen and paper and those wonderful random dice that tend to cause a lot of screaming for joy or in horror. I have to say I'm forever grateful to my parents for allowing me to play DnD when I was young and not listening a whit to the fearmongers who tried to ban the game - it's made my imagination what it is today.

The group was a good size: eight people, including the DM, only some of whom I've met before. We gamed at a lovely location just outside the city with plenty of room for us all to gather round a single large trestle table. Although we didn't game for more than a few hours at this initial session, I found the people to be simply wonderful folks who, if you believe it, all have an appreciation for puns!

It was pretty much like this. Guess who I am?

Needless to say, I had a great evening and I admit that I spent more time thinking about one -liners then I did about how my character's personality was being portrayed. I also am happy to say that I spent a lot less time with my nose in a manual buying equipment and far more time paying attention to the game, something I've known that I'm guilty of doing from past DnD sessions.

There's a certain thrill to gaming with people in person that can't be had online, though there are advantages to both. I do enjoy using my imagination and interacting with people personally quite a lot, so tonight was wonderful in both regards. I'm really looking forward to the next session in a few weeks when we might actually get something done other than swat a few cyclops mere steps from a bar...

In the meantime, my rogue will be counting his loot.



April 6 - Idle Recycle

This coming week has me working a mere two days. Erk.

Part-time doesn't cut it for making headway in my financial life as you might imagine. Ironically, I cashed in a whole pile of cans and bottles for recycling from work today, simply to get them out of the way as nobody else there has bothered in months. My motive was to use the money to pay for a farewell party for one of the staff who's leaving in a few week's time, which was fine by store management. As I was heading out to Cordova Bay today for the first of four days of writing, I had the van anyway and was able to pack it to the gunwales with the entire load of recyclables - they barely all fit, if you 'can' believe it.

A canner in NY from the Oscar-nominated film 'Redemption' 

Now, there are people here in Victoria( and elsewhere, too )called 'canners' who go around the entire city tirelessly, searching every available bin for recyclable items to take for a deposit refund. I see them wheeling bicycles or shopping carts festooned with bulging backs of cans and bottles and have sometimes wondered what all that effort has netted them. I wonder if it's worth the effort compared to holding down a regular job that doesn't pay much, like mine.

As it turns out: it doesn't pay very well at all.

After sorting and bagging five massive sacks of recyclables, the total payout was $53.00 even for over 1,000 items turned in. Good for party funds, lousy for living on.

See if you can name them all; I couldn't ... 

Tonight is also the premiere of the 4th season of Game of Thrones, which I'm sure has millions of people jumping up and down for joy. While I'm one of those people, I'm not going to be watching the 4th season premiere tonight as I still haven't manage to see any of the third season episodes yet, for various reasons.

Soon enough, though. In the meantime, if you need to catch yourself up on what's happened in the previous three seasons, you can find a great refresher over at io9.com who have done a wonderful job in the article of catching readers up on each season. They also have an episode by episode guide that you can read too; again, I'll be getting there soon...

That's all I've got for you this week. Since I'm starting my writing sabbatical early on Sunday night in Cordova Bay, I don't have my home PC's voice recognition software to help me write this week's blog. Meaning that I had to use Google Voice on my phone to capture the bulk of the words, errors and all, then slap that into my browser to edit by hand. As error-prone as the raw text was, it still took me about three hours to edit it all down to the final version, which isn't bad. Have a great week!