The Mothership

Every year I swear I’m going to get them done as early as possible, but once again, the tax deadline looms large and I’m frantically filling out forms…

Don’t link to someone else’s site when putting up pictures of an iBook for your auction. Not only is it bandwidth leeching, but it’s potentially fraudulent since it’s not really your own system. Yours could be missing half the keys and have a huge scratch across the screen, but the buyers can’t tell that if it looks brand new in the picture because it’s someone else’s.

Plus the webmaster could replace it with goatse…

(fortunately I’m in a good mood)

When I first started working here, our office was in the same building as a fairly decent food court and right next to a couple other good ones. When we moved away, I could still get to those food courts through the +15 walkway system, I just had to go through about 9 buildings to get to it. After the next move, it was 15 buildings. And now it’s 18 buildings, and backtracks a couple blocks since not all buildings are directly connected.

Ah, the things we do to avoid going outside…

Upon arriving home last night I was immediately hit by an acrid smell when I entered the building. “Man, I hope that’s not my apartment, ” I thought to myself.

Of course, it was.

It looks like the compressor on the fridge is failing, so it was switching on and off too quickly and generating that lovely electrical burn smell.

It took me six tries just to write out next month’s rent cheque just because I kept fucking up my own goddamn signature.

That’s a lot of wasted cheques. It’s a wonder I remember how to breathe properly…

Now that I’ve been using my PVR for a while now, one thing I’m noticing is that there are certain series where I’ll record a bunch of episodes, not watch any of them, and then later on have to delete them to free up space.

So why hadn’t I gotten around to watching them? Simple: they didn’t have enough continuity yet. The series where this happens are almost invariable long story-arc based ones like ST:DS9, Farscape, 24, and so on, where I’ve started recording episodes while they’re already in the middle of some storyline. Instead of just going ahead and watching them and ‘picking it up as I go along,’ having the PVR’s recording ability deludes me into thinking that I can just wait long enough and then I’ll have all the episodes and *then* I’ll be able to watch them in order properly.

Except then a month later I’m almost out of disk space and something’s got to go and I don’t want to burn them to DVD out of order and with some still missing and hey, I haven’t even watched any of this one yet…

I’m either going to need more disk space (a coworker of mine has an almost-a-terabyte array set up for his recordings), or just give in and start picking them up on DVD.

This is the last day of my vacation, and unfortunately, it’s been a cold one. Ever since I got back from Edmonton, it’s consistently been below -15C, with only a one day spike up to -7C. It must be revenge for the last couple of fairly mild winters…

So, instead I caught up on some reading (most of the way through Cryptonomicon now, and working through Code Complete and Learning Python), caught up on some recorded shows and burned more DVDs, and played World of Warcraft a lot. Yes, my life is a never-ending thrill ride…

CDs
I Mother Earth – Dig
Genesis – Nursery Cryme
Beck – Mellow Gold
Sonic Youth – Washing Machine

Videos
La Femme Nikita
UHF
Falling Down
Koyaanisqatsi
A Perfect Circle: aMOTION

The aMOTION set is weird, though. It was supposed to come with a CD of remixes of APC songs, done by other bands. It did come with a CD, but it’s remixes of other bands’ songs, done by APC. In fact it’s exactly what their latest release eMOTIVe was. But it was labelled and put in the aMOTION set instead. Somebody screwed up at the pressing plant…

Which is kind of nice since I essentially get eMOTIVe for free then, but now I’m missing the remix CD that was supposed to be there and can’t be bought on its own…

Picked up so far in the post-holiday shopping:

CDs
Beastie Boys – Paul’s Boutique
Yes Highlights – The Very Best Of Yes
The Black Eyed Peas – Elephunk
U2 – How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb
R.E.M. – Green
Sonic Youth – Daydream Nation

Games
Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando

Videos
LotR: Return Of The King Extended Edition
Spiderman 2
The Simpsons 5th Season
Matrix Revolutions (hey, it was cheap and I’m a stickler for completion)

Of course there are more tempting me, but a man’s got to have limits. Maybe tomorrow…

As nice as it is to visit friends and family, it’s still nice to be back in your own home, too.

Plus, one lesson learned: don’t take along on your trip more big, heavy books than you could possibly read even with copious free time…

Word around the office is that there was a shooting this morning at the convenience store I stop at on the way to work most days, just a block away from the office. And, a coworker saw the nearby train platform closed one day recently due to a stabbing.

Being on the edge of downtown, this isn’t exactly one of the best neighbourhoods, but it hadn’t seemed that bad before…

Forget the 8-buns-vs-10-hotdogs problem. What really needs to be solved is the 30-minute-washer-vs-45-minute-dryer problem…

Well it’s winter and it’s getting dry and colder out (-11C right now), so you know what that means…

Yup, it’s Static Electricity Season. I can’t walk anywhere without building up a charge, and when I went to turn on the bedroom light, I got a double dose from the screws above and below the switch.

I’d better not have to work on any of the computers’ internals anytime soon…

To give you an idea of just how out-of-touch I am, I didn’t even realize that yesterday was the day of the provincial election until it was too late…

Now that I have a more-or-less working PVR, what have I discovered about TV?

Damn, there’s an awful lot of Star Trek on…
(more…)

I received a couple packages this week, and one of them had a fair bit of water damage along one edge. I don’t mean discoloured-and-wrinkled either; it was still fairly damp and easily tearable when I took it out of the mailbox. The mailbox itself is inside, so I’m not sure if water got in the drop-box, or delivery van, or sorting centre, or what.

Fortunately it’s the first time it’s ever happened, but too bad it had to be to someone else’s artwork originals… At least they seem to be mostly repairable by reflattening them under a stack of books.

The other package only suffered bent corners, but it seems that happens to nearly everything that gets mailed, no matter how well it’s protected.

One of the more interesting links I’ve run across lately: Yamaha Motor Corporation Paper Sculpture

Interesting because, a) it’s amazing what you can do with just paper (and infinite patience, probably), and b) Yamaha???

An interesting read about the whole Killdozer phenomenon.

I like The Onion, but they recently underwent a slight site redesign and now things are a bit…spread out. For example, the main stories are split into two pages now, which I didn’t realize at first until I scrolled down a bit after thinking that one of them seemed a bit short. The motive here is fairly obvious: get more separate page views in order to get more advertisements in, or entice people into premium subscriptions. Fair enough, we’re reading it for free after all so we don’t really have much room to complain.

When they go so far as to put each individual single-paragraph News In Brief blurb on a separate slow-loading page though… Well, I still don’t have much room to complain. But it’s still annoying.

Once again it is time to celebrate our country’s, uh, liberation from polar bears. Or something. Which I did by playing video games all day. Whoo.

(Seems like holidays are the only chance I even get anymore to do what used to be a daily ritual…)